Rostnikov’s Vacation

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “I simply forwarded information to my superior,” said Rostnikov, deciding to suffer the cramping agony in his leg rather than stand and show Colonel Zhenya that he was nervous or, worse, rising to challenge him.

  Zhenya leaned on the rail. Beyond him, on the shore, Rostnikov could see the diving boards of the Moskva Swimming Pool. A man on the top board leaped off gracelessly. Zhenya turned and looked back at the two men.

  “I see a question in your eyes, Rostnikov,” he said. “Do you wish to ask it?”

  Rostnikov said nothing, and Emil Karpo stood motionless.

  “You want to know why I am here. You expected me, but you did not know why I would come. You were disturbed by what has happened, but you did not know quite what to conclude. I will enlighten you, Rostnikov. I will enlighten you because you have once again been used. I will enlighten you because I want you to know that you have been used.”

  “I appreciate that you would not be here if you did not intend to enlighten me,” said Rostnikov.

  “I did not order Georgi Vasilievich murdered,” Zhenya said. “If I had, I would tell you now, for there is nothing you could do about it. That murder was ordered by the man who organized the conspiracy, which you and Karpo thwarted with the help of one of my men.”

  “Misha Ivanov is one of your men,” said Rostnikov.

  “Yes,” said Zhenya. “The notebook that you brought to Colonel Snitkonoy was a fake. Misha Ivanov planted it for you to find. Vasilievich’s notebook, which was full of nonsense and would have led you in the wrong direction, was destroyed. You are wondering two things at this moment. First, given my own lack of sympathy for the current reforms, why did I not let the conspiracy take place and simply benefit from it? Second, if I did not want the conspiracy to take place, why did I not simply reveal it myself and take credit? I need not hide from you that I have ambitions, that I wish to serve the Revolution and not participate in its destruction. Have you figured out where we are going with this yet, Inspector?”

  Rostnikov could stand it no longer. He raised himself from the chair and leaned forward with both hands on the horizontal pipe before him to keep from falling. Rostnikov had figured it out, but it might well be essential to his survival to allow Colonel Zhenya to outwit him. Rostnikov resisted the urge to look at Karpo.

  “I am in your hands, Colonel,” Porfiry Petrovich said.

  “The conspiracy the two of you helped to thwart was not aimed at Gorbachev and the reformers,” said Zhenya. “It was aimed at the true patriots, the old guard and those of us who support the Revolution. It was not the Stalinists who planned to kill but the reformers who plotted to end opposition, to kill the Stalinists. Rostnikov, I was certainly one of the intended victims. The idea was to blame the entire operation on the CIA, Americans who wanted to keep Gorbachev in power. I needed honest policemen like you to step in. It is quite possible that you have now earned the enmity of the very people you thought you were saving from death. Now that is irony, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. As a Russian, you should appreciate that. Now you may smile. Karpo, you have a question.”

  “Alexandrov,” Karpo said so quietly that the word was almost obscured by the purring engine of the ship.

  “Jerold,” corrected Zhenya. “He was part of the conspiracy. He had several options. If Krivonos had succeeded, Alexandrov would have escaped and left him to his fate, assuming that Krivonos, if he survived, would identify an American as the man who had hired him to do the deed. If Krivonos failed, as he did, Alexandrov would kill him, as he did, and emerge a hero. See how honest I am being with the two of you?”

  Rostnikov allowed himself a glance at Karpo, whose attention was riveted on the colonel.

  “You have helped our cause, the true cause of the Revolution, to survive to do battle another day,” said Zhenya. “Inspector Karpo, you, as a zealous and loyal member of the party, might, I would think, be content with this outcome that holds open hope of maintaining the old order.”

  “Within the old society the elements of a new one have been created,” said Karpo. “The dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.”

  Zhenya shook his head.

  “You are becoming a reformer, one of them, Inspector Karpo,” he said.

  “Those were not my words, Colonel,” said Karpo. “They were written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They are part of the Communist Manifesto.”

  Colonel Zhenya looked first at the man known as the Washtub, who was trying to hide his pain, and then at the cadaverous creature who stood beside him and wondered how much naïveté could survive. It had been foolish to seek them out, to savor his victory. It had been self-indulgent, a mistake he would never make again. Without another word, Colonel Zhenya walked to the front of the boat and lost himself in the crowd.

  “Well, Emil Karpo. What do you think?”

  “I do not think, Inspector Rostnikov. I enforce the law.”

  “And I, Emil Karpo, think too much. We are cursed by a disease of opposites. It may account for our compatibility.”

  “I was not aware that you considered us to be compatible,” said Karpo as Rostnikov moved slightly to his right, urging feeling and circulation back into his leg. He checked his watch. There was still an hour to go on the ride.

  FOURTEEN

  ON A SPRING EVENING, a very few months ago, three policemen, two in Moscow and one in Livadia, less than two miles from Yalta, were out walking at the same precise moment.

  Before the night was over, one of the men would be laughing, one would be crying, and the third would be showing no emotion whatsoever.

