Stuart Kaminsky - The Dog Who Bit a Policeman

“No,” she said, handing Oleg a large green plastic garbage bag.

“Fill this. I can dump it in the trash. It will be picked up in the morning. Put in everything.”

The man and woman worked together. Yulia produced a blanket to wrap the German’s body, which they did with surprising ease, though Oleg did his best not to look at the grotesque naked man with the battered face and the sharp piece of wood buried in his neck. Without hesitation, Yulia pulled the wooden stake from the neck of the man who had humiliated her. She wiped it to remove any possible fingerprints and dropped it into the rapidly filling bag.

Then she produced two electrical extension wires and used them to tie the top and bottom of the makeshift shroud in which what was once a man was wrapped.

The blood was the most difficult part of the operation. Yulia said, “I’ll be right back. Try to rouse Yevi. We will need his help.”

Oleg did as he was told and tried not to look at the bundle on the floor. Yevgeny Pleshkov did not respond to his entreaties, but he did look into Oleg’s face as if trying to recognize him. Oleg gave up and resumed his cleanup, wondering if Yulia would suddenly appear with armed policemen and point her finger at the scene, denouncing Oleg and Yevgeny.

She did reappear with a bucket containing a variety of plastic cleaning items, a pair of brushes, and some towels.

“Took them from the storage closet on the next floor,” she explained. “I will have to get them back soon. Let’s put the body by the door. See if he is leaking through first.”

Again, Oleg did as he was told. The blood did not seem to be spreading, at least not yet. Together they moved the wrapped corpse near the door.

Cleaning up the blood took almost half an hour and left the thin carpet wet.

“We can do no better,” Yulia had announced, surveying the room. “I’ll rearrange the furniture later to cover the spot. It will look fine. Now we get rid of the bag and the body.”

“How?”

“I’ll take the bag,” she said. “I’ll carry it to the park and drop it in the trash there.”

“Burn it,” Yevgeny suddenly said in a monotone, without looking at the others. “No one must find those photographs, those tapes.”

“All right, I will burn the bag,” she said.

“I want to watch,” said Yevgeny.

“You don’t trust me,” Yulia said with a smile.

“No.”

Yulia gave a raspy, deep laugh which sent an icicle down Oleg’s back. “Then you shall watch,” she said.

“The originals,” said Yevgeny, slowly coming to life and rubbing his eyes.

Yulia shook her head. “I will protect you, Yevi. I will burn these photographs and tapes. I will help get rid of the body. The three of us, if the police get close, and they are looking for you, must never vary from the story that Jurgen was attacking me, that he had a gun, that you bravely overcame him and had to kill him to protect yourself. As for the body, you panicked and to protect me again wrapped him up, and we, you and I, took him to the place I have in mind. Your friend Oleg need not be involved.”

Yevgeny nodded in agreement.

“I have the originals of the photos and the tapes safely hidden,”

she said. “And so they will stay. I ask you for nothing in exchange.

They are my insurance that the two of you will not betray me. I like you, Yevi. You have never hurt me. You have been generous and undemanding. And now you’ve rid me of my beast. No, that is a cliche. You’ve rid me of something that looked like a human, something with an insatiable lust, who enjoyed the anguish of others.

He is the only person I have ever known who simply enjoyed being evil. One time I asked him if he was the devil. He said he was.”

Yevgeny finally stirred and stood. “Let us do it,” he said.

The rest was a frightening nightmare for Oleg, who was grateful that Yulia was clearly in charge and knew what she was doing and that Yevgeny was participating. She carried the bulging garbage bag through which shards of wood from the broken box now jut-ted like angry little spikes, while Oleg and Yevgeny carried the awkward and heavy dead German. Yulia also held a two-liter plastic bottle. Yulia had surveyed the hallway and, assured that no one was in sight, led the two men carrying the body to the service steps.

Oleg started to head down but Yulia said, “No. Up.”

Oleg was in no state to challenge anything she said, and Yevgeny had lapsed back into a near-somnambulistic state.

They struggled up two flights, where Yulia opened the door to the roof and put down bottle and bag to open the door with a key.

“Jurgen had the key made,” she explained. “I was never sure why.

Now I have a reason.”

