Tatiana

25

Since his first visit to Ludmila Petrovna’s garden, her sunflowers had become slightly blowsy, her tomatoes had grown heavy on the vine and her zucchini had gone rogue. Her weeds, on the other hand, were thriving.

A pug ran out of the cottage door in chase of a rubber ball. The dog seized the ball, shook it furiously and began to race back to a woman who leaned against the doorway with her arms crossed.

“Polo!” Arkady said.

The woman looked up. The dog stopped and tried to look in two directions at the same time, then, with an eye to a new playmate, carried the ball to Arkady.

“You’re back,” she said.

“I’m afraid so.” Arkady extracted the ball from the dog’s mouth. “I’m sorry to say your friend has no sense of loyalty.”

She didn’t smile but he had the sense that in some grim way, she was amused. “Every time I try to garden, Polo wants to play.”

“Maybe that’s the price of friendship.” He looked around the garden. “Your vegetables look ready to burst.”

“Perhaps I haven’t been paying them enough attention.”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Arkady said. “I’m not a gardener.”

“It’s supposed to be pretty simple. Plant them and water them.”

“And keep the dogs out. A lot of your vegetables look ready to pick. I could help you.”

“What about your investigation?”

“It can wait,” Arkady said.

“What makes you think I need help?”

“When I was here with Maxim, you wore dark glasses because you were sensitive to light.”

“Maxim is always looking out for me.”

“That was my impression. And you haven’t weeded since then. Ludmila was the gardener.”

“How did you know?”

• • •

Besides the dog, the derelict garden and the absence of dark glasses? He had listened to Tatiana’s voice on tape for hours. He’d have known her anywhere.

She turned and walked into the cottage and although there had been no invitation, Arkady followed. The pug followed Arkady, dropping the ball as a suggestion, letting it roll and retrieving it. While she heated water for tea, Arkady looked at knick-knacks that occupied kitchen shelves and cabinets. Family photos of Ludmila Petrovna holding babies and small children of varying ages. Postcards from all over the world. Framed photographs of the same two girls with bright smiles and golden hair biking, kayaking, running down a sand dune with arms outstretched as if they could fly.

“Who was older?”

“She was. We were only ten months apart.”

“Are these pictures of her children?”

“No. Cousins, friends, children of friends. In spite of her poor eyesight, Ludmila was an avid amateur photographer.” She placed two cups of tea on the table and sat. “Sugar?”

“No thank you.”

“All the men I know have their tea plain. Why is that?”

“I don’t know. Why do all the women I know suck tea through a sugar cube?” He caught her in the act.

“I told Ludmila not to come to Moscow, but she always had to be the big sister. She hated to worry and I’m afraid I made her life miserable. How did you know? Oh, yes, the dark glasses.”

“You seemed to have been miraculously cured.”

“It was as simple as that?”

“More or less.”

“Do you think I’m going to get out of here alive?”

“I doubt it. You could take your chances as Ludmila, but my guess is that they’re suspicious.”

“Why do you think they’re suspicious?”

“I noticed on the way in there’s a man in a car watching your door.”

“That’s Lieutenant Stasov. He’s made me his personal project. He pushed his way in and searched the house. Now he lingers on the street.”

For a second Arkady had the impulse to touch her and see if she was real and wondered how often she had that effect on men, the creation of a faint vibration.

He pressed ahead. “Let’s assume the person who killed Ludmila was waiting in your apartment. Where were you?”

“I was working late at the magazine with Obolensky. Maxim swooped in and said I had been reported dead, that I had jumped from my balcony and we had to get out of Moscow as quickly as possible. Because once you’re officially dead you soon will be. It’s a matter of bookkeeping. We drove all night to Kaliningrad. I didn’t know Ludmila was going to my apartment.”

“The question is who pushed her. She would have rung the bell when she got to your apartment.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“But Ludmila had a key of her own, didn’t she?”

Her voice hollowed out. “Yes. My sister was mistaken for me and she died. Now I’m alive pretending to be her.” Although she clearly despised tears, she wiped her eyes before she changed the subject. “Maxim told me about your adventure on the beach. So you met the boy called Vova.”

“He drives a hard bargain.”

“I know. I paid fifty dollars for the notebook.”

“What’s in it?”

She said, “I confess, I don’t know.”

