Death of a Dissident

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “You’re a crazy old man,” Malenko whimpered, lowering his scissors still further.

  “Maimonides said that when a man has a mean opinion of himself, that any meanness he is guilty of does not seem outrageous to him. You’ve come to this state, Ilyusha. Killing me won’t end it. I’ll tell you the truth. You’ve heard it in my voice. I’ve pretended, but I’m afraid. But at the same time, I am not wrong. You can’t get back what you lost, and you must accept that the meaning you have chosen will come to an end and leave you empty.”

  “You are right,” Malenko said. “Of course. That is what I needed. I needed your advice. I can’t erase it by destroying all of the ridiculing faces. I couldn’t erase it by killing even my father. I must do to him what he did to me. I must balance the scales. His death and hers didn’t balance the scales. It brought justice but it didn’t balance the scale. Your death wouldn’t balance the scale.”

  The late afternoon had brought darkness, and out of it came Malenko’s laughter.

  “What will you do?” asked Lvov, straining to see the outline of his visitor.

  “It is not simple murder that will set me free of what he did to me,” he said softly. “Why didn’t I see that? There was but one of her. There are two of them.”

  And with that he went to the door and was gone.

  Lvov knew that he had wet his pants and that his face was damp with tears. He pulled himself from his chair and went to the door, locking it. Then he hurried back to his heavy chair and slowly, slowly, slowly pushed it across the room against the door. When the chair was firmly in place, Simon Lvov took off his pants and underwear and started slowly across the room toward his dresser.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man in the room, and before fear could overtake him he realized that the man was his own reflection. He looked at his distorted image in the window glass. It was a ridiculous sight. A tall old man in a sweater wearing no pants and a little shriveled penis bobbing up and down. Lvov began to laugh. And then he began to cry, and had anyone been able to ask him at the moment if he were very happy or very sad he would have been totally unable to answer.

  By the time he got to bed that night, Porfiry Rostnikov concluded that he had experienced far better days. Karpo was almost certainly going to lose his left arm. Malenko had been lost, lost by Tkach’s inability to follow a nearsighted old man. In the morning he had to face Colonel Drozhkin at the K.G.B. The toilet was completely backed up, and while he was confident that he could repair it, he was aware that the part he needed might be almost impossible to obtain. That did not deter him. If necessary he would get a book on machine shop tools and learn to make the part. He was determined to absorb the totality of human knowledge if necessary to repair that toilet. But all this had been nothing compared to Sarah’s reaction to his news about Iosef.

  He had told her after dinner and she had taken it well, too well. All she had said was, “I see,” and had gone back to watching television. It was a special film produced by the USSR Central Television and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was about Pavlov and showed the physiologist in his Leningrad research center while a voice told of his accomplishments. They both watched without speaking. They watched movies of H.G. Wells visiting Pavlov. They heard Pavlov speak about his concern with objective experimentation and the extension of conditioned reflex methodology to the problems of neurology and psychiatry. They watched and absorbed nothing. When it was over, Sarah had touched his hand and gone to bed two hours earlier than usual. Rostnikov had lifted weights for more than an hour till a tremor in the tendon of his weak leg warned him that he must stop. He defied the tendon, which knew more than he, concluded one more brief exercise, and then stopped. He took a cold shower, since there was no hot water, and tried to read an American paperback by a black writer named Chester Himes. It was about police in Harlem, New York, which struck Rostnikov as a mad, violent place. He prefered Isola or even Moscow.

  The next morning he woke up early and touched Sarah, who slept soundly. She resisted, waking so he touched her again, and she sat up, turning on him.

  “You don’t have to break my arm,” she shrieked.

  “I just touched you,” he said.

  “I didn’t sleep,” she said, turning back into the bed.

  “You slept soundly,” he said, knowing he should simply stop but unable to do so.

  “You sat up all night watching me sleep?” she asked with sarcasm.

