Death of a Dissident ir-1

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “That was Rostnikov,” he said, running his hand through his blond hair and pulling on his pants.

  She looked at the clock. It was three and she would have to get up in an hour.

  “Take your lunch in your pocket,” she said. His salary was two-hundred-fifty rubles, hers ninety rubles. They spent almost 70 percent of that on food and couldn’t afford to have either of them eat any meals at restaurants.

  He nodded, moved to her, kissed her lightly and touched his hand to her shoulder, indicating that she should go back to sleep.

  If there was no delay on the Metro, he could get to Dimitri Ulyanov Street in twenty minutes. A cold cloud of snow came dancing down the street as he stepped out, wondering what might cause Rostnikov to call him so early. There was a night shift for emergencies. It must be something big.

  At three o’clock a dark figure stood swaying on Lenin Avenue. He was not drunk. He was trying desperately to think, but all that would come to him was that he would go home and wait for her.

  He knew he had been walking for-how long? Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour or more. And there were many things to do, to plan, but they would not form into words and pictures. It had been like this when he was a child, but he was no longer a child. It was like trying to put ideas together when sleep is coming.

  Logic was the proper recourse, think it through, come to a conclusion only after you had asked the right questions. That was what Granovsky had taught him. Maybe if he could phrase the question clearly, he could trick it, get it done and answered, and go on to other problems, go home and wait for her.

  Through the snow flakes on his eyelashes, he looked up at the tall apartment buildings and felt dizzy.

  The taxi was in front of him and a thick-necked man leaned out and said something. The voices that plagued him vanished and he looked at the man in the taxi.

  “You want a taxi?”

  He had never been in a taxi alone. In the past two years he had really only been in a taxi three times, always when someone else paid. Two of those times it was Granovsky who had paid. He climbed into the back of the cab, touching the seat, smelling the sweat of the day and trying to fix the blue-black face of the driver in the present.

  “You drunk?” asked the driver with a sigh.

  “No,” he said, “I…I’ve been thinking and my mind is just…Take me to Petro Street.”

  “Where on Petro?”

  “One three six.”

  “You want a bottle?” Ivan held up a vodka bottle pulled from under the seat. “Two rubles.”

  The passenger reached forward and took the bottle. He opened it in darkness as the cab moved slowly forward, and he drank deeply, waiting for the sting of cheap vodka. Maybe it would give him a moment, just a moment of clarity. He felt if he could just break through, be sure, there would be a tremendous surge of power, strength. He wanted to be fully awake and aware. A man cannot cope if he is not awake and aware, not in control. He had learned that from Granovsky. He did not want to be a dreamer. He had almost been lost in dream those years earlier at the hospital. But there had been no comfort in the dream. It had sucked him deeper and deeper, drowning, as he called for wakefulness and had not been heard. It had taken long, and his family had abandoned him at his father’s decree. Slowly he had awakened and felt the touch of objects and people. He had gradually gotten better. Then he had met her, had met Granovsky. Granovsky had helped him. They had both helped him move from dream to reality, but he felt the tug of the dream again and knew he might slip back if he did not make a mighty effort. It had to be stopped. If he could be sure that he had done it, then it might stop. He drank from the bottle and this seemed to help.

  “It’s not the best, not American or Czech,” said the driver, unable to turn his fat neck, “but it’s not bad, right?”

  The passenger said nothing. He thought. He would wait for her. But what if his father’s voice were right? What if he hadn’t done it? He leaned forward toward the sweat smell and solidness of the driver, who sensed him and was startled.

  “My problem,” said the passenger, “is that I’m not sure if I did something tonight. If I didn’t do it, I can’t take the next step. Each thing must come in order. To do one without having done the other would make me a fool. Do you understand?”

  The driver grunted. He had hauled drunks and lunatics through the streets of Moscow for over thirty years and he had learned not to argue, simply to listen and agree. Ivan Sharikov had his own problem, the pain in his back that was too severe to ignore.

  “Moscow is a city of pain,” said the passenger.

  “True,” said the driver. The cab skidded on a patch of ice on the bridge across the Moscow River and spun slightly. The passenger said something else, but the driver was too busy with the skid to pay attention, though he caught the last few words:

  “…it again, but I couldn’t go back, could I?”

  “No,” the driver agreed, “you couldn’t.”

  For blocks the passenger was silent, and then fear came. He felt himself sinking into the dream. He felt panic and knew he had to talk, to claw with the fingers of his mind to stay in the world of cold and pain. In the rear-view mirror, Ivan could see the passenger sweating as if it were half time in a summer soccer game.

  “You can’t know what it is like. Something has to be done. I have to feel, touch, know I’m here. If I did it, I have a purpose, things to do. I can wait for her.”

  At best, drunk, at worst, mad, Ivan was thinking, and he sped up slightly, afraid of skidding but eager to get rid of the sweating, babbling passenger and get to his room where he could wrap a blanket around his back.

  “If I act in this world, I stay in this world. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” grumbled Ivan.

