Death of a Dissident

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “We’ve done nothing,” pleaded the old man, “nothing.” His eyes, yellow and soft, were moist with self-pity.

  Karpo handed the report back to the officer and faced the old man. The sudden attention caught the old man in mid-sentence, stopping him. There was something about this corpse-like policeman that made such rambling pathetic even to Vladimir Roshkov, who had spent an eighty-year lifetime perfecting it, but the pause was only that. Vladimir Roshkov could no more hold his tongue than he could join the Bolshoi Ballet.

  “Officer, sir,” he pleaded, actually bringing his hands together, “we did nothing. We were on our way to work, to work. There is no crime in going to work, is there sir, comrade, officer?”

  Karpo said nothing but turned his eyes on Pytor Roshkov who sat sullen, a coarse brown police blanket wrapped around his legs.

  “Are you ill?” Karpo asked.

  “No,” said Pytor, “I have no pants. That cab tore off my pants, and the police wouldn’t let me go home for another pair. Mind you, I’m not complaining. I understand, but…I understand.”

  “My son is not complaining at all,” shouted the old man, rapping his son on the head. “He’s happy to help any way he can. We both are, but we had nothing to do…”

  “Sit,” commanded Karpo, and the old man sat next to his son, his voice momentarily stilled but his mouth was open and ready, his teeth poor and jagged.

  “You saw the man get out of the cab?” Karpo said, standing with his hands behind his back over the two men.

  “Yes,” said the old man, “he was all in black, a madman. I thought he was going to kill us. His clothes were good, not new. My first thought was, ‘Here is some capitalist tourist drunk and up to no good.’ ”

  “He was a foreigner?” tried Karpo.

  “Yes,” went on the old man, “definitely a foreigner, English or American, he…”

  “Did he speak?” tried Karpo.

  “I…I…,” stammered the old man, anxious to please.

  “No,” said the son, hugging the blanket over his vulnerable legs. “He said nothing. He just ran down Petro Street.” Pytor Roshkov had decided to fix his eyes on the fascinating painting on the wall of the first meeting of the Presidium.

  “Then you don’t know if he was a foreigner,” Karpo continued.

  “No,” said the son.

  “Yes,” said the father.

  “If you would try less hard to please me and harder to simply tell the truth, you will get out of here much faster and back to your home or work,” Karpo said. “However, if you continue like this, it may take hours before we feel we can let you go. Now, can you describe the man you saw running from the cab on Petro Street?”

  “I…,” began old Roshkov and stopped, clamping his jaw tight with an audible click.

  “No,” said the son. “He was a regular man in a black coat and hat and he was young, at least he was fast like a young man.”

  “And you heard Ivan Sharikov say ‘Granovsky’?” asked Karpo.

  “We don’t know any Ivan Sharikov,” wept the old man. “We are just shopkeepers. We aren’t political, just poor peasants who…”

  “Sharikov was the taxi driver who was murdered,” Karpo said evenly.

  “Granovsky,” said Pytor, moving his eyes from the painting to look at Karpo, but unable to hold the look.

  “So,” babbled the old man, “it’s simple. You find this man Granovsky who killed the cab driver, and everything is fine. So simple. How many Granovsky’s can there be in Moscow? Our police can find him like that.”

  “Old man, you are babbling with guilt,” Karpo said softly, wanting to shake the trembling creature into simple responses. “I don’t care what you have done. I want information.”

  “Done?” said the old man, rising and pointing a thick finger at his chest. “Done? We have done nothing, nothing. If you mean those shoes, well, those shoes. How were we to know the soles were cardboard. We bought them from…”

  “Father, shut up,” shouted the suddenly frantic son rising to quiet the old man and letting the blanket drop to the floor.

  “But…” continued the old man, prepared to confess to seven decades of crime. The naked son clasped a hand over the old man’s mouth and Karpo glanced at the uniformed officer who was trying to control a grin.

  “Get them out,” said Karpo.

  “We want to help,” said the old man, leaning forward on the table as his son retrieved his blanket.

