The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  They moved past a living room, also Orientally decorated, where a woman sat in a sweat suit that matched Morchov’s. She was dark-haired, with a drink in one hand, a magazine on her lap. She looked up at Karpo, her face a mask, but Karpo sensed an inadvertent shudder as he passed. This time the wave of nausea was more brief. He controlled it easily.

  The woman returned to her magazine as Morchov ushered Karpo into an office and closed the door. The office was not Oriental. It was stark, windowless, a single desk, a large desk with work neatly stacked upon it in bins. Two simple wooden chairs stood before the desk, and the desk chair itself was solid, wooden, unsingular. There were old file cabinets, and bookcases filled with worn books. The walls were empty except for a large photograph of Lenin looking to his right.

  “You have four minutes,” said Morchov, continuing to dry himself as he sat behind his desk and motioned to Karpo to take a seat across from him. Karpo sat and Morchov reached for a tumbler of slightly pink liquid. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t offer you a drink. I have an engagement and will have to shower and dress for it very soon.”

  “I do not mind,” said Karpo.

  “My secretary said you have some information concerning a possible threat to my life,” Morchov said, looking at the towel and placing it on the corner of his desk. “I find it difficult to imagine why anyone would want to kill me. It is an essential part of my political life that I do not always please those with whom I must deal. But it is equally essential for one in my position not to turn those with whom I disagree into enemies. The price I pay for this is that I have made no friends. I have betrayed no one, and there is no one who would consider me close enough to call my behavior betrayal even if we disagree.”

  “We have reason to believe that if such a threat is serious, it is, in fact, personal and not professional or political,” said Karpo, hands folded on his lap.

  “And,” said Morchov after taking a drink, “do you propose to supply me with information concerning this possible threat?”

  “At this point, we have very little beyond an overheard conversation by a woman named Elena Vostoyavek.”

  Morchov rolled his drink between his palms and continued to look at Karpo, who added, “The name is not familiar to you?”

  “No.”

  “Yuri Vostoyavek: Is that name familiar to you?”

  “No. Is he the one who has supposedly threatened my life?”

  “Yes,” said Karpo as Andrei Morchov finished his drink and placed the glass on the desk after wiping its bottom with the towel.

  “Well, why are you wasting your time here?” Morchov said with a sigh. A knock at the door and Morchov said, “Yes?”

  The beautiful woman with the dark hair opened the door. She now wore a white robe, and her hair was noticeably damp.

  “We will be late,” she said without looking at Karpo.

  Morchov, unsmiling, held up his right hand and nodded. The woman left, closing the door gently.

  “I do not wish to be late, Comrade,” he said.

  “I do not wish to keep you,” replied Karpo.

  “Who is this Yuri whatever?” Morchov said with an impatient sigh. “And why would he wish to harm me?”

  “He is a young man who works as a messenger in the Central Telegraph Office,” said Karpo.

  “How young?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “I will exercise some caution,” Morchov said, standing. “There may be counterrevolutionary ethnic separatist groups that might wish to make a point. Terrorism is, after all, not restricted to the Arabs. I doubt if this threat is serious, but I expect you to handle it quickly. Keep me informed through my assistant. I think there is no reason for us to speak again. You understand?”

  Karpo rose and nodded.

  “You may show yourself to the door,” Morchov said. “Touch nothing on your way out.”

  Karpo left the room. The pain returned with an acrid surge, expanding within the left side of his head, ordering him to seek darkness, the quiet, enclosed tomb of his small room. When he left the apartment, the well-built man in the suit was standing outside the door expectantly, as if he had been called.

  He nodded and Karpo followed him down the hall, wondering why Morchov had been unnecessarily rude.

