Stalin’s Ghost

25

They returned to Tver, Arkady on the motorcycle, Sofia Andreyeva and Zhenya in her car. The boy had suffered a concussion when Urman hit him and he was alert but silent. Zhenya had been forced to gather the handcuff key from what was left of Urman. A jumping mine had a lateral blast; at close range it could cut a man in half. As the temperature dropped, rain turned to snow. Zhenya clutched his backpack and stared out the window at passing streetlamps, at flakes dancing by glass, at anything rather than the images in his mind.

Arkady and Sofia Andreyeva agreed to keep the story simple: Detective Marat Urman ill-advisedly went to a hot site alone in the dark, stuck a spade into the ground, and hit a land mine. Evidence that anyone else was there had been shredded into a million pieces.

Arkady’s plan was simple too. It was time for him and Zhenya to cut their losses and treat the Tver experience as a high fever or a nightmare. Arkady could pack in a minute and Zhenya carried everything in his backpack. Taking stock, Arkady had lost Eva, traumatized Zhenya and ended his less than illustrious career. How much more damage could a man do?

Arkady turned onto Sovietskaya Street, the main thoroughfare. The snow melted as it landed and the street had a photographic stillness, a contrast of silvery tram rails, the sheen of wet asphalt and a couple walking beside a wrought iron fence.

A block farther on at the Drama Theater, Arkady motioned the Lada to pull over and walked back to Sofia Andreyeva while she rolled down her window.

“Do you usually spit in public?”

“Of course not, what a question.”

“There’s a building we passed. Whenever you go by it, you spit.”

“That’s not spitting, that’s protection against the devil.”

“The devil lives on Sovietskaya Street?”

“Of course.”

“I think I just saw him.” Arkady gave Sofia Andreyeva the key to the apartment. “He’s not alone.”

They walked along the wrought iron fence, Eva in a coat and scarf, Isakov’s hands plunged in the pockets of an OMON greatcoat. They didn’t seem surprised when Arkady fell in step with them, other than to take a long look at a bruise that colored half his face.

Arkady offered a one-word explanation. “Urman.”

“And how is Marat?” Isakov asked.

“He was digging a hole when he hit a mine. It was a jumping mine. He’s dead.”

Eva asked, “Where were you?”

“I was in the hole. So was Zhenya. He’s all right.”

No one was on duty at the guardhouse at No. 6, although through the bars of the fence Arkady spied a black BMW in the courtyard with a driver dozing at the wheel. Closed-circuit cameras were mounted inside the gate and Arkady thought he made out floodlights on the roofline.

Isakov said, “You killed Marat? I find that hard to believe.”

“So do I,” said Arkady. “What is this building?”

“This was the headquarters of security during the war.”

“It’s where Nikolai’s father worked,” Eva said. “Tver’s own Lubyanka.”

The Lubyanka in Moscow was the maw of hell, a monolith the color of dried blood. In comparison, the building at No. 6 was a frosted cake.

“He was an agent of the NKVD?” Arkady asked.

“He did his part.”

“Tell him,” Eva said.

Isakov hesitated. “Eva is a stickler for the truth. So, my father. I always wondered how he could be in the NKVD and be treated with such contempt by his colleagues. He was old when I was born and by then a drunk, but at least he had been a spy in the war, I thought, and he acted as if he had guarded secrets of the state. He had a skin condition from washing his hands and the more he drank the more often he would leap from the table to wash and dry his fingers. On his deathbed my father said there was one more Polish grave. When I asked what he was talking about he told me he was an executioner. He never spied, he just shot people. He not only shot them, he kept track of where they went. That was his farewell gift to me: one more Polish grave. Two gifts,” he corrected himself. “He gave me his gun too. I found it this morning in a velvet sack, still loaded.”

Arkady asked Isakov, “Why are you telling me this?”

“I think it’s safe with you.”

“I’m cold,” Eva said. “Let’s walk.”

A civilized stroll in a light snow in the middle of the night. With bonhomie.

Isakov put his arm over Arkady’s shoulders. “Marat should have eaten you alive. You don’t look that strong and, frankly, you don’t look that lucky.”

“It wasn’t me; he dug up a mine.”

“Marat knew better than that. He was a Black Beret.”

“The elite?”

“Who else? They sent us down to Chechnya to stiffen the troops. Army officers were too drunk to leave their tents and the soldiers were too scared. They’d call in an air strike if they saw a mouse. If they did go out it was to loot.”

“What is there to loot in Chechnya?”

“Not much, but we have a looter’s mentality. That’s why I was a candidate. I want to revive Russia.”

“You had political plans?” Arkady asked. “Beyond immunity, I mean. You admired Lenin, Gandhi, Mussolini?”

