The Man Who Walked Like a Bear Read online

  As Karpo left the small office, Zelach and Tkach moved down the narrow aisle to the small head-to-head desks from which they worked.

  “Where do we start?” he heard Zelach ask, though Zelach, officially, was the senior officer. “Wherever it is, let’s stop for something to eat on the way.”

  Rostnikov emerged from the questioning room and moved slowly away toward the small cubicle that served as his office. The cubicle was a combination of plasterboard and plastic waist-high with windows reaching another two feet higher. There was no real door, just a narrow opening. Privacy was reserved for those of higher rank, which, several floors up, Rostnikov had once been. Porfiry Petrovich thought of none of this, nor of his wife or son, the plan he had for repairing the drain in the apartment of the Agarevas on the fourth floor of his building, or his leg.

  He stood next to his desk, deciding that it would not be worth the trouble to sit down and then rise again. Rostnikov flipped the page of his notebook with the drawing of the pipe connection and looked down at the notes he had taken about Ivan Bulgarin, the man who walked like a bear. One of the notes was the phone number of the Lentaka Shoe Factory. Porfiry Petrovich picked up the phone on his desk and through the window of his cubicle watched Emil Karpo at his desk reach into his jacket pocket and pull out a plastic container from which he extracted a pill, which he put on his tongue and swallowed dry.

  Rostnikov had noticed the signs of Karpo’s headache, the slight rise of the left eyebrow, the dryness of the narrow lips, the almost imperceptible flaring of the gaunt man’s nostrils.

  Ten minutes later, after having talked to five people at the factory and taken three pages of additional notes, Porfiry Petrovich hung up the receiver and looked beyond his cubicle window through the windows of Petrovka and into an early-afternoon thundershower. Rostnikov hoped the winter would come early this year. He savored the blanket of white silence, the clean isolation of the cold. He picked up the phone again and dialed the five numbers that would connect him to the office of the Gray Wolfhound.

  “It’s raining again,” Jalna Morchov said, looking out the window.

  She had arrived home only minutes earlier in the bus provided for the children of people of influence. Their dacha was twenty miles outside of Moscow in one of the small villages unofficially reserved for “special” people, high-ranking party members, artists, generals, and KGB directors and department heads. The Morchovs’ dacha was at the end of a lane protected by trees and a KGB car parked a few yards down the driveway. Jalna knew her father was home by the presence of the KGB car and the two men in it wearing brown suits.

  Andrei Morchov, who had been busy preparing a massive report on production drops resulting from ethnic unrest in the Ukraine, had been spending less time at the dacha and more time in his Moscow apartment. Since Jalna’s mother had died three years earlier, when Jalna was fourteen, her father had thrown himself into his work and into his mistress, a translator in the Telecommunications Division of the International Trade Center. Andrei Morchov was under the mistaken impression that his daughter knew nothing of Svetlana Petranskova.

  Yuri had told her. Yuri had discovered the relationship in his weeks of following her father. Yuri knew a great deal about Andrei Morchov, who was putting on his coat as Jalna spoke.

  “I must go back to the city,” Morchov said, looking out the window past his daughter.

  Andrei Morchov was a man of moderate height and usually described as slender. His pale brown hair was receding from his forehead, but there was about him an aura of confidence, strength. Jalna believed that her father was not conventionally handsome but did have the power to mesmerize, and that power had kept him from going under through five regimes. Jalna believed that none of her looks came from her father. She liked to tell Yuri that she had inherited everything from her mother and nothing from her father. She imagined secretly that Andrei Morchov was not her father, that she was the result of a single night between her mother and some army private, though her mother had never given anyone reason to believe she was anything but the frightened wife of a determined and emotionless man. Jalna was and knew she was beautiful, that she looked like her mother, slender, blond, pale, wide of mouth, and able to draw the eye of any man.

  “You will remain in the house for the rest of the day,” her father announced as he buttoned his raincoat.

  Jalna had no intention of remaining in the house.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have schoolwork to do.”

