Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

“We will take those also,” said Karpo.

“I’ll have to walk around all day in my stockinged feet.”

“You will not be alone,” said Karpo.

Vladimir Kinotskin had been warned that policemen were coming to talk to him. He had been told that it could not be avoided. He had been informed that it was about Tsimion Vladovka, who was, as he well knew, missing.

Vladimir had changed greatly since he had returned to earth. He had lost weight and his once-blond hair was almost completely white. His youthful handsome face had darkened too and taken on several rigid lines. He did not smile. His ambition had, for good reason, deserted him. He had no goal beyond continuing his routine work and keeping to himself. He had given up all hope of marriage and family. He could not imagine subjecting a woman to his moodiness, and he knew he could not pretend to be happy or even content. All he hoped for was an eventual truce with his memories, a fragile peace of mind with which he could live, but he doubted he would achieve it.

Perhaps he should have run like Vladovka, if that is what Vladovka had done. They had seen each other infrequently since the moment the shuttle had landed. They never spoke when they passed.

Vladimir had two hours before the police arrived. He had decided to walk, to walk aimlessly, to think about how he would answer the questions Mikhail Stoltz had posed to him.

“Just tell the truth,” Stoltz had said.

“You want me to tell the truth?”

“Yes.”

“But …”

“The truth,” Stoltz had repeated.

The boyish exuberance that might once have been enough to protect Vladimir was gone. The confrontation would be difficult. Stoltz had put a hand on his shoulder and told him he would be just fine. Then Stoltz had him driven from Star City to the Moscow office of the space program.

Vladimir Kinotskin was not sure he would be fine, but he thought he could be good enough.

It was growing humid and hot after the morning rain, and Vladimir had left his jacket on the back of a chair in the office that had temporarily been assigned to him. He had sweated through the white shirt he was wearing. He had loosened his tie and he had gone out to walk and try not to think.

Now he found himself before the Church of Simeon Stylites. He remembered something, something Vladovka had mentioned during the long flight. Vladovka had read some poems to him, poems by Mikhail Lermontov, who had lived more than a century ago. Lermontov, whom Kinotskin had read but not remembered, was also an artist. Vladovka had read but Vladimir had not really listened. Now he remembered.

He went around the church down to Vorovskogo Street and into the small alley which is Malaya Molchanovka Street. The house was there. Now a museum, the house where Lermontov lived with his grandmother stood, restored, modest. Nine windows downstairs, three up, a small gable. Perhaps Vladimir was paying homage. He wasn’t sure to what he was paying homage, but it felt right, the proper preparation for the interrogation he would soon undergo.

There was no one in front of the wooden house. After all, one had to know it was there and wend one’s way back to it to find the unassuming structure.

As he moved along the white fence toward the entrance, he sensed a movement behind him. He started to turn. He felt no more than the sting of a bee, the prick of a pin. It was in his lower back, somewhere near his liver. An irritation. He finished turning and found himself looking at a bare-headed man with curly black hair. The man was walking away from him. The man was carrying an umbrella.

Vladimir turned back toward the house and wondered why the man had come up behind him and then turned away when Vladimir turned. The sting. No, he told himself. It couldn’t be. But he knew that it could. He felt fine, but that meant nothing. It wouldn’t end like this. They wouldn’t … but he knew they could.

He made it as far as the front door and then he fell to his knees. No one was around. It would, he knew, make no difference. It was too late. The ground was moist from the morning rain. He didn’t want to die here.

The door of the house opened and an old woman stepped out, covered her mouth with her hand, and leaned over to him. She had a look of horror in her eyes. Vladimir did not know that his eyes and mouth were streaming blood. He felt nothing but weakness. He was suddenly very sleepy.

Maybe he should try to say something to the woman, write something in the dirt, but he couldn’t think what he might write or say. He fell forward on his face before the woman, who screamed and ran back into Lermontov’s house.

When an ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later they found the body of the young man, whose head was encircled by a large pool of deep-red blood. The two men who had come out of the ambulance had seen sights like this before. They could take the vision. What they couldn’t grow accustomed to was the stench of the dead man, who had befouled himself in a last spasm of indignity.

Since Elena was to play the niece, she could not return for the tour of Yuri Kriskov’s editing facility. The chances were more than good that the negative-napper worked for Kriskov. The trip from the office to the production center just outside the outer ring on Durova Prospekt, not far from Mira Prospekt, was taken with Yuri Kriskov, who drove, explaining the list he had prepared of employees who had access to the negative.

Though Kriskov maintained an office in the heart of the city, the production facility, including a small studio, was a long, traffic-jammed ride away. On the way Kriskov said, “Normally I go to the production building from home. I live not far away, but sometimes …”

“Stop,” shouted Sasha.

Kriskov hit the brake and Sasha lurched forward, hands against the dashboard. Kriskov had come very close to ramming into the rear of a very large, rusting blue truck.

“I am more than a bit upset,” Kriskov explained.

You are more than a bad driver, Sasha thought.

Traffic was slow. It usually was, but Yuri Kriskov wove his blue Volga with tinted windows through the narrow, momentary spaces between buses, trucks, and cars.

The list Kriskov had prepared was long and, Sasha decided, probably useless at this stage. Besides, he couldn’t concentrate on it with Kriskov, who chain-smoked and challenged sanity as he sped past cars, trucks, buses, and an occasional bicycle. There wasn’t enough time to check out each name. Yuri had done his work. There were forty-two names on the list and it was possible none of them was the right one. If the thief was not trapped tomorrow, Sasha and Elena would go to Porfiry Petrovich and ask for additional help in checking the people on the list.

The car was thick with smoke. Yuri made no effort to apologize or open a window more than a crack. The car was specially equipped with air conditioning, but it did little and was noisy.

Sasha had the list in his lap.

“I trust everyone on that list,” said Kriskov between nervous puffs. “And, at the same time, I don’t trust anyone on the list. This is maddening. How can I look at them. Kolya I have known since we were children in Rostov. And his sons I have known since they were babies. Forfonov, Blesskovich, Valentina Spopchek nursed me through the flu, and … I may reach out and strangle one of them if they show the slightest hint of deception.”

“You won’t,” said Sasha, opening his window as they nearly missed a rickety little yellow Yugo whose driver cursed and managed to get out of the way, almost hitting a pickup truck in the next lane.

Yuri paid no attention. “We are almost there,” he said.

A few minutes later Yuri turned off the highway, sped down Mira Prospekt, made a sharp left onto Durova Prospekt, and drove until they came to a newly paved narrow road. At the end of the road stood a five-story building, white with a dome that looked as if it had been designed for a science-fiction movie. The structure stood alone in an open field of tall weeds. Yuri drove to the building and parked in a space marked by a black-on-white sign nailed to the concrete wall, stating that this was the space, of “Y. Kriskoff.”