Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

Valery walked with his head up this day. He was Kon. He was not afraid of beggars or of the mad woman who spent her mornings and most of the day in front of the Sokol metro station. Her hair was as wild as her words. She wore a series of solid-colored dresses-blue, green, black, but never red-and could have been any age. A fire raged in her eyes. She never seemed to grow tired of berating the passersby, who pretended that she did not exist. On the sidewalk each morning, in white chalk, she wrote a new message. Today’s was “You are destroying the air we breathe.”

For the first time Valery paused in front of the woman, who looked him in the eyes and lowered her voice to say, “You are destroying the air we breathe.” Her face was red from months of shouting and the summer sun.

“You should wear a hat,” he said.

“You are destroying the air we breathe,” she said again, her voice a bit louder.

“We are all destroying the air we breathe. What would you have me do about it?” he asked.

“Stop,” she said.

“Stop what?”

“Creating filth, smoking, driving cars, running factories, making bombs and biological weapons.”

A few passersby glanced at the odd pair, the thin ranting woman and the short block of a hairy young man, standing face to face.

“I do none of those things,” Valery said.

“You allow others to do them.”

“And what am I to do?”

“Stop them,” she said, pointing down the street at some vague them.

“Are you trying to stop them?”

“Yes, by being here each day.”

“You think you are successful?”

“No,” she said. “But that is no reason not to try.”

“People think you are crazy,” Valery said. “They don’t listen to you because you rant and scream your messages.”

“I tried to be more reasonable,” she said, suddenly transformed and calm. “I tried. I dressed well, talked reasonably, went to meetings protesting this, that, everything, was even elected to committees to lead marches. Nothing was accomplished. And so I began to scream. My husband left me. My mother will not let me come to her house. I have nothing left but to try, to scream.”

“And to fail?” Valery asked.

“Possibly, probably, but I cannot live without trying,” she said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said, “but that means little. I am in a fever and I fear that I may be going mad.”

“You too have a mission?”

“I have a mission.”

“Then do it,” she said, touching his shoulder. “Do it and fight the taxes, the people who kill animals and wear them, the Nazis who have infiltrated our economy and our government, the people who make artificial sugar that is killing us. Don’t eat artificial sugars. Don’t let your children eat them.”

“I won’t,” Valery said. “And I will complete my mission.”

He walked on. Behind him the woman resumed her screaming. Valery wiped his damp hands on his trousers.

When he arrived at the bicycle-repair shop on a small street just off Gorky, the owner, a man who resembled a long-necked chicken, was just opening for business. He looked over at Valery, who nodded to him, and Valery followed the man into the shop where the chicken man turned on the lights.

“You do not look well,” the man said.

“I am well,” Valery answered.

The chicken man who sold and repaired bicycles shrugged. It was not his business.

Valery walked past the racks of bicycles and through the smell of oil and grease to the back of the shop where he had rented a closet.

Valery paused to be sure the owner was not watching him. He heard the man in the front of the store. Valery opened the closet door. In the dark closet were the cans containing the negatives, the case containing the rifle, and the small pouch containing the pistol. The cans were in a sealed cardboard box. He knew that they would have to be stored somewhere reasonably cool within the next few days. The rifle was inside a separate long cardboard box, which had once held curtain rods. He took the box with the rifle, locked the closet, and tucked the box under his arm. It was not particularly heavy. Valery thought of it as a black rook. He was going to move this rook into checkmate position within the hour.

In the morning, well before dawn, Igor Yaklovev sat in his living room drinking coffee, being very careful not to drop any of the thick dark liquid on the notes neatly arranged before him on the square work table.

The Yak had few indulgences but he took great pleasure in his coffee, which he prepared each morning by selecting an appropriate bean from the collection of eighteen that sat in glass containers on the counter in his kitchen. The appropriate coffee for each day depended on his mood. Sometimes he wanted a coffee that was thick, dark, and even somewhat bitter, a Sumatra. Other times he went for a lighter Colombian or African blend. He ground his own beans and kept his coffeepot spotless.

The Yak lived alone in an apartment building on Kalinin that had once been reserved for Party officials. It was more space than he really needed, but it was conveniently located. He could and did walk to Petrovka almost every morning for exercise, uninterrupted thought, and scheming. He was a solitary, pensive figure with a determined, marchlike step. He was lean, dark haired, and had only one really distinctive feature, his bushy eyebrows.

Once he had a wife. She had conveniently died. He had not disliked her. On the contrary, she was decent company, but she wanted more of him than he was willing to give. He was willing to give nothing.

Now he was fifty years old, director of the Office of Special Investigation, preparing for his next move upward. To do so required careful planning and all of his time. Idle conversation, music, theater, movies, restaurants, were a distraction. There were risks. A need to be constantly alert, prepared. There were always risks when one chose to make use of the mistakes and secrets of others. The papers before him and the documents and tapes he had safely stored were going to be used with great care, if at all.

Igor Yaklovev was ambitious. He lived for power, intrigue. He did not question his need. He had a few theories about why this was so, but he didn’t waste his time thinking about his father’s fall from grace in the Party and his eventual suicide. His father had been weak. His father had not planned, as his son was doing. His father did not gather evidence and secrets that could have not only kept him in his position but allowed him to move up and keep his family in comfort and prestige. So, perhaps the lesson of his father’s failure had been a factor in the decision of Igor Yaklovev to become what he had become.

Igor had a brother and a sister. The brother was a low-level postal worker who had inherited the low intelligence of their mother. His sister was married to a relatively successful owner of a children’s clothing store near the Kremlin. She had two children. Both were probably grown by now. Igor never saw or talked to his siblings, though his sister lived no more than five miles from the Yak’s apartment. Their mother had died ten years earlier. He had not attended the funeral.

The papers were in five piles laid out neatly before him, three relating to current investigations and two relating to past investigations that had yielded information Yaklovev was deciding how to use.

A small blue stick-em note was pressed onto the document at the top of each pile.

The stick-em on pile one read: “Mikhail Stoltz. What is the secret of Mir ?”

The stick-em on pile two read: “More than gratitude to be gained from duma for saving Tolstoy film?”

The stick-em on pile three read: “Who supports psychic research center? Is there a secret? Why the high priority to solving the murder of the scientist quickly?”