Karpo, without watching, turned his back on the two guards, glanced up at the Spassky tower and let his eyes drift around the square once more, but there was no sign of the woman. Of course it was possible that she would send someone else, but he doubted it. This was her moment.
Behind him he could hear a movement, slight but distinct. He assumed that one of the guards had a microphone or some other device with which he could summon help. Karpo hoped this was true, for he could not stand there for more than a few minutes without attracting attention, especially if the Germans moved away and no other group moved close.
He turned again, glancing along the wall and beyond the marble stands at the foot of the Kremlin tower to the Nikolsky tower and the gate below. Two men in uniform were moving forward quickly, hands on their flapping holsters. Karpo sauntered in their direction through the group of Germans, still trying to look like a tourist, but knowing that he would fool no one.
He intercepted the two men about a hundred yards to the right of the mausoleum and kept his hands in front of him and clearly visible.
“Major,” he said, stepping in front of them.
The major, a hard-faced man of about forty-five with jaw clenched, flipped open his holster as the officer behind him took two steps to one side and did the same.
“If you will be as inconspicuous as possible,” Karpo said, noting that a few people were looking their way, “you can remove my identification from my right coat pocket. May I warn you that someone may be watching us? If we do not act with speed and caution, we may be too late.”
The major nodded toward the other officer, a young lieutenant, who advanced on Karpo, one hand still on his open holster. Reaching into the policeman’s pocket, he removed the wallet and handed it to the major, who opened it, examined it, and looked at Karpo.
“Lieutenant Aronsov will remain with you while I check on your credentials,” the major said softly.
“There may not be time,” Karpo said, looking at the tower clock which now showed fifteen minutes to eight.
“Damn you,” hissed the major. “Why didn’t you go through proper channels with this?”
“There was no time,” Karpo replied evenly. “I wasn’t sure until a short while ago.” He did not add that he was not certain even now.
The major’s hands drummed against the leather of his holster as he appraised Karpo. Evidently he was properly impressed.
“Come,” he said. He walked past Karpo and the lieutenant and headed directly for the mausoleum. Karpo turned and followed with the lieutenant behind, watching him.
“No one can enter the mausoleum carrying anything,” the major said, “not a briefcase, flight bag, camera, anything.”
“The detonator would be quite small,” said Karpo.
The major grunted, pushed aside a startled Asian tourist and strode to the bronze door.
“With a dozen men we could do this in one minute,” the major said impatiently, “but I suppose…”
“It would be rather conspicuous,” finished Karpo, “and the terrorist might simply decide to detonate if she is watching. She might do so anyway.”
“She,” grunted the major, waiting for the guard to open the bronze door.
“Yes,” said Karpo.
They entered and picked up an echo in the near darkness.
“And what we have already done might be sufficient to set her off,” the major observed, nodding at the lieutenant to move. The major did not take his eyes off Karpo. The lieutenant moved swiftly, clearly knowing every inch of the interior, every place a bomb could conceivably be placed. Karpo watched, wanting to help and knowing that he would not be allowed to. The slight hum of the air conditioning played above the rapid movements of the lieutenant as they moved down the stone staircase. The light around the sealed case was dim, but the young officer’s hands were swift. Karpo watched with fascination as the young man moved behind the glass-covered face of the corpse of Lenin.
“Here,” cried the lieutenant, emerging from the far side of the casket holding up the small black box. “Plastic on the outside held it in place. No way to judge how powerful it is.”
“One of her bombs went off a few hours ago at the Zaryadye Cinema,” said Karpo.
“That was a bomb?” asked the major. “We heard…”
Karpo nodded.
“Out with it,” the major said, and the lieutenant moved swiftly to the stairs.
“I suggest you put that in your pocket,” Karpo said, hearing his voice echo back. “If she is out here and…”
The young man looked at the major who shrugged and said, “The important thing is to get out of here with it. Let’s go.”
“I’ll take it,” said Karpo, moving forward as the lieutenant passed him. He grabbed the small box and heard both men respond almost immediately with drawn guns.
“If I were the one, I wouldn’t have waited till I was in here,” he said.
“What do you-” began the major, holding his pistol aimed at Karpo’s chest. “Forget it. We’ll deal with this outside. Move.” He motioned with his gun as Karpo plunged the box into his pocket and moved quickly up the stairs through the cool tomb.
Beyond the bronze doors, the sun nearly blinded them. Karpo had been ready for this, and he dashed forward into a crowd of sailors and began to run across the square. He was heading toward an open area not far from the Lobnoye Mesto, the Place of Execution, the Skull Platform of white stone more than four centuries old where the czar’s edicts had been proclaimed and public executions carried out.
There was no place to dispose of the bomb. Whichever way he turned he would be heading toward a national monument. The major and the lieutenant would have followed whatever procedure had been established for bomb disposal. It would have been impossible to impress the urgency on them, because they did not have his understanding of the woman.
