Stuart Kaminsky - The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

Perhaps it would be better if the police did come. These men might simply be planning to kill him when they got where they were going.

“What’s your name?” the young man said. He was standing behind Boris and softly humming some foreign song.

“You already asked … Boris,” the driver said, amazed that he could get sound through his dry lips. A small drink. That’s all he needed. A very small one.

Boris drove the bus down a heavily rutted road in a broad field in which nothing seemed to be planted but miles of weeds.

“I … the road is too narrow,” Boris chattered.

“It is wide enough,” the older man in the back said softly, dreamily. “We measured. Drive slowly.”

“Drive slowly,” the young man repeated happily. “Are you excited, driver Boris? Afraid?”

“I have a large family, a wife, a mother, four children,” Boris repeated his lie. If the young man had forgotten his name, he might also have forgotten their earlier conversation about the children.

“Too many children, Boris,” the young man said. “Unpatriotic. You are not a good citizen.”

“They are all adopted,” Boris said. The barrel of the pistol clunked against his ear as the bus hit a wide dent in the road.

“Adopted?”

“Orphans,” Boris said.

“You’re a true hero of the revolution, Boris,” the young man said. “And you are a liar. There, to the right, that house there.”

Boris slowly turned the bus toward a small sagging wooden house in the open field. The road was even more narrow and difficult to navigate.

“You know what happens to heroes and saints, Boris?” the young man whispered. “If they are lucky, they become martyrs.”

Emil Karpo’s head was aflame with pain. He ignored it. Or at least he worked through it. He was well aware that the pain was an impediment that even if ignored would take a toll, but he also knew that it would eventually-an hour, two or three at the most-pass. Perhaps the pill had had some effect.

He had purposely decided to walk in the hope that when he arrived at his destination the cool air would aid him and the pill would have time to work. He crossed Gorkovo to the City Hall side and moved south and downhill toward Red Square and came to a series of large, forty-year-old Victorian-looking apartment houses on the right.

He found the correct building and paused. In front of it, parked by special permit, was a black Zil, not unlike the one assigned to the Gray Wolfhound, but this one had gray curtains to hide the passengers from the gaze of the people on the street. The polished granite of the building that faced the street level in front of him came, Emil Karpo knew, from a quarry captured by the Soviet army at the end of the war against the Axis. The Nazis had planned to use the granite to erect a monument to celebrate the defeat of the Soviet Union. The building behind the granite facade and those surrounding it housed special people-bureaucrats, foreigners, including Americans and even Germans with business in Moscow, and upper-rank party members, nachalstvo, bosses like Andrei Morchov who also had dachas just outside the city.

There were far more prestigious addresses in Moscow: 26 Kutuzov Prospekt, for example, a nine-story apartment building where premiers, KGB chiefs, and ministers traditionally maintained vast apartments. The Gorkovo address was a bit safer, less ambitious, a statement that the inhabitants were content at their level, at least for the moment.

A well-built man in a dull, dark suit and striped tie looked at Karpo through the thick glass of the door. Karpo welcomed, savored the wave of sharp pain on the right side of his head followed by nausea. This wave had come before during his headaches. Mastering the unexpected was a challenge, a test that kept him on guard. That the challenge frequently came from his own body did not strike Emil Karpo as strange or ironic.

He opened his identification folder and displayed his photograph and identification card. The well-built man opened the door.

“Come,” the man said when the door closed behind them.

The tiled entranceway smelled of lilacs, though Karpo was sure that there were no lilacs nearby, that it was his migraine trying to trick him. He followed the man to a stairway in the rear of the building and they moved upward in soft light, wooden steps creaking beneath them. The man said nothing. Neither did Emil Karpo as they went up two flights and through a door that opened quietly onto a carpeted hallway. The man turned to his right and headed to the end of the hallway, where a door faced them. The man knocked gently, carefully, not too loud and insistent but loud enough to be heard if someone was expecting a caller. The door opened.

The slender man before Karpo wore a loose-fitting gray sweat suit. His hair was wet with perspiration and slightly unkempt. The man brushed his hair back, adjusted the glasses on his nose, looked at Karpo, and nodded at the man who had led the detective to the apartment.

Andrei Morchov nodded and the well-built man turned away and headed down the hallway. Morchov stepped back and allowed Karpo to enter. When the door closed behind them, Morchov produced a towel and dabbed his face as he led the detective down a small hallway decorated with Oriental figures and a metallic figure in bronze hanging from the ceiling.

They moved past a living room, also Orientally decorated, where a woman sat in a sweat suit that matched Morchov’s. She was dark-haired, with a drink in one hand, a magazine on her lap. She looked up at Karpo, her face a mask, but Karpo sensed an inadvertent shudder as he passed. This time the wave of nausea was more brief. He controlled it easily.

The woman returned to her magazine as Morchov ushered Karpo into an office and closed the door. The office was not Oriental. It was stark, windowless, a single desk, a large desk with work neatly stacked upon it in bins. Two simple wooden chairs stood before the desk, and the desk chair itself was solid, wooden, unsingular. There were old file cabinets, and bookcases filled with worn books. The walls were empty except for a large photograph of Lenin looking to his right.

“You have four minutes,” said Morchov, continuing to dry himself as he sat behind his desk and motioned to Karpo to take a seat across from him. Karpo sat and Morchov reached for a tumbler of slightly pink liquid. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t offer you a drink. I have an engagement and will have to shower and dress for it very soon.”

“I do not mind,” said Karpo.

“My secretary said you have some information concerning a possible threat to my life,” Morchov said, looking at the towel and placing it on the corner of his desk. “I find it difficult to imagine why anyone would want to kill me. It is an essential part of my political life that I do not always please those with whom I must deal. But it is equally essential for one in my position not to turn those with whom I disagree into enemies. The price I pay for this is that I have made no friends. I have betrayed no one, and there is no one who would consider me close enough to call my behavior betrayal even if we disagree.”

“We have reason to believe that if such a threat is serious, it is, in fact, personal and not professional or political,” said Karpo, hands folded on his lap.

“And,” said Morchov after taking a drink, “do you propose to supply me with information concerning this possible threat?”

“At this point, we have very little beyond an overheard conversation by a woman named Elena Vostoyavek.”

Morchov rolled his drink between his palms and continued to look at Karpo, who added, “The name is not familiar to you?”

“No.”

“Yuri Vostoyavek: Is that name familiar to you?”