Tatiana

11

“The moon will float up in the sky, / Dropping the oars into the water. / As ever, Russia will get by, / And dance and weep in every quarter.”

“So nothing changes,” Tatiana said. “The poet Yesenin knew it a hundred years ago. Russia is a drunken bear, sometimes an entertainment, sometimes a threat, often a genius, but as night falls, always a drunken bear curled up in the corner. Sometimes, in another corner lies a journalist whose arms and hands have systematically been broken. The thugs who do such work are meticulous. We don’t have to go to Chechnya to find such men. We recruit them and train them and call them patriots. And when they find an honest journalist, they let the bear loose.

“Is it worth it? The problem with martyrdom is the waiting. Sooner or later, I will be poisoned or nudged off a cliff or shot by a stranger, but first I will put a torpedo under their waterline, so to speak.

“Also, why does heaven seem so dull? There’s love in heaven but is there passion? Do we really have to go barefoot and wear those robes? Are we allowed high heels? I have always envied women in high heels. I would like to spend my first thousand years in heaven learning to tango. In the meantime, I’ll stay ahead of the bear as long as I can.”

It wasn’t so much that he was listening to her, it was more a sense of being alone with her, and if they were alone, he would have been so bold as to offer her a cigarette.

When Arkady heard a key in the door, his first impulse was to gather the tapes and recorder and put them in a kitchen cabinet. He didn’t. Then wished he had.

Anya came in and Alexi Grigorenko piled in after. They were flushed with pre-party hysteria and the first bottle of Champagne. If it was bad taste for him to celebrate so soon after a father’s death, there also was a message to men of his father’s generation that old manners, even between thieves, were out of date. He seemed to think he was a prince. In fact, he was a sitting duck. They made a handsome pair of boutique darlings, Arkady had to admit. In comparison, he looked as if he had dressed from a stranger’s clothesline.

Anya said, “Alexi said he wanted to see my apartment, then I thought I heard Tatiana in yours.”

“She’s an interesting woman,” Arkady said.

“She’s seductive even dead, apparently.” Anya walked back and forth, almost sniffing the air.

“I hope we’re not disturbing you,” Alexi said.

Anya said, “Arkady is always up, like a monk at his prayers.”

“Is that how you solve your cases?” Alexi asked. “Prayer?”

“A good deal of the time.”

Alexi’s eyes were slightly hooded. Hands quick and delicate as a croupier’s. Under his jacket the hitch of a gun.

“Can I offer you a drink? Something to eat?” Arkady asked, as if there were any food in the refrigerator.

“No thanks,” Anya said. “He’s going to show me his new apartment. It’s a penthouse.”

“Penthouse?” That was a word Arkady never expected to hear on Russian lips. “You’re moving to Moscow?”

“Why not?” Alexi said. “Grisha left a number of properties and investments here and in Kaliningrad.”

“He left the makings of a war. Things were quiet until your father was killed. Quiet like a jungle, but quiet. Why don’t you cash out and live peacefully on some tropical island?”

“Perhaps I have more faith and less negativity than you do.” Alexi’s gaze lit on Tatiana’s cassette tapes, still on the table. “For instance, how can you stand to listen to this garbage?”

Alexi reached for the cassettes and Arkady seized his wrist.

“Don’t.”

“Okay, relax.” Alexi straightened up and rubbed his arm. “I had no idea they meant that much to you. My mistake.”

Arkady knew it was a moment that distilled the day. Alexi’s ambition compared to his own isolation. He didn’t dare look at Anya.

• • •

One in the morning was a territory as much as a time, and Victor Orlov and Arkady were long-term residents. Victor dropped into a chair and contemplated the recorder and cassettes on the kitchen table.

“Is this what you’ve been listening to?”

“Tatiana.”

“Huh. She’s the one who’s been fucking you over.”

“Victor, she’s dead.”

“Doesn’t matter. She has you ready to make a swan dive into a bucket of shit. Just because you got authority to go to Kaliningrad doesn’t mean you have to do it. This is not exactly hot pursuit. She’s been dead for ten days and my only hope is that whoever got her has her on ice.”

“There’s a connection-”

“There’s no connection. Tatiana Petrovna jumped off her apartment balcony in Moscow, was autopsied in Moscow, and if the fuck-ups in the morgue lost her, they did it in Moscow.”

