Death Of A Russian Priest Read online

  The assistant procurator adjusted his spectacles and looked at Rostnikov. “I … we lived in an apartment,” he answered, clutching his brown briefcase protectively to his side.

  Rostnikov nodded. “What good is the past if we cannot remember it?” he said. “A woman named Galina Panishkoya reminded me of that earlier.”

  “Galina … ?”

  “We remember only the shared past we are taught,” Rostnikov went on, “the history of czars and commissars, premiers, generals, scientists, and presidents. We can be reasonably sure that at some point in our lives even that will be revised.”

  They had moved another few paces closer to the guard window. The assistant procurator was looking decidedly uncomfortable. “History is …” he began, and then paused.

  “… elusive,” concluded Rostnikov. “Nostalgia, the history of our own lives, is too often demeaned as trivia. And that demeans each of us.”

  “Indeed,” agreed Lavertnikov as he turned to show his identification card.

  “It’s not madness,” said Rostnikov. “It is chaos. And they are not quite the same thing.”

  The guard waved the assistant procurator in and turned to Rostnikov, who held up his photo identification card. The young man in uniform looked at it, then at Rostnikov, then back at the card before nodding him on.

  Beyond the gate Petrovka 38 is modern, utilitarian, and very busy. Police officers wearing the gray uniforms with red braid and investigators of the MVD, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in their blue suits stream in and out of the building throughout the day and night. All are wondering if they will be uniformed at the same hour next week, which leads to a sense of irritability spoken of only behind closed doors and only among friends.

  Just inside the inner doors at the top of the wide steps in each wing of Petrovka 38 stand uniformed officers armed with automatic weapons. Where there were two, there are now six. They have been told to watch not for disgruntled Arabs or separatists as in the past, but for old-guard Communists who might go mad like those postal clerks in America who seem to run amok every month or two because they’ve lost their routes, jobs, or bonuses.

  Rostnikov moved up the steps past the armed guards and into the overwhelming warmth of the building. Since the fall of the union someone had decided that Petrovka needed more heat. It was probably impossible to determine who made this decision, but the building had become soporific.

  On the top floor of Petrovka, in the right tower facing the narrow street, is the office of the director of special projects, Colonel Aleksandr Snitkonoy. On this morning three men sat at the oak conference table in the office of Colonel Snitkonoy, their backs to the door, as the colonel paced in front of them and spoke in the commanding deep voice that had made him a favorite speaker at factory openings and funerals of military and party leaders.

  The three men watched the colonel, known throughout the MVD as the Gray Wolfhound. The colonel was tall and slender, with distinguished-looking gray hair at his temples. He wore a brown uniform, perfectly pressed. His many medals and ribbons of honor were neatly aligned on his chest. One of the ribbons commemorated his legendary speech in Prague in 1968 when he turned a rabble crowd of irate young Czechs with promises that were never delivered upon. The speech had been spoken in perfect Czech. The colonel’s latest ribbon had come when his men had thwarted an assassination attempt on President Gorbachev.

  During the days of confusion when Yeltsin had barricaded himself in the Parliament Building, Colonel Snitkonoy had found himself torn between two apparently conflicting orders, one from Major General Gurov himself commanding him and his men to support the loyal militia preparing to storm the parliament, and one from a KGB source whose name was indecipherably signed at the bottom of a hand-delivered directive ordering the Department of Special Projects to resist all efforts to undermine the revolution.

  The colonel, confused but dignified, had assembled his small staff, manned all phones twenty-four hours a day for the entire week of conflict, and reassured all callers, and there were few, that his office would follow only the orders of those legally empowered to issue them. The result was that he and his staff followed no orders at all until it was quite clear who was in charge.

  The result of this position was inaction with the appearance of great activity.

  In appreciation of the work and loyalty of the Special Section during the days of tension, the colonel had been given responsibility for “various matters of a delicate investigatory nature as they arise in the newly independent Republic of Russia.”

