Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

“Shh,” she said. “It will work out.”

Yuri simply shook his head.

He had to die. She could not live with this lying, worthless thing next to her for another week. Valery would have to kill him and kill him soon. She would have to find a way to get in touch with him, to urge him to move quickly. Maybe she would threaten him, tell him that he would lose her if he didn’t act, tell him that his mad phone call was giving her second thoughts about him and the whole plan.

“Can I get you anything?” the young policeman asked.

“No, thank you,” said Vera with a sad smile.

“A drink,” said Yuri. “I’ll die if I don’t have a drink.”

You will die with or without a drink if Valery Grachev keeps from going completely insane, Vera thought. “Brandy, in the cabinet over there,” she told the policeman, nodding toward the large wooden antique in the corner.

“They’ve traced the second call and a car was there in less than two minutes,” said the older policeman from the phone. “A public phone just outside a metro station.”

“And?” asked Yuri hopefully.

“Nothing,” said the older policeman. “They’re asking questions. Trying to find if someone saw …”

The front door opened. Sasha and Elena came in.

“Doesn’t anyone knock?” Yuri shouted, accepting an overly large and welcome brandy snifter from the young policeman. “Knock. Knock. Knock. That lunatic could walk right in here with a … an automatic weapon and kill me. You failed.”

“Not completely,” said Elena, looking at him and then at Vera.

“Not? …” Yuri said, looking up from the drink he held in two hands.

“The second call,” said Sasha. “The chess allusion.”

“He sent us to a chess table in the park,” Elena went on. “It is possible he has played at that table.”

“Thousands of people must have played at that table,” groaned Yuri.

“We have officers talking to people at the metro stop and near the telephone,” said Elena. “Perhaps we can get a description of whoever used the phone.”

“But people just rush by,” said Vera. “Anyone who might have seen him has long gone.”

“No, perhaps,” said Sasha. “Someone running a kiosk or some pensioner who might have been strolling by with nothing to do or walking his dog, or … maybe someone will be able to come up with a description we can take to the regular chess players in the park.”

“No,” said Yuri. “He will kill me. That is that.”

“He won’t kill you, Yuri,” Vera said soothingly, beginning to worry now that Valery might, in fact, fail, and deciding that she would have to find a way to get rid of Valery when Yuri was gone.

Elena watched the beautiful woman soothe her frantic husband. She watched and she felt that it was not love she was seeing. But what of it? Many women did not love the men to whom they had found themselves married. And, besides, perhaps it was the woman’s beauty to which Elena was reacting. It made no difference. What was important was the tugging feeling that the man with the negatives somehow knew that the money would not be delivered.

Elena was more and more certain that the real goal in this was not ransom but an excuse to kill Yuri Kriskov. But who would want Kriskov dead? She had no intention of sharing this intuition with Sasha Tkach, who would, in his present state, humor her. Had he been as he had before this inexplicable euphoria, he would have ridiculed her feelings and they would have fought. Elena would have to talk to Porfiry Petrovich.

At the same moment Elena was deciding that she had to talk to Rostnikov, a twenty-four-year-old uniformed policeman named Yakov Pierta, his second week on the force, was talking to a beggar woman just inside the entrance of the Novoslobodskaya metro station, within sight of the phone from which Valery had made his call to Yuri Kriskov. He leaned in front of her, gave her some coins, and asked her if she had seen anyone making a call on the phone to which he now pointed. She looked at the coins and then at the phone. Then she looked at the policeman and said, “Ten rubles.”

Emil Karpo patiently questioned Boris Adamovskovich in a small, white-walled, windowless room on the fourth floor of Petrovka. There was a table in the room with four chairs. Adamovskovich had been directed to sit in one of the chairs. Zelach had taken a position behind the scientist. Karpo stood across the table before the man they were questioning. It was routine procedure. Zelach did his best to pay attention, but it was still early and much had already happened.

Less than an hour earlier he had walked behind Nadia Spectorski down the hall of the psychic research center and into the same room where she had tortured him with playing cards. He had little hope of outwitting the scientist, so he had a battle plan to name the cards based on a simple pattern he had worked out the night before with his mother.

Eagerly, Nadia Spectorski had sat him at the table and said, “We are going to do something different today, Inspector Zelach. Here is a pad of paper and a pencil.”

He adjusted his glasses and looked at the pad and pencil.

“I am going to draw six things on the pad before me,” she said. “This screen will prevent you from seeing what I am drawing.”

The screen was simple, a tall brown piece of plastic with two hinged sides.

“I will draw first, nod to you, and you will draw,” she said.

“What will I draw?” he asked.

“Whatever you wish to draw,” she answered. “Simple drawings.”

“I can’t draw,” he said.

“Keep it very simple,” she said. “This isn’t an art class. It won’t take long. Trust me. There are no grades. Just draw.”

Ten minutes later Zelach was breathing hard. The experiment was over. He put down his pencil. Nadia Spectorski reached for his pad and took it behind her screen.

Zelach watched her eyes compare what she had done with what he had drawn. She made a sound, made some notes on a separate pad, and looked up at him.

“Would you like to see?” she said.

“See?”

“What you did.”

“No,” he said. “I would like to go now.”

“Look,” she said, folding the screen and turning the pads toward him. “This is my first drawing and this is yours.”

Nadia Spectorski’s drawing was a circle with a small square inside it. Zelach’s drawing was a circle with a squiggle inside it. She went through the six drawings. Her number-two drawing was a crude man. His was a stick figure of a man. Her third drawing was an automobile. His third drawing was a cart with wheels. Her fourth drawing was the letter L. His fourth drawing was a right angle with both sides equal. Her fifth drawing was a vertical pencil. His fifth drawing was a simple vertical straight line. Her sixth drawing was a five-sided star. His sixth drawing looked like an asterisk.

“Nothing alike,” he said, peering at the pads through his glasses.

“On the contrary,” she said. “The match is remarkable. Another test.”

“No,” he said, rising.

“I understood that you were asked to cooperate, Akardy Zelach.”

“Another time,” he said. “I cannot …”

“Yes, I understand,” she said. “Talk to your mother.”

“My mother?”

“The woman at the table last night. That is your mother?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Don’t worry. Tell her not to worry. I won’t make trouble for you. I’ll keep it to myself.”

That was no more than an hour ago. Now he stood behind the big scientist named Boris, who was being questioned by Emil Karpo.

“… the blood of Sergei Bolskanov,” Karpo said.

“I don’t know,” said Adamovskovich, shaking his head.

“You were there,” said Karpo.