Red Chameleon (17 page)

“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.

The woman trudged forward toward the edge of the hotel roof, stopped, took a small bottle out of her pocket, removed some green pills, and threw them into her mouth. Then she turned her head upward to the sky to take in rain to wash down the pills. The rain hit her face, pushing her hair from her eyes and mouth, and for an instant Karpo thought there was the remnant of something in the woman's face, something that might have been but had been burned away.

Her head came down, and she stood, arms folded at the edge of the building, looking down, waiting. They both waited for perhaps ten minutes, sharing the solitude. Then the rain began to ease, and within a minute it stopped. Behind him, Karpo could hear a bird singing as the woman knelt with some pain and opened her trombone case.

He waited till she lifted the rifle out, waited till she carefully loaded it, waited till she propped it up on the stone facade and looked down at the street, before he stepped out from behind the turret.

“No,” he said as the bird sailed past him, singing.

The woman was not startled. In fact, for an instant Karpo thought that she might not have heard him, that she might be hard of hearing or so preoccupied that his word did not penetrate her consciousness. Then she turned to him, and he could see her strange smile of satisfaction. The rifle in her hands, large and clumsy, came around in her large hands and aimed at him, smelled him out. Karpo stopped ho more than a dozen feet from her.

“You are a policeman,” she said. It wasn't a question.

“I am a policeman,” Karpo agreed. “Assistant Inspector Emil Karpo of the procurator's office. And you are—”

“A killer of policemen,” Vera said with defiance.

“Yes, what is the name of this killer of policemen?”

“Vera Shepovik,” she said, spitting out her own name with what sounded like hatred. “I don't mind telling you. I'm going to kill you. I saw you following me. I hoped you would be here. I was afraid you wouldn't. I—”

“I saw you compete in the university games three years ago,” he said. “At the Palace of Sports in Luzhniki. Javelin and—”

“Hammer,” she said. “I placed second in the hammer. That was my last competition.”

“You were very good,” he said. Karpo had no passion for sports, for athletic competition, but he did find satisfaction in the vision of athletes, Soviet athletes, who disciplined their bodies, drove them. It was something he respected, and so when Rostnikov had invited him to watch the competition, Karpo had agreed. Rostnikov had shown little interest in anything but the weightlifting, during which he talked constantly, pointing out nuances and tensions that Karpo could not discern.

“Do you want to know why it was my last competition?” she asked.

Karpo nodded.

“Because I discovered that I was ill, that I was poisoned, that steroids were eating away my organs from within.” She took one hand off the rifle to touch her stomach, to indicate where the process of decay was taking place. “They used me; the great Soviet state used my body, used me like a zombie, and then cast me aside to die without meaning when their experiment failed.”

Her hand went back to the rifle.

“And you are sure your illness was a result of—”

“I'm sure,” she shouted. “I feel it.”

“A doctor confirmed—”

“I don't need a doctor to confirm what my body knows,” she said. “My mind knows that the state killed me and left my body to walk about. I know you are one of the tentacles of the state, that I must cut down as many tentacles as I can. My life may be small, but it will have this meaning, demand this attention. I'm dying.”

“And so are we all,” Karpo said, stepping a bit closer to the woman, whose red eyes were fixed on his own.

“But some of us sooner than others,” she said with a smile.

“Yes,” he agreed.

She raised the rifle, and Karpo saw the dark hole of the barrel searching his face. His chance was to keep her sights high, to move low after she shot. If the rifle came down, it would be aimed at his body, and even a miss might take off his head.

“Why aren't you afraid, policeman? There is a gun in your face. People with guns in their face are afraid. People are afraid to die, policeman.”

“You are afraid to die, Vera Shepovik.” He took a step forward and continued. “You are quite right. I am a part of the state. I can be killed, and you will either be caught or you will die from whatever it is that tears at you.”

“Be afraid,” she shouted. “It doesn't have meaning if you aren't afraid. It doesn't count if I can't see—”

“The policeman you shot two days ago was thirty years old,” he said, moving to within four feet of her; the rifle was almost touching his mouth. “He was quite brave, a hero.”

“And that is why you hate me,” she said in triumph. “Now I understand. You want revenge.”

“No. I want you to understand that your act has no meaning. You kill us, and there are others. You accomplish nothing. Come from this roof and we will get you to a hospital where you can be looked at, where you can find out what is really within you.”

She laughed and looked for an instant at the sky, but the rifle did not move.

“And I will be kept alive long enough to be executed.”

There was no denying it.

“I can't allow you to kill again,” he said softly.

“And I can't stop,” she said almost softly. “There is a painting in the Pushkin Museum …”

The moment was strange, intimate, and Karpo, blaming his fever, his pain, the quivering cold, wet skin, felt that he could love this woman. The thought almost got him killed. The metal click of the rifle entered him, was absorbed without thought. When the bullet cracked, his head was already moving down to the right. There was a roar, an explosion, and he felt his inner ear vibrate and go deaf. His left arm went up, hitting the barrel of the rifle as he sprawled backward, awkwardly unable to use either hand to stop him from crashing to the rough, wet roof. He rolled quickly over, sensing the barrel of the rifle striking the space where his head had been.

Karpo scrambled up, expecting to be hit or pushed over the edge twenty floors to the street. He wondered what the sensation would be, whether he would have time to think, observe, before he was absorbed into the pavement.

He managed to get his pistol out awkwardly in his left hand as Vera raised the rifle to strike again.

“Enough,” he said gently. “Enough.”

Something in his voice stopped her. She had expected anger, hatred, but this walking death of a man gave her only a sense of understanding. It was not what it should be.

“Damn you, policeman,” she said.

She threw the rifle over his head, and it sailed down toward Kutuzov Avenue.

“All over,” Karpo said, feeling his head go light, warning him that he might soon simply pass out.

“No,” she said, stepping to her right to the edge of the hotel. She looked over the side in the direction she had thrown her rifle. Her hair blew back. Tears were in her eyes.

“Perhaps, if I aim carefully, I can hit a policeman walking by. On the television they jump from airplanes and guide themselves.” She looked down, and Karpo aimed his pistol at a pink, faded rose on her dress.

“No,” he commanded.

She was standing on the narrow wall, not looking at him, looking downward, biting her lower lip.

“Vera,” he said gently, and she looked at him. He had the impression that she was listening, was considering stepping back.

She did indeed say, “Maybe,” as her foot slipped on the wet mounting and she went over the edge, her head striking the wall with a horrible crack before she tumbled out of Karpo's sight.