Fall of a Cosmonaut ir-13

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  When he had closed the door of the incinerator, he had a sudden thought. What if Bolskanov had printed more copies? He had been careful, had seen no one else, though he was sure others were in the building. There had been a risk, but it had been slight. He could have run into someone, but what of it? He had taken the bloody lab coat off before leaving the lab. With shaking hands he had folded the thin coat and plunged it under his shirt. It showed only as a bulge. He had put his own shoes on immediately after the murder.

  But now he would have to take the chance. His mind had worked quickly. If he heard someone coming to Bolskanov’s laboratory, he could shout out for help and claim to be discovering the corpse.

  His luck had remained. There was no other copy in the laboratory. He looked carefully, thoroughly. He was certain. He moved downstairs to the dead man’s office. Drawers, files, top of the desk, nothing. He was sure. He even checked to see if there was a second backup disk. This had been the most dangerous part of the evolving plan. If he were found in the dead man’s office he would make an excuse, but his presence would be noted. He would surely be a suspect, a secondary one to be sure, but a suspect. Again he was certain. Nothing there.

  He went back to his office, checked everything, put the report in his briefcase, signed out, and went home.

  That night, at home, in bed, certain that he would sleep well and be ready for the chaos that would come during the night or in the morning when the body was discovered, a new thought came and Vanga suddenly realized that he was a fool.

  He sat up in panic. What if Bolskanov had a copy of the research in his home? On a home computer? A hard copy? Maybe several copies, just lying in the open? Vanga had never been to Bolskanov’s apartment, didn’t know where it was, though he could have found out simply by looking at the … wait, he had a copy of the two-sheet directory in the top drawer of his desk, which stood in a corner of his bedroom. He rose quickly, found the address, and stood thinking.

  He rejected the idea of dressing, going to the man’s apartment, breaking in, searching. Far too dangerous, even more dangerous than going back to the lab, finding the dead man’s keys and attempting to sneak into the apartment, search, and get the keys back before the body was discovered, if it had not already been discovered.

  No, he would not reveal the paper as his own till he was certain. He would suggest that he go with the police to search Bolskanov’s apartment for anything that might shed light on his murder. If they said no, he might suggest that when the investigation was done he would like to look for some notes he and Bolskanov had been working on. He had to remain calm. There would be no reason for the police to bring anyone else to the dead scientist’s apartment, and the police would not understand what the paper meant even if they found a copy. Vanga would work that out.

  The shoes, the shoes. What if they were too stupid to check the shoes? Then, somehow, he would have to suggest it to them, subtly. He hoped that would not be necessary. As it had turned out, it wasn’t.

  But hours after he had committed murder, Andrei Vanga could not sleep. His mind was racing. He had to slow it down.

  He got back in bed and picked up the copy of War and Peace that rested on his night table. Perhaps once every month or so he would read a bit of it. He had never actually finished the book and felt guilty about it. Tonight he would read. He would read till he fell asleep.

  He remembered reading somewhere or hearing on the radio or the television that a movie was being made about the life of Tolstoy. Though he seldom went to the movies, he would make it a point to see this one.

  He read: “The day after his initiation into the lodge Pierre was sitting at home reading a book and trying to fathom the significance of the square …”

  It was after midnight. Lydia was snoring in the bedroom and Sasha sat at the table in the tiny kitchen, cutting slices from the block of yellow cheese his mother had left out for him along with a small loaf of bread. He sat in his shorts, not wanting to get into the bed on the floor. He continued to feel free, able to do anything, full of good will, and, at the same time, wanting desperately for Maya and the children to come back. It was a contradiction Porfiry Petrovich had pointed out and that Sasha could not comprehend and was not certain that he wished to, though he knew the contradiction would haunt him.