“I visited her apartment twice,” Arkady said. “The first time, it was turned upside down by someone searching for something, maybe the notebook. The second time, it was absolutely bare, to take no chances.”

Victor said, “I asked around. The first time was skinheads trashing the place just for the fun of it. The second time the apartment was bare because the developer wants to build a shopping mall. Those are the facts. I have to ask, Arkady, are you feeling okay?”

“I talked to the prosecutor. He agreed that I could search in Kaliningrad.”

“Of course he did. Kaliningrad is like Siberia. He’d like it if you spent the rest of your life searching for bodies in Kaliningrad.”

“Just a day trip.”

“To Kaliningrad? No such thing, you’ll see. Chasing a body from town to town, calling a bicycle maker in Milan? That’s too crazy even for me.”

Too crazy for Victor? That was worrisome, Arkady thought.

He said, “The bicycle maker led us to Bonnafos, who, I believe, was a source for Tatiana. We can’t question him because, unfortunately, he was shot and killed on the same beach where the notebook was found. It was important enough for Tatiana to make a special trip to Kaliningrad. I don’t know what she was after, but the notebook is the key.”

“Only you can’t read it.”

“That’s right. We’ll have to call in some experts.”

“Didn’t you try with Professor Kunin?”

“We’ll try again.”

Victor said, “I just don’t get it. Why are you so hooked by a notebook no one can read? I’m with you, but I want you to know how I feel.”

“Now I know.”

“That we’re covering two cities. This should be interesting.”

“Do you want to see the notebook? See what the fuss is all about? It’s in the desk.”

Victor dug his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ll pass. It’s late and I can already feel the blade of the guillotine. We’re so fucked.”

• • •

It was a shameful thing for Arkady to admit, but he couldn’t wait for Victor to leave so he could return to the tapes and listen to the voice within the words. He had read that auditory hallucinations were more subtle and more powerful than their visual counterparts. He still occasionally heard his wife, Irina. Which was crazy, since she was dead.

On the last cassettes, Tatiana sounded tired, her guard down.

“I am supposed to be so grave but I am sick of gravity. Of being Our Lady of the Sorrows. Of being Tatiana Petrovna. In fact, I’d rather steal away with the Gypsies. Perhaps I’m insane. I ache for a man I haven’t met.”

That said enough, Arkady thought. Yet there was the last cassette with a metallic tapping so faint it was hardly worth recording. Arkady dug into Zhenya’s box of castaway computer gear, USB connections, tapes, headphones, discs, electrical chessboards. Monkey see, monkey do. He had seen Zhenya attach the sound-enhancer system to his earphones a hundred times. Arkady plugged them into the recorder and listened.

Silence. Vacuum. An amplified three taps of metal on metal. Then three scrapes. Silence. Tap, tap, tap.

Arkady’s father had taught him a number of useful skills. How to field-strip a gun, signal with flags, send Morse code.

The tapping and scraping was in Morse code and said over and over, “We are alive.”

Who was alive? For how long? Why would Tatiana keep such a faint recording? The realization came with a cold sweat. How could he not know?

The nuclear submarine Kursk had been carrying one hundred and eighteen officers and sailors to war games in Arctic waters when, for unexplained reasons, its forward torpedoes exploded, setting off fires the length of the ship. The crew had operated in the highest tradition of the Russian navy and were posthumously awarded Orders of Courage. Families were reassured that the entire crew died almost instantaneously.

Tap. Tap. Scrape.

The chief of rescue operations reported that he heard knocking in the submarine’s Compartment 9 at the rear of the hull.

“Everything is being done. People should remain calm and stay at their position,” the prime minister said, and hosted a barbecue at a Black Sea villa.

Tap. . Tap. .

At a press conference, the mother of a crewman demanded the truth. She was forcibly sedated and dragged from the hall. The chief of operations decided that he must have misinterpreted signs of life from Compartment 9.

The tapping came to an end.

Finally, ten days after the accident, Norwegian divers breached the hatch and found a scribbled note wrapped in plastic on the body of a seaman dredged from Compartment 9. He had marked his note 15:15, four hours after the explosion. Some experts thought that the twenty-three submariners may have lived another three to four days.

The label on the cassette said “Grisha,” although the connection to the Kursk escaped Arkady like a fish between his hands.