Death of a Dissident ir-1 Read online

  “Lvov, Simon Lvov.”

  Tkach hung up and considered his alternative. He could wait for Rostnikov and chance missing Lvov, or he could go on his own and, assuming Lvov had not yet left his apartment, follow the old man to his meeting. Since Sasha knew both Lvov and Malenko by sight, it seemed reasonable not to wait. He scribbled a message to Rostnikov on the lined sheet and hurried out the door.

  Emil Karpo was awake but his eyes were closed. He was aware that someone stood next to his bed. He was also aware that it was Rostnikov. The slight drag of the leg had given the older man away. There was a low level of conversation in the twelve-man ward, but no noise.

  “Inspector,” said Karpo, opening his eyes.

  “How do you assess your progress, Karpo?”

  Something approaching a sad smile played on Rostnikov’s face. His coat collar, the left side, was awkwardly tucked under while his right stuck out at an angle. He was, Karpo knew, not a man dedicated to appearances.

  “My eyes were closed not because of particular pain,” explained Karpo softly, “but because I am making all necessary efforts to allow my body to recover. I wish to get back to duty within a week.”

  “The possibility exists,” said Rostnikov, sitting on the edge of the bed to ease the pressure on his leg, “that you will lose that arm.”

  “I do not intend for that to happen,” said Karpo without emotion.

  “Emil Karpo, you may have no choice,” Rostnikov responded masking quite distinct emotion. “The doctors are not going to consult with you.”

  “It is out of the question,” Karpo said.

  “There have been one-armed inspectors,” Rostnikov said, leaning over.

  “That was during the war against the Germans, and only Baulfetroya in Kiev,” said Karpo, closing his eyes.

  “I’m glad you came up with that. I had no examples in mind,” Rostnikov answered. The thought chain had struck like lightning. Kiev, where his son Iosef had been stationed. Now Afghanistan. The murder of one child and murder by another.

  Karpo sensed the change in his visitor and opened his eyes to see Rostnikov looking at a spot of nothing on the brown woolen blanket.

  “I’ll not lose the arm,” Karpo said. “You have work. I’ll be all right.”

  “Are you dismissing me, Sergeant Karpo?” Rostnikov rallied.

  “I am relieving you of responsibility,” said Karpo.

  “I accept,” smiled Rostnikov.

  “What has happened to Kroft?” Karpo added as Rostnikov rose to leave.

  “Imprisoned. The trial will wait till you are well enough to testify. So the faster you recover, the faster you can return to battling enemies of the state like Kroft.”

  “He saved my life,” said Karpo, his eyes closed again.

  “So?”

  “I think that might be taken into account.”

  “Do you want it to be? In another sense, you might not be here if it were not for him.”

  “It was not his fault that I got out of bed with a bad arm to pursue him. He could have waited another day or two,” said Karpo. “He is a confusing criminal in some ways.”

  “I’ve seen many like him,” said Rostnikov, “but he did tell me something that may help.”

  “In the Granovsky murder?” Karpo said, trying to reopen his eyes and failing.

  “No, about the proper grip for a dead lift. Don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  By the time Rostnikov got back to his office in Petrovka, Tkach had been gone almost forty minutes. The young officer had been wise enough to put the time in the right-hand corner of the message. Rostnikov called Maxim and asked if there was any other information. He had the impulse to get back in his car and race to Lvov’s apartment, but he checked himself. He could not really help. With his leg he was too slow and conspicuous to follow anyone around Moscow. Tkach would have to handle this himself.

  At 5:15 a call came. Rostnikov then decided that he would have to tell Sarah that Iosef was in Afghanistan. It was her right to know and worry, and if he did not tell her and she found out that he knew all along, she would hold it against him. She would try not to, but it would be there. It had happened before for things of much less importance. The call had been brief. Colonel Drozhkin wanted to see him at K.G.B. headquarters at seven the following morning.