Knowing the sailors were behind him, he ran on, pushing through the crowds and dashing across the open spaces, trying to figure out the least damaging place to put the bomb in case she was nearby. And then luck intervened. Standing in front of him, perhaps fifty yards away in front of the Place of Execution was a blond tourist in a blue suit. She was carrying a camera and wearing dark glasses. Karpo headed toward her and glanced up at the Spassky clock, which showed that it was only a few minutes to eight.
At first the woman ignored him, but when it became clear that he was coming directly at her, she turned to face him. Behind her a young couple examined the Place of Execution.
When he was no more than twenty yards from her, the woman removed her dark glasses and fixed him with a look of black hatred.
“Stop,” she commanded, and Karpo stopped. Behind him the soldiers brushed people aside and moved toward him.
Karpo turned his head in the direction of the running boots and saw the lieutenant in advance of the major and another armed soldier.
“That is the woman,” Karpo shouted back to the young man who, panting, looked beyond him and stopped.
The lieutenant glanced at the woman and then at Karpo and saw the same look on both faces that he would never be able to describe adequately, though at the inquiry that night he would make an attempt at it. But whatever it was he saw convinced him, and he turned, still panting, and intercepted the major and the soldier with the rifle.
Karpo turned back to the woman, who held her camera in front of her. He hoped that the soldiers would back away, keep their distance, and clear the area.
“I said stop,” said the woman, in almost unaccented Russian, but Karpo did not stop. “Do you know what this is?” She held up the camera.
In response, Karpo took another step toward her. He was now no more man a dozen paces away, surely well within the destructive range of the small device he now removed from his pocket and held in front of him.
“You’ve failed,” he said.
“I’ll try again,” she said, her eyes looking beyond Karpo at the soldiers. “If you don’t want me to press this button, yo
u will give me assurance that the soldiers will remain where they are until I am gone.”
“I can give no such assurance for the soldiers,” he said, taking another step toward her.
The young couple who had been examining the Place of Execution moved past the woman, talking to each other, ignoring the conversation between her and the tall, cadaverous man.
“There is no place for you to run, Louise Rich,” he said.
His use of the name stung, and the woman shook her blond hair out of her eyes.
“That’s not my name,” she said.
“I didn’t think it was,” said Karpo.
“But you know about my flight reservation,” she said, “and the identity I’ve been using.”
“And so,” Karpo said softly, since he was close enough, “your options are gone.”
“Limited,” she corrected, “but not gone.”
“Perhaps,” he said with a shrug.
A draft of wind came across Red Square behind Karpo, blowing the woman’s hair back and creating an image of her against the background of the Cathedral of Saint Basil the Blessed that drilled itself into Karpo’s mind. At this moment, bomb in hand, facing this enemy of the state, he felt an emotion he wanted to deny but couldn’t. Determined in the face of certain defeat, she looked quite beautiful.
“How did you find me?” she said quietly in a voice that matched his own as she looked over at the soldiers.
“Reason, a process of elimination, and a little luck,” he admitted.
Her eyes were on him, her lips pale. He considered turning away, recalling a faint childhood image of Medusa, but he kept his gaze steady.
“We are alike,” she said through clenched white teeth.
And Karpo realized that in some way she was correct and that he stood here now looking at an important aspect of himself which, until this moment, he had denied. The realization shocked him.
“In some ways,” he said.
“You won’t back away, will you?” she said with admiration.
“I can’t,” he said.
“In a moment or two that soldier will raise his rifle and shoot me,” she said, nodding beyond Karpo. “You know that.”
“Yes,” he said.
“And what would you do in my place?” she asked.
Karpo was silent.
“What is your name?”
“Karpo, Emil Karpo. And yours?”
“That,” she said with a grin, “you will never know.”
Karpo felt a surge within and about him, an explosion of love, regret, and death as he leapt toward the stone platform.
Roman Tibiliski was standing across from the State History Museum at the far end of Red Square seven hundred yards from the Place of Execution. He was telling his co-manager from the Gdansk Steel Mill that the building they were looking at was the headquarters of the KGB, which was as wrong as one could be about a building, but Tibiliski, at the age of sixty, was a massive, confident man with a gruff, assured style that usually masked his ignorance.
He had just turned to Waclaw Wypich, his co-manager, to add a few erroneous details to his description when the explosion occurred. He found himself looking directly at the flash of red, followed almost instantly by a whooshing sound and a ball of smoke.
Tibiliski had no idea what the explosion was, but he felt that he ought to explain it. “Look,” he shouted to Wypich, “the fireworks. The Sunday fireworks in Red Square. They’ve begun early.”
Wypich, who believed almost nothing his older co-manager said, nodded knowingly, which was his means of getting through life minimally scathed.
“Shall we take a look?” Wypich asked.
Tibiliski could now see the rushing of soldiers and the scurrying of people in the crowd. It dawned on him that he had been quite mistaken about the cause of the explosion.
“No,” he said knowingly, “it’s not worth looking at. Let’s move on into October Square and have a look at the Sports Palace.”
