Stalin’s Ghost

23

The Russian dead sometimes carried plastic cylinders with a scroll of paper bearing a name, rank and blood type, but, otherwise, nature had digested everything but bones and identity was a matter of conjecture. Likely Russian skulls were stacked up in the trenches and German remains piled in a central heap.

Trophies of the first day were as reverently displayed as holy relics. Tables were covered with the flotsam of war: brass cartridges, machine gun belts, aluminum canteens, encrusted bayonets, mess tins, lieutenant’s bars, a crushed bugle and half-sized, withered rifles.

Zhenya lugged a backpack heavy with a chessboard, clothes and rubber boots for wading in Lake Brosno. Arkady had brought him only because there was no alternative. Put Zhenya on a train to Moscow and he’d be on the next train back to Tver. So far Zhenya seemed to consider the dig a worthy detour, lingering at each display with fascination, the monster in Lake Brosno temporarily out of mind. He inserted a finger through a bullet hole in a helmet and stole a glance at Arkady.

Crews digging since the day before exposed a network of bunkers two meters deep and fifty meters long, taking care to keep remains whole and not detach feet or fingers. Two skeletons were found in an embrace, one with a dagger, the other with a bayonet. A tent with the front canvas rolled up was being readied for pathological examination.

All of this was preliminary to opening the ground beneath the pines, marked off-limits by a red tape on stakes 30 meters from the camp. The general mood was one of solemn excitement, and enough snow fell to add an auspicious sparkle to the day.

Big Rudi tugged at Arkady’s sleeve. The old man had polished his medals and donned a moth-nibbled army fore-and-aft cap in honor of the occasion.

“My grandson Rudi told them where to look, but they won’t put him on television.”

“It’s all horseshit.” Rudi appeared at Arkady’s other side. The biker’s fashion note was a bulletproof vest. “They’re amateurs and they resent a professional.”

“I thought you were a Red Digger.”

“Do I look like the sort of fuckless wonder who’s going to dig up dead bodies for free? If they want to play around mines, let them.”

“You don’t like mines.”

“They’re so…I can’t even find the word for it.”

“Perverse,” said Arkady.

“Yeah, that’s the word. Or mind-fucking. A landmine is just as happy disabling you as killing you. Happier. When you see your pal blow up and come down screaming without a leg, you don’t check for tripwires. You rush in to help and trip more mines and disable more men. You can’t outrun it either.” Rudy hitched up his armor and shirt to show his back, an expanse of mixed colors.

“The German spoon you found?”

“On the Internet, thank you.”

“Have you seen Stalin?” Big Rudi asked Zhenya.

“The one that skinheads talk about? I thought he was dead.”

Big Rudi patted Zhenya on the head. “He was. Now he’s back.”

Nikolai Isakov wore camos with the tiger head emblem and the red star shoulder patch of the Red Diggers. He didn’t give a speech so much as share stories of battles won and lost. In the war against terror sacrifices had to be made. But sacrifices by whom?

“Has Mother Russia abandoned her children? Or have we been led astray by a superrich elite so devoid of spiritual values that it would steal the coins off the eyes of our dead heroes? The men whose remains lie on the fields around us answered with their lives the order ‘Not one step back!’ The question is, who will stand fast for Russia now?”

Every word was taped by the television crew that had been at the chess tournament. Arkady remembered the name of the young, upbeat presenter was Lydia something. Bits of that day were filling in, although he still remembered nothing about being shot. With her raincoat and undimmed smile Lydia put Arkady in mind of a doll wrapped in cellophane. Zhenya was transfixed by a charred and twisted chessboard and pieces made of tin. There was no sign of Eva.

A visitors’ tent with brandy, cheese cubes and pistachios was set up for the television people. Pacheco waved Arkady and Zhenya in.

“It’s a hell of a combination, Stalin’s spectral visit and a new Nazi atrocity. You don’t get those opportunities every day,” Pacheco said. He and Wiley were outfitted in camos but marked by their white, unsullied hands.

“Do you mind?” Arkady speared cheese with a toothpick from a glass.

“Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” Arkady introduced Zhenya and filled his hand with cheese.

Wiley said, “We have a bit of a coup, an election eve news event that will feature Detective Isakov. We may have a genuine upset here. Isakov may be the real thing.”

“Well, he is the only candidate endorsed by both the living and the dead. I doubt you can do better than that,” Arkady said. “There are a few loose ends, though, a homicide here and there.”

Wiley said, “Those suspicions seem to be limited to you. Anyway, an image of strength is not a problem. Weakness is a problem. A mass grave is a perfect example of what happens when a threat is ignored.”

“And good television?”

“He’s catching on,” Pacheco said.

Arkady looked around. “Where is Urman?”

“Who knows?” Pacheco said. “Urman is like a genie. I think he hides in a magic lamp.”

Wiley said, “He’s impulsive. He might be a liability down the line.”

They were thinking ahead, Arkady thought. Isakov really had a chance.

“Time to cut the cake,” Pacheco said.

All work came to a halt as Diggers with metal detectors crossed the field to the pine trees. The men moved at the pace of mushroom hunters and Arkady heard one mutter over and over, “If treasure be hidden here, make the Devil give it back without shaming myself who am a servant of God. If treasure be hidden…” Wherever their gauges spiked or earphones squawked, the men planted a red plastic flag on a wire.

Zhenya wormed his way through the Diggers to Arkady and showed him the tin chess set.

Arkady said, “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to put that back.”

“Nikolai said I could keep it.”

Zhenya pointed to Isakov, who was watching them in return.

“Do you know him?” Arkady asked.

“He’s Eva’s friend from Moscow. Nikolai’s famous. He’s my friend too.”

Isakov acknowledged Zhenya with a wave and the boy swelled. The detective was growing into his role of a media hero. Lydia and a camera moved in for an interview.

“What do you expect to find here?” she asked Isakov.

“We will find Russian prisoners of war who were slaughtered by their German captors at the onset of the great counteroffensive of December ’forty-one.”

“Will the spirit of Josef Stalin then walk the land?”

“That’s not for me to say. What will walk the land is a spirit of patriotism. The heroes brutally murdered and buried here symbolize the sacrifice of millions of Russians.”

By the time the Diggers with minesweepers emerged from the trees they had no red flags left. One man balanced on his shoulder a long-nosed skull that looked like driftwood.

“Moose!” he shouted ahead. “The whole skeleton’s in there.”

“Our first find. Shot by a hunter?” Lydia was instantly excited.

The man with the moose skull let it slide off his shoulder to the ground. The antlers were grainy, the skull was smooth. “I don’t think so. No signs of it being dressed. It could be ten or twenty years old. Nobody goes in those gloomy trees. Why would they?”

“Maybe it died of old age,” Lydia said.

“Maybe it stepped on something,” said Rudi.

As Diggers with probes moved into the trees Arkady realized how gray the day was getting and what a black palisade the pines made against the sky.

“Why don’t you go home and sit at your computer and make more money from death?” a Digger asked Rudi.

Rudi said, “Because I’m the one who found this gold mine, asshole.” Arkady pulled him away, although he wondered why Rudenko had told anyone else; this could have been his private gold mine. Rudi shook free. “Amateurs.”

One by one the probers replaced red flags with yellow flags. Pacheco asked, “Renko, why does Detective Isakov look as if he’d like to plunge a dagger into your heart? I want my candidate positive and personable. Would you mind taking a walk? Pretty please?”

Arkady intended to search for Eva anyway. As he moved around the perimeter he was joined by Petrov and Zelensky. The filmmaker was furious. “They had us up the ass. As soon as a network showed any interest we were out the door.”

Arkady asked, “How did you pull off the Stalin sighting on the Metro?”

“Let me tell you something else about old age: the dick goes first, but when Tanya gets on the train in a wet fuck-me outfit the old boys steam. And when she jumps up and says she sees Stalin, the geezers swear they see him too. Without a law being broken.”

“Why the Chistye Prudy Station?”

“It’s a wartime station. We couldn’t have Stalin show up at a station with a shopping mall.”