  The colonel was vaguely aware that his mission prior to the new directive had been almost entirely ceremonial, but all that had changed. The Gray Wolfhound and his men now had the official responsibility for politically sensitive cases that no other branch would touch. In short, the Gray Wolfhound’s Special Section was now the unofficial scapegoat of the new and not yet clearly defined criminal justice system.

  Colonel Snitkonoy, hands folded behind his back, head held high, continued his regular early-morning meeting, a meeting he had called an hour earlier than usual. “The union for which our fathers fought and died has come asunder. The revolution is over and the images of Lenin are crushed. As Marx said, ‘The task I have set myself is to sweep away the stumbling block which people under the guise of Marxism are offering as order but which is something incredibly muddled, confused, and reactionary.’ And therefore, comrades, we must make the present better so that our children and their children will have a past worth remembering.”

  Colonel Snitkonoy had no children and, in fact, had never married, as those who listened knew. He lived in a dacha just outside of Moscow beyond the Greater Ring Road with his former military aide and a woman who served as his cook-housekeeper. It was rumored that his monthly salary was now fifteen thousand rubles compared with the maximum four hundred and twenty rubles a month a uniformed policeman could earn.

  The colonel paused at his favorite morning spot, where the sunlight, what there was of it, outlined him dramatically for those who sat before him. “And now, comrades, to our task.”

  He looked at the trio at the table and smiled enigmatically. He meant that sly smile to suggest that he was about to give them a philosophical puzzle that only the brightest of them might be able to solve.

  The men were looking at the papers in front of them when Rostnikov entered the room behind them. He removed his coat, placed it on an empty chair at the end of the table, and sat.

  The colonel looked at the new arrival. Rostnikov looked back at him emotionlessly, then pulled a pad of paper in front of him, removed a Japanese-made Rolling Writer pen from his pocket and began to write.

  “Events move quickly in troubled times,” Snitkonoy announced. “A revolution can take place in a moment.”

  The three other men at the table looked at Rostnikov, who continued to write on his pad.

  “Promptness is essential,” continued the colonel.

  Since Rostnikov continued to write without looking up, the colonel turned his attention to his assistant, Pankov, a very small man with thinning hair who held his job primarily because he was such a perfect foil for the colonel. Whereas the colonel, in emulation of the American General MacArthur, changed his clothes three times a day and always smelled fresh and ready for battle, Pankov had been a perspirer even in the days when Petrovka was kept frigid. He was always uncertain, his clothes were always rumpled, and his few strands of hair were unwilling to obey even the most determined attempts to tame them with oil. In appreciation of his assistant’s total inadequacy the colonel never failed to treat Pankov as if he were a bewildered child.

  “Pankov,” the Wolfhound said gently but firmly. “Schedule.”

  Pankov shuddered as if someone had placed an ice chip from the Moscow River down his back.

  “Formatov and Seekle,” he began, “are to report this morning on the thieves who are attacking shoppers in the Cherymushinsky farm market, grabbing their shopping bags, cutting their avoska, their
string bags, and—”

  Pankov stopped suddenly: The colonel was bored. His department was now beyond such pettiness. “We must continue to improve our efficiency,” he concluded abruptly.

  Though the statement made no sense under the circumstances, the Wolfhound nodded indulgently and turned to the man sitting to Pankov’s left, Major Andrei Grigorovich, a blocky man in his mid-forties who had once offended a general without knowing why and, as punishment, had been assigned to the Gray Wolfhound. Considering the recent transfers and suicides (one by way of three bullets to the head) of many ranking members of the KGB and MVD, Major Grigorovich regarded his offense as a good career move. Now he nurtured a renewed spark of the ambition he had once held. With the recent elevation of the Special Section, the major believed it was only a matter of time until the new minister of the interior came to the same conclusion Major Grigorovich had about Colonel Snitkonoy’s competence.

  “The daughter of the Syrian oil minister is still missing,” Grigorovich said. “Progress is slow. I suggest—”

  “Who is on the case?” asked the colonel.

