Stuart Kaminsky - The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

“Mystical,” said Karpo.

“On the contrary, one of my meditations is plumbing,” Rostnikov said. “Have you ever tried to get your building director to arrange for repairs? It can’t be done. I do it myself. I do it with books and trial and error. I lose myself in leaks, plastic pipes, and wrenches, and when I am finished, in contrast to what happens frequently in an investigation, something that did not work, works. It is a meditation and satisfaction. If you have a leak, Emil Karpo, let me know.”

“I would think your time could be better spent, Inspector.”

“What is your meditation, Emil Karpo?”

“I neither have nor need one. I work.”

“And you like your work,” said Rostnikov.

“I am satisfied that within the parameters of our system and the reality of human fallibility I perform a worthwhile societal function,” Karpo said.

“Do you know the story of the man who lost his ego?” asked Rostnikov, moving past Karpo to open the door. “It’s Dostoyevski.”

“No,” replied Karpo.

“It is of no consequence. Let us go out and save Mother Russia from the criminals,” Rostnikov said after a small smile. “And if possible, take care of ourselves at the same time.”

Emil Karpo was not quite sure of what Rostnikov had just told him. The inspector had grown more and more cryptic and preoccupied in the past months. Karpo was sure it had something to do with Rostnikov’s wife and son, Iosef, who, Karpo knew, was no longer in Afghanistan. Karpo also knew that Iosef was, or so Rostnikov had been told, on a special secret assignment for the army. Iosef was a pawn, a hostage of the state to keep in check the inspector, who had frequently stepped on the very large toes of the KGB. Though he had been much decorated and had nearly lost both his life and leg in the war against the Axis, Rostnikov had never, since Karpo had known him, displayed the slightest revolutionary zeal or interest in politics. And yet Rostnikov was known to be the most effective and relentless criminal investigator in Moscow. It was a constant puzzle for Karpo but one he tried not to address. To even consider it was a distraction from his duty.

As Karpo left the small office, Zelach and Tkach moved down the narrow aisle to the small head-to-head desks from which they worked.

“Where do we start?” he heard Zelach ask, though Zelach, officially, was the senior officer. “Wherever it is, let’s stop for something to eat on the way.”

Rostnikov emerged from the questioning room and moved slowly away toward the small cubicle that served as his office. The cubicle was a combination of plasterboard and plastic waist-high with windows reaching another two feet higher. There was no real door, just a narrow opening. Privacy was reserved for those of higher rank, which, several floors up, Rostnikov had once been. Porfiry Petrovich thought of none of this, nor of his wife or son, the plan he had for repairing the drain in the apartment of the Agarevas on the fourth floor of his building, or his leg.

He stood next to his desk, deciding that it would not be worth the trouble to sit down and then rise again. Rostnikov flipped the page of his notebook with the drawing of the pipe connection and looked down at the notes he had taken about Ivan Bulgarin, the man who walked like a bear. One of the notes was the phone number of the Lentaka Shoe Factory. Porfiry Petrovich picked up the phone on his desk and through the window of his cubicle watched Emil Karpo at his desk reach into his jacket pocket and pull out a plastic container from which he extracted a pill, which he put on his tongue and swallowed dry.

Rostnikov had noticed the signs of Karpo’s headache, the slight rise of the left eyebrow, the dryness of the narrow lips, the almost imperceptible flaring of the gaunt man’s nostrils.

Ten minutes later, after having talked to five people at the factory and taken three pages of additional notes, Porfiry Petrovich hung up the receiver and looked beyond his cubicle window through the windows of Petrovka and into an early-afternoon thundershower. Rostnikov hoped the winter would come early this year. He savored the blanket of white silence, the clean isolation of the cold. He picked up the phone again and dialed the five numbers that would connect him to the office of the Gray Wolfhound.

“It’s raining again,” Jalna Morchov said, looking out the window.

She had arrived home only minutes earlier in the bus provided for the children of people of influence. Their dacha was twenty miles outside of Moscow in one of the small villages unofficially reserved for “special” people, high-ranking party members, artists, generals, and KGB directors and department heads. The Morchovs’ dacha was at the end of a lane protected by trees and a KGB car parked a few yards down the driveway. Jalna knew her father was home by the presence of the KGB car and the two men in it wearing brown suits.

Andrei Morchov, who had been busy preparing a massive report on production drops resulting from ethnic unrest in the Ukraine, had been spending less time at the dacha and more time in his Moscow apartment. Since Jalna’s mother had died three years earlier, when Jalna was fourteen, her father had thrown himself into his work and into his mistress, a translator in the Telecommunications Division of the International Trade Center. Andrei Morchov was under the mistaken impression that his daughter knew nothing of Svetlana Petranskova.

Yuri had told her. Yuri had discovered the relationship in his weeks of following her father. Yuri knew a great deal about Andrei Morchov, who was putting on his coat as Jalna spoke.

“I must go back to the city,” Morchov said, looking out the window past his daughter.

Andrei Morchov was a man of moderate height and usually described as slender. His pale brown hair was receding from his forehead, but there was about him an aura of confidence, strength. Jalna believed that her father was not conventionally handsome but did have the power to mesmerize, and that power had kept him from going under through five regimes. Jalna believed that none of her looks came from her father. She liked to tell Yuri that she had inherited everything from her mother and nothing from her father. She imagined secretly that Andrei Morchov was not her father, that she was the result of a single night between her mother and some army private, though her mother had never given anyone reason to believe she was anything but the frightened wife of a determined and emotionless man. Jalna was and knew she was beautiful, that she looked like her mother, slender, blond, pale, wide of mouth, and able to draw the eye of any man.

“You will remain in the house for the rest of the day,” her father announced as he buttoned his raincoat.

Jalna had no intention of remaining in the house.

“Yes,” she said. “I have schoolwork to do.”

“I will call to be sure you do,” he said.

Jalna was sure he had no intention of calling, though he had been known to surprise her as he had surprised various enemies over the past three decades. It didn’t matter. If he called and she was not there, she could claim later that she fell asleep or was in the bath. He might not believe her, but that, too, did not matter. What he wanted would make no difference by next week.

“Come,” he ordered, picking up his briefcase. Jalna moved to her father and kissed his cheek as quickly and dryly as possible. Before she could move away, he grasped her arms and looked into her face. She returned the probing look.

“Yes?” she said.

“I see something in your eyes.”

“What?”

It was probably a trick. He saw nothing in her eyes, nothing, she told herself.

“I don’t know. My own reflection, perhaps.”

He let her go and she stepped back, willing herself not to tremble.