Death of a Dissident Read online

  “That was five years ago,” corrected Rostnikov, “and he didn’t kill everybody. There are still a few Muscovites left. He shot two people, one was his brother.”

  “He was crazy,” Vonovich insisted, crashing his fist down on the desk. Rostnikov had to catch his skittering cup, and a burly uniformed policeman who had been stationed outside the door burst in with his pistol ready.

  “It’s all right,” Rostnikov said, holding up a calming right hand. “Comrade Vonovich is making a point.” The policeman backed out, closing the door.

  “I’m an honest citizen,” Vonovich tried with something he must have thought was a pout.

  “You are, at best a pidzhachnik,” said Rostnikov. “You pick up a drunk or visitor and steer him into some little club where he is overcharged for vodka and a gypsy with a balalaika playing ‘Dark Eyes.’ You keep him going till he is so drunk that he can’t see. Then you steal his money and his clothes and leave him in some doorway. Or you are a fartsovschik, a black marketeer. Where do you roam—hmm?—from the Rossiya Hotel to the Bolshoi Theater finding tourists to trade your rubles away for foreign money?”

  Vonovich looked at Rostnikov warily.

  “It says that about me in your files?” he asked.

  Rostnikov nodded wearily, but in fact there had been very little in the file on Vonovich. There are more than ten thousand cab drivers in Moscow, and Rostnikov knew that there were not enough honest ones to fill a small cell. Vonovich was surely not one of that few.

  “Why did you continue to try to escape when you saw that it was the police who were after you?” he went on.

  “I was drunk,” said Vonovich sadly.

  “No,” replied Rostnikov.

  “Well, I knew it was too late. I had shot a cop. I had a gun. By then I just wanted to get away. I knew what would happen to me.”

  “What would happen to you?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Just what is happening to me.”

  “Which is?”

  “This.”

  Rostnikov wanted more tea, but that would let Vonovich know he had time to pause, to wait, to try to think. It would have to go on.

  “Ivan Sharikov,” said Rostnikov, looking directly into the eyes of the creature before him.

  “What about him?” Vonovich answered. “Can I get more tea?”

  “He’s dead. No you can’t, not yet.”

  “Water? Coffee?”

  “Don’t you want to know how Sharikov died?” Rostnikov tried.

  Vonovich shrugged and spoke while looking at a spot on the wall above Rostnikov’s head.

  “He was nothing to me, another cab driver. We had words a couple of times, that’s all.”

  “Words?”

  “All you do is ask questions about everything,” Vonovich burst out.

  “That is my job. Yours, at the moment, is to answer them.”

  “I had a few arguments with Sharikov. He was a difficult, stubborn man.”

  “And you are as gentle as a Georgia peasant. Someone stabbed your friend in the face with a broken vodka bottle.”

  Vonovich shrugged again. His hat moved precariously on an angle.

  “That is a chance you take when you drive a cab in Moscow at night.”

  “How do you know it was night?” Rostnikov jabbed.

  “He drove at night. I guessed. Who knows? Who cares?”

  “You killed him. That’s all.” Rostnikov rose as if the meeting were suddenly over, and Vonovich looked bewildered.

  “That’s all?” asked the giant. “You tell me I killed someone and that’s all?”

  “We have all the evidence we need. Where were you last night?”

  “Driving my cab.”

  “Except,” said Rostnikov sitting again, “for the time you were arguing with Aleksander Granovsky in the hall of your apartment building.”

  “Ha,” laughed Vonovich, a single mirthless laugh. “Now you are going to say I killed him too. I was running around Moscow killing everybody as fast as I could. Bing, bing, bing.”

  “You tried to kill a police officer tonight,” Rostnikov reminded him.

  “Accident,” corrected Vonovich holding up his hand. “Accident.”

  “The gun,” Rostnikov tried.

  “Left in my cab this very evening by a fare I dropped at the airport. I was going to turn it in.”

  “I’m taping this conversation, you know,” Rostnikov said. “Do you know how stupid you sound?”

