Stalin’s Ghost

11

At five in the morning a table and chairs were brought into a basement room at Petrovka. The room was maroon, no windows, only a toilet, a mop sink and an oversized drain in the floor. Arkady sat facing Prosecutor Zurin and a major of the militia. The major’s cap was the size of a saddle, gray with red trim. He removed it to take notes because taking notes was a serious business; more careers were built by going to meetings and taking notes than by triumphs on the battlefield. They all stood as a deputy minister arrived with a pair of Kremlin guards and took the last chair. He did not introduce himself and didn’t need to. He relieved the major of his pad and pencil and when Zurin started to tape-record the session the man shook his head and, poof, the recorder disappeared.

“It didn’t happen,” he said.

“What didn’t?” the major asked.

“Any of it. The Communists do not want their headquarters to be known for drunken debacles. There will be no militia report. The accounts of what happened last night are so contradictory it would take a trial to sort them out, and a trial is the last thing we will allow. There will be no medical report. The girl and Renko will receive medical attention but the official cause of injuries is their choice. She ran into a door and you, Renko, I suppose, accidentally scratched yourself shaving. It won’t go on your record, but in a few weeks you will be quietly cashiered and an appropriate occupation will be found for you. Tending a lighthouse, something like that. In the meantime, there will be no mention of Stalin. No mention of Stalin sightings or Stalin singing or anything having to do with Stalin at all. This is considered a matter of state security. If and when Stalin is reintroduced to the public we will do it on our own terms, not as part of a brawl or an attempted rape.” He stood to go. “This meeting did not happen.”

Arkady said, “I won’t go.” He had to push each word through his throat.

“You won’t go?”

“I won’t leave Moscow.”

“We will ship you in a railway car for pigs.”

“I can’t go.”

“You should have thought about that before you attacked the girl.”

“I didn’t.”

Zurin and the major shifted their chairs, putting some distance between themselves and Arkady. In the Vatican, did priests defy a message from the pope? The deputy minister slapped a dossier.

“You killed a prosecutor.”

“Long ago. Self-defense.”

“So who am I to believe, a man with a history of violence or a girl? You’re getting off very lightly. You broke her nose.”

“In self-defense.”

“So you did attack her? That’s what the witness Surkov said.”

“He didn’t see.”

“Didn’t see what? That she led you on and then stopped? Naturally, you got angry. It got a little rough, a little out of control. Did you threaten to cut off her hands? The hands of a harpist?”

Arkady meant to say he never would have done it but his throat seized up.

“And you say you didn’t attack her. A girl has a broken nose and you hardly have a scratch. Let’s see this famous neck of yours.”

Arkady stood still while the bodyguards braced him and the deputy minister undid the top button of Arkady’s jacket, spread the collar wide and involuntarily sucked air. Even the guards flinched, because despite the fact that Arkady’s collar had been turned up during the attack, his neck bore the deep blue bruising and red rope burn of a hanged man.

“Oh.” The deputy minister covered his confusion with the last of his outrage. “At any rate, you should be ashamed to drag your father’s name through the mud. Renko was a respected name.”

Snow had stopped falling and had left a bell-like resonance in the air. Traffic lights blinked awake and the noise of plows subsided, but halfway home the pain of driving-turning his head to look right and left-was more than Arkady could bear and he left his car by the river and walked the rest of the way, head down, following his feet, letting the few flakes of snow lifted by the breeze settle in his hair, melt and cool his neck.

At least the search for Stalin was over. Which meant, presumably, that Arkady no longer had to listen to the imaginary threats that Grandmaster Platonov concocted to stall real estate developers. An American-style apartment house with a spa and sushi bar could soon rise from the ashes of the chess club. To Platonov’s credit the old Bolshie had stoutly defended Arkady in his police statement. Anyway, Arkady was free to rest up for his next assignment, which sounded as if it might be east of the Urals and north of the Arctic Circle.

Arkady headed for the yard behind his building. The parking area consisted of three rows of metal sheds smacked up side by side and so narrow that a driver had to squirm to emerge. Cutoff plastic bottles shielded padlocks from snow and ashes had been thrown on the ground for walking but the lamp that usually lit the yard was dark. Arkady hesitated beside a playground set of monkey bars sheathed in ice. He stayed still; the stiffness of his neck worked for him and the burns on his neck kept him warm. No blinding headlights rose. Merely, a dot like a moth’s eye swirled in a car: a cigarette brought to the mouth, inhaled and released. The driver had parked at the far end of the row opposite Arkady’s shed. Had Arkady driven in as usual he never would have spotted it.

Arkady backtracked from the yard and went to the front of the building, pausing at the corner. He did not feel up to a physical confrontation or even conversation. All he saw under the streetlamps was an early-morning road crew morosely assembled around a heavy roller sunk in the same pothole they had been working on for a week.

Arkady took the elevator two stories above his own floor and waited for any movement below before descending the stairs. Finally his neck hurt enough for him not to care whether vipers were waiting on the other side of the door and he went in.

He left the lights off. The first thing he did was go to the kitchen and make an ice bag with ice cubes and a dish towel and chew a handful of painkillers for the throat. Still in the dark he checked the closet by feel whether Eva’s suitcase and tapes were still there. They weren’t and he wondered whether she had heard about him and Tanya. News that bad traveled fast.