  “I will call to be sure you do,” he said.

  Jalna was sure he had no intention of calling, though he had been known to surprise her as he had surprised various enemies over the past three decades. It didn’t matter. If he called and she was not there, she could claim later that she fell asleep or was in the bath. He might not believe her, but that, too, did not matter. What he wanted would make no difference by next week.

  “Come,” he ordered, picking up his briefcase. Jalna moved to her father and kissed his cheek as quickly and dryly as possible. Before she could move away, he grasped her arms and looked into her face. She returned the probing look.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I see something in your eyes.”

  “What?”

  It was probably a trick. He saw nothing in her eyes, nothing, she told herself.

  “I don’t know. My own reflection, perhaps.”

  He let her go and she stepped back, willing herself not to tremble.

  “I haven’t done anything,” she said, trying to sound open, afraid her response might have a touch of defiance and a bit of telltale fear.

  “And you’ll not, not again,” he said.

  “Not that again,” she said. “I’m going to my room.”

  “That again,” he said firmly. “You’ll never cause me embarrassment again. Never. That is understood. We do not discuss it. You know the consequences.”

  She opened her eyes wide, the practiced innocence of seventeen years. Their eyes met, and Jalna was determined to hold out, to meet him, to prove her unprovable innocence, but he, as always, held firm, his eyes unblinking until she turned away. Once, only once had she been with a boy before she met Yuri, and that was the one time her father had caught her, caught her in bed on a night he was supposed to be in Tbilisi for a conference. She had told Yuri two days after she met him at the American Club on Gorky Street. He had understood, but her father had not, never would.

  “Be in bed by eleven,” he said, moving to the door. “I don’t know if I will be back before tomorrow.”

  Jalna was tempted to speak, to say something acrid, but she held her tongue. There was no need or would soon be none. In a world of winners and losers, she had always been a loser and her father a krepki khozyain, a strong master. But things would soon change.

  A smile swept her face, and her father touched her cheek as he moved past her and allowed a slight upturning of the right side of his mouth, which hinted at a smile.

  As he went through the front doorway of the dacha and closed the door behind him, Jalna continued to smile, to smile at the picture in her mind of her father lying quite still and dead.

  To get to the director of security at the Lentaka Shoe Factory, Porfiry Petrovich had to telephone the assistant to the factory director. The assistant, Raya Corspoyva, was the Communist Party representative at the factory. Rostnikov explained to her that he was conducting a routine update of the case of Ivan Bulgarin, who was now in the September 1947 Hospital. Bulgarin, he explained, had been involved in a minor incident at the hospital that had to be incorporated in his file.

  “Comrade Corspoyva said she understood and that it would not be necessary for the inspector to talk to the factory director. Instead, she told him what he already knew from the file.

  “Comrade Bulgarin was an unfortunate victim of overwork,” she said, and then paused.

  Rostnikov, who was seated at his desk, fingered the pages of the American paperback novel on his desk and repeated, “Overwork.”
/>   “Yes,” she went on. “Comrade Bulgarin was section foreman in plastic and leather processing. The factory is undergoing reform. Production was far behind reasonable quotas. The entire management had to be replaced.” Another pause.

  “I see,” said Rostnikov. He was getting more information than he asked for, but he had no intention of stopping her.

  “Comrade Bulgarin worked night and day,” she continued. “He is a glowing example of a revolutionary zeal that has been all but lost. He is a party member, a dedicated citizen, one of the peredoviki, the model workers.”

  The woman sounded to Rostnikov as if she were reading a tract written in the 1930s.

  “Almost a hero,” Rostnikov said to break the latest pause. “How long did he work there?”

  “Only a few months. He had been transferred from a wristwatch assembly plant in Kalinin. But he was magnificent. There was a slowdown in April. Comrade Bulgarin helped to break it. We need him back,” she said. “Production and processing in leather and plastics have been down. There has been petty pilfering and—”

  “Theft?” asked Rostnikov.

