Death of a Dissident

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Karpo shrugged.

  “The sergeant was shot in the stomach,” he said. “Lost blood, possibly punctured kidney, broken rib, but he should survive.”

  “Tkach?” Rostnikov said with concern, putting his sheet aside.

  “I don’t know. He was a fourteen-year-old boy named Sasha, and I killed him.”

  “He was an enemy of the state,” Karpo said, with just a touch of irritation. “Boys of his age fought and died in the revolution and in the wars against the Japanese and the Germans. The choice was to let him kill us, and that was certainly not reasonable.”

  “True,” said Rostnikov, “but logic, political logic, the logic of the expedient present does not necessarily account for the emotion built into our bodies. We are, as you know, imperfect creatures, Emil Karpo, and some of us will never get used to killing. It is sad, but something we must face.”

  “I am not immune to sarcasm, inspector,” Karpo answered, removing his coat.

  “I would hope not,” said Rostnikov. “I was not engaged in self-indulgence but in irony, which requires our mutual cooperation and understanding.”

  “Your point is taken,” said Karpo.

  “And respected?” said Rostnikov.

  “Yes.”

  “An observation, Karpo. One I have wanted to make for some time. How is it that you never blink? Is it hereditary or something you have cultivated?”

  “Blinking is functionless,” said Karpo. “I have learned to control what appears to be a reflex but what is in fact a weakness.”

  Rostnikov put up his hands and looked again at Tkach. The discussion had been indulged in to give the young officer time to recover. If he did not recover, Rostnikov was prepared to dismiss him and get someone to replace him, which would create problems, both for Tkach and the investigation.

  “Shall we get back to the Granovsky murder, inspector?” Tkach said, looking up.

  Rostnikov was tempted to talk about the men he had killed, from the first when he was a soldier to the most recent, a drunk who had beaten his wife and then turned on Rostnikov with a chair when he was brought in for questioning. The first had happened so fast that it always seemed to Rostnikov as if he had imagined it. He had a captured German rifle and he had walked into a bombed-out building, a farmhouse on the road from Kiev. Other members of his squad had gone past, and he had been told by his sergeant to look inside. No one expected anything to be there, certainly not the German soldier, who had been cut off from his troops, and lunged at Rostnikov with a bayonet in his hand. Rostnikov had turned and fired at the man and plunged his own bayonet forward so quickly that it required no thought. It wasn’t an act of consciousness. But there was no point in telling this to Tkach. One either accepted and learned, or one was a victim.

  “Very well,” said Rostnikov, forcing himself up from the desk. He had sat too long and the leg had, as always, begun to stiffen. There wasn’t really anyplace to pace in the small room, but he could stand and flex his joints. He could also exchange looks with Karpo, who had obviously observed the deep scratch on the desk. “You must get back to the friends or acquaintances of Granovsky, Tkach. Prepare your report on this shooting and then resume your investigation, Emil. Go to Granovsky’s apartment and talk to people in the building. Maybe someone saw or heard something. Maybe someone knows of a local enemy, a nonpolitical enemy. Unlikely, but…who knows. Any other suggestions?”

  The two men had none.

  “I’m going home after I report to Procurator Timofeyeva. Call me if anything happens. Be sure to get something to eat. Now, go.”

  The two men left, and Rostnikov gathered up his single sheet with the doodle, placed it in a file with rough notes on his interview with the K.G.B. officer and reports from Karpo on the sickle and from Tkach on his interviews, and left to report to Comrade Timofeyeva.

  At that moment, the man who had killed twice within a day sat on the floor of a small apartment, shifting a heavy iron-headed hammer from one hand to the other. Early evening darkness had come. He knew that if he moved to the window he could see only the old crumbling one-story wooden house next to his apartment building and another concrete apartment building exactly like his own no more than thirty feet away.

  He had been disturbed only once during the long day. At first he had ignored the knocking at the door, but the knocking had continued with persistence and he had hidden the hammer and opened the door. The caller was a young policeman, who looked not like a policeman but a ballet dancer, asking about the murder of Aleksander Granovsky.

