The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Who died?” Lydia shouted. “Maya? The baby? Uncle Mikhail?”

  “No one died,” Sasha said, looking around as the woman at a nearby desk looked at him. “I was nearby and wanted to bring you this.”

  He reached down with the flowers and her hand came up to take them and then pulled back, as if sensing a trap within the bright petals.

  “What is this?” she demanded.

  “Flowers, Mother,” he said. “Just flowers. I was in—”

  “Bribes,” she said, looking around the room toward her fellow workers, who did their best to ignore her. “My own son is reduced to bribes with wilting flowers. I can’t be bought, Sasha. I cannot be bought. You want to throw me into the street. That you can do, but you cannot salve your conscience with a few flowers.”

  “Mother, this is—”

  “I don’t even like this kind of flower,” she said in exasperation. “You’ve known me thirty years and you don’t know what kind of flowers I like.”

  “I’m only twenty-nine, Mother, and I thought you liked all flowers. You always say you—”

  She reached over, took the flowers from him, and gave him a look of deep contempt.

  “That baby needs me,” she said, fishing into a drawer for a glass, which she popped into the desk and filled with the flowers. “You don’t just take a baby from her grandmother.”

  “No one is taking … Mother, we’ve been through all this.”

  “You’ve been through all this,” she said. “I listened. You talked.”

  It was clear to Sasha that everyone within five or six miles was listening to his mother shout. They had no choice even if they had no interest.

  “I’ve got to get back to work, Mother,” he said.

  His mother glared up at him. Sasha leaned over the desk and kissed her head.

  “The flowers aren’t so bad,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You doing something dangerous today?” she asked, her voice dropping several decibels as she looked up at him.

  “What makes you—?” he began.

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” she said loudly. “Chief Inspector Rostnikov took me to lunch yesterday and told me about you. Are you doing anything dangerous?”

  “No,” he lied. “Inspector Rostnikov … ?”

  “Take care of yourself,” she said, looking down at her work and ending the conversation.

  “You, too,” he said, taking a step back.

  “Of course. Who will if I don’t?”

  With that Sasha made his escape, vowing never again to visit his mother at work.

  He made it back to the square a few minutes before noon and found that Sonia had sold most of her flowers. She smiled up at him. Her teeth, he noticed, were remarkably white and even.

  “You brought your flowers home?” she asked, pushing her cart toward him. “How did your wife like them?”

  “I gave them to my mother,” he said, falling into step beside her.

  “You want another bunch for your wife?” Sonia asked.

  “Perhaps, after I see your father,” he said.

  “Is your wife pretty?” Sonia asked, maneuvering her cart down a curb.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Of course,” Sonia said with a laugh, dodging behind a car, the wheels of the cart clattering. “A pretty policeman would have a pretty wife. Nothing else would make sense.”

  “You’re sure your father will be home?” he asked.

  “He’ll be home,” she said. “But he’ll be leaving for work soon. Maybe you and I can talk a bit then. I can tell you more about Kotsis. And other things. Sasha and Sonia.”

  She moved quickly, and he had to hurry to keep up with her.

  “Is it far?” he asked.

  A barrel of a man stepped back awkwardly to avoid the momentum of the flower cart.

  “Not far,” she said. “Right down this way.”

  “Can we move a bit slower?” Sasha said. “I don’t want to arrest you for dangerous driving.”

  Sonia slowed down.

  “Better?” she asked.

  “Better,” he said.

  She took his arm and pushed the cart expertly with one hand. Sasha did not pull away.

  “Right over there,” she said, pointing to a small, slightly run-down ancient building that had managed to escape the demolition and rebuilding of the 1950s. She opened the door with a key and maneuvered the cart through expertly, though it looked to Sasha as if there was no room to do so. There was almost no light in the alcove in which Sasha found himself. He could barely see the outline of the flower cart as Sonia pushed it into a corner.

  “This way,” she said, taking his hand and pushing open a door.

  Her hand was warm and rough and not at all unpleasant.