As Eva crossed to the Drama Theater, she sang the old ditty, “Stalin flies higher than anyone, routs all our foes and outshines the sun.”

Arkady couldn’t tell whom she was mocking. Snowflakes on her scarf made him aware more snow was falling, which was a return to normalcy. To hell with warm weather.

Eva returned to her place between the men and put her arms through theirs, the three of them a troika. “Two men willing to die for me. How many women can say that? Will you each claim a half or will you take turns?”

“It’s winner take all, I’m afraid,” Isakov said. He spotted the motorcycle on the theater portico and placed his hand on the engine. “Still warm. I wondered how you were getting around without being seen. Clever.”

The neighborhood was not residential; at this hour of night only a few cars were parked on Sovietskaya and no one else was afoot along the dark offices and shops. A terrific shooting gallery.

Isakov’s mind must have been running in the same direction because he looked across Eva and asked Arkady with a note of idle curiosity, “Do you have a gun?”

“No.”

Actually, for once a gun seemed not such a bad idea. A Tokarev would do, but it was in pieces in Zhenya’s backpack.

“Anyway, no gun could match yours,” Arkady said. “When you think about it, your father’s gun may hold the record for a single handgun killing the most people. A hundred? Two hundred? Five hundred? That makes it at least an heirloom.”

“Really?”

“I feel for him. Imagine shooting people one after the other, head after head, hour after hour. The gun gets hot as an iron and twice as heavy and there must be some uncooperative victims. It had to get messy; he must have had work clothes. And the sound.”

Isakov said, “As a matter of fact, my father had earplugs and he still went deaf. Sometimes he would try to leave the room and they would pour vodka down his throat and push him back in. He was just sober enough to pull the trigger and reload.”

“He gave his eardrums for the cause. Did the gun ever misfire?”

“No.”

“Let me guess. A Walther?”

“Bravo.” Isakov pulled a long-barreled pistol out of a sack. “My father liked German engineering.” Even in the light of streetlamps the gun showed its nicks. It also looked eager.

A blue and white militia van cruised up Sovietskaya and slowed alongside Arkady, who expected an ID check at the very least. Isakov tucked the Walther into his belt, showed OMON printed on his jacket and bent his elbow in a drinker’s salute. The van flashed its head beams and rolled away, purring.

Eva said, “He recognized you. You made his day. You are a hero in their eyes.”

Not to mention a killer, Arkady thought. People were complicated. Who could say, for example, which way Eva would lean? It was like playing chess and not knowing which side his queen was on.

Arkady said, “The fight at the Sunzha Bridge sounds like quite a victory.”

“I suppose so. The enemy left fourteen bodies and we lost none. There was a raid on an army field hospital earlier that same day. Thank God, we got the message in time.”

“You were at the bridge when the attack began?”

“Of course.”

“You got a message that in a few minutes half the Russian soldiers in Chechnya would cross your bridge to chase the rebels. Did you worry what they would think if they saw your squad of Black Berets eating grapes and lounging with the enemy?”

“There were some Chechens at the bridge. They turned on us, but we were ready.”

A reply steeped in humility. Wrong choice, Arkady thought. Outrage and a punch to the mouth was always a safer answer. Of course, Isakov was painting himself a rational man for Eva’s sake. So was Arkady. They were actors and she was their audience. It was all for her.

By the time they arrived back at the wrought iron fence snow was starting to stick and narrow the bars.

“I talked to Ginsberg,” Arkady said.

“Ginsberg?” Isakov slowed for the effort of recollection.

“The journalist.”

“I’ve talked to a lot of journalists.”

“The hunchback.”

“How can you forget a hunchback?” Eva asked.

Isakov said, “I remember now. Ginsberg was unhappy because I wouldn’t let him land in the middle of a military operation. He didn’t seem to understand that a helicopter on the ground is nothing but a target.”

“The military operation was the fight at the bridge.”

“This conversation is boring for poor Eva. She’s heard the story a hundred times. Let’s talk about rebuilding Russia.”

“The operation was the fight at the bridge?”

“Let’s talk about Russia’s place in the world.”

“Ginsberg took photographs.”

“Did he?”

Arkady stopped directly under a streetlamp and opened his pea jacket. Inside was a folder, from which he took two photographs, one behind the other.

“Both from the air, of the bridge, bodies sprawled around a campfire and Black Berets walking around with handguns.”

“Nothing unusual about that,” Isakov said.

Arkady held up the other for comparison.

“The second photograph is of the same scene, four minutes later by the camera clock. There are two significant changes. Urman is aiming his gun at the helicopter, and all the bodies around the campfire have been rolled forward or been moved to one side. In those four minutes the most important goal for you and your men was to ward off the helicopter and get something out from under the bodies.”

“Get what?” asked Eva.

“Dragons.”

