Self-discovery

by Vladimir Savchenko

  Matvei Apollonovich remembered what the late Krivoshein had looked like and he experienced typical male envy. “Hilobok was right; he’s no match for her. What did she see in him? Was she looking for security? A husband with a good income?” Like most men whose looks and age left little hope of romantic conquest, Onisimov had a low opinion of beautiful women.

  “Please be seated. You are familiar with the name Valentin Vasilyevich Krivoshein?”

  “Yes.” She had a throaty, mellifluous voice.

  “How about Victor Vitalyevich Kravets?”

  “Vitya? Yes.” Elena Ivanovna smiled, showing her even teeth. “I didn’t know his father’s name was Vitaly, though. What’s the matter?”

  “What can you tell me about the relationship between Krivoshein and Kravets?”

  “Well… they worked together. Victor, I think, is a distant relative of Valya… I mean, Krivoshein. I think they were good friends. What’s happened?”

  “Elena Ivanovna, I’ll ask the questions.” Onisimov figured that she would reveal more if she were emotionally off balance, and he was in no hurry to clear up the situation. “Is it true that you and Krivoshein were close?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you stop seeing him?”

  Elena Ivanovna’s eyes became cold, and a blush came and went from her cheeks.

  “That has nothing to do with this!”

  “And how would you know what does and what doesn’t have to do with this?” Matvei Apollonovich perked up.

  “Because… because this can’t have anything to do with anything. We broke up and that’s all.”

  “I see… all right. We’ll come back to that later. Tell me, where did Kravets live?”

  “In a dormitory for young specialists in Academic Town, like all the probation workers.”

  “Why didn’t he live with Krivoshein?”

  “I don’t know. Apparently they both preferred it that way.”

  “Despite the fact that they were friends and relatives? I see. And how did Kravets behave with you? Did he court you?” Matvei Apollonovich was milking his version for all it was worth.

  “He did….” Elena Ivanovna bit her lip. But she couldn’t control her tongue. “I think you’d do the same if I let you.”

  “Aha, so you let him, eh? Tell me, was Krivoshein jealous of Kravets and you?”

  “Perhaps, he was… but I don’t understand what all this is about.” The woman looked at the investigator with great hostility. “All these innuendos! What happened, will you please tell me?”

  “Calm yourself, citizen!”

  Maybe I should tell her? Should I? Is she involved? She is beautiful, and a man could really fall for her, but… it’s the wrong milieu for serious sexual crimes. The statistics are against it. A scientist wouldn’t lose his head over a woman… but Kravets….

  The telephone interrupted Onisimov’s ruminations. He picked it up.

  “Onisimov here.”

  “We’ve found him, comrade captain!” the operative announced. “Do you want to participate?”

  “Of course!”

  “We’ll wait for you at the airport, car license plate 57–28 DNA.”

  “I see!” The investigator stood and looked merrily at Kolomiets. “We’ll finish this little talk another time, Elena Ivanovna. Let me sign your pass. Don’t be upset, and don’t be mad: it’s nerves — we’re all like that, you and I, included….” “But what happened?”

  “We’re investigating. I can say no more for now. Good day!” Onisimov walked her out, then got his gun from the desk drawer, locked the room, and hurried, almost at a run, to the parking lot.

  The snow white IL jet taxied up to the terminal exactly at 13:00. A light blue, elevated companion stairway pulled up at its door. A heavyset, short man in tight green pants and bright shirt was the first to run down the stairs, and, swinging his colorful traveling bag, he marched down the concrete hexagonal paving stones to the barrier. He kept looking around, seeking someone in the crowd of people greeting the arrivals, found him, and rushed toward him.

  “You look great! What’s all the rush, the ‘fly out immediately’ during vacation? Let me get a look at you! You’re better looking than ever, even taller! That’s what a year away does for your looks! Your face seems noble and I can even look upon your jaw without irritation.”

  “And you, I see, have gotten fat off the graduate land.” The greeter looked him over with a critical eye. “Have you furnished yourself with socialist accumulations?”