  “A few tools, odd pieces of material. Minor, yes, but indicative of the morale crisis that must be overcome,” she said emotionlessly. “You might wish to allude to that in your report, Comrade Inspector. Certain people might wish to consider further changes in the administration of this vital factory. Our nation cannot function without well-made shoes in which to work.”

  Rostnikov put the book in his pocket and followed the progress of a pair of uniformed MVD officers ushering a handcuffed man past Rostnikov’s office. The man wore an open-collared shirt with a tie dangling from his neck. The man was thin, with a belly. The man was smiling as if he held a secret that would protect him.

  “It would be awkward without shoes,” Rostnikov admitted.

  “You’ll put all this in your report?”

  “In detail,” Rostnikov said. “Bulgarin had no family? No wife? No mother?”

  “Correct,” said Raya Corspoyva. “He was wedded to his work. Fifteen, sixteen hours of work each day. Six, seven days a week.”

  “A saint?” Rostnikov tried.

  “A hero,” she replied. “Saints are for the decadent.”

  Ten minutes after hanging up the receiver, Rostnikov was walking alongside Colonel Snitkonoy, who was on his way to the massive black Zil limousine with dark-tinted windows that would take him to a reception for visiting American businessmen. Normally the colonel strode through Petrovka and life with long steps, never looking to right or left. He moved slowly now, allowing Rostnikov to keep up with him, adopting the manner of a highly attentive superior listening to a sensitive report.

  “… a series of thefts at the Lentaka Shoe Factory,” a clerk heard as she passed and received a nod from the Gray Wolfhound.

  “And you wish to investigate personally?” the Wolfhound said conspiratorially.

  “My staff is occupied with pressing matters that are fully documented in my day report, which will be on your desk when you return,” said Rostnikov softly. “I believe I can deal with this quickly. Our nation cannot function without well-made shoes in which to work.”

  They stopped in front of the elevator, where the thin, smiling, handcuffed man with a belly was being attended by one of the two MVD officers.

  “Boots,” said the Wolfhound pensively. “Does the factory make boots?”

  “I don’t know,” said Rostnikov. “But I’ll find out.”

  “Good,” said the Wolfhound, stepping into the elevator and facing front.

  The MVD men entered the elevator with their prisoner and also faced forward. The thin, handcuffed man’s eyes met Rostnikov’s and the knowing smile suddenly disappeared, replaced by a look of panic. Rostnikov gave the man a small, wry smile and nodded almost imperceptibly. As the elevator doors closed, the man tried out a new smile, a slightly less mad smile of resignation.

  Boris had driven the bus like a robot where he was told. The young man said turn, Boris turned. Right, left. It was hard to think of anything but the gun against his neck and the dead man who had been pushed down and out of sight by the man in the long coat. Boris was vaguely aware of passing the Yaroslavi Railway Station and heading away from the city on Rusakovskaya Street. A bus came toward him once and passed, and Boris thought the driver had a puzzled look on his face as he glanced at the out-of-route bus heading away from the city, but Boris had not looked closely. Perhaps it was only his imagination. Besides, did he really want to be discovered? What if the police did locate him, surround the bus? There would be shooting. What would the police care about the life of a loyal bus driver who had worked diligently for more than twenty-five years, who had never done anything to disgrace the company and had never missed a day of work for anything but illness and understandably bad reactions to vodka?

  “Pay attention,” the young man said. “We turn here.”

  Boris nodded. He couldn’t speak. His eyes went up to the mirror. The older man sat about halfway back in the bus, looking out the window as if he were on his way home from work.

  Perhaps it would be better if the police did come. These men might simply be planning to kill him when they got where they were going.

  “What’s your name?” the young man said. He was standing behind Boris and softly humming some foreign song.

  “You already asked … Boris,” the driver said, amazed that he could get sound through his dry lips. A small drink. That’s all he needed. A very small one.

  Boris drove the bus down a heavily rutted road in a broad field in which nothing seemed to be planted but miles of weeds.

  “I … the road is too narrow,” Boris chattered.

  “It is wide enough,” the older man in the back said softly, dreamily. “We measured. Drive slowly.”

