Stuart Kaminsky - The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

“I won’t,” said Boris earnestly. “You have my promise.”

The lie was evident. Boris knew that they would kill him the moment he got them to the tomb. They couldn’t let him get away.

Peotor suddenly stopped.

“My people have asked to be heard for almost a thousand years,” Peotor said, looking south in the direction of the province from which he had come. “We have not been allowed to speak until now. Now voices are being raised throughout the land and we are allowed to speak, but Boris, the irony is that no one will listen. Georgians, Armenians, even Mongol mongrels are being heard, but we are considered to be too small and too weak. The world will notice us after this, Boris Trush. The world will notice and we will be part of history.”

“They’ll hate you,” Boris said, knowing he had no chance of prevailing.

“Yes,” said Peotor. “At first they will. There will be days, weeks of shock, but our cause will be explored in magazines, newspapers all over the world. We will no longer be ignored. We must be heard, Boris. We must be heard or the lives of our fathers and mothers and theirs before them for a dozen generations will be meaningless. Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” said Boris. You are insane, Boris thought. That is what I understand. You are insane. I need a drink and I have to hope I have enough nerve to do what I must to save my life.

Vasily was now trotting across the field toward them with a smile on his face. The gun strapped around the young man’s back jostled. Thunder cracked in the distance, and Boris hoped that he would neither step back nor cringe when the young and smiling lunatic came upon him.

“You know what this is?”

Kostnitsov spoke as if he were addressing a severely retarded child. Kostnitsov was somewhere in his fifties, of medium height, with a little belly, straight white hair, poorly cared for teeth, and a red face more the result of his Georgian heritage than his intake of alcohol, which was moderate. He was an assistant director of the MVD laboratory but he had little or no contact with the director and had no one working under him. Kostnitsov wanted no assistants, and it was clear to everyone that none would be able to tolerate him. Boris Kostnitsov was left alone in his unnumbered laboratory two levels below the ground in Petrovka.

Now, standing in his lab and wearing a blue laboratory coat and a scowl, he held out his hand to display to the two policemen something formless and quite bloody.

Zelach looked at Sasha Tkach for an answer, but Sasha’s thoughts were elsewhere.

“A heart?” Zelach guessed.

Kostnitsov looked disgusted.

“A heart? This little thing looks like a heart to you? Does your little finger look like your penis? In your case, possibly. A penguin has a heart this size, not a human. Tkach, what do you say?”

Kostnitsov held the bloody blob under Sasha Tkach’s nose. Tkach looked down at it emotionlessly.

“A liver,” he guessed.

“A liver,” Kostnitsov repeated incredulously. “This bright-red organ looks like a liver to you? This is a human organ. A human liver is dark, firm, unless, of course, it is diseased.”

Kostnitsov began to pace between his cluttered laboratory tables and his even more cluttered desk, which held, somewhere beneath the books and papers, a bottle in which it was rumored Josef Stalin’s spleen resided.

Zelach looked at the desk and blurted out, “Spleen.”

Kostnitsov stopped pacing, dropped the slithery organ in a metal bowl, placed the bowl on the lab table, and turned to Zelach with a grin.

“There’s hope for you,” he said, advancing to Zelach and patting him on the cheek with a still-bloody hand. Zelach stepped back and looked around frantically for something reasonably clean with which to wipe his face. Seeing nothing he would be willing to use, Zelach moved to the sink, turned on the water, and washed, while Kostnitsov turned his attention to Tkach.

“The spleen,” Kostnitsov explained as if to an avid student, which Tkach was not, “is one of the largest lymphoid structures, a visceral organ composed of a white pulp of lymphatic nodules and tissues and a red pulp of venous sinusoids in a framework of fibrous partitions lying on the left side below the diaphragm, functioning as a blood filter and to store blood. It is said to be either the seat of melancholy or mirth. An underappreciated and quiet poetic organ.”

“Quite poetic,” Tkach agreed.

“The bullet went through the heart,” Kostnitsov said, weaving his bloody hand as if following the trajectory of the missile through an imaginary body. “It moved down through the left lung and heart, shattering a rib, and ending its journey in the spleen. Remarkably little damage to the spleen, but man cannot live on a spleen alone. Are you listening, Comrade Tkach, or am I boring you? Are your thoughts of university girls on the grassy Lenin Hills?”

“I’m listening,” said Tkach, who stood, arms folded, as Kostnitsov pushed his face forward in front of the detective.

“You want to know about the bullet? What?”

“I want to know whatever you know that could help us find who shot Tolvenovov,” said Tkach. Zelach had finished washing his face and was drying his hands on his rumpled trousers.

“You want some tea, coffee?” Kostnitsov asked.

“Information, opinion,” said Tkach, who knew, as did every other MVD investigator and uniformed police officer, that Kostnitsov was probably a bit mad, certainly offensive, and possibly the best forensic scientist in the Soviet Union.

“Information. You have the man’s name, the make of the weapon that killed him,” said Kostnitsov, moving to his desk, pushing away some papers, and picking up a cup of tepid liquid, which he put to his lips. There was a bright glow in the scientist’s eyes as he looked at the two detectives.

“The victim was about to struggle when he was shot,” Kostnitsov said. “His right hand was still in a fist, and judging from the calluses on his hands, he was right-handed. From the path of the bullet, it is clear that he was just rising from a sitting position when the bullet struck. The shot surprised him. He didn’t turn away.”

“Go on,” said Tkach when Kostnitsov paused and looked at Zelach, who was standing near the door, as far from the scientist as he could get.

“The man was shot on a bus,” said Kostnitsov.

Tkach was suddenly quite alert.

“How …?”

Kostnitsov opened his mouth and pointed to his teeth before he spoke.

“When he died he pitched forward, hitting his teeth on chrome. I have a small piece of chrome I took from his tooth. The report said this might have something to do with a stolen bus, so I got a sliver of chrome from a bus seat this morning. Same. But more. Our victim slumped or was pushed down after he was shot, and the open wound in his chest scraped along the bus seat picked up bits of plastic, inferior quality. That, too, I checked by getting a sample from a bus this morning.”

Kostnitsov paused and looked at both detectives, waiting.

“Karpo should have this case,” Kostnitsov finally said when he had no response, no applause. He finished his drink and put the cup down on a pile of precariously balanced books and papers. “He knows how to appreciate professionalism.”

“Your conclusions are remarkable and quite helpful, Comrade,” said Tkach.

“I know that. I know that. I know that. You know how small the particles are that I had to work with? And do I have decent equipment?”

He looked around the laboratory, as did the two policemen.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Tkach.

“No,” said Kostnitsov. “I do not. Can you imagine the miracles I could perform with an electron microscope? Not that I can’t do almost impossible things now.”