“The man has lost it,” Isakov said.

“When Kuznetsov’s wife said you took her dragons I didn’t understand what she was talking about.”

“She was a drunk who killed her husband with a cleaver. Is that your source of information?”

“I wasn’t thinking about Chechnya.”

“Chechnya is over. We won.”

“It’s not over,” Eva said.

“Well, I’ve heard enough,” Isakov said.

Eva asked, “Why, is there more?”

Arkady said, “The rest of the world puts its money in banks. This part of the world puts its money into carpets and the most prized carpets have red dragons woven into the design. A classic dragon carpet is worth a small fortune in the West. You don’t want to spill blood on that and, as you said, there’s not much else worth stealing in Chechnya.”

“The dead men were thieves?”

“Partners. Isakov and Urman were in the rug business. They rolled out the carpet for their partners and then they rolled it up.”

Snowflakes swam across the glossy surface of the photographs, over the coals of the campfire, across Marat Urman’s purposeful stride, around bodies sprawled on bloody sand.

“Now I see,” Eva said.

Isakov had an ear for nuance. “You’ve seen these photographs before?”

“Last night.”

“You told me you were going to the hospital. I watched you pick up the cassettes.”

“I lied.”

“Renko was with you?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Eva gave Isakov a drawn-out, emphatic “Yes.”

Isakov laughed. “Marat warned me. Look at Renko, look at him, the man looks disinterred.”

Arkady said, “I feel surprisingly good, considering.”

“You don’t care if you’re dead or alive?” Isakov asked.

“In a way, I feel I’ve been both.”

The Walther reappeared in Isakov’s hand.

“Okay, let’s be grown-ups. Marat and I did trade in carpets. So what? In Chechnya, everybody did something on the side, mainly drugs and arms. I doubt that saving a precious work of art from a burning house is against the law. Dealers and collectors certainly don’t ask questions and the Chechens, if you treated them with respect, were trustworthy partners. But that day, when I got the message from a Russian Army convoy that they were a minute away from the bridge, there just wasn’t time to end the lunch, fold the carpets and make nice good-byes. Sometimes you have to make the best of a bad situation.”

Eva laughed. When she wanted to deliver contempt she did it well. “You’re a rug merchant? Fourteen men dead for rugs?”

“And in Moscow, murdering members of your own squad,” Arkady said.

“Loose ends.” Isakov motioned for Arkady to be still and patted him down. “You really don’t have a gun. No gun, no case, no evidence.”

“He has the photographs,” Eva said.

“Prosecutor Sarkisian would tear them up. Zurin would do the same.” Isakov aimed the Walther directly at Arkady, a certain threshold crossed. “They’ll probably let me lead the investigation. You don’t have a gun? Maybe this will do. Maybe you found this old gun at the dig. Mainly, you didn’t have a plan. You saw Eva and jumped off your bike. Was it worth it just to win her back?”

“Yes.” He realized that she was what he had come back for out of the black lake he had sunk into when he was shot.

But part of him was thinking in a professional mode. Isakov would shoot him first, then Eva, and then wrap the gun in Arkady’s dead hand to mimic a murder-suicide, all to be carried out on the street at close range and with dispatch. The Walther was a heavy double-action pistol with a long trigger draw and a huge kick. It filled Isakov’s hand. No rush but no hesitation either. Arkady remembered Ginsberg’s admiration of Isakov’s calm under fire.

Was anyone awake at the security monitors, Arkady wondered? In the BMW? He heard far-off machinery, but where was the white van of the militia? Weren’t bakers abroad at this hour, on their way to their ovens? Sovietskaya Street was as still as a tomb.

“No gun, no prosecutor, no case, no evidence.” Isakov did not stand back to shoot Arkady; he tucked the barrel up under Arkady’s jaw at can’t-miss range. “And then your lover left. No wonder you’re depressed.”

“No wonder you’re depressed,” Isakov’s voice repeated from Eva’s coat pocket.

She took the tape recorder from her coat, popped the machine open and held up a cassette. Isakov watched in disbelief as she threw it over the fence. The cassette happened to be white and disappeared on the snowy lawn. The bright lights of a motion detector flashed on and off.

Isakov kept the gun tight on Arkady. “Go get it.”

“There’s a camera at the gate.”

“I don’t care if you go over, under or through.” Isakov let Arkady go and gave him a push. “Get it.”

“Or what? I don’t think that tape is going to be easy to find. You’ll never have time to find it once you fire that old cannon, and you have to find it because it’s a full confession. In chess that’s called a pin.”

A grinding sound announced the approach of snowplows scraping the street. The trucks traveled slowly but majestically in a blaze of light that Arkady and Eva walked next to. From the motorcycle they saw Isakov still in front of the gate, immobilized.