  Tkach had arrived in front of Simon Lvov’s apartment just in time. He had been standing in the doorway of an apartment building across the street from Lvov’s for no more than five minutes when the figure of a tall old man in a long dark coat emerged. Although Tkach was more than one hundred yards from Lvov, the old man was unmistakable. His tall, stooped form and his thin face with horn-rimmed glasses were clear from the distance, and traffic was very light so that nothing stood in the way.

  It seemed quite early to Tkach. Lvov was giving himself a full hour. The place must either be quite far, or Lvov was planning to make a stop first. It was also possible that Lvov, who had been a known dissident, was well aware of the possibility of his being followed and wanted to give himself ample time to lose his follower.

  Keeping up with Lvov proved to be no great problem for Tkach, at least at first. Lvov boarded a bus and Tkach, his face covered as if to keep out the chill wind, boarded behind him. Lvov rode without looking about and got off not far from Red Square. The crowds were thick on the relatively pleasant sunny day, and Tkach had to close the distance between himself and the old man. In the crowd in front of the Lenin mausoleum, Tkach confused a pair of tall, dark clad figures before him but managed to select the right quarry with little trouble. Lvov walked slowly to the Lobnoye Mseto, the four-hundred-year-old white stone platform where the Tsars had performed their executions. From there Lvov crossed Kuibyshev Street and entered G.U.M., the State Department Store, the biggest and most crowded store in Moscow. In Stalin’s day it had been a massive office building, but in 1953, with Stalin’s departure, it had been returned to its commercial use, a huge department store with curved display windows on the main floor, many small shops and a massive press of 350,000 customers each day. Tkach muscled his way past afternoon tourists and old women with white babushkas to keep up with Lvov, who moved slowly but steadily through the crowds without really pausing to look in any windows.

  It became clear to Tkach that the old man was diligently and intelligently trying to lose him. The moment of truth came at one of the first level overpasses between the store’s sections. Lvov paused at the dark metal railing to look up at the arcade’s glass ceiling several stories above. He seemed to be in no hurry. Tkach stopped and leaned against a wall on one side of the overpass. A crowd of people surged out of a store and moved onto the bridge toward Tkach, coming between himself and Lvov who remained along the rail and moved quickly to the other side. Tkach considered forcing his way over the overpass but realized that he would surely lose Lvov if he did so. The alternative was to anticipate where the old man was going. He could see Lvov’s thin figure above the crowd moving away and Tkach guessed and acted. He went back into the store behind him, found the stairway and ran to the lower level. On the main floor of the arcade he ran through the window-shopping crowds and headed to the far exit. A tall, thin figure was just touching the bottom of the steps, and the panting Tkach slowed down for an instant, but only for an instant. The figure was not Lvov.

  He looked around frantically and headed for the stairs pushing people out of the way. A very fat man said something in an angry hiss that might have been English, but Sasha didn’t pause. He didn’t even care now if he ran headlong into Lvov as long as he could catch sight of him, but he could not find the thin figure he sought.

  There was no help for it. He would have to return to Petrovka and report to Rostnikov. He assumed the next step would be for Rostnikov himself to pay a visit to Lvov after Lvov’s meeting with Malenko.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was no more than two minutes after four when Simon Lvov returned to his apartment, the apartment where, no more than a m
onth before, Ilyusha Malenko, quite drunk, had accidentally broken a window. Lvov had led the young policeman away, easily lost him, and had returned almost on the dot. He had left his door open and the lights off.

  “Where were you?” Dyusha Malenko’s voice came from the corner near the window.

  Lvov slowly took his coat off and hung it on a hook near the door.

  “Ilyusha, my phone is probably monitored by both the police and the K.G.B.” He moved slowly and wearily from his recent outing and sat in his chair. “I had to get them away from here, lose them.”

  “They are after me,” Malenko said, stepping away from the window.

  “I advise you to remain right where you were,” said Lvov reaching for his pipe. “I shall leave the light off and we shall talk quickly. Then you shall leave. If you do not, they will surely catch you.”

  “You know why I’m here?” whispered Malenko from the dark.

