Death of a Dissident

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“Maybe he is scheduled to be the next victim,” Rostnikov tried.

  Tkach was confused but convinced of his observation.

  “No, I talked to him yesterday. He was strange. I can see that now. When we find him, I’m sure we will find the murderer.”

  “His motive,” said Rostnikov opening a dresser drawer. “Why?”

  “He is clearly mad,” Tkach almost laughed.

  “Yes,” nodded Rostnikov, “but even a madman has reasons, even mad reasons. He didn’t kill you yesterday. There are certainly others he has met in the last two days whom he has not felt the need to murder with some tool at hand.”

  “I don’t know,” said Tkach. “We can find that out when we find him.”

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov, “but if we know why he did these things, the possibility would exist to prevent him from doing even more.”

  “I see,” said Tkach.

  “Then, while we are trying to find Ilya Malenko, it might be a good idea to see some more of his and Granovsky’s friends to try to puzzle this out. Take your list and go.”

  Tkach went and Rostnikov stood alone. He had avoided staring at the corpse with Tkach present. Now he felt himself compelled to do so, not for professional reasons, but for reasons he could not fully understand. He felt the need to reach up and take her down. He could do it easily. Her weight was nothing. There was so little of her, but it was a weight he could not lift. She was an accusing weight.

  An hour later he was back in Procurator Timofeyeva’s office, in the same black chair, the same cold room. He watched the square of a woman eat a sandwich and drink some tea at her desk. She looked as if she had not slept. She had offered him tea, but he had refused. His task would not be easy.

  “So,” he said. “There is reason to believe that Ilya Malenko killed Granovsky.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said, holding up a finger to which a large bread crumb adhered. “He could have killed his wife and Vonovich have killed the others.”

  “Possible,” said Rostnikov. “Very coincidental. We don’t have that many murders in Moscow. Even if Malenko didn’t kill his wife it is certain that Vonovich, who was with us, did not do it. There is a connection.”

  Procurator Timofeyeva removed her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger never putting down the sandwich of stale bread, and savoring every bit of gastronomical discomfort.

  “Not necessarily,” she said.

  “As you say, Comrade Procurator,” Rostnikov agreed. “However, I may assume that I can pursue the murderer of Marie Malenko?”

  Procurator Timofeyeva rose, her face a sudden crimson, and threw her sandwich on the desk. The sandwich crumbled, confirming Rostnikov’s belief that it was stale.

  “Rostnikov, it is not that simple. There are political ramifications that go beyond—”

  “Beyond catching the right murderer?” Rostnikov continued.

  “Perhaps even that,” she shouted, retrieving the parts of her scattered cheese sandwich. “Perhaps even that. The state and its needs go beyond the justice of one particular murder. We are not naïve Swedes or Americans who place such simple concepts up as truths which will rule the world and make men just, true, and honorable. Choices must be made. There are few absolutes. There are just situations.”

  “Am I to ignore this last murder, then?” he asked as innocently as he could.

  Procurator Timofeyeva sipped some tea and looked at him.

  “No,” she said. “Go ahead, but report what you find to me. At the moment the Granovsky murder is solved, the murderer has been caught. If we find that this Malenko killed his wife, it is another matter, another crime. You are not to connect the murders in any way without first discussing the situation with me. You understand?”

  “Yes, Comrade Procurator.”

  “Then you may get back to work,” she said, looking up to Lenin for inspiration. “And Porfiry, heed my words. Be careful.”

  He closed the door behind him and went back to his office. The barking of the police dogs coming off of another shift came to him from afar. Back in his office, he found his two guest seats occupied. In one slumbered Emil Karpo, his bandaged arm dirty. In the other sat a ragged, docile, little man.

  “I think he needs a doctor,” said the man as soon as Rostnikov entered.

  Rostnikov went to his phone and barked an order into it and then hung up.

  “He insisted on coming here,” the man said looking protectively at Karpo.

  “And you?” asked Rostnikov. “Who are you?”