  “No,” he said, moving to the sink to heat water so he could shave. “Forget it. You didn’t sleep.”

  “Don’t humor me,” she said angrily. “You think I slept all night.”

  Rostnikov turned on the light in the corner. The sun was not yet up out the window. He looked into the darkness outside and then at her.

  “Iosef will be all right,” he said.

  “Now you’re a god,” she said, glaring at him.

  “No. He will be all right.”

  Sarah looked at him for an instant and then turned her head away into her pillow. He finished his shaving, dressed, found some bread in the cupboard and a piece of cheese, and made himself a lunch, which he rolled in some newspaper and placed in his worn briefcase.

  At the door he paused.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He wanted to repeat that Iosef would be all right, but his mouth went dry and the words called him a liar. The Volga and the new driver were waiting for Rostnikov at the curb in front of his house. People hurrying to work in the near dawn glanced to see who was important enough in the neighborhood to merit a car and driver.

  “Why are you here?” Rostnikov asked.

  “Orders from the Procurator’s office,” he responded instantly. “I am to pick you up and be available throughout your current investigation.”

  “That will be most helpful, Michael Veselivitch Dolguruki,” Rostnikov answered getting into the back seat.

  “You remembered my name,” said the driver, pulling into the nearly empty street.

  “You are an unusually talkative driver,” said Rostnikov.

  “I’m sorry, comrade,” answered the driver. “I assume that is a rebuke.”

  “Assume only that you made some impression on me,” said Rostnikov, looking out the window. “Do you know where the K.G.B. headquarters is?”

  “Of course,” said the driver.

  “That is where we are going.”

  This time Rostnikov did not wait at all. He announced himself at the front desk, and seconds later the man named Zhenya appeared to lead him up to Colonel Drozhkin’s office. Again, Rostnikov had to hurry behind him to keep pace.

  “Go right in,” said Zhenya.

  “Thank you,” replied Rostnikov, reaching down to massage his leg. Zhenya watched him for a second and then turned and left. Rostnikov knocked and entered the room before waiting for an answer.

  “Rostnikov,” said Drozhkin, without rising. Rostnikov decided that the colonel resembled the dead branch of a birch tree. The image pleased him and gave him a secret to sustain him through the conversation.

  “I called you here to say that we appreciate the speed with which you conducted the Granovsky investigation,” said Drozhkin, looking up with a pained look on his face that Rostnikov took to be a smile.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” said Rostnikov. He was not offered a seat, and Drozhkin seemed not to have noticed. Then the colonel realized the situation and said, “Please sit down.”

  Rostnikov sat and nothing was said for a few seconds.

  “This Vonovich will be given a quick trial,” Drozhkin said, fixing his eyes on Rostnikov, who returned the look while holding a gentle smile on his face.

  “That,” said Rostnikov, “is up to Procurator Timoteyeva.”

  “Of course,” said Drozhkin, standing nervously. “I was not asking a question. I was making an observation. I understand that you are already on another murder, an entirely unrelated murder.”

  “I am on another mur
der,” said Rostnikov.

  Drozhkin paced to a corner nervously, looked out of the window behind him and turned to face Rostnikov with hands behind his back.

  “Neither of us is a fool, Inspector.”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  “Good,” Drozhkin said, returning to his desk. “I understand that troops are being rotated in Afghanistan this very day. I know this because we have direct contact with agents who are there. We can get information and relay orders instantly. While our relations with the military have been strained in the past, this is a new era, especially where political matters are involved. It is hypothetical, of course, but we could have individual soldiers transferred or even recalled from the front if we thought it necessary.”

  “I see,” sighed Rostnikov.

  “Good,” said Drozhkin. “Well, I hope you catch your new murderer as swiftly as you caught your last one. And I hope you will be hearing from your son very soon.”

  Drozhkin started to rise again but changed his mind, and Rostnikov moved slowly to the door.

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Rostnikov said.

