Stalin’s Ghost

16

Zurin gave a going away party for Arkady, a quiet affair in the prosecutor’s office, just espressos and pastries with other investigators. That Senior Investigator Renko was being bundled off was all the staff knew. Not really demoted, but certainly not promoted. Moved sideways. Reassigned.

“The choice of his post,” Zurin said. “The choice of his post in some beautiful-”

“Backwater,” said a wit.

The prosecutor continued, “Some historical town like Suzdal, a quiet setting far from the stress of Moscow. It has been only a month since Investigator Renko was shot in the line of duty. No one has been more concerned about his recovery than I. I speak for the entire office when I say, Welcome back.”

“And good-bye, it seems,” Arkady said.

“For the time being. We will reassess the health situation periodically. I understand it takes a year for a full recovery. In the meantime, younger hands will have their turn at the oar and gain some experience. Of course, we all look forward to your return. The main thing for you is to not hang about aimlessly. Not linger.”

Arkady looked on the faces of the office staff, the time servers who moved at half speed, the spent and bitter, the up-and-comers who aped Zurin’s bonhomie. And what did they see in him but a pale man whose black hair was growing in mixed with gray and a small livid scar on his forehead? Lazarus barely back from the dead and already being shown the door.

“My choice of reassignment?”

“It’s been cleared with the prosecutor general.”

“You don’t think that because of the Stalin sightings anyone would want to keep me away from reporters?”

“Not at all. To a man we envy you. We’ll be tripping over corpses while you will be reconnecting with the true, authentic Russia.”

Arkady considered Suzdal as he drove. Suzdal, holy beacon of holiday buses. Suzdal, two hundred kilometers from Moscow. Suzdal, the perfect place for a damaged man to rusticate.

He stood on the accelerator, forged a new lane between two legal ones, slowed on Petrovka and then plunged into traffic headed for the river. As in chess, position was everything. A cardboard box carrying leftover evidence, personal effects and a spiral notebook with a cheerful cover of daisies bounced on the back seat of the Zhiguli.

Snow had melted away in weather that was freakishly warm, swinging from one extreme to the other with no stop in between. Caused by global warming? No matter, the city basked in its false spring, in balmy breezes that teased out daffodils and uncovered Igor Borodin.

Borodin had been found in a culvert in Izmailovo Park, an empty vodka bottle by his side. Forensics found no sign of violence. The contents of his stomach matched what he had consumed after his acquittal for shooting the pizza deliveryman a month before. His doctor confirmed that Borodin suffered from depression and had nearly killed himself binge-drinking twice before. This time, with so much to celebrate, he had succeeded. It seemed only fitting that the investigating detectives, Isakov and Urman, had served with the dead man in OMON.

So far as Arkady knew, no one drew a connection between the fatal domestic quarrel of Kuznetsov and wife and Borodin’s overindulgence. All they seemed to have in common was alcohol and the crackerjack team of Isakov and Urman, whose solution rate was a thing of joy.

At an outdoor market Zhenya hopped into the car with a fistful of pirate CDs and DVDs. Arkady hoped the boy hadn’t shoplifted; the mafia had rules about that sort of thing. As they drove to the chess club Arkady worked on his visuals. A blue truck. A rectangular poster. A gray traffic officer. A golden onion dome. A green something. A blue bus. A priest like a black cone. A checkerboard pattern of maroon and something bricks. A black and something-striped something. He remembered Elena Ilyichnina had said that injured brain cells could repair themselves but that dead ones never came back. So, one brain, slightly trimmed.

They found Platonov sitting on the club’s basement stairs. Although weeks had passed since his five-hundred-dollar celebration, the grandmaster was still a wreck.

“I am proud that I defied the banality of a savings account but debauchery has come at a cost. I have to say that your friend Victor stood by me shoulder to shoulder in my resolve. Most men would have broken and said, ‘My dear Ilya Sergeevich, set some aside for a rainy day.’ Not Victor. Will you see him soon?”

“This afternoon.”

“Dear Lord, make him suffer. My liver is as tender as a balloon and I had hoped to make some small improvements around the club. Not that I’m complaining to somebody who was, you know-bang!-in the head.”

Down the stairs the same unwashed basement window allowed the same murky light. A fluorescent tube sizzled over a dozen games so deep in progress the players seemed somnambulists. In scummy glass cases not a single chess set, time clock or layer of dust seemed disturbed. Heads swiveled, however, as Zhenya took over the board tacitly reserved for the strongest player in the room. He opened his backpack and chamois sack and sniffed the air as if for prey.

