Death Of A Russian Priest

FOUR

Before he left Petrovka, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov called his wife. He knew she would be home. Sarah was recovering from surgery for a brain tumor. The operation had gone well, but the recovery was taking much longer than they had expected. They had gone on a vacation to Yalta, which had not been much of a rest, and some progress had been made, but Sarah still grew dizzy if she walked more than a few blocks and she needed at least ten hours of sleep each night.

“You’re home,” he said when she answered the phone.

“I was about to go through the door when you called,” she said. “I’m trying out for the circus in an hour.”

“Trapeze?” he asked.

“High wire. Only the Americans and the Brazilians still do trapeze. What’s the bad news?”

He was doodling again, trying to find … “I’ve got to go to Arkush today. I may not be back tonight. A priest has been murdered. Father Merhum.”

There was a silence on the line and then a sigh. “Iosef’s play,” she said.

Their son had been out of the army for almost six months, and a play he had written about his experiences in Afghanistan was scheduled to open that night.

“I’ll try to come back,” he said.

“Father Merhum,” she said. “Isn’t he the one …?”

“Yes.”

“Who would …?”

“That’s why I am going.”

She laughed. Her laugh had not changed and it always broke his heart. He had known her since she was a young girl, and now he saw a few film frames of the young pale girl with the long red hair laughing in the park. It was a laugh filled with sadness.

“Try to get back for the play,” she said.

“You’ll be all right?”

“My cousin Gittel will be here this afternoon.”

“Good,” he said. “Sarah, you remember my family’s apartment near the Arbat?”

“I was only in it twice,” she said.

“Were there three chairs in the bedroom or two?”

“I don’t know, Porfiry. Is it important?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “I will be back tonight if I can. If not, I will call Iosef and tell him we will come tomorrow.”

“They still murder priests,” she said. “The Cossacks are back in the street.”

Sarah’s uncle, her father’s brother Lev, had been a rabbi. Just before services on a Friday afternoon in the winter of 1940, before Rostnikov had met his future wife, her uncle had been taken by the police and never returned. And when Sarah had married a policeman, a gentile policeman, most of her family had ceased to speak to her.

There was a silence. Then Rostnikov said, “I must go.”

“I think there were two chairs,” she said. “And a sofa.”

“Yes, perhaps. Rest.”

And she hung up.

Rostnikov stood and massaged his leg in the privacy of his tiny, unbearably hot, windowless office. He considered what he might need for his trip and decided he required his briefcase, which contained a clean shirt, a toothbrush, a book, and a change of underwear. He removed the briefcase from beneath his desk and walked into the next room, where Emil Karpo was hanging up the phone.

Rostnikov wondered if Karpo’s call had been to Mathilde Verson. Mathilde was the prostitute Karpo now visited every Thursday evening. Today was Thursday. Though she was a prostitute, she was also a friend. For four years Karpo had lived under the illusion that no one knew of his relationship with Mathilde Verson. Karpo the emotionless, unsmiling vampire in black, devoted only to his work and the party, wanted no one to know of his human need.

But Rostnikov had discovered the relationship, and Karpo had learned to accept this exposure just as he had learned to accept the need. At first he had seen his relationship with Mathilde as a weakness. Over the past year, however, he had begun to recognize that his dependency on her went beyond the animal needs of his body.

Mathilde was a large woman of forty, with a handsome face and billowing red hair. She worked as a telephone operator during the day and as a prostitute at night and on weekends. Age and increased competition from young girls seeking survival had cut into her clientele and she had seriously begun to consider retirement.

“We are ready?”

“I am ready,” said Karpo, picking up a black plastic briefcase.

“Then,” said Rostnikov, “we are off to see the wizard.”

“He was a priest,” Karpo said. They walked along the aisle between desks where a few investigators were on the phones or talking to each other. Far off in the Petrovka 38 kennels dogs began barking.

“I think I have an assignment for you, Emil Karpo,” Rostnikov said. Approaching the elevator, they passed a trio of uniformed officers guiding a very sullen and bruised little man. The little man glanced up at Karpo’s face, turned white, and looked away, a bit less sullen than before. “Learn a joke and tell it to me.”

“A joke?”

“Something that makes people laugh,” said Rostnikov.

