Fall of a Cosmonaut Read online

  Stories had come from her brother about sickness in the family, aunts, uncles, cousins with cancers and other illnesses. All were explained away, but now Maya had seen with her own eyes. More than a decade after the nuclear disaster there were sick people on the streets, sickness that could not simply be explained by heavy smoking and alcoholism that matched that of Russia and caused a death rate equal to that of the poorest African countries.

  She had to get her children someplace safer. She knew of no other place but Moscow.

  As she crossed Leipzig Street, she willed her husband to call tonight. She willed him to sound genuinely different, not just guilty and contrite. She was no longer really interested in guilt. They had more than enough between them to last a lifetime.

  He will call, she thought. Sasha will call. If not tonight, tomorrow. And then what will I say? She really had no idea.

  She remembered that there was something she had to do before she went back to the apartment. Something … oh, yes. She would stop at the sweet shop near the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and bring something back for her children and her brother.

  “A great chain of being,” Mikhail Stoltz said, sitting in his small office behind his desk. “An action begets another action which begets two reactions and …”

  He leaned forward and looked around his office. There were photographs of him with astronauts, cosmonauts, visiting dignitaries, and members of the current government. He had other photographs with now-discredited leaders. They were in a drawer in the desk behind which he sat looking at the man across from him.

  The man sat back, his umbrella between his legs. The umbrella was upright on the floor. The man had both hands on the curved handle. He said nothing. Stoltz would say what he had to say and the man with the umbrella would do what he had to do.

  Stoltz sighed. “How many will we have to eliminate before this is ended?” he asked.

  Since the question was not really being asked to the man with the umbrella, he did not answer.

  “There are some secrets too big to conceal forever,” said Stoltz. “For such secrets there is only the possibility of delay.”

  The man with the umbrella nodded in agreement.

  “The two in America?” Stoltz asked.

  “It is being taken care of,” said the umbrella man.

  “The one in China?”

  “Done,” said the umbrella man.

  “Then …”

  “There is just Vladovka,” said the man with the umbrella. “And I will find him.”

  “Rostnikov.”

  “Rostnikov.”

  Chapter Six

  “IT FLEW THROUGH THE AIR?” asked Laura with the skepticism of both a twelve year old and a Russian.

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov, examining the weights he had laid out for the nightly ritual.

  “A green bench?” said Nina with the desire of an eight year old to fix on a fact.

  “Green,” said Rostnikov. “It flew down Petrovka Street about three feet higher than a car, flew like a spaceship, zing-zing-zip.” He reached over to turn on the Dinah Washington tape he had set up.

  “Why didn’t you fly?” asked Nina.

  “I clung to a tree,” he said as Dinah Washington began to sing “Nothing Ever Changes My Love for You.”

  “Did you stick straight out like in cartoons?” asked Nina.

  “Straight out,” said Rostnikov, sitting on the bench which he kept stored in the cabinet in the corner of the living room along with his bars and weights.

  “And you didn’t fly away?” said Nina.

  “Porfiry Petrovich is very strong,” said Laura.

  Sarah was in the bedroom, reading and listening to her own music. She preferred Mozart, chamber music. Porfiry Petrovich was not fond of chamber music, though he now took them all regularly to the concerts put on by Sarah’s cousin Leon and three of his friends. Leon was a doctor who catered to the well-to-do and well connected and was probably quite wealthy, but his passion was the piano.

  Rostnikov began to do curls with his fifty-pound dumbbells. He did twelve with each hand and then twelve more with each hand and then a final dozen with each hand while the girls stood watching and, perhaps, listening to the sadness of Dinah Washington.

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” Laura said, and then puffed out her cheeks like a balloon. “Nina and I took one of those out yesterday. It took both of us to lift it just a little.”

  Rostnikov adjusted the weights on the bar, tightening the lock, being sure that all three hundred pounds were secure. “I know,” he said.

  “How?” asked Laura. “We put it back exactly.”

  “I’m a detective,” he said, lying down awkwardly, his gray sweat suit already showing patches of perspiration under the arms and at the stomach. “I’m obsessive about details.”

  “What is obsessive?” Nina asked.

  “It means,” said Laura to her sister, “that he weighs too much and it makes him watch his stomach and other things carefully.”

  Rostnikov dried his hands on the towel beside him on the floor and reached up to grip the weight. Since he had no spotters, he could not push himself to the maximum, but he came close, very close, painfully close. The senior competitions were coming up in less than two months. Rostnikov was looking forward to them. He imagined Mikhail Stoltz in some gym at this very moment with five pounds more on each end of the bar or maybe even working on five hundred pounds.

  “That’s not right,” said Nina. “About obsessive.”

  Rostnikov had learned to count on his new leg in a way he had been unable to count on the sickly old one. If he managed to place the leg just so, it could actually help him lift, but he still had much to learn about adjusting the leg. He was concerned that there would be some protest this year, claims that the leg was helping him. Rostnikov was prepared for that. He would simply volunteer to participate in all the events for which he had registered on one leg. Since he was only doing what he could with his arms and lying on his back, it might cost him a few pounds, but he would still be very competitive.