They struggled onto the roof. Yulia led the way to a ribbed metal shed whose door was open.

There wasn’t much inside the shed: a few paint cans, a pile of rags, something that looked like a radio with its electrical intestines showing. The shed was dark, and no light came from the moon and stars covered by clouds. But there was enough, just enough, light coming from Kalinin Street below so that Oleg saw where Yulia pointed. He guided Yevgeny and the body to the spot she had indicated and they put their burden down.

“Back,” said Yulia, pouring the contents of the bottle she had been carrying over the body and the garbage bag she had placed atop it.

Oleg led Yevgeny several steps away from the shed. There was a sudden flare of flames as Yulia joined them.

“Someone will see,” Oleg said. “Someone will report a fire on the roof. The police. .”

Yulia stepped to Yevgeny’s right and took his arm.

“No one will see. No one will report. No one will discover perhaps for days, and no one will be able to identify the corpse. The evidence will be gone. It will remain a mystery. I have seen such things happen. Yevi can stay with me tonight. Tomorrow. . I don’t know.”

“It looks like rain,” Oleg said as the sky rumbled above them.

“It has for days,” she said, “but the shed will keep it from our work. Even a deluge won’t stop that fire.”

They stood watching for a few minutes, just to be sure the body and the bag were on fire and not likely to go out.

“Go home, Oleg,” Yulia said.

Oleg was hypnotized by the flames, the smell of tape and flesh.

He stood transfixed.

“Go home, Oleg Kisolev,” she said firmly.

And, finally, he did.

Oleg had made his way home and now lay in his bed next to Dmitri, trying to convince himself first that the whole thing had not happened. He failed. Then he tried to convince himself that he was safe, that the body of the German would burn beyond recognition, that the green garbage bag and its contents would also be burned without leaving a trace, aside from ashes.

Oleg put the Olympic history book down and reached over to turn off the light. His hand hesitated and he realized that he did not want to be in darkness. He adjusted his pillow and slid down under the covers, turning to put his arms around Dmitri, who made a slight sound of childish pleasure.

Maybe, thought Oleg, maybe I can sleep like this. Maybe.

Sarah Rostnikov’s cousin, Leon Moiseyevitch, the doctor, sat at the piano beside the cellist and oboe player with whom he had performed for almost five years. They specialized in standard works, Bach and Mozart particularly, and Leon found that he could lose himself in the music, that rehearsal after rehearsal, concert after concert, brought him closer to the magical state in which he could simply let his fingers and body perform while he listened.

It was late, but the small hall which held seventy-five was full and the trio had played for more than two hours.

Some nights Leon played with a jazz group at a nightclub called Hot Apples, a short walk from the Kremlin walls.

It had been a nightmare of a day in his office, a nightmare from which he tried to distance himself emotionally, and from which he knew he could partially cleanse himself through music. When he was finished, he would go home, kiss his sleeping son, and go to his bedroom.

Leon was financially comfortable. His reputation was secure among both the newly rich and the old powerful Communists who had managed to make the transition to new power by renouncing the crumbled party and embracing the sham of democracy. Leon was secure.

To help cleanse his conscience, he put in a dozen hours a week at the public hospital, treating whoever came into the emergency room and charging nothing.

The past week had been typical. He had treated one woman who had been struck by a piece of falling concrete from a crumbling building. The woman had died from massive head wounds, as Leon had known she would when she was brought in. It was amazing that she had stayed alive long enough to be brought to the emergency room. About one hundred Muscovites died each year after being struck by falling bricks and concrete. Another dozen died annually after being crushed by huge icicles as they walked down the street. Leon had treated people who had stepped into holes in the sidewalk and suffered broken limbs, people who had drunk contaminated tap water, people who had received deadly shocks of electricity while riding trolley buses, people who had been poisoned by bootlegged vodka, people who had been struck by automobiles driven by motorists who routinely ignored the yellow painted lanes and drove madly, ignoring pedestrians.

