Ten minutes later he stood in front of his room at the rear of the fifth floor of an apartment building built less than thirty years ago and already smelling of mold and mildew. As he always did before he entered, Emil Karpo checked the thin hair at the corner just above the door hinge to be sure no one had entered the room. Only then did he insert his key and step into darkness.
The shade was, as always, drawn. There was nothing to see through the window beyond, nothing he wished to look at. He clicked on the light in the ceiling and moved to his desk to turn on the desk lamp. The room was remarkably small, small even for a poor Muscovite. It was almost a cell, a cell with a simple table desk, a bed that was little more than a cot, a hot plate in the corner, and shelves of notebooks, each with the same black cover, notebooks filled with legible handwritten reports on every investigation he had ever engaged in.
It was in such a room that Lenin had worked, and Emil Karpo did not find it constricting. On the contrary, he enjoyed the compactness, the wall that kept his energy imploded.
He sat, reached for the current notebook, opened it to the proper page with some awkwardness, since he had but one hand to use, propped the book open with another book, and began to write and to think as he wrote of the next move in his campaign to catch the Weeper.
SIX
Sasha sat up on the mattress and groped for something to cover himself, a blanket, something, but there was nothing within easy reach. He brushed his hair from his eyes and realized that he was covered with sweat. The room was small, about the size of a large office at Petrovka. It contained a worn mattress in one corner, on which Sasha was now sitting; metal shelving, rusted and cluttered with bits of wiring, machinery, and dusty cans; a very battered table covered with automobile parts; and the woman named Marina, who stood calmly and quite as naked as Sasha, at least from the waist up. She was about to pull her blouse over her head, and Sasha observed with quite conscious guilt that her breasts were much fuller, much larger and rosier, than those of his own Maya.
He watched her pop her head through the blouse and shake her hair clear. She didn’t look at the naked policeman sitting on the mattress who had, for the moment, forgotten his elusive trousers.
The ceiling of the room was high. In fact, it stretched far above them, perhaps two floors, and since the partition that defined it as a room was made only of thin planks of wood, the sound of grinding machines in the room beyond easily penetrated the sanctum of this unlikely sexual space.
Marina didn’t brush or comb her hair. With confidence she simply tossed her head like an unconscious animal that must clear its field of vision to watch for predators.
Sasha Tkach remembered his pants again, looked about, saw them across the room on a chair near the cluttered table, and tried to urge his body to rise. He touched the hairs on his stomach with a solitary finger and brought it away damp.
Why he had come to this moment of confusion and embarrassment was not completely clear to Sasha Tkach. How he had come to it was as sharp and visual as a poster for increased production glued to the temporary wall outside the Bolshoi.
The woman, Marina, had questioned him, questioned him in painful detail, about his alleged father, the kind of automobile he wanted, the deal they could make. As she had led him through the small workshop with the sullen, muscle-bound man named Ilya at their side, Sasha had the distinct impression that Marina was playing with him, smiling to herself as if she had a secret. She stayed close to Sasha, sometimes touching him, once let her breast run against his arm as she pointed to two men who were spray painting a small Volga. The Volga was basically blue, but under the hand of the two goggled men in overalls, it was turning a deep blood red.
The work space, the factory, was not enormous, but it was large enough to hold five automobiles in various states of alteration. The most striking of the vehicles was a white Chaika suspended about eight feet in the air by heavy chains attached to the front and rear bumpers.
“So, Comrade-” she had said.
Sasha had completed: “Pashkov.”
“Yes, Comrade Pashkov,” she went on, leading him past two goggled men who glanced at him with Martian eyes. “So, what do you think? Anything here you or your wealthy friends would like?”
She had paused, hands on hips, to say this, and Sasha, playing his role, had glanced at her, thinking that there was some provocation in her tone, words, attitude, but deciding that it was simply the woman’s normal tone or his imagination.
All he had to do at that point was to make some deal, any deal, not to appear too anxious, to remember to pause, even idle, and then get to a phone, for surely he had found what he had been searching for. All he had to do was play his role out for a few more minutes. He had looked over at the man called Ilya, who was uncomfortably close, his arms folded across his muscular chest, his eyes filled with suspicion.
“The Chaika,” Sasha said. “It’s just what I need. Perhaps we can make a deal for that and”-he shrugged, beginning to perspire in the closeness of the loud shop and the man and woman who wedged him in-“who knows, some additional vehicles for my friends.”
“Fifteen thousand rubles,” the man called Ilya finally said in a growl.
Sasha had looked around at the Chaika with interest and was about to agree when the woman, who had stepped very close to him, whispered with a smile, showing very white, large teeth, “Thirty thousand rubles.”
“Thirty thou-,” he began.
“Worth every ruble,” she went on with that same smile. He could smell her breath on his face.
“I’ll-” Sasha had said as Ilya picked up a very nasty looking electric tool of uncertain function, umbilically tied to the wall with a thick cord. There was anger in Ilya’s face as he pushed a button on the machine and it roared into artificial life in his hands, a metal blade whirring noisily as the machine vibrated. Something in Ilya’s look made it quite clear that he was experiencing at least antagonism and more likely hatred toward the potential customer. The source of that hatred might be resentment at Sasha’s feigned wealth, suspicion that something was not quite correct, or jealousy of Marina’s attention to him. Whatever it was, Sasha did not like the look of the whirring blade or the noise or the man or the fact that he was now effectively blocked from a clear run to the door through which they had come. He might be able to push past the woman. After all, Ilya was carrying a heavy tool in his hands, and the other two burly men seemed to be reasonably well occupied with their painting. But there were two doors to get through, either of which might have been locked behind him, and there were automobile body parts to leap over and perhaps here and there a small pool of oil on which he might slip. No, though the situation was uncomfortable, his best chance was to see it through, play the role, though he wished now that he had been better prepared for it.
“Comrade Pashkov,” she had said at that point, taking his arm quite firmly, “let’s go into the office and conclude our deal.”
The man named Ilya had flipped a switch on the machine. It shook in his hands, sending it into a louder, angrier paroxysm that seemed to amuse Marina as she led Sasha through a wooden door and into the smaller cluttered room where he immediately saw the mattress in the corner. She closed the door behind them, her back to him a moment, possibly locking the door before she turned to face him, still that look of amusement in her eyes. It was at that point Sasha became well aware of the single drop of sweat on her upper lip, her quite full upper lip. The room was hot, and he felt dizzy. Had he his gun, he would simply have pulled it out and ended the whole charade, but he had purposely left it behind in case he might be searched or the bulge seen by an experienced criminal eye. Besides, he had expected no real danger. Even at this point he told himself that it was imagination, an imagination that any policeman felt in such a situation, the fear that his frail disguise had been penetrated, a sense of guilt at being the deceiver, though he was on the side of law and they were the criminals.