The Man Who Walked Like a Bear

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.

They moved past a living room, also Orientally decorated, where a woman sat in a sweat suit that matched Morchov’s. She was dark-haired, with a drink in one hand, a magazine on her lap. She looked up at Karpo, her face a mask, but Karpo sensed an inadvertent shudder as he passed. This time the wave of nausea was more brief. He controlled it easily.

The woman returned to her magazine as Morchov ushered Karpo into an office and closed the door. The office was not Oriental. It was stark, windowless, a single desk, a large desk with work neatly stacked upon it in bins. Two simple wooden chairs stood before the desk, and the desk chair itself was solid, wooden, unsingular. There were old file cabinets, and bookcases filled with worn books. The walls were empty except for a large photograph of Lenin looking to his right.

“You have four minutes,” said Morchov, continuing to dry himself as he sat behind his desk and motioned to Karpo to take a seat across from him. Karpo sat and Morchov reached for a tumbler of slightly pink liquid. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t offer you a drink. I have an engagement and will have to shower and dress for it very soon.”

“I do not mind,” said Karpo.

“My secretary said you have some information concerning a possible threat to my life,” Morchov said, looking at the towel and placing it on the corner of his desk. “I find it difficult to imagine why anyone would want to kill me. It is an essential part of my political life that I do not always please those with whom I must deal. But it is equally essential for one in my position not to turn those with whom I disagree into enemies. The price I pay for this is that I have made no friends. I have betrayed no one, and there is no one who would consider me close enough to call my behavior betrayal even if we disagree.”

“We have reason to believe that if such a threat is serious, it is, in fact, personal and not professional or political,” said Karpo, hands folded on his lap.

“And,” said Morchov after taking a drink, “do you propose to supply me with information concerning this possible threat?”

“At this point, we have very little beyond an overheard conversation by a woman named Elena Vostoyavek.”

Morchov rolled his drink between his palms and continued to look at Karpo, who added, “The name is not familiar to you?”

“No.”

“Yuri Vostoyavek: Is that name familiar to you?”

“No. Is he the one who has supposedly threatened my life?”

“Yes,” said Karpo as Andrei Morchov finished his drink and placed the glass on the desk after wiping its bottom with the towel.

“Well, why are you wasting your time here?” Morchov said with a sigh. A knock at the door and Morchov said, “Yes?”

The beautiful woman with the dark hair opened the door. She now wore a white robe, and her hair was noticeably damp.

“We will be late,” she said without looking at Karpo.

Morchov, unsmiling, held up his right hand and nodded. The woman left, closing the door gently.

“I do not wish to be late, Comrade,” he said.

“I do not wish to keep you,” replied Karpo.

“Who is this Yuri whatever?” Morchov said with an impatient sigh. “And why would he wish to harm me?”

“He is a young man who works as a messenger in the Central Telegraph Office,” said Karpo.

“How young?”

“Nineteen.”

“I will exercise some caution,” Morchov said, standing. “There may be counterrevolutionary ethnic separatist groups that might wish to make a point. Terrorism is, after all, not restricted to the Arabs. I doubt if this threat is serious, but I expect you to handle it quickly. Keep me informed through my assistant. I think there is no reason for us to speak again. You understand?”

Karpo rose and nodded.

“You may show yourself to the door,” Morchov said. “Touch nothing on your way out.”

Karpo left the room. The pain returned with an acrid surge, expanding within the left side of his head, ordering him to seek darkness, the quiet, enclosed tomb of his small room. When he left the apartment, the well-built man in the suit was standing outside the door expectantly, as if he had been called.

He nodded and Karpo followed him down the hall, wondering why Morchov had been unnecessarily rude.

When he got back to his small room, Karpo, in spite of the insistent pain that demanded that he capitulate, bow to it, checked the two sets of hair and the piece of dust he had pushed gently against the hinge of his door to be sure no one had entered. Emil Karpo turned on a small light and refused to close his eyes or even blink at the cold needles the light stabbed into his head. He would stay here in darkness for no more than half an hour. He would allow himself no more than that. He would then return to his duty even if he had to suffer through the searing pain, the almost unbearable light. But before he allowed himself the darkness, he picked up his phone, which he used only in pursuit of his duty, and called Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov at Petrovka. The phone rang five times before the junior officer on duty picked it up and informed Karpo that Inspector Rostnikov had left word that he could be found at home going over reports. Karpo hung up and called Rostnikov at his home.

“I wish to report,” Karpo said.

“Proceed,” said Rostnikov.

And Karpo slowly, in detail, omitting only his own pain, related what had transpired in his visit to Andrei Morchov.

“I will have a full, written report on your desk this afternoon,” Karpo concluded.

“Comrade Morchov sounds as if he may have some idea of why this young man might want to do him harm,” said Rostnikov. “Or he may simply have a great deal on his mind, or he may simply be an unpleasant person. Who knows?”

“I was not antagonized by Comrade Morchov’s behavior,” Karpo said. “Though I did find it curious.”

“Forget the report till tomorrow,” Rostnikov said. “I won’t get in till late in the morning. There are some thefts at the Lentaka Shoe Factory I must look into. I may need your assistance with this. Shall we have someone keep an eye on our young suspect? Yuri …”

“Vostoyavek,” Karpo supplied.

“Get some rest, Emil Karpo,” said Rostnikov. “You’ll function better with some rest.”

Rostnikov hung up, and Karpo did the same. Yes, Karpo knew he would function better with rest, and he would get that revitalizing rest by lying in bed fully clothed, but first he would change those clothes, wash, shave. During the conversation with Rostnikov, Emil Karpo had decided the pain would have to wait. He would not permit it to interfere with the performance of his duties. And, later, when he did lie down, he would leave the light on.