  When he got back to his small room, Karpo, in spite of the insistent pain that demanded that he capitulate, bow to it, checked the two sets of hair and the piece of dust he had pushed gently against the hinge of his door to be sure no one had entered. Emil Karpo turned on a small light and refused to close his eyes or even blink at the cold needles the light stabbed into his head. He would stay here in darkness for no more than half an hour. He would allow himself no more than that. He would then return to his duty even if he had to suffer through the searing pain, the almost unbearable light. But before he allowed himself the darkness, he picked up his phone, which he used only in pursuit of his duty, and called Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov at Petrovka. The phone rang five times before the junior officer on duty picked it up and informed Karpo that Inspector Rostnikov had left word that he could be found at home going over reports. Karpo hung up and called Rostnikov at his home.

  “I wish to report,” Karpo said.

  “Proceed,” said Rostnikov.

  And Karpo slowly, in detail, omitting only his own pain, related what had transpired in his visit to Andrei Morchov.

  “I will have a full, written report on your desk this afternoon,” Karpo concluded.

  “Comrade Morchov sounds as if he may have some idea of why this young man might want to do him harm,” said Rostnikov. “Or he may simply have a great deal on his mind, or he may simply be an unpleasant person. Who knows?”

  “I was not antagonized by Comrade Morchov’s behavior,” Karpo said. “Though I did find it curious.”

  “Forget the report till tomorrow,” Rostnikov said. “I won’t get in till late in the morning. There are some thefts at the Lentaka Shoe Factory I must look into. I may need your assistance with this. Shall we have someone keep an eye on our young suspect? Yuri …”

  “Vostoyavek,” Karpo supplied.

  “Get some rest, Emil Karpo,” said Rostnikov. “You’ll function better with some rest.”

  Rostnikov hung up, and Karpo did the same. Yes, Karpo knew he would function better with rest, and he would get that revitalizing rest by lying in bed fully clothed, but first he would change those clothes, wash, shave. During the conversation with Rostnikov, Emil Karpo had decided the pain would have to wait. He would not permit it to interfere with the performance of his duties. And, later, when he did lie down, he would leave the light on.

  Emil Karpo looked around his room carefully before moving to the sink in the corner. His desk, shelves full of black notebooks on each and every case he worked on, the bed in the corner, the single wooden chair, and the squat, wooden dresser in the corner were in place, and the photograph of Lenin working at his desk was where it should be, over his bed.

  Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had just finished his right-handed curls with fifty-pound weights when Karpo had called. When he had come home an hour earlier, he had changed into his blue sweat suit, pulled the weights out of the lower cabinet in the corner of the living room, laid out his blanket, and arranged the wooden chair so that he was facing into the room with the music from the record player behind him. Recently, since Sarah’s surgery, Rostnikov had found himself drawn to melancholy French music. He had traded six of his paperback American mysteries—two Lawrence Blocks, three Ed McBains, and a Jonathan Valin—for two very old Edith Piaf albums.

  The weight routine required no thought. In fact, thought was to be avoided if at all possible. The workouts that left Porfiry Petrovich most satisfied, most refreshed, were those that passed without his being aware of time, passed with only a vague, blue-white hum instead of thought. But time had moved too slowly this night. He had sat on the chair, looked down at the neatly arranged weights, and smiled at his newest acquisition, a compact fifty-pou
nd dumbbell from Bulgaria. It rested blue-black in front of him, inviting. He had listened to Edith Piaf sing about a piano and he had let the thoughts come, Sarah, the man who walked like a bear, his son Iosef, the Gray Wolfhound, Sasha Tkach’s distracted look, Karpo’s headache. The thoughts came and began to fade into the blue-white hum of soft music and the flow of energy and effort in his muscles.

  The positions were awkward because of his leg, but Rostnikov had mastered them long ago. His lifts and repetitions were mostly for the upper body, arms, neck, abdomen, back. His good leg received a series of weighted rises near the end of the workout that ended with a painful but necessary manipulation of his left leg. When Sarah was home she usually helped him with the final manipulation. Rostnikov had been bending the leg and coming out of his blue-white peace when Karpo called.