  Karpo left the room, feeling the aura of a coming headache. He would retrieve the sickle from the evidence men and work on that. The sickle would be tangible and might say much without speaking. A pinpoint of irritation vibrated somewhere in Karpo’s brain, and he thought of Rostnikov’s question about the American actress. A voice wanted to ask Karpo how anything could be accomplished in such emotionalism, irrelevance, and chaos, but he stilled the voice before it could speak and remembered Rostnikov’s past successes and reminded himself that the Roshkovs were a step in the movement toward an ideal Soviet state, a movement which he knew would not he an easy one.

  Perhaps the room was not getting larger. It was a thought he had never considered and the voice of his father had never suggested. This thought came in something like the voice of the cab driver he had killed, the cab driver with the bloody face, the gross pig of a cab driver to whom he owed so much. The smashing of the vodka bottle. The moisture of the vodka in his face. The feeling of solidity when he plunged the bottle into the fat surprised face. The two men in the snow. It had been a warning to stay alert.

  He sat on the floor of the apartment, his coat still on, the darkness surrounding him. As the minutes passed, the light from the single window illuminated the familiar room, but it looked unfamiliar, new to him. The world had changed. And then the room had threatened to grow. He had scrambled from the floor to the old chest of drawers, his parent’s old chest and had pulled out the heavy hammer. The handle had been made on the farm by his father and the heavy iron head purchased before he was born. It felt solid, good, and cool. He let the metal head cool his burning cheek and forehead, but the room threatened to grow and he thought again that the room might not be getting larger. What if he were growing smaller? The thought made him shriek and shiver. There should be someone to help. He should turn the lights on, but he couldn’t move. He wanted to put the idea away but it was fascinating. Maybe he would just keep getting smaller and smaller and when she came in in the morning after work, she would step on him, squash him like a bug. There would be a small spot of blood on the floor and she would make a sandwich and go to bed, not knowing what she had done.

  But he knew what she had done. Granovsky was smart, so smart, but he was no more and there was no heaven or hell for him. Now he, sitting there with the hammer, was in control of the world. He could kill a cab driver to verify his experience. He was not growing smaller. The room was not getting bigger. It had always passed before and would pass again. He would sit, covered with a terrible sweat, and he would feel fear and no one would help him. She had promised to help him, to stay near him, but that had been a lie. He had only the voice of his father and victims and the hammer. He cuddled the hammer, placed it under his arm, put it between his legs like a wooden erection and laughed. He had taken charge of the world. There would be no more fear or listening to others or standing in line. She would find out. She had changed all this and would get her reward, and the reward would be the hammer as Granovsky’s reward had been the sickle. There should be something beyond that, something to do. Others to be shown, taught. It would come. He knew it would come. He thought of one of his mother’s meals of sausages and dumplings and cheese and the thought held at bay the growing of the room.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FILE ON ALEKSANDER GRANOVSKY had been thick and neat. Sasha Tkach expected as much and knew that the K.G.B. must have drawers of files on Granovsky, but they were files he could not hope to get or see. He had taken the file to the large office room where he had shared a desk wit
h another junior inspector named Zelach. The bottom drawer was supposed to be Sasha’s for records, storing tea, but Zelach kept infringing on the space with his own things. Sasha did not mind sharing the drawer. He minded Zelach’s sandwiches, which left a garlic smell on all of Sasha’s notes and papers.

  The lights in the large room were dim, and one or two other inspectors were working. Sasha thought he heard the grunt of a greeting from Klishkov, but he couldn’t be sure. The room was, even when full, a quiet place in spite of the twenty or thirty people who rambled in it at any given time. If one had to shout at a suspect or underling, one was expected to move to an investigating room. The room was also clean, almost antiseptic. One could never go back into the garbage to retrieve an inadvertently discarded note.