  “I don’t care to hear it.”

  “I was not offering to play it for you. Your apartment is full of stolen property. Your cab has an illegal supply of vodka. You have American money in your pocket, and you have shot a policeman. What do you think will happen to you?”

  “I’ll be given justice?” Vonovich asked, starting to rise. His hat fell off again.

  Rostnikov sat back heavily while the giant groped for it.

  “Vonovich, we know about the murder, all about the murder. We have evidence. Can’t you see your bloody victim before you? Don’t you want to confess and make both of our nights easier?”

  Vonovich rose from the floor, hat in hand, face pale, eyes confused and still a bit drunk.

  “It was an accident,” he said, almost too low to be heard.

  “What?” demanded Rostnikov.

  “An accident. I didn’t know I would…we fought and I just…I was too…I didn’t expect him to die.”

  “But die he did. Where did you get the sickle?”

  Vonovich looked bewildered. “Sickle?”

  “You killed Granovsky with a sickle, you fool.”

  “Granovsky?”

  “Who did you think we were talking about?” Rostnikov was up and shouting. “Did you kill someone else too?”

  “I have nothing to say,” said Vonovich. “I have said too much.”

  “You’ll say more.”

  “No.”

  And Rostnikov knew that the “no” was probably all he could get for now. He had all he needed. Rostnikov turned off the tape recorder, rose, and went to the door. He opened it keeping his eyes on Vonovich, who was twisting his upper mustache.

  “Take him to the cells,” Rostnikov told the officer.

  The policeman reached over to nudge the sitting bear, who was startled and began to rise as if to respond. Vonovich realized where he was and grew docile as he walked ahead of the policeman.

  “Thank you, Comrade Inspector,” Vonovich called back.

  Rostnikov could think of nothing the man had to thank him for. When the policeman and prisoner were gone. Rostnikov pulled out his tape and went up to the office of Procurator Timofeyeva. She let him in almost immediately.

  Young Lenin smiled down at him from the wall, and Procurator Timofeyeva sat in exactly the same position he had left her in earlier, wearing the same uniform and looking just as weary.

  “And?” she said.

  Rostnikov handed her the tape, which she took and placed on a machine which she pulled from a drawer. She set it up and listened intently, moving only once to adjust her glasses. When the tape ended, she snapped off the machine decisively.

  “Congratulations, Comrade Rostnikov,” she said with a tired smile. “You’ve done your job well. I’ll call the Chief Procurator at once and inform him that Granovsky’s murderer has been caught.”

  Rostnikov looked down at his hands. He was seated in the comfortable black chair before her desk and wished it were further away in a dark corner. He should certainly be quiet now, but he could not be.

  “Has he?” he asked.

  “Of course,” said Timofeyeva impatiently. “You have his confession. He knew both victims, quarreled with them, tried to kill a policeman.”

  “I think at some time this Vonovich has quarrelled with everyone in Moscow,” Rostnikov said, looking up. “I think this Vonovich did murder someone, but not recently and not Granovsky or the cabdriver.”

  Procurator Timofeyeva looked at the pile of work on her desk and then at Rostnikov.
/>   “Is that what you want me to tell the Procurator General, Porfiry Petrovich, that you haven’t caught the murderer?”

  “It is not my position to tell you what to say, Comrade Procurator,” he answered.

  “Porfiry,” she answered in a voice Rostnikov had never heard from her before, a voice with the timbre of emotion and something else. “There is so much to this. It is best that there be an end, that the murderer be this worthless enemy of the state, that the world know it was the deed of a drunken lout, a criminal. It is best.”

  “As you say, comrade,” Rostnikov agreed rising.

  “Go home, rest. You have a heavy caseload. Get back to it. I’ll take care of the report.”

  “As you wish.”

  “As I wish,” she repeated with words far away. “There is much to be done, Porfiry, and too few of us to do it. Even after all these years the old society is still disintegrating. As Lenin told us, this disintegration is manifest in an increase of crime, hooliganism, corruption, profiteering, and outrages of every kind. To put these down requires time and an iron hand.”

