The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

23

WHILE ON DUTY ONE NIGHT AT THE PRECINCT, KUPCHINO resident Semion Kurilko, a militia officer and squadron leader, beat the shit out of a prisoner. Not more than usual, within limits, but toward morning the guy died.

The guy turned out to work at a museum. And all because of that skinny-pants faggot, that pansy dick-licker, Semion got into so much trouble that his whole life took a left turn. They kicked him out of the militia, adding: you ought to be thankful they didn’t put you in the slammer . . . His wife left him and moved with their daughter to Karelia. Then his mother—the only person who had stood up for him, not to mention fed him—died. Then, after all this, Semion himself got sick: in a fit of rage he axed to shreds a brand-new, just constructed children’s playground, with a little house for crawling into, a sandbox, and a carved wooden bear. They strait-jacketed him right there alongside the mangled bear and took him to the mental hospital. He was treated for almost a year, then released back to his room in Kupchino. While he was sick, his neighbors cleaned his place out, taking his blankets and his “Spidola” radio receiver left over from better times.

Semion had served eight years in the militia, joining right after the army, and he had no other profession. They gave him a disability pension, but a small one. Fortunately, he didn’t drink, because the pension barely covered food. He had a good appetite that didn’t match his pension. In the hospital he had put on a lot of weight, and now he needed more than before. The way he saw it, a skinny guy doesn’t need as much nourishment as someone with meat on his bones. He would have looked for a job somewhere—as an armed guard someplace, for example, but they wouldn’t take him because he’d been severed from the militia. He tried to get a job as a loader at a print shop, but they fired him for a—you have to admit—really stupid reason: smoking was forbidden on the premises, but he kept lighting up out of habit. They caught him once, twice, a third time, and then the foreman, a young kid just out of university, the same kind of skinny-pants shit as that museum worker the whole ruckus in the militia was about, fired him.

Once again Semion was left with nothing. That was when he was overcome by enormous anger at those skinny young guys, all those brainy boys, who had messed up his whole life. That was when Semion picked up his shiv. Thin, sharp, thicker than a knitting needle, but thinner than a file. He’d kept it at home for a long time, since his militia days when he took it away from a thief they’d hauled in. Why he pocketed it, he didn’t know. He stuck it in his sleeve, tucking the blade under the band of his wristwatch. The watch was broken and hadn’t worked for a long time, but now it came in handy. It was a crafty setup.

Semion lived near the Memorial Cemetery of the Victims of January Ninth, located on an avenue with the same name, in a building with a deep courtyard formed by three two-story barrack-type apartment buildings, about twenty minutes by foot from the suburban train station. On May 1, 1961, his favorite holiday, when the militia was up to its ears with business—drinking brawls, slashings, and other cheerful entertainments—he completed his first mission. He strolled down to the train stop, got on a suburban train, and rode to the Vitebsk train station. From there he turned left down Zagorodny Avenue, and, not hurrying, checking out the passersby, set off in the direction of the Technological Institute. There in the walk-through courtyard with a huge trench running through it that deprived it of its walk-through functionality—people peeked in, went as far as the trench, then returned to the archway they had come in through—he sat down on a bench and sat until evening, because things were not going as he had planned: either people walked together in groups, or the lone passerby was not of the right type he needed. It was only after eight that a skinny faggot in narrow-legged pants (with a thin little briefcase) came by. He was drunk as well. He wasn’t looking for a way to exit to the other street; all he needed was a secluded spot, a dark corner, to release the fast-flowing beer. After he had splashed his load in a suitable place, Semion approached him from the back and stuck the shiv right where it was supposed to go, slightly to the side and between the ribs. At first the shiv seemed to hesitate, as if it had run up against a dense film, but after that it was like cutting butter . . . In, and out. The guy oohed, fell nose-first against the wall, and dropped without even turning around. Semion didn’t even look at the briefcase, wiped the shiv neatly with a kitchen rag taken with forethought from home, stuck the instrument back up his sleeve under his watchband, and exited the courtyard with the new gait—stiff and manikin-like—that he had developed after his hospital treatments.

