Stuart Kaminsky - The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

“Good. Pursue your work and meet me at eleven-thirty tonight in front of the Tass building,” Rostnikov said. “Zelach, would you please go process an order for level two computer access? I will get Colonel Snitkonoy to approve it. Sasha, remain a moment.”

Karpo left the room and moved to his desk.

“Sasha Tkach,” Rostnikov said gently, “if you do not sleep nights, you cannot work days, and ours is a job where being alert may mean staying alive. You have much to live for.”

Tkach looked up but slouched back in his chair.

“My mother is making me feel guilty about the move,” he explained. “She weeps, she complains, she goes silent, she threatens, she casts looks. She wakes the baby. Pulcharia is a good child, but … And Maya, Maya who has always been so gentle, so quiet and loving, is becoming … I’m caught between.”

“I can’t have you caught between or feeling caught between,” said Rostnikov. “There is a murdered man, a missing bus and driver, more crimes taking place every day.”

“I know,” Tkach said with exhaustion before he nodded and left the room.

When Tkach was back at his desk, Rostnikov reached for the phone and checked his watch. He had ten minutes before his morning meeting with the Wolfhound. Rostnikov got the operator and asked for the Ministry of Information. Moments later he asked for and got Lydia Tkach on the line.

“You remember me?” he asked when she shouted “Zdrah’stvooit’e,” hello, into the phone.

“Yes!” she screamed. “What do you want? I’m very busy!”

Rostnikov moved the phone a foot away from his ear and returned it only when she was not speaking.

“Children,” he said, “are ungrateful creatures. Your son is an ungrateful creature.”

“You think I don’t know that?” she said with a bitter laugh. “I needed you to call me from my work to tell me what I already know.”

“Sasha, my son Iosef, all of them ungrateful,” Rostnikov said.

“Tell him that,” she cried. “He won’t listen to me.”

“He is beyond reason,” Rostnikov said with a sigh. “I can’t get him to do a decent day’s work. All he thinks about, talks about, is you, his poor mother for whom he is trying to do his best. I’ve done much for him, Lydia Tkach. I’ve treated him like my own son, but if he doesn’t start working, doesn’t start showing some gratitude for all I’ve done, doesn’t stop putting your feelings and welfare above his duty to the State, I’ll have to consider asking him to leave the service.”

“Leave the-” she began.

“For his own good,” said Rostnikov, sighing. “I must leave now. Your son is sitting at his desk with his head in his hands and not getting his work done.”

“I’m deaf, Rostnikov, not stupid!” she shouted. “My son would not sit at his desk like a whipped child. Don’t call and play games with me.”

“He is a good man and I need him,” said Rostnikov. “And he is a good son. And you need him. Think about it, Lydia Tkach, and we’ll talk about it at lunch. I’ll come for you at two.”

“You can’t bribe me out of my apartment with a bowl of soup and a blini!” she bellowed.

“Think about it,” he repeated.

“I can get off for lunch at one, not two,” she said in a nearly normal tone.

“Good-bye,” he said.

When he hung up the receiver, Rostnikov knew he would have to hurry to make the Wolfhound’s morning meeting. He hoped the meeting would be brief.

The computer came up with several names and places for Zelach and Sasha Tkach. There was the new Center for Turkistani Culture. There was a prisoner in Lubyanka who was suspected of robbing a couple on the Metro. When arrested he claimed to be liberating the money to make bombs to demonstrate the seriousness of Turkistani cultural identity. Of course, the young man was drunk when arrested, but he was being held nonetheless. There were other names. Tkach made a printout and signed for it. He gave Zelach half the names and took half for himself. It would be faster this way, though Sasha had no confidence in Zelach asking the right questions. If Sasha turned up no leads, he would have to go back and check Zelach’s list himself. He was not particularly sure of his own ability to do his own job, let alone Zelach’s, without a bit of undisturbed sleep, but he felt a sense of urgency. What would Turkistani separatists want with a bus? Why would they want it so much that they would kill for it? And why would they want a bus driver?

Three hours later, he had talked to the young man in prison, who proved to be a braggart, a drunk, and a fool. Three other leads proved to be useless and, what is worse, quite distant from each other.

By one in the afternoon, Sasha wanted to think, to wake up. The afternoon was brisk, cool, and threatening, once again, to rain. He walked down to Petrovka Street past the Bolshoi Theater’s eight tall stuccoed columns, atop which stood four rearing horses harnessed to the chariot of Apollo. He crossed Marx Prospekt to the garden in front of the 220-ton monument to Karl Marx, which had been officially completed and shown on Sasha’s sixth birthday. Lydia, he remembered, had brought him down for the unveiling of the great man, who leaned eternally against a stone rostrum as if in midspeech, while below him were engraved his words of revolution, “Workers of the world, unite.”

Beyond Sverdlov Square he glanced at the old Central Lenin Museum and moved down into the huge underground connection to the Revolution Square, Sverdlov Square, and Prospekt Marksa Metro Stations. Ten minutes later he stepped out of the Volgograd Prospekt Station, found a small café when he had two coffees in the hope that they would wake him up, and made his way to the run-down concrete building that housed the Center for Turkistani Culture and dozens of other offices, causes, and businesses that awaited a moment of respect or recognition that might never come.

The Center for Turkistani Culture, as it turned out, consisted of two mismatched desks, one of metal with rust creeping through the thin layer of paint, the other of battered wood. A quartet of wooden chairs stood in the corner of the room, with a table in the middle where two very old men, one of whom was turning out billows of gray smoke from an ancient and foul-smelling pipe, were playing a game of chess.

Behind one of the desks sat a very dark woman who was neither young nor old nor very interested in the visitor. She wore a serious dark dress that came up to her collar and a more serious, short, no-nonsense hair style.

She looked very Greek to Sasha, who showed his identification card.

“So you are a policeman,” she said, apparently unimpressed, her hands folded.

“Are you here to return our country to us?” said the old chess player with the pipe. The other man grunted.

A year ago such talk to a policeman could have been enough for a journey to Petrovka. It was still not the safest thing to do even in a mad world, but Sasha was too tired for such games.

“I’m looking for some men and a woman,” he said, addressing the woman behind the desk. “Possibly a group of young people and an older man. Turkistanis who may have some knowledge of a crime.”

“Not much to go on,” the woman said.

Sasha suddenly felt like a schoolchild in front of his teacher. Yes, the woman looked like a teacher.

“If these people commit a crime, your cause will be set back,” Sasha tried.

Both old men laughed, and the one who had spoken before removed the pipe from his mouth and spoke again. “A cause that has gotten nowhere cannot be set back.”

“It can be destroyed,” said Sasha.

“Threats?” said the old man, now looking up from the board.

“Play,” said the other man irritably. “Play the game. Mind your business, Ivan.”