Tarnished Icons ir-11

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Yevgeny took a long iron bar from Leonid, who backed away from him. Then they all retreated to separate corners and began to pace off toward the center of the room. They placed their small flashlights on the floor, the beams crossing one another. Yevgeny put his weapon on the floor at his side, where he could reach it quickly. The men were now separated by about ten feet.

  Yevgeny reached down to find a space between the boards at his feet into which he could insert the steel bar. His fingers touched the wood beneath him and he pulled at it hard. The board came up easily, suddenly hitting him across the cheek.

  He dropped the board and went to one knee for his weapon. In the light that shone up from the floor, the faces of Leonid and Georgi looked ghostly pale, sunken holes for eyes, dark, upward shadows in skeleton grins.

  Each of them had found the same thing. The boards beneath them had simply come up with a slight pull. It was Georgi who picked up his flashlight first and shined it at the ground under the board he had placed at his side.

  “Someone’s been here,” Georgi said. “Someone’s been digging here.”

  “And here,” said Leonid.

  Yevgeny turned his light downward and said nothing. The other two were right.

  “How did you know where to start digging, five paces from the corner?” asked Georgi, hoisting his crowbar like a baseball bat.

  “Igor had a letter,” said Yevgeny, trying to think.

  “One of us came here and got it,” said Georgi.

  “Yes,” said Yevgeny as Georgi stepped forward and Leonid stepped back.

  “No,” came a new voice.

  The three men threw the beams of their lights across the walls and into the corners and then toward the alcove as overhead ceiling lights came on and two men stepped into view. One was the rabbi who had beaten them in the street. The other was the policeman, the Washtub, Rostnikov, holding something in his arms. Whatever it was, was covered by a white cloth.

  “This is what you are looking for,” said Rostnikov, pulling the cloth away to reveal a tarnished stone-encrusted figure of a dog or wolf. Even after a century under the earth, the creature was magnificent. “When it is expertly cleaned and restored, it will go to either the Hermitage, from which it was stolen, or to the Kremlin Museum. You have murdered for nothing. You do not even have the excuse of murdering for hatred, simply greed.”

  “Put it down and back away,” said Yevgeny, aiming his weapon at the two men.

  Rostnikov didn’t move.

  “How many are outside waiting?” Yevgeny asked.

  “None,” said Rostnikov.

  “Leonid,” said Yevgeny.

  Leonid went to the window and looked out cautiously, half expecting a bullet through his forehead. He rushed across the room and did the same on the street side.

  “I don’t see anyone,” Leonid said.

  “You can’t be that stupid,” said Yevgeny.

  “Thank you,” said Rostnikov, still holding the golden wolf.

  “Georgi,” Yevgeny said, “when I shoot, you take the wolf. Leave the tools here. We go through the front door. Leonid, you turn off the lights and close the door.”

  There was nothing more to say. Yevgeny pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He pulled again. Nothing.

  “We found the gun while you were at work this morning,” said Rostnikov. “Behind a panel in the ceiling of the bathroom down the hall from your room. We disarmed it.”

  “You knew before you came to the laundry,” said Yevgeny.

  Rostnikov shrugged.

  “You wanted to catch us here,” Yevgeny went on.

  Belinsky could take no more. He strode across the floor, pushed Yevgeny’s gun to the side, and slapped the young man with the back of his right hand. Yevgeny’s head spun to the side. A tooth spat from his open mouth. The young man staggered back, dropping his gun, stunned, mouth bloody. The rabbi slapped him five more times and said, “One for each of the men you murdered.”

  “I don’t think we’ll need guns, will we?” asked Rostnikov.

  Georgi took another step forward past the rabbi, hoisting his crowbar high. Once past the smaller man he advanced on Rostnikov, who still held the wolf and blocked the doorway.

  “Give it to me or I’ll break your head,” Georgi threatened.