“What would be the function of my learning to tell you a joke?” Karpo asked as the elevator reached the sixth floor, its door opened, and out stepped a plainclothes officer and a group of civilians, all male, who hurried in the direction of the three policemen and the sullen little man they had passed.

“To broaden your emotional potential. To make you better company on train rides such as the one we are about to take,” explained Rostnikov as both men stepped into the elevator.

“It will be a waste of our time,” said Karpo. “Every minute I spend learning a functionless joke could be devoted to the investigation of a crime. A minute lost might hinder the successful conclusion of an investigation or the apprehension of a criminal who might need that minute to run or cover his trail.”

“That is reasonable,” Rostnikov agreed. “But if you develop a sense of humor, you will have greater insight into the workings of people’s minds. This will make you more capable of understanding them, innocent and criminal alike.”

They reached the main floor and the elevator doors opened.

“I will leave understanding to you, Inspector. I prefer procedure and no distraction. Understanding makes me uncomfortable.”

The six uniformed and armed young men in the lobby glanced at the familiar figures of the Washtub and the Vampire and turned their eyes away to scan the faces of those who were entering.

There was a car waiting for them at the curb on Petrovka Street, a Moskovitch. Since the triumphant rescue of the kidnapped President Gorbachev and the alignment of the Special Projects office with the new government, the Gray Wolfhound’s men had reasonable access to motor-pool vehicles and drivers. Rostnikov had not as yet been given one of the BMWs that were being added to the police transport pool, but a cramped Moskovitch might be better than no car at all. The assignment of a car and driver was, in fact, often no great saving in time, since the metro was much faster than a car even in the privileged center lanes of the larger streets. But the Wolfhound insisted that his staff drive whenever possible.

There was an additional problem. It was also well known that in the past drivers were often KGB informers within the MVD who reported on conversations within the supposed privacy of the assigned cars. This had led to long, silent, and boring automobile rides or conversations with the drivers about safe issues. Rostnikov was not yet sure that this situation would not return and so he chose to remain uncomfortable.

“A moment,” said Rostnikov, moving past the car to a kvass cart a few yards down. There was no line, and like most Muscovites, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov could not resist the opportunity to buy something without having to wait in line.

“Mahlyeneen’koσyoo pahzhah, a small one,” he told the old woman bundled in a coat, gloves, and babushka seated on a rickety wooden folding chair next to the cart. “You want one, Emil?”

“No.”

“Ask the driver.”

Karpo approached the car, leaned forward, conferred with the driver, then called out again, “No.”

The old woman filled a plastic cup with the dark liquid and handed it to Rostnikov, who drank it without haste while Karpo stood patiently at his side.

“Good,” said Rostnikov, dropping the empty cup in the tin can on top of the cart.

The old woman, whose face was very round and red, responded with the hint of a smile.

When they were seated in the rear of the car, Rostnikov said, “My father believed that kvass was like medicine, the mixture of black bread and yeast stimulated the body fluids.”

“It’s possible,” said Karpo.

“There are fewer and fewer carts in the city,” said Rostnikov with a sigh. “Do you remember the apartment in which you were a small boy?”

“Yes,” said Karpo.

“In detail? Where the chairs, beds, tables, windows were?”

“Yes.”

“About the joke. You don’t have to learn one. I was joking.”

“I see,” said Karpo, looking straight ahead and making it quite clear that he saw nothing.

There were only two people Emil Karpo trusted, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov and Mathilde Verson. He did not always understand either of them, but he had come to the conclusion that not only could they be relied upon but that they had strong feelings for him. Since he was well aware that there was no humor or warmth within him, he found their feelings inexplicable and meaningful.

For more than forty years of his life all meaning had been contained in the Soviet state and the revolution. The function of Emil Karpo had been to obey his superiors and to locate and bring to justice all criminals, all enemies of the revolution.

The union was gone. The Soviet Socialist Republics were now a commonwealth of sovereign states. Leningrad was once again St. Petersburg. They had even gotten rid of the hammer and sickle and designed a flag that seemed no flag. Next, he thought, there would be a return to the two-headed eagle of the czars. The party was underground, crying in pain, dying. The revolution was gone and there was nothing ahead but a gray imitation of the Western democracies.