  There was a bit more light on the stairway she led him up. A solitary small and dirty window on the landing above them allowed them to see the worn-down wooden stairs. On the second floor, Sonia tugged him to the left.

  “Right here,” she said. She let go of his hand, inserted her key in the lock, and opened the door.

  Sasha stepped into the small room behind her. There were a few pieces of old furniture, a worn sofa, a table with three chairs, a lamp, and a dresser with a radio atop it. A small rug hid few of the stains on the dirty floor. Sonia closed the door and called out, “Father, we’re here!”

  A man came through the door to the right, a somber man in dark pants, a flannel shirt, and a blue jacket. In his right hand he held a pistol, which he aimed directly at Sasha Tkach’s chest.

  “This is my father, Sasha,” Sonia said. “Peotor Kotsis.”

  TWELVE

  EMIL KARPO HAD SIX officially active cases to deal with. He also had 604 officially inactive cases to deal with. The 604 cases on which he kept records in black notebooks on the shelves in his small room were those that had been placed in the inactive files of the Procurator’s Office and the MVD. Only twenty-three of these cases had been assigned originally to Karpo. In the past fourteen years Emil Karpo had brought sixteen of those cases to satisfactory conclusions either by apprehending the lawbreaker or by discovering that those responsible were dead or had left the country.

  Emil Karpo’s evenings were spent updating his records of those cases and conducting his investigations. His holidays were spent following leads, sometimes leads on cases fifteen or twenty years old. The oldest case in Emil Karpo’s file involved the murder of a doctor on the Fili Metro platform twenty-nine years earlier.

  Of the current cases to which he had been assigned, he was most confident that he could and would locate those responsible for kidnapping pets, particularly cats in the housing complexes near the airport. He was making a slow deliberate investigation of both government-authorized and black market sausage and ground-meat distributors. The operation was too big and too much in need of distributors to keep quiet. The crimes that were most difficult to deal with were those that involved apparently random acts of violence by individuals against others they did not know. When the perpetrator simply acted once and receded and no witnesses were present, it was almost impossible to deal with. Like the person who killed the doctor on the Metro platform. Almost impossible.

  What Karpo really wanted to do was deal with Yuri Vostoyavek and Jalna Morchov, and he would have done so if he knew where the boy was. Karpo had waited for Yuri outside the apartment where he lived, but the boy had not come out. His mother had emerged around eight, hurrying to catch a bus, but by nine Yuri was not down. Perhaps he had been too frightened by Karpo to get up and go to work. This Karpo doubted. Karpo had, in fact, admired the boy’s reaction to his intrusion.

  A few minutes after nine, Karpo had climbed the stairs and knocked at the door to the Vostoyavek apartment. There was no answer. He had used his identity card to open the door and found the apartment empty. The conclusion was simple: Expecting to be followed, the boy had gotten out through an alternate exit.

  After concluding that Yuri had not gone to wo
rk, Karpo had gone to his desk at Petrovka and called the dacha of Andrei Morchov. The girl, Jalna, answered the phone. Her “Yes, who is it?” had held a challenge.

  “Comrade Morchov, please,” he said.

  “He just left,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said and hung up.

  The next step was obvious: Karpo rose, signed out on the board near the sixth-floor exit, and went out in search of Andrei Morchov.

  “Policeman,” Peotor Kotsis said, shaking his head, “you are an annoyance”

  Sonia moved behind Sasha and quickly, efficiently searched him, finding his pistol and pulling it out with a satisfied, “Uh.”

  She displayed it to her father, who nodded his approval and pointed to the table. Sonia bounced over and placed the weapon gently next to a steaming cup of liquid.

  “Sit, policeman,” Kotsis said, pointing to the sofa with his gun. Sasha moved to the sofa and sat.

  Sonia sat at the table, put her finger in the barrel of Sasha’s gun, and spun it gently as she sipped the hot liquid.

  “Sonia and Sasha,” she said with a smile, and Sasha concluded that the lovely young woman was more than a bit mad.

