Death Of A Russian Priest Page 15

  TWELVE

  WHEN ROSTNIKOV ARRIVED IN Arkush a little before nine, he could tell from the delegation that watched him get off the train that something had changed. The farmer Vadim Petrov stood next to the little mayor Dmitri Dmitriovich, beside whom stood the disheveled MVD officer Misha Gonsk, who had made some effort, though a poor one, to put himself in order, an effort that had resulted in his cutting his cheek while shaving. Peotor Merhum was missing, but Emil Karpo was standing next to Gonsk, his unblinking eyes focused not on Rostnikov but through him and well beyond.

  Rostnikov had never seen this look on the face of Emil Karpo. It was the look of a dreamer or a person in shock. Though his words had sometimes betrayed a hint of emotion, Karpo’s face had never, till this moment, revealed anything but a slight tension of the forehead that told Rostnikov that his colleague was in some stage of a migraine.

  “Who is dead?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Sister Nina,” said Vadim Petrov, his voice tense. “Someone—” He stopped, trying to find the words. A trio of men coming off the train brushed past them, talking excitedly, and Rostnikov heard one of them say, “Murder.”

  “She has been mutilated,” said Karpo. “Someone has hacked into her body fifteen or sixteen times. The killer left the weapon, an ax, embedded in the wall. It is possible that it is the same weapon that killed the priest.”

  “Madmen,” mumbled the mayor, looking around for agreement with his observation. “A madman is loose, killing priests, nuns. Maybe he will start killing government officials.”

  “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk, Emil Karpo,” Rostnikov said, stepping past the four men.

  Emil Karpo nodded, his eyes fixed where Rostnikov had been standing a moment ago. Rostnikov repeated, “Somewhere we can talk and I can have a glass of tea.”

  “Yes,” said Karpo, tearing himself from the vision only he could see. “The meeting hall.”

  “What would you like us to do, Inspector?” asked Petrov. He removed his cap and rubbed his head with a flat, heavy palm.

  “Try to keep people calm,” said Rostnikov. “Tell them that more police will soon be here, that they are safe, that we expect to find the killer very soon.”

  “You do?” asked the mayor.

  “We always do,” said Rostnikov. “We will talk to you all later. Where is Merhum’s son? Peotor?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gonsk. “He wasn’t home. I stopped to … his wife said … I don’t know. You want me to find him?”

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov. “Find him and bring him to the meeting hall. Bring his son, Aleksandr, too. And the wife.”

  The three men moved away. Only Gonsk moved quickly. Petrov, who towered over the mayor, walked at the little man’s side, supporting him gently at the elbow.

  Rostnikov and Karpo walked down the same street they had taken the day before. “About fifty paces behind us walks a man who was on the train with me from Moscow,” said Rostnikov. “He looks a bit like a frog.”

  “Klamkin,” said Karpo. “He was here yesterday also. He followed me. He was in KGB Five with Colonel Lunacharski.”

  “Our Wolfhound will find that interesting.”

  They walked a few minutes in silence.

  “I have a confession to make, Emil Karpo,” Rostnikov said when they came to the town square. “I do not like to stay in small towns at night. During the day I enjoy the isolation. At night I like to feel that there are people around, beyond the walls, down the street. I like the sound of an automobile horn from somewhere far away. I am uneasy in towns like this.”

  Karpo said nothing as he opened the door of the party hall and stepped back so Rostnikov could enter. The lights were turned on, a necessity since the room was low and dark even in the daytime. Something was steaming in a pot on the table where they had sat the night before. Rostnikov took off his coat and moved to the table. He found an empty chair, dropped his coat, and sat.

  “It smells of the country,” he said, leaning over the pot. “But that may be an illusion. Would you like a cup?”

  “No. The written report of my interrogations, including one of the nun, are in the room where I slept. If you like, I will get them for you now.”