  This was not, Emil Karpo was sure, the ultimate solution to his increasingly frequent moments of uncertainty. He walked because he did not wish to be close to people on the Metro or a bus. He did not wish to be reminded of his own existence, did not wish to hear people talk of what had happened the day before. He walked knowing that when he reached his destination he would have respite from the memory of Colonel Zhenya.

  Karpo had become a policeman because it was at once the easiest and most difficult thing he could do. It was easy because he felt confident that the law was, basically, simple and direct, and the philosophy behind it was evident. Crime was crime. The goal of the Soviet state was the total success of the Revolution. That which prevented the success of the Revolution was politically wrong. Murder, rape, robbery, fraud, corruption, those were easy, those were clearly counterrevolutionary. Crime was a rejection of the goals of the state, roadblocks, setbacks. He looked at himself, as Porfiry Petrovich had once said, as a determined tractor whose function was to remove an endless line of fallen logs along the road of the tank of Revolution.

  It was the responsibility of the leaders of the party to set the policy of the Revolution in light of internal and external events. But now the party was not in command; the law was being interpreted by suntanned men who wished to be exactly like those against whom they had for so long struggled. What was the meaning of their life? What was the meaning of the life of Emil Karpo? It had never been a question before, but it had come to him increasingly in the past months.

  He was gradually coming to the conclusion that had always been evident to many of those around him. One’s loyalty should be given to those whom one trusts, and to them only, not to an abstraction called the State.

  This was a new concept for Karpo.

  He could neither embrace the return to the past represented by Zhenya nor give his allegiance to the new leaders who had abandoned the Revolution and were now behaving like Americans or the French to keep and consolidate their power.

  It was at that moment that Emil Karpo, as he opened the door to the apartment building, first seriously considered the possibility of resigning his position as a police officer.

  He knocked at the door to the apartment, though he knew the door would be open, that the aunt and cousin would be out. Mathilde answered the door. The amused smile was on her face; her dark brown hair hung
loosely around her shoulders. She had on no makeup, and she wore a plain blue dress. She could have been a housewife in the midst of cleaning house.

  Their relationship had grown more complex than he had ever anticipated. In truth, Emil Karpo had anticipated no relationship other than one that provided him respite from the animal necessity that he could not deny. But something more had happened. She had become—for reasons that Karpo could not identify and that might not exist, since Mathilde did not function on the basis of reason—his friend. Mathilde Verson and Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov were the only people he had known since he was a boy, and that included his own parents, who seemed to display any concern for him.

  “Emil Karpo, for a hero of the Revolution who has saved the life of the president himself, you look even more serious than usual, and the usual is about as serious as a human being can get.”

  With this she stepped back and let him enter. She closed the door behind him and stood as he turned to her.

  “The tea is warm, and we can talk about life and the state before we go to bed,” she said, moving past him to the curtain that separated the small living room from the kitchen area. Beyond the kitchen was the single bedroom with the oversized prerevolutionary bed.

  “I do not wish to talk,” said Karpo, following Mathilde as she moved to the pot boiling gently on the stove.

  “Then let’s just drink our tea and—”

  “I do not wish to drink tea,” he said.

  She turned to him, put her hands on her hips, and tilted her head to one side. The puzzled smile disappeared from her face as Karpo moved toward her and reached out to touch her left breast.

  “Emil Karpo, with what drug has someone secretly injected you?”

  Karpo gripped her arms firmly but gently, and she looked up into his pale face. Something very like tears were forming in his eyes, and she did not know whether to be frightened or very pleased.

  Sasha Tkach, closely shaven, walked into the hospital in clean clothes. His hair was combed back, and Maya had put a touch of hair tonic on it to keep it from falling forward into his face. Under his left arm he held a package wrapped in green paper.

  No one stopped him as he went to the elevator and informed the thin woman who operated it that he wanted the sixth floor. He was the only passenger, but she stopped at each floor along the way. He was not disturbed. No one got on.

  “Thank you,” he said, getting out when the doors finally opened on six.

  The nurses on duty at the station did not ask Sasha Tkach for identification or where he was going. He moved down the hall and into the ward where Zelach had been moved following his recovery from surgery.

  Other patients in the eight-bed ward had visitors; some had two or three, and one man in the corner seemed to be having a party. Zelach was lying back, his face almost as white as Karpo’s, his left eye covered by a bandage, his right eye closed. Sasha moved to the side of the bed and quietly said, “Arkady.”

  There was no answer. Sasha put the package down, found a folding chair in the corner of the room against the wall, returned to the bedside with it open, and sat. Five minutes later, when Zelach stirred to the sound of laughter from the party in the corner, Tkach repeated, “Arkady.”

  And Zelach opened his eye. The lid fluttered, and Zelach seemed to be having trouble focusing. He turned his head slowly and found Sasha. Zelach’s swollen lips formed something that might have been a smile.

  “Sasha,” he said dryly.

  “Would you like a drink, some water?” asked Tkach, getting up from the chair.

