Death of a Dissident

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Rostnikov touched the bandage and shook his head, no.

  “Wounded, stitches, twenty-seven,” he said. “We got Malenko. And there is a tale to tell. How are you feeling?”

  Karpo looked around the room. A man in the bed next to him looked away.

  “My arm,” he said.

  “Is still there,” said Rostnikov. “A surgeon with a cancelled operation decided to spend four hours on you, putting little pieces back together, rebuilding your bones with little leftover pieces. He is quite proud of what he has done. You will have a little difficulty with it, but you should be using it again in a matter of months. The doctor predicted six months. I told him it would be two.”

  “It will be one,” corrected Karpo in a whisper, feeling himself sink back into sleep.

  When he woke up again, there was no one in the room. He tried to move his injured arm but could not. He could, however, feel some tingling in his fingers. Minutes or an hour later, the man in the next bed returned. He said nothing to Karpo, and Karpo said nothing to him. The man, a bricklayer, tried not to look at the tall man beside him who never blinked, but it was an effort. After a while, the vision of Karpo proved too much for him, and the man made an excursion out of the room, almost bumping into Rostnikov and Tkach on the way.

  “You are awake,” observed Rostnikov. Karpo looked at him. Tkach nodded, and Karpo nodded back. The two visitors moved close to the bed. Something was clearly on their minds.

  “We have a problem, Emil, a problem indeed that the three of us must be aware of,” whispered Rostnikov.

  Karpo’s brow furrowed, and he turned his full attention to the inspector, whose turban had been replaced by a piece of white tape through a patch of shaved scalp.

  “I’ll give you the facts,” said Rostnikov sitting on the side of the bed. “You draw the conclusions. Before he died, Ilyusha Malenko said that he had been told by a friend named Dolonick that his wife and Granovsky were lovers. Dolonick had shown him a photograph of them, given him evidence. I attempted to find this Dolonick. He is a writer who has been friendly with several leading dissidents including Granovsky. He is now unfindable. I called the K.G.B. and left a message for Colonel Drozhkin to call me. Ten minutes later a call came that the colonel was not available. Five minutes after that, Procurator Timofeyeva called to order me to her office this evening and told me to talk to no one about this incident.”

  Karpo’s eyes remained fixed on Rostnikov’s face. Rostnikov reached up to touch his bandage to be sure it had not departed.

  “There is more,” said Rostnikov looking up at Tkach, who stood pale and listened. “Malenko was shot by a police officer named Dolguruki who was serving as my driver. He took over from another driver who was supposedly ill. I checked on the earlier driver. He was not ill. He had simply been transfered to other duties. I attempted to find Dolguruki but was told that he had been sent to Tbilisi on a special assignment. I did not question that it was unusual to send uniformed officers from Moscow on special assignment to Tbilisi. The conclusion?”

  “Yes,” said Karpo. “But I’m sure there was a reason, a good reason.”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Rostnikov, “a very good reason. The K.G.B. asks an agent posing as a dissident to find a way to get rid of Granovsky before his trial, before he can cause international embarrassment. The agent, Dolonick, knows about Granovsky’s affair with Marie Malenko. He also knows of Malenko’s instability and begins playing on it, prodding Malenko to act. To set the stage, Granovsky is allowed to be free and guarded only by one incompetent K.G.B. agent. Malenko kills Granovsky and we are called in to find Malenko and prove that the killing is totally nonpolitical. When Vonovich came up, the K.G.B. was quite satisfied to go with him and let Malenko go, but Malenko was out of control and had killed two more. And we refused to stop the pursuit of Malenko and kept tying it in to the Granovsky murder. And so the K.G.B. arranged for a man who would serve as my driver and be ready to get rid of Malenko as soon as he was found to avoid any talking about Dolonick, who had prodded Ilyusha Malenko to the killing.”

  “Perhaps it had to be that way,” said Karpo softly but firmly. “Granovsky’s import goes beyond such simple questions as right and wrong.”

  “You believe that?” Tkach said.

  “Yes,” said Karpo, but Rostnikov noticed the pause before the sick man’s answer, which Tkach did not catch and which Karpo would have covered had he been well.

  “In any case,” Rostnikov said, rising from the bed, “I thought you should know primarily because I must insure that no further inquiries are made. The case is closed. The murderer has been caught. Malenko killed his wife and kidnapped Natasha Granovsky. Vonovich, the drunken anti-revolutionary lout, killed Granovsky and the cab driver.”

  “And the girl?”

  “She is recovering,” sighed Rostnikov, touching his head again. “Her body is recovering well.”

  Rostnikov moved to the door with Tkach at his side.

  “Goodnight, Inspector Karpo,” said Rostnikov.

  “I will be at work in one month,” said Karpo.