Arkady almost laughed. “You don’t know? People are being shot and thrown off balconies for this notebook, and you don’t know why?”

“Joseph, the interpreter, was going to translate it for me.”

“And this was going to be a big story, as big as a war in Chechnya or a bomb in Moscow?”

“That’s what Joseph said. And the proof was in the notebook.”

“He didn’t give you any idea?”

“Only that it couldn’t be understood by anyone but him.”

“Why was he willing to help you? Why was he willing to put his life in danger?”

“He wanted to be somebody. He wanted to be something besides an echo, which is what he had been all his life. Besides, he thought that keeping everything in notes that only he could read would keep him safe.”

“Instead it’s poison passed from hand to hand.”

“Have you got the notebook?” she asked.

“It’s with a friend.”

“An interpreter?”

“You could say that.”

The tea had gotten cold. Tatiana stared out the screen door at a row of watermelons that had swollen and split open.

“It’s my fault,” Arkady said. “If I had just kept my nose out of it and not questioned the identification of Ludmila’s body, you might be safe.”

“Now you have to follow through. You’re the investigator.”

Arkady heard a noise. The pug had nudged open a cabinet and spilled the box of dog biscuits.

Tatiana swept them up. “What a little pig.”

“That reminds me, how did Polo get here?”

“Maxim brought him later.”

“That’s a long drive. You have to go through Lithuanian and Polish customs and all. Maxim was happy going back and forth?”

“He seemed to be.”

Arkady wondered what they would do to her, those censors who follow journalists with a pistol or a club. Just as she must have been wondering.

“Do you know Stasov?” Tatiana asked.

“We’ve talked on the phone.”

The gate was open. Arkady pulled a window shade aside to see a man in a weathered Audi parked across the street at a travel agency that promised romance in Croatia. He didn’t look like someone planning holiday.

“Do you have a gun?” Arkady asked.

“Do you?” She read his pause. “What a helpless pair of human beings.”

Arkady shrugged. So it seemed.

He went to the other rooms. The house was small and snug, feeding off one narrow hallway. The furniture was prewar oak. Ancestors looked out from oval frames. The back room had been made into a photography darkroom with a back door that did not open.

“You’re not going to find anything. Stasov took my laptop.”

“But he still thinks you’re Ludmila?”

“So far. I erased everything.”

On the bed was a backpack stuffed to the gills. It wasn’t the sign of someone resigned to being trapped.

“Where is your canary? She seems to have taken her cage with her.”

“With a friend.”

“Then you’re ready to go.”

She took a second to say, “I suppose so.”

“Where?”

She fixed Arkady with a look that told him he was asking for more trust than he had earned. After all, how long had she known him? Fifteen minutes? And what could he do for her while she was trapped?

• • •

Arkady went first with Polo and rolled the pug’s rubber ball underneath the detective’s car. The dog set in yapping hysterically enough that Arkady had to shout, “Don’t move.”

Stasov rolled down his passenger window. “What? What are you talking about?”

“My dog is under your car. If you move, you’ll run over him.”

“Then get him out.”

“I’ll try if you don’t move.”

“I’m not moving, for God’s sake.”

“He was chasing a ball.”

“Just get the fucking dog. What an idiot.”

“Do you have the emergency brake on?”

“Hurry up or I’ll run you both the fuck over.”

“He’s only a puppy.”

“He’s roadkill if you don’t get him out.”

“Can you reach his leash from your side?”

“No, I can’t reach his fucking leash.”

“Oh good, we have more people to help.”

“We don’t need more people.”

“You can’t blame a puppy.”

“I will fucking shoot you if you don’t get away from the car.”

“Well, he seems to have disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Oh, I see him. It’s all right, thank God.” Arkady pulled Polo out by the leash and picked him up. By then Tatiana had slipped out the garden gate and joined the shoppers in the stalls.

• • •

“Six letters, a breed of dog, starting with the letters Af.”

“I don’t believe this,” Zhenya said.

“Come on, don’t be such a stick. You’re doing a puzzle, I’m doing a puzzle. We can help each other. Okay, favorite television show, two words, starting with Da. It’s not like you’re going anywhere. Okay, have it your way.”

Half an hour passed before the man in the hall pressed his mouth to the door again. “Don’t be such a hard-ass. Two words, starting with Da.”

