Black Knight in Red Square (17 page)

Stock removed his jacket and shirt and peeled off the paintings. In his haste he had hidden the bottom painting, a landscape, so that the paint pressed against his sweaty chest. A good deal of paint stuck to his skin when he peeled the canvas off.

If they inspect me at the airport, Osip thought, the evidence of my guilt will be painted in reverse on my body. He thought about where he might wash.

“Enough.”

Stock thought the voice was the Dutchman's, who in turn thought it was Stock. They were both wrong. It was the voice of Emil Karpo who now stepped out into the starlight, a tall outline with a hand outstretched, holding a gun.

“Police,” he explained evenly. “You will raise your hands slowly and lie on the ground, face down.”

Osip let out a small whimper and looked at the Dutchman. The Dutchman looked around quickly, and seeing no escape, he brought his hands up. In his right there glittered the bar of metal. Stock took in the metal bar.

“You were going to kill me,” he said slowly.

The Dutchman, who knew more about the Soviet system of justice than Osip Stock did, was beyond concern. He was thinking of the prison years ahead, but Osip was a man who had been betrayed and whose dream had been shattered. He threw down the paintings and, ignoring Karpo's gun, lunged at the Dutchman.

“Stop,” shouted Karpo, but Stock was not to be stopped. The Dutchman swung the bar and caught the advancing madman on the shoulder, but Osip had his hands around the smaller man's throat. The metal bar went skittering across the pavement, clanking and sending up sparks.

“Stop,” Karpo repeated, stepping forward. With but one good arm, he doubted if he could separate the two and knew that if he came too close he ran the risk of losing his gun. “I am going to shoot,” he said over the grunting of Osip and the gurgling of the Dutchman.

Karpo aimed a few feet from the struggling pair, who had rolled over on the paintings. The bullet hit the head of an eighteenth-century saint but did nothing to discourage Stock. Karpo aimed the second bullet at Stock's legs. But it was dark, and the thieves were moving. Even as good a shot as Emil Karpo could be forgiven for what happened.

The bullet struck the Dutchman on the left side of his chest and made a path through his heart before lodging in his lung. There was a convulsion, and the man died, but Osip Stock kept strangling him. As long as he kept his attention on the little man, he would not have to think about what was coming next.

“He is dead,” said Karpo, stepping forward to stand next to Stock. “You madman. He is dead.”

It took a substantial clout with the gun to make Osip stop and look about. It took another clout to make him react.

“Now get up and pick up those paintings,” Karpo said. The kneeling Stock looked up at this angel of death, then down at the Dutchman. Anger turned to fear, which turned to panic. Stock rose, looked at the gun pointed at him, glanced around the alley, and took off at a sprint. Karpo considered chasing him, but he was running at a breakneck pace, his jacket flying open, his thin, birdlike chest heaving.

Karpo raised his gun, but when he had Stock's back firmly in sight he changed his mind. He knelt to be sure the Dutchman was dead and listened to Stock's clattering footsteps receding in the darkness.

From a public phone nearby, Karpo called for an ambulance. Then he called the gallery and told one of the guards to come for the paintings. His third call set up a general alarm to pick up Osip Stock. Then he returned to the alley to wait with the body. He would have to make out a report, but he would worry about that later. The fact that he had shot a parasite did not bother him, though he considered that he might have handled the situation better.

For Karpo it was a case closed, a job done. Even as he leaned against the wall within feet of the dead man, his mind was back on the woman with the dark eyes. It was almost like love, this hatred he felt for her, but either way it spurred him on. If he could think like her, he might be able to figure out her next move. As he waited for the ambulance, he closed his eyes and went over the case from his first sight of the woman to his discovery of the maps. Just before the ambulance arrived at 3:15
A.M
. an idea came.

By the time Osip Stock was picked up at 4:47, he had run almost ten miles. The police had found him not far from his home. He was exhausted and not terribly coherent. Karpo did not know that Stock had been picked up till nine the next morning, because he had left word that he was not to be disturbed. He had a plan to work out, and it would require his full concentration.