  “I know,” said Rostnikov going out the door.

  Rostnikov and Tkach stopped at a Stolovaya for a bowl of soup. They said little and took the metro back to Petrovka.

  “And?” said Tkach when they returned to Rostnikov’s office, where the inspector gathered his notes for his meeting with Procurator Anna Timofeyeva.

  “And we go on working,” said Rostnikov. “Do you see a resemblance between the scar on my desk and the one on my head? Curious.”

  “Yes,” agreed Tkach. “Curious.”

  “Perhaps you and your wife would like to have dinner with my wife and me tomorrow night,” said Rostnikov, looking intently at the autopsy report on the cab driver and wondering if he should bring it with him to his meeting with Anna Timofeyeva.

  “Tomorrow, I…yes, I’m sure that would be fine.”

  “Nothing elaborate,” warned Rostnikov.

  “Thank you, comrade, we will be looking forward to it,” Tkach said with a small smile.

  “You did well, Sasha,” said Rostnikov.

  Before Tkach could consider an answer Rostnikov was gone. He could hear the older man’s limping footsteps on the outer office floor. Tkach rubbed his stubbly face. He would stop at a liquor store on the way for a bottle of wine. It would surely delay him, especially if there was a long line, but Tkach wanted to celebrate, or perhaps he wanted to hide from what had happened in the last days. He wasn’t at all sure which was which.

  I must be tired, he thought to himself, but he did not really think it was so.

  Anna Timofeyeva sat behind her desk, hands folded. This time she was not working on the stack of papers on her desk. This time her full attention was fixed on Porfiry Rostnikov, who hobbled in and nodded.

  “You look terrible, Porfiry,” she said.

  She looked even worse to Rostnikov, Her face was pale and she looked more tired than he thought it was possible for a human being to look. He considered inviting her over for dinner too, but knew she would reject it and might even think it was an attempt to gain influence. It was not done to invite superiors to dinner. It was too suspicious.

  Rostnikov waited till she motioned him to sit down. He did and put his file on her desk.

  “I have all the papers.” He began taking the reports out to hand to her but she stopped him.

  “That was a foolish thing to do, Porfiry,” she said.

  He leaned back and rubbed his face with his right hand. The call to the K.G.B. was obviously at issue.

  “There are times,” she said carefully, “when it is best to forget about being a policeman and accept political truth and expediency.”

  “Yes, comrade,” he said.

  “You are a good policeman, Porfiry Rostnikov,” she said slowly. “Will this report indicate that you are also one who can accept political compromise?”

  “I present you with the evidence, Comrade Procurator. That is my function. It is u
p to you to draw conclusions.” The chill of the room went through his back.

  “That is true,” she said, reaching her short arm across the table for the report file. Her uniform buttons were shiny and caught the light. “I think it best that you not testify at the trial of the cab driver, Vonovich. I don’t think it will be necessary.”

  “Nor do I, comrade,” he said.

  “Granovsky’s wife insists that her husband’s murder was political, was somehow an act of the state,” said Anna Timofeyeva, looking through the file, “but the evidence of the case is quite clear and will be so even to foreign journalists. You have done well, Porfiry, and you deserve a rest.”

  “I would like one, comrade, a brief one,” he said.

  “And I would like to grant you one, but I’m afraid I need your services. An American staying at the Metropole Hotel has been murdered. It looks like a routine case, but…”

  “It is politically awkward,” said Rostnikov.

  “Let’s hope not,” smiled Procurator Timofeyeva. “Let us hope not.”

  “And I assume I can use Tkach and Karpo if he is back on duty before we have the murderer?”

  “Yes,” said Timofeyeva handing him the police report on the dead American and turning back to her pile of work.

  Rostnikov tucked the file under his arm and made his way back to his office. Malenko, the K.G.B., the corpse of Granovsky and that of Marie Malenko drifted into the file of unconsciousness, ready to come out when least expected. Tangible and dancing in his hand was the report on the murder of an American. An American.

  Rostnikov’s phone was ringing when he got to his office. It had been ringing as he walked through the outer office past the night shift of officers, but he did not hurry. When he got to it, he spoke evenly, efficiently, and with authority.

  “Inspector Rostnikov,” he said.

  “Porfiry,” came his wife’s voice. “Iosef is back in Kiev. He just called.”

  The bloody face of Ilyusha Malenko leaped out of the darkness of memory and Rostnikov held back a surge of weakness.

  “Good,” he said, and his voice broke as he repeated, “good.”

  Acknowledgments

  Many former Muscovites now living in the United States contributed to the background of this book. My greatest thanks, however, go to Boris Vinocur, whose years as a special corespondent for the Soviet Agency News, Moscow Pravda, and Moscow Evening News gave him access to information and background which proved to be essential in bringing Moscow to life for me.