Death Of A Russian Priest

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Leonid had considered stepping across the floor and smashing the big man, who took a limping step toward him. There was no fear in the man’s eyes, nor was there any eagerness for battle. If anything, there was a look of curiosity, and Leonid had the sense that this man might well be capable of prying secrets from him.

  So Leonid had turned and left, certain that Tatyana could take care of herself, as she always had. Even if she could not, he was confident that he could survive without her, especially if he could find the Arab girl.

  He found the apartment and knocked at the door. No answer. He knocked again and then stood listening. He listened patiently for a long time, five or six minutes. A woman wearing a thin coat and carrying an empty shopping bag walked past. She kept her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her except to steal a glimpse of Leonid. Then she hurried away.

  He was certain now that no one was hiding inside the apartment. He would have heard some sound. Leonid tried the door. He knew there were several locks; he could feel their resistance.

  To keep any listening neighbors at bay, he did what he had done many times in the past. He shouted, “Police, open the door.”

  He paused for a second, then kicked the door. It flew open and came off at the top right hinge. He stepped into the apartment, propped the door back in the doorway, and looked around.

  The place was large and messy, which displeased Leonid Dovnik, who was a neat man. “If one is forced to live in a pigsty, one must keep his own corner of it clean or he is no better than the pig and deserves to be eaten”; that is what Leonid Dovnik’s mother had taught him. It was the way she had kept her home while Leonid’s father tried to turn it into filthy hell. Leonid’s own room was almost as clean as a surgery, a surgery where he sometimes imagined carving his father’s carcass and showing it to his approving mother.

  Now, this sty. Leonid despised whoever lived here. The name in the notebook for this address was Chesney. That sounded American or English to Leonid. Americans and English could be filthy pigs, but so could Russians. Besides, there were many Russians with odd names.

  He thrashed through the rooms, not worrying about making noise. The living room was overcrowded with soft furniture covered with a pink-and-yellow-flowered fabric. The dark drapes that covered the windows kept out the morning light, and the smell of something sweet reminded him of burning sugar. His tooth ached at the smell.

  He searched and quickly found what he had hoped to find. In the single bedroom was a bed, whose twisted sheets smelled of sex and sweat. Leonid found the odor slightly repulsive. In the closet were the clothes of a man and a woman. He thought he recognized a dress as the one the Arab girl had been wearing the one time Tatyana had introduced him to her. This memory was confirmed by the photograph he found on the dresser. He had to move a pair of stained male undershorts to find the photograph, but there it was, and in it was the girl. The photo had been taken along the Moscow River. Leonid knew the place, right across from the old monastery.

  The girl in the picture stood next to a man much taller and much older than she. He had his arm around her possessively, and there was a smile of triumph on his thin lips. The girl was smiling, too, but there was a faint hint of fear in that smile. The man was tall, with lots of white hair and a smile of white teeth. He wore a white shirt and white trousers. Leonid Dovnik did not like this man.

  He tore the photograph from the frame, folded it, and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he began to search the apartment for a clue as to where they might have gone. He could simply have sat down and waited till they returned, but it might be hours, all day, late into the night. That did not bother him, but he knew that others were looking and that he had only the advantage of Grisha Zalinsky’s address book.

  He found nothing that could help him, so he left the apartment and replaced the door in its frame. He listened for a moment and then moved to the door across the hall. Someone was inside. He could hear a radio or television and voices. He knocked.

  “Who is it?” came a woman’s voice.

  “Police,” he shouted. “Open.”

  The door opened.

  A young woman peered up at him in fear. She wore a purple robe and her hair was wild from washing.

  “The man across the way, Chesney,” he said. “Where does he work?”

  “I don’t know,” said the woman.

  “What’s wrong?” came a voice behind her, and a young man appeared.

  Leonid didn’t bother to look at him. “I want to know where the man works who lives in that apartment,” he said.

  “Chesney?” asked the man.

  Now Leonid looked up. The man looked even younger than the girl and was dressed in an identical purple robe.

  “Chesney, yes.”

  “He’s English,” said the young man. “He’s with a trade delegation from some heavy-machine company. He told me once.”

  “The name of this machine company,” asked Leonid flatly.

  The young woman’s robe flapped open and she hurried to cover her breasts. Leonid was not interested.

  “I don’t remember,” the young man said. “I think it was Robinson or Robertson, something like that.”

  “The girl?” Leonid asked.

  “Girl?” asked the young woman. “He has—”

  “The Arab girl,” said the man.

  “The Arab girl,” agreed Leonid. “How long has she been here?”

  “Two nights, maybe three,” said the man. “But she has been here before.”

  “If they return,” said Leonid, “you are not to tell him that the police were here. Tell them that you heard noises, if you must tell them anything. Let them think they have been robbed. Go steal something in there if you wish. You understand?”

  “We don’t have to—” the young woman began, but the young man interrupted her.