  “An actor,” said Kroft.

  “Then thank you actor and you may go after you fill out a report on what happened,” said Rostnikov, who moved to examine Karpo.

  “I’m an actor first and a criminal second,” the man said. “He was arresting me when he got hurt. I greatly respect the police, but don’t you think you should be more careful of those you send out on such assignments?”

  Karpo seemed to be more in a coma than asleep, and Rostnikov went back to his chair. He and Kroft looked at each other.

  “You remind me a little of Ibiensky, the strong man in the circus,” Kroft observed.

  Rostnikov woke from his thoughts and examined the man, who suddenly seemed much wiser and more perceptive.

  “I lift weights,” Rostnikov answered.

  “I could tell,” said Kroft with satisfaction, rubbing the grey stubble on his chin. “I was with the circus for almost thirty-five years. I learned all of Ibiensky’s tricks.”

  Rostnikov’s eyes lit with interest, and he leaned forward.

  “You did?” he asked.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “WHERE IS THE OTHER DRIVER?” Rostnikov asked settling into the rear of the police Volga. The temperature had crept up to nineteen or twenty degrees fahrenheit, with no snow falling. He could have taken a train, but he would have spent a good part of his day in transportation, and Procurator Timofeyeva had urged him to conclude his investigation swiftly.

  “He is ill,” said the new driver pulling into the street and looking over his shoulder.

  This one, thought Rostnikov, has an intelligent face. Let us hope the face does not hide a talkative personality.

  “What is his malady?” Rostnikov asked, going over the notes in his notebook.

  “American flu,” said the driver.

  “I understand they call it Russian flu in the United States,” Rostnikov replied.

  “I know little of American prejudices,” said the driver. Rostnikov examined him further. He was young, with close-cut brown hair under his fur cap. He looked like an athlete in some track or field sport.

  “I know of them through occasional reading of American novels,” said Rostnikov, looking out of the window into the glaring sun.

  “I cannot read American novels,” said the driver. “I can’t keep the names straight. Americans have so many strange names, so many variations and diminutives. I can never keep it straight. For example, an American can have the names John, Jack, Jonathan, Johnny—and all be the same person.”

  “And your name?” asked Rostnikov, willing to carry on the conversation because he did not look forward to the interview he was about to undertake.

  “Dolguruki. Michael Veselivitch Dolguruki.”

  That ended the conversation. Rostnikov could think of nothing further to say. Had he been sitting in the front seat, he might have found it easier. In fact, he had observed that other inspectors and even government officials and the wealthy and elite tended to sit in the front seats with their drivers as acts of social equality, as if everyone did not know that they were far from equal. Rostnikov preferred the space of the back seat and the solitude.

  Rostnikov was being silently jostled as the car moved expertly through the wide black asphalt streets jammed with late morning trucks spitting exhaust and with swarms of cars—Volgas, Muskvitches, Laplas, and tiny Zaporojetzes—jockeying for the curb as if in a race or game. They drove through old Moscow, just outside the walls of th
e Kremlin with houses one-hundred-fifty years old side by side with new concrete blocks with few windows that looked like untreated marble ready for a sculptor to release the imprisoned figure or figures frozen within it. They passed the ministries and went through the small side streets with wooden houses that looked ready to fall and had looked that way a dozen or more years before the Revolution.

  The driver found Leningrad Prospect and headed out to Volokolamsk Highway. The last circle one encounters in moving away from Moscow is that of the dacha suburbs where many wealthy Muscovites have their summer villas. This circle is, ironically, also shared by the poorest of the Muscovites, those who cannot afford to live closer to the city where they work and are forced to exist in shacks of one room which tourists are steered away from. So only those who can afford to travel easily to the inner city and those who are least able to do so, share this ring. It was here, on Moscow Ring Road, that they were heading now.