  “No,” Zelach said in a dry voice that was not his own. “Have you forgiven me?”

  “Arkady, it is you who should forgive me.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I forgive you, Sasha, but I don’t—”

  “Your mother says your eye will be saved. You will need glasses. You’ll look like an intellectual.”

  “I’ll look,” Zelach rasped, “like a potato sack with glasses.”

  “You are too hard on yourself, Arkady.”

  “No, I am not, Sasha Tkach. It is you who is too hard on himself. You are only a human being. See, I can think of nothing to say but my mother’s old sayings.”

  “You are right, Arkady Zelach,” said Tkach.

  “My mother said you and Karpo are heroes,” said Zelach, trying to raise his head. “Or was I dreaming?”

  “We were not heroes.”

  Zelach held back the sharp pain in his face as he propped himself higher and turned his head far enough toward Tkach that he could see the green paper of me package lying on the small table near his bed.

  “What is that?”

  “Open it,” said Tkach.

  “I don’t think—”

  “I’ll open it for you,” Tkach said, taking the package and carefully opening it so that Zelach could give the wrapping paper to his mother if he wished to do so. The contents of the package were small, a packet of papers about the size of an eyeglass case.

  “Shall I read it?” Tkach said.

  “Yes,” Zelach said as a peal of laughter came from the party in the corner and a patient somewhere in the ward began coughing uncontrollably.

  Sasha Tkach read:

  “‘Upon recovery from injuries received in the course of his duties, Arkady Sergeivich Zelach will take two weeks of vacation in the Crimean region of the Ukrainian Republic at the Lermontov Hotel in Yalta. There will be no expenses incurred for this period, and Arkady Sergeivich Zelach will be permitted to be accompanied by his wife or any immediate member of his family.’”

  “My mother,” said Zelach.

  “Arkady, my wife and I will be going with you. I have also been given a vacation. My wife’s family is in Nikopol. We will see them for several days and then join you and your mother, if that pleases you.”

  “You want to go on a vacation with me and my mother?” asked Arkady incredulously.

  “Very much,” said Sasha Tkach.

  “Does that mean we are friends?” Zelach asked.

  “I would consider it an honor,” said Tkach with a laugh.

  At the airport in Yalta, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was met by his wife, who handed him an envelope that had been delivered to the hotel just before Sarah had left for the airport.

  Rostnikov’s leg had already been aching from the boat ride that morning, but the cramped conditions on the plane and the turbulent weather that made it impossible to get up and walk about had led Rostnikov to consider seeking medical help. He had tried sleeping on the plane. Impossible. He had managed to finish the book he had begun on the flight to Moscow, an Ed McBain tale, Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man. He had read the book many times before. The pages were now, like many of his favorite books in his American detective-novel collection, unglued and ready to escape from the battered cover that held them loosely together. It helped a bit, but he could not read for more than a few minutes at a time.

  He took the envelope and looked at his wife in the red-sun twilight. Her hair had grown back quickly since the surgery, and though he knew there was a scar, it could not be seen. She had lost weight, but she was still a solid woman whose face was remarkably unlined considering the roughness of the life she had led for her forty-eight years.

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” his wife said, looking over the top of her glasses as she had done since the day he had first met her. “You are ill.”

  “And you are quite beautiful,” he said.

  “That is your fever talking.”

  “No,” he said, opening the envelope. There was a single-spaced typed, unsigned sheet inside. He read it, put it back in the envelope, and put the envelope into his pocket.

  “What is wrong, Porfiry?”

  “Nothing. My leg, that’s all. And I need sleep.”

  “Can you sleep with this pain?”

  People were moving past them, around them.

  “We shall see,” he said.

  “We shall not see, Porfiry Petr
ovich. We shall find a physician and get you something for your pain. Then you will go to bed, and I will bring you soup and medicine and take care of you.”

  “You are not well enough yet,” Rostnikov said, stopping to regain his strength.

  He looked at her in the evening light, and she shook her head.

  “I’m well enough, Porfiry Petrovich. I’ve been lying around recovering for weeks. I’d like to feel useful. Will you deprive me of the opportunity to feel useful for the first time in months?”

  “I will not,” he said, moving again but trying to put as little weight on his wife as he possibly could.

  “Enjoy being ill,” she said. “You deserve it. Porfiry Petrovich, I have never asked you a question about your work. Is this true?”

  “Yes,” he said as they entered the bright airport terminal.

  “What is in the envelope?”

  “A KGB colonel named Zhenya has met with an accident,” he said. “He fell over the side of one of the tourist boats on the Moscow River and was pulled into the propeller.”

  “And you knew this man?”

  “I knew this man,” said Rostnikov, wondering how many other officers in the MVD, KGB, and GRU would be having accidents in the near future.

  “It’s time you stopped thinking for a while,” Sarah said, letting go of her husband’s arm so he could make his own way with dignity through the crowded waiting room of the airport. “If you cannot stop thinking on your vacation, when can you?”

  “Yes,” Rostnikov agreed, taking a step on his own, “when can you?”