  “Drive slowly,” the young man repeated happily. “Are you excited, driver Boris? Afraid?”

  “I have a large family, a wife, a mother, four children,” Boris repeated his lie. If the young man had forgotten his name, he might also have forgotten their earlier conversation about the children.

  “Too many children, Boris,” the young man said. “Unpatriotic. You are not a good citizen.”

  “They are all adopted,” Boris said. The barrel of the pistol clunked against his ear as the bus hit a wide dent in the road.

  “Adopted?”

  “Orphans,” Boris said.

  “You’re a true hero of the revolution, Boris,” the young man said. “And you are a liar. There, to the right, that house there.”

  Boris slowly turned the bus toward a small sagging wooden house in the open field. The road was even more narrow and difficult to navigate.

  “You know what happens to heroes and saints, Boris?” the young man whispered. “If they are lucky, they become martyrs.”

  FIVE

  EMIL KARPO’S HEAD WAS aflame with pain. He ignored it. Or at least he worked through it. He was well aware that the pain was an impediment that even if ignored would take a toll, but he also knew that it would eventually—an hour, two or three at the most—pass. Perhaps the pill had had some effect.

  He had purposely decided to walk in the hope that when he arrived at his destination the cool air would aid him and the pill would have time to work. He crossed Gorkovo to the City Hall side and moved south and downhill toward Red Square and came to a series of large, forty-year-old Victorian-looking apartment houses on the right.

  He found the correct building and paused. In front of it, parked by special permit, was a black Zil, not unlike the one assigned to the Gray Wolfhound, but this one had gray curtains to hide the passengers from the gaze of the people on the street. The polished granite of the building that faced the street level in front of him came, Emil Karpo knew, from a quarry captured by the Soviet army at the end of the war against the Axis. The Nazis had planned to use the granite to erect a monument to celebrate the defeat of the Soviet Union. The building behind the granite facade and those surrounding it
housed special people—bureaucrats, foreigners, including Americans and even Germans with business in Moscow, and upper-rank party members, nachalstvo, bosses like Andrei Morchov who also had dachas just outside the city.

  There were far more prestigious addresses in Moscow: 26 Kutuzov Prospekt, for example, a nine-story apartment building where premiers, KGB chiefs, and ministers traditionally maintained vast apartments. The Gorkovo address was a bit safer, less ambitious, a statement that the inhabitants were content at their level, at least for the moment.

  A well-built man in a dull, dark suit and striped tie looked at Karpo through the thick glass of the door. Karpo welcomed, savored the wave of sharp pain on the right side of his head followed by nausea. This wave had come before during his headaches. Mastering the unexpected was a challenge, a test that kept him on guard. That the challenge frequently came from his own body did not strike Emil Karpo as strange or ironic.

  He opened his identification folder and displayed his photograph and identification card. The well-built man opened the door.

  “Come,” the man said when the door closed behind them.

  The tiled entranceway smelled of lilacs, though Karpo was sure that there were no lilacs nearby, that it was his migraine trying to trick him. He followed the man to a stairway in the rear of the building and they moved upward in soft light, wooden steps creaking beneath them. The man said nothing. Neither did Emil Karpo as they went up two flights and through a door that opened quietly onto a carpeted hallway. The man turned to his right and headed to the end of the hallway, where a door faced them. The man knocked gently, carefully, not too loud and insistent but loud enough to be heard if someone was expecting a caller. The door opened.

  The slender man before Karpo wore a loose-fitting gray sweat suit. His hair was wet with perspiration and slightly unkempt. The man brushed his hair back, adjusted the glasses on his nose, looked at Karpo, and nodded at the man who had led the detective to the apartment.

  Andrei Morchov nodded and the well-built man turned away and headed down the hallway. Morchov stepped back and allowed Karpo to enter. When the door closed behind them, Morchov produced a towel and dabbed his face as he led the detective down a small hallway decorated with Oriental figures and a metallic figure in bronze hanging from the ceiling.