Death of a Dissident

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“Looking for…aha, here,” he said.

  “Sasha, what’s wrong?” came his mother’s voice from the next room.

  “Nothing mother. Go back to sleep.” He looked at his notes again and there it was. He should have put it together. It might be nothing, but he should have seen it. He was sure Rostnikov and Karpo would have seen it, but he had not tied it together.

  “I have to go quickly,” he said to Maya, slipping into his pants.

  “All right,” she said. “Take the sandwiches, and don’t eat them too early.”

  He took them and grabbed for his coat on the wall. “And don’t worry.”

  “Worry?” he asked.

  “About the boy,” she said.

  And then he felt a terrible guilt.

  In twenty minutes he stood before the apartment building he was seeking. He had been there the day before, had interviewed a young man, a confident young man, one of four people he had talked to, friends or acquaintances of Aleksander Granovsky. This one had really been no different. The difference was that he lived on Petro Street. Petro Street was where the cab driver had been killed. True it was at least a mile from here, but he remembered the two witnesses who had reported that the killer looked young and had headed down Petro Street. He had accepted the young man’s alibi too easily. He had to check with the man’s wife.

  When he had looked up the names of the Granovsky friends, the Petro address had simply been one of them. In fact, it was probably nothing, a coincidence, but he should have noticed. Tkach bounded up the stairs and down the dark hall.

  “Ilyusha Malenko,” he called after he knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again and called again.

  He tried the door but it was locked. Five minutes later he found the building superintendent, who was unimpressed by the police officer. She was a stout woman in her thirties with stringy red hair and a permanent scowl.

  “The Malenkos are quiet people,” she said.

  “I don’t care about that,” Tkach answered impatiently.

  “I know they have some friends whom they should not have, but they are young. They will learn. We have to support our comrades. Besides,” she said leaning toward Tkach, “young Malenko’s father is a man with influence.”

  “I want the door open now,” demanded Tkach.

  “And if I say ‘no?’” she said with hands on ample hips.

  “I’ll have you arrested,” he said slowly. “You are obstructing an investigation of murder. In fact, I think you have gone too far already.”

  “Wait,” said the woman searching in her apron pocket. “I’m just being careful. I have a responsible job.”

  Tkach took a particular delight in frightening the woman. He had never had any success in influencing his own building superintendent, who did not look radically different from the one before him.

  She wobbled down the corridor ahead of him and grunted up the stairs. He followed, wondering what he would find in his search. Maybe something incriminating, some evidence of a sickle, something. In fact, though he was excited by what he was doing, he also hoped that he would find nothing, expected that he would find nothing and that Malenko’s wife would say he had been quietly at home when the murders were committed.

  “All right, it’s open,” said the red-haired woman stepping in ahead of him. “Now what you think you will find is…”

  Tkach had been right behind her when she suddenly backed up. Her wide rear hit him in mid-stomach, and they both tumbled to the hall floor. Tkach’s breath was gone, and he struggled to push the heavy burden from him so he could try to resume living.

  His first thought when he saw her face was that she was having a heart attack. The woman’s eyes were wide with fright, and she was gurgling. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation would be essential, but the idea repulsed him and he considered seriously letting her die. Instead of dying, she pointed to the room. Tkach forced himself up, pulled out his gun, and moved into the room doubled over, though he was now getting air. What he saw straightened him up and filled him with nausea.

  The figure swayed above him in the room, strung up by a man’s tie to a rod which was used to separate the room into two halves. The figure was all red and that of a woman. He could tell from the dress. He certainly could not tell from the face. There was no face, just a pulpy mass of blood.

  There was no one else in the room. Had there been he could easily have smashed Tkach’s brains and walked out even though the detective was armed, because the detective was also hypnotized by the image before him. He didn’t want to think of his first impression, but it came up at him as his eyes held fast on the gently swaying body. His first impression was that he was looking up at the corpse of his own Maya. He knew he was going to be sick, but he didn’t want it to happen in here where he would have to explain it. He went out the door, tripped over the superintendent, who screamed, and raced for the cold outside.

