The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “She won’t speak,” Sasha said with a sigh without looking at his pale companion.

  Karpo nodded, his eyes fixed on the face of the woman who was doing her best not to be afraid of this new presence. But her best was far from good enough. Karpo picked up the information sheet from the table, read it quickly, and shifted his eyes to the face of the woman in the chair, who failed to avert her eyes in time and found them locked on those of the Vampire.

  “Why are you here, Elena Vostoyavek?” he said.

  “My-my-my son,” she answered dryly.

  Sasha put his hand to his forehead and shook his head.

  “What about your son?” Karpo went on insistently.

  “I think,” she said, pulling her coat more tightly around her in spite of the heat of the room, “I think he is planning to do something very bad. I heard him talking to someone—a girl, I think—on the phone.”

  “Something bad?” Karpo prompted.

  “Something bad,” she repeated.

  “And what is this bad thing?” asked Karpo patiently.

  The woman looked at the two policemen and then at the wall.

  “What is this thing?” Karpo repeated with less patience.

  “Kidnapping,” she said softly. “I think he is planning to kidnap Andrei Morchov or worse. He mentioned Comrade Morchov several times.”

  “The Politburo member?” asked Sasha.

  The woman nodded her head and looked down at the floor.

  “Why are you telling us?” asked Sasha, certain now that he would not be getting to his paperwork and thoughts this day.

  “To stop him,” she said. “If you tell him you know what he is planning, thinking, he won’t be able to do it, don’t you see? No crime will have been committed. It’s just a crazy … Yuri is not a bad boy. He just gets … well, he’s not really a boy anymore, not really. But a mother—you understand? You have children?”

  “No,” said Karpo.

  The word conspiracy came into Sasha’s thoughts. If her son were guilty of planning a kidnapping, especially the kidnapping of an important member of the Politburo, that was a crime whether he succeeded or not, even if the plan were only something he mentioned once and never planned to carry out.

  “You’ll talk to him, stop him, frighten him,” she said, looking directly at Karpo and reaching out to touch his hand. Karpo withdrew his hand before the contact was made and stood erect. “I’m sure you could frighten him.”

  “We will stop him,” said Karpo.

  Bus number 43, driven by Boris Trush on the 75 route, pulled over in front of Sokolniki Recreation Park at eleven-twelve in the morning. Boris announced the stop and opened the doors. Four of his passengers got off, leaving only a half-asleep man with a cap pulled over his eyes and an old couple arguing in the rear.

  Boris had a hangover. He wanted to be home in the dark or immersed in warm water. Before all this reform, this perestroika, economic restructuring, and glasnost, openness, all this change, a man could have a hangover, a man could get drunk, a man had reason to drink. Now there were signs posted all over the city saying drinking was subversive, that drinking undercut the very fabric of the revolution. First they had raised the drinking age to twenty-one. That had been a good idea. Then Gorbachev had increased the price of vodka from four and a half rubles to ten rubles a liter. That had been a bad idea. And there were more bad ideas. Cutting the hours of State stores that sold alcohol was one.

  Soon, Boris Trush thought, they will be making us embarrassed about smoking the way they are in the United States. What will be left when they take away the minor vices of the overweight and the middle-aged? Boris was, clearly, in a very dark mood when the two men climbed onto the bus, dropped their five kopecks in the box, and tore off their tickets.

  Boris did not look at the faces of the men. He barely noticed that one was wearing jeans and a dark jacket, and the other was older and also wore sunglasses. The young man was like all the other young people, like his own sister’s son, Vladimir. Young people wanted to look like Frenchmen or Americans or even Japanese. Where was their pride? Boris had heard that Soviet watches were in great demand in France. He pulled away from the curb and into the light late-morning traffic.

  “What is your name?” a voice said behind Boris.

  Boris looked up into his mirror into the dark lenses of the glasses of the young man. Beyond the young man who spoke to him Boris could see the second man, an older man in a long coat talking to the old couple in the back.

  “Don’t talk to the driver,” Boris said.

  “Hey, Comrade,” the young man said. “I’m just trying to make things easier.”

  Boris’s head ached. The young man in the mirror talking to him had long blond hair and needed a shave. He looked undernourished and nervous.

  “Sit down,” Boris said.

  The young man sat behind Boris and looked out the window.

  “Stop here,” the young man said.

  “There is no stop here,” said Boris. “No stop. No talking. I’ll announce the stops.”

  A light rain had begun. Boris turned on his windshield wipers.

  “Stop here,” the young man said evenly and reached over to touch something against Boris’s neck. Boris, startled, almost lost control of the bus. He did move slightly into the outer lane, but there was no traffic.

  “You crazy lunatic,” Boris said with a growl, pulling over to the curb. “Get off my—”

  And with that Boris Trush stopped, for at this point he turned his head and saw that the thing that had touched his neck was the barrel of a pistol in the young man’s hand.

  “You know what this is?” the blond young man said.

  “A gun,” Boris said, quietly blaming Gorbachev for this moment. If it weren’t for Gorbachev, Boris could have called in to his supervisor this morning, made the old excuse, which would have been understood, and Boris could have been home in a dark room with his pain. But that was no longer acceptable. Everyone wanted to show sobriety, zeal, support, a new beginning. Not only did it make Boris Trush sick, it now also showed signs of possibly killing him.