Platonov said, “If the little shit induces any member to play for money he will learn that no member of this club has any. They are carefully screened to be pure and poor.”

“Like an anticasino.”

“Exactly. Renko, they’re not going to tax me on the five hundred dollars, are they? It went through my hands so quickly. It’s not even as if I won the money fair and square. Zhenya gave me the game.”

“How far can he go?”

“Hard to say.” Platonov dropped his voice. “He’s like a boy born with perfect pitch. He may lose it when his voice changes. He’s of ordinary intelligence. His idols are the Black Berets, which is normal for a boy his age. At the chessboard he is a different creature. Where more intelligent players analyze a situation, Zhenya sees. He’s a bratty little Mozart who composes music as fast as he can write because it’s already complete in his head.”

“Any Black Beret in particular?”

“A Captain Isakov seems to be the main hero. Did you know that he led six Black Berets against a hundred Chechen terrorists?”

“Do you believe it?”

“Why not? At Stalingrad we had snipers who killed Germans by the score. Look it up. We had the Volga River at our back. Stalin said, ‘Not one step back!’ One step back and we would have been in the drink. So how has the recuperation been going? You’re looking well, everything considered. Are you yourself?”

“How would I know?”

Arkady had mineral water and Victor a beer at a sidewalk café under a leafless tree on the Boulevard Ring. Arabs swept by to their embassies. Babies rolled by in their strollers. Victor read Arkady’s spiral notebook and when he was done he waved to the waiter.

“This is not a notebook of beer-sized insanity; this merits vodka. To begin with, Arkady, are you crazy? Maybe this is a result of the shooting?”

“These notes are just to jog my memory of certain cases.”

“No. These notes cover cases that were never yours. Kuznetsov chopped by a cleaver, his wife stuffed with her own tongue, the journalist Ginsberg run down and Borodin drunk. These cases were disposed of by Detectives Isakov and Urman as a domestic squabble, a slip on the ice, the dangers of drinking alone and not sharing. But you insinuate murder.”

“Just suggesting they were inadequately investigated.”

“Did you see Ginsberg run down?”

“No.”

“Was there any evidence of foul play with Borodin?”

“No.”

“What have they got to do with the Kuznetsovs?”

“Isakov and Urman.”

“Do you hear the circularity of your argument?”

“The notes are just for me.”

“You had better hope so, because if Isakov and Urman get wind of it your body will be found, but the notebook will not. I feel bad. I got you involved with Zoya Filotova killing and scalping her husband. That blew up in our face.”

“The notes aren’t well organized.”

“Well, you just tossed everyone in.”

“I tried to give everyone their own page and a list of facts and near-facts. Isakov and Urman to start with. Then the Russian Patriot video crew-Zelensky, Petya, and Bora-each got a page.”

“They’re campaigning in Tver today.” Victor paused reverently as a short carafe of vodka arrived, then reached across to flip pages. “You gave Tanya a page.”

“Urman’s girlfriend and handles a garrote well. Bonus points for playing the harp.”

“Here’s Zhenya’s father, Osip Lysenko? What the devil has he got to do with this?”

“Anyone who shoots me automatically earns a page.”

“If you keep this up you will get shot again. Who knows? Isakov and Urman may be the ones to find your body. I thought you had a ticket out of town.”

“So they say.”

Victor turned another page. “The rest of the notes are crazy. Arrows, diagrams, cross-references.”

“Connections. Some are sketchy.”

“You worry me, Arkady. I think you’re coming undone.”

“I wanted to be complete.”

“Is that so? You know whose name I haven’t seen? Eva. Doctor Eva Kazka. I think she deserves a page.”

Arkady was startled by the omission. He wrote Eva’s name on a fresh page and wondered what else about her he had missed.

“I think you have it all now,” Victor said.

Arkady watched a bus roll by advertising a day trip to Suzdal. “See the Soul of Russia.” The trip included lunch.

“There’s a number,” he said.

“What number?”

“I don’t recall the shooting and there are some other blank patches, so I’ve been working on phone numbers, addresses, names. What does thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three mean to you?”

“You’re serious? It means nothing.”

“What could it mean?”

Victor took a first sip of vodka like a butcher whetting his knife.

“Not a phone number; that would be seven digits. Maybe the combination to a padlock or a safe. Right twice to thirty-three, left to thirty-one, right to thirty-three, turn latch and open, only…”

“Only I don’t know whose safe or where it is.”

