Fall of a Cosmonaut

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“Which is one reason you have been assigned this investigation,” Rostnikov said as he nodded and left the cubicle.

  He arrived in the outer office of the director one minute before his scheduled appointment. Pankov stood up and handed him a dark mug of steaming black coffee. Rostnikov took it with thanks. Pankov bit his lower lip, waiting for the chief inspector to taste the brew. Rostnikov did so. It was not foul. It was not good, but it wasn’t foul.

  “Very satisfying,” said Rostnikov.

  Pankov smiled, having lived through another of the thousands of ordeals in his daily life.

  There was no time to sit and, besides, Rostnikov did not want to go through the trouble of sitting for less than a minute. The maneuvering of his leg was more than the moment of repose was worth, especially when he was holding a mug of hot liquid.

  The door to the inner office opened and Pankov rose behind the desk to look at the director, who stood in the doorway.

  “Pankov, sit down. Inspector, come in.”

  Yaklovev left the door open and turned back into his large office. Rostnikov, still carrying his coffee, followed him and closed the door. The Yak sat at the far end of his conference table.

  “Sit,” said the director.

  Rostnikov placed his mug on one of the brown cork circles provided for drinks and eased himself down to one side of the director.

  “Do you know a man, a cosmonaut, named Tsimion Vladovka?” asked the director.

  Sasha Tkach made a sound, perhaps a groan, probably a reaction to the dinner of oversalted barley-and-beef soup his mother had prepared the night before. He rolled out of bed and tried to see the clock on the bed stand. Normally Maya would have awakened him by now. Instead he had been awakened by the electric crackle of nearby lightning and the sound of rain hitting the windows across the room.

  It was late. He would have to hurry, to shave, take a cold shower in the little tile cubbyhole in the bathroom. To accomplish this he would have to get past his mother in the bedroom. Lydia, in spite of her loud snoring, was a light sleeper. He did not want to wake her. He wanted coffee, though he was sure the acid in it had been giving him stomach pain. Perhaps he would switch to Pepsi-Cola. He had appropriated a large supply from a tourist hotel that wanted no trouble with the police. There were six bottles in the refrigerator and a carton of them next to it.

  Tomorrow, he told himself, tomorrow I’ll start drinking Pepsi-Cola. Today I need coffee. Who could deny me coffee in a life like mine?

  Sasha was thirty-four, an inspector in the Office of Special Investigation. When he had begun as an investigator, he had been in the procurator’s office under Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, who reported to Procurator Anna Timofeyeva. Looking a decade younger than his years, lean, handsome, with straight blond hair that often hung over his forehead, he had done undercover work, pretending to be a student, a naive computer salesman, a manager of killer dogs, a black marketeer, an innocent file clerk, and many other things, but now …

  He looked around the living room—dining room—kitchen. It was empty. There was no Maya in the bed. The baby was not in the crib, though the crib was still there, and he knew his four-year-old daughter, Pulcharia, wasn’t in the next room. His wife, Maya, had taken the children and gone back to Kiev to live with her brother and his family, indefinitely.

  Sasha took a deep breath, heard his mother snoring in the bedroom, folded the bedding and pillows, and closed the bed back into the sofa.

  Sometimes, during the past few weeks, he had concluded that it was his own fault. He had staggered, fallen, been with other women, unleashed periods of brooding anger and sullen silence. In short, he had been less than a joy to his family. However, with “help, he had convinced Maya to give him one more chance, twenty-two days. She had reluctantly agreed, partly, he thought, because it had been a strangely specific number to choose.

  She had remained the entire time and he had tried, really tried, to change. But change does not come easily. He had loved his children, held his wife in the darkness of night when he came home, avoided other women, and done his best, though his moods had still come. And at the end he had the feeling that it was she who was becoming sullen, that somehow she had taken on his moods of depression as if they had been a disease transmitted from one person to another.

