Stuart Kaminsky - Death of a Dissident

Emil Karpo did not spend the night in the hospital, though he was advised to do so. His wound was not bad, though he had to wear a bandage and sling. The pain was greater than he would have expected, but he did not fear pain. The hospital was too protective and protected. Emil Karpo wanted to be somewhere where he could count on the help of Emil Karpo, and that somewhere was in his room. He had slept for six hours and then arose in the morning with an arm so sore that any movement was agony. His first act, after forcing his pants on with one hand, was to call Petrovka, where he found out that Vonovich was being held for the murder of Aleksander Granovsky.

He was told by Rostnikov to take the rest of the week off. His protest was overridden, and a compromise was reached. Karpo would take the day off to rest. He hung up and went back to his room to rest, but he knew he would not rest. There was nothing wrong with his feet or his head. He could work, must work. Every day that went by without catching a criminal meant another day for another crime. In spite of social change and the clear needs of the state, people continued to commit crimes against each other, and it remained the responsibility of Emil Karpo to do his best to keep the criminals in check.

So Karpo dressed. It was painful and took almost half an hour, but he did it and did it alone. Since he knew no one in his apartment building with any intimacy or cordiality, that was the way he would have to have done it anyway.

He was on his way out of the building when the phone rang in his room, but he did not hear it. It was, in fact, Rostnikov calling to tell him of a call he had just received from Sasha Tkach on Petro Street.

Karpo decided his task for the day would be a relatively easy one. He had a few suspects to check in the case of the person who was impersonating a police officer and preying on the African students. It was a short list of people who had been arrested for crimes committed while in some kind of disguise or uniform. The first name on the list was that of Vasily Kusnitsov also known as Chaplin because he liked to think that he looked like Charlie Chaplin. Kusnitsov was not home. The next name on his list was that of Rudolf Kroft, a former circus performer who had come on bad times after injuring his leg in a fall. He had twice been arrested for posing as a bus driver and a census taker. The house on Meduedkoya Street was not difficult to find, but it was an incredible house. Karpo thought that a good breath of air or another touch of snow would be enough to send the old wooden building tumbling. He walked gently up the steps of the three-story building and opened the door. The little alcove was cold as the outside. Karpo resisted the desire to rub his sore arm and examined the names on the wall. Kroft was on the top floor. He made his way up the creaking stairs finding that it grew no warmer as he rose. The room he sought was right at the top and he knocked.

“Kroft,” he said. “I want to talk to you. Police.”

“I’ve done nothing,” insisted the frightened voice inside.

“We’ll talk about it when you open the door.” Karpo heard a shuffling sound on the other side of the wooden door and something that sounded like the opening of a window. He took a step back in the narrow hall, lifted his foot, and kicked at the door. It gave as if it had been sucked in by a vacuum, and Karpo skidded across the floor of a room even smaller than his own. His eyes saw two things immediately: a police uniform laid neatly on the small bed and a frightened little man in his underwear standing next to it. The frightened little man, in turn, saw the angel of death that had broken down his door, and he turned and leaped out of the window.

Karpo hurried across the room and to the window to look down for the body, but there was no body. There was no impression in the snow three floors below. Then the answer came. Snow fell from above onto Karpo’s head, and he looked up. The overhang of the roof was inches over his head, and he could hear the scuttling of feet on the roof.

With just one hand, he knew he could not follow Kroft, but he was equally determined that he would not let the criminal get away. He went back in the room and out the door, looking up and around. He began kicking down doors.

The first room was unoccupied at the moment except for a huge photograph of a naked woman. The photograph looked very old. In the next room whose door he kicked down, an old woman was talking to a small child. The woman screamed without sound, and the child-Karpo could not tell if it was a boy or girl-looked at him blankly. He paid no attention to them but leaped to the ladder nailed to the wall. He banged his sore arm against the wail and made his way awkwardly up, having to let go at each step and grab for the wooden rung above. He took splinters in his hand, but fortunately there was a very low ceiling and the rungs were few. He forced open the trap door covered with snow by pushing his head against it. It gave slowly, struggling with him for supremacy, but Karpo was a stubborn man with a strong head. He worked his way up on the sloped roof and looked around for Kroft.

“Kroft,” he called. “Give up. There is no place to escape.”

“I could have killed you,” a voice came from behind Karpo. As he turned to face it, his feet gave way in the snow, and Karpo began to fall toward the edge of the roof. He went down on his arm and immediately felt an agonizing pain and heard something crack. Suddenly a sure hand grabbed his sleeve and pulled him.

“Are you all right?” said Kroft, looking into his face.

“Yes,” said Karpo struggling to get up. “You are under arrest.”

“I know,” said Kroft, who stood shivering in his underwear, “but all the same, I could have simply pushed you off the roof. You shouldn’t be climbing around with an arm like that.”

“That is my concern,” said Karpo, unable to resist the help of the man in underwear. “Now go ahead of me down the ladder, and don’t try anything or I’ll have to shoot.”

Kroft shivered and shrugged his shoulders.

“There’s a little boy in that room,” he said. “You think I’d want you to shoot? For a policeman you don’t think much about the people you’re supposed to be helping.”

“I don’t need lectures from a criminal,” said Karpo. “Now down.”

And Kroft went slowly down the ladder with Karpo struggling behind him, but the struggle was in vain. The policeman fell to the floor dropping his gun beneath him. He tried to roll over and extract the weapon from the weight of his own body but found the pain in his arm nearly unbearable. When he finally did retrieve the weapon and looked around, he saw Kroft on a small bed in the corner with a blanket wrapped around his legs. The old woman and the boy looked at Karpo expressionlessly, as if they were now quite accustomed to people in their underwear and wounded men with waving pistols going through their little room.

Karpo was drenched in sweat and unable to come to a sitting position.

“Don’t move,” he warned Kroft.

Kroft touched his nose with his hand, clutching the blanket to him tightly for warmth, not modesty.

“If I wanted to move, I could have run while you were squirming around down there like a turtle on its back. I’ll help you up.”

He got up and started to hobble toward Karpo who waved him back.

“Don’t move, I said.”

“If I don’t help you, you will sit there till Moscow turns capitalist, and I will wither away,” Kroft said reasonably.

“Why didn’t you run?” Karpo demanded, trying to find a reasonable way to at least come to a sitting position.

“Where would I run? I could grab my pants and go out the door. Where would I sleep? Who do I know well enough to hide me? The circus people would turn me in. My relatives are two thousand miles away. Why should I make you even angrier than you are with me? This way I go to trial. I say I’m sorry. I repent. I tell the judge I don’t know what got into me. Maybe I’ll even blame decadent French novels and magazines for my folly. Confession is a marvelous tool. Maybe my sentence will be light.”