  “We understand.”

  Leonid turned away and walked down the hall. Behind him the door closed and the lock turned.

  A man named Chesney who works for an English heavy-machinery company called Robinson or Robertson. It would be difficult, but not impossible. There were directories, government agencies anxious to guide a Soviet businessman to a foreign investor. It might take a few hours, but it was possible, and Leonid Dovnik fully intended to do it.

  At seven in the morning on that day, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov looked out the window of his apartment at the black Zil parked across the street. He considered going down and inviting the men in the car up for some hot buckwheat porridge with butter, but it was not a serious consideration even for a second. The men would not come in and the situation would be very awkward. Rostnikov did not want to make their lives more difficult than they already were.

  “They are there?” asked Sarah, moving to his side and putting her arm around his waist.

  Rostnikov nodded in the direction of the Zil.

  “It looks like a cold morning and their engine isn’t on,” Sarah said.

  “Fuel is expensive,” Rostnikov said.

  “Then why drive a great fat Zil?”

  “Because that is the legacy of the KGB,” he explained, moving from the window and adjusting his tie. Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich had made love this morning, just before dawn, for the first time in many months, since before Sarah’s operation. Tentatively they had clung together and she had put his rough head against her breasts and then she had said, “Would you like to try?”

  And he had answered, “I believe we can do more than try.”

  It had not been perfect, but it had not been bad either.

  “I’m going to look for work,” she said afterward. “The hospital says I am well enough. I am going to try a music store on Kalinin. I have experience. What do you think?”

  “If you are well enough and wish to,” he said.

  “Iosef will meet me for lunch. We will spend the afternoon trying to find enough food for Sasha Tkach’s birthday party. Will you be back tonight, do you think?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “B
ut I may have to stay in Arkush.”

  He stood silently as she searched for her good shoes in the freestanding wooden closet in the corner. She found them and turned to him.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I may have to stay in Arkush tonight,” he said again.

  She sat down to put on her shoes.

  “You feel … ?” he asked.

  “Wash your bowl and then let’s go out together,” she said, standing and taking his hand, “My intuition tells me that this will be a good day.”

  At seven in the morning, after spending the night trying to straighten up the Nikolai so she might open that night, Tatyana gave up. She looked in what was left of the mirror over the bar and saw the face of a tired woman with puffy eyes and wild yellow hair.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she whispered. “Forget it.” She got her coat from the back room, turned off the lights, and moved toward the door.

  Two foreign-looking men stood before her, blocking the door. She had not heard them enter.

  “Closed,” she said. “Come back tonight.”

  The men said nothing.

  “Closed,” she said. “Can’t you understand Russian?”

  The men did not move.

  It was at this point that Tatyana felt fear. “You are the police,” she said, hoping that they were but knowing that they were not. These men were too well dressed, too foreign. “What do you want?”

  Again they said nothing.

  She considered turning and running, but the backdoor was too far away and the pathway to it strewn with bits of broken bottles, shattered mirror, and lost dreams. “It isn’t fair,” she said, brushing back her hair as the two men moved toward her. “It isn’t fair.”

  At seven in the morning of that day the man who had murdered a priest and a nun stood in the center of Klochkov Street in the town of Arkush. The street was named in honor of Vasili Klochkov, who, bleeding profusely, had hurled himself with a grenade beneath a Nazi tank, after shouting “Russia is vast, but there’s nowhere to retreat. Moscow is behind us.” That act of heroism supposedly inspired the nearly defeated Russian army to hold their positions and, soon after, turn the tide of the war. But few people in town called the street Klochkov. Most called it Venyaminov, the name it had sixty years ago. Innokenty Venyaminov was a nineteenth-century missionary who carried the gospel of the Orthodox Church to the Aleutian Islands and Russian Alaska.

  The man standing in the street knew a great deal of the history of Arkush. Within the past three days he had been responsible for what would certainly be a most important part of that history.

  The scrawny rooster belonging to Old Loski cackled beyond the houses. The assassin turned his head, unsure of what to do. He could not go home, could not face the bed he had left, the dreams that were bad, and the thoughts that came in the wakeful darkness, thoughts that were even worse than dreams.

  And so, body weary, he had dressed and wandered with the first light of dawn. He had smelled the morning bread of Tkonin the baker and heard the birds in the woods beyond the town where ghosts now walked.

  He had done what he had to do, he told himself. He had done what must be done. To do otherwise would have been to betray his family, his name.

  Someone called that name from a nearby second-story window. He waved without looking up and moved down the street, hands in his pockets, as if he had somewhere to go.

  He would have to go to work soon, though he could not imagine going through the motions of his work. That which had given him respite, even pleasure, before now seemed a horrible, endless burden.

  A thought. It had come to him last night when he went home, afraid he would lose his breath and not be able to catch it, afraid that his wife would sense his terror. He walked more quickly to make the thought go away.

