Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

“Iosef,” he said, putting the book in his lap and using his hands to move his leg.

His son turned to him and pulled slowly out of his musing. “Yes.”

“I have a game I wish to play with you. A game I played with the same Elena Timofeyeva about whom you were thinking just now. We played it when we were on a plane to Cuba.”

Iosef nodded and shifted to face his father. The young man’s handsome face, the male version of his mother, was now focused.

“What is the single most interesting thing about the people on this flight?”

Iosef smiled. “The lady, the one with the wig, four rows behind us at the window. She keeps looking back through the window, back toward Moscow, as if something or someone is following her. I would guess that she is right. Since she is no beauty, I would guess that it is not a lover. I would guess that she is running away with something of value. It would be interesting to talk to her.”

“Very interesting to talk to her,” agreed. Porfiry Petrovich. “Anything else?”

Iosef’s smile broadened. “The man with the umbrella who is following us,” said Iosef. “The one in the crowd at Lermontov’s house. Do I pass the test?”

“Tell me more about the man.”

“Well,” said Iosef. “He is almost as tall as I am, not as heavy. His clothes are adequate but not expensive. His face is the face of hundreds we pass in the street every day. He is bland, not the least bit sinister. A quick glance would lead one to the conclusion that he worked in a bank or office, low-level, a dull man.”

“In short?” asked Porfiry Petrovich.

“In short,” Iosef continued, “a good appearance for an assassin. A young woman with a baby, a very old man who needed a cane to walk, an overweight babushka with pink cheeks carrying a string shopping bag, they would be even better for the task, but he will do.”

Rostnikov reached over and patted his son’s cheek. “And what shall we do with him?” he asked.

“For now? Nothing, but when you do decide to confront him, I would like very much to squeeze fear and a groan of agony from him.”

“That may be possible, but I don’t think it will be a good idea.”

“I know,” said Iosef. “It is a fantasy. I am learning to live with my fantasies.”

“Have you read this book?”

Iosef looked at the paperback. His English was not as good as his father’s but it was adequate.

“No.”

“Here, try it,” said Rostnikov.

“You are reading it.”

“I have read it. Besides, I have work to do.”

Iosef was not particularly fond of mystery stories, but he had brought nothing with him to read. He accepted the offer, and his father shifted and awkwardly removed his pad of paper from his inner jacket pocket.

Iosef began to read and Porfiry Petrovich began to draw.

There was a mischief in Rostnikov. It had come before. On occasion, it had yielded interesting results for him and others. On other occasions, it had gotten him into trouble. But it was an urge he had trouble resisting.

He got out his mechanical pencil with the eraser, clicked once to make the lead come out just a bit more, and began to draw.

“Boris Adamovskovich, you are under arrest,” said Emil Karpo.

“What?” asked the scientist, looking up, mouth open, at the two unsmiling inspectors.

“On suspicion of murder in the death of Sergei Bolskanov,” Karpo continued.

The office was not large. Adamovskovich rose from behind his desk, computer screen alive with numbers behind him. He looked from Zelach to Karpo with disbelief.

“I did not kill him,” Adamovskovich said with his right hand on his heart.

“There is blood on your shoes, the blood of the victim.”

“On my shoes? Blood? Sergei Bolskanov’s blood? No. No. That isn’t possible. Someone put it there. People here are jealous of my success.”

“We have heard that you were jealous of Bolskanov’s success,” said Karpo flatly.

“No, nonsense … well, maybe a slight bit of envy, but we all … I didn’t kill him. We weren’t even interested in the same research.”

“We shall see,” said’ Karpo. “Please come with us. If we are in error, you will be given a letter of apology.”

“I need to finish what … I am in the middle. I’ll save it and turn off my computer.”

Nothing else was said inside the office. Adamovskovich turned off the computer, looked around, patted his pockets to see if he might be forgetting something, and followed Zelach and Karpo into the bright white corridor.

Nadia Spectorski was the only one in the hall.

“I didn’t do this, Nadia,” Adamovskovich said.

She looked at him and smiled knowingly.

“Someone is making me take the blame,” he said, following Karpo and Zelach.

About halfway down the hall, Nadia called, “Wait. Please. Inspector Zelach, can you give me just half an hour?”

“No,” he said.

“The director has called your director, Yaklovev,” she said. “Director Yaklovev said that you are to cooperate with us, cooperate fully.”

Karpo had stopped and so had the bewildered Adamovskovich. Zelach adjusted his glasses and looked to Karpo for help.

“I have to help take the suspect in,” he said.

“I expect no trouble,” said Karpo. “Stay, then join me at Petrovka.”

Karpo led the scientist down the hall, and Zelach stood facing the diminutive Nadia Spectorski. He wondered if he could possibly outwit her. He very much doubted it.

Kiro-Stovitsk, eighty miles west of St. Petersburg, was little more than a village. It lay in a vast plain of bleak cold winters and summers that were either too dry or too wet. The two hundred and forty people of the town were either potato farmers or made a meager living selling to or working for farmers.

For more than a thousand years, Kiro-Stovitsk had been relatively undisturbed by the outside world. During World War II, the Germans had not bothered with the town or not known it was there. That did not mean that the people of Kiro-Stovitsk had not fought and died. Half of the men, all between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five, had gone off to fight. All but six of the eighty-seven men had died. There was a cemetery a short walk from the edge of town. It was marked by small headstones. Some of the headstones were for those who died in the war, though their bodies were not here below the ground.

Food had always been scarce. The people of Kiro-Stovitsk had lived mainly on their own potatoes and what little they could get for trading those potatoes. Cash was almost nonexistent. It had been a barter economy, even with Alexander Podgorny, who ran the store and the tractor-repair shop behind it. Podgorny, his father before him, and generations before that of the family, had owned the store, which stocked meager supplies of clothing, food, tools, a few items of furniture, and Pepsi-Cola in a large blue cooler. The Russian Orthodox church, the tallest building in the town, a solid structure of red stone built by farmers more than a century ago, had served as the town meeting hall in the years of the revolution. Five years ago, a pair of priests with a small group of servants and a single nun had come to the town to reclaim the church, but the people had no heart for the enterprise. The men, women, and children did not wish to give up their town hall, which had become not only the meeting center but the communal gathering place where people came to gossip, drink tea and coffee, play chess, make plans.

Only a small handful of people had come to the services and none had volunteered to bring the church back to its former state. An attempt was made by the priests and the nun to gather donations to buy icons, but it failed. After almost two years, the priests had declared that the town was not ready for God, and they had left vowing to return when the mother church told them the time was right and God had entered the hearts of the ignorant farmers who had for too long been under the oppressive spell of Communism.