Black Knight in Red Square by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page A

a minor Party official who was browsing in the Moscow Book House, Dom Knigi. No one had seen the crime done. The following Tuesday, a reasonably well-known poet had been similarly skewered in the philately department of the Moscow Book House. Again, no one saw it happen. Karpo had worked for almost three months on the case, which his colleagues jokingly called the shish-kabob murders. Then he was ordered to go on to other things. But his spare time was his own, and his spare time existed only to serve the state. So, every other Tuesday afternoon, at precisely the time the murders had occurred, Karpo returned to the Moscow Book House, in the faint hope that the killer, who had not struck for almost a dozen years, might show up again. He looked especially hard at people carrying umbrellas or canes or anything that might hide a long, sharp instrument. Such dogged pursuit had, in fact, led eventually to the apprehension of eight criminals who would otherwise have gotten away with their crimes.
    When the notebooks were in order, Karpo took a shower and ate a piece of bread and a potato, washing the food down with a large glass of Borzhomi, a mineral water that tasted a bit like iodine. By ten, after an hour of sleep made difficult by the constant ache in his left arm, he fixed the wire on his door and left his apartment. An hour later, about the time Rostnikov and his wife were getting to bed, Karpo emerged from the Novokuznekskaya metro station, walked slowly down the street to a huge Victorian mansion at number 10 Lavrushinsky Pereulok, went around to a small side door in the darkness, and let himself in with a key he’d had made.
    Once inside the Tretyakov Gallery, Karpo, having visited the building many times in the daytime, moved softly in the shadows, avoiding the old guards, to a room on the second floor. There the walls were jammed with gilt-framed paintings of various sizes. Sliding around a small marble statue of a man with a spear, Karpo opened the door to a maintenance closet and eased inside. He had done this for the past five nights, knew the room well, and placed himself so that he could see out through a thin space where door and jamb failed to meet. As usual, he would stand there till nearly dawn, watching and waiting.
    The building contains the world’s largest collection of Russian paintings, certainly more than five thousand. More than one and a half million visitors each year look at the iconic paintings of Andrei Rublev or the massive nineteenth-century realist paintings of Ilya Repin or the hundreds of photolike social realist paintings done during Stalin’s tenure, such as Workers at the Feskoskaya Factory in Morensk.
    A week ago a director of the gallery had discovered that one of the oldest paintings in the collection was missing. This was Karpo’s case, and he had advised the gallery director to say nothing. When another painting, of a different period and in a different room, was found missing two days later, Karpo had begun his closet vigil. If there was a pattern, and the pattern held, eventually the thief would enter this room during the night, and Karpo would be there to catch him. Throughout the night, guards came and went. The room was silent but for the scuttling of something, probably a mouse, just before dawn. One of the guards paused on his rounds for a long drink from a bottle hidden in his jacket, and then light came. There had been no theft, at least not in this room.
    Karpo was undiscouraged. He would simply return again tomorrow and the next night and the next, as he returned to the Moscow Book House. He had enough time to slip out unseen, get back to his room, and catch an hour of sleep before returning to the current investigation. Karpo had no great interest in the murder of an American writer, especially one as decadent as Aubrey clearly had been, but it was his duty, and he would work on the case as diligently as he worked on any other.
    As Karpo allowed himself to