  “Val, it’s not simple accumulation — it’s an informational material reserve. I’ll tell you all about it later, even give you a demonstration. It’s a complete turnaround, Val… but let’s talk about you first. Why did you summon me before it was time? No, wait!” The recent passenger pulled out a notebook from his pocket and withdrew several ten — ruble notes, “Here’s the money I owe you.” “What money?”

  “Please, spare me the act!” The passenger raised his hand to forestall further protests. “We know; we’re touched: the absent — minded scientist who can’t be bothered with prosaic minutiae. Drop it. I know you better than that: you remember debts of fifty kopecks. Take the money and cut the bull!”

  “No,” he replied, smiling gently, “you don’t owe me a thing. You see — “He stumbled under the direct piercing stare of his companion.

  “Goddamn it! So you’ve started dyeing your hair? And the scar?

  Where’s the scar over the eyebrow?” His voice dropped to a whisper.

  “Who are you?”

  Meanwhile the crowd of arrivals and welcoming friends and relatives had thinned out. Five men who had met no one and were in no hurry discarded their cigarettes and quickly surrounded the two men.

  “Keep quiet!” Onisimov hissed, squeezing in between the lab assistant and the passenger who was staring at him in disbelief; the second man had money in his fist. “We’ll shoot if you resist.”

  “Oh, boy!” the astonished passenger said, stepping back a pace; he was immediately grabbed by the elbows.

  “Not ‘oh, boy! but the police, citizen… Krivoshein, I believe?” The investigator smiled with maximum pleasantness. “We’ll have to hold you for a while, too. Take them to the cars.”

  Victor Kravets, seating himself in the back seat of a Volga between Onisimov and Gayevoy, had a tired and calm smile on his face.

  “By the way, if I were you, I’d drop the smile,” Matvei Apollonovich noted. “You serve time for jokes like this.”

  “Ah, what’s time!” Kravets waved his arm. “The important thing is that I think I’ve made the right move.”

  “I never thought that my return would begin with an episode from a detective story!” said the passenger as he entered the investigator’s office. “Well, once in a lifetime this could prove to be interesting.” Without waiting for an invitation, he sat down and looked around. Onisimov sat down opposite him in silence. Two feelings were battling within him: self — congratulation (What an operation! What success!! Caught two at once — red — handed, it looks like!) and worry. Up until now the case had been built on the fact that Krivoshein died or was killed in the laboratory. But…. Matvei Apollonovich took a hard look at the man sitting before him: a slanted brow with a widow’s peak, ridges over the eyebrows, a purplish scar over the right brow, a freckled face with full cheeks, a fat nose with a high bridge, and short red hair. There was no doubt about it; Krivoshein was sitting in his chair! “Boy, was I off. So who was bumped off in there? I’m getting to the bottom of this right now!”

  “Is that a hint?” Krivoshein pointed at the barred windows. “To make even the innocent confess?”

  “No, this used to be a wholesale warehouse,” the investigator explained, and remembering that the lab assistant had begun yesterday’s interview the same way, chuckled at the coincidence. “It’s a leftover… Well, how do you feel, Valentin Vasilyevich?”

  “Thank you — I’m sorry, I don’t know your name and patronymic — I can’
t complain. How about you?”

  “Ditto. Though my condition has no direct bearing on the case.”

  They smiled at each other broadly and tensely, like boxers before beating each other’s faces in.

  “And mine, it would appear, does? I just thought it was standard procedure to enquire about the health of passengers that you grab for no good reason at the airport. So what does my condition have to do with your case?”

  “We don’t grab, citizen Krivoshein. We detain,” Onisimov corrected him. “And your health interests me in a completely legal way, since I have a doctor’s certificate and several witnesses who say that you are a corpse.”

  “A corpse?” Krivoshein examined himself with exaggerated playfulness. “Well, if that’s your information, you might as well haul me off to the autopsy room.” Suddenly he understood and his smile disappeared. He looked at Onisimov angrily and anxiously. “Listen, comrade investigator, if this is a joke, it’s a lousy one! What corpse?”

  “Please, who’s joking?” Onisimov gestured broadly with his hands. “The day before yesterday your body was found in a laboratory — I saw it with my own eyes — I mean not your body, since you are in good health, but someone who looked very much like you. It was identified as being you.” “Damn it!” Krivoshein hunched over and rubbed his cheeks. “Can you let me see the body?”