  “It’s not just a gun, Comrade,” the young man whispered. “Open the doors.”

  Boris opened the doors and looked up in the mirror to see the old couple being escorted off the bus by the man who had gotten on with the gunman.

  “He told them there’s a problem with the bus,” the young man whispered. “You wanted to know about this?”

  The young man held the gun out so Boris could get a better look at it. Boris did not want to know.

  “This is a Stechkin,” the young man whispered almost lovingly. “The slide-mounted safety catch has three positions: safe, repetition, and automatic. When I move the catch like this and clip this wooden holsterstock to the butt, the Stechkin is no longer a pistol but a submachine gun with a twenty-shot box. Nice, huh?”

  The man in the long coat moved forward with no sense of urgency and shook the shoulder of the dozing man with the cap over his eyes.

  “Hey,” the man in the long coat said. “Last stop.”

  As Boris watched in his mirror, the dozing man roused himself, pushed his cap back with irritation, and looked out the window. He was a burly man, a laborer of some kind, Boris was sure, for the man was a regular on Boris’s route and frequently got on the bus with grimy hands and face.

  “It’s not the last stop,” the laborer grumbled and pulled the cap back over his eyes.

  “Bus is down,” the long-coated man said, jostling the laborer’s shoulder again.

  This time the laborer pulled his hat off and grabbed the neck of the long-coated man standing over him.

  “Who the hell are you?” the laborer growled, looking around the bus for the first time.

  The young blond man standing next to Boris sighed, pushed his dark glasses back on his nose, and turned. Calmly, the young man raised his gun and fired. Boris jumped and yelped like a puppy, as if it were he who had been shot. The tin-can rattle
of the shot echoed through Boris’s aching head as he turned in his seat and saw the long-coated man push away the blood-spattered body of the laborer, who wore a quite surprised look on his face.

  “Close the doors,” the young man said, looking outside to see if anyone had heard or seen what had happened. The old couple who had been evicted from the bus were half a block away. They turned, looked back.

  “Wave at them,” the young man said.

  Boris waved.

  “Now close the doors.”

  And Boris closed the doors.

  “The Stechkin is unreliable,” the young man said conversationally. “Too big as a pistol. Too light as a submachine gun. It makes big holes but … You never told me your name.”

  “Boris, Boris Trush. I have a wife and four children.”

  The man from the rear of the bus had now joined them. The young man adjusted his sunglasses and turned to him.

  “This is Boris Trush. Comrade Trush says he has a wife and four children. I think Boris may be lying just a little bit. I think he may not have four children. He looks like too good a citizen to have so many children. I think Comrade Trush is afraid.”

  “Enough,” said the older man in the long coat.

  Boris wanted to remove his cap. He knew his nearly hairless scalp was drenched with sweat that would soon be burning his eyes. He looked up at his mirror into the shaded eyes of the older man and shuddered. The man looked like an older, more conservative version of the young man with the gun, but the older man held no gun in his hand. He held a very narrow piece of dark metal pipe.

  “You have a picture of your family, Boris?” the young man teased.

  “I … not with me.”

  “Enough,” said the older man.

  “But, Boris—” the young man began but never finished.

  The older man brought the metal pipe down with a ringing clang against the steel change box next to Boris, who pulled in his breath and began panting.

  “We have work,” the older man said. “Get in the back and keep your eyes open.”

  The young man nodded and backed away.

  “You’ll have to forgive him,” said the older man quietly to Boris as he tapped the metal pipe into the palm of his left hand. “He’s young and nervous. He’s never done anything like this.”

  “I forgive him,” said Boris, thinking that yes, oh, he certainly was going to wet his pants. “What are you going to do?”

  “Steal this bus,” said the man. “Now, if you will drive where I tell you, there is a chance—a slight chance, I must admit, but a chance—that you will live long enough to tell this story to the police.”

  THREE

  GENTLEMEN, THERE IS A cancer in our midst.”

  Colonel Snitkonoy, the Gray Wolfhound, made his pronouncement and paused to watch its effect upon his senior staff. The Wolfhound, slender, resplendent in his perfectly pressed brown uniform, medals glittering, had paused, hands behind his back, white mane finely brushed back, head erect.

  The Wolfhound headed the MVD’s Bureau of Special Events. The MVD consisted of the uniformed and non-uniformed police who directed traffic, faced the public, and were the first line of defense against crime. Everyone, with the possible exception of Colonel Snitkonoy, knew that the Gray Wolfhound headed the Special Events Bureau because he looked as if he had been cast for the role. His real job was to appear at public events, present medals, make patriotic speeches at factories, and handle criminal investigations that no other bureau wanted.

  Before his transfer to the Wolfhound’s staff, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had been a senior inspector in the procurator general’s office in Moscow. The procurator general is appointed for a seven-year term, the longest of any Soviet official. The procurator general is responsible for sanctioning arrests, supervising investigations, executing sentences, and supervising trials. Now, following any inquiry, or doznaniye, Rostikov would have to turn over his information to the procurator general’s office if the case were of sufficient importance to go to trial.