  “Of course,” he said. Her hand reached out for the phone and she waited while he left and closed the door behind him.

  Rostnikov picked up his coat in his office and went home. He could not justify a police car now so he took the bus and walked telling himself it was over but realizing that he could not accept this. Oh, he could accept it with his body and go on with his caseload. It would not be the first case that ended without a solution or with one that Rostnikov thought was wrong. No, this one would continue to bother him because if Vonovich were not the killer then the killer was still out there in one of the buildings he was passing or a hotel or walking the streets.

  Rostnikov had difficulty accepting the priorities of his society. He recognized them, understood them, sympathized with them, but it was difficult. He had perhaps read too little Lenin and too much Dostoyevsky, or maybe too many of the American police stories that he had bought from Chernov the bookseller, the stories in which Ed McBain’s 87 Precinct Police always got their man or woman. If he ever got to America, Rostnikov wanted to meet Ed McBain, or at least visit the city of Isola.

  Sarah had a pot of soup and a half loaf of black bread ready for him when he got home.

  “It’s finished?” she asked.

  He shrugged and looked over in the corner toward his beloved weights, but he was too tired. He should rise above his weariness and do some lifting, show his resolve.

  “The hell with it,” he said instead with a huge glob of bread in his mouth.

  “What?” asked Sarah.

  “Nothing,” he said and reached for his plumbing book.

  Anna Timofeyeva had a cat. It was one of the few things in her life about which she felt guilty, for she spent very little time with the animal. Home, except for the cat, was where Anna went because it was improper to sleep in her office.

  “I hear, Bakunin,” she told the ancient grey fluff that waddled toward her as she took off her coat, “that in America they have special food for cats, special food. You go to the store and stand in line for cat food.”

  In spite of her position, Anna Timofeyeva lived in a small one-room apartment in an old one-floor concrete building that had originally been built as a barracks for an artillery unit. When the site was abandoned after ground-to-air missiles were developed, the barracks along the Moscow River were converted into small apartments with a communal kitchen which had once served as the kitchen for the artillery unit stationed within its walls. Anna Timofeyeva felt comfortable in the small room. It required little cleaning, was conveniently located and quite practical.

  It was somewhere around three in the morning, she knew, but she had no interest in checking the time. The important time was when she got up, not when she went to sleep. She had named the cat Bakunin, for the infamous anarchist who had opposed Marx, because she liked to think the cat was an adventurous troublemaker who had to be forgiven. Bakunin purred loudly and rubbed against her as she pulled a can of herring from her pocket. Bakunin was, in fact, a remarkably docile creature who, having been denied the opportunity to roam, became like a beast in a zoo, dependent on the one who feeds him and in a general state of physical torpor with occasional moments of undefined resentment.

  “Patience, Baku, patience,” she said, finding her can opener and working on the herring. “We must learn patience.” And, she thought, above all we must learn to compromise.

  Although she was hungry, Anna Timofeyeva knew that sleep was more important to her. She would not go down to the kitchen to cook something or even make some tea. Such an act would disturb the other tenants. Not that they would complain. They all deferred to Comrade Timofeyeva, who was a legend in the building, a legend seldom viewed but often discussed. That one of her high rank should live among a group of the relatively poor was most puzzling. The tenants vacillated between extreme suspicion and fear and pride, believing that somehow her presence provided those under the roof with a special protection.

  She had lived in the building for more than twenty years, but Anna Timofeyeva was barely aware of the other tenants. She knew that at least one of the other six was a family with a small baby that occasionally awoke crying in the middle of the night.

  After rubbing her eyes, Anna Timofeyeva allowed herself to move to her bed where she slowly pried at the can of herring with an old metal opener. The cat purred loudly, and Anna moved surely with thick, strong fingers.