  “Well, you know that we can’t, Valentin Vasilyevich. It turned into a skeleton, you know. This mischief isn’t a very good idea. It could be misinterpreted.”

  “Into a skeleton?!” Krivoshein looked up and confusion showed in his brown — flecked green eyes. “How? Where?”

  “It happened there, at the scene, as if you needed any information on the matter from me,” Onisimov stressed. “Maybe you’d like to explain?”

  “There was a body which became a skeleton,” Krivoshein muttered, frowning. “Then… oh, then it’s not so bad. He wasn’t wasting time; it looks as if something went wrong. Damn it, look at me!” He cheered up and carefully looked at the detective. “You’re mixing me up, comrade, and I don’t know why. Bodies just don’t turn into skeletons like that. I know a little about it. And then, how can you prove that it’s my… I mean, the body of a man who looks like me, if you have no body? Something’s wrong here.”

  “Perhaps. That’s why I want you to shed light on this yourself. Since all this happened in the laboratory you run.”

  “That I run? Hm….” Krivoshein laughed, and shook his head. “I’m afraid nothing will come of this light shedding. I need someone to explain it all to me.”

  “And this one is going to go mum, too!” Matvei Apollonovich sighed glumly, took a sheet of paper, and unscrewed his pen.

  “Let’s do this in order. Your name is Valentin Vasilyevich Krivoshein?”

  “Yes.”

  “Age thirty — five? Russian? Bachelor?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You live in Dneprovsk and head the New Systems Laboratory at the Systemology Institute?”

  “No, that’s the part that’s wrong. I live in Moscow, and study in the graduate biology department at Moscow State University. Here!” Krivoshein handed him his passport and documents across the desk.

  The papers had a realistically weather — beaten look. Everything in them — including the three — year residence permit for Moscow — corresponded with his story.

  “I see.” Onisimov put them in his desk. “These things are done quickly in Moscow, in one day!”

  “What are you trying to say?!” Krivoshein stared at him, one eyebrow arched aggressively.

  “Your documents are phony, that’s what. Just as phony as your confederate’s, to whom you were trying to pass money at the airport. Were you trying to guarantee an alibi? You needn’t have bothered. We’ll check it, and then what?”

  “Go ahead and check!”

  “We will. Whom do you work under at MSU? Who’s your advisor?”

  “Professor Vano Aleksandrovich Androsiashvili, department chairman in general physiology, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences.”

  “I see.” The investigator dialed the phone. “Operator? This is Onisimov. Quickly connect me with Moscow. I want this man on the videophone as soon as possible. Write it down, Vano Aleksandrovich Androsiashvili, professor, head of the physiology department at the university. Hurry!” He stared at Krivoshein triumphantly.

  “The videophone! Marvelous!” he chuckled. “I see that detective work is approaching science fiction. Will this be soon?”

  “It’ll happen when it happens. We have things to discuss, you and I.” Krivoshein’s confidence, however, made an impression on Onisimov. He thought: “And what if this is some kind of crazy coincidence? Let me check.”

  “Tell me, do you know Elena Ivanovna Kolomiets?”

  Krivoshein’s face lost its calm expression. He sat up and looked at Onisimov angrily and questioningly.

  “Yes. So what?”

  “Very well?”

  “So?”

  “Why did you break up?”

  “This, my dear investigator, if you will excuse me, is absolutely none of your business!” Krivoshein was getting very angry. “I do not permit anyone to meddle in my private life — not God, not the devil, not the police!”

  “I see,” Onisimov said calmly. And the thought: “It’s him! No way out of it — it’s him. Why is he covering up? What could he possibly be hoping for?” He continued the questioning. “All right, here’s an easier question: who’s Adam?”

  “Adam? The first man on earth. Why?”

  “He called the institute… the first man. He wanted to know how you were, wanted to see you.”

  Krivoshein shrugged.

  “And who is that man who met you at the airport?”

  “Whom you so cleverly branded as my confederate? That man….” Krivoshein raised and dropped his eyebrows meditatively.

  “I’m afraid he’s not the person I took him for.”