  And now Rostnikov, having arrived late at the morning administrative meeting, sat doodling as the Gray Wolfhound stood waiting for the appropriate response from the three men seated around the wooden table in his large office. Rostnikov looked down pensively at the credible drawing of a bear he was working on. On Rostnikov’s right sat Pankov, the ever-frightened Pankov, a near-dwarf of a man with thinning hair who served as the colonel’s assistant and who always appeared in public at the colonel’s side to present a startling contrast and further bring out the impressive figure of the Wolfhound. Pankov, rumpled, unkempt, confused, was treated with great respect by his superior. The third man at the table was Major Grigorovich, who sat three seats down, a solid, uniformed block of a man in his middle forties who was ever alert and ever prepared to support the Wolfhound’s philosophy of life in the clear hope of taking over when the colonel made the inevitable mistake that would bring him down.

  “Pankov,” the Wolfhound said, turning his eyes to the frightened little man.

  “Yes, Colonel, a cancer,” said Pankov.

  “Go on, Pankov,” the Wolfhound said attentively.

  Pankov’s professional life was totally dependent on the continued success of the Wolfhound. And yet Pankov always harbored the hope that he might survive if and when the great man stepped down or was stepped upon. To do that he had to keep from offending Grigorovich, who might find him useful enough to retain, and not annoy Rostnikov, who might turn in a report on his incompetence.

  “Crime,” Pankov began. “The criminals. There is too much, a cancer.”

  “Too much?” said the Wolfhound.

  Pankov’s eyes turned to Rostnikov, who continued to write in his little book, and Grigorovich, whose eyes met Pankov’s with no sign of sympathy.

  “I mean,” said Pankov, “any crime is too much. The figures show that crime is being reduced significantly and—”

  “Crime has increased in the past year,” said Snitkonoy. “Grigorovich, the Interior Ministry report.”

  Grigorovich slowly reached forward and opened the notebook in front of him. He cleared his throat and said in his deepest and most serious voice, “Assaults, robberies, and theft increased by twenty-five to forty-four percent in the past year. Murders were up fourteen percent and rapes five percent throughout the Soviet Union. The overall crime rate increased in the past year by seventeen point eight percent. Violent crimes, street crimes, thefts are up even more.”

  “I did not have access to this information,” Pankov pleaded.

  “It was published in Izvestiya,” said Grigorovich.

  Rostnikov thought of the old joke that there is no pravda (truth) in Izvestiya and no izvestiya (news) in Pravda. That had changed quite a bit in the past four years, but not completely.

  Pankov sat back defeated, wondering if his cousin in Leningrad would let him work in his furniture store.

  “It is better to know the reality of things,” the Wolfhound said, resuming his pacing. “Because then our level of security will be clearer, as well as the tasks and the problems that we face.

  “Criminals are preying on newly formed cooperative businesses. Street fighting among rival gangs of youths has reached murderous levels right in our city. Some people have claimed that General Secretary Gorbachev’s political and social reforms, which have relaxed state controls, are to blame for this grave new crime wave.”

  The Wolfhound turned suddenly on his staff. Pankov looked away, defeated. Grigorovich sat ready to respond, and Rostnikov paused in his drawing to look up. Snitkonoy’s eyes fell on Rostnikov.

  “According to the Ministry report,” said Rostnikov, “there were fifty-seven crimes for every hundred thousand people in the Soviet Union, while the United States in a comparable period had five thousand, five hundred fifty crimes for every hundred thousand people.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” agreed Snitkonoy, “but what difference does it make to us? We know the Americans distort their crime figures. It m
ust be even worse there than they are willing to admit.”

  “Fortunately,” said Rostnikov, “we can place our complete trust in the figures supplied to us by the Interior Ministry.”

  “And we will redouble our efforts,” said Snitkonoy. “We will not rest. What do we have in progress and what is new? Pankov?”

  Pankov pulled himself together and flattened the morning report in front of him.

  “Visit from the trade delegation from the American United State of Illinois,” said Pankov. “The Trade Ministry would like you to join the minister for lunch with the American today. I’ve taken the liberty of scheduling it. Um, traffic accident report is up again. Investigators Karpo and Tkach have a possible crank report of a boy who says he wants to kidnap a Politburo member, but I doubt that it is worth serious consideration. A distraught mother simply overheard a conversation she almost certainly misunderstood. Next, the Central Bus Authority reports a missing vehicle, the assault squad—”

  “Enough,” said Snitkonoy. “Pass it around. Porfiry Petrovich, have your people check on the kidnap report and the missing vehicle. Grigorovich, coordinate the accident investigation report. Any questions?”

  The colonel, all around the table knew, had been aware of the lunch with Americans for months and had been looking forward to it and practicing his English with Rostnikov. The duties the colonel had just assigned were the routine responsibilities of the men to whom they had been assigned. In each case, the investigation or report would be taken over by a higher agency if anything came to the surface to indicate something beyond the routine. Rostnikov knew that if he wanted to complete an investigation he had to move quickly and report slowly or risk losing the assignment.