  Rostnikov did not enjoy this task. He had called at a suitable hour in the morning, a time that seemed not too early to wake up anyone at the house and not too late to miss the person he was trying to reach. He had gotten someone, a woman, and explained his mission and was given an appointment for the next hour. It gave him little time to prepare, but he preferred the discomfort of the encounter and the lack of preparation to the alternative, the continued freedom of a brutal killer who was most likely Ilya Malenko.

  He had taken upon himself the responsibility for tapping the phones of Malenko’s various known acquaintances in the hope that the man would try to contact one of them. In addition, Tkach would go to each of the dozen or so people on the list and inform them of the gravity of the situation if Malenko should try to reach them other than by phone. There was some hope that at least some of them would cooperate, not for political reasons or fear, but because Malenko had murdered Granovsky and Marie Malenko. Of course, he might contact no one, but that was unlikely. He could get no work without identifying himself. He would have nowhere to stay without contacting a friend or relative.

  The most likely person to contact was obvious and that, indeed, was the person with whom Rostnikov had made the appointment. Although he had been in this area of dachas in which they found themselves, Rostnikov was not really familiar with them. It was an alien world normally denied him and other policemen. When crime occurred by or to the members of this cultural elite, it was invariably handled by the K.G.B. or the militia.

  The driver found the house with little difficulty and pulled into the small driveway in front. It was a two-story home, wood and brick, freshly painted from the summer. Rostnikov got out and the driver began to follow.

  “You remain here,” said Rostnikov, motioning the man back without looking at him.

  “As you wish, Comrade Inspector,” was the reply, and Rostnikov heard the car door close behind him. He walked to the front door, anxious, apprehensive and a bit angry, angry that he should feel this way. This was the home of a rich man, not one who was rewarded for his achievements in the arts or sciences or government or even athletics, but a man who everyone knew had grown rich by black market connections, by alterations of government manufacturing contracts, by bribes—yes even massive bribes to the police. It was known and he was tolerated. No, he was not just tolerated, he was supported, one of the hidden capitalists who helped the economy and were purposefully overlooked.

  Rostnikov knocked. The door was solid and painted white. Inside he could hear footsteps on a hard floor and the door opened. A woman, a very beautiful woman somewhere in her thirties, opened the door and smiled at him with teeth Rostnikov thought impossible to maintain in Moscow. Her eyes were so blue that they seemed to be painted and her straight yellow hair was swept back like a Frenchwoman’s.

  “You are Inspector Rossof?” she said.

  “Rostnikov,” he corrected.

  “Yes,” she said, stepping back to let him in. “Sergei was on his way out of the door when you called this morning. I just caught him.”

  They stood in a small hallway with dark wooden floors.

  “I did not mean to…” Rostnikov began.

  “That’s all right,” she stopped him with a smile. “Come, he is in the parlor.”

  Rostnikov followed her a few steps. She stopped and turned around.

  “It is Ilyusha, isn’t it?” she said softly, her smile suddenly vanishing.

  “Your…” Rostnikov began not sure of the relationship of this woman and the man he was pursuing.

  “My stepson,” she said coming to his aid. “I don’t really know him. I actually only met him once and we didn’t get on.”

  “I see,” said Rostnikov sagely, though he didn’t see why she was telling him this.

  Her smile returned. “I don’t even know what he has been doing, what his interests are,” she said, and Rostnikov understood. This woman wanted to make it clear that she was no part of Malenko’s political position or anything else he might be involved in.

  “I see,” he said, and this time he did.

  “I was a clerk in my husband’s factory when Ilyusha—”

  Her statement was interrupted by the opening of the door before which she stood. She stepped back as if the sound had brought with it a terrible blast of heat.

  “Elizabeth,” said the man who now stood before them, “I must get to town for that meeting with the under-minister. I’d appreciate seeing the inspector immediately.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elizabeth Malenko said, unable to keep from looking around the hallway at all she might lose by offending the important man.

  “It’s all right,” the man said. “Perhaps the inspector would like some tea or coffee.”

  “Coffee would be fine,” said Rostnikov, wondering if a cup of coffee constituted the first step in a bribe.