His next mission took place November 7, also without a hitch. Now he already knew that next year on May 1, he would celebrate his holiday as his heart desired: he’d shiv that shit, the skinny faggot, that worthless kike . . .

He’d been coming to this courtyard for three years. The trench had been covered over long ago, and people came through not in big streams, but in trickles. In May when it was light—more; in the November darkness—fewer. Semion was always lucky: one time the guy had a bouquet of flowers; another one—a tape recorder; the third was carrying two cake boxes tied together with string. Some he’d already forgotten. First he’d track one of them down: he recognized the type immediately. Then he’d catch up with him, stick to him for a second, then grab him with his right hand by the shoulder and strike with his left. Semion was a lefty retrained at school so he wrote with his right hand and did other things with both, but more easily with his left.

He had already scored seven when once, while in line in a store, he overheard two women talking about a murderer who’d appeared in town that the authorities hadn’t been able to capture for ten years already, and that the maniac killed only on holidays—all red-letter days, killing men on all the holidays, except for March 8, once a year, when he killed women. At first Semion was surprised, but a few seconds later he figured out that they were talking about him. They exaggerated, of course, the number of years and about the holidays. But basically they had it right. Two weeks later, passing by his former place of work, he saw a large poster reading: “Wanted . . .” There were three photographs—two men and one woman con artist, with names; the fourth was a sketch, an artist’s rendering instead of a photograph. The only thing in common between the sketch and Semion were the steep arches over the eyebrows and the buzz cut.

Semion got scared, went into hiding, and didn’t come out of the house for a week until he had eaten his last piece of macaroni. It was close to November, and he decided that year not to go out of the house on the seventh. The manhunt didn’t just scare him, it also provoked him. From the seventh through the eighth he sat at home, barely able to control himself, his hands even shaking. On the ninth he went out. And carried off his mission quite well and successfully. The guy had nothing in his hands, but on his face he had this chi-chi little beard, and he was for sure a stinking faggot . . .

After each mission Semion always felt better. He was even earning money now from time to time in a furniture store as a loader. Only just before the holidays he would begin to get jittery and attempt to recollect where he had hidden the shiv. He hid it at home, each time in a new place; one time he forgot where he’d hidden it, and turned the place upside down before he found it. He’d put it under the oilcloth tablecloth where the table ran up against the wall . . . Now he decided that he was going to detour the holidays, going out two or three days earlier or later . . . The militia was nothing but a bunch of idiots, that Semion knew well. They’d been told to search on the holidays, and there’d be no getting them out on any others.

In November of 1966 number ten’s turn had come. But Semion came down with a bad cold—he had a cough, his body ached—and so he put things off not for three days, but for a whole week. He even thought that maybe he would skip this time. But it didn’t work out that way. The urge to go hunting beckoned. Only on the fifteenth he put on his cherished watch, loaded the shiv, and left the house when it was still light, right after three. As always, he rode the train to the Vitebsk station and headed down Zagorodny Avenue. Instead, though, of turning in the direction of the Technological Institute, he went in the other direction, toward Moskovsky Avenue . . .

He didn’t know Leningrad well: he had been born in Kupchino and rarely made his way into the city. His mother always used to say it that way: we’ll go into the city . . . In school they took them on field trips several times. And his army service stationed him in a village, at a prison in the Kursk oblast. So he wound up neither an urbanite nor a villager, but a lifelong outlier, who couldn’t saddle a horse or find his way to the football stadium . . . Before serving in the militia, he hadn’t been able to cross the street without almost getting hit, and to this day he lost his way in unfamiliar places . . .

