Tatiana

10

The website for Bicicletta Ercolo was a single screen in gothic red on black, with its name, phone number, fax and e-mail address. Its severity suggested that it did not welcome casual visitors.

“Excuse me, do you speak Russian?”

Click.

“English?”

Click.

“German?”

Click.

“Is Mr. Ercolo there? I’ll only keep calling.”

“Mr. Ercolo is not here. Ercolo is Hercules, sometimes Heracles. He is a mythical character. Good-bye.”

A good start. The man spoke English. In the background Arkady heard the clanging of a workshop.

He called again. “That was stupid of me. I should have known about Ercolo.”

“That was stupid.”

“But I have your bike.”

“What do you mean, you have my bike? Who are you?”

“I am Senior Investigator Renko calling from Moscow. I think one of your bikes was stolen.”

“From Moscow? You’re crazy.”

“We think it may have been involved in a homicide.”

“Sei pazzo.”

“I have just faxed you a copy of my identification card and phone number.”

“I’m hanging up.”

• • •

Arkady thought microwave ovens were the greatest boon to the single man. Men were meant to warm things up. To take blocks of ice and change them into peas or enchiladas and have time to stand in the kitchen and ponder the digital seconds as they ticked by. The bicycle makers at Ercolo had not called or faxed. They were probably sitting down to a platter of spaghetti.

One angle he had not pursued was the shooting of Grisha Grigorenko. There was a bumper crop of suspects for that deed, and the prospect of more to come as long as Alexi Grigorenko stayed in Moscow. It mystified Arkady why Anya wanted to be so close to a likely target. Maybe it was for the sake of the article, for a proper climax. He remembered what she said was the secret of better photographs: “Get closer.”

The phone rang. Arkady picked up and caught the whine of a saw. It was Milan.

“Senior Investigator Renko, in Italy a senior investigator is a man with a broom.”

“The same here. May I ask who I’m talking to?”

“Lorenzo, chief designer.”

Arkady got the impression of a Vulcan smeared with charcoal and sweat.

“What about the bicycle?” Lorenzo asked.

“We have a dead man here with no identification other than his connection to an Ercolo Pantera.”

“So?”

“I’m hoping you can help us.”

“Why? If someone is shot in an American car, do you question Mr. Ford? Let me warn you, many of the Panteras out there are imitations. Each authentic Ercolo is unique. That’s why the high and mighty come to Milan to be measured and fitted. We don’t sell to just anyone. Bicycle and buyer must be a match.”

“Absolutely.”

“So each Pantera is numbered on the underside of the top tube. Can you read the number to me?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You don’t have the bicycle.”

“No.”

“And you don’t have the rider.”

“No.”

“You don’t have anything.”

“That is, more or less, correct.”

“This must be difficult work.”

“It takes perseverance. You say that each Pantera is unique.”

“Yes.”

Arkady read from the notebook’s back cover. “Who was this? ‘Sixty centimeters, fifty-six point five centimeters, nineteen-ninety grams’?”

Lorenzo took over. “Sixty-centimeter frame, fifty-six-point-five-centimeter top tube, nineteen-ninety-gram weight, for someone with long legs and a short torso. We call it high hipped. It’s a funny thing; I remember bikes better than the people who buy them. I’ll find you the order form or the receipt. Signor Bonnafos, I remember. I told him he didn’t need ten gears, eight would do, but he thinks he’s in the Tour de France.”

“A steel frame, not carbon?”

Lorenzo made a noise as if sharing a joke. “Carbon is fine unless it breaks. We have built with steel for over a hundred years.”

“Your help is vital. Would you call me if you find the number of the bike? Do you happen to remember his first name?”

• • •

Joseph Bonnafos, thirty-eight, was a Swiss national, interpreter and translator, single, income two hundred thousand euros. No arrests. Received Russian tourist visa, entered Russia at Moscow Domededovo Airport, continued to Kaliningrad the same day, information gathered from data programs at the Ministry of the Interior that watched and cataloged people the way astronomers ceaselessly scanned the night sky.

There was a footnote. Before the Kaliningrad flight, the ground staff had refused to load his bicycle in its hard case on the grounds that it was too large and too heavy. Bonnafos called somebody, who must have called somebody, because in a minute the crew loaded the bike with special care.

Arkady wasn’t superstitious but he did believe that momentum only existed if used. He called the same Kaliningrad hotels he had before, this time asking for a guest named Bonnafos. All but one hotel receptionist took a moment to search the guest list before saying no. The exception was Hydro Park, which said no at once. Arkady wondered whether she was just as quick at alerting Lieutenant Stasov. Just a thought.

Arkady tried calling Tatiana’s sister. Ludmila Petrovna was not home but a neighbor who happened to be in the apartment said she would be back in an hour.

And he tried calling Victor in his car.

“Any luck with Svetlana?”

“She’s on the night train to Kaliningrad, arriving in the morning at oh nine-fifty.”

“Amazing. Who told you?”

“Conan. He may have been headed to Central Asia, but he only got as far as the drunk tank. They know me there. He had my card and I got him out.”

“Nicely done.”

“So now you can fly to Kaliningrad and bring her back. That way we keep the investigation contained. Just us, just Moscow, right?”

“Actually, it’s getting a little complicated. The scope of the investigation has broadened.”

Victor said, “I don’t like broadened and I hate complicated.”

“Two days before she was killed, Tatiana went to Kaliningrad and came back with a notebook. So far, nobody can read it because the notes are written by a professional interpreter in a kind of personal code. He could help us but he’s dead, shot on the same beach where the notebook was found. We have his name: Joseph Bonnafos, Swiss, an interpreter. Who knows, the notebook may tell us everything we need to know.”

“Where is it now?”

“It’s locked in a drawer of my desk.”

“You don’t know what the notes are for?”

“Some sort of international event, I assume, since they needed the services of an interpreter.”

“Can’t the local police take care of business there?”

“The case is being torpedoed by a Lieutenant Stasov, who seems to regard the hotels in Kaliningrad as his slice of the pie. There hasn’t been any real investigation into Bonnafos’s death.”

Victor said, “Wait, all we signed on for was to find Tatiana’s body. Just find her, not who killed her, if she was killed. Now you’re phoning people in Kaliningrad? She wasn’t killed in Kaliningrad and her body isn’t in Kaliningrad. I’m saying this as a sober man: we should stay with what we know.”

“There’s also a missing Italian custom bicycle,” Arkady said.

By then, Victor had hung up.

• • •

How does a man know when he becomes obsessive? Who can tell him except a friend? More specifically, how could two men cover one city, let alone two cities, hundreds of miles apart? He would need a dozen detectives and police dogs, none of which the prosecutor would authorize. All Zurin would support was a game of musical chairs in the morgue. At this point, if Tatiana had been moved from drawer to drawer, her body would be light blue with a film of crystals. Perhaps the person hiding her was waiting for the first mantle of snow to lay her down properly, when outrage was spent and she was just one saint out of many. The strange thing was Arkady looked forward to listening to the other tapes, not because Tatiana’s voice was especially mellifluous, but because it was clear, and not because the events she described were dramatic but because she underplayed her part. And because, listening to the tapes, he thought he knew her and that they had met before. Was that obsessive?