“Visualize the number. Typed? Handwritten? Who wrote it, you or somebody else? A man or a woman’s hand? What was the number originally written on? A paper napkin or a bar coaster? Is it a license plate number? The winning number of a lottery? How can you remember and not remember?”

“Elena Ilyichnina says that bits of my memory will come back. I have to go.”

Arkady paid for Victor’s vodka, the price of his expertise.

“Do you think I drink too much? Be honest.”

“A touch.”

“It could be worse.” Victor looked right and left. “Did Elena Ilyichnina say anything about me?”

“No.”

“Did she recognize me?”

“Why should she?”

Victor pulled back the hair at his temples and revealed a small puckered scar on each side.

“You always astonish me,” Arkady said. “You too?”

“A little different. I had a tiny drug addiction problem about ten years ago, so I had myself drilled.”

“Drilled?”

“On local anesthetic. I talked to the doctor while he took some brain tissue from each hemisphere. A dab. The procedure was a wonderful example of Russian ingenuity. It’s outlawed now because Elena Ilyichnina turned him in, but it worked. I’ve been drug-free since.”

“Congratulations. And the drinking?”

Victor patted his hair down. “It fills the gap. It completes me. It’s my veneer. Everyone has a veneer, even you, Arkady. Everyone sees a peaceful man. There’s nothing remotely peaceful about you. We started off, you and I, investigating two detectives. Now you’re after the Black Berets.”

“Something happened in Chechnya.”

“Horrible things, no doubt; it’s war. But why would heroes like Isakov and Urman come back to Moscow and kill their friends and former comrades in arms? Do you know what this notebook adds up to? Wishful thinking. Ask yourself what you’re after, Isakov or Eva? I speak as the man who killed the man who shot you. What makes you think Eva is unhappy with him?” When Arkady said nothing Victor dredged up half a smile. “Fuck, forget about all this. I’m rambling. I’m drunk.”

“You sound sober to me. Think about thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three. I just wonder why my brain chose this number to fix on.”

“Maybe at this point your brain hates your guts.”

With the thaw a moving truck had finally delivered Arkady’s furniture and earthly goods, including a cot, although Zhenya maintained his independence by sleeping on the couch with a backpack ready for instant departure. He still bore the stamp of early malnutrition but he had started lifting weights and developed hard little muscles like knots in a rope.

He did schoolwork quickly so that he could turn on the television and watch a nostalgia channel that ran grainy wartime documentaries on the siege of Leningrad, the defense of Moscow, the carnage and valor of Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd but forever Stalingrad. Also, war films about pilots, tank crews and riflemen who shared snapshots of mothers, wives and children before attacking a machine gun bunker, piloting a burning plane, crawling with a Molotov cocktail toward an enemy tank.

“I’m sorry,” Zhenya said.

Arkady was a little startled. He was at the desk writing in the notebook and hadn’t heard Zhenya approach.

“Thank you. I’m sorry about your father.”

“Did you see it?”

“No, not actually.”

“You don’t remember it?” Zhenya asked.

“No.”

Zhenya nodded, as if that were a good option.

“Do you remember going to Gorky Park?”

“Of course.”

“Remember the Ferris wheel?”

“Yes. Your father ran it.”

Osip Lysenko had hit on a perfect situation for dealing drugs: young people paying in cash for a five-minute ride in the open-air privacy of a gondola. That no one tried to fly from the top of the wheel was a miracle.

“He was never there,” Zhenya said.

Thank God, Arkady thought. Each had gone to the park with a false assumption. Arkady thought that the boy sought a missing father. The boy thought Arkady carried a gun.

One minute was usually the time limit on discourse with Zhenya, but he stood his ground and brightened. “Winter is a bitch.”

“It certainly can be.”

“In the rail yard you could freeze to death. Sniff glue during the day and turn blue at night. That’s when you go to the shelter.”

“Like wintering in the Crimea.”

“The problem is, if a parent shows up they hand you over, even to my father. He said the law was on his side; I’d never get away.”

“You saw him here?”

“Right across the street. He was with a crew filling in a hole.”

“Just bad luck.”

“It was snowing. I didn’t see him when I went out the building. I walked right by him. The wind pushed my hood back and he said my name. He said, ‘Do you still play chess?’ And then he saw my book bag and said, ‘Do you have your chess set with you?’”

“Did you?” Arkady asked.

