Stuart Kaminsky - The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

He looked around and went on. “God, she may be watching us. She watches me all the time. I must be going as mad as Bulgarin.”

“Bulgarin said the devil was after him,” Rostnikov said.

“You said that before,” Lukov said. “No more talk. My tongue should be torn out. Maybe it will be. All I want to do is make shoes. Smell me.”

Rostnikov let his nose flare.

“I smell of leather,” said Lukov with a sigh, looking at his cigarette as if it held some answer.

“Give me a name,” Rostnikov said.

Lukov looked at the factory entrance in fear.

“A name,” Rostnikov repeated softly. “You were waiting for someone to tell about the corruption of your factory. I’m listening. You may not get another chance. A name.”

“There’s nothing you can do,” Lukov said. “I’ll give you the name and then you’ll have to forget it. Believe me. I told you. I feel better. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“The name,” Rostnikov repeated, almost whispering, his hand reassuringly on Lukov’s bony shoulder, his head inches from the frightened man’s face.

“Nahatchavanski,” Lukov spat out. He pulled away from Rostnikov’s grasp and ran back to the factory entrance where, indeed, Raya Corspoyva stood watching him.

Rostnikov had no car, no driver. He had come by the Metro and would head back that way. He had his Ed McBain book in his pocket but knew he would not read it. As much as we wanted to know what happened to the dead magician in the book, he knew he would open the book, stare at the page, and try to decide what he was going to do with the information that a high-ranking KGB member had just been accused of corruption.

Yuri Vostoyavek crossed quite illegally in the middle of Arbat Street, dodged a small black foreign car, and ignored the mad, angry honk of the horn behind him.

Yuri paused to glance at the newspaper that had been handed to him by a screaming man atop an overturned concrete flower planter in front of the Khudozhestvenny Cinema. He had seen the gathering of people when he came up from the Arbat Metro Station in Arbat Square and, though he was late, detoured to see what was going on.

The police, a group of brown-clad young men in brown hats, had arrived at almost the moment Yuri had taken the newspaper in his hand. The crowd had dispersed, moved suddenly away in a ripple while a young policeman ordered ruki nazad, put your hands behind your back. The screaming man being spoken to had resisted, but his arms were pulled firmly behind him by a trio of police, who ushered him away.

“Chaos,” mumbled a well-dressed man with a briefcase who smelled of something sweet.

Yuri had grunted and watched.

“Freedom is not chaos,” another well-dressed man had countered while they watched the police guide the screaming man with the armload of newspapers toward a parked car.

“It must be for the briefest moment or those let free will not experience the light-headedness of realization and responsibility,” a woman behind them said.

Yuri had turned to look at the woman, a small truck of a woman in a coat too warm for the weather and glasses so thick they made her eyes look like comic caricatures. She could have been any age.

“Stupid,” said the first well-dressed man to Yuri.

“Engels is stupid,” said the woman, turning to others in the small group of stragglers.

“You are stupid,” said the second well-dressed man.

The woman, at that point, had swung a mesh shopping bag filled with oranges in a wondrous, almost slow-motion arc, striking the second well-dressed man directly in his face and seriously disrupting his confidence. The man staggered back against Yuri, who pushed him upright to face the advancing, squinting, relentless woman.

“Stupid,” she hissed, and Yuri had turned away, though he would dearly have loved to see the outcome. In turning away, he ran into a man and with irritation looked up to tell the man that he should watch where he was standing, but the warning froze on Yuri’s lips. He found himself facing a tall, gaunt, unsmiling man whose hands plunged into the deep pockets of his dark coat. His eyes met Yuri’s and the young man felt that this pale stranger knew his every thought.

Yuri had moved around the man, may even have mumbled a prastee’t’e, excuse me, and dashed across the square, behind a bus on Suvorov Boulevard, and then in front of the car on the Arbat.

He hurried down the Arbat. He knew, from his history in school, that the street was first mentioned in writings of the fifteenth century, but he was not interested in history now. He ignored the ancient houses, the little shops, and the large mansions on either side of the narrow, winding street. He paused for a moment in front of number 53, where Pushkin lived in 1831. Yuri neither knew nor cared about that part of the history of the street. He glanced at the newspaper in his hand and was momentarily surprised to see a cartoon of Lenin waking from a long sleep and looking around in confusion.

Yuri smiled at the sacrilege, folded the newspaper, hurried on, and entered a small church a block away. It wasn’t crowded, but there were about fifty people gathered, listening to a priest who was in the middle of some mumbled ritual that Yuri neither understood nor cared to understand. There were no benches, no seats, and there was no way of simply characterizing the worshipers. Some were young-a couple with a baby-some old, men, and in the corner, looking toward him and the door, stood Jalna.

She smiled, a warm, somewhat pained smile that filled Yuri with love and longing. He moved forward, opened his mouth to apologize for being late, but she stopped him with a warm finger to his lips as the voice of the priest rose. The priest’s eyes found Yuri for an instant and then moved on to someone else who had entered the small church. Yuri took Jalna’s hand and stood silently, respectfully, but not listening.

Jalna’s eyes were bright in the dim light of the church. She clutched his hand warmly and beamed. Yuri, infected, smiled with her and turned his head in the direction in which the priest had looked. In the darkened corner near the entrance stood a figure, a dark figure, a familiar figure. Yuri’s grip tightened and Jalna looked at him, saw his turned head, and followed his gaze into the corner, where a man stood apart from the worshipers.

Coincidence, Yuri told himself. The gaunt man had been on his way here. He was no ghost. He was a coincidence, if, indeed, it was even the same man he had run into in the square.

Yuri fixed his eyes on the dark corner, unable to make out the face. He stared, determined to cause the man to back down. But the man did not move. The priest’s voice rose and then dropped, indicating an end to the service or at least this part of it. The man in the corner did not appear to breathe. Yuri shuddered, and Jalna, sensing, feeling his fear, gripped his arm tightly.

Yuri turned toward her reassuringly as the crowd muttered a gruff, unfamiliar “amen.” When he turned back to the ghost in the corner only seconds later, the man was gone.

“Yuri, are you all right?” Jalna said softly.

The couple with the child hurried to the door of the church and out into the cool air, neither looking to either side nor speaking to others. Worship was still a guilty pleasure. Anyone could be a KGB agent noting faces, taking names, gathering information for the moment when all this new freedom suddenly disappeared.

“I’m fine,” Yuri said, leading her out the door. The ghost was nowhere in sight. “Are you hungry?”

Jalna nodded and they moved down the street to a stolovya, a small self-service luncheonette where they got in line behind a man in a workman’s cap and scarf who hummed to himself.