“A window?” said Shemenkov.
“First- and second-floor windows were locked from inside,” Sanchez responded. “The apartment is on the top floor. There have been eleven break-ins in the neighborhood in the past month.”
Shemenkov’s eyes scanned the room looking for answers. There were none there.
Rostnikov leaned forward and touched the bewildered man’s arm. Shemenkov tried to focus on the homely face before him but seemed unable to find him.
“Igor Shemenkov,” said, Rostnikov. “Do you have a diminutive, a name your friends and family call you?”
“No.”
“He is called Perets,” said Sanchez wearily. “Pepper.” He looked at Elena.
Rostnikov nodded.
Shemenkov seemed to awaken just a bit from his stupor. He looked at Elena.
“It seems our Russian adviser has a temper,” explained Sanchez. “That’s how he got the name.”
“I didn’t …” Shemenkov began. Then he shook his head and placed his wide palm on his forehead, as if checking for a temperature.
“I have a hobby,” said Shemenkov suddenly. “I make miniature animals from the shells of coconuts. With these hands. Would a man who does such a delicate thing murder like that?”
“I think you’ve hit upon a flawless defense,” said Sanchez.
Rostnikov rose awkwardly, nodded to Elena to take the file, and stepped around the little table to help Shemenkov to his feet. Throughout the ten or so minutes of sitting, Rostnikov’s leg had pulled at him like a spoiled child demanding attention. It was not quite pain, but a nagging dull shock, a demanding tightness. It was difficult to move.
“Rise, Shemenkov,” he said, pulling the dazed Russian into a standing position. “Officer Timofeyeva and I, with the help of the Cuban police”-he looked again at Major Sanchez, who smiled cooperatively-“will conduct a complete investigation.”
“You are in a hurry to go home,” said Shemenkov. “Or you want a vacation here. You won’t help me.”
“Officer Timofeyeva and I will not leave Cuba until we know who murdered Maria Fernandez.”
“That’s all I ask,” said Shemenkov, wearily holding out his hands.
Sanchez had walked to the door and opened it. A burly man in a blue uniform and a blue baseball cap entered the room. Sanchez nodded toward Shemenkov and the burly policeman stepped forward and touched his arm.
“Venga,” the policeman said in a high voice that surprised Rostnikov.
Shemenkov was ushered out without another word. When the door was closed, Sanchez looked first at Elena, who had stood up, and then at Rostnikov.
“Forgive my intrusions,” said Sanchez. “But we have many crimes-more each day as our people become more desperate. Not long ago we boasted that there was almost no murder, no violence in Cuba, but now … The man is guilty. If he were not Russian, he would have been tried and convicted.”
“I would like Elena Timofeyeva to talk to Victoria Oliveras,” said Rostnikov.
Sanchez nodded.
“She is in a women’s prison not far in the countryside. I will have Señorita Timofeyeva taken there when you wish.”
“And I would like to talk to Carlos and Angelica Carerra.”
“They speak no Russian. I don’t know if they speak English. I will be pleased to translate. Anything else?”
“Something to eat, perhaps?”
“I should have offered,” said Sanchez, smiling at Elena. “You know he is guilty, your Russian.”
“With certainty at the moment, I know only that I am tired and hungry,” said Rostnikov.
FOUR
The door to Paulinin’s basement laboratory in the Petrovka Police Station was unmarked and unnumbered. Dozens had mistaken it for a rest room. If the odors did not convince them of their error when they opened the door, the sights that greeted them made it instantly clear that they had blundered into madness.
Karpo entered Paulinin’s sanctuary at ten on the night of the murder of Iliana Ivanova, whose name he did not yet know.
Karpo’s distaste for the sprawling room had nothing to do with the odors nor the glass containers filled with greenish liquid and the remnants of body parts. It was the lack of order that displeased him.
In one corner stood a quartet of unpainted plaster statues of religious figures. In another corner, tucked under a table, was a box of empty bottles. The walls were lined with steel-topped tables covered with fragments of clocks, papers, parts of toys, and unnameable machinery.
Three long tables in the center of the room were also covered with stuff.
It was a room totally unlike Karpo’s own small room, which was neat and clean, like the cell of a monk. A bed in one corner. One table with a drawer alongside the bed. An old, large chest of drawers that had belonged to his family and now, along with the narrow wooden closet at its side, held Karpo’s few possessions. A small wooden desk. And ceiling-high bookshelves almost filled with identical black notebooks containing Karpo’s carefully written and cross-referenced files of unsolved Moscow crimes going back thirty years.
Karpo looked across the clutter, past the headless bust of a dressmaker’s dummy, at the man in the dirty blue smock. Paulinin looked back at him.
“I would like more time,” Paulinin said.
He was a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversize head topped by wild gray-black hair.
“I can return when you wish,” said Karpo.
“I didn’t say I had nothing for you,” said Paulinin. “I was stating a wish. I have things to show you. Come.”
Karpo made his way around the lab tables, avoiding something shapeless and quivering in the shadows. Paulinin had moved to his desk against the wall.
“Sit,” Paulinin ordered, pointing to the metal folding chair next to his desk.
Karpo lifted a pile of books from the chair, searched for someplace to put them, and settled for a spot on the floor between a metal coffeepot and what looked like a pants pressing machine. Then he sat.
Paulinin swept away some frayed notes on his desk, piled a few books onto an already precarious pile, and placed a notebook in front of him.
“I’ll share a secret with you, Karpo,” Paulinin said, pushing his glasses back on his nose with unscrubbed fingers. “I will share a secret and some tea.”
Paulinin reached down to his left, came up with a pot and two clear laboratory measuring cups. As he poured and served, Paulinin rambled.
“They are all butchers,” he said. “Butchers. Only Liebinski has pride. Only Liebinski has the right to call himself a pathologist. And he is not that good. The others are a disaster, a disgrace. And no one cares. No one cares. I get a lung or a brain and it looks as if it has been handled by a street cleaner.”
“There are times when it may have been,” said Karpo.
Paulinin looked over the rim of his cup to see if the gaunt policeman might be making a joke at his expense. But there was no humor in the pale Tatar. It was one of the things Paulinin liked about the forbidding figure who sat across from him.
“Perhaps, but the incompetence of a trio of ill-trained men without pride in their work is not the secret. Your visiting foreign minister from Kazakhstan is the secret.”
Paulinin put down his cup and opened a drawer. From the drawer he pulled a clear glass pot.
“The minister’s liver,” he said triumphantly. “Who do I trust with the minister’s liver? Which fool? Which liar? Which incompetent? Which politician? Who would appreciate what I have discovered? Only you, Emil Karpo.”
Karpo finished his tepid and tasteless tea. Was there an aftertaste of some bitter chemical in the cup?
“I appreciate your confidence.”
“Before I moved down here,” said Paulinin, looking around the lab, “I think I had a sense of humor. But now? I am too much in the company of ruptured spleens and infected brains. One loses one’s sense of humor. I knew that. It is a loss I accept in exchange for the sanity of being left to work. We are considered eccentrics, you and I.”