  The K.G.B. officer did not answer.

  Zhenya was waiting outside the door to escort Rostnikov out, but Rostnikov had no intention of rushing after him. He walked slowly, and Zhenya was forced to stop and wait twice.

  At the door, Rostnkov said “Thank you, comrade,” to the retreating back of Zhenya and moved to the waiting car.

  “Next time you wait for me,” Rostnikov said, sinking back into the seat, “turn off the engine. You waste petrol.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the driver.

  A blanket of heat lay on Sonya Granovsky like a wet cat, as she tried to read by the light of the single bulb in the apartment on Dimitry Ulanov Street. She was as far from where her husband’s body had been as she could be. The police had tried to keep her from returning, but she had threatened to go to the housing board. The apartment was hers. If they had completed their investigation, she wanted to return with her daughter. Apartments were not easy to get and she didn’t want this one picked cold by some policeman who wanted to move his family in over the body of her husband. She would fight them at every step. She didn’t know why the apartment was so warm. Perhaps it wasn’t warm at all. Perhaps she was feverish. It was possible.

  It was almost dawn. In the hall two tenants were arguing about something. She could make out few of their words and didn’t want to listen to them. She had been unable to sleep. In the other room, her daughter Natasha lay dreaming fitfully, tossing and moaning. There was nothing Sonya wanted to do, but what she wanted least was to sit alone in that smothering dark room. It had, she admitted, been terrible here when Aleksander was alive. They had never been happy and she had never liked him, though she had loved him and respected him. He had provided the focus of meaning in her life. She knew no other.

  The voices in the hall grew louder, a man and a woman. It had something to do with using hot water. Sonya wanted to go to the door and shout at them to be quiet, but she couldn’t bear to be part of what would follow such an act. She couldn’t rise. Moist hands of heat pushed her down trickling wet under her print dress, between her breasts and thighs, into the hair between her legs, making her shudder and whimper. She closed her eyes again and opened them to her daughter standing in the door to the second room.

  “What’s the noise?” she asked sleepily.

  Sonya thought there was contempt in the girl’s eyes as she looked down at her, as if she knew her thoughts and feelings, as if she probed her mind and body and shame. Sonya had seen this look in Aleksander’s eyes.

  “Just some neighbors fighting, arguing,” Sonya said. “Go back to sleep for a while. Are you warm?”

  Natasha, whose hair was wound in braids, was wearing long-sleeved flannel pajamas that had been Sonya’s.

  “No,” said the girl, heading back into the dark room.

  The fight stopped abruptly in the hall, and a door closed. Footsteps went down the corridor, and there was silence. Sonya pushed herself from the chair, her back soaked with sweat and her bare lower legs sticky. The wooden floor boards creaked when she crossed the room and went to look out the window into near darkness.

  The knock at the door was firm and insistent. Sonya started and wasn’t sure that it had been a real sound and not just something in her head. Then it came again.

  “Coming,” she said. It was probably her brother Nikolai, stopping to see her on the way to work.

  Before opening the door, Sonya paused at the wall to look at the photograph of her and Aleksander on the day of their wedding. She knew that it would soon become a ritual, a requirement. She would have to look at the photograph every time she passed. There were no words to give to this sensation, but it was welling in her nonetheless.

  Sonya opened the door, not to the pale sad face of her brother, but to the figure of a young man in a black coat.

  “Ilyusha,” she said softly. “What are you doing here?”

  He moved quickly past her.

  “Is Natasha here?” he said, looking around.

  “Yes,” Sonya said confused. “What is wrong?”

  He paused for a moment and looked at her. He looked as if he had not slept in days. Certainly he had not shaved.

  “Don’t you know about Marie?” he asked, his hands plunged deeply into his pockets.

  “Marie? No. What?”

  “She’s dead,” he said, taking a step toward her. Sonya Granovsky stepped back.

  “Dead?”