  “Sarah says that lifting weights is your only vice,” said Laura.

  Porfiry Petrovich could not talk. His face was red, and he was doing his breathing as he went to five presses with the enormous weight.

  “What’s a vice?” asked Nina.

  “A bad thing. Like sucking your thumb or taking drugs,” Laura explained.

  “What’s wrong with lifting weights?” asked Nina, who had only recently stopped sucking her thumb.

  “I don’t know everything,” said Laura.

  For the first two months the girls had lived with them, they had said almost nothing, trusted no one, and never asked to watch anything on television or go anywhere. Only gradually had they taken to watching Rostnikov lift his weights and listen to American music. And little by little they had come closer and begun to talk.

  The girls’ grandmother was still at work at the bakery but would be home soon. She spent all her free time with her grandchildren, listening to their day’s adventures, telling what she had done. Every night she came home with something for each of them, an éclair they could share, their own cookies in the shape of stars, different things.

  The girls’ parents had long since left the scene. And it was very likely, though they did not know it, that each girl had a different father. They did look somewhat alike, thin of face and body with clear skin, a small nose, short brown hair, and pink cheeks. They might well turn out to be pretty.

  The time when their grandmother had been in prison had been the worst, but they had taken it as just another blow that was their lot in life.

  But things were getting better now.

  One more, Rostnikov thought, just one more.

  The phone was ringing. Laura hurried across the room to where it sat on a table near the sofa.

  Rostnikov and Dinah Washington finished at the same time. The weight went back on the rack over “head. He lay there exhausted, breathing deeply.

 
“When you breathe like that, it looks like there is a melon in your belly,” said Nina, pointing to “abdomen. “And your face turns red like a crayon.”

  “I’m pleased that the display provokes your imagination,” said Rostnikov, sitting up and reaching for his towel. His hands were wet now. His palms were red. He still had more to do, and Dinah Washington was well ahead of him.

  “It’s Iosef,” said the older girl, holding the phone out. “He says lots of things were flying today, like horses and pots of flowers and balloons.”

  “Balloons fly every day,” said Nina.

  “Iosef Rostnikov was making a joke,” Laura said with an exaggerated sigh.

  Rostnikov reached out his hand for the phone. He had a fifteen-foot extension that could reach anywhere in the room and just far enough into the bedroom so that one could close the door for some privacy.

  “Iosef,” he said, taking the phone. “You called me to say that you are packed, ready, and will meet me at Sherametyevo Airport at seven in the morning. Correct?”

  “Yes, but …” Iosef began.

  “Then there is nothing more to say,” Rostnikov said pleasantly. “I am busy getting ready. We can talk tomorrow.”

  He hung up, knowing that his son had understood, that whatever he was going to say, and Rostnikov thought he knew what it was, would be best not spoken on the phone.

  Rostnikov had been followed home from Petrovka. He had been followed, in fact, by the same man he had seen in the crowd at Lermontov’s house. The man had been carrying an umbrella. When he had come home, Rostnikov had looked out the window in the kitchen alcove. Another man, also with an umbrella, was standing across the street in the shadow of a doorway.

  Sarah appeared at the door of the bedroom, a book in her hand. She was still dressed, but in one of her loose-fitting, comfortable dresses, the orange one with white flowers.

  “Who called?” she asked.

  “Iosef,” said Nina. “He says horses can fly.”

  “But I would advise them not to do so,” said Rostnikov.

  Sarah was still well built, red haired and beautiful, with pale unblemished skin. Since her brain surgery five years earlier, she had lost some of the weight it had taken her years to nurture, weight Rostnikov had loved. She had gained back her hair and taken on a knowing smile. Rostnikov once told her that she looked as if she had had a long talk with death and that he had told her that she had too much life in her for him, and so he sent her back to Moscow and her husband.

  “I wanted to talk to him,” Sarah said.

  “Nina, you know the number?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It is my turn,” said Laura.

  “No,” said Rostnikov, wiping his neck with his now sweat-drenched towel. “I remember precisely. On Tuesday, just after dinner, I asked you to call Sasha Tkach for me. You were sitting on the chair at the table doing homework. You were wearing your jeans and a blue T-shirt. Nina was sitting on the sofa, looking at the dinosaur book. She was wearing …”

  “It is difficult living with a detective,” said Laura.

  “Very,” Sarah confirmed with a smile. “But it has its rewards.”

  Rostnikov smiled and moved back to his bench. Dinah Washington had not waited for him. She was selling more love.

  Nina dialed.

  Rostnikov reset the weights on the bar and wondered briefly if the first man with the umbrella had been the one who murdered Vladimir Kinotskin. He probably had.

  The two men, both bachelors, both in their mid-thirties, stood in front of the bar in the town of Brevard, North Carolina, hoping for quite different encounters.

  Both men were Russians. Both spoke passable but not fluent English. The move had come abruptly. They had been summoned to the office of their commander at Star City, where they had been assigned since returning to earth from their mission on Mir.

  They were not celebrities, though their names were known within the space community. Their jobs were simply to keep up with their technology studies and training in preparation for their next mission.