The major, who had been more than fifty yards away when the explosion came, had been knocked backwards and lifted into the air. He had struck the soldier behind him, whose bayonet pierced the major’s right arm.
The lieutenant was ten yards farther back, gently but insistently urging bystanders to move away from something they could neither see nor understand. He felt only the warm blast and turned to see the smoke.
His first act was to go to the major, who lay wounded. Beyond the immediate scene tourists and visitors were running, screaming, or standing in confusion. As far as the lieutenant could tell, no one except the major was seriously injured unless, of course, one counted that mad-looking woman with the camera and the policeman named Karpo. The woman was quite dead. Karpo was a bloody blot huddled against the platform; however, he was still breathing.
FIFTEEN
“Karpo has been injured. He may be dying,” said Tkach, putting down the telephone and turning to his wife.
Maya looked at her husband’s pale face and knew that he was about to collapse. She took his arm and eased him into a chair.
He had come home from the hospital and immediately assured her that he was all right, that he had escaped with a few stitches and a slight shock, but now a second shock, a more profound one, had hit him.
“It could have been me,” he whispered. “It was a bomb, a bomb like the one…”
He let his voice trail off and looked at her for an answer but she didn’t have one. Fortunately, his mother was sleeping in the other room when the call came just before midnight on Sunday.
“It could have been me,” he repeated.
“Yes,” said Maya, “but it wasn’t.”
He had turned on the light in the room to answer the phone, and now the dim yellow glow on her face and in the corners of the room frightened him and she knew it.
“Maya,” he said looking at her.
“I know,” she answered.
“Karpo,” he said.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she asked, not wanting to hear about it but knowing it would help him to talk.
“Not now,” he said, brushing his straight hair back like a little boy. “Maya, if we have a boy, we will call him Emil.”
“Yes,” she agreed, knowing they would do no such thing, “we will call him Emil.”
It took them an hour to get back to sleep, but sleep they did.
Anna Timofeyeva lay in her bed at midnight unable to see in the darkness but quite able to hear the breathing of the woman in the bed next to her and the snoring of the woman across from her.
No one had told her about what had transpired, for the doctors had given specific instructions that she was not to be excited. In fact, she was supposed to be asleep at this very moment. They had given her a pill to make her sleep, but they had not accounted for the determination of Anna Timofeyeva.
She had always considered sleep a waste of time that she could use to perform productive work. She worked well at night, in the moments just before sleep. At home she kept paper at her bedside to write down ideas about cases that she worked out in the darkness with Baku snuggled against her leg.
Rostnikov had assured her that the cat was taken care of, and the doctor had assured her that, with caution, she could return home and resume a limited work schedule after proper treatment. She would undergo that new rehabilitation technique for heart attack victims, learned from a South African who had defected to the Soviet Union. The South African would work with her himself.
Anna Timofeyeva was eager to get back to work. She could not think in this bed, could not think in bed without the cat, could not think with these hospital noises and the pill she was fighting.
She had faith in Rostnikov, she told herself, but there had been something in his tone, his movement. He’d held something back when he visited her. But she must have been mistaken. It must be the illness, the medication. Rostnikov would not hide anything from her.
A twinge hit her just below the breast bone. Angina, the doctor
had called it. She considered cursing it and changed her mind. If rest would return her to the desk in Petrovka, then she would try to rest.
Unlike Tkach and Anna Timofeyeva, Rostnikov did not sleep. Neither did Sarah. Part of the reason for his restlessness was the condition of Emil Karpo, but Rostnikov did not blame himself. He had considered doing so, had sat up drinking tea and talking about it to Sarah after he returned from the office, but he could find no logical reason to blame himself for Karpo’s condition.
The guilt I feel, he finally decided, is not because of Emil Karpo.
Some time after two in the morning Sarah went to bed, knowing she would not sleep. Rostnikov chose to sit at the table touching his trophy and deciding on how long to wait until he called Drozhkin. He expected that the colonel would eventually call him, but he could not wait too long.
When dawn came, Rostnikov moved to the window and looked across the wide street at the apartments where others were rising to meet Monday. Lights were on, and people were boiling water, rubbing their sleepy eyes, brushing their teeth. Unlike Rostnikov, they did not sense the significance of this Monday.
If Karpo survived, Rostnikov might change his mind, his course of action. But he could not wait. Instead, he told himself that if Karpo died, it was but the final reason for him to act. It was the cutting of a tie.
Sarah rose at eight and silently made breakfast. She wore a long white linen nightgown, and her hair was down.
“Shave,” she said.
He got up, made his way groggily toward the bathroom and shaved. In the small mirror he examined his dark face.
“It is time,” he told himself. “Time, you dull-looking oaf.”
“I’m calling,” he told Sarah as he returned to the room and picked up a piece of bread and butter. She nodded and sat down with her tea and toast to watch him. He reached out a hairy hand and touched her before picking up the phone.
Though it was before eight, Drozhkin was in and took the call almost immediately.
“A somewhat disappointing conclusion to the case,” the colonel said icily.
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