  “Later,” Rostnikov said, pouring a cup of tea for himself. He passed his hand over the top of the cup and felt the warmth of the steam on his palm. “Emil, please sit. It is difficult to enjoy a cup of tea with you hovering.”

  Karpo sat stiffly, a palm on each knee. His jaw, always firm, was rigid.

  “You have something to tell me,” Rostnikov said, after taking a sip.

  Karpo reached into his jacket pocket and removed a book with a badly worn black leather cover. The book was slightly oversize and as thick as a Tolstoy novel. Karpo placed the book on the table and returned his hands to his knees. Rostnikov dried the palm of his hand on his pants, pulled the book in front of him, and opened it. It was some kind of ledger or diary. The handwriting was firm, slanted, and almost certainly that of a woman.

  “I found it less than an hour ago in the room of Sister Nina,” said Karpo. “It was hidden in a compartment in the headboard of her bed. The bed had to be moved to reach it. To make the entries she had to move a very heavy bed each night and then return it. I found it an effort. The nun was almost eighty.”

  “Had the killer tried to find it?” asked Rostnikov, thumbing through the pages before him.

  “I don’t believe so. The house was torn apart, religious icons were broken, the priest’s belongings were mutilated in much the same way that the body of the woman was mutilated. Whoever killed her appeared to be looking for something of the priest’s. There was, in fact, very little in her room: a small case of religious books, a simple wooden dresser, a bed, and a painting of Christ on the wall. The woman lived simply.”

  “And died violently,” added Rostnikov, thinking that the dead nun’s room sounded much like Emil Karpo’s room in Moscow, which Rostnikov had entered only once, a room that looked like the cell of a monk or a Lubyanka prisoner. The major difference between the dead nun’s room and that of Emil Karpo was that Karpo had no paintings or photographs. His books, several hundred of them, looked not unlike the one before Rostnikov, but they were filled with notes on unsolved crimes going back to Karpo’s first days as an investigator in Moscow, closed cases that Karpo diligently investigated on his own time.

  “Have you read this book?” asked Rostnikov.

  “I have had little time, but I’ve read some of it and have examined the most recent entries. I have placed yellow tabs on two pages that I think may be of particular interest. But first, see here, right at the beginning.”

  Karpo leaned over the table, opened the book, and pointed to its first entry. Rostnikov looked at the page held open before him and read where Karpo’s finger pointed: “On this day I begin my journal. Father Merhum keeps his journal with diligence and suggests that I do the same, that I share my soul with God and look back at my past, confess my sins, offer my gratitude to Him as Father Merhum does, and so I—”

  “Father Merhum kept a journal,” Rostnikov said, looking up. “Is that what you believe the killer was seeking?”

  “It is possible.”

  Rostnikov drank more tea and poured a cup for Karpo. “Humor me, Emil Karpo,” he said. “Have a cup of tea while I read.”

  Karpo took the cup and drank obediently.

  Rostnikov opened the book to the yellow tab nearest the front of the diary. It was dated May 2, 1959. He read:

  The son is come this day to Father Merhum and it brings him no joy. He confides in me and not his wife, and he does so without guilt. He does so knowing that I will say nothing. He does so knowing that it is for our Lord to judge if there is judgment to be made. He does so knowing that I will not judge. He has the power through God and he shall see his son through all the days of the rest of his life and that will be the burden of his guilt. He will be forever reminded that the Lord who gloried in his son looks down about his minion and sees th
at he shall not know this glory on earth.

  Hearken to me, you who know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law; fear not the reproach of men. …For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the work will eat them like wool; but my deliverance will be forever, and my salvation to all generations.

  Rostnikov looked up at Karpo, who had finished his tea and sat watching.

  “It is from the book of Isaiah,” said Karpo.

  Rostnikov tried to hide his surprise at his colleague’s knowledge.

  “She gave me a Bible last night,” he said. “I found it with little difficulty. If you turn to the next yellow tab, you will find that her entry begins with another quote from Isaiah.”