  The game began and the killer felt no fear. He acted. He acted with subtlety, courage, conviction. He nearly wept when told of Granovsky’s death and said he had been at home with his wife at the time of the murder, which was not at all true, but he was prepared to add details, little details so vivid that they would build a picture of truth.

  “Terrible,” he had said. “We had a quiet evening at home. We’re painting the walls, as you can see. We worked. I had some newspaper gathered to back up the paint. She kept saying ‘Ilyusha, we are going to run out of paint and end with three grey walls and one blue.’ I told her that would be a modern look and maybe we should leave it. I’m sorry. I’m forgetting about Aleksander. Maybe I’m just trying not to face it.”

  “I can understand that,” the young policeman had said sympathetically, but then the policeman was acting too. “It’s important to find out if Aleksander Granovsky had any enemies, people who might want to do this, perhaps someone particularly volatile, emotional?”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “Aleksander had many enemies. Some of them were going to put him on trial this day. The enemies of Aleksander Granovsky are in the millions. He has been depicted as an enemy of the state and as you know, many fools believe in such propaganda and get carried away. You are the most likely suspect. Oh, not you personally, but the police, the K.G.B.

  “You’ll probably try to blame it on one of us,” the killer had continued. He was leaning against the table in which he had hidden the hammer. “It will make things easier for you. I’m as good a scapegoat as you can get. Do you want to arrest me?”

  “No,” the young officer had said, looking quite warm and uncomfortable. “I don’t want to arrest you. I simply want to know if he had any enemies. Any who might have some personal reason for wanting to kill him.”

  “None that I know,” said the killer. “Aleksander was a good man, one who we shall miss. Another will have to be found to replace him. His voice is stilled, but there are other voices, will be other voices.”

  “Such as yours?” the policeman had asked, with some irritation finally showing.

  The killer had shrugged. “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I think my destiny lies elsewhere. Now, if you will excuse me, I have some preparation to do before my wife comes home for dinner.”

  “You do not work?” the policeman had asked, with the hint of a barb in his words.

  “I am a student,” the killer had replied, “and as such, I quite possibly put in more hours at work than you do, and the ultimate value of my studies may have far more input to our economic future than does your pursuit of the depraved, deprived, and unfortunate. Now, if you wish to threaten me with loss of the apartment or a trip to Petrovka, please do so and then leave.”

  The policeman had left with a smirk but in confusion and the killer had closed the door, retrieved the hammer and gone back to sitting on the floor.

  And now he heard the footsteps in the hall. And now he heard the knock at the door. He didn’t answer. And now he heard the sound of her key in the lock and the opening of the door. In the bleak light of the hall he could see her outline, the outline of his Vera. In her hand was her shopping bag filled with food she would never eat.

  “Ilyusha?” she said, speaking into the darkened apartment. “Ilyusha, are you home?”

  He rose from the floor as she removed her boots, still standing in the doorway. She heard him move forward and paused with one shoe off.
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  “You startled me,” she said with a nervous smile. “Why are you in the dark?”

  He waited till she took off the other boot and walked in.

  “Ilyusha,” she said, “what is wrong?”

  “Aleksander is dead,” he answered.

  She dropped the shopping bag, and a sound like air escaping from a child’s balloon in Gorky Park came from her dark outline. A bread skittered out, and a can of something rolled.

  “I thought it would disturb you,” he said. “But I have something that will disturb you even more. I killed him.”

  “No,” she cried. “Ilyusha you…”

  “Yes,” he said, knowing that tears were coming to his own eyes, that he would soon be unable to control his own voice. “Yes, I know. I saw the pictures. Ilyusha the-fool-no-more knows. Ilyusha who was used and laughed at.”

  “No,” she said backing away from him. “It wasn’t like that, nothing like that. You must understand.”

  Her coat was still on and he could sense her fear through it.

  “I understand,” he said, unable to hold back the tears. “Now you must understand.” He brought the hammer up over his head. It was heavy up there like a barbell. He knew she could see it, could feel his weakness, and he hated both her and himself as he brought the hammer down as hard as he could as she started to whimper something softly that he never heard.