  “That will be a problem,” said Rostnikov. “I don’t think you can hold it in one arm. It is quite heavy and if you use both arms, you will have to put the crowbar down. It is a dilemma.”

  Yevgeny was on the floor, using his sleeve in an effort to stop the blood from his nose and mouth. Leonid had backed against the wall and sagged to a sitting position on the aluminum tunnel.

  “Now,” demanded Georgi. “Leonid, come.”

  Leonid paid no attention.

  When Georgi, crowbar upraised, stood directly before Rostnikov, the inspector dropped the wolf. It landed on Georgi’s right foot. Every man in the room heard the bones cracking followed by a shriek of pain and the crowbar clanking across the room in a wild spin into the aluminum tubing, which clanged loudly. Even this did not rouse Leonid.

  Georgi’s eyes rolled back and he slumped to the floor and onto his back, unconscious with the shock of sudden, horrible agony. For an instant, Rostnikov wondered if the big man on the floor would lose his foot.

  With the help of Rabbi Belinsky, Rostnikov handcuffed Yevgeny and Leonid together and got them out to their car, where Zelach sat behind the wheel. Rostnikov then went back into Congregation Israel for the wolf, which he put in the trunk of the car. Finally he returned to carry the limp, semi-conscious Georgi Radzo, who, Belinsky estimated, weighed well over 220 pounds. Rostnikov had lifted him with no great effort in spite of having to do so with only one good leg.

  Outside, after turning off the lights and locking the door, the rabbi took a handful of snow and gently put it to the mouth of Yevgeny Tutsolov, who sat in the backseat of the police car handcuffed to the zombielike Leonid, who did not even react to the weight of Georgi unconsciously slumped against him.

  “That should stop the bleeding,” said Belinsky, examining Yevgeny’s face.

  Yevgeny didn’t answer. His hand was cuffed to the dead weight of Leonid, and he was at the mercy of the mad Jew.

  A little more than an hour later, when the three murderers were behind bars and Belinsky had gone home, Rostnikov entered Petrovka and went up to see the director of the Office of Special Investigation. The lights were on and the door open. Rostnikov entered, holding the wolf in one arm, and then walked in front of Pankov’s desk to the inner door. It came open before he had to shift the burden again.

  Director Yakovlev stood back to let him in and pointed to the conference table, where a thick towel lay. Rostnikov placed the wolf on the towel. The Yak said nothing. He shook Rostnikov’s hand and stood at the door ushering his deputy director out. He closed the door behind him.

  Twenty minutes later Rostnikov took off his left leg and crawled into bed under the thick blanket next to Sarah.

  “You’re all right?” she asked dreamily.

  “I’m all right,” he answered.

  And then they slept.

  THIRTEEN

  It was a narrow street in the old part of Moscow, a street that had been fashionable a century ago and now withstood the crumbling of its stores and brick houses, which had been turned into apartments.

  Karpo knew the street well.

  It was where, for several years, he had come to meet Mathilde Verson, where they had gone to a small room, a neatly decorated and quite comfortably bright room where they initially had sex and eventually did something very close to making love. Mathilde was smart, a flaming redhead with good teeth and extremely fair skin. She was a little over forty. During the day she filled in as a telephone operator. For the last six months of their relationship, Mathilde had refused to take money from him, though the thought of anything but a business arrangement made Karpo uneasy. Yet resistance to the life force that was Mathilde, the good-natured fun she made of his
seriousness and his lack of a sense of humor, was impossible.

  When Mathilde was caught in the crossfire between two gangs and torn to pieces by bullets from automatic weapons as she sat in a small cafe drinking tea, Karpo had, with Rostnikov’s support, joined with Craig Hamilton, the American FBI adviser on organized crime, to find, confront, and destroy those who had taken her life.

  This retribution had given Karpo little satisfaction, and he had stepped back into total dedication to his work. He had also, Porfiry Petrovich had told him, begun behaving like a man who was now courting death. If that was true, Karpo was not consciously aware of it.