  Rostnikov turned many pages and found the tab on an entry marked “July 6, 1970.”

  For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces and was despised, and we esteemed him not.

  The entry for the day continued with,

  The Father is of the flesh and of the Spirit. He cannot deny the sins of flesh. That, he believes, is the curse which God has placed upon him, and so he devotes himself to the sins of others against all men. The saints learned that they must fall low before they might find true redemption.

  And each day Father Merhum sees him and is reminded.

  That was the end of the entry. Rostnikov looked up again. Emil Karpo was motionless. His jaws did not seem quite as rigid.

  “You are getting a headache?” Rostnikov asked.

  “I can function quite efficiently,” responded Karpo.

  “Emil Karpo, I must conclude that you do not wish to answer the question I have asked you.”

  “I have a headache,” Karpo said.

  Rostnikov was well aware that Karpo’s migraines were massive and painful and that Karpo would not take the pills that had been prescribed for him unless directly ordered to do so. For Karpo, to acknowledge pain was a sign of weakness. “Take a pill, Emil,” said Rostnikov.

  “It is probably too late. The aura has passed. It cannot be halted.”

  “Like the tea, it is an order.”

  Karpo rose, reached into his pocket, extracted a small bottle, removed a large white pill, put it into his mouth, bit it several times, and swallowed without the aid of tea or water. Rostnikov was sure, for he had smelled the pill, that the taste must be quite vile. Karpo put the bottle back in his pocket and sat again.

  “And what do you make of these entries?” asked Rostnikov.

  “That Father Merhum had a deep dislike for his son, and that the son represented some act about which the father was guilty.”

  “It would seem so,” agreed Rostnikov, considering whether to pour another cup of tea even though it had little taste. It was the recent memory of Karpo chewing the pill and the sudden empathy Rostnikov felt at that moment that decided him. “Emil, find me information on Father Merhum and his wife. Find me information on Merhum’s son. Find me photographs. Find what you can find.”

  Emil Karpo nodded and rose. “There is one more entry with a yellow tab,” he said. “At the end.”

  Rostnikov turned to that final entry of the previous day. It was very brief.

  “And the voice of the Holy Mother has said that the son slew the father. The laws of men shout that I must speak, but these are the laws of the men who have put a hand of iron over the mouth of the Holy Church and held it in place for nearly my entire lifetime. It is not the province of such men to decide the law, but it is the province of God. I shall leave it to Him. As Father Merhum lived with his guilt, so shall his son. And if the son comes to me, I shall tell him to seek the ear of the Holy Mother, who knows compassion even for those who have fallen most low.”

  Once again Rostnikov looked up.

  “The son killed him. And then he killed the nun,” said Karpo.

  “Emil,” said Rostnikov, with a great sigh, trying to inch his leg into a less distressed position. “The ‘voice of the Holy Mother’ told her. Are you telling me you now believe in religious visitations?”

  “No,” said Karpo.

  Rostnikov could see that his left eyebrow was definitely drooping slightly, a clear sign that the headache was mounting.

  “But I spoke to the woman and believe that her judgment was sound, that her intuition was grounded not in faith but experience.”

  “You liked the nun,” said Rostnikov.

  “I respected her,” said Karpo. “There is a difference.”

  Rostnikov said nothing. He continued to look at his deputy with no hint of a smile.

  “I liked her,” Karpo admitted.

  “Work, Emil Karpo. Work.”

  Karpo, understanding that he was dismissed, went quickly out the door.

  Rostnikov sat alone in the large room.

  He flipped through more pages of the diary, pausing here and there but certain that Karpo had read it carefully in spite of the brief time it had been in his possession.

  He stopped at the entry for Christmas 1962:

  Father Merhum and his son have returned from Pochaev. He was called to protest the closing of the monastery. The son insisted on joining him. Two years ago there were one hundred and fifty monks in Pochaev Monastery. Many were forced by the government to return to their native regions. Others were tried for breaking the passport laws. And some who protested were given medical examinations, judged insane, and placed in asylums.