Meaning was disappearing, but what little there was he clung to. His faith and loyalty had lost their certainty and there were moments when panic threatened to break through, moments that were longer each time they came. And each time the moment was accompanied by the headaches, the headaches that he still welcomed, that still tested him as they had since he was a boy. There were still the headaches and he could still welcome them. There were still criminals and they could be identified. He wondered if Porfiry Petrovich was aware of these moments of doubt.

Rostnikov was looking out the window making a sound that might have been humming and might simply have been a sound. “Were your grandparents religious, Emil Karpo? Did they believe in a god?”

“They were members of the Orthodox Church,” said Karpo. “They died long before I was born.”

They drove the rest of the way to the train station in silence.

Through a curtained window slightly parted so that he could look out onto what had recently been Dzerzhinsky Square, Colonel Vladimir Lunacharski looked down at the group of tourists gathering for a guided tour of Lubyanka, the former headquarters of the Committee for State Security, the KGB. The tour guide was pointing to the empty pedestal in the center of the square where the statue of Iron Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Secret Police, had stood until the rabble had torn it down. There were rumors that Lubyanka, too, would either be torn down or turned into a government office building.

The tourists would pass by his office door sometime later that morning, whispering such rumors in foreign languages, looking at everything as if they were in some Byzantine church.

Cars circled the square, headed toward the heart of Moscow. A small group of people gathered in front of the toy store beyond the square.

The colonel suppressed a sigh. He had no great love for these changes, for this new Russia that brought Americans and jabbering Germans galloping past his office. Independence had resulted in a demotion for him. Well, they had not called it a demotion.

The fifth directorate, the directorate responsible for monitoring the activities of dissidents, the directorate in which Vladimir Ivanovich Lunacharski had served for thirty years, had been reorganized even before the collapse of the union. Its name had been changed first to Directorate Z, but now, for almost a year, it had been called the directorate for safeguarding the constitution. This reorganization, the tours of Lubyanka, had all come about after the KGB’s power had been transferred from the Politburo to the Supreme Soviet, implying greater scrutiny over the KGB’s activities. But that, too, had changed, and now every day there were new laws and new restrictions. Lunacharski did not even know with certainty from day to day what organization, if any, he worked for.

The KGB had, since its inception, been at the service of the Communist party. Now all security forces within the Russian borders were under the direct control of the egomaniac Yeltsin and his young idealists.

But General Karsnikov had assured him that the collegium, the highest decision-making body of the KGB, would remain strong, that the nation needed the confidence and control of the security apparatus, whatever they chose to call it. Of this, General Karsnikov had no doubts. General Karsnikov had called Colonel Lunacharski into his office on the first floor less than a month ago to tell him all of this. The office, with large, modern furnishings, sturdy chairs, and a circular conference table for six, had not changed in twenty years, and the large photograph of Lenin still hung on the wall near the door.

Others had removed their Lenin photos and paintings and replaced them with nothing, but General Karsnikov had left his where it had always been, a sign that for him the change would not come simply, that too many lives had been invested in the institution to give it up with a whimper.

“Changes will have to be made,” the general had said.

He was a heavy man who liked to wear uniforms but had ceased doing so a week before Russia declared its independence. Colonel Lunacharski had done the same.

Colonel Lunacharski was fifty-one years old. His weight, maintained by vigorous exercise and diet, was the same as it had been when he had entered the service at the age of twenty-one, the son of a hero of the revolution and the war against the Nazis. Lunacharski always stood erect and kept his still-dark hair cut military style. Lunacharski’s one regret was that he was not quite five and a half feet tall. He was determined that this lack of height would not keep him from rising in the ranks, that no one would ever say that this man with the face of a peasant and size of a large Alsatian dog could not represent state security at its highest levels.

“So, there will be some cosmetic changes, little things, temporary things,” the general had said, sitting across from him at the round conference table. “A few big ones.

“The truth,” he had continued, lowering his voice in confidence, though no one else was with them, “is that me KGB grew stronger, not weaker, with this perestroika. We withstood the attacks within our ranks, the attempts to cut our financial resources. We maintained more than two hundred and twenty thousand border guards, a volunteer militia of eighty thousand. Some of the army’s best units, including two paratroop divisions, were transferred to the KGB. We had our own planes and ships, our own army, and do you know what we provided?”