Moskovsky Avenue led him to a square. He looked at the last house: the sign read PEACE SQUARE. It was crawling with people. There were lots of stores here. The square was odd-shaped, with lots of little side streets coming into it. Turning into one of the narrower and quieter ones, he thought to himself that he’d been wrong not to go to the Technological Institute, where he knew his way around. But the lane he was moving down now was, overall, just what he needed. Semion dropped into one courtyard, then another: they were all deep as wells, and not one of them had two exits . . . Then he walked into a deep archway and stood near the door of a former servants’ entrance that exited into the archway. PAWNSHOP read the modest little sign on the securely closed door. Occasionally people passed by, but his view was blocked and he couldn’t make anyone out. Furthermore, there were mostly women with shopping bags. It occurred to Semion that more young guys came out on the streets during the holidays, while there were mostly only middle-aged women on weekdays.

Then he tried a different tactic: he started walking up and down the side street from corner to corner until he sighted “his man.” He was walking toward him, and Semion simply began to tremble he was so right . . . By comparison with this one, the nine before simply didn’t count. The guy wore a jeans jacket that was too big for him; he was skinny, and for sure worked at a museum. A blond girly-style ponytail swung down his back. And he was walking slowly and real laid back. Semion even managed to notice his shoes, which were special, not regular shoes . . . In his hand he carried a little suitcase, also not the usual kind, not like regular people carried. Semion’s heart thumped. It was like love at first sight, like a flame of recognition. Semion had never experienced such a piercing sensation. At that moment he felt no hate; he was overwhelmed by the ecstasy of the hunter enraptured by his beautiful quarry . . .

But this quarry was dragging himself pretty slowly and people kept walking around him. Semion was walking behind him now, several steps behind. He got the urge to look at his face again and crossed over to the other side of the street, got in front of him, then walked toward him face-to-face. His little snout was the size of a fist, a fox’s, and he was deep in thought. Faggot, now I’ll get you . . .

Semion walked behind him again. They passed one courtyard entrance, and while they were approaching the next one, the one with the servants’ entrance in the archway, Semion focused himself and pulled the end of the shiv out from under his watchband. When they were even with the archway, Semion placed his right hand on the guy’s shoulder, and set the shiv in motion with his left. The interference was minimal; the jeans jacket slowed down the movement of the blade, but Semion’s swift and experienced hand sensed that it was going in well, and then it passed through the usual spot where the membrane between the ribs squeaked with resistance, and then the shiv slipped on smoothly, softly, with a slight pull . . .

The guy sighed, lurched initially upward, then began falling forward, but Semion did not let him fall, grabbing him with both hands by the shoulders and shoving him into the archway.

The guy wanted to drop, but Semion dragged him deep into the archway and wanted to leave him in the courtyard, so that the body lying on the ground would not be visible from the street. But just then the door of the servants’ entry opened, and a huge, decent-looking man came out and looked inquiringly at Semion.

Semion dropped the guy and leapt out of the archway. He ran straight ahead, along the deserted lane, with no route in mind and only one thought in his head: he’d not managed to retrieve the shiv.

TWO CIRCUMSTANCES SAVED SERGEI’S LIFE. THE FIRST was the shiv, which had stuck in his heart. The second was the decent-looking man who had come out the door, the director of the pawnshop, formerly a medico. Holding Sergei upright, he shouted into the open door for someone to call an ambulance and to bring down a bandage . . . The doctors who revived Sergei from clinical death and sutured his punctured pericardium told him later: “It was a miracle, Seryozha, a miracle. One in a million.”

Sergei asked them to give him the shiv, but that was impossible, because it had been made physical evidence, and so he never even saw it.

Semion was arrested two days later. He was accused of twenty-six murders, three of them involving rape. He confessed to his “own,” but denied and refused to admit to the others. But it had already been decided on high that all the militia’s “cold cases” be hung on him. They gave him the death penalty, which was implemented a half-year later. No appeal was entered, and no psychiatric testing was performed . . .