Zhenya nodded. “Then he told me to give it to him to keep it safe and that we’d pick up where we left. ‘Partners again,’ he said. That’s when I ran. He was in rubber boots, but he slipped on the ice and went down. He yelled. He said ‘I’ll wring your neck like a chicken! The judge will give you to me and I’ll wring your neck like a chicken!’ I heard him for blocks.”

“Where did you go?”

“Where Eva works. She told me to stay away from the apartment.”

“That makes sense.”

“And not to tell you because it would end badly. She knew people who could arrange things so that no one got hurt.”

“That’s a special skill. Who did she have in mind?”

“I don’t know.”

Arkady let the lie go by. Zhenya had unloaded quite a lot.

“Eva was right,” Arkady admitted. “It didn’t end well.”

And it wasn’t getting better. He had no memory of writing 33-31-33. Perhaps it was an imaginary number and his notebook was a fiction concocted to smear a better man. He considered the lengths he’d gone to, casting suspicion on the Kuznetsov investigation and, on no evidence, trying to tie Isakov to Borodin’s solitary death in the woods.

Even drunk, Victor had nailed it. Eva had left him. What made him think she wasn’t happy?

The Great Patriotic War paused for the evening news. Five minutes in, Arkady realized that a Russian Patriot demonstration in Tver was being covered. Nikolai Isakov was in the front rank helping to carry a banner that read Restore Russian Pride! At Isakov’s side Marat Urman continuously scanned the crowd, and in the second row stood Eva, sharp and exotic among round faces.

Through a bullhorn Isakov announced, “I was a lad in Tver, I served in the Tver OMON, and I will faithfully represent Tver in the highest levels of government.”

The day was warm enough for many to wear Patriot T-shirts, making the Americans, Wiley and Pacheco, all the more conspicuous in their parkas. As Arkady entered pages for the two political consultants he remembered breakfast in the Hotel Metropol, the harpist’s closed eyes and the hotel phone number scribbled in ballpoint pen inside a matchbook.

Arkady went to the closet and tore through the cardboard box he had brought from the office until he found the matchbook he had taken from Petya, Zelensky’s all-purpose cameraman. “Tahiti-A Gentlemen’s Club” was printed in red letters against a plastic field of pink. The Metropol number was handwritten inside the flap. There was no phone number for the club itself, initially, but as it warmed in his fingers the imprint of an open hand appeared on the front and the back divulged the phone number 33-31-33. Like a mood ring. One digit less than Moscow. He had no conscious memory of seeing the number before; his mind, out of habit, had collected it. The Tver area code was 822.

He called on his cell phone. On the tenth tone a deep voice said, “Tahiti.” Arkady heard a background of heavy metal, laughs, arguments, the sociable clatter of glasses.

“In Tver?”

“Is this a joke?”

On the chance, Arkady asked, “Is Tanya there?”

“Which Tanya?”

“The one who plays the harp.”

“She’s on later.”

“Her nose is better?”

“They don’t come here to see her nose.”

Arkady hung up. He got a short glass of vodka and a cigarette. He was starting to feel like himself. Zhenya watched the war again. The Hitlerites were in full retreat. Their trucks and caissons wallowed in mud. Dead horses and burnt tanks lined the road. Arkady picked up his cell phone and called a Moscow number.

“Yes?”

“Prosecutor Zurin.”

“It’s you, Renko? Damn it, this is my emergency line. Can’t this wait?”

“I made up my mind about my next post and I want to get there as soon as possible. Not linger, as you say.”

Zurin reorganized himself. “Oh. Well, that’s the right spirit. So, Suzdal it is. I envy you. Very picturesque. Or perhaps you have some other quiet destination in mind. What will it be?”

“Tver.”

A long pause. Both men knew that if in their long professional association the prosecutor could have found any excuse to send Arkady to Tver, Zurin would have seized it. Now that Arkady volunteered for the abyss the prosecutor audibly held his breath.

“You’re serious?”

“Tver is my choice.”

Isakov was from Tver. The Black Berets at the Sunzha Bridge were all from Tver. Tanya was from Tver. How, Arkady asked himself, could he go anywhere else?

“What are you up to, Renko? No one goes to Tver by choice. Are you on a case?”

“How could I be? You haven’t given me one.”

“That’s right. Very well, Tver it is. Don’t tell me why. Just say good-bye to Moscow.”

On the television screen a victorious Red Army carried Nazi standards upside down and hailed the man on Lenin’s Tomb.

Feeling expansive, Arkady added Stalin to his notebook, for good measure.