  The television, a small black-and-white on the table before him, was tuned to a station showing a documentary about bears in the Ural Mountains. He had the sound turned down very low so that Lydia would not wake up, come in, and complain. She was almost deaf, yet she could hear a television through a door even if the sound was nearly off. It was a gift granted only to mothers who in spite of failed eyesight could see the hint of a frown on a child’s face, or despite deafness hear the whisper of an aside across a room full of people, providing the aside was made by their son or daughter.

  The table was cluttered. Sasha decided that it was time to clean up, which meant putting the bread back in the bag, covering the cheese with plastic wrap, putting them in the refrigerator, and consolidating the papers he had spread out to look at. He would brush his teeth in the small kitchen sink so he wouldn’t have to go past Lydia to the bathroom. That meant he would have to go down the hall to use the community toilet for the three apartments on the floor which had no private toilets. It was worth it.

  A bear was standing tall on its rear legs in front of a woman with a very wide-brimmed hat. She looked skinny, English or American, but she could have been Russian. Russian women with a bit of money had learned how to look like people who spoke English or French. She was very pretty in a healthy kind of way. Sasha paused, cheese in one hand, bread in the other.

  The woman was smiling at the bear. The bear was showing its teeth. The woman reached over and scratched the bear’s chest. Sasha was fascinated. The documentary was on film, so he knew the woman would not be torn apart on television. And yet there was a tension. If he could not have Maya in bed tonight, the woman with the hat … The bear turned its head sideways in ecstasy. It would have been nice to be that bear instead of a tired policeman whose wife had left him, and who stood holding a plate of cheese.

  The scene changed. A sincere, thin man with white hair, wearing a suit, was sitting behind a desk. Behind him was a map of the Ural region. Sasha looked at the pile of papers he had to put away. If he didn’t organize anything, and he didn’t plan to do so, he could simply push it all together, shove it in his briefcase, and worry about it in the morning.

  His eyes fell once again on his copy of the artist’s sketch of the man the beggar had described and the chess players had identified. Kon. It looked like many sketches, but something … the description-stocky, homely-and the drawing. Sasha, for just a moment, felt that he may have seen the man somewhere. He stood dreamily trying to put a living face to the drawing. His memory was normally very good, not as good as Emil Karpo’s but better than Elena’s.

  No, it didn’t come. He turned off the television set, felt the stubble on his chin, put the food away, and gathered the papers into a pile with the sketch on top.

  Then he went to bed.

  In the dark, the baby did not turn restlessly or cry, Pulcharia did not come in and ask for water or to climb into bed with her parents. Maya did not reach over in her sleep to touch his bare bottom.

  As he went to sleep, he felt the inexplicable euphoria of the past days begin to slip away.

  Chapter Ten

  In the morning, Nadia Spectorski awoke to a fresh, vivid, and inexplicable vision that seemed to mean absolutely nothing. It was another overcast day. Somewhere north of the city clouds were rumbling. Her room was small, brightly decorated, small computer desk in the corner with a flowerpot and cactus next to the Compaq Presario 2240. Next to the cactus was a kaleidoscope that she looked through every morning for a few minutes, losing herself in the never-repeating meditation of changing colors.

  The vision was just as vivid as the one in which she had seen the murder of Sergei Bolskanov through the eyes of the killer
. Nadia had feared that she had simply remembered what she herself had done and that she was the killer, but there were too many details, little things that convinced her she had not done this thing.

  This morning she was as sure that she had not done it as she was that Boris Adamovskovich had not committed the murder. She had looked down through the killer’s eyes at the shoes and remembered now that the shoes had not fit, had been too large. Yes, Adamoskovich’s shoes would have been too large for her, but the leg was not that of a woman. Nadia reached for her glasses. She needed them to think.

  The vision had been brief, mundane.

  In the vision a book lay in her lap. The book was thick and open, facedown. It was War and Peace. Had the person in her vision turned the book over, she was certain she would have been able to read the words before her.