  Sasha had compiled a list of Granovsky’s acquaintances. The compiling had not taken long, perhaps an hour, even with corresponding addresses, but it was a bit too early to begin to act. There was nothing wrong with questioning people at four in the morning, but Rostnikov had told him to be friendly and persuasive rather than demanding. It was an easier order to give than to execute, for Sasha knew from experience that his youth and disarmingly innocent face would not carry him far in most investigations. Muscovites were too cautious. Innocence was something they distrusted in anyone and were particularly wary of in a policeman.

  Sasha pulled out his lunch and began to eat it at his desk, after looking across the room to see if the other officers were interested in his activities. Inspectors were not supposed to eat at their desks. They were supposed to go to the building cafeteria. By pretending to reach for files in his drawer, Sasha managed to sneak bites of the sandwich and wonder if he had enough money to stop at a Stolovaya for lunch or some borshcht and a sausage.

  The door opened across the room and Emil Karpo, looking like the angel of death searching for his next victim, strode in, carrying a sickle. Sasha sat up with a mouthful of sandwich, and Karpo glanced in his direction. Sasha nodded, trying to hide his bite of sandwich with a gulp that sent him into a choking gasp. Karpo paid no attention and moved to his own desk, where he placed the sickle gently in front of him and closed his eyes.

  By six, Sasha Tkach had had enough waiting. He had memorized the list of twelve names but not the addresses. He placed the list carefully in his pocket, put on his coat and hat and strode out of the office past Karpo who sat with closed eyes over the sickle. Karpo looked like a man with a headache, but Sasha knew it was more likely that he was simply deep in thought. He did not pause to ask. Like the other younger inspectors he had a fearful respect for Karpo who was known to act with cold fury in the face of violence. The younger men were afraid that they might be teamed with the Tatar one of the times he risked his life and possibly theirs.

  It was a cold dark morning promising nothing, but Sasha Tkach asked much of it as he hurried down the steps and towards the first friend of Aleksander Granovsky.

  Not far from the Kremlin is one of the busiest intersections in Moscow, Dzerzhinsky Square, where as many as half a million people come each day. Many of them come to visit the Museum of History and Reconstruction of Moscow or the Mayakovsky Museum. Others come to the Slavyansky Bazar Restaurant or the Berlin Hotel, but most come to two massive buildings. One building is the Detsky Mir or Children’s World, the biggest children’s store in Russia. The other building is a strange, hulking creature in two sections at the corner of Kirov and Dzerzhinsky Streets. One half of the building pre-dates the Revolution. The other half was completed in 1948, using the labor of captured German soldiers. When the project was completed, the German soldiers were reportedly executed so that they could not divulge information about the labyrinth of rooms they had built. The building does not show up on the official tourist books and pictures of the square. Most such pictures or drawings are presented from the point of view of this massive building, the Lubyanka, which houses the K.G.B.

  The square itself is named in honor of the man whose tall bronze statue stands in the center of the intersection, seemingly guarding the building. Felix Dzerzhinsky, who died in 1926, is described by those same guide books as an eminent Party leader, a Soviet statesman, and a close comrade of Lenin. He was, in addition, the principal draftsman of what became the Soviet secret police. The proximity of statue and building is not coincidental.

  Until the late 1950s, the organization which became the K.G.B. contented itself with political matters and allowed the regular police to go its own way in dealing with other crimes. The K.G.B. had bided its time after the liquidation of Lavrenti Beria who was executed by the others vying with him for power, Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Molotov. Beria had built a career by kissing Stalin’s hand in public and tearing arms out of sockets like the petals of a flower. When he died, the K.G.B. adopted a posture of extreme patriotism and disinterest in the petty disagreements of man—including murder. With a rash of black market crimes and capitalistic enterprises at the end of the 1950s, the K.G.B. tested its strength by asserting control over economic crimes. Since all crimes can be viewed as political and economic, the K.G.B. could take over whatever crime it chose to investigate.

  This knowledge was clear to Porfiry Rostnikov as he sat waiting on the wooden bench at K.G.B. headquarters. He had been in the building several times in the past and had noticed how quiet it was. People spoke in whispers as if in a place of worship. Even the typewriters and phones seemed to be muted. Dark wood dominated railings, benches, ceilings. Rostnikov thought it needed only religious icons, a few saints sprinkled here and there, but the K.G.B. was most careful not to elevate any secular political saints.

