Emil Karpo left the office, closing the door behind him.
It was slightly after five in the morning. The colonel had said Karpo was to go on vacation tomorrow. Karpo would not disobey a direct order. However, the colonel's order meant that Karpo had all of this day and until midnight of the following day to continue the investigation. If he did not sleep, he had forty-three hours to find Krivonos and the bearded man. In forty-three hours, it would be Thursday.
Karpo wasted no time. He went to the elevator, aware that people were avoiding his eyes, pretending, as they always did, that they had just remembered something that had to be done in the opposite direction, suddenly saying something urgent and animatedly to whomever they were walking with and giving the companion undivided attention. A woman, who Karpo knew was Amelia Smintpotkov in Records Two, muttered, "Vampire," when she thought she was safely out of Karpo's hearing. Amelia Smintpotkov might well have needed the day off had she known that Karpo heard her and knew her name. In fact, Karpo was unmoved by the reaction to him or by the muttered word. If anything, though he might not be able to admit it to himself, he was mildly pleased. The privileges of police authority were rapidly being taken away. Others around him were finding it frustrating and quite difficult to deal with criminals and a public that were losing their fear of the law. Karpo was confident of his own ability to create fear without recourse to threats or action.
He took the elevator down to the unnumbered laboratory of Boris Kostnitsov, two levels below the ground in Petrovka. Kostnitsov was an assistant director of the MVD laboratory, though he assisted no one and had no contact with the director, whose name he did not know or care to know. Boris Kostnitsov worked alone. He had been assigned an assistant once, but the man had quit after four days, insisting that Kostnitsov was a madman. It was generally agreed that the assistant was right, but it was also agreed that Kostnitsov was brilliant.
Karpo knocked once, firmly, at the gray metal door of the laboratory and waited.
Before opening the door, Kostnitsov's high voice said, "Inspector Karpo. I know that knock."
Then the door opened, and Karpo found himself facing Kostnitsov, a man of no particular distinction, medium height, somewhere in his fifties, a little belly, straight white hair brushed back, bad teeth, and a red face. Kostnitsov was wearing a bloodstained blue laboratory coat. His left hand opened the door so Karpo could step in. His right hand held something white and fleshy about the length of an adult finger.
Kostnitsov pushed the door closed and held up his prize.
"Well?" he asked, head turning just a bit to the side, a knowing hint of a smile on his lips.
"Intestines, small intestines," said Karpo. "Recently removed, human."
Kostnitsov beamed.
"The stomach, the intestines. These are the organs that give the easy answers, that paint the clearest pictures. My favorite organ remains the little-appreciated spleen, but the stomach is the pathologist's friend. That which it contains can reveal much. That which it does not contain can reveal even more. Did you know that each of us eats at least a pound of insects each year? Not the gnat that flies in as we yawn or speak but the bits trapped in drinks, canned foods, meats, fish. And the irony, Comrade, is the pound of insects you eat each year is the most nutritious part of your diet. This intestine. Look. Diseased?" he asked.
"Impossible to determine without close examination," Karpo responded.
Kostnitsov handed the fleshy piece of intestine to Karpo, who took it in his palm and turned it over.
"Discoloration," said Karpo. "Diminution of blood supply. Possibly disease, possibly poison, possibly-"
"Drug," Kostnitsov said, taking his prize back and placing it gently in a white china teacup balanced precariously on top of a pile of thick books towering up from the floor. Dangerously close to the books danced the single flame of a Bunsen burner.
"You got that from the body of the young woman, Carla Wasboniak?''
Kostnitsov moved around his cluttered laboratory tables to his even more cluttered desk and lifted a sheet of paper, which he scanned and put back before making his way back around the tables to Karpo, who waited patiently.
"You want some coffee, tea?" asked Kostnitsov.
"No, thank you, Comrade," said Karpo.
"Why can't they send you down here all the time?" Kostnitsov complained, reaching for the teacup that contained the piece of Carla's intestines and then realizing only at the last instant, as he put it to his lips, that it was not the cup containing tea.
He put the cup down and continued. "Tkach is a child. He poses, and his mind is always somewhere else. That sack Zelach is worthless. Rostnikov, now Rostnikov is not bad, but he has no love of the tangible. The fact is a means, not, as it is to you and me, an end. You understand? '' "I believe so," said Karpo, whose pulsing head told him that precious time was passing. He could, however, do nothing but play out the scene with Kostnitsov or risk losing the man's cooperation. Not even the threat of death could make this man do or say what he did not wish to do or say. Kostnitsov found his teacup and held its charred ceramic bottom over the flame of a Bunsen burner.
"I'll tell you about the bullets first," said Kostnitsov, looking at Karpo. "The ones you brought in."
Karpo said nothing.
' 'They came from an interesting weapon, West German, adjustable for rapid fire or single action," said Kostnitsov, tasting his tea and deciding that the temperature was acceptable. "The same weapon was used to kill the businessman two weeks ago. German. Special forces, government controlled, but they get out.
A Walther RA 2000, but you know that, don't you?" ' 'Yes,'' said Karpo.
"Yes. Doesn't matter. The weapon is outside my area of primary concern. The woman died of trauma suffered an instant after contact with the blue-enamel surface of the car she hit. Would you like to know the precise cause of death, the damage to organs from the trauma of impact?"
"If it might be relevant to my investigation," said Karpo. There was no denying it now. The migraine was coming. He would have to work through it. There was no time for retreat to the cool darkness of his small room.
"It is not," said Kostnitsov, tilting his head to the side again, examining Karpo as they spoke and he drank. "However, it may be relevant that the young lady would have been dead in a matter of weeks even had she not been thrown, for she was thrown, unless she leaped up and backward through the window.''
Kostnitsov juggled his teacup as he turned around and demonstrated the turn. His sloped shoulders lifted, and he went up on his toes like an egg attempting to perform ballet.
"Glass in the shoulders, back of the neck, scalp," he explained.
' 'She would have been dead in a matter of weeks,'' Karpo reminded him.
"Ah," Kostnitsov replied, finishing his tea and putting the cup down next to the one containing the intestine, which he now picked up again. ' 'Cocaine with strychnine. Judging from the layers of both substances in the intestines, she had been ingesting increasingly high levels of cocaine mixed with strychnine for several weeks. Even if she took no more, there is enough throughout her body to cause death in two to three weeks. Similar cases, almost undiscovered, took place last year in Paris. Both victims were high-ranking foreign service officers. French Journal of Pathology, spring issue last year, had an article."
"Conjecture?" Karpo said as the pulsing on the right side of his head began in earnest. Recently, the headaches had begun to come more frequently and without the warning odors and occasional flashes of light he had experienced since childhood. Now the headaches were suddenly there, without warning, as if his brain were independent, playing a new game with him.