Fall of a Cosmonaut ir-13

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “The man,” Elena said. “What did he look like?”

  “Not big. Wide like …” The boy opened his arms to indicate the width of the man’s body. “His face … he wore a cap pulled down to his ears. A cap like the men on the riverboats wear. And he had a short beard, black. And a Band-Aid on his nose.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “Wearing? I don’t remember. Pants. A shirt. I think they were dark or something.”

  Elena knew the beard, the Band-Aid, and hat were probably gone by now. Even if he had the description from the boy, Sasha could walk right past the man.

  “And he told you to do what?” Elena said.

  The boy pursed his lips and paused. “Will you give me thirty rubles if I tell you?”

  “If you don’t tell me, and quickly, I will give you the day to think about the consequences of not telling a police officer what you know. The day will be spent in a cell. If you are lucky, you will be alone.”

  “He told me to come here, to the lady with the blue bag. That I should open the bag, and if there was anything but money in it I was to make that signal with my hands and shake my head.”

  “Be quiet,” grumbled one of the two big men playing chess behind them.

  “Did he tell you what this was supposed to be about?” Elena asked, ignoring the men.

  “He said you and he were playing a game.”

  “You believed him?”

  The boy turned away. “He gave me one hundred rubles.”

  “Would you recognize him again if you saw him without the cap, without the Band-Aid, without the beard?”

  The boy shrugged and said, “Maybe, no. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Even if I gave you another hundred rubles?”

  “No,” said the boy. “I know what police do. You would have a lineup, and if I identified some policeman as the man, you would put me in children’s detention.”

  “Go to school,” said Elena. “Now, fast.”

  The boy ran, back in the direction from which he had come.

  Elena suddenly felt a presence behind her. A hand touched her shoulder. She drew her pistol from her purse and turned, backing away a step.

  One of the two big men who had been playing chess behind her stood looking at her and the gun. There was a look of surprise on his face, which quickly turned to resignation. He shook his head.

  “Am I to die at the hand of a pretty young lady in the park just because I want to have a quiet chess game?” he said. “Yevgeny Savidov, this was a day to make deliveries, not to die.”

  Elena put the gun away and said, “I’m sorry. Finish your game. I’m going.”

  The man with the tough face nodded and moved back to the table.

  Elena picked up the blue bag and began to walk back to the car. Sasha appeared before her, out of breath.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Elena nodded and kept walking. “Something is wrong,” she said.

  Sasha walked at her side. He had not exercised in weeks and he had a slight pain in his side.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why didn’t he do this at night?” she asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe he works at night or has a wife who knows nothing about his extortion.”

  “Maybe,” said Elena. “But he sent the boy and told him to signal if there was no money in the bag.”

  “So?” asked Sasha.

  “Would it not have made more sense for the boy to nod or bow to indicate if the money was there?”

  They were almost at the street now.

  “It could go either way,” said Sasha.

  The pain in his side was gone and he could breathe normally now. He would have to start exercising again. He was the youngest member of the Office of Special Investigation, and everyone, with the possible exception of Pankov and the Yak, was in better condition than he was.

  “What if he expected the bag would not contain the money?” she asked him. “He gave Kriskov a little over a day to raise two million American dollars in cash. Why didn’t he give him more time? Raising that much would be difficult, if not impossible.”

  “Our man didn’t know that,” said Sasha. “He just thought Kriskov was a millionaire movie producer with big backers. Why would he want Kriskov to fail to raise the money?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, facing Sasha. “Maybe he just wants an excuse for killing our movie producer.”

  “And the negatives?” asked Sasha.

  “I don’t know,” said Elena. “I think we should talk to Porfiry Petrovich.”

  When the boy was waving his arms in Timiryazevsky Park, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was in an aisle seat near the front of the airplane. He was reading a tattered paperback of Ed McBain’s Sadie When She Died. The book was in English.

  Rostnikov was aware of several things on the airplane as they headed for St. Petersburg, but these things did not stop him from enjoying the book, though it was the third time he had read it.

  He was aware of his son, Iosef, seated next to him at the window, looking out at dark clouds below, chin resting on one hand, thinking of something important, something about which he had to make a decision. Porfiry Petrovich was aware of the vibrations of the plane and the hum of the jet engines. He was aware of conversation among the hundred or so other passengers behind them. But foremost in his awareness was the man seated fourteen rows back, on the aisle. It was the same man who had been in the crowd looking at the body of the murdered cosmonaut. The man was even carrying an umbrella, probably the same one he had when he looked up at “window the night before.

  “Iosef,” he said, putting the book in his lap and using his hands to move his leg.

  His son turned to him and pulled slowly out of his musing. “Yes.”

  “I have a game I wish to play with you. A game I played with the same Elena Timofeyeva about whom you were thinking just now. We played it when we were on a plane to Cuba.”

  Iosef nodded and shifted to face his father. The young man’s handsome face, the male version of his mother, was now focused.

  “What is the single most interesting thing about the people on this flight?”