  He moved to the small sink in the kitchen area near the window and turned the water on, but not full blast. The pipes were noisy and there was a precise point, which he could never quite judge, when they would begin to rattle and shake. Porfiry Petrovich, who for reasons Sasha did not understand had a great interest in plumbing, had during his last visit to the apartment offered to look into the problem. Sasha had said he would let him know. He cupped cold water in his hands and plunged his face into his palms. He let the water drip onto his extra-large gray Nike T-shirt and he rubbed his eyes. He could see somewhat clearly now.

  When Maya had moved out, Lydia, who was retired and supposedly on pension from the Ministry of Information, had insisted on moving in with her only son. At first Sasha had protested, said he would be all right, that he was sure his family would be returning soon. She had insisted and, he admitted, he really did not want to be alone.

  There were times, however, in the last weeks when he was sure he had made a mistake. Lydia could barely hear. She had a hearing aid but she either didn’t use it or turned it off. Lydia issued commands and criticism. Until Maya had left, Lydia’s favorite topic had been Sasha’s dangerous work and her insistence that he seek safer employment. She had not given up on that quest, but she now had a list of her son’s shortcomings that required addressing.

  Lydia had money. She had invested most of her salary for decades in property. It had all been done quietly and with advice from her superiors, who taught her how to make such purchases and protect them even within the Soviet system. Now, having sold much of that property and placed the money in high-yield foreign investments, Lydia was more than comfortable financially. Her prize investment was a bakery and pastry shop on the Arbat. It had been a state-run bakery, with sad loaves and lines of shuffling people. And then the revolution ended: crime, punishment, money flowed next to poverty even worse than that during the Soviet reign. But those with many new rubles, some with hard foreign currency, and even a few with very little flocked to the bakery on the busy Arbat to buy sweet cakes and brown healthy breads.

  When even the new ruble had fallen to near nonexistence, Lydia, whose investments and money were all secure in German banks, had become even richer.

  Maya had more than once suggested that Sasha stop being a policeman, manage the bakery, perhaps open a second one, maybe a chain of bakeries in various Russian cities. He would make money. He would have time to be with his wife, his children, his mother.

  The idea, when presented to Sasha the first time, had made him seriously consider that suicide would be a better alternative to a career in bakery management, a career in which he would work for his mother.

  Sasha liked being a policeman. He liked having new problems almost daily, dealing his way in and out of dangerous situations, meeting challenges, carrying a weapon. Anything else, particularly managing a bakery, would mean a slow death.

  Now, with Maya and the children gone, he needed his work more than ever and, surprisingly, in the few weeks since she had been gone, he was sure that he was becoming a better policeman. He got along better with the partner assigned to him for each case. He wrote his reports without complaint and he did not frown or sulk when given a case he normally would not have liked.

  But at the same time he missed Maya and the children and lived for the day they would return. He would be a better husband and father as he had become a better policeman. At least he thought he would.

  He moved slowly to the bedroom door and opened it, inch by inch, pausing when he heard the slightest creak. When it was open just enough to slide through, he eased in carefully to the snoring of his sleeping mother. By all rights, the nearly deaf woman would not have heard a medium-range mis
sile rip through one wall and out the other. But her son’s slightest move would sometimes bring her upright in bed, squinting toward the hint of a sound.

  This time he was lucky. He moved with the trumpet of her noise to the tiny bathroom and closed the door before turning on the light. There was just enough room to stand and carefully take off his T-shirt and boxer shorts. And then he turned on the water. With luck, he could shower, shave, shampoo, dress, and be gone before Lydia woke up.

  As he shaved in the cool water Sasha became angry, angry with Maya. What had he done? She had given him a deadline. He had done his best. She knew what he was, how he was. He had done much to change, but one doesn’t change in days. It takes weeks, months, if it can be done at all.

  She has another man, he thought, and not for the first time. This is all a sham, a trick to make me look responsible, guilty while she is with him, probably someone she met at the Council for International Business Advancement, where she had worked. Why had it been so easy for her to be reassigned to Kiev? Was the man someone higher up in the trade center?