  “He told me that. Granovsky told me that, and he was right. I used to think the whole world was a fake, cardboard sets like a play with everyone acting their roles. I used to think there was another world quite different from ours, and I could get to it if I could just get past one actor on the street, just make it around a corner before they had time to set up another façade. I have a sense of that coming back now. There’s no point asking you because if you’re part of it, you’ll lie. You see. I’m thinking logically again.”

  The passenger now leaned back into darkness and covered his face with his hands.

  “It’s logical,” said the passenger. “The only way to know is to do it again and do it right and feel it, have evidence, blood, something.”

  “Right,” said the driver, pushing the Volga to its swaying limit. “Just relax. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Then rooms would not grow and things would feel,” came the muffled voice from the rear followed by the sound of breaking glass.

  “Hey,” shouted the driver in anger mixed with fear, trying to look over his lump of a shoulder. “I just had that seat cleaned and…”

  At the corner of Petro Street and Gorky Place, eighty-year-old Vladimir Roshkov and his fifty-year-old son Pyotr were about to cross the street on their way to their small clothing store. The basement had flooded and they wanted an early start to clean it up before the business day began. The taxi came around the corner sideways in a mad skid catching Pyotr’s pants on a bumper, stripping him, and throwing him against a street light. Vladimir jumped back, looked at his startled son, and watched the taxi bounce over the curb and come to a solid stop against the wall across the street. Pyotr stepped forward dazed, bruised, and confused, and thought only of getting back home and putting on a pair of pants. Anger took a few moments to hit the father and son, who were strong, solid, and very slow of thought. When it came, it came to them both at the same moment and they strode toward the now silent cab. They took a few more steps forward and stopped.

  The black figure was covered with blood, but it was not the blood that stopped them. It was the fact that the man was laughing softly, not the laugh of hysteria, but the laugh of gentle pleasure. The man looked at the two figures in front o
f him, one in the snow without pants, laughed and ran down Petro Street. By the time the Roshkovs recovered their wits and hurried after him, the man was almost out of sight. They stopped, panting, with no heart for the pursuit and headed for the taxi.

  The wind was whipping Pyotr’s bare legs, and his father could not help thinking this would mean the police and questions and hours lost in draining the basement. He opened the front door of the cab saying to his son, “Go call the police-”

  As the door came open, the body of Ivan came tumbling out into the street, a lump of human with a face as red as his country’s flag.

  “Go, fast,” said Vladimir, waving at his son and considering whether the two of them should simply run away. He decided that someone might have seen them by now and to run might make them suspects in this murder. As Pyotr hurried bare-legged across the street and back to find a phone, a groan or sound came from the heap of blood in the snow.

  Vladimir forced himself to the side of the man and leaned forward.

  “Yes,” he said. “My son is getting the police. Don’t worry.”

  “Granovsky,” said Ivan Sharikov the cabman.

  “Granovsky?” repeated Vladimir Roshkov.

  Ivan nodded his bloody face in agreement and went silent.

  “Are you dead?” said Vladimir Roshkov.

  “I don’t know,” replied Ivan the cabman who promptly died.

  The young police officer parked the yellow Volga in Dmitri Ulyanov Street and sat looking straight ahead the way he had been taught to do. He wondered why the Inspector did not get out of the car immediately and rush into the building, but he did not let his curiosity show with even the twitch of his face. He tried to think of nothing and was surprised at how easy it was to do so.

  Rostnikov knew that once he plunged into this case-with pressure from above and a good chance that he would come up with nothing-the days and the nights would begin to blend, he would grow weary and irritable; he would be uneasy until he had a desk full of possibilities and a suspect to talk to. If it was to be as it had been in the past, these were his last moments of ease before embracing the agony of the investigation and the torment of other people’s tragedies. He planned nothing. The case would define itself, carry him into branching streams and dead ends. He would float or fight as he saw fit, trying not to drown in paperwork and bureaucracy.

  He thought of his son’s face. It was a trick he used to relax. He forced himself to recall the boy’s features, to let the nose define the face and the mouth, to remember him as a child of fourteen, lean and uncertain, and as a young man of twenty-four, solid and curious. The mouth always came to Rostnikov as a stern line that had to be modified by a great effort of will. With concentration, the face of his son came to him and he smiled, let it go and stepped out of the car. The pre-dawn air was sharp and cold and clean compared to the enervating warmth of the Volga.

  “Turn off the engine,” he said to the driver. “If you get cold, come inside.”

  Rostnikov moved into the building and up the stairs slowly. His leg would allow no other progress, but that did not disturb him. He knew that Alexiev, the strongest man in the world, could move no faster than himself. If Alexiev walked up four flights of stairs, his massive legs were in pain from chafing against each other. Strength was not a matter of swiftness but heredity, determination, and dignity. Dignity had a price. Rostnikov’s hand touched an old peeling poster on the red brick stairway wall. “Surpass America…” it began and never ended. The area of competition was lost in the act of some young vandal of the past.

  The officer in front of Apartment 612 was short, stocky, and dark. His collar was clearly rubbing his neck painfully. His winter cap was pulled down against his ears, which bent comically. The officer recognized Rostnikov and stepped out of the way.

  “It’s warm out here,” said Rostnikov. “Open your jacket and relax. Who’s in there?”