  “I don’t think he is, either. Not at all.” Onisimov perked up. “But then who is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The same nonsense all over again!” Onisimov wailed, throwing down his pen. “Enough of this baloney, citizen Krivoshein. It’s unbecoming! You were giving him money, forty rubles in tens. You mean you didn’t know to whom you were giving money?”

  At that moment a young man in a white lab coat came in to the office, put a form on the table, and left, after giving Krivoshein a sharp, curious look. Onisimov looked at the form — it was a report on the analysis of the suspect’s fingerprints. When he looked up at Krivoshein, his eyes had a sympathetically triumphant smile.

  “Well, that’s it. We don’t have to wait for the Moscow professor to give a visual ID — and he probably wouldn’t anyway. Your fingerprints, citizen Krivoshein, correspond completely to the prints that I took at the scene of the crime. Here, see for yourself!” He handed the form and a magnifying glass to Krivoshein. “So let’s drop the game. And remember that your flight to Moscow and the fake papers only make things worse. The court adds three to eight years to a sentence for premeditation and the attempt to confound the police.”

  Krivoshein, his lip extended, was studying the form.

  “Tell me,” he said, raising his eyes to the detective, “why can’t you allow for the fact that there are two men with the same fingerprints?”

  “Why?! Because in a hundred years of using this method in criminology, such a thing has never happened once.”

  “Lots of things have never happened before, like Sputnik, hydrogen bombs, and computers, but they exist now.”

  “What do sputniks have to do with this?” Matvei Apollonovich shrugged. “Sputniks are sputniks, and fingerprints are fingerprints, incontestable evidence. So are you going to talk?”

  Krivoshein gazed deeply and thoughtfully at the detective and smiled gently.

  “What’s your name, comrade investigator?”

  “Matvei Apollonovich Onisimov, why?”


  “You know what, Matvei Apollonovich? Drop this case.”

  “What do you mean, drop it?”

  “Just like that, the usual way, cover it up. How do you phrase it: ‘for insufficient evidence’ or ‘lack of proof of a crime. You know, ‘turned over to the archives on such and such a date…. “

  Matvei Apollonovich was speechless. He had never encountered such brass in all his years on the force.

  “You see, Matvei Apollonovich, you’ll continue with the varied and, in usual cases, certainly useful activity of questioning, detaining, interrogating, comparing fingerprints, bothering busy people with your videophone.” Krivoshein developed his thought gesturing with his right hand. “And all the time you’ll keep thinking that any second now you’ll have the truth by the tail. Contradictions will smooth out into facts, the facts into evidence; good will triumph, and evil will get a sentence plus time for premeditation.” He sighed sympathetically. “The hell these contradictions will smooth out! Not in this case. And you will never hit on the truth for the simple reason that you are not ready to accept it at your level of reasoning.”

  Onisimov frowned and his lips compressed into a huffy pout.

  “No, no!” Krivoshein waved his hands. “Please don’t think that I’m trying to put you down, that I want to demean you, or cast aspersions on your qualities as a detective. I can see that you are a tenacious and hard — working man. But — how can I explain this to you?” He squinted at the sunny yellow window. “Oh, here’s a good example. About sixty years ago, as you undoubtedly know, the machinery in factories and plants was powered by steam or diesels. A transmission shaft went through the workshops with driving belts running from it to the machine pulleys. All this spun, buzzed, and hummed, its wild noise bringing joy to the director or owner. Then electricity came on the scene — and now all that has been replaced by electric motors, built into the machines.”

  Once again, like last night, when he had interrogated the lab assistant, Matvei Apollonovich was seized by doubts: something was wrong here! Quite a few people had been in his office, polishing the chair with their squirming: taciturn teenagers who had gotten into trouble through stupidity; weepy speculators; overly — casual accountants caught through a routine check of the books; and repeat offenders who knew all the laws. But all of them realized sooner or later that the game was over, that the moment had come for them to confess and hope that the record reflected their clean — breasted repentance. But this one. just sat there as though nothing had happened, waving his arms and explaining at a simple level why the case should be closed. “This lack of game playing is throwing me off again! But no, I’m not going to slip twice in the same place!” he thought.