Petya said, “By the way, watch out for Bora. First you almost drown him dead and then you spray his older brother and almost blind him.”

“The boxer with sore knuckles? Interesting family.”

Arkady disengaged and watched for Eva. She had come to him and all he’d had to do was be an agreeable lover and keep his questions to himself and he and Eva would be in Moscow now. People said that good marriages were built on honesty. Arkady suspected that as many solid relationships were based on a lie shouldered by two.

After the top layer of needles and earth was declared safe other Diggers moved in with wheelbarrows and shovels. Arkady completed his circuit and found that Zhenya had moved beside Isakov, who rested his hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder. Zhenya was honored, as any lad would be, although Arkady heard Wiley ask Pacheco, “Is this the most photogenic kid we could find?”

A shout from the trees indicated that a body had been found. Lydia and a camera followed as the remains were carried on a litter to the examination tent, which was outdoor theater. Onlookers jockeyed for position to observe a pathologist in a lab coat and surgical mask separate bones, boots and a pot-shaped helmet. She turned the skull and untangled a metal disk-a Wehrmacht ID-on a chain.

“German!” the doctor declared, and expressions of satisfaction went around the crowd.

Marat Urman arrived and Isakov passed him possession of Zhenya, who basked in their attention. The three of them made their way to Arkady.

Isakov said, “Zhenya wants to go to Lake Brosno and look for sea serpents. I told him that as soon as the election is over Marat and I will take him. We might plug the beast and mount it.”

“Arkady doesn’t carry a gun,” Zhenya said. “I remind him but he always forgets.”

Urman said, “That’s because he’s a member of the hole-in-the-head club. Anything you say goes right through.”

Zhenya snickered although his face was red with embarrassment.

The topsoil around the trees yielded a few rusty cartridges, food tins and mess kits. Word came back, however, that when metal detectors were set for a lower level they got more response. Arkady was surprised since execution victims were usually stripped of arms, helmets, watches and rings before they were shot and afterwards of gold fillings. What else would cause a metal detector to spike?

Lydia was a shade paler when she returned with her camera crew from the examination tent, but she was game. “Nikolai Isakov and Marat Urman, as detectives and former OMON officers, people here are talking about the possibility of finding a mass grave at this site. How is this sort of atrocity carried out?”

Isakov said, “Victims are either forced to dig their own grave and then machine-gunned, or killed somewhere else and brought to a grave. If we find Russian prisoners of war, they were probably killed here by German guards afraid of being overwhelmed by the counteroffensive.”

Urman added, “You can tell the difference because a machine gun chews up a body, bones and all. If you’re going to transport dead bodies you want as little mess as possible, so you just pop them in the back of the head. Sometimes you have to pop them twice.”

It was a reflective moment. A digger raised high a CD player and the wartime anthem rang out across the dig:

Arise, the great country,

Arise for the final struggle,

With the dark fascist force,

With the accursed horde.

Everyone sang. Zhenya sang with Isakov and Urman. Arkady was sure that when the song was over Big Rudi would point to a shadow or a stirring bough and see Stalin. Before the song ended, however, a voice called from the pines, “A helmet! A Russian helmet!”

“Show time,” Pacheco said.

The first helmet was joined by more helmets, bottles, boots, razors, all stained, broken or disintegrating Russian junk. No weapons. Bodies, though, there were. As the day warmed, snow became a soft rain that revealed a cranium here, a kneecap there.

“A two-point bump,” Wiley told Pacheco. “If Uncle Joe shows, ten.”

The plan was for no retrieval until every red flag was investigated, but the promise of so many Russian heroes waiting to be found was too much. Red Diggers were neither military nor pathologists; when one got a wheelbarrow and started toward the trees he was followed by another and another.

“In an upwelling of patriotism, the people mobilize,” Lydia told a camera. “Ignoring red danger flags they are rushing to exhume lost martyrs of the Patriotic War.”

Zhenya said, “Let’s go with them.”

“No one investigated the flags,” Arkady said. “They didn’t investigate a single one.”