  Iosef smiled. “The lady, the one with the wig, four rows behind us at the window. She keeps looking back through the window, back toward Moscow, as if something or someone is following her. I would guess that she is right. Since she is no beauty, I would guess that it is not a lover. I would guess that she is running away with something of value. It would be interesting to talk to her.”

  “Very interesting to talk to her,” agreed. Porfiry Petrovich. “Anything else?”

  Iosef’s smile broadened. “The man with the umbrella who is following us,” said Iosef. “The one in the crowd at Lermontov’s house. Do I pass the test?”

  “Tell me more about the man.”

  “Well,” said Iosef. “He is almost as tall as I am, not as heavy. His clothes are adequate but not expensive. His face is the face of hundreds we pass in the street every day. He is bland, not the least bit sinister. A quick glance would lead one to the conclusion that he worked in a bank or office, low-level, a dull man.”

  “In short?” asked Porfiry Petrovich.

  “In short,” Iosef continued, “a good appearance for an assassin. A young woman with a baby, a very old man who needed a cane to walk, an overweight babushka with pink cheeks carrying a string shopping bag, they would be even better for the task, but he will do.”

  Rostnikov reached over and patted his son’s cheek. “And what shall we do with him?” he asked.

  “For now? Nothing, but when you do decide to confront him, I would like very much to squeeze fear and a groan of agony from him.”

  “That may be possible, but I don’t think it will be a good idea.”

  “I know,” said Iosef. “It is a fantasy. I am learning to live with my fantasies.”

  “Have you read this book?”

  Iosef looked at the paperback. His English was not as good as his father’
s but it was adequate.

  “No.”

  “Here, try it,” said Rostnikov.

  “You are reading it.”

  “I have read it. Besides, I have work to do.”

  Iosef was not particularly fond of mystery stories, but he had brought nothing with him to read. He accepted the offer, and his father shifted and awkwardly removed his pad of paper from his inner jacket pocket.

  Iosef began to read and Porfiry Petrovich began to draw.

  There was a mischief in Rostnikov. It had come before. On occasion, it had yielded interesting results for him and others. On other occasions, it had gotten him into trouble. But it was an urge he had trouble resisting.

  He got out his mechanical pencil with the eraser, clicked once to make the lead come out just a bit more, and began to draw.

  “Boris Adamovskovich, you are under arrest,” said Emil Karpo.

  “What?” asked the scientist, looking up, mouth open, at the two unsmiling inspectors.

  “On suspicion of murder in the death of Sergei Bolskanov,” Karpo continued.

  The office was not large. Adamovskovich rose from behind his desk, computer screen alive with numbers behind him. He looked from Zelach to Karpo with disbelief.

  “I did not kill him,” Adamovskovich said with his right hand on his heart.

  “There is blood on your shoes, the blood of the victim.”

  “On my shoes? Blood? Sergei Bolskanov’s blood? No. No. That isn’t possible. Someone put it there. People here are jealous of my success.”

  “We have heard that you were jealous of Bolskanov’s success,” said Karpo flatly.

  “No, nonsense … well, maybe a slight bit of envy, but we all … I didn’t kill him. We weren’t even interested in the same research.”

  “We shall see,” said’ Karpo. “Please come with us. If we are in error, you will be given a letter of apology.”

  “I need to finish what … I am in the middle. I’ll save it and turn off my computer.”

  Nothing else was said inside the office. Adamovskovich turned off the computer, looked around, patted his pockets to see if he might be forgetting something, and followed Zelach and Karpo into the bright white corridor.

  Nadia Spectorski was the only one in the hall.

  “I didn’t do this, Nadia,” Adamovskovich said.

  She looked at him and smiled knowingly.

  “Someone is making me take the blame,” he said, following Karpo and Zelach.

  About halfway down the hall, Nadia called, “Wait. Please. Inspector Zelach, can you give me just half an hour?”

  “No,” he said.

  “The director has called your director, Yaklovev,” she said. “Director Yaklovev said that you are to cooperate with us, cooperate fully.”

  Karpo had stopped and so had the bewildered Adamovskovich. Zelach adjusted his glasses and looked to Karpo for help.

  “I have to help take the suspect in,” he said.

  “I expect no trouble,” said Karpo. “Stay, then join me at Petrovka.”

  Karpo led the scientist down the hall, and Zelach stood facing the diminutive Nadia Spectorski. He wondered if he could possibly outwit her. He very much doubted it.

  Kiro-Stovitsk, eighty miles west of St. Petersburg, was little more than a village. It lay in a vast plain of bleak cold winters and summers that were either too dry or too wet. The two hundred and forty people of the town were either potato farmers or made a meager living selling to or working for farmers.

  For more than a thousand years, Kiro-Stovitsk had been relatively undisturbed by the outside world. During World War II, the Germans had not bothered with the town or not known it was there. That did not mean that the people of Kiro-Stovitsk had not fought and died. Half of the men, all between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five, had gone off to fight. All but six of the eighty-seven men had died. There was a cemetery a short walk from the edge of town. It was marked by small headstones. Some of the headstones were for those who died in the war, though their bodies were not here below the ground.