  The Rostnikov toilet did not work. Well, it did work if you were willing to clean up the floor each time you flushed. So, between complaints to the regional manager who was responsible for the building, the Rostnikovs used the toilet at the end of the hall. Porfiry Rostnikov had done what he could. He had threatened the manager, a thin party member named Samsanov who wanted to talk only about his wife’s illness. Threats did not work. The offer of a small bribe brought only promises and an explanation. The tenants above Rostnikov were a Bulgarian whose family was spending a year in Moscow in a technological exchange program. To fix Rostnikov’s toilet meant disrupting the toilet of the Bulgarian technological expert. The Bulgarian did not know anything was wrong with the toilets. A decision had been made at a political level Rostnikov could not penetrate to keep the Bulgarian visitor from knowing that there was anything wrong with the toilet. The building manager had promised that when the Bulgarian family left in the summer, the toilet would be fixed immediately, providing of course that a higher priority political family did not move into the apartment and that a suitable bribe be involved.

  Rostnikov missed his toilet. He had given up complaining as had his wife. A new idea had begun to form within him. He would go to the library, find a book about plumbing, learn how to fix the toilet and then approach the Bulgarian family directly. He did not even know if they spoke Russian, but he was sure they must in some manner. He was also of the belief that Bulgarians in general were polite people who would find it difficult to refuse his request. So, in his spare moments Porfiry Rostnikov read plumbing books.

  He and his wife had eaten a quiet meal of fish soup, bread and tea with a small glass of after-dinner cognac and talked about the things they usually talked about. Rostnikov said nothing about Iosef or about the fourteen-year-old boy killed by Tkach.

  Sarah was a solidly built woman of forty-five with a surprisingly unlined face considering the wear of her life. She belonged to an official national group in Russia. The Jews had to register just as did the Armenians or any other ethnic segment of the populace. Sarah was so registered. They had married after Porfiry was a policeman. If they had married before, it was almost certain that he would never have been given the job he was so good at. In fact, it was only his reputation that protected him.

  He fingered the plumbing book near his plate and tore off a piece of dark bread.

  “Procurator Timofeyeva does not look well,” he said.

  Sarah wore the familiar round Russian glasses and had a habit of looking over them when she wanted to emphasize her interest. The habit had begun when she went to work as a clerk in the Melodiya record shop on Kalinin Prospect eight years earlier. She would look over her glasses at the top of an album selected by an important customer and nod at the sagacity of the selection.

  “She does too much,” Rostnikov went on. “She works too hard. Loyalty and dedication have reasonable limits.”

  Sarah nodded in agreement.

  “That young man, Tkach, shot a boy today, a robber, killed him,” Rostnikov went on, looking down at his plumbing book. “You’ve never met him. He’s a good man. Reminds me…”

  “Of Iosef?” Sarah supplied.

  Rostnikov shrugged. “In some ways. Others not.”

  “And you want to invite him to come over?” she said.

  “Maybe, with his wife, for a drink of coffee, some time,” Rostnikov went on.

  “Would they accept?”

  Rostnikov knew what she meant, but he felt she was oversensitive to her Jewishness. He knew, if he ever let it happen, she would open up the question of leaving Russia, of going to Israel or England or America. They had skirted the possibility many times. It was an unanswered challenge. He was not even sure what his own status was if it came to such a request. He doubted if a police official, even one as low as he, would be permitted to leave, and even to think about it publicly might end his career. There were many ways to end his career, but that might be the surest of them all. Besides, he was a Russian, a Muscovite. It wasn’t just a matter of love or loyalty. It was part of him. His thoughts, past, future were within a few miles of where he now sat worrying about his son, the plumbing, a murderer, a stubborn procurator with a heart condition, a young officer fighting a sense of guilt, and a murder which made him uneasy in ways he could not quite understand.

  He rose from the table, reached over with the remnants of his bread to soak up the last bit of moisture from the soup in his bowl, popped the bread in his mouth, and moved to the corner of the room.

  “You shouldn’t lift those things after a meal,” Sarah said.

