Tatiana

14

A pathologist was no respecter of men. To him, heroes, tyrants, holy men were all meat on a slab. Alive, they may have been draped in military decorations or a professor’s robes. Dead, their secrets poured out as cheesy rolls of fat, blackened liver, the tender brain exposed in its bowl. Nothing more.

That Willy Polenko was still alive was a relief to the other pathologists, because nobody wanted to carve up a colleague. He had done his part, lost a hundred pounds, huffed and puffed around the dim halls of the morgue for exercise, a half-deflated balloon moving in slow motion. Tatiana’s body had been found-not only found, but burned, and her ashes resided in a cardboard box labeled “Unknown Female #13312.”

Willy told Arkady, “You can upgrade to an urn of ceramic or wood. Most people choose the wood.”

“I told you there was to be no cremation.”

“I know, I know, it happened when I wasn’t here. Half the assistants are Tajiks. If you give them orders and they nod their heads, it means they haven’t understood a word you said. On the other hand, they don’t drink the disinfectant. Anyway, with this and that, she was two weeks unclaimed and you know how it is, the lowest fruit is picked first.”

“But cremated?”

Willy consulted a folder. “She was identified by her sister, her only sibling. She made the request.”

“Her sister was here in Moscow?”

“No. She wasn’t well enough to travel from Kaliningrad, so she performed the identification by phone from her home.”

“On a cell phone? We’re in a tunnel here and the reception is impossible.”

“We took the picture here and went up to the street and transmitted it.”

“Who took the picture?”

“Someone.”

“Was it saved?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Teeth?”

“You might find some pulverized in the bottom of the box.”

“Enough for DNA?”

“Not after cremation. What can I tell you, I’m surrounded by incompetents.”

“Did they, at least, get any corroborating identification?”

“By a Detective Lieutenant Stasov of the Kaliningrad police.” Willy patted the folder. “It’s all in here.”

“One last question. If this is Tatiana Petrovna, why is the box labeled ‘Unknown Female’?”

“It could mean we’re running out of boxes. Do you want it? Her sister said we should dispose of it any way we want.”

“You’re not serious.”

“It’s you or the trash bin.”

“Have you tried her magazine or her friends?”

“I can’t dash around scattering ashes like salt and pepper. You know these people.”

“And the folder?”

“All yours.” He handed everything over and gave Arkady a critical opinion. “I really think you should go with wood.”

• • •

In his car, Arkady tried calling Ludmila Petrovna again, and got no answer. The same with Detective Stasov. The operator at Now said that Obolensky had not come in. The dead were dead. The living marched on.

Arkady visited the computer repair shop where Zhenya sometimes worked. The technicians said that he had been in earlier to borrow a laptop.

As Arkady drove away, he kept an eye out for the boy’s skulking figure. Zhenya had not picked up any of Arkady’s calls, in itself a form of negotiation.

Victor had called and left a message to meet at the cemetery where Grisha Grigorenko was buried. Two men had been shot execution-style and dumped like offerings at Grisha’s headstone. The War of Succession had begun.

• • •

Detectives Slovo and Blok had partnered so long they had come to look like each other, with similar steel glasses and jowls of white stubble. They had plans to retire together and live in a dacha and garden in Sochi, and they were not about to be dragged into a shooting war. They had produced the outer semblance of an investigation-the immediate site was cordoned off-but the forensic van had not arrived.

Victor led Arkady through the cemetery gate. “Blok and Slovo are old-school. As far as they’re concerned, if two gangs want to fight it out, fuck ’em, let them kill each other. Two dead is a good start.”

“Welcome, gentlemen,” Slovo said. “Do you know how much I’m going to miss your two ugly mugs? Zero. We’re having a good-bye party. You’re not invited. And neither are these two.”

The victims had bloody hair and a Nordic pallor. Arkady recognized them from the Den as Alexi’s men; they had swaggered then, released from a murder charge for lack of evidence. Arkady wanted to see if they were armed but didn’t dare move the bodies before the forensic van arrived. Slovo and Blok were happy to do nothing. Their attention had moved on to their next life. Blok’s clipboard carried an article on “planning a subtropical garden.” “Did you know that there are two hundred sixty-four days of sunshine annually in Sochi?” he asked Victor.

“Amazing.”

Slovo indicated a grave digger who stood at attention with a shovel. “Here’s the man who found them.”

It was one of the grave diggers that Arkady had talked to two weeks before, on the night of the demonstration. It occurred to Arkady that there was no one else in sight.

“Where is everybody?”

Slovo said, “The workers are celebrating Sanitary Internment Day.”

“What does that mean? ‘Sanitize’ what? It’s a cemetery.”

“It means they’re taking the day off,” Victor said. “That’s why it took so long for the bodies to be discovered.”

The angles of the entry wounds suggested that the men had died on their feet. In both cases the bullet entered through the right rear quadrant of the skull and exited through the opposite eye. Been executed, not died. The lack of blood on the headstone and on the ground around them indicated that the victims had been shot somewhere else and brought to Grisha’s headstone to add insult to injury.

“Like bookends,” Blok said.

“Like a gang war,” Slovo said. “Well, we’ll be out of it soon.”

“Counting the days.”

“Peace and quiet.”

Arkady played the beam of his penlight on one body and then the other. Revolvers were reliable and Glocks were in style, but real artistes used a pistol with a.22 slug that would carom like a billiard ball within the cranium and even stay inside. Nothing was so tidy about the dead men themselves. Bloodstains and gray matter speckled them from head to toe, as if they had shared one last, enormous sneeze.

Arkady said, “It makes no sense. Who would want to start a gang war now? The pot is always simmering, but there’s a rough understanding now. A parity. Everyone is making money.”

“That doesn’t change the fact they’re killers,” said Slovo.

“They’d shoot their mother if she was standing on a dollar bill,” said Blok.

“It looks like a gang war to me,” said Victor. “Now Alexi has to do something.”

Arkady took in Grisha’s headstone and its life-size portrait etched in granite. Was this a gangster’s pyramid, his landmark for the ages? Or a biography with just the good parts: the civic leader, bon vivant, generous donor, rugged sportsman, family man standing with one foot up on the bumper of a Jeep Cherokee, a ski slope in the background, with a yachtsman’s cap cocked on his head and on his face the grin of a man who had it all. Yet something was missing or out of place.

“The car key is gone,” Victor said.

It was snapped off at the surface of the headstone, a message that anyone could understand.

“That reminds me,” Slovo told Arkady, “Abdul Khan wants to see you.”

“The Abdul Khan?”

“Actually, he wants to talk to whoever is handling the Tatiana Petrovna case. I told him there was no case anymore but he refused to take no for an answer. I said you’d be in touch.”

“Abdul is one of your players in the Tatiana case,” Victor said.

“So far as I can see, there is no Grigorenko case or Tatiana case,” Arkady said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Blok.

“It’s a double negative,” said Slovo.

Victor said, “It’s a dog chasing his fucking tail.”