  The woman disappeared through another door, and the man backed up to let Rostnikov enter the room.

  In the doorway, Sergei Malenko had simply seemed a middle-size, middle-shaped man, but inside the surprisingly large room, he reminded Rostnikov of a small actor playing a businessman. Malenko was about sixty, with bushy grey-black hair and a determined, furrowed brow. It was a hard face, one that had suffered and worked, not the soft image of the black market capitalist that had flourished in Russian movies and posters during the two decades after the war. This did not surprise Rostnikov. What little he had been able to gather on Malenko told him that the man had begun humbly enough—a farmer’s son and a farmer himself, who had gone to work in a tubing factory when he was thirty-five and made himself an expert on tubular metal construction. He used this expertise to move up in the factory at the same time as he moved up in party circles by applying himself diligently to political organization. Sergei Malenko was a clever man and not a weak one.

  The room was very much the man, with well-polished, heavy wooden furniture, dark brown walls and rug, a fireplace already crackling with burning logs in spite of the fact that the house obviously had another heat source. On the walls were painted portraits of Lenin and figures unknown to Rostnikov.

  “I’m sorry to be a bit abrupt, Inspector,” Malenko said, sitting in a dark couch and indicating to Rostnikov that he should sit across from him in a matching couch, “but I do have to get to my work.”

  “I understand fully,” said Rostnikov with an apologetic smile as he seated himself, letting his leg remain out where it would not stiffen.

  “This is about Ilyusha,” said the man, looking directly at Rostnikov, his hands folded before him. Malenko’s suit was similar to Rostnikov’s, but there were subtle differences. Malenko’s was much newer, and he wore a light green sweater of some particularly soft material.

  “It is about your son,” Rostnikov confirmed.

  “I imagine he is—” and it was Malenko’s turn to be interrupted by his wife, who pushed open the door and moved forward quickly with a tray containing two steaming cups of coffee.

  “You want sugar and milk?” Malenko asked, taking some himself.

&nbs
p; Rostnikov declined. He assumed the coffee would be good and he had good coffee so infrequently that he wanted it to be very hot and its taste very distinct.

  “You have some questions about Ilyusha?” Malenko asked after his wife had withdrawn from the room, closing the door behind her.

  The coffee was good and very hot and very strong. It burned the roof of Rostnikov’s mouth, and he wished he had asked for some milk.

  “My first question is perhaps a bit tactless,” he said. “If so, please forgive me.” He put up his hands and shrugged in apology. “I’m a policeman and spend much of my time asking crude questions to enemies of the state and not to respected men of production. It strikes me as curious that a policeman comes to your house, that you know it concerns your son, and that you are not upon me with curiosity demanding to know if he is all right, what he has done. Instead you calmly drink your coffee and worry about getting to work.”

  “The question is tactless,” agreed Malenko, “but reasonable. I have had little contact with my son for many years, perhaps four or five. We were never close. I think he took up with those dissenters, those social disrupters in reaction to me. And I suppose you are here to tell me that he has gotten into some trouble because of these stupid activities of his.”

  “In a sense,” said Rostnikov. “Then, I take it, if your son were in trouble, it is not likely he would come to you for help.”

  Sergei Malenko began to laugh. He laughed so hard that the cup in his hand began to shake, and he just reached the dark mahogany table just in time to set it down. His hair tumbled over, and he began to choke on his laughter.

  “You’ll have to pardon me,” he said trying to pull himself out of his reaction, “but the very idea of Ilya coming to me for anything is laughable don’t you see?”

  “Not in the least,” said Rostnikov sipping his own coffee.

  “I have a new life, a new wife, a small daughter. Ilya is not part of that life. He spent seven years making my existence miserable, causing me trouble. He lived here and went to school. He was terrible in school. He got into trouble. Drinking, girls, gambling. He more than embarrassed me. He very nearly ruined me, and you know what? I think that is what he wanted to do. I finally threw him out. That is when he became a political dissident. I am the last person he would come to for help and the last person who would help him. You understand?”