  Now it was a Thursday again, and he was on the same street where he had first begun meeting Mathilde. It was also almost the same time of day.

  Emil Karpo had only broken one law in his life. He had believed fervently in Communism from the time he was a boy and his father took him to his first party meeting. He had believed in its laws and promise. There were weak and corrupt government officials and police, but Karpo, erect, dressed in black, pale-faced and determined, walked like death in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a film he had never seen, through the streets of Moscow.

  The law he had broken was that of frequenting a prostitute. He wanted no wife and was not sure of the kind of woman who would have him even had he so chosen. He was aware, not just from the teachings of Lenin and Marx and Chairman Mao, that men were potentially superior animals, but that did not stop them from being animals.

  Emil Karpo had decided that to fulfill his function as a citizen of the Soviet state he had to acknowledge his existence as a sexual animal or he would lose at least some of his ability as a police inspector. It had been a difficult position to arrive at for Karpo, especially in a Soviet Union that proclaimed prostitution did not exist.

  Now Karpo walked. The sun was out, but the snow was not melting. People, carrying their plastic bags and bundled up, avoided him on the street, and only an occasional young man would look directly at him.

  The shop was small, the walls cracking. An icon of the Madonna and the baby Jesus hung where only a few years ago Lenin had looked off into the future. The owner of the small coffee and tea shop, much smaller than the one in which Mathilde had been killed, was not a Communist or a Christian. He was a survivor, a Turk by birth, with a round body and mustache and a look of constant consternation on his face.

  The prostitutes had paid him a token fee for taking up table space in his shop. He didn’t mind having the place look a little busy. But those were the old days. Now prostitutes plied their bodies openly near the big hotels that made special arrangements for visiting businessmen. The newly rich, proudly unscrupulous capitalistic entrepreneurs and the mafias had their own contacts for obtaining prostitutes and seldom accepted the offers of the women who were reduced to walking the streets.

  The shop was nearly empty. There were only five tables, in any case, with a counter against the far wall that was only a dozen paces from the door. One table held a couple, a man and woman about the same age. Maybe they were married or lovers, or maybe this was one of the last vestiges of the old days and they were talking money for favors.

  At another table sitting alone, looking out of the frosted window, was a dark-haired young woman, thinner than Mathilde and wearing more makeup than Mathilde had ever used. She was wearing a reasonably modest green dress, and she was seated far enough back from the small table to reveal a black belt around the middle of the dress. Draped over her chair was an expensive-looking black jacket.

  Karpo approached the young woman. Before her was a demitasse of dark coffee and a smoldering cigarette in a clear glass ashtray.

  “Amelia?” he asked, standing over her.

  The woman turned to look up at him. She was definitely pretty. She was also older than she had looked in profile, which, he decided, was probably why she had been looking out of the window instead of at the door when he entered. She was somewhere in her thirties. Beyond that, he couldn’t be sure.

  She smiled, a very small but sincere smile, and held out her hand. It was slender and her nails were cut relatively short and painted bright red.

  “Please sit,” she said, putting out the cigarette. “Would you like a coffee? Tea?”

  “Nothing,” he said, sitting, not unbuttoning his coat.

  “You are going to make this difficult for me, aren’t you, Inspector?” she said with a sigh.

  “That is not my intention.”

  “We have met, you know?” she said.

  “Almost two years ago,” he said. “On the street. Mathilde said hello to you. You were with two other women.”

  “Quite a memory,” she said, looking impressed.

  “I am a policeman,” he said.

  “I thought it might have been me who impressed you,” she said.

  There was a teasing in her voice and manner that reminded him of Mathilde. Was she imitating Mathilde? Was it part of her act? Was he seeing the real woman?

  “You asked to see me,” he said. “You said it was important.”

  “Down to business,” she said, slapping both hands on the small table. “All right. Mathilde and I were friends. We talked. I knew about you. I knew something close existed between the two of you toward the end. But you want to get to business. Fine. If you are interested, I will take Mathilde’s place. Not in a personal relationship but a business one. My rates are low and my time flexible. I would like to be able to do it for Mathilde.”