  “Dead, dead, dead,” he repeated. “And so is Aleksander. ”

  “I know,” said Sonya softly. “Please, Ilyusha, sit down. I’ll make some tea and we’ll talk.” She moved toward the kettle, but Malenko stepped in her way.

  “Do you know who killed Aleksander?” he whispered.

  “A man named Vonovich,” she said. “I know you’re upset Ilyusha, but you’ve got to keep quiet. Natasha is sleeping. It’s been very hard for her.”

  Malenko shook his head and ran his hand through his hair.

  “Hard for her,” he chuckled.

  “Ilyusha, are you sure Marie is dead?” Sonya Granovsky said softly. “Maybe you’re just upset by what happened to Aleksander and—”

  Ilyusha Malenko’s sudden move forward sent her staggering back. Panic was in his eyes.

  “Oh no,” he said, holding his hand out while the other remained in his coat pocket. “That’s what happened before. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I proved it with the cab driver. I proved it. It did happen. She is dead. I hit her and hung her up. I killed her and the cab driver and Alek. I did. You aren’t going to convince me that I didn’t.”

  His hand came out of his pocket slowly, holding a large, heavy pair of rusty scissors.

  “Ilyusha,” Sonya started to scream.

  “But it’s not enough,” he said, stepping toward her. “Simon convinced me, showed me, it’s not enough. He’s the one I should have listened to all the time. I’m going to make things even.”

  Sonya was paralyzed with fear. She imagined herself turning to run, feeling the thud of a heavy blow to her back, and knowing that filmy thing in his hand was plunging into her. There was nowhere to run. She stood in confusion and terror as he moved to her.

  “I’ll explain,” he said, holding his free hand up to his lips. “Let’s be quiet and not wake Natasha yet. I’ll explain and you’ll understand why I will do what I must do.”

  At the moment Ilyusha Malenko had entered the Granovsky apartment on Dimitry Ulanov Street, Porfiry Rostnikov was on his way back to his office from his meeting with Colonel Drozhkin. He weighed in his mind the possibility of trading what he knew for the safety of his son. The deliberation was brief. He would do what he could to protect Iosef. He would trade with the odious colonel. What difference did it make if Malenko went to Siberia for killing his wife or for killing Granovsky and the cab driver too? The K.G.B. wanted it finished so the political crisis could end. Then so be it, it was ended. Of c
ourse it meant that Vonovich would go to trial and be quickly convicted of murders he did not commit, but Rostnikov was also convinced that Vonovich had murdered some unknown human in his past. It didn’t matter to Rostnikov who murdered whom as long as the killers were all caught, stopped, and punished. What nagged Rostnikov was something much more basic than that. The “who” was no longer important. What was important was “why.”

  “Wait,” he called to the driver as they turned down the street less than a block from Petrovka. “We have someplace else to go.”

  The driver made a broad U-turn and headed back where he was told without comment. There was no time to waste. Rostnikov would confront Lvov directly and see what he could discover. Tkach had had two chances, but there was a limit to the amount of time he could give the young man when the issues were so important. There was a chance, Rostnikov realized, that he had given Tkach too much authority, had relied too heavily on him, had treated him and viewed him as a substitute son, a hedge against the possible loss of Iosef. If it were true, it may have jeopardized this investigation, for Tkach was not yet worthy of the responsibility he had been given.

  When they pulled up to the apartment building where Simon Lvov lived, Rostnikov told the driver to turn off the engine.

  It was easy to find the apartment of Simon Lvov. What proved to be more difficult was getting the old man to open the door.

  “Lvov,” Rostnikov shouted, after knocking loudly. “I can hear you in there. This is the police. I’ll give you fifteen seconds to open the door, and then I call my man in to shoot it down.” Rostnikov knew he would do nothing of the kind, but he was not worried about losing face in front of this old dissident who had some information he might be able to use.

  “You have ten seconds,” he said, not knowing if five, ten, or thirty seconds had passed.