D
ISCOURAGING, ROSTNIKOV THOUGHT, MOST
discouraging. The room was crowded with people. It was normally a basketball court, but at present it was being used as a warm-up room for those competing in the Sokolniki Recreation Park's annual weight-lifting competition for men and women over fifty. The contestants warmed up in here and then competed in another building. Four people competed at a time early in the competition, and as the lifting continued, this was decreased to two, and at last the finalists competed individually before a substantial audience.

In the past, Rostnikov had seen only the finalists. He did not realize how many people in Moscow over the age of fifty considered themselves weight lifters. There were several hundred, and it was discouraging. The room was filled with people doing situps and pushups, running in place, turning red in the face from their efforts. It was madness. Some of the contestants looked too old to compete in anything. Others looked far younger than fifty.

Feeling awkward, he moved to a corner and flexed his muscles. Normally he warmed up by simply lifting. He had a terrorist killer to catch, a dangerous plan to execute. How long could he wait here to be called? Yes, it was Saturday, and most of the people here did not have to work, but for him this was a working day.

“Breathe,” said a robust woman doing situps next to him. “You don't want to hyperventilate. Breathe deep.”

This discouraged Rostnikov even more. He must look like a novice if this woman was giving him advice. Many of the people in the gymnasium were wearing sweat suits like his. Others wore fancy European running suits in blue or red. A good number were in shorts and shirts emblazoned with the names of the cooperatives or factories they represented. Rostnikov's sweat suit was gray and baggy.

“Breathe,” insisted the robust woman, coming up from a situp.

“I
am
breathing,” Rostnikov replied. Off in a corner, someone dropped a weight with a terrible clang and cursed. A man with an enormous belly and a bald head came past and paused to look down at Rostnikov as if he were inferior competition. Around his neck the man had draped a blue towel, which he held with both hands and used to flex the muscles in his hairy arms. Rostnikov suddenly felt like apologizing and heading for the exit, but it was too late for that, and this might well be his last chance to compete.

Names were called. Weight totals were posted solemnly on a blackboard to indicate leaders. Losers trooped in silently, some angry with themselves. The bald man, as it turned out, was an early loser. He stomped past Rostnikov and threw his towel at the wall. It hit with a sweat-soaked splat. People around pretended not to notice.

And then Rostnikov was called. The robust woman who, he was sure, had warmed herself up into total exhaustion, wished him luck and reminded him to breathe. He promised to do so.

“Name,” said a man in a white shirt, dark tie, and thick glasses. He held a clipboard and did not look back at Rostnikov as he led the way. Rostnikov, dragging his bad leg, had trouble keeping up with him.

“Rostnikov, Porfiry Petrovich,” the chief inspector called ahead, following the man through the crowd and out of the building.

“That is right,” said the man, heading for the next building.

“I thought it might be,” said Rostnikov.

The man stopped and turned to the detective, his clipboard clutched to his chest. “This is a most serious competition,” he said. “We take it seriously.”

“As do I,” said Rostnikov, wondering if the man was using an editorial “we,” or whether “we” referred to the state, or to everyone competing except Rostnikov.

The man examined Rostnikov and found nothing impressive in the washtub with the oversized gray sweat suit.

As a participant rather than a spectator, Rostnikov's first view of the auditorium was a revelation. The sense of being looked over and criticized was overwhelming. He followed the man with the glasses like a lost child latching onto the nearest adult.

There was little formality. When he got to mat number three, a no-nonsense woman checked his name again and pointed with a pencil for him to move to the weight that sat waiting. No one told him how much it weighed. Things were moving too quickly. The morning was too hot, and there were too many people to eliminate. A pair of bored, muscular young spotters with tight white shirts moved to either side of Rostnikov as he stood behind the bar and looked at the woman who held the stopwatch.

“Time,” she said.

Rostnikov took a deep breath, bent awkwardly with his bad leg braced. He had taped the leg to give it a bit more stability, but he knew he could not count on it for help. He looked down at the bar but not the weights. You will rise and become one with me, he commanded the bar.

