Death of a Dissident Page 3

  At three o’clock that morning Ivan Sharikov dropped his fare on Lenin Avenue and accepted the eighty kopeks fare, knowing he would get no tip. Party officials gave no tips and Ivan expected none. The fare, heavily bundled and in bad humor, had slipped getting out of the cab as he walked to his apartment door. Ivan, whose neck was fat and slow, turned away hiding a satisfied grin, and flipped on the green light in his windshield to show he was free to take another fare. He slowly put his taxi into gear and backed into the street slipping as the thin, nearly bald tires tried to grab the street and clawed only at ice.

  Ivan’s prospect of making any real money that night was slim, but he owed too much and knew he could not sleep anyway with the pain in his back. When the pain got really bad, he considered going to the clinic, but the clinic wait might be hours, and the doctor, if he even got to see one, would send him back to work with meaningless pills or worse, he would be sent to the hospital ward and lose his chance to make up some of the money he owed his brother-in-law. In the old days, even a dozen years ago, he could have told his brother-in-law what to do with his loan, but time had reversed their positions. Ivan had grown fat, old, and tired and Misha had grown lean, hard, and resentful from his years at the packing house.

  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 recours
e, 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.

  “You drunk?” asked the driver with a sigh.

  “No,” he said, “I…I’ve been thinking and my mind is just…Take me to Petro Street.”

  “Where on Petro?”

  “One three six.”

  “You want a bottle?” Ivan held up a vodka bottle pulled from under the seat. “Two rubles.”

  The passenger reached forward and took the bottle. He opened it in darkness as the cab moved slowly forward, and he drank deeply, waiting for the sting of cheap vodka. Maybe it would give him a moment, just a moment of clarity. He felt if he could just break through, be sure, there would be a tremendous surge of power, strength. He wanted to be fully awake and aware. A man cannot cope if he is not awake and aware, not in control. He had learned that from Granovsky. He did not want to be a dreamer. He had almost been lost in dream those years earlier at the hospital. But there had been no comfort in the dream. It had sucked him deeper and deeper, drowning, as he called for wakefulness and had not been heard. It had taken long, and his family had abandoned him at his father’s decree. Slowly he had awakened and felt the touch of objects and people. He had gradually gotten better. Then he had met her, had met Granovsky. Granovsky had helped him. They had both helped him move from dream to reality, but he felt the tug of the dream again and knew he might slip back if he did not make a mighty effort. It had to be stopped. If he could be sure that he had done it, then it might stop. He drank from the bottle and this seemed to help.

  “It’s not the best, not American or Czech,” said the driver, unable to turn his fat neck, “but it’s not bad, right?”

  The passenger said nothing. He thought. He would wait for her. But what if his father’s voice were right? What if he hadn’t done it? He leaned forward toward the sweat smell and solidness of the driver, who sensed him and was startled.

  “My problem,” said the passenger, “is that I’m not sure if I did something tonight. If I didn’t do it, I can’t take the next step. Each thing must come in order. To do one without having done the other would make me a fool. Do you understand?”

  The driver grunted. He had hauled drunks and lunatics through the streets of Moscow for over thirty years and he had learned not to argue, simply to listen and agree. Ivan Sharikov had his own problem, the pain in his back that was too severe to ignore.

  “Moscow is a city of pain,” said the passenger.

  “True,” said the driver. The cab skidded on a patch of ice on the bridge across the Moscow River and spun slightly. The passenger said something else, but the driver was too busy with the skid to pay attention, though he caught the last few words:

  “…it again, but I couldn’t go back, could I?”

  “No,” the driver agreed, “you couldn’t.”

  For blocks the passenger was silent, and then fear came. He felt himself sinking into the dream. He felt panic and knew he had to talk, to claw with the fingers of his mind to stay in the world of cold and pain. In the rearview mirror, Ivan could see the passenger sweating as if it were half time in a summer soccer game.

  “You can’t know what it is like. Something has to be done. I have to feel, touch, know I’m here. If I did it, I have a purpose, things to do. I can wait for her.”

  At best, drunk, at worst, mad, Ivan was thinking, and he sped up slightly, afraid of skidding but eager to get rid of the sweating, babbling passenger and get to his room where he could wrap a blanket around his back.

  “If I act in this world, I stay in this world. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” grumbled Ivan.