  Maya was beautiful. Perhaps she had become vulnerable.

  Yes, it was her fault. He had done his best. He turned off the water in the shower and, as he dried himself with Maya’s favorite towel, changed his mind again and was sure that he was to blame. Fully, certainly. There was no other man. There was no other reason. The fault was his. She had simply endured as much as she could. He longed for Maya, for his children—for Pulcharia to run into his arms and announce that she had a story to read to him.

  Sasha wiped the steamy mirror and looked at his face, toothbrush in hand. The face looked tired, the eyes heavy, the hair not as lively as it should be in spite of just having been shampooed. The body looked pale. He could no longer pass for a student. He looked thirty or more. It was not a bad-looking face and body, but it was not the face and body that could convince anyone he was a naive twenty year old. He had been through too much, had seen too much.

  He dressed, compensating for his feeling of self-pity by putting on his best suit, the one he had hung on the bathroom door the night before. A reasonably eager smile and good grooming might compensate for the fact that he was going to be late. Sasha and the rest of the inspectors had no given hours unless Rostnikov or the Yak himself told them to be in at a specific time. But Sasha had arranged to meet Elena Timofeyeva at Petrovka at eight o’clock. Elena was always on time. Elena, the only woman in the office, made it her business to be on time and do her job with as much energy or more than any of the men.

  Elena was plump, pretty, serious, and smart; smarter, Sasha thought, than Sasha Tkach. He had seniority, but she was two years older than he and more likely to get ahead somewhere in the Ministry of Interior, which oversaw all criminal investigation. At first, when he came to this realization about Elena, he had been sullen and felt sorry for himself. That was no longer the case. He belonged exactly where he was. Promotion meant responsibility and greater vulnerability. He had no passion for power, and the greater salary was not sufficient incentive.

  Sasha was dressed, ready. With the money from Maya’s salary, which was larger than Sasha’s, not coming in, Lydia had found ways to try to buy her son’s happiness. She had urged money on him, far too much, to pick up a few things on the way home if he ran into them. She would not ask for the change. She found other ways. At first he had been reluctant to take the money, but he had soon found himself accepting, wondering if he was being lured into an emotional debt to his mother, a debt that he would be unable to escape. However, that easy money did provide compensations.

  He would take two sweets from his mother’s bakery out of the refrigerator and buy a large coffee from the nearest kiosk today. She was snoring still as he eased out of the bedroom door, deciding not to close it.

  Luck was with him as he opened the refrigerator, selected something small and cakelike, covered with chocolate, and a French croissant, dropped them in a brown paper bag, and headed across the room to the front door.

  Suddenly the snoring stopped. Sasha could either break for the door and hope she would not hear him leave or move slowly while she got up, hoping to make it out of the room before his mother came through the partially open door.

  Neither turned out to be possible.

  “Sasha? I hear you. I have to talk to you.”

  He was doomed.

  She sat in her small office, looking at her cooling cup of tea. It was a bleak, white-walled office. That was the way it was supposed to be. It had no windows. That was the way it was supposed to be. The door was closed. That was the way it had to be.

  The woman’s desk was almost completely clear and the dark wood shone with neatly applied polish and without a bump, mark, or scratch. The only object on the desk was her cup of tea in a simple white porcelain cup. The tea strainer had been removed, the grounds dumped into the wastebasket.

  The only outside distraction this early in the morning had been a rattle of windows down the hallway outside of her office. She thought she heard the sound of rain on glass and was sure that there had been lightning and thunder. The weather had never intruded this deeply into the Center for the Study of Technical Parapsychology. She had waited till it passed.