  “The old man,” Sasha said.

  “Yes,” agreed Kotsis. “The old man. The woman at the center. You have, as others before you have done for two centuries, underestimated the determination of the Turkistani. You have been, as the Americans used to say and the French continue to say in their pale imitations of old movies, set up.”

  “Why?” asked Sasha.

  “Hostage,” said Sonia.

  “Yes,” agreed Peotor. “We plan to take a series of hostages. We’ve learned much from the mistakes in Lebanon. You are, in fact, the second of our hostages. We have no illusions about your value to the government. Therefore, we will make your kidnapping public knowledge. We will make our reasons quite public. We will make the citizens of Moscow, of the Soviet Union, afraid to walk in the streets. We will make them so afraid that the government will give us independence. Oh, they won’t say that our actions are the reason. They’ll say it is part of the massive reform. They will give it with other concessions in other areas, but it will be because of us. It will take time, but they will be worn down.”

  “You’re not going to kill me?” asked Sasha.

  “No,” said Peotor. “Not yet, not unless we have to. Are you disappointed?”

  “No,” said Sasha.

  “We can be friends,” said Sonia, happily turning the barrel of the pistol in Sasha’s direction.

  “You’re going to keep me here?” Sasha asked.

  “No,” said Kotsis. “You are going to put out your hands in a few minutes so that Sonia can put handcuffs on you. Then we will go to a car and take you someplace out of town.”

  “Where?” asked Sasha.

  “Why is it that you don’t seem particularly surprised by all this?” said Peotor Kotsis, looking a bit puzzled. “A bit frightened, yes. I’ve learned to recognize that, but not surprised.”

  Sasha was about to answer when the door through which he and Sonia had come burst off its hinges and skidded across the floor. Kotsis turned his gun toward the sound, but two quick shots from the doorway tore into his chest. The gun in Kotsis’s hand flew across the room and hit the wall. A spray of bullets spat out, thudding into the wall.

  Sasha was on the floor now, his eyes on Sonia, who watched her father slump to the floor. She turned, her hand still clutching the cup of hot liquid, and faced the figure in the doorway who had shot her father. Her hand reached for Sasha’s gun.

  “No!” Sasha cried.

  Zelach stood in the doorway, his pistol leveled at the girl, but he hesitated. At that instant, Sonia smiled at Sasha, lifted his pistol to her mouth, pulled the trigger, and blew off the top of her head.

  “God!” Sasha screamed.

  Zelach stepped into the room, his pistol leveled at the fallen Peotor Kotsis. “Dead,” he said.

  Porfiry Petrovich stepped through the doorway and looked at Sasha, who sat shaking on the floor. Rostnikov put an arm around the younger man and helped him to his feet.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” Tkach said.

  “I know,” said Rostnikov.

  Tkach’s eyes were wide and focused on the mutilated body of the girl who moments before had been smiling.

  “You were late,” Tkach said, trembling, near breakdown.

  “You moved quickly,” said Rostnikov. “I do not move so quickly.”

  “I mean it, Porfiry Petrovich,” he said as Zelach turned and Rostnikov nodded to him. Zelach left the room in search of a phone.

  “You mean it now,” said Rostnikov. “I have meant it each time. You did very well.”

  “Very well?” said Sasha, looking more than a bit wild, his hair dangling over his eyes. “They’re dead.”

  “And you are alive, Sasha,” said Rostnikov. “We’ll talk more of this later. Now I need your help. There is still a bus and a driver to find, and more people will die if we do not find them. You understand, Sasha, when the others discover what has happened here, they will probably want to do something very violent. We must find them, Sasha. You and I. We must find them.”

  “Yes,” said Sasha, panting. “We must find them.”

  “We must search these rooms quickly, Sasha,” he said. “Zelach is calling this in. The KGB will be involved. We must search these rooms and find something to lead us to the rest of these people.”

  Sasha nodded his head, stood up straight, and brushed back his hair.

  “Then let’s do it,” he said.