  Rostnikov had arrived by metro at 6:30 after a few hours of non-sleep in his bed trying to rest, thinking and not thinking. A dream came in which he had to eat a sausage pudding with a heavy iron hammer. Comrade Timofeyeva urged him on with quotations from Lenin, but he made a mess of it, trying to keep from getting his coat dirty. To get a coat cleaned in Moscow was a major effort. Finally, in the dream he had grown angry, had lifted the hammer over his head, to establish a new U. S. S. R. record for a hammer lift, and brought it down heavily on the dish, sending pudding, sausage, and shards of plate in all directions. He had awakened with a grunt and said, “Carole Lombard.”

  “What?” his wife had asked dreamily.

  “Carole Lombard,” Rostnikov grunted straining to see the time on his clock. “An American movie actress whose hair kept falling in her face in some movie.”

  “That was your dream?” asked his wife turning to him.

  “No,” he had said, sitting up to find his trousers again. “I don’t know why it came to me. Perhaps to clear my mind.”

  “Be sure to eat,” she had replied, turning over for another hour or two of sleep.

  He had grunted again, slipped on his pants, washed, and shaved after boiling some water for the task and then spent fifteen minutes with the weights. Only with the weights could he step outside of himself and watch. Once he began, it was as if he had no real part of it, that he was just an observer. The exercise of will was not to do more or to conquer the pain of adding weight. Oh no, for Rostnikov the problem was to stop, to feel. It was too easy to simply sink into a state of forgetfulness and go on forever observing himself lift and add weights. The addition of weight had, indeed, proved a problem, but not a psychological one. It was simply hard to get weights in Moscow. He had tried improvising, but the balance was impossible. Finally, he had turned to the black market—a storekeeper he had once decided not to bring in for a minor infraction knew a man who knew a woman who knew an athlete who could get weights. There was an annual competition for men and women fifty and over in Sokolniki Recreation Park in June. Rostnikov had decided to enter and was, though he had told no one, not even himself, in training. He went over events, calculated weights, and worried about his leg.

  “Inspector Rostnikov.”

  Rostnikov looked up. He had been aware of the black suited man moving toward him, but he had been trying to decide whether to try to bu
y a new weight bar.

  “Yes,” Rostnikov answered.

  “Follow me,” said the man. Rostnikov rose and followed. His leg slowed him down, but he managed to keep up with the straight-backed man with curly brown hair down the corridor and up a short stairway. The man made it clear that they were not walking together, that he was a guide and not a new acquaintance. They stopped at a door without name or number, and the guide knocked once, firmly.

  “In,” came a man’s raspy voice, and the guide opened the door, stepped back and let Rostnikov move past him. The guide left, closing the door behind him, and Rostnikov found himself in an office in sharp contrast to that of Comrade Timofeyeva. This office was carpeted, a dark brown carpet, not too thick, but carpet nonetheless. The posters on the wall were familiar ones from Rostnikov’s boyhood, colorfully urging productivity and solidarity, posters with bright reds and firm faces. Each was framed. The furniture was comfortable, chairs with arms and dark nylon padded seats, and the desk itself was well polished and old, probably an antique from before the Revolution. The man behind the desk was thin, his face dark with the memory of some labors in youth. His hair was white and well groomed. He wore a dark suit and blue tie.

  “I am Colonel Drozhkin,” he said, extending an open calloused palm toward the chair on the other side of the desk. Colonel Drozhkin’s accent was that of a workingman, a holdover peasant. It had probably taken him some effort to retain it in what must have been years in Moscow. Rostnikov sat and Drozhkin did the same, a thin reed of anticipation behind the huge desk, which his fingers touched possessively and nervously.

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” Drozhkin said moving some papers on his desk and making it quite clear that he was not sorry at all. The waiting and the tone made it clear who was master and who servant in this situation of comrades.