  Now Rostnikov put down the receiver and looked around the room. He would turn off the phonograph, put away the weights and blanket, place the chair back next to the table, and then shower, after which he would change, make the promised visit to his neighbors, the Agarevas, with his tools to fix the leaking pipe, and then return home to finish for the second time his Ed McBain novel as he ate his sandwich of black bread and thick-sliced cheese. He had one cucumber and four potatoes left plus a bottle of mineral water.

  Rostnikov knew he would eat quickly, that the emptiness of the apartment without Sarah would be most evident at the table. He let the thoughts come back now, his wife and son, the people with whom and for whom he worked, but behind them loomed the large and melancholy shadow of Ivan Bulgarin, the man who walked like a bear.

  At the precise moment that Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was turning off his phonograph, Sasha Tkach was telling his wife and mother in great detail about his and Zelach’s efforts to locate a missing bus and its driver.

  “Put it on television,” Lydia said, sipping her glass of tea. Lydia was small, loud, decisive, and inflexible. Unfortunately, she was, as even Maya had to admit, sometimes right. It was simply difficult to acknowledge that someone as maddening as Lydia Tkach could be right about anything. “Go on television and tell everyone to look for the bus.”

  “There are priorities,” Sasha explained. “We would fill the television time with announcements of crimes. There would be nothing but descriptions of criminals, pictures of stolen automobiles, missing children.”

  The baby Pulcharia tugged at her father’s pants and grunted. She was more than ten months old, crawling and good-natured. They were seated around the table finishing their Moscow-style borscht of beet soup, tomatoes, cabbage, and a bit of ham. Sasha reached down to pick the baby up and smiled at his wife. She returned the smile without enthusiasm. Missing buses were not what she wished to be talking about. She wished her husband to address their forthcoming move, to tell his mother that she would not be moving with them. She knew his pain, but it had to be done, and putting it off would not make the task easier.

  “So,” Lydia went on loudly, reaching over to pat her granddaughter’s head, “so the television would be filled with crime. What is so terrible about that? It’s better to see bald men reading the news and old men making speeches?”

  “No one would watch,” said Sasha.

  “Nonsense,” said Lydia. “They do in America. In America that’s all they do now, show pictures of murderers and the people watch and go out and drag the killers in. What are they showing here on television that’s better than murderers and bus thieves?”

  Pulcharia leaned forward against her father and gave his neck a gentle, moist, and toothless bite.

  “In any case,” Sasha went on, “we did find one bus driver who says he saw the missing bus heading away from the city, far off its route, a short time after it was reported missing.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” Maya said softly, too softly for Lydia to hear.

  “And no one else saw this?” Lydia asked, finishing her borscht. “Don’t let the baby chew on you. It will make her sick.”

  Sasha sat the baby on his lap and whispered to her, “Krasee’v/aya doch,” beautiful daughter.

  “A man reported having seen an old couple get off the bus in front of the park,” Sasha went on as the baby rubbed her eyes. “He didn’t exactly report it. We followed the bus route and found him on a bench, an old man himself. He thinks he knows the old couple but we couldn’t find them.”

  “Television,” Lydia said. “You should put the baby to sleep. She’s tired.”

  “Sasha,” Maya said softly, taking the baby from his arms.

  “Not tonight,” he whispered back.

  “‘What?” asked Lydia, reaching over to touch the baby.

  “Sasha, she wants to know,” said Maya.

  “All right,” he said with a deep sigh as Maya moved to the corner of the room to change the baby and get her ready for bed.

  “What?” Lydia repeated.

  “I … we,” Sasha began. What remained of the evening, Sasha was sure, would not be pleasant.

  SIX

  THE UNIFORMED MAN was standing at the window, looking across at a blank wall of stone. The wall, while not fascinating, did appear to hold his attention as the other man in the room gave his report. When the report was completed, the uniformed man spoke.

  “Good. I want no mistakes, Vadim.”