Rostnikov had not practiced the snatch very often. It was too difficult to do with his leg, to bring the weight from the floor to a locked overhead position in one smooth move. In addition, when he practiced in his apartment, he was afraid of sending the weights through the floor onto the heads of the Vonoviches below.

Rostnikov grabbed the weight. Though this was not his event he would try not to embarrass himself. Up, he commanded, up as one, and he imagined Alexiev or young Anatoli Pisarenko flinging the metal overhead with that beauty of motion that demonstrated a man's control over his own body.

He bent his good knee and moved his other leg to a firmer position and lifted. Up, up, up, he commanded, but he was lucky to get the weight as far as his chest. Fearing that time was running out, he paused only a fraction of a second, then pressed the weight upward and held it. It was heavy, but tolerable. He looked over at the woman and the man with the glasses for the sign that he could drop the weight and end the embarrassment of having failed, but there was something strange about their faces. Both had mouths open and the woman was not looking at her watch. Several people from the other mats had moved over quickly to look at him, and there was a buzz of words he could not make out. The weight above his head began to sway, and he was afraid he would drop it.

Rostnikov pleaded with the woman with his eyes, and finally she nodded to indicate that the lift was complete. He dropped the weight as easily as he could and pulled his bad leg back out of the way as the bar bounced against the mat as if alive. The two spotters bent over to stop it, and Rostnikov straightened up, a slight ache in his back. It was at this point that he realized the cluster of people around his mat were applauding.

“Why did you do that?” asked the man with glasses, a look of awe on his face.

“It was too heavy for me to snatch,” Rostnikov answered, bewildered.

“You weren't supposed to snatch it,” said the man. “That was the weight for the dead lift. It was more than three hundred pounds. You were just supposed to lift it off the mat. No one has ever cleaned and jerked that much in this competition.”

Rostnikov's eyes widened. So he was doing all right after all. Then again, he knew that Alexiev and Pisarenko and a handful of Americans, Poles, East Germans, and Bulgarians could clean and jerk almost 600 pounds.

Then things began to move quickly. Rostnikov developed a retinue led by the man with glasses, who became his guardian through the competition.

“Did you breathe?” asked the woman back in the warm-up building when Rostnikov returned between events. She sat cross-legged, red-faced, rubbing her cheek.

“I breathed,” he said.

“I forgot,” she said, getting to her knees and reaching for a blue bag. “Good luck.” And she was off.

With the help of the man with glasses, Rostnikov found out not only what the weights were but how he stood in the competition as the morning moved to afternoon. For the final rounds of each event, there was but one mat, and things moved more quickly.

Rostnikov's snatch proved to be his weakest event, and there was even a moment of consultation among the judges when they had to decide if his awkward thrust counted.

One of the judges stepped forward, a young man with enormous shoulders and white-blond hair.

“How did your leg get like that?” the young man asked.

“The war,” Rostnikov explained. “Battle of Rostov.”

The young man nodded, looked at his pad of paper, bit his lower lip, and returned to the other two judges. They consulted briefly and announced that Rostnikov's lift, good enough for third place, would stand.

In the dead lift, however, there was no problem or question. His 560 pounds won easily as did his 300 pounds for the clean and jerk. His totals for the three events were enough to give Rostnikov the championship.

“I knew it,” said the man with glasses, taking Rostnikov's sleeve and leading him back to the platform to receive his awards. “I knew we could do it.”

Then applause, and lights. Rostnikov blinked back the sweat and wiped his face with his sleeve. He knew he should smile, but the serious look would not leave his face. He held one arm up to acknowledge the applause. It was too much like a dream, and the most amazing part of the dream was Alexiev. Rostnikov could see him now, but it was a strange Alexiev wearing a suit. He had never thought of Alexiev wearing a suit, only the shorts and light shirt or blue sweatshirt, but it was Alexiev, and he was applauding—applauding for Rostnikov. It was a moment to savor. Rostnikov tried to shake himself out of the dream and enjoy the moment, but his mind would not respond. He walked as if in a heavy fog.