  “Later I’ll be too tired,” he countered. Their dialogue had been almost exactly the same on this point for years, but neither could resist it. “I’m preparing for a competition.”

  Sarah cleared the dishes and said nothing.

  “The weight lifting competition for strong old men,” he said, removing his jacket and shirt and rummaging for the old sweat shirt he wore while lifting.

  “Maybe you can get strong enough to lift Samsonov over your head till he promises to fix the toilet,” she said, turning on the kettle on the single burner to create some hot water to clean the dishes.

  Rostnikov prepared his weights. It was awkward for him to bend with his bad knee and even more awkward to do the actual lifting. He would definitely forego, if possible, the dead lift and the clean and jerk if the competition permitted. After all, he was a war hero. Compensation should be made for that even if it couldn’t get his toilet fixed.

  He was into his fiftieth right arm bend with twenty-five pounds when the phone rang. He kept lifting. Almost all the calls to the apartment were police business, which was why he had the phone. But this time a finger of fear went down his back and made him shiver. It might be about Iosef.

  Sarah answered. “It’s for you. Karpo.”

  Sarah did not like Karpo. She had met him once, and he had made not the slightest attempt at being civil. Rostnikov assured her it had nothing to do with her being Jewish, that Karpo treated everyone exactly the same—badly—but Sarah did not like him.

  “Rostnikov.”

  “Inspector, I’ve taken the liberty of having a car sent for you,” said Karpo. There was something strange about his voice as if he felt the need to say each word precisely. “If you would meet me at the Metro entrance at Komsomol’skaya as soon as possible, I will explain. We may have the Granovsky murderer trapped. All exits are blocked.”

  “I’ll be there quickly. You sound—” Rostnikov began.

  “I have been shot,” said Karpo.

  Rostnikov hung up and moved across
the room quickly to put on his shirt, jacket, and coat.

  “I must go out,” he said. I don’t know when I will be back.”

  “You’re sweating,” Sarah said. “You’ll catch cold.”

  “I’ll be in a warm car.”

  She nodded in resignation.

  “Porfiry,” she began as he opened the door.

  “Yes,” he said, looking back.

  “As always,” she said with a smile.

  He returned her smile.

  “There’s a hockey game on the television. Why don’t you watch it and report to me when I get back,” he said, closing the door.

  He didn’t hear her say to herself, “I hate hockey.”

  The path that had taken Emil Karpo to the Komsomol’skaya station with a bullet in his right shoulder had begun shortly after he had left Rostnikov’s office at Petrovka. He had weighed the possibility of taking a bus to Granovsky’s apartment and decided he could make just as good time or better by walking the several miles. The walk in the falling snow had proved to be the easiest part of his night. When he got to the apartment building, he began systematically to question the tenants.

  The knock and the announcement, “Police,” got the doors open, and one look at this gaunt specter insured cooperation, but there was little to be learned from most of the people in the building. Some denied even knowing that Granovsky had lived in the building, an obvious lie. Others wanted so much to cooperate that they were prepared to describe endless streams of wild-eyed anti-revolutionary visitors. One woman, who worked in a state pharmacy, claimed that she could smell drugs on Granovsky’s visitors when she passed them in the halls. An old couple named Chernov, who lived below the Granovsky apartment, complained about noise from above but could supply no leads. It soon became fairly clear to Karpo that there was little to be learned from the neighbors, but he also knew enough not to stop. Then, on the fifth floor, he had found Molka Ivanova, a woman so small as to be within a fraction of being a dwarf. She was but one of the one hundred thousand Ivanovas in Moscow, for Ivanova is a more common surname in Moscow than Smith or Jones is in New York. But she proved to be a singularly important Ivanova. Molka Ivanova was a bookstore clerk who shared her apartment with her granddaughter’s family. The granddaughter knew nothing, but Molka was clearly frightened. Karpo bullied his way into the apartment. Molka’s fear was not the result of a normal fear of an honest person confronting the police. She had a secret. It might mean nothing. It might mean everything. She might have a black market purchased television set or forbidden book. Karpo had no time to be discreet and no talent for it.