Stuart Kaminsky - Death of a Dissident

“Then?” urged Karpo.

“Comrade Granovsky hurried up to the sixth floor where he lives with the man behind him shouting. And that’s all I heard.”

And, thought Karpo, many others must have heard it too and conveniently forgotten.

“Who was this man in black? You know him.” The second sentence was indeed a statement and not a question, though Karpo only sensed that it should be.

“His name is Vonovich, Mikel Vonovich. He lives down the hall in five hundred ten,” Molka Ivanova said. “He is a cab driver. A big man, as tall as you but bigger across.”

Karpo moved to the door and heard a voice behind him which must have been the granddaughter’s.

“Don’t tell him where you found out. Please.”

Karpo closed the door behind him, moved down the hall, and found five hundred ten. There was no answer. Karpo had decided to get a key and examine the apartment and was turning to find the building manager when luck struck, but it is difficult to determine if it was good or bad luck for Emil Karpo.

A huge, burly figure in black with a black beard came noisily down the corridor, almost filling it, and singing a popular song twenty years old. He was somewhere in his thirty’s and clearly drunk. He was about ten feet from his door before he saw Karpo.

“What?” asked Mikel Vonovich in a voice surprisingly high for his size.

“I’m from the police,” Karpo announced calmly. “I would like to talk to you.”

Vonovich looked to the wall on his left, then to the wall on his right and finally at the tile floor.

“What?” he bellowed.

“To talk about last night,” Karpo repeated, taking a step toward the giant cabdriver.

“Last night? Last night.” Something glowed in Vonovich’s grey eyes and a look of cunning crossed his face. Karpo, who was prepared for either a docile change of attitude, a feigned drunkenness, or even a physical attack was unprepared for what did happen next. Vonovich reached into his pocket swaying as he bumped into a wall and came out with something in his right hand. It was a gun and it fired in Karpo’s general direction. It was the second time in hours that Karpo had been shot at and once again, the shot had missed. Karpo fell against the wall, giving Vonovich enough time to turn and run down the hall into pools of light along the way-the plunge of a monster from folklore into the imaginary hell of the past. For a drunk, Vonovich moved with surprising speed.

Karpo was after him in less than a second. Not a door opened in curiosity. Not a sound was heard. Through the exit door Karpo plunged, and he could see the massive dark figure dive into a cab, his own cab surely, parked on the street. Karpo ran for it with drawn gun and shouted for Vonovich to stop. He considered shooting the cabdriver through the window but knew he would probably kill him and that he might be needed alive.

The cab ignition caught and Vonovich pulled away, skidding in the snow and almost hitting a woman and a young boy.

Karpo looked around for a car to commandeer, but there was nothing in sight but a streetcleaning truck brushing away the accumulating snow. Karpo ran to it, gun in hand.

The driver, a dark man with a grey stubble on his face, let out a gargling sound. Karpo leaped up next to the man.

“You see that cab,” he said, pointing with his gun. The streetcleaner added. “Follow it. I’m a policeman.”

“I can’t catch a car with this,” the man said logically.

“You can the way he is driving. Look.”

“But-”

Karpo took the man’s face in his free hand and turned it toward his own. They locked eyes for an instant, and the man pulled back.

“I’ll catch him,” he said dryly.

And the chase was on. The streetcleaning truck lumbered slowly forward, straight, sure, unswerving. The cab, with its drunken driver, sped for a few dozen feet, skidded, turned, stalled, started again, bounced off parked cars and hurried away.

“We will catch him,” said the streetcleaner, warming to the chase. Karpo grunted.

It was late at night and traffic was light when Vonovich went backward in a skid and flew over the curb into a small park. His cab stopped just short of a pond where a few people were skating. They scattered, clutching each other. Half a block behind, Karpo leaped out of the streetcleaning truck and ran in the direction of the screams. Vonovich had abandoned his cab by the time Karpo arrived, gun in hand, to frighten the skaters. He didn’t have to ask where Vonovich was. He could see him sludging forward through the park like an enormous bear.

“Stop,” the policeman shouted, but the bear did not stop. It headed out of the park down a street toward the warm hole of a Metro station with Karpo behind. Karpo couldn’t see Vonovich after he disappeared into the Komsomol’skaya Metro station, but he couldn’t wait. He ran in just in time to see the drunken cab driver hurl himself over the stile without paying his ten kopeks and roll across the floor with a mighty “grummpf.”

It was then Vonovich pulled out his gun and fired blindly in the general direction of the policeman who was pursuing him. The bullet struck Karpo in the right shoulder, knocking him back against the stairs. He could hear Vonovich hurrying, slipping down the stairs toward the platform.

“You, stop,” came a voice over Karpo. “Don’t reach for that gun.”

It was a brown uniformed policeman leveling a pistol at Karpo who, now wounded, looked even more cadaverous than usual.

“I’m a police inspector,” said Karpo.

“Yes,” said the policeman, putting away his gun. “I recognize you. You’re Inspector Karpo. Let me help-”

“No,” shouted Karpo. “Get to the other exit. There is a big drunken man with a black beard. He is not to get away. Shoot him if you must. I’ll watch this end. When is the next train?”

The policeman looked somewhat confused and tried to think.

“I don’t know. Not soon. Half an hour, perhaps.”

“Find out,” said Karpo. “No. I’ll find out. You get to the other exit. Move.”

The policeman ran back up the stairs into the night, and Karpo reached for his gun. His shoulder was bleeding moderately through his coat, and his arm was numb, but his legs were fine. He went down the stairs and found a schedule on the wall. If it was right, and the Metro usually did run on time, he had time enough to call Rostnikov. He pulled himself up the stairs and made his way slowly to a public phone he had seen on the street. While watching the exit, he called Rostnikov. He looked back at the dark trail of blood spots and wondered if he should take a chance on putting his gun away and packing his wound with clean snow.

Fifteen minutes later Rostnikov had arrived. He had no trouble finding Karpo. Police cars stood at both entrances to the Metro station. Karpo sat in one of them, his arm temporarily bandaged by a policeman.

“How are you?” Rostnikov asked, sliding into the back seat next to Karpo.

“I made a mistake,” said Karpo, between his teeth. “I had the chance to kill him, but I didn’t take it.”

“He killed Granovsky?” Rostnikov asked.

“Don’t know,” said Karpo. “Very possibly. But now he is down there with a gun. There are other people down there and he is drunk, perhaps mad.”

“And?” asked Rostnikov trying to make his leg comfortable.

“We have about ten minutes or less till the train arrives and he gets on it.”

“In that case, you better tell me what I need to know,” said Rostnikov. And Karpo did just that, quickly and efficiently.

When the briefing had finished, Rostnikov emerged from the car and headed for the Metro entrance, nodding at the armed police officers who guarded it. They were all uniformed. He was about to go down the stairs when he heard the voice of Sasha Tkach behind him.