  “Allow me a taste,” she said dipping her fingers past the jagged edges of metal. “It passes inspection.” She put the can on the tile floor and leaned over to pet the cat as it ate.

  “Bakunin,” she whispered. “Lenin said that to reject compromises ‘on principle,’ to reject the permissibility of compromises in general, no matter of what kind, is childishness, difficult even to consider seriously. Sometimes I think Rostnikov fails to understand the nature and need for compromise.”

  Bakunin was working on a particularly unresponsive piece of fish which dangled from the corner of his mouth.

  Anna Timofeyeva removed her uniform carefully, brushed it, and hung it on the high hook where Bakunin could not rub against it. There was no mirror in the room. Anna Timofeyeva was only interested in her image insofar as it displayed conviction and authority and that she could see in the window in the morning.

  She changed her warm, practical woolen underwear and moved to the small basin in the corner to brush her teeth with salt and a calloused finger. Something tugged at her chest like a marionette master pulling all the strings at once, and then it passed. She breathed deeply, rinsed her mouth and retrieved one of the small pills that had been given her by the doctor at the Institute Sklefasofskala. The tightness slowly passed as the pill began to work.

  “Bakunin,” she said softly. “I must straighten the room.” She moved slowly, putting what little there was to put in order in the right place and then she removed the note from her dresser drawer. It was a simple note that she had prepared three years before. It stated that if she were to be found dead, instructions for the continuance of her cases were in the top drawer of the desk in her office. Her instruction book was brought up-to-date each day before she came home to sleep. Her note asked that Bakunin be given to Rostnikov in the event of her death, but she had made no provisions for the eventuality of going to a hospital.

  Her principal fear, as she turned off the light and got into bed under the woolen blanket, was not that she would die at night, but that she would simply suffer a heart attack and live. Her nightmare was that she would lie helpless while someone in the building heard her gasps and dialed 002 for “fast help.” She could imagine the big white ambulance with its red cross and its soft siren pulling up in front of the building and the attendants coming in to lift her from the bed and take her out.

  The cat finished chewing down a bit of fish, and she could hear it in the darkness lapping at the bowl of water on the floor. Then the animal leaped softly to the bed and
sought the warmth of Anna’s solid body.

  “The worst thing,” she whispered to the cat as she stroked it, “is not to be useful.”

  Someone padded down the hall outside her door, moving toward the communal toilet, and somewhere else in the distance, a car hummed down the street.

  “I’ll not sleep this night,” she told her cat, resisting the urge to roll on her side for greater comfort. The doctor had told her to sleep on her back. “I’ll not sleep.”

  She slept.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SASHA TKACH WAS DISTURBED WHEN HE WOKE up. He had slept soundly and dreamed not at all of the boy he had killed the previous day. He felt guilty about his lack of guilt. He should have tossed and turned and wept and worried, but he had not. He had slept comfortably with one arm around Maya. In fact, just before he had fallen asleep, he had a strong urge to make love to her, and he felt she would have responded, but the guilt had been too much, or at least the feeling that he should feel guilty.

  “Do you understand?” he had whispered to Maya, so they would not wake his mother in the next room.

  “You don’t feel guilty,” she said, touching his face.

  “I should, shouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “I’m growing insensitive,” he whispered.

  “You are being honest. It is too bad the boy is dead, but you didn’t know him. He meant nothing to you. You had invested nothing in him and you killed him while doing your work. You are probably a bit ashamed of being proud.”

  “Perhaps,” he mused. “It is difficult to be a policeman.”

  “It is difficult to be anyone in Moscow,” Maya said, sitting up.

  And then it struck Tkach. He pushed his yellow hair from his face and remembered. Sasha Tkach was unaware that the case was over, that Vonovich the cab driver had confessed, that he was to go back to his regular caseload. Tkach was not aware that he was about to disrupt a politically tranquil situation. He was simply being a policeman. He leaped up and went to his pants searching for his notebook.

  “What are you doing?” Maya whispered from the stove where she was turning on the kettle.