  Karpo, who had mastered the skill of not blinking, looked directly at her and decided, at least for the moment, that she was telling the truth.

  “Why aren’t you working a hotel or …?” he began.

  She laughed. Not Mathilde’s ringing laugh, but a low, deep laugh and said, “I’m too old. The girls in demand are near amateurs, teens or in their early twenties. I hold on to my regulars and pick up extra money doing … well, things. I refuse to walk the streets in front of second-rate restaurants and hotels. Are you considering? It’s difficult to tell looking at you.”

  “I’m considering,” he said.

  Consideration of such a thing was not something Emil Karpo could do quickly.

  “You have a last name, Amelia?” he asked.

  “The real one or the easy one?” she asked.

  “Both.”

  “The real one is Boroskovich, Amelia Boroskovich. The professional one is Boros. I thought it sounded exotic when I began my profession. Now I am stuck with it.”

  Karpo rose and looked down at the young woman. He spoke deliberately with no trace of emotion.

  “I will consider,” he said. “If I decide to engage in the relationship, it will be for one time initially. We can decide what, if anything, happens after that. I want only the business relationship.”

  “Your gallantry is flattering,” she said with a smile on her very red lips. It was an ironic comment worthy of Mathilde.

  “If I decide affirmatively, will this time and place a week from now be acceptable?” he asked.

  She shrugged and said, “Now would be acceptable, but, I know, you want to consider.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I may decide negatively. It would have nothing to do with your appearance or personality, which are quite acceptable.”

  “A real compliment,” she said, showing more teeth, which were white and remarkably even. “I’ll be here a week from this moment, Emil Karpo. If you come, I will smile. If you don’t, I will drink a cup of strong coffee, have a cigarette, and whisper to the memory of Mathilde that I tried.”

  Karpo nodded and left the shop. He walked the way he had come without looking back. He told himself he would consider, that he would check on Amelia’s background, but unless he found something truly damning, he knew he would be back at the shop in exactly one week at the same time.

  The Yak stood looking out the window of his office. His hands were clasped behind his back when Rostnikov entered and closed the door.

  “It would be nice to have some fresh
snow,” said Director Yakovlev, still turned away from his deputy.

  There really was nothing intelligent to say about the comment, so Rostnikov stood silently. Written reports on the bomber, the rapist, and the men who had murdered the Jews were in his hand.

  Yakovlev turned around, approached Rostnikov. He took the reports and placed them on his desk without looking at them.

  “Last night our bomber, Alexi Monochov, was transported by plane to a mental hospital in Irkutsk, Siberia. An evaluation by a psychiatrist and a decree from a judge were obtained.”

  Rostnikov said nothing.

  “Monochov turned over the names of the eight profiteers and criminals his father had been blackmailing,” said the Yak, “along with the evidence against them.”

  Again Rostnikov said nothing, though he knew from his last conversation with Monochov that there had been sixteen people of substance being blackmailed. He had more than a good idea of where the evidence against the final eight, probably the most influential people on Monochov’s list, might now be.

  There was a pause while Director Yakovlev waited to see if Rostnikov would react. Rostnikov did not.

  “You’ve made me look like a genius in my first week,” said the Yak with a touch of what may have been relief. “Three major crimes brought to resolution. My decision to put you in charge of all ongoing investigations has brought me reluctant praise from several sources.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it,” said Rostnikov.

  “Would you like to sit?” asked the Yak, moving behind his desk.

  “Not if we will be brief,” said Rostnikov.

  “We will be very brief,” said the Yak, touching the tips of his fingers together. “I have only one more piece of information. Regrettably the statue of the wolf you brought in yesterday proved to be nothing but a cheap replica of the original. Sometime in the past century someone must have made off with the original and buried the imitation in its place.”