Emil Karpo looked around his room carefully before moving to the sink in the corner. His desk, shelves full of black notebooks on each and every case he worked on, the bed in the corner, the single wooden chair, and the squat, wooden dresser in the corner were in place, and the photograph of Lenin working at his desk was where it should be, over his bed.

Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had just finished his right-handed curls with fifty-pound weights when Karpo had called. When he had come home an hour earlier, he had changed into his blue sweat suit, pulled the weights out of the lower cabinet in the corner of the living room, laid out his blanket, and arranged the wooden chair so that he was facing into the room with the music from the record player behind him. Recently, since Sarah’s surgery, Rostnikov had found himself drawn to melancholy French music. He had traded six of his paperback American mysteries-two Lawrence Blocks, three Ed McBains, and a Jonathan Valin-for two very old Edith Piaf albums.

The weight routine required no thought. In fact, thought was to be avoided if at all possible. The workouts that left Porfiry Petrovich most satisfied, most refreshed, were those that passed without his being aware of time, passed with only a vague, blue-white hum instead of thought. But time had moved too slowly this night. He had sat on the chair, looked down at the neatly arranged weights, and smiled at his newest acquisition, a compact fifty-pound dumbbell from Bulgaria. It rested blue-black in front of him, inviting. He had listened to Edith Piaf sing about a piano and he had let the thoughts come, Sarah, the man who walked like a bear, his son Iosef, the Gray Wolfhound, Sasha Tkach’s distracted look, Karpo’s headache. The thoughts came and began to fade into the blue-white hum of soft music and the flow of energy and effort in his muscles.

The positions were awkward because of his leg, but Rostnikov had mastered them long ago. His lifts and repetitions were mostly for the upper body, arms, neck, abdomen, back. His good leg received a series of weighted rises near the end of the workout that ended with a painful but necessary manipulation of his left leg. When Sarah was home she usually helped him with the final manipulation. Rostnikov had been bending the leg and coming out of his blue-white peace when Karpo called.

Now Rostnikov put down the receiver and looked around the room. He would turn off the phonograph, put away the weights and blanket, place the chair back next to the table, and then shower, after which he would change, make the promised visit to his neighbors, the Agarevas, with his tools to fix the leaking pipe, and then return home to finish for the second time his Ed McBain novel as he ate his sandwich of black bread and thick-sliced cheese. He had one cucumber and four potatoes left plus a bottle of mineral water.

Rostnikov knew he would eat quickly, that the emptiness of the apartment without Sarah would be most evident at the table. He let the thoughts come back now, his wife and son, the people with whom and for whom he worked, but behind them loomed the large and melancholy shadow of Ivan Bulgarin, the man who walked like a bear.

At the precise moment that Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was turning off his phonograph, Sasha Tkach was telling his wife and mother in great detail about his and Zelach’s efforts to locate a missing bus and its driver.

“Put it on television,” Lydia said, sipping her glass of tea. Lydia was small, loud, decisive, and inflexible. Unfortunately, she was, as even Maya had to admit, sometimes right. It was simply difficult to acknowledge that someone as maddening as Lydia Tkach could be right about anything. “Go on television and tell everyone to look for the bus.”

“There are priorities,” Sasha explained. “We would fill the television time with announcements of crimes. There would be nothing but descriptions of criminals, pictures of stolen automobiles, missing children.”

The baby Pulcharia tugged at her father’s pants and grunted. She was more than ten months old, crawling and good-natured. They were seated around the table finishing their Moscow-style borscht of beet soup, tomatoes, cabbage, and a bit of ham. Sasha reached down to pick the baby up and smiled at his wife. She returned the smile without enthusiasm. Missing buses were not what she wished to be talking about. She wished her husband to address their forthcoming move, to tell his mother that she would not be moving with them. She knew his pain, but it had to be done, and putting it off would not make the task easier.

“So,” Lydia went on loudly, reaching over to pat her granddaughter’s head, “so the television would be filled with crime. What is so terrible about that? It’s better to see bald men reading the news and old men making speeches?”

“No one would watch,” said Sasha.

“Nonsense,” said Lydia. “They do in America. In America that’s all they do now, show pictures of murderers and the people watch and go out and drag the killers in. What are they showing here on television that’s better than murderers and bus thieves?”

Pulcharia leaned forward against her father and gave his neck a gentle, moist, and toothless bite.

“In any case,” Sasha went on, “we did find one bus driver who says he saw the missing bus heading away from the city, far off its route, a short time after it was reported missing.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Maya said softly, too softly for Lydia to hear.

“And no one else saw this?” Lydia asked, finishing her borscht. “Don’t let the baby chew on you. It will make her sick.”

Sasha sat the baby on his lap and whispered to her, “Krasee’v/aya doch,” beautiful daughter.

“A man reported having seen an old couple get off the bus in front of the park,” Sasha went on as the baby rubbed her eyes. “He didn’t exactly report it. We followed the bus route and found him on a bench, an old man himself. He thinks he knows the old couple but we couldn’t find them.”

“Television,” Lydia said. “You should put the baby to sleep. She’s tired.”

“Sasha,” Maya said softly, taking the baby from his arms.

“Not tonight,” he whispered back.

“‘What?” asked Lydia, reaching over to touch the baby.

“Sasha, she wants to know,” said Maya.

“All right,” he said with a deep sigh as Maya moved to the corner of the room to change the baby and get her ready for bed.

“What?” Lydia repeated.

“I … we,” Sasha began. What remained of the evening, Sasha was sure, would not be pleasant.