“Dating Game,” Lotte said.

“It fits. See, that wasn’t so bad. Now you can ask me one.”

“Ask you?”

“Fair is fair.”

Zhenya wondered what the man on the other side of the door looked like. Tall or short? Thin or fat? In between murdering people did he bounce a baby on his knee? Zhenya and Lotte waited with one shot from Arkady’s gun and ski poles under the table.

“It’s a different kind of puzzle,” Zhenya said.

“You have a very superior air. I’m only trying to help.”

“Do you have children?” Lotte asked.

“No, no. Nothing personal. Personal is verboten. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Then don’t,” Zhenya said.

“Suit yourself. You’ve got about an hour, according to my watch. Look, I’ll just talk to the girl. She doesn’t even have to say anything. Write it on a piece of paper, slide it under the door.”

“This is a total waste of time,” Zhenya said. “The man is a killer. He’s just torturing us.”

“I’m only talking to her.”

Lotte took a piece of stationery from the desk and wrote the letter L. She slid it under the door.

“That’s it?” the man asked.

“This should be beautiful,” Zhenya said. “He wouldn’t know an Afghan dog if it bit him.”

The page came back. The man on the other side of the door said, “The Roman numeral for fifty. It’s only in every fucking crossword puzzle ever written.”

Lotte went down the list of interpretations for the letter L and looked at Zhenya. “We missed that one.”

“It could be fifty thousand, fifty million, fifty percent.”

“For what? And what about the face with an X-or is it a wasp?”

Zhenya found himself looking at her breasts. “The wasp,” he said. “If it’s a wasp caught in amber, then amber is the clue, not the wasp.”

A cell phone rang in the hall. The puzzle man took it and sounded unhappy.

Zhenya asked, “Everything okay?”

There was silence on the other side of the door.

“Is Alexi coming back? We still have half an hour,” Zhenya said.

Again, nothing.

“You just told us we had almost an hour,” Lotte said.

Nothing.

“You can’t kill somebody ahead of time,” Zhenya said, even as he knew how ridiculous he sounded. “Is he still on the phone? Let me talk to him.” He opened the door a chain’s length and the puzzle man held the phone up to the crack. “Alexi, we’re making progress.”

“What have you got?”

“It’s not like the usual notebook or minutes of a meeting. There’s no date. I just know that a submarine will be repaired and that considerable Russian rubles will change hands.”

Alexi said nothing, but the silence was significant. This was the point in a chess match when a player had no choice but to bring his king out from the protection of the back row and plunge it into the center of the board.

“There is going to be another meeting,” Zhenya said.

“On board the Natalya Goncharova?”

“Yes.” What else could he say?

“Thank you, that’s all I needed to hear. Give the phone back to my man.”

Zhenya returned the phone and closed the door.

Lotte asked, “Did it work?”

“I don’t know.”

All he got from the other side of the door was silence. No “You did it, kid!” Only a clammy feeling and a dry mouth.

He and Lotte no longer looked at each other. It wasn’t fair. If anyone should hew to a schedule, it should be an executioner. They took in the sounds of the street, the emptiness of the building, the sound of a silencer being screwed onto the muzzle of a gun. He was only seventeen. Chess, he found, was no longer that important to him. He had fantasized about having a chess opening named for him. Now all games seemed trivial. He had other ambitions. This was unjust. Oddly enough, he thought it wouldn’t be so bad to be an investigator like Arkady.

Lotte decided to give up chess for music. Her family had always been artistic. She heard a bow drawn across the strings of a double bass. Something grim from Wagner. Götterdämmerung. The Twilight of the Gods.

Zhenya brought out the gun from the back of his belt but Lotte was in his way, trying to hold the door shut. He reached for her hand and they leaned together against the door.

The puzzle man heaved into it at full force. The chain snapped and Zhenya glimpsed a thin man with a vein-lined beak of a nose trying to insert a gun. The door slammed shut and was opened by an elderly man in a bathrobe and slippers.

“Lotte! I found you!” Lotte’s grandfather, the coward, struggled for the gun. “You must run!” The puzzle man swiped him away.

The door shut. Zhenya heard a head being cracked against the doorjamb. The door opened again like a reshuffled deck of cards as Victor Orlov rammed the puzzle man two more times against the doorjamb and threw him down the stairs.