Then there were the more bizarre cases he had seen over the past year: the two little boys aged six and five, who had found a hand grenade in Gorky Park and had died of injuries when it exploded while they were playing with it; and the bespectacled young businessman on the way home from work who spotted an odd white Styrofoam box on the ground next to a metal-mesh garbage container. The man had picked up the box to deposit it in the trash, and lifted the lid. The contents of the box were two soft, green claylike masses, the size of small melons. The suspicious and con-scientious young businessman, who had a wife and a three-year-old daughter, had brought the Styrofoam box and its contents to the hospital emergency room where Leon was on duty. Leon had told the young man to place the container on a small stainless steel table with rubber-covered wheels. The container proved to be emitting a high level of radiation. The man had been exposed to the radiation when he opened the box to examine its contents and when he carried it the half mile to the hospital. The man was still being treated half a year later and not doing particularly well. And the police still did not have the slightest idea who might have placed the white Styrofoam box near the trash container.

Leon had come to a passage that always pleased him. It was flowing, beautiful, a moment of salvation in a world of madness.

In his music, in Bach, Mozart, Schumann, and sometimes Brahms, Leon could stop being the confident, wise, supportive physician whom he had made himself into, and inside of whom existed an angry and sometimes frightened man.

Even in the hospital the people of Moscow were not safe. A woman had recently bled to death while giving birth because the power company had, without warning, turned off the hospital’s electricity in a dispute over nonpayment of bills.

The trio was coming to the end of the piece and the end of the concert. Leon did not want it to end. Given the slightest encouragement from the audience, Leon would be willing to give encore after encore throughout the night. He was sure his fellow musicians felt the same.

The horrors would not stop even during the most delicate of passages.

Leon remembered helping to treat the victims of a utility company blunder in which a high-pressure gas line had been attached to a residential neighborhood instead of the industrial plant for which it was intended. Fifteen homes had burst into flames. Fortunately, it happened in the early afternoon, which kept the number of burn victims down.

Leon knew well from the statistics he accessed on his computer that Russians are five times more likely to die from accidents than are Americans. Deaths in Russia exceed births by more than six hundred thousand. Of the boys who are now sixteen, only half would reach the age of sixty, which is a worse rate than a century ago.

The Mozart piece came to an end with Leon’s brief solo, a slow and bittersweet conclusion.

The audience consisted mostly of university students and teachers, with a smattering of old people who attended anything-concerts, lectures, travel films-as long as the evening or afternoon entertainment or enlightenment was free.

The applause was enthusiastic, appreciative, but there was something in it that the musicians frequently sensed. The people before them had decided that the diversion was over. There would be no encores this night. The audience trickled out. A few, as always, almost always the young, approached the trio, thanked them, and asked questions or simply wanted to talk about their own love of music. Part of the trio’s mission, as they saw it, was to listen em-pathetically to those who approached.

Leon adopted his physician’s manner. The others, Lev Bulmasiov and Dmitriova Berg, alternatively beamed and took on serious looks, nodding their heads, saying something that showed the person who had approached that they understood what they were trying to express.

All three-Leon, Lev, and Dmitriova-were Jews. It was the combination of their love for the same genre of music, their mu-tual background as Jews without religion, and their talent that brought them together. Lev was a successful carpenter in his forties who held an advanced degree in electrical engineering, a profession that would have earned him far less than he brought home to his family as a carpenter. Leon knew that Lev did not dislike being a carpenter but would have preferred the profession for which he had been trained and which he loved. Lev’s oboe was his solace. Dmitriova was a medical lab technician at the hospital where Leon did his volunteer work. She was in her twenties, short, approaching a serious weight problem, and very plain with slight recurrent acne. Her compensation for the body and skin that had been given her was her cello, her music. Dmitriova was easily the most talented of the trio and should have been making her living on the concert stage.

But those who managed musicians, while recognizing her talent, were certain that they could not market someone who looked like Dmitriova.

When the last questioner, the one who always lingered until the musicians said they had to leave, had departed, the trio had said good-bye, told each other that the concert had gone well, and went their own ways.

Leon dreaded the next day. He had tried to put it from his mind, but he now had to deal with it. In the morning, he would have to call his cousin Sarah and tell her that she probably needed more surgery, that something had happened, that he wasn’t sure what it was, though he was certain, as was the woman who had been the surgeon on Sarah’s original operation, that an internal examination had to be made. Leon thought the problem was a growing clot of blood in the brain, a clot resulting from the original surgery, which may have weakened a crucial vessel.