“Stability,” Colonel Lunacharski had answered, knowing that he was being prepared for some sacrifice.

“Stability,” the general had agreed. “It is we who will hold this confederacy of fighting chickens together, we who will provide hope, we to whom they will turn when they fear their Ukrainian and Georgian neighbors, we to whom they will turn when the world treats them like hulking trash. Lunacharski, these new leaders are no different from the old leaders, but they do not have the mask of communism to hold in front of them. They will change the face on that mask. They will call it democracy. And they will need us. But some surface changes are needed, temporary. There will be battles for control, power. Civilian idiots will think they are giving us orders and we will make them think we are obeying. There are those of us who will not allow the Russians to slip back into the nineteenth century.”

It was then that the colonel had been told that he would head the Office of Internal Investigative Control for the Division of Moscow. This meant that he would monitor and, when necessary, manipulate investigations of Colonel Aleksandr Snitkonoy’s special investigation unit. When the unit failed, General Karsnikov would step in, and Lunacharski, if all went well, would take over. The general made it clear that Lunacharski’s mission was informal. Such a subversive directive could not officially exist.

That meeting with the general had taken place four months ago, and Lunacharski had discovered much since. The staff of his office was twelve men and two women. In his last command he had had three hundred men and women. He could call upon resources from related divisions when necessary. The problem in calling on related divisions, as he had learned in the fifth directorate, was that other ambitious officers would then share his information, a situation not to be desired, especially in these volatile times. So be it. He would do as he was told. He would work eighteen-hour days as he had always done. He might be able to turn this demotion into an opportunity. It was not too late, given a major success or two, to move up. In fact this new Russia might well provide him with his greatest opportunity.

And so Vladimir Lunacharski turned away from the window and walked to the desk in his small Spartan office. He sat, put on his glasses, opened the file before him, which he had read before, skimmed it, running his fingers over each line, and then removed his glasses to look at the man across from him, who had been sitting patiently for more than fifteen minutes.

The man, who was dressed in a dark suit and equally dark tie, was of average height and quite ugly. His lips and mouth were very large, as were his eyes, and his skin was marked by dark blemishes. His name was Ilya Klamkin and he had, since boyhood, been known as the Frog.

“Go to Arkush in the morning,” Colonel Lunacharski said.

Klamkin nodded.

“Use our resources there to keep track of the Wolfhound’s investigation,” he continued. “Keep me informed. If any action must be taken, I want as much time as possible to consider it. You understand?”

Klamkin nodded again. “This Rostnikov,” the colonel said, tapping the file in front of him with his glasses, “was a source of some concern for the KGB in the past.”

Since this required no verbal confirmation, Klamkin nodded a third time.

“Read his file. Then watch, listen, and report, Lieutenant,” the colonel said. “As their fortunes fall ours rise. There are only so many bones to gnaw in a hungry nation.”

Klamkin rose quietly and nodded yet a fourth time. The colonel did not rise as the lieutenant left the room.

When Klamkin had gone, the colonel removed a second file from his desk. This file involved the search for a missing girl, an Arab whose father was oil minister of Syria. Like the Father Merhum investigation, it had been assigned to Snitkonoy’s unit, which would be blamed if there was failure. If success were imminent, it was Lunacharski’s responsibility to step in, file his own report, and take credit.

Fourteen more active files lay in the desk drawer, and Colonel Lunacharski knew he would go through each of them before the day was over, get reports on each case, either in person, which he preferred, or by phone. He would then review and revise, if necessary, each written report. It would be a long day, a long day in this small office with only a one-hour break for exercise in the gymnasium and a light lunch.

Footsteps tramped above his head. He was on the top floor of Lubyanka, and the roof above was where the prisoners had only months ago exercised twice each day. Now the sound signaled a stampede of tourists. The colonel shook his head and turned to his work.

There were no other distractions. His wife would not be looking for him. She had, years ago, resigned herself to a life alone, though she and her husband shared the same apartment with their two now-grown children, who at the earliest possible moment had married and moved as far from Moscow as they could. Marina Lunacharski was accustomed to spending days or even weeks without seeing her husband, which suited both of them.

The tramping overhead was nearly deafening now, and the colonel could no longer ignore the fact that he had been given the worst office in the building.