  “Tkach and Timofeyeva,” replied Grigorovich with a touch of scorn in his voice. Sasha Tkach and Elena Timofeyeva were not among those in the Special Section aligned with the major. They, like Emil Karpo, the tall specter to Grigorovich’s right, were known allies of his painfully unambitious rival, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, who sat at the end of the table. Grigorovich noted that Rostnikov had not looked up from his notes since being seated.

  “Bring me their reports when they return,” said Colonel Snitkonoy. He turned his gray eyes on Karpo. Colonel Snitkonoy did not like being eye to eye with Investigator Emil Karpo, the unblinking Tatar with thinning hair. Karpo was called “the Vampire” behind his back. To Snitkonoy he looked more like the man who played the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a German silent film he had seen at the Moscow Film Festival of 1984, where the colonel had served as official government host.

  “Comrade …” he began, and then corrected himself. “Citizen Karpo.”

  “Written reports on the telephone exchange suicide, the woman who claims her dead husband is not dead and is trying to kill her, and the—”

  “Old business,” the colonel interrupted. “You must put old business aside. Do you know how many unsolved crimes we have in the records room for the past five years alone?”

  “Four thousand three hundred and six as of Monday,” Karpo replied seriously.

  “Four thousand three hundred and six,” the Wolfhound repeated, as if Karpo had just come up with the correct answer, which the colonel knew as well as he knew his own military ribbons.

  “Anything else, Karpo?” he asked indulgently.

  “It was Lenin,” said Karpo.

  “Lenin?” repeated Colonel Snitkonoy.

  “Lenin, not Marx, who said, ‘Namely, the task I set myself …’”

  “Yes.” The colonel sighed. “It was Lenin, not Marx. You did not fall into my little trap. Porfiry Petrovich,” he now said, “you are to put aside whatever you are working on and take up an emergency case. It involves Prahvahslahvnahyah tsehrkaf, the Orthodox Church.”

  It had long been believed by all who attended these morning meetings that the man known as the Washtub missed not a word, not a nuance. However, for the past few minutes, Rostnikov had been paying little attention to the Gray Wolfhound. He had been trying to remember precisely the small one-bedroom apartment in which he had grown up on Leningrad Prospekt. After his conversation with Galina Panishkoya that morning it seemed a very important task. The house was long gone, replaced by a poured-concrete Stalinist high rise with frightened oblong window eyes.

  His bed had been right by the window in his parents’ room. He had drawn the bed carefully with his pencil, right down to the remembered pattern of faded flowers on the quilt. But what about the sofa, the walls, the chairs? Had there been three? He could remember only two vividly, but a third chair, with a high back and a carving …

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” the Wolfhound repeated, and with a sigh Inspector Rostnikov put down his pen and looked up at the waiting colonel.

  The colonel continued, “A case has come to us regarding an important church matter which will soon be brought to the attention of the public.” He paused, prepared to stun his staff with the name of the infamous priest.

  “Merhum,” said Rostnikov. “Father Vasili Merhum. He was murdered yesterday in the woods of Arkush. Ax blows to the front and to the back of the head. He managed to crawl to his nearby cottage. There he muttered a few words to his housekeeper, an old nun.”

  The meeting was on the verge of becoming a disaster, but with military genius the Gray Wolfhound smiled. He had perfect strong teeth. “And do you know what those words were?” he asked. He did not know the words himself, nor had he known that words had been muttered, but he had been assured by his superiors that the death of the priest had been kept quiet, that the town of Arkush had been effectively sealed, that—

  “Sister, Oleg must forgive me,” said Karpo.

  Major Grigorovich placed his pencil neatly atop the pad before him. The battle with Rostnikov was definitely lost for the day. It was time to lay down his arms and prepare for another tomorrow. He would quietly explore the mystery of how Rostnikov and his men had learned of the murder.

  He suspected that the information had come to Karpo from Kosnitsov, the forensic scientist who worked in the bowels of Petrovka. Kosnitsov would have already examined samples of the victim’s hair and blood and bits of his clothing. He would have relayed his findings to Karpo and Rostnikov.