  Food had always been scarce. The people of Kiro-Stovitsk had lived mainly on their own potatoes and what little they could get for trading those potatoes. Cash was almost nonexistent. It had been a barter economy, even with Alexander Podgorny, who ran the store and the tractor-repair shop behind it. Podgorny, his father before him, and generations before that of the family, had owned the store, which stocked meager supplies of clothing, food, tools, a few items of furniture, and Pepsi-Cola in a large blue cooler. The Russian Orthodox church, the tallest building in the town, a solid structure of red stone built by farmers more than a century ago, had served as the town meeting hall in the years of the revolution. Five years ago, a pair of priests with a small group of servants and a single nun had come to the town to reclaim the church, but the people had no heart for the enterprise. The men, women, and children did not wish to give up their town hall, which had become not only the meeting center but the communal gathering place where people came to gossip, drink tea and coffee, play chess, make plans.

  Only a small handful of people had come to the services and none had volunteered to bring the church back to its former state. An attempt was made by the priests and the nun to gather donations to buy icons, but it failed. After almost two years, the priests had declared that the town was not ready for God, and they had left vowing to return when the mother church told them the time was right and God had entered the hearts of the ignorant farmers who had for too long been under the oppressive spell of Communism.

  Boris Vladovka and the people of the town of Kiro-Stovitsk knew the priests were wrong. Whether it was the church or government or a political party, the people of the town wanted no part of it. The church might well return. The government would grow increasingly corrupt and, if they felt it was profitable, appointed officials would set up an office and try to take a piece of the town’s small profits. Something calling itself Communism might even return, but the people were determined to survive. History had long since proved that they could.

  When the commune farms had been disbanded and the land given to the people who had been tenants of nobles, kulaks, small landlords, and corrupt Communist commissars, most of the people had been frightened. They had no experience selling potato crops. They could not afford their own machinery. They prepared themselves for starvation.

  But Boris Vladovka had reluctantly stepped forward. Boris, father of Konstantin the farmer and Tsimion the cosmonaut, had suggested that the farmers of Kiro-Stovitsk enter into a partnership, pool their meager money, buy two ancient trucks, and have Boris and Konstantin drive to the markets of St. Petersburg and sell the crops to one of the new dealers who had stepped in to serve as brokers for restaurants, the new supermarkets, and the growing number of hotels and clubs throughout Russia and beyond its borders.

  Boris did not make the town wealthy, but as long as the weather did not destroy an annual crop, he did bring in enough for the people to live without fear of starvation or even hunger.

  Boris was the unofficial mayor of Kiro-Stovitsk, a sixty-year-old patriarch of the entire grateful town, a town that had little to be proud of outside of Boris’s cosmonaut son.

  In the center of the town’s only street there was a war memorial, a simple, six-foot-high weather-pocked concrete obelisk with the names of the eighty-one who had died fighting the Germans chiseled carefully into its surface. Many of the names on the obelisk were Vladovka, Dersknikov, and Laminski. The town, like hundreds across Russia, had been inbred for as far back as anyone could remember and farther back than that.

  Kiro-Stovitsk was now a town of the very young and the very old. The young left, most of them as soon as they were able. They left with dreams of becoming business successes or cosmonauts like their most famous citizen. A few of them had returned, disillusioned, carrying a wisdom of the outer world that had drained a bit of life from them.

  Most of the people of the town lived in the small farms well beyond the edge
of the wooden buildings on the main street. Over the centuries, the farms and village buildings had been propped up, rebuilt, and reinforced so many times that there was no real sense of what they had been originally.

  The wind blew hard enough in winter to knock a man from a tractor or lift a child into the air. But this was summer. It was hot and humid and the heavy clouds brought rain. It was a good season.

  Into this town drove Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov and Iosef Rostnikov in a ten-year-old tan Ford Mustang provided by the security staff by order of General Snitkonoy, head of Hermitage security and former director of the Office of Special Investigation. The general had not forgotten his debt to Inspector Rostnikov for helping to make his reputation. Not only had he provided a car but a driver too, a driver who had been born in the town to which they were going.

  The driver, a very thin, talkative young man with a red face, named Ivan Laminski, wore a blue summer uniform and cap. The uniform was clean and the buttons polished. Ivan occasionally returned to Kiro-Stovitsk to show off his uniform and talk of his responsibilities in the city. Ivan was close to having saved enough money to buy his own car so he could return more often to his brothers, sisters, father and mother, and friends.

  Ivan told the two detectives from Moscow about the town, its past and present.

  “I don’t think Tsimion Vladovka has come back here more than once or twice,” said Ivan, looking at the two detectives in his rearview mirror. “Once, when his mother was sick with some problem, liver, gallbladder, he took her into town and used his influence to get her an operation. I think he came again but I don’t know if there was a reason. That was a few years back. I doubt if anyone in town knows where he is if he is missing.”

  The road was not paved, but it was not particularly bumpy.

  In his rearview mirror, Ivan watched the older policeman, the one built like a block of stone, listen and look out of the window. There was little to see but open fields of weeds and an occasional farm. The other policeman, the younger one, listened to Ivan, nodded at appropriate times, knowing he could be seen in the mirror, and occasionally asked a question.