Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

Emil Karpo was still a Communist, not a member of the party any longer. Those who said they were Communists now were opportunists preying on the memories of the poor who had forgotten the corruption and remembered only safe streets and having just enough to eat without worrying about making a living. Perhaps there was only one true Communist and his name was Emil Karpo.

He moved the cursor and found the file he sought on the computer screen.

Outside of the table, bookshelves, and chair, Emil Karpo’s room was, intentionally, as bare as a prison cell or a monk’s chamber. The wooden floor was dark and uncovered. There was a cot in the corner near the single window covered by a shade. Next to the cot was a small square table with a telephone, a clock, and a lamp on it. Under the single drawer of the table was space for about a dozen books. The space was filled. There was a wardrobe, a tall rectangle in a corner that could have been a large standing coffin. Next to the wardrobe was a modest, dark chest of drawers upon which stood nothing. Above the chest of drawers was a painting, a painting of a smiling red-haired woman in a field with a barn in the distance behind her. The painting was of the dead Mathilde Verson. It was the only sign of life in the room.

Emil Karpo kept his room scrubbed and clean. Each morning, before dawn, he awoke without needing to check the small electric clock. It took him exactly twenty-eight minutes to exercise by the light of his lamp. His motions were without sound and without the accompaniment of music or the news. He owned no television set.

After he exercised, Karpo would don a robe, a blue one Mathilde had given him for a birthday, and he would go down the hall with a towel to take a shower in the bathroom he shared with the other tenants on the floor. Everyone knew when the ghost got up to take a shower. No one left his apartment till he had finished.

Karpo could have afforded much better. He spent almost no money and ate little. He cut his own thin hair the infrequent times that it was necessary, and he did not use a bank. His room was a vault, rigged to shock an intruder and detect any attempt to enter without the specially machined two keys of which only he and Porfiry Petrovich had a set.

Now Emil Karpo worked not for a cause but to punish. The law was under siege, had always been. The law was ridiculous, but it was law. Those who challenged it had to be stopped if even the semblance of sanity was to be maintained.

Karpo was relentless. To be otherwise was to invite madness. Karpo, who had decades earlier accepted that he was devoid of emotion, had discovered when he was past the age of forty-with the help of Mathilde-that he did have emotions, had covered and protected them. When she had gotten him to let some of those emotions out, she had left a hole big enough for madness to slink in.

Mathilde had given him a gift and a curse.

Very early that evening, Karpo had talked to Porfiry Petrovich by phone. The conversation had been brief.

“Paulinin is examining all of the shoes tonight,” Karpo had said. “He will work through the night if necessary, and he believes it will be necessary.”

“So?” asked Porfiry Petrovich.

“We may know by morning who killed Sergei Bolskanov.”

“And your thoughts about psychic happenings?” asked Rostnikov.

“I have brought some books to my room,” said Karpo. “I will read. However, I believe some psychic phenomena may well exist. They are not mysterious in any way other than that we do not yet understand them scientifically.”

“Then,” Porfiry Petrovich had said, “they do not lead us to gods, demons, or ghosts?”

“No,” said Karpo.

“But perhaps people can move objects with their thoughts, and dreams can tell us of the past and the future, and unidentified flying objects may exist?”

“You are being provocative, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov.”

“Yes.”

“It is likely at some point in the future there will be only identified flying objects, as there may be dreams which contain the possibility of alternative future events,” said Karpo. “The dreamer remembers only those aspects of the dream which prove to be more-or-less prophetic and forgets those which are not.”

“Emil, it might help if you tried using your imagination.”

“You have suggested this frequently in the past. I have little or no imagination. I do not wish one. I am reading books and examining theories,” said Karpo. “I continue to believe that there is but one life, that magic does not exist, and that which we have called magic is simply phenomena not yet explained by science.”

“I don’t believe you are as dispassionate as you claim,” said Rostnikov. “I have seen you when … but that is yours to do with as you will. Iosef and I will be gone a day or two or three, no more than that. Pankov will know how to reach me.”

“Very good,” said Karpo.

“And, Emil, I think that if you could allow yourself to do so, you should find someone you could trust with your secrets.”

“I have no secrets.”

“You have secrets, Emil Karpo. I have known no one without secrets. Even apes, even dogs and crows have secrets, places where they have things. We have places like that within ourselves.”

“And the person I could trust is you?”

“No, Emil, the person you can trust is you.”

“You are feeling very philosophical tonight.”

“Yes, I think it is storms that make buses and benches fly and the vastness of the universe in which tiny machines carry men beyond our sight that has put me in this mood. When we come back, you will come to dinner. I will be less pensive. The girls miss you. Laura thinks you are cute.”

“I am not cute,” said Karpo.

“You can explain that to Laura. She doesn’t believe me. Be good to yourself, Emil Karpo.”

And then the conversation had ended.

Emil Karpo had gone to see Mathilde regularly once a week for years. He had paid her the price she asked till the last year or so when she had refused to take his money. He had told himself that going to a prostitute was essential, that he was a man, that man was an animal. He was satisfying a need. But his relationship had changed and he had been about to give that change a name when Mathilde had been murdered in the crossfire of a Mafia war. Her death had given him a determination, a new meaning, to destroy the gangs, the gangs that slaughtered the innocent and destroyed hope. He had made clear to Rostnikov that he wished to be assigned to Mafia-related crimes that came to the Office of Special Investigation. Sometimes Rostnikov listened to his wishes. Sometimes he did not.

Karpo had not wished to go to a prostitute since Mathilde had died. He had briefly thought that Mathilde’s sister, who had come to Moscow from Odessa for the funeral, might … but she had left. It was better to be alone. Feeling was less likely to enter the portal Mathilde had created in him if he was alone.

Enough. He knew it was two in the morning. He required a full four hours’ sleep. He turned off the computer, rose, moved to the cot, turned off the light, and was asleep in less than thirty seconds.

A sleepy dawn of dark clouds was just coming when the phone in Yuri Kriskov’s living room rattled. It was sitting on a table before the three of them-Kriskov, his wife, Vera, and Elena Timofeyeva-who had been drinking coffee and waiting with little to say.

The house was large, not a mansion but complete with large living room, three bedrooms, two baths, full kitchen, separate dining room, and a garage. The view from the front windows was of other recently built houses that looked much the same.

“Wait,” said Elena, touching Yuri’s hand as he reached for it.