Wiley said, “The flags are theater. Decoration. Any ammunition here is sixty years old. It’s not going to do anything.”

“Can my crew and I get closer?” Lydia asked. “I feel the viewers would want to get closer.”

“You’d better have this.” Rudi ripped open his vest and handed it to Lydia.

“I can’t take it from you.”

“Why not?” Rudi said. “I’m not going there.”

Pacheco told her, “A little advice. Any time, anywhere you have an excuse to wear body armor on television, you grab it.”

“Ready, Captain?” Urman said. “Don’t let me down.”

Isakov gathered himself together. “Right.”

A party of five-Isakov, Urman, Lydia and her two cameramen-trudged toward the trees, following wheelbarrow tracks in the muck. Although Isakov was in the lead, Arkady thought there had been a moment when the bold commander seemed to have cold feet and Urman had to prod him into action.

Something odd was happening ahead. Diggers who had arrived at the trees in such a hurry spread around the periphery instead of going in.

Zhenya told Arkady, “You’re not my father, you can’t tell me what to do.”

Arkady heard and didn’t hear. He was intrigued by Isakov’s hesitation.

Wiley said, “The people here must have wondered why there were suddenly pine trees planted in the middle of a productive field.”

“They steered their tractors around it until it became invisible,” said Pacheco. “You don’t see what you don’t want to see.”

Arkady watched Isakov lead the way to the edge of the trees. All five stopped and crossed themselves.

Zhenya bolted. Backpack and all, he was across the tape and into the field before Arkady had a chance to stop him. Zhenya didn’t stay on the wheelbarrow paths but took a mocking, looping route, swinging his backpack as if he’d just been let out of school. All Arkady could do was follow.

As he tramped across the field he reassessed Zhenya and how the boy had shifted his allegiance to Isakov and Urman without batting an eye. Snakes were slower at leaving the nest.

Arkady reached the pines and joined the Diggers staying motionless and mute on the periphery of the stand. A wheelbarrow that trespassed accentuated the unnatural, regularly spaced columns of trees and rain that escaped the upper canopy fell into silence and a thin blanket of needles. There was no birdsong, no squirrel chatter.

Bodies must have been thrown in sideways, head first, feet first, one on top of the other; Arkady couldn’t estimate how many, only that they all appeared part of a violent struggle. A head lifted here, a knee there. Over the years nature’s parade of scavengers and microorganisms had stripped the flesh and the remains were not only skeletonized but an interlocking puzzle. Did this skull go on that neck? Did these two hands make a match? When the merest tug pulled the tip from the finger, the finger from the hand, the hand off the arm, where to even begin? The distance between the trees was an unnaturally uniform five meters, but stepping on clear ground meant crushing remains underneath, so Diggers put together composite bodies of whatever they could reach.

“You shouldn’t take it so hard,” Big Rudi said. He had a way of appearing at Arkady’s side when least expected. “War is a meat grinder. Farmers, doctors, teachers? Ground beef. And if Fritz doesn’t shoot you, the commissar will. But I miss the camaraderie. I was smoking at your age,” he told Zhenya, who was approaching tentatively.

“Did you kill anyone?” Zhenya asked.

Arkady stuck a cigarette in Big Rudi’s mouth and lit it. The old man inhaled deeply and coughed up half a lung.

No one stopped the cameraman Grisha from using bones as stepping stones because everyone understood that television ruled. This was the Diggers’ moment in the sun. Better than the sun, the camera’s eye. Wiley was right, Arkady thought, it was a great visual.

Big Rudi said, “The collective used to have a nice field of wheat here. Nice soil, sandy, well-drained.”

“Why didn’t the collective take the trees out?”

Big Rudi shrugged. “They had to apply. Someone said no.”

“Why would anyone in Moscow care whether a collective farm in Tver cut down trees?”

“Who knows? These were the old days. An order from Moscow took into consideration forces and dangers we knew nothing about.”

Arkady watched Grisha’s advance through the trees. The cameraman kept each move smooth and slow, a step away a brown line that led to what looked like a pinecone standing up.