  “Wife, daughter, Officer Drubkova,” said the officer, unbuttoning his coat.

  “The corpse?”

  “Covered with a sheet. No one has touched it.”

  Rostnikov knocked and waited for a woman’s voice that told him to come in.

  An awkward move of the foot was all that kept him from slipping in the sticky trail of blood, and even so, he almost fell. Only one of the three women in the room had looked up to see him enter. She was clearly Officer Drubkova. Her face was pink and eager. Her zeal would be oppressive and tiring. He knew her type as soon as their eyes met. She had been kneeling next to the corpse which was covered with a white sheet, a sheet that showed remarkably little blood, considering the broad trail of it in the room. The corpse must have been covered very recently, Rostnikov decided, fascinated by the clear outline of the sickle under the sheet.

  A woman and young girl, with hands identically folded on their laps, sat in an uncomfortable-looking straight-back sofa of uncertain period looking at the white figure on the floor.

  Officer Drubkova bounded toward him like an athletic bear and introduced herself, almost saluting.

  “Officer Drubkova,” she said. “The hospital has been alerted and will come for the body when you are finished. There is a hole in the window which I have covered with cardboard. We have touched almost nothing and I have retrieved a book that was thrown through the window.”

  She handed it to Rostnikov, who tucked it awkwardly under his arm not wanting it at all, but not wanting to offend her. Nor did he bother to tell her that it was pointless to avoid touching the room. If there were fingerprints, they would be on the handle of the sickle and nowhere else that would be meaningful. Any room is a maddening, useless fury of fingerprints.

  “Very good,” said Rostnikov. Officer Drubkova’s pink face turned a pleased red. “Now go to another apartment and call the hospital. I want the corpse taken care of as soon as the photographs are taken. When you make the call, remain in the hall and do not let anyone in except Inspectors Karpo and Tkach. Do you know them?”

  She nodded affirmatively.

  “Good. I can count on you.”

  Officer Drubkova hurried out of the room and Rostnikov opened his coat in relief. He glanced at the law book under his arm and placed it gently on the wooden table. He lifted one of the three wooden chairs at the table and moved it directly in the line of vision between the two thin women on the sofa and the body on the floor. The mother tried to look through him, found him too solid and then allowed something like anger to touch her face. That was what he wanted, some awakening and emotion, something to touch beyond grief. The young girl, however, simply stared through him.

  “I’m Inspector Rostnikov. Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. My father enjoyed Crime and Punishment and named me after the detective. I’ve always thought it had something to do with my becoming a policeman.”

  The woman allowed more anger to show.

  “I am Sonya Granovsky and this is my daughter Natasha.” Defensiveness and hostility were there, waiting for him to say the wrong thing, for she badly needed someone to attack, to blame.

  “I have a son,” said Rostnikov, looking at the young girl.

  Sonya Granovsky’s brown eyes looked at him curiously. This was not the conversation she expected.

  “He’s in the army now, but I don’t think he likes it. Why would anyone in his right mind except Officer Drubkova like the army?” he said in a whisper.

  They fell silent as Rostnikov continued to look at Natasha.

  “How old are you?” he said softly.

  The mother looked down at her daughter as if she had forgotten the girl was there and was curious about what the answer might be.

  “I’d guess you are sixteen,” Rostnikov said.

  “Fourteen,” the girl said, without refocusing her eyes.

  Rostnikov sighed and spoke even more softly, so softly that it almost seemed that he was speaking to himself.

  “My father died when I was fourteen,” he said. “For a few years after that I had trouble deciding whether I had liked him or
not. I still have trouble, but I think I understand him better now. It always surprises me to think that I am now older than my father ever was. Did you like your father?”

  The mother turned her head fully to the daughter now, definitely curious about the answer.

  “I don’t think so,” said the girl. “No…I did like him…I…”

  She was almost on the verge of tears, and Rostnikov pushed her a little further, unsure of whether he was doing it primarily for her therapy or to break through to conversation quickly, for once Karpo and Tkach came the approach would have to change and time might be lost. Rostnikov chewed at his lower lip and turned around to look down at the corpse.

  “To tell the truth,” he said. “For years I felt guilty about not liking my father. It was only after I became a man that I began to feel sorry for that fourteen-year-old boy who carried all that guilt for something that was not his fault. I felt better about my father after that.”

  He kept his back turned to the two women, but he could hear the sound of sobs suppressed, a spurt and then the gentle cry of grief. He had not wanted hysteria and had done his best to avoid it and had succeeded. He rose slowly and took off his coat. There were many questions, many things to do. He felt terrible, he felt wonderful. He felt the excitement of the chase and the inevitable curiosity at his lack of regret over the victim. He almost wished that it would not turn out to be too simple. Before it was over, Rostnikov would remember that wish and regret it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “So,” Rostnikov said, “Who would want to do such a terrible thing?” He looked back over his shoulder to see if he would get a response, would break through the sobbing. If not, he would try again. It sometimes happened, actually more times than it did not, that a close friend, a neighbor, a relative committed a murder and those around indeed knew and could provide the name immediately. Rostnikov sensed that it would not be that simple, but not to try would be an error that might come back to haunt him.