  Emil Karpo did not spend the night in the hospital, though he was advised to do so. His wound was not bad, though he had to wear a bandage and sling. The pain was greater than he would have expected, but he did not fear pain. The hospital was too protective and protected. Emil Karpo wanted to be somewhere where he could count on the help of Emil Karpo, and that somewhere was in his room. He had slept for six hours and then arose in the morning with an arm so sore that any movement was agony. His first act, after forcing his pants on with one hand, was to call Petrovka, where he found out that Vonovich was being held for the murder of Aleksander Granovsky.

  He was told by Rostnikov to take the rest of the week off. His protest was overridden, and a compromise was reached. Karpo would take the day off to rest. He hung up and went back to his room to rest, but he knew he would not rest. There was nothing wrong with his feet or his head. He could work, must work. Every day that went by without catching a criminal meant another day for another crime. In spite of social change and the clear needs of the state, people continued to commit crimes against each other, and it remained the responsibility of Emil Karpo to do his best to keep the criminals in check.

  So Karpo dressed. It was painful and took almost half an hour, but he did it and did it alone. Since he knew no one in his apartment building with any intimacy or cordiality, that was the way he would have to have done it anyway.

  He was on his way out of the building when the phone rang in his room, but he did not hear it. It was, in fact, Rostnikov calling to tell him of a call he had just received from Sasha Tkach on Petro Street.

  Karpo decided his task for the day would be a relatively easy one. He had a few suspects to check in the case of the person who was impersonating a police officer and preying on the African students. It was a short list of people who had been arrested for crimes committed while in some kind of disguise or uniform. The first name on the list was that of Vasily Kusnitsov also known as Chaplin because he liked to think that he looked like Charlie Chaplin. Kusnitsov was not home. The next name on his list was that of Rudolf Kroft, a former circus performer who had come on bad times after injuring his leg in a fall. He had twice been arrested for posing as a bus driver and a census taker. The house on Meduedkoya Street was not difficult to find, but it was an incredible house. Karpo thought that a good breath of air or another touch of snow would be enough to send the old wooden building tumbling. He walked gently up the steps of the three-story building and opened the door. The little alcove was cold as the outside. Karpo resisted the desire to rub his sore arm and examined the names on the wall. Kroft was on the top floor. He made his way up the creaking stairs finding that it grew no warmer as he rose. The room he sought was right at the top and he knocked.

  “Kroft,” he said. “I want to talk to you. Police.”

  “I’ve done nothing,” insisted the frightened voice inside.

  “We’ll talk about it when you open the door.” Karpo heard a shuffling sound on the other side of the wooden door and something that sounded like the opening of a window. He took a step back in the narrow hall, lifted his foot, and kicked
at the door. It gave as if it had been sucked in by a vacuum, and Karpo skidded across the floor of a room even smaller than his own. His eyes saw two things immediately: a police uniform laid neatly on the small bed and a frightened little man in his underwear standing next to it. The frightened little man, in turn, saw the angel of death that had broken down his door, and he turned and leaped out of the window.

  Karpo hurried across the room and to the window to look down for the body, but there was no body. There was no impression in the snow three floors below. Then the answer came. Snow fell from above onto Karpo’s head, and he looked up. The overhang of the roof was inches over his head, and he could hear the scuttling of feet on the roof.

  With just one hand, he knew he could not follow Kroft, but he was equally determined that he would not let the criminal get away. He went back in the room and out the door, looking up and around. He began kicking down doors.

  The first room was unoccupied at the moment except for a huge photograph of a naked woman. The photograph looked very old. In the next room whose door he kicked down, an old woman was talking to a small child. The woman screamed without sound, and the child—Karpo could not tell if it was a boy or girl—looked at him blankly. He paid no attention to them but leaped to the ladder nailed to the wall. He banged his sore arm against the wail and made his way awkwardly up, having to let go at each step and grab for the wooden rung above. He took splinters in his hand, but fortunately there was a very low ceiling and the rungs were few. He forced open the trap door covered with snow by pushing his head against it. It gave slowly, struggling with him for supremacy, but Karpo was a stubborn man with a strong head. He worked his way up on the sloped roof and looked around for Kroft.