  Such things happened to Nadia less frequently than they had when she was younger. When she was a young teen, the visions had come so frequently that they disrupted her life, set her trembling, caused her parents, who were both physicians, to send her for medication and treatment. Almost none of the visions had any meaning. She had seen unfamiliar couples screaming at each other, a cat dying in a doorway, screaming in pain, a boy writing something obscene on the wall of a school or church, a woman with an enormous head smiling at her. Medication and hundreds of hours in therapy, coupled with the passing of time, had kept the visions from lining up and leaping out. Her experiences and her curiosity had led her to her lifetime career and the hope, so far unrealized, that such phenomena could be understood in a scientific context.

  Yes, Jung, Freud, and others had noted that what they called hysteria seemed particularly powerful in young girls reaching puberty. Witches, who were probably hysterical girls, began their calling early. She herself had concentrated much of her research on girls in their teens, many of whom had been considered extreme neurotics and borderline psychotics. She had taken them off of drugs and also taken them seriously. She had been one of them.

  Occasionally, a man would turn up who had some of the psychic characteristics, someone like the not-too-bright, gentle slouching policeman who was afraid of his ability, wanted to deny it.

  Nadia, wearing an extra-large plain-white T-shirt, got out of bed, deciding to get a copy of War and Peace. She had read it only once, when she was a brilliant, nearsighted girl who was being given drugs to help control her supposed deliriums. The book had absorbed her, helped calm her. She had been particularly fascinated by Tolstoy’s Napoleon, a tormented, overly confident creature moved more by chance and the inevitability of history than by his own design. But she had soon moved from fiction and for more than a decade now had read none at all.

  But now … she suddenly felt weak. Her knees threatened to abandon her. A vision. Brief. A computer monitor with a file open on the screen. The file had a name. She could read the name. Sergei Bolskanov. The name was suddenly deleted. The vision was gone.

  Nadia put one hand on the bed, adjusted her glasses with the other, and moved to the window to whisper to her cactus and look through her kaleidoscope.

  In the morning, Iosef awakened and looked at his watch. It was after seven. He had stayed up late, reading. When he had been a soldier, for three years Iosef had gone to bed early and been awakened early. When he had left the army and become a self-employed and not-successful playwright and actor, he had gone to bed late and awakened well after eleven. And now he found himself caught between two routines. He went to bed late and got up early.

  The sun was up. The day was slightly overcast.

  He got out of bed, rubbed his stomach to be sure it hadn’t ballooned to a grotesque size, and walked across the small room in his underpants to put on his trousers. On top of his trousers, someone had placed a towel and a very small bar of soap. He picked them up and went in search of somewhere to shave.

  On the narrow landing he saw that the door to his fathers room and that of the man who called himself Primazon were open. Iosef looked into both rooms. They were empty. A woman was in Porfiry Petrovich’s room making the bed. He had noticed her the day before. With the sun behind her through the window, she reminded Iosef of a painting by Vermeer. The illusion was shattered when she sensed him watching her and turned to face him with a smile. It was a good smile but one in need of serious orthodontia.

  He smiled back as she brushed her hair from her eyes and examined his bare upper body.

  “Gdyeh tooahlyeht? ‘Toilet?’ ‘Wash room?’” he asked.

  “Downstairs,” she said.

  He nodded, took his towel, soap, toothbrush, and razor and walked barefoot down the wooden stairs, following now the sound of voices. The shop was empty. The voices came from behind a curtain. Iosef followed them and found himself in a large room, surrounded by cabinets containing dishes, pots, books, candlesticks, and children’s board games.

  In the center of the room was a round table with six chairs. Only three of the chairs were occupied. Porfiry Petrovich, fully dressed and shaved, sat in one chair, drinking tea. In another chair, also fully dressed, sat Anatoli Primazon, tearing pieces of bread from a loaf in the center of the table and popping them into his mouth. The third person at the table was Boris Vladovka, who looked somber and pale and was neither eating nor drinking.

  “Bathroom?” asked Iosef.