His last hope was the tiny blinking light of the answering machine. There was a message. Three messages.

“This is Ginsberg. I’m at Mayakovsky Square, in the sidewalk café, a little early because I finished the pizza trial story faster than I thought. And now I need a drink. In fact, what I really need to do is take a pee. I could step between cars and no one would be the wiser. (A nervous cough.) I’m sorry to use your home phone, but the card you gave me got messed up and I don’t have the number of your cell. Look, Renko, I don’t think it’s such a great idea, the two of us getting together. This is all about a woman, isn’t it? That’s what people say. It doesn’t sound as if it has much to do with Chechnya. It sounds personal. So I’m going to pass on this.”

The second call, received five minutes later, was a hang-up from the same number.

The third was from the same number ten minutes later but it was not a hang-up.

Ginsberg said, “It’s me again. Did you know that when Mayakovsky shot himself he left a cautionary note about suicide. He wrote, ‘I do not recommend it to others.’ So, Renko, you should be happy. I apologize for my spell of cowardice and, although I would not recommend it to anyone, I will help you. Not face to face. Phone only.” Ginsberg went silent for a moment and Arkady was afraid the message machine would disconnect but it kept turning. “I don’t have to find any old notebooks. Of course, I know who was with Isakov and Urman the day of the so-called Battle at Sunzha Bridge. I saw them all from the helicopter and I checked the roster again when we returned to the base. I’ll take those names to the grave.” Arkady heard Ginsberg light another cigarette. “The roster of heroes: Captain Nikolai Isakov, Lieutenant Marat Urman, Sergeant Igor Borodin, Corporal Ilya Kuznetsov, Lieutenant Alexander Filotov, Corporal Boris Bogolovo. All OMON officers from Tver and all on their second or third tour in Chechnya. Six Black Berets either beat off an assault by forty or fifty heavily armed terrorists or slaughtered a dozen rebels in the camp. As I said before, you choose. Either is possible. I’ve seen Isakov in action. With bullets flying he’s the calmest man I’ve ever seen and his men would follow him anywhere. Especially Urman. They make an unusual team. Isakov’s philosophy is, ‘Immobilize your enemy and he is yours.’ Marat’s is, ‘Cut off his balls, fry his balls, make him watch.’ We were friends then. Now I’m jumping at shadows.” It was a long message, as if the journalist was calling in a story while he could. “Isakov said I was his mirror. He said I was made the way I was so that I wouldn’t be wasted in the army, that I could watch and report the truth. When he waved off the helicopter I put my camera down because I thought, ‘He doesn’t want a mirror anymore. He doesn’t want to see himself.’ I still don’t understand. Given the worst possibility, that at Isakov’s order his men murdered rebels he had allowed to stay in the camp, I ask myself why the Chechens were there to begin with. Anyway, Fate has a way of settling scores, right? Insh’Allah-,” Ginsberg was saying as the tape ran out.

Kuznetsov and his wife were dead and Ginsberg hadn’t jumped at shadows high enough. Arkady gingerly touched his neck. People didn’t have to go to Chechnya to be killed; they could do it right here in Moscow.

Arkady’s cell phone rang. He answered and Victor said, “Are you in a drunk tank with inebriates and addicts puking on your shoes?”

“No.”

“Well, I am. They picked me up outside the Gondolier. Police arresting police, what is the world coming to? I’m the one who suffers the hangovers, isn’t that enough? Children ask me, ‘Why do you drink?’”

“I can imagine.”

“You sound awful.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, I tell the children I drink because when I’m sober I see that life is not a primrose path, no, life is shit. Well, a road with bumps.”

“Potholes.” Arkady edged closer to the window. The women of the road crew had harnessed themselves to the roller handle and were slowly pulling the roller free of the pothole while the foreman urged them on. He looked like he wouldn’t refuse the loan of a whip.

“So I was at the Gondolier when who comes in but Detectives Isakov and Urman, along with some politicians handing out free T-shirts that say ‘I am a Russian Patriot.’ I got one.”

“Eva?” Despite the ice against his neck Arkady’s voice was a croak.

“She wasn’t there. But can you picture it, politicians in our bar? You know what this means? Isakov’s picture will be everywhere and our little plot with Zoya Filotova is over, after all we did.”

“We didn’t do much.”

“Some did more than others.”

Arkady let that enigmatic statement die; he was good for maybe four more words.

“You think Eva will come home?” Victor asked.

“Yes.”

“And Zhenya?”

“Yes.”

“Hope springs eternal?”

“It’s pathetic.”

As Arkady turned off the phone an ice cube squirted out of the dish towel and pinged the windowpane. The foreman on the street looked up. One of the women stumbled. Coins and keys spilled from her jacket and the roller began rolling back into the hole, dragging the women behind, but the foreman only stood and watched the window.

Arkady’s intention had been to stumble to the mattress and collapse, but it occurred to him that Eva had not left her key to the apartment. Eva tended to approach life in an all-or-nothing way. She may have taken the suitcase, but if she had been actually leaving for good she would have locked the door from the outside and slid the key under the door. He found himself on his knees searching the parquet with a penlight. What could have happened, he told himself, was that Isakov came for the suitcase and kept the key so he could get back in when he wanted, a possibility that Arkady was willing to call good news.

The little beam swept the floor like hope at the bottom of a well.