  “You killed Aleksander,” said Lvov without looking back.

  “Yes,” replied Malenko, his voice quivering. “And I killed Marie too.”

  Lvov dropped his pipe and couldn’t resist turning to the voice.

  “You-”

  “You know why,” Malenko said. “You know why. You were part of it. Part of making a fool of me.”

  “Ilyusha…” Lvov began trying to get up but finding himself trembling.

  “Don’t say Ilyusha to me,” Malenko’s voice broke. “I trusted Aleksander. I trusted you, but you are no better than anyone else. No better than, than-”

  “Your father?” Lvov supplied. “And Marie was no better than your mother?”

  “Shut up,” Malenko hissed, taking a step away from the dark shadow of the wall.

  Lvov shook his head.

  “So you’ve come to kill me?”

  “Yes. I’ll smash you. I’ll smash all the liars and cheats who have made me into a fool. I’ll not be a fool. You hear. I’ll not be a fool.”

  “You came at the right moment,” said Lvov, his voice regaining control. “I think I have no great interest in remaining alive. Had you come an hour later I might have struggled and argued and wept, but I don’t want to argue with you. If you kill me it will be meaningless.”

  “It’s not meaningless,” cried Malenko taking another step forward. In his hand he held a scissors, a heavy pair of tailor’s scissors. Lvov saw the object and choked back a sob of fear.

  “No, it is not meaningless,” he agreed. “You kill me and someone else and someone else and someone else till the police catch you. You know why you are doing this? Because it is over for you and you won’t admit it to yourself. When you admit it to yourself you will stop running, stop killing, stop having meaning. You will be the nothing you fear you are.”

  “Shut up,” shouted Malenko, raising his scissors.

  “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thy heart be glad when he stumbleth, lest the Lord see it and it displeases Him and He turn away His wrath from him.”

  “What are you talking about?” Malenko cried, pausing.

  “Proverbs 24:17–18,” said Lvov. “I’ve been sitting in this room for years with nothing to do but listen to hopeful young men and read. In the process, I remembered that I am a Jew. When you forsake one God, the God of communism, or it forsakes you, you search for another. I have read the words, but I have not accepted them. I’ve lost my belief in anything and so have you, but I am an old man who needs no father and you are a young man lost in the wilderness.”

  “You’re a crazy old man,” Malenko whimpered, lowering his scissors still further.

  “Maimonides said that when a man has a mean opinion of himself, that any meanness he is guilty of does not seem outrageous to him. You’ve come to this state, Ilyusha. Killing me won’t end it. I’ll tell you the truth. You’ve heard it in my voice. I’ve pretended, but I’m afraid. But at the same time, I am not wrong. You can’t get back what you lost, and you must accept that the meaning you have chosen will come to an end and leave you empty.”

  “You are right,” Malenko said. “Of course. That is what I needed. I needed your advice. I can’t erase it by destroying all of the ridiculing faces. I couldn’t erase it by killing even my father. I must do to him what he did to me. I must balance the scales. His death and hers didn’t balance the scales. It brought justice but it didn’t balance the scale. Your death wouldn’t balance the scale.”

  The late afternoon had brought darkness, and out of it came Malenko’s laughter.

  “What will you do?” asked Lvov, straining to see the outline of his visitor.

  “It is not simple murder that will set me free of what he did to me,” he said softly. “Why didn’t I see that? There was but one of her. There are two of them.”

  And with that he went to the door and was gone.

  Lvov knew that he had wet his pants and that his face was damp with tears. He pulled himself from his chair and went to the door, locking it. Then he hurried back to his heavy chair and slowly, slowly, slowly pushed it across the room against the door. When the chair was firmly in place, Simon Lvov took off his pants and underwear and started slowly across the room toward his dresser.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man in the room, and before fear could overtake him he realized that the man was his own reflection. He looked at his distorted image in the window glass. It was a ridiculous sight. A tall old man in a sweater wearing no pants and a little shriveled penis bobbing up and down. Lvov began to laugh. And then he began to cry, and had anyone been able to ask him at the moment if he were very happy or very sad he would have been totally unable to answer.