  When they had been summoned, the two men, Misha Sorokin and Ivan Pkhalaze, who had been kept apart since their return to earth, both wondered if this was the moment when the secret they held would end their careers if not their lives.

  But the meeting had gone quickly and much to their satisfaction. They were being sent to the United States, immediately, to serve as liaisons with a space-study program at the University of North Carolina, a satellite program near a town called Brevard.

  Misha and Ivan had been given a crash course in English and told that the assignment was open-ended. Its conclusion would be determined by consultation with the Americans. Both men were told to be cooperative. American support and money were needed for the construction of the new space station. No mention was made of the secret the men shared. Perhaps, both thought, it has been forgotten, put away, no longer meaningful.

  They were, of course, quite wrong.

  Within two weeks Misha and Ivan were sharing a house near a waterfall near the small town in North Carolina. Their input, services, and expertise were seldom drawn on by the quartet of three men and a woman who came occasionally to meet with them and even more infrequently to drive them to Asheville or even as far as Chapel Hill for discussions with professors and students.

  Eventually, they had been assigned a 1995 Chevrolet Celebrity, white, with a blue cloth top.

  It was in Brevard that night that they first discussed what they had not discussed before.

  Misha, tall, with light-brown hair and looks that often resulted in his being compared to Liam Neeson, was acknowledged to be the leader of the duo, a degreed aeronautical engineer, a voracious reader, and a man who perhaps thought too much but kept most of what he thought to himself, his primary goal in life being to survive in safety and to continue to hide his homosexuality, a homosexuality he had not engaged in for the past six years since becoming a cosmonaut. Ivan knew nothing of his fellow cosmonaut’s sexual orientation. Misha was certain, however, that Mikhail Stoltz was very well aware of it. Soon after their return from space, Stoltz had a meeting with Misha in which he made it clear without really saying so that he knew. He also made it clear that secrets could be kept for those who could keep secrets. Misha had understood and agreed.

  Ivan’s solid body and dark face suggested an intellectualism which was not there but which he had learned to feign. In contrast to his fellow cosmonaut, who was now his friend, Ivan’s sexual urges were decidedly heterosexual and open. Women, however, were in short supply where the two of them had been sent, and their lack of ease with the English language did not help his pursuits.

  Coltan’s Bar just outside of Brevard had a reputation that had eventually made its way to the two Russians. The reputation was that people could be met there for friendly encounters, possibly free, possibly for money. Ivan and Misha had money, a more-than-adequate amount for their needs.

  Both men hoped to make contact. Both men hoped that they could do so separately and move on with discretion.

  The bar was crowded and since they were wearing American casual clothes no one seemed to pay attention to the men who made their way through the noise, past a few tables, and into a booth. Both men knew they were here for sex. Ivan did not know that Misha’s idea of what that might be was quite different from his own.

  “I suggest we separate,” said Misha, scanning the room as a waitress made her way to their table and a woman’s voice, over, two badly balanced speakers, sang plaintively, “if you loved me half as much as I love you …”

  “Name it,” said the heavyset woman with clear skin and a body that very much suited Ivan.

  She wore no uniform, just a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt with an order pad and pencil in one pocket in case she needed it.

  “Name? …” asked Ivan.

  “What are you drinking, eating, buying?” she said, shifting her weight to her left foot.

  “Beers,”
Misha said.

  “Germans?” she asked.

  “Germans,” Misha said.

  “My name’s Hoffer,” she said. “Helga Hoffer, German.”

  “A pleasant coincidence,” said Ivan. “You are married?”

  “I am not,” she said, turning her eyes from the handsome one to the intense dark one, who was cute in his own way.

  “You accept invitations to drink from German customers?” Ivan said.

  She smiled now. Her smile was good. Her body was better.

  “We don’t get Germans in here,” she said, leaning over and showing her ample breasts as she lowered her voice. “No young, good-looking ones.”

  “Then it might be possible to? …” Ivan asked.

  “You’re in luck,” she said. “I get off in half an hour. You have a car?”

  “I do,” said Ivan.

  “Then maybe we can go somewhere and talk,” she said. “Two beers.”

  She turned and walked back toward the bar.

  “I can’t believe it,” said Ivan.

  “It is probably that touch of French blood in you left over from Napoleon’s short-lived vacation in Rostov,” said Misha.

  “I don’t care,” said Ivan with a grin.

  “She is not young,” said Misha. “Perhaps forty-five.”

  “Age means nothing,” said Ivan. “She is my kind of woman and I am very, very much in need.”

  “I understand,” said Misha, looking toward the bar where two men in their twenties were looking at the two cosmonauts. One of the men caught Misha’s eye and the two men exchanged a look that Misha well understood.

  “Shall I ask her if she has a friend?” asked Ivan.

  “No, thank you,” said Misha with a smile. “I will see what I can do on my own. You go off with Miss Hoffer. I’ll make my way back to the house. If worse comes to worse, I’ll get a cab.”

  They listened to music and drank two beers each.

  Misha and the young man at the bar glanced at each other from time to time, and eventually Helga Hoffer, minus pencil and pad, made her way to the booth and wedged in next to Ivan, who enjoyed the touch of her hip against his.