  “No mistakes,” Vadim said.

  “The consequences of a mistake will be—”

  “No mistakes,” Vadim repeated. “We have him. As Lenin said, a single claw ensnared and the bird is lost. We have that claw ensnared.”

  The uniformed man at the window said nothing for perhaps half a minute and then turned and spoke.

  “We have him when it is done. Understand that. And no one will be involved, have any specific knowledge but you, me, and Nikolai.”

  “I understand, Comrade,” Vadim said.

  The uniformed man now faced Vadim and looked into his eyes.

  “The times are perilous,” he said. “The romantics are taking over all across the Soviet Union. Weasels who cheered us yesterday, today call for rebellion, chaos, all in the name of freedom. Religion is no longer the opiate of the people. Glasnost, openness, an invitation to mindless mimicry of a decaying West, is worse than an opiate. Revolutionary goals have been abandoned. Soviet identity is endangered. You go down the street, turn on the radio, read a newspaper, and you’d think you were in New York or Rome. It cannot last. It cannot be allowed to continue. My father and his rather lived, fought, died for the revolution. We cannot let it go to the god of Pepsi-Cola, Big McDonald’s, and Bruce Joels. We cannot have our history, our commitment demeaned by the triumph of materialism.”

  Vadim was attentive. Basically he agreed with his superior, though he thought the game they were playing was less philosophical and more pragmatic than the uniformed man had stated it. He was also uneasy about his superior’s sharing of his thoughts about the project in which they were engaged. It was generally best simply to act and not to carry information that might later be an embarrassment, an embarrassment that his superior might decide to remove.

  “Report again tomorrow,” the uniformed man said abruptly, perhaps sensing that he had said too much. He moved to his desk and Vadim turned smartly and left the room. The corridors of the KGB building echoed with the clap of his shoes. It was late, but he still had work to do, things to check. There could be no mistake. His superior was certainly right. A mistake and they could both be facing something far more fearsome than the presence of the Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company.

  Boris Trush rubbed the top of his head where he had just been hit with a stalk of celery. The stalk had exploded from the unexpected, at least to Boris, collision with his head, and pieces of vegetable had sprayed around the room.

  “The man is dense,” the young man said, looking back at the older man.

  In the past few hours, Boris Trush had discovered the names of his captors. The older man was Peotor Kotsis, the younger his son Vasily. The other four people at the crumbling farmho
use had gone unnamed and, essentially, unseen since Boris had pulled the bus into the barn where he had been directed. Three men had climbed into the bus and had begun to move the body of the laborer as Vasily and Peotor had led Boris to the main house and the small room in which he now found himself nursing the emotional if not physical bruise of having been hit on the head with a stalk of celery.

  “Look what I did,” Vasily said.

  Boris was seated on a bed in the corner.

  “Look what I did,” Vasily repeated, and Boris looked at the various pieces of celery he could see from where he sat. He also looked at the older man, who stood against the wall near the door, arms folded.

  “Look what you made me do,” Vasily amended. “You are stubborn and stupid, Boris. I’m not trying to offend you here. Are you offended?”

  “I’m not offended,” said Boris.

  “Good,” said Vasily on his hands and knees, looking for a missing piece of stalk. “But you are stupid. You understand your situation here. If you weren’t stupid, you’d be agreeing with me.”

  “But—” Boris said.

  “No!” shouted Vasily, getting to his feet and throwing celery pieces on the table. “If you’re not going to make sense, don’t speak!”

  “You wish to live, Boris,” said the older man against the wall.

  “Yes,” said Boris.

  “It wasn’t a question,” said Vasily with a sigh. “He was telling you. My father was telling you, reminding you.”

  “But we will be killed,” Boris said in anguish.

  Vasily removed his gun from his pocket and moved toward Boris on the bed.

  “And what will happen if you don’t?” he asked.

  “This isn’t right,” Boris appealed to the elder Kotsis. “I’m just a bus driver.”