  By the time he got to bed that night, Porfiry Rostnikov concluded that he had experienced far better days. Karpo was almost certainly going to lose his left arm. Malenko had been lost, lost by Tkach’s inability to follow a nearsighted old man. In the morning he had to face Colonel Drozhkin at the K.G.B. The toilet was completely backed up, and while he was confident that he could repair it, he was aware that the part he needed might be almost impossible to obtain. That did not deter him. If necessary he would get a book on machine shop tools and learn to make the part. He was determined to absorb the totality of human knowledge if necessary to repair that toilet. But all this had been nothing compared to Sarah’s reaction to his news about Iosef.

  He had told her after dinner and she had taken it well, too well. All she had said was, “I see,” and had gone back to watching television. It was a special film produced by the USSR Central Television and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It was about Pavlov and showed the physiologist in his Leningrad research center while a voice told of his accomplishments. They both watched without speaking. They watched movies of H.G. Wells visiting Pavlov. They heard Pavlov speak about his concern with objective experimentation and the extension of conditioned reflex methodology to the problems of neurology and psychiatry. They watched and absorbed nothing. When it was over, Sarah had touched his hand and gone to bed two hours earlier than usual. Rostnikov had lifted weights for more than an hour till a tremor in the tendon of his weak leg warned him that he must stop. He defied the tendon, which knew more than he, concluded one more brief exercise, and then stopped. He took a cold shower, since there was no hot water, and tried to read an American paperback by a black writer named Chester Himes. It was about police in Harlem, New York, which struck Rostnikov as a mad, violent place. He prefered Isola or even Moscow.

  The next morning he woke up early and touched Sarah, who slept soundly. She resisted, waking so he touched her again, and she sat up, turning on him.

  “You don’t have to break my arm,” she shrieked.

  “I just touched you,” he said.

  “I didn’t sleep,” she said, turning back into the bed.

  “You slept soundly,” he said, knowing he should simply stop but unable to do so.

  “You sat up all night watching me sleep?” she asked with sarcasm.

  “No,” he said, moving to the sink to heat water so he co
uld shave. “Forget it. You didn’t sleep.”

  “Don’t humor me,” she said angrily. “You think I slept all night.”

  Rostnikov turned on the light in the corner. The sun was not yet up out the window. He looked into the darkness outside and then at her.

  “Iosef will be all right,” he said.

  “Now you’re a god,” she said, glaring at him.

  “No. He will be all right.”

  Sarah looked at him for an instant and then turned her head away into her pillow. He finished his shaving, dressed, found some bread in the cupboard and a piece of cheese, and made himself a lunch, which he rolled in some newspaper and placed in his worn briefcase.

  At the door he paused.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He wanted to repeat that Iosef would be all right, but his mouth went dry and the words called him a liar. The Volga and the new driver were waiting for Rostnikov at the curb in front of his house. People hurrying to work in the near dawn glanced to see who was important enough in the neighborhood to merit a car and driver.

  “Why are you here?” Rostnikov asked.

  “Orders from the Procurator’s office,” he responded instantly. “I am to pick you up and be available throughout your current investigation.”

  “That will be most helpful, Michael Veselivitch Dolguruki,” Rostnikov answered getting into the back seat.

  “You remembered my name,” said the driver, pulling into the nearly empty street.

  “You are an unusually talkative driver,” said Rostnikov.

  “I’m sorry, comrade,” answered the driver. “I assume that is a rebuke.”

  “Assume only that you made some impression on me,” said Rostnikov, looking out the window. “Do you know where the K.G.B. headquarters is?”

  “Of course,” said the driver.

  “That is where we are going.”

  This time Rostnikov did not wait at all. He announced himself at the front desk, and seconds later the man named Zhenya appeared to lead him up to Colonel Drozhkin’s office. Again, Rostnikov had to hurry behind him to keep pace.