“Can I see what-?” Zhenya started toward the cameraman.

“No.” Arkady pulled him to the ground and shouted, “Grisha, stop! Land mine!”

Grisha tripped, aimed down, and the ground erupted. When the smoke cleared, the cameraman was soaked in blood, on all fours, blinking, experimentally searching his crotch. Isakov helped Grisha to his feet and out of the trees. Grisha could walk, but Isakov tipped the bones out of a wheelbarrow and put Grisha in. Zhenya disappeared. The Diggers called for a pullback, which became a wholesale retreat to the tents.

Arkady stayed. Now that he knew what to look for, he found more unexploded mines. The POMZ land mine was a Russian creation as successful as the AK-47 and even simpler: seventy-five grams of TNT in a cast iron cylinder crosshatched for fragmentation and mounted on a stake. A trip wire ring looped over the igniter, a cigarette-sized rod that capped the mine. A safety pin hole was provided, although the pin had been pulled long ago. He spread-eagled on the ground studying how to remove the igniter and get to the fuse.

He was tentatively wriggling the stake when he noticed a wire running the other direction. He brushed aside rotten needles and discovered another POMZ. He discovered seven mines altogether on the same trip wire circling a tree, a necklace of ancient POMZs with their safety pins pulled and rigged like a string of holiday lights; if one went off, they all would, spitting shrapnel with a lethal range of four meters.

Probably all duds.

Arkady rolled on his back to dig into his pockets, found his keys, and slid them off the key ring. As occasionally happened under stress, a loud, unwelcome tune began in his head. His brain selected Shostakovich’s “Tahiti Trot.” Tea for two and two for tea, me for you…

Although he couldn’t straighten the entire ring he did, at the cost of a bloody finger, manage to bend a tip of wire. He rolled onto his front, held the stake steady with one hand, and with the other inserted the wire into the safety pin hole and pulled out the igniter and fuse. Didn’t even have to unscrew the fuse. The General always said they came out too easily.

Arkady was wet and covered in needles from head to toe, unintentionally camouflaged in case Urman came searching. Arkady could tell how much the detective itched to go into action. That was the exciting thing about Urman, his unpredictability. He could be affable company one moment and help you swallow your tongue the next.

Using his makeshift safety pin Arkady disarmed the next two mines in short order. The safety hole of the fourth was rusted shut and demanded exquisite pressure to force open without tripping the wire.

“Nobody near us, to see us or hear us…”

What Arkady did not understand was why the mines were set on metal stakes rather than wood. It was as if whoever rigged the POMZs had intended them to stand guard during the war, after the war, forever.

“What are you doing?” Zhenya asked.

Arkady was startled enough to make the trip wire tremble: he had not heard the boy coming.

“Rendering these mines a little less dangerous.”

“Huh. You mean, disarming them.”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s what you should say. ‘I’m disarming these mines.’ That’s simple.” Zhenya shifted the weight of his backpack. Damp ringlets stuck to his brow. “You’re making such a deal out of it. They’re all duds according to Nikolai and Marat. Nikolai and Marat would know better than you.”

“What about the cameraman Grisha?”

“Scratches. The mine didn’t have any real charge left. Marat says Grisha will still be able to scratch his balls.”

“Marat said that to you?”

“Yeah. I’m looking for him.”

Arkady considered the prospect of Zhenya wandering around land mines and skeletons. Or worse, being near if Arkady tripped a wire.

“I think Marat was looking for you around the pathology tent.”

“I was just there,” Zhenya said. “That’s a long walk.”

“Get a lighter backpack.”

“I bet Marat could disarm mines like these in his sleep.”

“You could be right.”

“I’m bored.”

“I’m busy,” Arkady said with a look that matched.

Zhenya’s cheeks went red, the most color Arkady had ever seen in them.

Arkady found a tripwire to follow, but when he crawled forward he felt something scratch his stomach. He rolled away from a mine set as a booby trap deep and on its own. After waiting sixty years, the bomb detonated with the soft pop of a champagne cork.

A dud.

When Arkady looked up, Zhenya was gone, except for his laugh.