  Too many variables. That is what the KGB officer thought as he paced his room. Too many variables. The knock came and he moved to his desk, sat, composed himself, folded his hands, and told the man at the door to enter.

  The man came in, closed the door behind him, and moved in front of the desk.

  “Sit,” said the KGB officer.

  “You know about the call?” Vadim said, sitting. He had never before been invited to sit in this office. He took it as a bad sign.

  “Variables,” said the KGB officer.

  “Variables, yes,” said Vadim. He didn’t like what was going on here, didn’t like it at all. The officer was always composed, superior. There were signs here of concern, and if the officer was concerned, Vadim had reason to be concerned, too.

  “Go on,” said the officer.

  “Both Rostnikov and Tkach are devoting full attention to what now appears to be a terrorist situation,” Vadim said. “I would assume Rostnikov will pull the other one, Karpo, from his case to join them. The investigative bureau has officially been brought in and is taking over the situation. It is now a KGB operation, but …”

  “… but that will not stop Rostnikov,” the officer said.

  Vadim shrugged.

  “It is in our best interest to conclude the situation as soon as possible,” he said.

  “Find the terrorists. Finish them. Our plan requires that this be concluded quickly. Every minute, every hour this goes on we run the risk of being discovered,” the KGB man said.

  Vadim nodded in agreement.

  Emil Karpo concluded before noon that Andrei Morchov was safely inside the walls of the Kremlin and would be there till at least seven that night for meetings. This much he had learned directly from Morchov’s secretary after identifying himself.

  He called in to Petrovka to let the duty officer know he was proceeding to another investigation. Rostnikov, calling Petrovka seconds later, missed him, but left a message.

  Karpo spent most of the afternoon tracking down informants and getting a line on a meat dealer who seemed to be a promising lead, not necessarily because he would be the one dealing in the meat of dead cats and dogs but that he would be likely to know who was doing so. Karpo checked his notebook and at a few minutes after three decided, since he was not far from Dynamo Stadium, to interview a ticket saleswoman who had witnessed an armed robbery two years earlier. He had interviewed her six m
onths ago, but there were a few variations on earlier questions he wished to try.

  By five, Emil Karpo was sitting at his desk in his apartment, carefully copying the notes he had taken into the properly filed black notebooks on the shelves that lined his room.

  The knock on his door was firm and confident. If Karpo were given to or capable of smiling, he would be smiling now as he rose, moved a few feet across the room, and opened the door to Yuri Vostoyavek.

  “Come in,” he said, and the boy entered.

  “I’ve been following you,” Yuri said aggressively.

  “I know,” said Karpo. “There is only one chair. You may sit.”

  “I don’t want to sit,” Yuri said, facing Karpo.

  “You are not tired?”

  “Of course I’m tired,” the boy said. “You’ve been running me all over the city for hours.”

  “You did well,” said Karpo. “I didn’t pick you up till I left my office.”

  They were facing each other as they had the previous night in Yuri’s room.

  “You have something to tell me?” asked Karpo.

  “I’d like to beat the hell out of you,” said the boy.

  “A natural reaction,” said Karpo. “But beyond that?”

  “You are a policeman,” said Yuri.

  “I am aware of that,” said Karpo.

  “I’m not afraid of you,” said Yuri.

  “You’re not?”

  “Well, I am, but it makes no difference. That’s not why I’m going to say this,” Yuri said. “I’ve given up … what I was considering. You understand?”

  “I understand,” said Karpo.

  “But … I can’t stop Jalna. She plans to … I think she might… She has my gun … tonight. When he gets back to the dacha. She said … I can’t get out there. They stop me when I try.”

  “Then,” said Karpo, “I suggest we go together.”

  It was a bit after six. If they hurried, Karpo could get a car on an emergency requisition and they could get to

  Morchov’s dacha by seven-thirty if they rode the center lane all the way.

  By six, when Peotor had not returned, Vasily and the girl Lia went to the nearby village to call Sonia. They left the three others with Boris Trush, who was ordered to ready his bus for action “very soon.”