  “Kroft,” he called. “Give up. There is no place to escape.”

  “I could have killed you,” a voice came from behind Karpo. As he turned to face it, his feet gave way in the snow, and Karpo began to fall toward the edge of the roof. He went down on his arm and immediately felt an agonizing pain and heard something crack. Suddenly a sure hand grabbed his sleeve and pulled him.

  “Are you all right?” said Kroft, looking into his face.

  “Yes,” said Karpo struggling to get up. “You are under arrest.”

  “I know,” said Kroft, who stood shivering in his underwear, “but all the same, I could have simply pushed you off the roof. You shouldn’t be climbing around with an arm like that.”

  “That is my concern,” said Karpo, unable to resist the help of the man in underwear. “Now go ahead of me down the ladder, and don’t try anything or I’ll have to shoot.”

  Kroft shivered and shrugged his shoulders.

  “There’s a little boy in that room,” he said. “You think I’d want you to shoot? For a policeman you don’t think much about the people you’re supposed to be helping.”

  “I don’t need lectures from a criminal,” said Karpo. “Now down.”

  And Kroft went slowly down the ladder with Karpo struggling behind him, but the struggle was in vain. The policeman fell to the floor dropping his gun beneath him. He tried to roll over and extract the weapon from the weight of his own body but found the pain in his arm nearly unbearable. When he finally did retrieve the weapon and looked around, he saw Kroft on a small bed in the corner with a blanket wrapped around his legs. The old woman and the boy looked at Karpo expressionlessly, as if they were now quite accustomed to people in their underwear and wounded men with waving pistols going through their little room.

  Karpo was drenched in sweat and unable to come to a sitting position.

  “Don’t move,” he warned Kroft.

  Kroft touched his nose with his hand, clutching the blanket to him tightly for warmth, not modesty.

  “If I wanted to move, I could have run while you were squirming around down there like a turtle on its back. I’ll help you up.”

  He got up and started to hobble toward Karpo who waved him back.

  “Don’t move, I said.”

  “If I don’t help you, you will sit there till Moscow turns capitalist, and I will wither away,” Kroft said reasonably.

  “Why didn’t you run?” Karpo demanded, trying to find a reasonable way to at least come to a sitting position.

  “Where would I run? I could grab my pants and go out the door. Where would I sleep? Who do I know well enough to hide me? The circus people would turn me in. My relatives are two thousand miles away. Why should I make you even angrier than you are with me? This way I go to trial. I say I’m sorry. I repent. I tell the judge I don’t know what got into me. Maybe I’ll even blame decadent French novels and magazines for my folly. Confession is a marvelous tool. Maybe my sentence will be light.”

  “You are a parasite,” hissed Karpo bewildered by his predicament.

  “Perhaps,” agreed Kroft. “But would I be less of a parasite if I didn’t work at all? No one wants to hire a sixty-year-old arielist with a bad leg and a prison record.”

  “You are sixty-two,” Karpo corrected.

  “Look at him,” Kroft appealed to the old woman and the boy. “He lies there in helpless agony and he can’t help arguing with me about a few years. What is your name?”

  “Deputy Inspector Karpo, but that is not meaningful at present. You can help me up, but do so carefully.”

  “Thank you, Mister Detective Inspector Karpo,” Kroft said with sarcasm and a deep bow. “It will be an honor to help such a fine fellow as you. Perhaps you will bear in mind my consideration when you testify at my trial, if I am to have one.”

  With Kroft’s help and the watchful eyes of the old woman and boy, Karpo stood on wobbly legs. He almost fell, but Kroft helped him.

