Stuart Kaminsky - Death of a Dissident

Ivan’s plan was to go back to the center of town in the hope of picking up another late-working middle-level government official. The really big officials would have their own cars. The little officials could not afford a taxi. The middle officials who lived on the fringes of Tolstoy Street could pay the price but were never good for conversation or a tip. As his tires caught ice and turned slowly, easing the taxi into the street, Ivan spotted a lone dark figure standing at the curb fifty feet away. The figure seemed to be waiting and swayed a little, perhaps drunk. Ivan’s dull eyes squinted with the possibility of an easy fare and he drove forward toward the figure.

At three o’clock Porfiry Rostnikov made two phone calls and said ten words to each of the men he called:

“Rostnikov here, come to three-forty-four Dmitri Ulyanov Street. Apartment six-hundred-twelve.”

Although he had been fully asleep when the phone rang, Emil Karpo had answered before the first short ring had finished bouncing off the walls of his small room. He said nothing when he heard Rostnikov’s brief message followed by a click ending the connection. Karpo looked at his clock in the dim street light from his undraped and unshaded window. It was three exactly and he would remember it if a report were called for later. Karpo remembered everything, every detail. This recall had started more than twenty years earlier to protect himself and it soon became so much a part of him that it was no longer conscious. His mind was filled with data, and his one bookcase was lined with notebooks full of observations which would probably never be called for or used. He stood up from his mattress, his dark body catching the dim light from the window. He dressed quickly, without looking. All his clothes were the same. He had two suits, both grey-black, both neatly pressed, both quite old. He had five shirts, all a dull white, all starched. He had three ties, all dark and unstylishly thin even for a Moscow which perversely prided itself on being five years behind the rest of the world in fashion, and he had the uniform of the male Muscovite, a long black coat and black fur hat.

Karpo knew who lived at 344 Dmitri Ulyanov Street, but he did no more than register the fact and feel the reinforcement of something like pride at having the information. He refused to conjecture or guess about what it might mean. Guessing was a waste of time and if anyone were to ask him what he thought was happening, he could honestly say he had no idea, at least no idea anywhere near the conscious level. Karpo was a man who kept his thoughts and his body to himself. He lived for his duty, coolly, and without humor. When he had started with the old M.V.B., he had quickly earned the nickname of “The Tatar” because of his slightly slanted eyes, high cheekbones, tight skin, and expressionless dark face. That was twenty years ago. Now, the younger men had taken to calling him “The Vampire” for many of the same reasons and his preference for working nights. He was, at six-foot-three, tall for a Tatar and not pale enough to be a vampire. Karpo had not a single friend, which suited him. He would tolerate no slackness in others and radiated cold, silent fury toward those who did not devote themselves fully to their tasks, particularly the seemingly endless task of cleansing Moscow. He also had many enemies among the continued offenders of what passed for an underworld in Moscow. And that too suited him.

Karpo had only one conscious secret, the savage headaches that came for no apparent reason and stayed for periods of an hour to half a day. The pills he had been given years earlier helped to control the pain to the point where he could work in spite of it. There were times he even welcomed the pain as a test of his body and mind, a test to prepare him for a greater pain from some unnamed enemy of the state at some unspecified moment in the future that would probably never come.

When he was fully dressed and had brushed back his dark thinning hair, Karpo stepped out into the hall outside of his small cell-like room. He closed the door quietly, setting the hair-thin wire that would later tell him if anyone had visited him or might be inside waiting when he returned. He expected no such visit and had never had one.

“Rostnikov here, come to three-forty-four Dimitri Ulyanov Street. Apartment six-hundred-twelve.”

“What…” Sasha Tkach started to answer, but cut himself off and began to say, “I’ll be right there,” but the line went dead before his last word.

The phone had rung six times in the two-room apartment. Sasha’s mother slept no more than a foot from the phone in the bedroom but she was nearly deaf. He had really wanted the phone in the other room, the living room/kitchen where he and his wife Maya slept, but the phone had been installed when he was at work and he did not want to complain. The phone had been a sign of his priority, his standing as an investigator, a person to be respected, but it was a privilege one did not want to abuse. So the phone remained in the bedroom. He gathered his clothes quietly and went back out to the living room.

“You’re going?” Maya said, sitting up on her elbows. She turned on the light. Her hair was long and straight and covered part of her sleepy face. She had an accent of the Ukraine. To Tkach, who was twenty-eight and had been married for four months, it still sounded exotic. She had come to Moscow to work as an accountant in the State License Bureau and he had met her there while doing a few days of investigation on a black market case. The case had been a success. They recovered four cartons of American blue jeans which had been turned over to the case procurator after Tkach committed the first legal violation of his adult life. He had taken one pair and given it to Maya.

“That was Rostnikov,” he said, running his hand through his blond hair and pulling on his pants.

She looked at the clock. It was three and she would have to get up in an hour.

“Take your lunch in your pocket,” she said. His salary was two-hundred-fifty rubles, hers ninety rubles. They spent almost 70 percent of that on food and couldn’t afford to have either of them eat any meals at restaurants.

He nodded, moved to her, kissed her lightly and touched his hand to her shoulder, indicating that she should go back to sleep.

If there was no delay on the Metro, he could get to Dimitri Ulyanov Street in twenty minutes. A cold cloud of snow came dancing down the street as he stepped out, wondering what might cause Rostnikov to call him so early. There was a night shift for emergencies. It must be something big.

At three o’clock a dark figure stood swaying on Lenin Avenue. He was not drunk. He was trying desperately to think, but all that would come to him was that he would go home and wait for her.

He knew he had been walking for-how long? Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour or more. And there were many things to do, to plan, but they would not form into words and pictures. It had been like this when he was a child, but he was no longer a child. It was like trying to put ideas together when sleep is coming.

Logic was the proper recourse, think it through, come to a conclusion only after you had asked the right questions. That was what Granovsky had taught him. Maybe if he could phrase the question clearly, he could trick it, get it done and answered, and go on to other problems, go home and wait for her.

Through the snow flakes on his eyelashes, he looked up at the tall apartment buildings and felt dizzy.

The taxi was in front of him and a thick-necked man leaned out and said something. The voices that plagued him vanished and he looked at the man in the taxi.

“You want a taxi?”

He had never been in a taxi alone. In the past two years he had really only been in a taxi three times, always when someone else paid. Two of those times it was Granovsky who had paid. He climbed into the back of the cab, touching the seat, smelling the sweat of the day and trying to fix the blue-black face of the driver in the present.