  “He told me that. Granovsky told me that, and he was right. I used to think the whole world was a fake, cardboard sets like a play with everyone acting their roles. I used to think there was another world quite different from ours, and I could get to it if I could just get past one actor on the street, just make it around a corner before they had time to set up another façade. I have a sense of that coming back now. There’s no point asking you because if you’re part of it, you’ll lie. You see. I’m thinking logically again.”

  The passenger now leaned back into darkness and covered his face with his hands.

  “It’s logical,” said the passenger. “The only way to know is to do it again and do it right and feel it, have evidence, blood, something.”

  “Right,” said the driver, pushing the Volga to its swaying limit. “Just relax. We’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Then rooms would not grow and things would feel,” came the muffled voice from the rear followed by the sound of breaking glass.

  “Hey,” shouted the driver in anger mixed with fear, trying to look over his lump of a shoulder. “I just had that seat cleaned and…”

  At the corner of Petro Street and Gorky Place, eighty-year-old Vladimir Roshkov and his fifty-year-old son Pyotr were about to cross the street on their way to their small clothing store. The basement had flooded and they wanted an early start to clean it up before the business day began. The taxi came around the corner sideways in a mad skid catching Pyotr’s pants on a bumper, stripping him, and throwing him against a street light. Vladimir jumped back, looked at his startled son, and watched the taxi bounce over the curb and come to a solid stop against the wall across the street. Pyotr stepped forward dazed, bruised, and confused, and thought only of getting back home and putting on a pair of pants. Anger took a few moments to hit the father and son, who were strong, solid, and very slow of thought. When it came, it came to them both at the same moment and they strode toward the now silent cab. They took a few more steps forward and stopped.

  The black figure was covered with blood, but it was not the blood that stopped them. It was the fact that the man was laughing softly, not the laugh of hysteria, but the laugh of gentle pleasure. The man looked at the two figures in front of him, one in the snow without pants, laughed and ran down Petro Street. By the time the Roshkovs recovered their wits and hurried after him, the man was almost out of sight. They stopped, panting, with no heart for the pursuit and headed for the taxi.

  The wind was whipping Pyotr’s bare legs, and his father could not help thinking this would mean the police and questions and hours lost in draining the basement. He opened the front door of the cab saying to his son, “Go call the police—”

  As the door came open, the body of Ivan came tumbling out into the street, a lump of human with a face as red as his country’s flag.

  “Go, fast,” said Vladimir, waving at his son and considering whether the two of them should simply run away. He decided that someone might have seen them by now and to run might make them suspects in this murder. As Pyotr hurried bare-legged across the street and back to find a phone, a groan or sound came from the heap of blood in the snow.

  Vladimir forced himself to the side of the man and leaned forward.

  “Yes,” he said. “My son is getting the police. Don’t worry.”

  “Granovsky,” said Ivan Sharikov the cabman.

  “Granovsky?” repeated Vladimir Roshkov.

  Ivan nodded his bloody face in agreement and went silent.

  “Are you dead?” said Vladimir Roshkov.

  “I don’t
know,” replied Ivan the cabman who promptly died.

  The young police officer parked the yellow Volga in Dmitri Ulyanov Street and sat looking straight ahead the way he had been taught to do. He wondered why the Inspector did not get out of the car immediately and rush into the building, but he did not let his curiosity show with even the twitch of his face. He tried to think of nothing and was surprised at how easy it was to do so.

  Rostnikov knew that once he plunged into this case—with pressure from above and a good chance that he would come up with nothing—the days and the nights would begin to blend, he would grow weary and irritable; he would be uneasy until he had a desk full of possibilities and a suspect to talk to. If it was to be as it had been in the past, these were his last moments of ease before embracing the agony of the investigation and the torment of other people’s tragedies. He planned nothing. The case would define itself, carry him into branching streams and dead ends. He would float or fight as he saw fit, trying not to drown in paperwork and bureaucracy.

  He thought of his son’s face. It was a trick he used to relax. He forced himself to recall the boy’s features, to let the nose define the face and the mouth, to remember him as a child of fourteen, lean and uncertain, and as a young man of twenty-four, solid and curious. The mouth always came to Rostnikov as a stern line that had to be modified by a great effort of will. With concentration, the face of his son came to him and he smiled, let it go and stepped out of the car. The pre-dawn air was sharp and cold and clean compared to the enervating warmth of the Volga.