  The thought would not be stopped. He squeezed his nails into the palms of his hands.

  He would probably have to kill again. If he did not, Sister Nina would have died for nothing, and he could not live with that. No, better to kill anyone who might bring shame to his family, make each victim a martyr to his secret. He did not know if anyone else in Arkush knew the shame of his mother and brother.

  He knew he should eat, but he had no taste for food.

  As he walked he remembered the first Easter service he had attended. Father Merhum had stood in front of the congregation and sung out, “Chri’stos Voskresye.”

  And the congregation had answered, “Veyeastino Voskresye. “

  The sound of voices chanting in the dead of night, the heat of the church, a hundred candles. And then the bells had rung and he had shuddered. The bells rang out the triumph of life over death while he thought of murder.

  He had joined the congregation as they sang an Easter hymn; then he went outside and circled the church. He heard the chanting and the bells echoing into the woods, and then he went back into the church. It was even more crowded now, for some of those who had stood outside to wait for the procession had now entered with it. Icons of the saints looked down at him, and he looked away, not because he feared their eyes, but because he feared others seeing the defiance he might show.

  And then the priest stood in front of the iconostasis and sang from the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

  The words were chanted in church Slavonic and in Russian, and he had been moved by the words, had looked them up, had committed them to memory, and recited them to himself to calm him in moments of rage.

  “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it,” he said softly to himself. “The question I must ask myself is: Am I the light that shines or the darkness that cannot be overcome?”

  Shortly after seven in the morning Emil Karpo heard the door of the meeting hall open and footsteps move quickly across the floor in his direction.

  He had been awake for two hours. His bed was made and in the small kitchen he had found a pot of cold tea and some bread, which he had eaten slowly while he finished his report.

  He was reading a book on the Russian Orthodox Church when the door opened. Karpo put the book aside and stood.

  “Are you awake, comrade? Tovarish Karpo, are you up?”

  Karpo opened the door and found himself facing Misha Gonsk, the MVD officer, in need of a shave, uniform partly buttoned, trying to hold himself together.

  “Dead, murder,” said Gonsk, trying to catch his breath.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “The nun,” said Gonsk, pointing toward the next room as if the body were just beyond the door.

  “Sister Nina?” asked Karpo.

  “Sister Nina,” Gonsk confirmed. “She … he … her body is … Come.”

  “Wait for me in the street,” Karpo said. “I will be there in a moment.”

  Gonsk nodded and hurried off. When he was through the outer door and into the street, Emil Karpo stepped to the hook next to the door and reached for his dark coat. He put the coat on and moved across the small room into the cold outer room and crossed to the door to the street. It was only when his hand went out to turn the doorknob that he became aware that he was shaking.

  A little past seven that same morning Peotor Merhum, son of Father Vasili Merhum, father of Aleksandr Merhum, husband of Sonia Merhum, keeper of a farm equipment shop, decided to run away.

  “Decide” is, perhaps, too strong a word. He fled in mindless panic, fled without packing, fled without eating, fled without leaving a note.

  The hardest part about flight was remaining calm as he ventured out into the street. Pulling his coat around his chest and covering his ears with his cap, he stepped into the morning and turned to his right. He encountered no one as he forced himself to walk north from Arkush in the general
direction of nowhere in particular. After almost an hour of walking he stopped abruptly, looked up, and realized that this would never do. He would be found walking this road or hiding in an icy barn. Night would come and he would be lost in the woods and never found. Or worse, he would be found frozen, his body nibbled by mice, gnawed by rats, his …

  Peotor turned and headed back toward Arkush, moving faster, ordering his mind to come up with a plan. But he could think of sanctuary or survival for only a few seconds. A snatch of a children’s rhyme came to him:

  Thousands of animals on Noah’s boat, Two of all, even two goat, Wandering decks, watching the rain, Nowhere to go, just staying afloat.

  He repeated the rhyme, ordered it to go away, but it would not. It simply returned like a prayer, “Nowhere to go, just staying afloat.”

  At the same moment on that day a very large and ugly crow, with black wings and head and a gray body, perched on the window of the house of Father Vasili Merhum. He cawed four times and pecked at something that might have been a seed but turned out to be a small, bright stone. He dropped the stone, cawed again, and looked through the window at the bloody room and the mutilated body of the nun. Just inside the window a small bright object that resembled a human eye shone on top of a torn icon of St. Sebastian.

  The bird contemplated the object, tapped the window with his beak, and cocked his head at an angle to get a better look at the ax embedded in the wall.

  Once again he cawed four times and was about to caw again when he heard the sound of humans coming through the woods.

  The bird turned on the window ledge, flapped its black wings, and rose slowly toward the trees. He caught the wind and soared upward. Before he had cleared the first row of birches, he had forgotten the house and was thinking only of finding something to eat.