  Now she tried to clear her mind as she sat, tried to relax, used her techniques for concentrating on nothing. She hummed the single note she had chosen and paid attention only to it. After seconds or minutes, she didn’t know which, she let her eyes fall slowly to the cup. It was nothing. Some object. She continued the hum. A circle of nothingness surrounded her hum, and deep within she let the power unto itself reach out to the cup. Something was happening. She tried not to let thought enter her being. The cup. She gently allowed the power to engulf the cup almost lovingly. She waited, distanced, for the power to move the cup. It would not take much of a move, just a distinct small motion, an indisputable motion.

  And then her meditation broke, as she knew it would. Thoughts, fears, reality crept in, and the murder of the day before danced before her. Sergei Bolskanov at the table in his laboratory in his white laboratory coat. He had been listening to a CD, Mozart perhaps? He had turned. There was no look of horror or surprise on his face. There was a look, perhaps, of pleasant surprise. And then the hammer came out and fell hard upon Bolskanov, the claw side digging into his beard just below his lips. Bolskanov tried to rise, ward off the attack, but he was bewildered, dazed. The second blow dug deeply into his forehead. He yelped like a dog and tumbled back. No longer able to protect himself, blood spurting, he ripped off his glasses and flung them into the corner of the room.

  The blows continued. Four, five, six, until there was no doubt that the heap of blood and flesh on the floor was no longer alive. The hammer was wiped on the bottom of the dead man’s blood-spattered white smock, dropped on the floor, and kicked across the room to rest next to the pair of glasses.

  And so, she asked herself, reaching out for the cup of tea, how can one perform an experiment with such thoughts, such memories, such images?

  Her hands trembled but only slightly as she lifted the cup and took a sip. Tepid but with its flavor still intact.

  The police were coming back. It would be a long day.

  Chapter Two

  “TSIMION VLADOVKA.”

  “pad was open before him. His pencil was in his right hand, his alien leg stretched out under the table at a slight angle so it would not touch Yaklovev’s foot.

  “Tsimion Vladovka,” the Yak repeated, leaning over, head cocked at a slight angle, hands folded on the table as he looked at Porfiry Petrovich for a reaction. “Do you know him? Does the name mean anything to you?”

  “It is vaguely familiar.”

  “He was a cosmonaut,” said the Yak evenly.

  Rostnikov nodded, his eyes on the director, waiting for the point to come as it inevitably must. “There have been many cosmonauts,” he said.

  “Many,” agreed the Yak.

  Rostnikov reached for the mug of coffee before him and
drank slowly, waiting.

  “You remember the Mir flight of perhaps a year ago, the one in which the three cosmonauts came down prematurely?”

  Rostnikov did not particularly remember.

  “There was a problem during that particular flight.”

  Rostnikov said nothing.

  “Yes,” the Yak went on. “There were always problems. But this one prompted an early change of crews and the rather unceremonious return to earth of the three cosmonauts on board. Vladovka was one of the cosmonauts. He is missing. National Security has been unable to find him. The Space security force has been unable to find him. Military Intelligence has been unable to find him. We have been given the task of finding him.”

  Rostnikov nodded, let his eyes take in the thick file that lay behind the protective wall of the director’s arms, and then began to draw without thinking of what he might be drawing.

  “And? …”

  “You personally are to find him,” said the Yak.

  “Question. Why does he have to be found?”

  “He has information about our space program which might embarrass us, which should not be allowed to fall into the hands of other nations. He may have been kidnapped. He may have defected. He may have committed suicide somewhere, or he may simply have gone mad and run away.”

  “And when I find him?”

  “If he is alive, you are to inform me of where he is, be sure he remains there, and leave the rest to me, but if you believe he is trying to leave the country, take him into custody and bring him to me. It is better for you, better for me, if you do not ask him about the information he has. And it is essential that if he tries to tell you, you do not allow him to do so. There are secrets it is not safe to keep.”

  The Yak unclenched his fingers, opened his arms, and slid the folder over to Rostnikov. Rostnikov drew it in past his coffee cup, opened it, and found the photograph of a very serious dark man with the face of a peasant, a face not unlike his own.

  “I would like to work with Iosef on this,” Rostnikov said, putting down his pencil.