Red Chameleon Read Online Free PDF Page B

Triumphal Arch at the end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt that commemorated the heroes of that same war with the French. As far as Karpo was concerned, it was a decadent war fought by two imperialist forces. It was far better that the Russian imperialists won. It was not, however, something to build monuments to, though he understood the sense of history necessary to unite the Russian people.
    Emil Karpo was only slightly aware that more people were looking at him as he stood almost motionless than at the portly stone general seated on his horse twenty feet above him. Few looked directly at Karpo as they headed for the Panorama Museum of the Battle of Borodino, but few failed to notice the tall, lean, and pale figure dressed in black with his right hand tucked under his jacket as if he were reaching for a hidden gun or mocking that Napoleon whom the Great Mikhail Kutuzov had thwarted more than 170 years earlier. Some thought the tall, pale man looked like a vampire whose dark wing had been broken. One couple considered his resemblance to the painting of a Tatar that stood inside the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A tourist named Marc Lablancet from Lyon considered taking a photograph of Karpo in front of the statue, but his wife tugged at him and hurried him away.
    The cars and buses beeped, braked, and chugged noisily around the Triumphal Arch, but Karpo paid no attention. A passing group of Japanese tourists simply assumed the pale man was mad or meditating; in fact, they were quite close to the truth. Karpo never gave a label to his moments and even hours of concentration. He simply lost himself in the problem to which he had been assigned. His logic was unquestionable. He was a policeman. His job was to prevent crime or bring to justice those who committed a crime. Any crime was a threat to the state, an indication that the criminal did not respect the Party, the Revolution, and the need for total dedication. If there was any meaning to existence for Karpo, it was that the commonweal must be respected, sustained. His dedication to Leninist communism was complete, though he did not see Lenin as a god. Lenin had been a man, a man dedicated to the eventual establishment of a world as close to perfection for all as would be possible, given the weaknesses of the animal that was man.
    Little more than a month earlier, Emil Karpo had stopped a terrorist from damaging and possibly destroying Lenin’s tomb. Karpo expected no reward for his action. Indeed, the government had even covered up the incident and labeled the bomb damage in Red Square “a gas-line explosion.” Karpo had awakened days after the incident to face an incompetent doctor who told him he would soon have the use of his right hand again if he engaged in the proper therapy. The woman had spoken with confident calm as she stood over his bed, but one of the several weaknesses of the system that Karpo recognized and expected to see changed was the low level of competence of physicians.
    Karpo had not even bothered to nod his acknowledgment at the porcine woman. She had made the mistake of trying to wait him out, but he simply stared at her for five minutes, and she left in angry defeat. Two weeks later he left the hospital and ignored Rostnikov’s suggestion that he see a doctor who might know what he was talking about.
    â€œMy wife’s cousin,” Rostnikov had said, looking at Karpo’s arm. “He’ll look at you. He’s good, Jewish.”
    Karpo had declined, abruptly indicating his confidence in the system. In his small monastic room each night Karpo had attempted the exercises suggested by the hospital therapist, but they did no good. There was no doubt in Karpo’s mind that he would never regain the use of his right arm, and so instead of continuing the useless therapy, he had spent silent hours teaching himself to be left-handed. Left-handedness was discouraged in Russia. Russian children caught using their left hand to throw,