  When Father Merhum reached Pochaev Monastery, there were thirty-seven monks still remaining, but a special commission of the USSR Council of Ministers came to the cloister and ordered the remaining monks to leave.

  Father Merhum and the monks protested to Patriarch Aleksii in Moscow and to Khrushchev. Nothing. Ten protesting priests have been imprisoned. Novice Grigorii Unku, God rest his soul, has been tortured to death.

  And then, just three days ago, the voluntary people’s militia of the Ternopol region came in trucks to beat the few remaining monks and priests and nuns and any who tried to help them. Armed KGB agents tore down the doors with iron bars, dragged the monks out by their legs, threw them in trucks, and drove them away while the people of the town who had gathered were driven back by water from hoses.

  Father Merhum has been hurt, but he does not complain. He has ribs which are broken. Though he had vowed to observe only, the son, too, bears a scar from trying to protect the father. His chest shall carry this stigmata, and I pray to our Lord that each time he looks in the mirror he will be reminded of this desecration of the birthday of our Redeemer.

  “You want to see me?” came a voice.

  Rostnikov had heard the boy enter, but had chosen not to look up. He had never heard of the Pochaev Monastery, though he knew many such incidents had taken place. He closed the book and put it to one side.

  The boy, grandson of Father Merhum, son of Peotor, stood at near attention, his eyes blinking as if stung by onions. He wore rough pants and a blue sweater at least a size too large. His hair was uncombed.

  “Please sit, Aleksandr Merhum,” Rostnikov said.

  The boy sat nervously. Rostnikov watched his eyes move to the book and then turn abruptly away, as if he had witnessed something forbidden.

  “Do you know what happened?” Rostnikov asked.

  “Sister Nina is dead.”

  Rostnikov did not have to ask what the boy thought of the murdered nun. It was there in his face, body, and the weakness of his voice. “And what do you think?” he asked, allowing his hand to rest on Sister Nina’s journal.

  The boy paused and then said, “It is not right. It is not fair. Whoever did it should have his eyes poked out with a twig.”

  “Life is not fair, Aleksandr Merhum. I discovered that fact when I was a soldier not much older than you are. You see I had built a long list of wrongs that remained to be
righted. I carried these injustices with me night and day. They made me very heavy. And then I realized. Life is not fair. It was a great relief.”

  “Sister Nina says … said things like that.”

  “You want some tea?”

  “No,” the boy answered.

  Rostnikov stirred sugar lumps into his tea and said, “Since yesterday I have been trying to remember the house in which I lived with my parents when I was your age. What it looked like, where my bed was, who I played with.”

  “Why?” asked the boy.

  “If I lose yesterday,” Rostnikov said with a smile, “I may lose today. And if I lose today, then what will tomorrow be worth?”

  “You are a strange policeman,” said the boy. “And I know what you are doing. You think my father killed Sister Nina. My father wouldn’t kill her. He wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “And what makes you think I believe he would hurt her?” asked Rostnikov, massaging his leg.

  “You are looking for him. Tovarish Gonsk, the policeman, and the … other policeman with you, they are looking for him. They told my mother. They can’t find him. They think he ran away.”

  “Did he?”

  “I … no.”

  “Have you ever seen this book, Aleksandr?” Rostnikov held up Sister Nina’s journal.

  Alexander’s mouth opened just a bit and then he closed it again. “No.”

  “Did your grandfather have a book like this, one he kept notes in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can tell when people have secrets,” Rostnikov said. “It’s part of being a policeman. Secrets cry to be shared and policemen keep them well. If we didn’t, people would never trust us.”

  “People don’t tru—” the boy began, and then stopped himself.

  “I’m a different kind of policeman, a strange policeman, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think about it.”

  “I—”

  “Where is your mother?”

  “Outside, waiting,” the boy said.

  “Go tell her to come in.”