Karpo was no more than twenty paces behind the woman when she stopped abruptly in front of Don Igrushki, the House of Toys, at 9 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. She turned and looked directly at the detective. The long strands of dark hair clung to her face. There was a madness in her eyes, a defiance that convinced Emil Karpo that he had not wasted his day. He continued to walk, not looking at the woman. She stood, feet firmly planted, not moving the wet, clinging hair from her eyes, nose, and mouth. She watched as he moved past, looking directly in front of her, and he continued down the street as if he had an appointment for which he could not be late. He knew her eyes were on him, knew she would watch him, wondering, cautious, but Karpo did not look back. He knew where she was going and planned to be there when she arrived.
Inside the lobby of the hotel, Karpo paused for a moment, scanning the faces that glanced up at him. The lobby was filled with people talking, waiting, wondering when the rain would end so they could get about their business or pleasure.
There were more than two thousand rooms in the twenty-nine floors of the hotel, with excellent views of Central Moscow from many of the windows. The view from the roof was especially magnificent, but tourists had no access to the roof. Karpo, tingling hand plunged deeply into his black sling, strode across the floor to the bank of elevators and waited, watching the entrance in the reflection of a mirror next to the first elevator. The elevator dispatcher was a man with thick glasses and a tight collar. He was tall, with shoulders stooped from years of working hard to look important. The elevator doors came open, and the dispatcher signaled his approval for the five waiting people to enter after three businessmen came out, but Karpo did not enter.
“This car up,” he said to Karpo while the elevator waited and the young woman operating it watched in guarded curiosity lest she offend the militant dispatcher.
Karpo responded, turning to face the dispatcher, who mistakenly elected to attempt to stare him down. The crowd on the elevator grew impatient, and the operator continued to watch. It reminded her of two gunfighters she had seen in a Czech movie about American cowboys.
The sopping-wet stranger was the unblinking gun-fighter. The dispatcher was the sheriff whose authority had been questioned, and Elena Soldatkin imagined herself the schoolteacher who would have to step in and make an emotional plea to stop the bloodshed, a plea that would have no effect in a film and that she would never make in reality, because the dispatcher was a most unpleasant man who was also the party organizer for the Ukraine Hotel. So she sat, watched, and tried not to show emotion, but at this she was an amateur compared to the strange, besoaked, pale skeleton of a man.
Suddenly, the pale man glanced toward her, looked at the mirror beside the elevator, and then entered the elevator, room being quickly created for him by the retreating figures, who wanted neither the moisture nor the aura he carried. The dispatcher, feeling quite triumphant, though a bit unsettled by the strange man, watched the elevator doors close and turned to gather his next flock for the next ascent. The massive woman carrying some kind of instrument case strode wetly toward him, and he calculated how many people could reasonably be allowed to occupy the same elevator with her, but he was certain it was a task he could handle with his usual expertise.
Two men in the rear of the elevator spoke in a whisper as Karpo’s elevator moved slowly upward. They were not from Moscow. Their accents were from the west, possibly as far as Kiev.
“Because if we go to the Berlin,” said one man with exasperation, “he’ll bloat, get drunk. We’ll get no business done.”
“So we’ll get no business done,” the other man countered in a high voice, “But we’ll get goodwill, and tomorrow they will owe us. Don’t be impatient.”
The two men got out at the sixteenth floor. By the eighteenth floor no one was left but Karpo and the operator. Elena said, “Floor,” recalling that the dispatcher had never extracted a destination from the man. Elena had the sudden chill feeling that the man might pull out something he was hiding in his sling and plunge it through her back. Her voice was high, quivering slightly.
“Top,” he said.
“Twenty,” she answered, and threw the lever as far to the right as it would go, knowing that there was no way to make the elevator move faster but willing it to do so. The elevator stopped with a jerk, and she reached over to throw the door open. Only then did she look back at the man, who said, “The roof. How do I get to the roof?”
Elena knew she should ask a question, challenge his authority, demand an explanation, but this was not a man one asked for explanations. It was a man you got out of your elevator and forgot as soon as possible. Elena was twenty-six years old and looked forward to twenty-seven and thousands of miles going up and down in the elevator and the movie she was going to see that night with her friend Nora.
“To the right, end of the corridor. There’s a stairway, but I don’t know if-”
The stiff man was already heading down the hall, his back to her, his secret protected by his hand, plunged into his wet sling. Elena closed the door without finishing her sentence. She planned to forget the encounter, at least till she could see Nora and build it into something more than it had been.
Karpo found the door without trouble. It was unmarked and unnumbered. He turned the handle and pushed. The heavy door gave way slowly. Had he been able to use his right hand, he could have-but he stopped that thought. One used what one had, overcame obstacles, did not weep when they appeared. He pushed the door open, went in, and moved up the concrete steps in near darkness.
There was a single light on the landing above. The light was a dull yellow and made his hand look jaundiced. The steps were clean and rough. On the floor above twenty, Karpo found himself in front of a metal door with a push bar. He pressed against it and stepped out onto the roof of the Ukraine. The wind slapped him and cracked the metal door closed with a clang. The rain had dwindled but not stopped. It pelted down on the flat pebbled roof, sending up an odor of strong warm tar that Karpo savored without quite making the sensation conscious. Above him for nine floors stood the front tower of the hotel with a star on its uppermost spire. He looked around, up, saw nothing, and heard only the rain brushing the roof and the slight wind.
There were turrets, outcroppings for air, heating, and simple decoration, many places to hide and wait, but no place to keep dry. Karpo did not expect to be there long. He strode to the edge of the building and looked over the low stone wall down at the bridge, the Moscow River, the city where he had spent his life. He felt himself merge with the building, could imagine himself disappearing, to be absorbed in the stone and the water. Perhaps he was a bit tired. If Colonel Snitkonoy were not a fool, an armed man would be up there now, but, Karpo decided, perhaps it was better this way.
He walked to a stone heating turret, stepped behind it, out of the line of vision of the door through which he had come, and demanded that his body ignore the throbbing, electric tingling in his right arm. He looked through the thinning rain at the modern building of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Mir (Peace) Hotel and let his breath take in the smell of his own humid sweat.
He heard the sound of someone coming before the door opened. When it did open with a loud clank, Karpo was standing well back, where he could see but not be seen.
It was the large woman in the dark flower dress. She looked like a ripe country melon, the kind his mother had purchased once or twice when he was a child. The thought in this circumstance led Karpo to reach up and touch his forehead, which confirmed what he suspected. He was feverish. His body was damaged, and his mind was not at its best. He came as close to smiling as was possible for him, but no one, with the possible exception of Rostnikov, would have detected it had they been with him.