  “Sister Oleg,” said the colonel.

  “His housekeeper was a nun,” explained Rostnikov. “It was into her arms that he crawled and in her arms he died. “

  “Her name is Oleg?” Pankov asked incredulously.

  The colonel gave his assistant an imperious look of pity and ignored his question. “You will go to Arkush immediately,” he said to Rostnikov. “You and Investigator Karpo. Father Merhum was, as you all know, well known for his frankness. It is particularly awkward at this crucial moment in our history that such a tragedy should take place. Father Merhum was scheduled to make a highly critical speech here in Moscow. The speech, which attacks those at the highest level, is in the hands of the foreign press. President Yeltsin himself will tomorrow issue the following statement …”

  Snitkonoy looked at Rostnikov to see if he also knew this, but Porfiry Petrovich’s face betrayed nothing.

  The colonel went to his desk, lifted a spotless manila folder, removed a typed sheet and read: “The death of this innocent, revered citizen is a tragedy we must all feel. We shall spare no effort in finding the person or persons responsible for killing this respected figure.’

  “The honor of this investigation, the confidence of the president himself, has been granted to us,” said the Wolfhound, gently returning the sheet to the folder and placing the folder even more gently back on his dark well-polished desk.

  Which means, thought Rostnikov, that if the killer is not found, it will be considered a government cover-up. If the killer is found, it will be accepted as a frame-up. The situation was a familiar one. A change of flags did not change a national psyche.

  “Pankov has a complete file for you,” the colonel said. “You may take a car. Do you have any questions? Do you have any ideas with which to begin?”

  “Oleg,” said Inspector Rostnikov, looking down at the drawing he had made of his family’s house.

  The colonel was seated, his hands flat on the surface of his desk. He said, “It is likely the priest was simply babbling. However, he may well have been identifying his attacker. Perhaps, in his confusion, someone named Oleg. Perhaps the sister of someone named Oleg.”

  Rostnikov stood, steadying himself with both hands on the desk to keep his too-long-motionless leg from betraying him. “Very likely,” he agreed. “Under the circumstances it is probably best that I take immediate action.”
/>   The colonel looked at Rostnikov, as did Major Grigorovich and Pankov. Only Emil Karpo, who also rose silently, did not look at him.

  Major Grigorovich reached for the pencil he had set down only moments earlier. The battle, it seemed, was not completely lost. It was possible that Rostnikov’s mission would result in total disaster.

  THREE

  THREE MILES AWAY FROM Petrovka, near the Arbat pedestrian mall, Special Section investigators Sasha Tkach and Elena Timofeyeya were waiting in line.

  Lines are a way of life in Russia. There are housewives and house husbands, babushkas and grandfathers, who spend their lives in lines. People go mad in lines, come to the major decisions of their lives in lines, get their principal education and entertainment from the books they read in lines, and make lifelong friends and enemies in lines.

  In this particular line there were eight people ahead of Sasha to buy pizza from the big white truck. Though few could afford it, pizza had replaced McDonald’s burgers as the new rage in Moscow.

  Sasha’s ears were cold and he didn’t particularly want to try pizza, though Elena, who had spent two years studying English and English history in Boston, said it was “passable” pizza, nothing like in the state-run shops, where it tasted like baked pencil shavings. Nor was it anything like the pizza in the Pizza Hut across from the Intourist Hotel. But, she insisted, it was not bad.

  Sasha did not really care about the quality of the pizza. He could afford neither pizza nor anything else on the Arbat now that the price of everything had gone up with Yeltsin’s free-market insanity. He had a wife, a child, another on the way, a mother. Elena had no one to support but herself and she lived with her aunt, who had, no doubt, a comfortable government pension. Elena could afford pizzas.

  Now that they were approaching the open window from which the pizzas were dispensed, Sasha could smell the dough and the cheese. It was a warm smell of something in the past and it made him even more irritable. “We should be at the Nikolai,” he grumbled, without looking at his new partner.