  Primazon pointed deeper into the room to another curtain.

  Whatever they had been talking about, they had stopped when Iosef entered.

  Iosef looked at his father, who turned his head to face his son.

  “There is a pot of tea in the other room,” Rostnikov said. “And a refrigerator. Alexander Podgorny’s wife has been kind enough to also make some noodle soup.”

  “From a can,” the umbrella man, who did not have his umbrella at the moment, said with a smile. “A bit too salty for me. High blood pressure. I take pills. Little round brown pills.”

  Iosef nodded. “Then I better …” he began.

  “Boris Vladovka has just told us something of great importance,” said Porfiry Petrovich.

  Iosef looked at the large man and understood that the expression on his face was not simply somber but one of grief.

  “Something about Tsimion Vladovka,” said Primazon, looking at the somber man.

  “My son,” said Vladovka, holding back tears, “is dead.”

  “Dead?” asked Iosef, glancing at his father and then at Primazon.

  “Natural causes,” said the umbrella man.

  “When?” asked Iosef.

  “A week ago,” said Vladovka. “He had been ill for a long time. Liver disease. He had kept it a secret. He wanted to die at home. We buried him four days ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Iosef, looking to his father for help and receiving none.

  “Before he died, he asked us not to,” said Boris. “He was afraid someone would be coming from Moscow and want to dig him up.”

  Iosef was confused. He felt suddenly naked. He draped the towel over his shoulder.

  “Why would anyone want to dig him up?”

  “Tsimion had been in outer space. He had heard that other cosmonauts had been cut open when they died, cut open to see what, if anything, flying around the earth had done to their bodies.”

  “And so …” Iosef tried.

  “And so,” Boris went on, “here you are, from Moscow.”

  “I am afraid we will have to see the body,” said Primazon, chewing on a piece of bread. “It will take only a few moments. We need identification.”

  “Identification?” asked Boris, looking at the umbrella man.

  “Verification,” Primazon said. “That he is dead.”

  “Doctor Verushkin from Yerkistanitza gave me this,” Boris said, reaching into his pocket. “I’m sure you can talk to him. He is new in the area. We don’t really know him, but the old doctor, Feydov, he died. Feydov delivered both my sons and …”

  Boris Vladovka’s voice trailed off. He started to raise his hands as if in a prelude
to a new thought, but none came.

  Primazon wiped his hands on the napkin in his lap and looked at the death certificate witnessed by a nurse and a deputy mayor.

  “Liver disease,” Primazon confirmed. “Still …”

  “I anticipated someone like you. My remaining son and his friends have dug up the coffin. It is next to the grave. The sky is clear but it has been raining. The clouds rush in from the east and …”

  “We’re coming,” said Primazon. “Inspector Rostnikov?”

  Rostnikov nodded, put down his tea, and got up along with Boris Vladovka.

  “I’ll hurry,” said Iosef. “I can wash and shave later.”

  “You saw the cemetery when you came in?” asked Boris.

  “Yes,” said Iosef.

  “We will be there.”

  Iosef ran up the stairs, listening to the three men below him heading through the shop toward the front door. There was no mistaking his father’s footsteps, the sound of the slight limp.

  The young woman was still in his room, making up his bed. She looked up at him and smiled again as he pulled a fresh shirt from his bag, put it on quickly, slipped on his socks and shoes, and grabbed his blue zipper jacket.

  He found the driver, Ivan Laminski, standing next to the Mustang, reading a St. Petersburg newspaper. Laminski was still wearing his blue uniform, but Iosef noticed that the shirt under his open jacket was definitely wrinkled. Laminski looked up and nodded soberly.

  Iosef trotted toward the cemetery just outside of town. He could see a very small group: his father, Boris, Primazon, Konstantin Vladovka, and another man holding a shovel.

  Iosef slowed down and walked up to the open coffin in time to hear Porfiry Petrovich say, “It is him.”