Black Knight in Red Square Read Online Free Page A

his life with each delicate case he handled.
    â€œI understand,” Rostnikov said, rising. “I assume I am to go to the Metropole immediately. I am to keep you informed, and I am to work, as always, as swiftly as possible.”
    She stood and took the empty glass from his hand.
    â€œAn American is dead, poisoned,” she said. “It is already an embarrassment.”
    â€œAnd Karpo is to work with me?”
    â€œIf you wish,” she agreed, sitting again and already reaching for the next file on her desk. “But he must keep up with the rest of his case load.”
    Rostnikov moved toward the door.
    â€œIf you need Tkach, yes,” she said.
    He opened the door but paused before he stepped out. The next thing he was going to say would surely be dangerous, but it was worth saying, for he both liked and admired the homely, far too serious, and officious woman who sat behind the desk in this hot office.
    â€œHow are you feeling, Comrade Anna?” He spoke softly so that she could ignore him if she wished.
    Her reaction was to yank off her glasses and glare at him angrily for an instant. But something in his look, the way he stood, the sincerity of his tone, got through to her, and she couldn’t sustain the anger.
    â€œI am well, Porfiry,” she lied evenly.
    He recognized the lie and smiled ever so slightly.
    â€œGood,” he said and stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind him.
    He knew that she would not take his inquiry as the false solicitude of the underling who coveted his superior’s job, for the facts were clear. Rostnikov would never be more than a chief inspector in the MVD, a position higher than might be expected of him considering his inability to control his tongue, his frequent impetuousness, and his politically hazardous Jewish wife—a wife who had no interest at all in either religion or politics. Fortunately, Rostnikov had no ambition; he was politically uninterested. His job was to catch criminals and occasionally punish them at the moment of capture. Usually, however, the game—and he saw it as a game—ended when he caught the criminals and turned them over to the procurator’s office for justice. It didn’t matter to Rostnikov whether the law was reasonable or not. The criminals knew the law and knew when they were violating it.
    Beyond catching criminals, Rostnikov’s life was in his wife, his son Iosef who had recently been posted to Kiev with his army unit, weight lifting, reading American mystery novels, and, most recently, plumbing.
    Lost in thought, Rostnikov turned the corner and found himself facing Emil Karpo, a startling specter.
    â€œYou’ll be needing me?” Karpo said.
    â€œFor now,” answered Rostnikov, continuing to limp down the corridor. “We are going to the Metropole Hotel.”
    On Sverdlov Square facing the monument to Karl Marx stands the Metropole Hotel, which belongs to Intourist, the official Soviet tourist travel agency. The Metropole was built in 1903. In October 1917 the revolutionary workers and soldiers fought fiercely to capture it from the White army troops who had barricaded themselves inside. On the side of the hotel facing Marx Prospekt is a plaque commemorating this battle. Near the entrance to the hotel, on the square, are other memorial plaques, reminding people that the hotel for a time housed the offices of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of Soviets of Working People’s Deputies under the chairmanship of Yakov Sverdlov after whom the square had been named. Lenin often spoke in the ballroom of the Metropole.
    The Metropole has been renovated several times. The upper part of the facade is decorated with mosaic panels designed by Mikhai Vrubel on the theme of the play La Princesse Lointaine by the French playwright Edmond Rostand, who also wrote Cyrano de Bergerac. Feodor Chaliapin once sang in the hotel’s restaurant and Maxim Gorky once described