“Perhaps never,” Karpo said, unblinking eyes fixed on his superior.
Rostnikov rose with a sigh, holding the table with his right hand till he could straighten his left leg under him.
“Never?”
“When I catch the Weeper, perhaps,” Karpo amended. The amendment was necessary. Karpo lived by reason and dedication. It was only reasonable to come to this conclusion.
“You don’t have to retire even if you discover you have one arm,” Rostnikov said, shaking his head. “I have, in effect, only one leg, and the Gray Wolfhound has but half a brain.”
“I do not wish to be a detriment to-”
“Ha,” Rostnikov interrupted in mock exasperation. “With one arm you are the best man in the procuracy. See, now you have forced me to embarrass both you and myself by extending flattery. You keep on like this, and I will soon be cordial, then polite, and we will find ourselves in a situation in which we are like that pink panda who just shambled out of here.”
Karpo rose and nodded in agreement. “I will take your suggestion under advisement,” Karpo said.
“The Weeper,” Rostnikov said, holding back a morning yawn.
“The Weeper may return to any of those hotel roofs,” Karpo said softly.
“He appears to be a creature of habit,” Rostnikov prodded.
Karpo nodded and went on. “The attacks are coming more frequently. I believe the Weeper is on some time schedule, some constraint. I believe the Weeper is no longer shooting randomly but that Sergeant Petrov was an intended victim. I’ve examined the reports of the incidents, spoke to those who were nearby. For every attack there was at least one nearby witness in uniform, military or police. The Weeper has simply grown confident or angry enough to fire at the real intended victims.”
“And you conclude from this?” Rostnikov said with a small smile.
“That another attack will take place soon where people in uniform can be readily found.”
“That could be-”
“Many places,” said Karpo. “I am well aware of that. I would like to post men who would be well hidden atop the high buildings facing military establishments within Moscow and perhaps a man atop the Destky Mir children’s shop across from KGB headquarters. And, of course, atop this building.”
Rostnikov pocketed his doodles, shook his head, and smiled. “You have no evidence,” he said. “This is all concoction.”
“I remind the chief inspector that in the past I-”
“-have been right about such things,” Rostnikov finished. Karpo’s statement about his own record had been given without ego. He spoke not out of pride but confidence, a willingness to pursue. He might turn out to be quite wrong, but Rostnikov knew that Karpo would not mind, that he would simply formulate another theory, and another and another, and pursue until he caught the Weeper or someone else did so.
“You will have your men atop buildings, but I cannot take responsibility for placing anyone across from KGB headquarters,” Rostnikov said, reaching for the door. “It would be difficult to explain why we had not informed the KGB about our plan if we were caught. No, the KGB will have to rely on its reputation. Besides, they are more expendable than we are. There are so many more of them.”
Karpo gave no sign that he recognized irony in the Washtub’s words or manner. He simply nodded in agreement and moved to follow Rostnikov out of the now-open door.
“One final thing,” the Washtub said. “Why do you think the Weeper might be a woman?”
“I didn’t say-” Karpo began.
“You carefully avoided gender in describing the Weeper. I conclude-”
“The Weeper may be a man or woman,” said Karpo. “It might have been a man weeping in a high voice or a woman.”
They were standing in the hall now near a window open to let in some touch of air in the summer heat. The moist taste of coming rain prickled Rostnikov’s cheek and gave him a curious satisfaction. The sound of barking German shepherd dogs in the police kennels below the window gave a faraway sense of melancholy to the scene.
“Emil,” Rostnikov said, walking at the side of the taller, gaunt man whose limp left arm was plunged into the black sling under his jacket, “have you ever read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?”
“No,” said Karpo as they stepped aside to let a uniformed young man carrying a stack of files hurry past them. “Should I?”
“There is a passage in which the drifting young boy hears the faraway sound of someone chopping wood,” Rostnikov said. “The sound of something far away, the echo of each plunge of the ax blade into the wood. It is a passage of great beauty, Emil. It is a passage which vibrates like a summer day in Moscow.”
“I see,” Karpo said, unable to fathom the cryptic turns of mind of the limping, near block of a man at his side. Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was an enigma in the life of Emil Karpo but one that the younger man accepted, for he respected his superior’s abilities.
But Karpo knew that Rostnikov was not infallible. Occasionally, he failed to see something, to detect. The example was immediate. Rostnikov obviously had no idea that Karpo planned to make himself the next target of the rooftop Weeper.
Sasha Tkach had a headache. He was not much given to drinking vodka. He was well aware of the damage it did to those around him, and he often had the impression that at night Moscow was a vast matrix of drunks who staggered about like giddy or morose zombies. He had heard that it was worse in other countries-Iceland, the United States-but Moscow surely had a high percentage of those who sought escape in alcohol. One of those who did so was his neighbor Bazhen Surikov, the carpenter. Surikov liked to suggest that he was a painter. He wore a small beard like a caricature of a 1920s Parisian artist and even dabbled in painting, though Sasha thought the few works he had seen by the wiry man were at best mediocre. However, Sasha did not consider himself an art expert. He did, however, consider himself a man with many problems.
He and Maya had not exactly quarreled the night before. She had attempted to talk about their future, and he had attempted to avoid it. He was tired, sore from the bout with the blacksmith, angry at his assignment, and unable to think of a solution to the problem of what to do when the very visible child in Maya’s stomach decided to face the world.
Sasha’s mother, Lydia, offered no help, only her usual wisdom. “It will work out. Each day passes, and a new one comes. We have bread on the table, shoes on our feet, a bed to sleep on.”
One could not quarrel with such wisdom, especially when one’s mother was nearly deaf and interested in preserving platitudes rather than coping with reality.
And so when Bazhen Surikov had suggested that Sasha join him in his apartment to look at a new painting, Sasha had gone, leaving mother, wife, and soon-to-come child in their two-room apartment. And when Bazhen had shown him the idiotic painting of a horse or a boar or a bear on its knees, Sasha had been properly complimentary, which resulted in the offer by Bazhen of a shared bottle of vodka. Nearly two hours later, when Sasha had managed to return to his apartment, Maya looked at his smiling face and put down her book, undecided about whether to get angry or weep. She did neither but turned to go in the bedroom, realized her mother-in-law was in there, and then faced Sasha with a pleading look that said clearly, “See, I have no place to go when I am hurt, angry. And soon there will be a baby, your baby.”
The next day, the vodka was no longer in effect, the sun was hot, and Sasha had no heart to pretend that he was the spoiled son of a member of the Politburo. He had some sense, he thought, of how an actor must feel who has a hangover, an ulcer, a nagging wife, and a dying friend and who must still step upon the stage to pretend for two hours that he is Alexander the Great.
Sasha had already had a meeting with Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov; he had gone to two locations on his list and crossed out both, convinced that they were not what he was searching for. He had been especially disturbed by the fact that in his early-morning meeting, Porfiry Petrovich, who usually gave suggestions and attention and consideration to even minor cases, seemed to be indifferent to Sasha’s investigation in spite of the fact that pressure was now being exerted because “an important official” had been the victim of the car thieves.