  “Are they so short-handed that they send wounded police out to catch criminals?” Kroft asked as he helped Karpo to the door. “Or am I so insignificant a criminal that I merit only the lame for my pursuer?”

  “Parasite,” repeated Karpo.

  “I didn’t rob a single Russian,” Kroft insisted helping Karpo down the hall to his room. “Not a single Russian, only Africans and Indians. If I had not done this, I would have indeed been a parasite on the state, which would have fed and clothed me. Look how I live. You think I get rich being a criminal? What about the real criminals who take government contracts to make one thing and make something else more profitable instead?”

  “Dress,” said Karpo, leaning against the door as Kroft reached for his pants.

  “Not the uniform,” Karpo had to bark. Kroft shrugged and laid it aside, saying, “It’s the only decent clothing I own.”

  In a few minutes, Kroft was dressed, and Karpo was ready to pass out from the pain.

  “Public enemy number two, as the Americans say, is ready,” sighed Kroft.

  His coat was indeed badly frayed and his hat a worn cloth affair.

  “Perhaps it is better I look like this,” sighed Kroft. “You know, play for sympathy, though I far prefer dignity even at the price that must be paid for it.” He looked at Karpo for an answer but got none, so Kroft went on. “I know. I know. Muscovites are all philosophers. Let’s go, if you can make it.”

  It took them almost four minutes to get down the three flights of stairs and another ten minutes to find a taxi. The driver didn’t want to stop, but Kroft had leaped out in front of him.

  “This is a policeman,” he shouted at the red-faced driver. “A policeman. We are both policemen. Take us to Petrovka.”

  Along the way, Karpo passed out twice, regaining consciousness in a kind of dim twilight. He had no recollection of ever reaching Petrovka or being helped in and up the stairs by his prisoner.

  “It is a brochure, a pamphlet advertising an English aftershave lotion, a kind of perfume for men,” Rostnikov told Inspector Vostok. Vostok could not read English and had brought the odd piece of paper into Rostnikov’s office. It was well known that Rostnikov read English well though it was not generally known that this familiarity came primarily from reading black market American mystery novels.

&
nbsp; “A perfume for men,” the burly Vostok repeated incredulously. “For men to wear, like the aristocrats before the Revolution?”

  “Yes,” agreed Rostnikov.

  “Like women in France?” Inspector Vostok continued.

  “Something like that,” agreed Rostnikov. “Where did you get it?”

  “In the room of one of those three boys, the ones who were caught robbing the liquor store,” Vostok said, staring at the paper in his ruddy hands.

  “The dead boy’s room?” asked Rostnikov.

  Vostok shrugged. “I don’t know.” And then he was gone.

  This was the point at which Tkach had reached Rostnikov by phone, after which Rostnikov called and missed Karpo. He immediately ordered a car and headed for Petro Street. The driver was the same one who had taken him to Granovsky’s two nights earlier. He said nothing, which suited Rostnikov.

  Tkach was standing in the door of the Malenko apartment, transfixed by the bloody figure of the dead woman. It was still morning, and the bright light of day made every detail of the scene clear and repulsively beautiful.

  “Three in two days,” Rostnikov said easing past the younger man. “Did you call the evidence people?”

  “Yes, immediately after I called you,” said Tkach.

  “Good, have you looked around?”

  “Yes,” said Tkach. “The murder weapon appears to be a hammer found on the floor. No good fingerprints on it. I can find no picture of Ilyusha Malenko but I will find one and get it out to the uniformed…”

  Rostnikov looked up at the corpse and wondered at the fury that had caused such an assault.

  “You think the husband did this, then?” he said.

  “Yes, of course. He killed Granovsky, the cab driver, and his wife.”

  “Hmmm,” said Rostnikov. “You don’t think the poor man could simply be wandering around Moscow or at school or visiting, unaware that someone has done this?”

  “No,” said Tkach. “It is so unlikely as to not be reasonable. He lives on Petro Street, and his wife and friend are both killed within a day’s time.”