Tatiana

2

By the time Arkady caught up with the marchers, their numbers had swelled to more than one hundred and they had reached their destination, the cul-de-sac where the journalist Tatiana Petrovna had fallen to her death the week before. The buildings were all the same: six stories of drab cement, with dead saplings that had been plugged in and forgotten. A bench and seesaw were streaked with bird droppings, but the front steps where she had landed were newly scrubbed and bleached.

No one had been arrested, although a television reporter who stayed with the marchers breathlessly speculated that Petrovna’s confrontational style of reporting had its risks. He couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the journalist had taken her own life for publicity’s sake. Officially, suicide was the call.

What had caught Arkady’s attention was that a neighbor had heard her scream. Suicide usually took concentration. People who committed suicide counted pills, stared in fascination at their pooling blood, took the high dive in silence. They rarely screamed. Besides, Arkady didn’t see any neighbors. This was the sort of event that should have drawn gawkers to their windows.

The marchers lit candles and bore photographs that showed Tatiana as a negligently pretty woman at a desk, reading in a hammock, walking a dog, on the front line of a war zone. Her former editor, Sergei Obolensky, was in the forefront of the crowd. He was easy to spot because of his shaved skull, trim beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He and Arkady had met once and thoroughly despised each other. Through a bullhorn the editor demanded, “Where is Tatiana? What are they trying to hide?”

Anya and her camera seemed to be everywhere at once. Arkady had to snag her by the sleeve.

“You didn’t tell me about this.”

She said, “You would have told me not to come. This way we don’t fight. The police claimed that she jumped from her balcony and took her life. We demanded an independent autopsy, and now they claim they can’t produce her body. How can they lose a body?”

“They’ve lost bodies for years. It’s one of their functions. More to the point, do you have a permit for this demonstration? Without a permit this could be regarded as a provocation.”

“It is a provocation, Arkady. In the spirit of Tatiana Petrovna, that’s exactly what it is. Why don’t you join us?”

While Arkady hesitated, Obolensky appeared. “Anya, what are you doing back here? I need you up front to take pictures.”

“A moment, Sergei. Remember Investigator Renko? He marched with us.”

“Is that so? The one good apple among the rotten. We’ll see if it’s true or not.” Obolensky gave Arkady a mocking salute before moving on to welcome a group of university students to the demonstration.

“We’ll have two hundred marchers at least,” Anya told Arkady.

“You should have told me.”

“I knew what your answer would be and you didn’t disappoint.”

Everything was simple for her, he thought, so jet-black or snow-white. She held the advantage because he had never had that purity of conviction. If she was a spoiled child, he was a wet blanket, a spoilsport. As a journalist, Anya wanted to be close to the action, while Arkady was a man in retreat. She didn’t pretend to be faithful and he didn’t expect her to be. They were interim lovers. It simply happened that the margins of their lives overlapped. There were no expectations.

“Go home, Arkady,” Anya said.

Obolensky returned to put a proprietary grip on her arm and led her to a bench where a man with a bullhorn was haranguing the wind. Arkady thought Tatiana Petrovna would have smiled to see who had come to pay their last respects. It was a middle-aged intellectual crowd. Publishers who abandoned their writers, writers who wrote for the drawer, artists who had become wealthy by turning Social Realism into kitsch.

He wondered what other accusations could be hurled at them. That they once were a special generation that had overthrown the dead weight of an empire? That they were romantics who lamented a rendezvous with history that never took place? That they had gone as soft as rotting pumpkins? That they had rallied around Tatiana when she was dead but stayed at arm’s length when she was alive? That they were old?

It seemed to Arkady that Obolensky didn’t need hundreds of marchers, he needed thousands. Where were the kids who Twittered and texted and organized a march of thousands with their iPhones? Where were the liberals, communists, anti-Putins, lesbians and gays? In comparison, Obolensky’s march was a garden party. A geriatric ward.

If it had been up to Arkady, he would have sent everyone home at this point. Nothing that he could point to in particular, only an electric imbalance in the air waiting to be discharged. A protest was fitting because Tatiana was indeed a troublemaker. She attacked corruption among politicians and police. Her favorite targets were the former KGB who dwelled like bats in the Kremlin.

Arkady separated from the crowd and walked around the building. On one side was a row of derelict apartment houses, on the other, a chain-link fence and a construction site that had barely gotten off the ground. Stacks of rebar were covered with rust. Work trailers were abandoned, their windows punched in and swastikas spray-painted on the doors. A circle of men gathered around a cement mixer. They had shaved heads and wore red, the totemic color of the Spartak football club. At Spartak games they were often kept in a caged section of the stands. Arkady watched one pick up an iron rod and take a test swing.

By the time he returned to the demonstration it was well under way. There was no format. People shared the megaphone and poured out their guilt. Each had, at some point, advanced his or her career by pulling an article that Tatiana Petrovna had written at the risk of her neck. At the same time, they recalled, she knew what her end would be. She didn’t own a car because, as she said, it would only be blown up, and what a waste of a perfectly good car. She could have moved to a larger flat-could have blackmailed her way to material luxury-but was content with her dead-end apartment, its rickety lift and insubstantial doors.

“Every snail prefers its own shell,” Tatiana had said. But she knew. One way or another, it was just a matter of time.

Afternoon faded into twilight and the television news team had gone before the poet Maxim Dal stepped forward. Maxim was instantly recognizable, taller than anyone else, with a yellow-white ponytail and sheepskin coat and so heroically ugly that he was kind of beautiful. As soon as he got his hands on the megaphone, he condemned the investigation’s lack of progress.

“Tolstoy wrote, ‘God knows the truth, but waits.’ ” Maxim repeated, “God knows the truth, but waits to rectify the evil that men do. Tatiana Petrovna did not have that kind of patience. She did not have the patience of God. She wanted the evil that men do to be rectified now. Today. She was an impatient woman and for that reason she knew this day might come. She knew she was a marked woman. She was small but so dangerous to certain elements in the state that she had to be silenced, just as so many other Russian journalists have been intimidated, assaulted and murdered. She knew she was next on the list of martyrs and for that reason, too, she was an impatient woman.”

One of the demonstrators fell to his knees. Arkady thought the man had tripped until a streetlight shattered. A general intake of breath was followed by cries of alarm.

From the edge of the crowd, Arkady had a clear view of the skinheads scaling the chain-link fences like Vikings boarding a ship. Just a handful, no more than twenty, wielding iron rods like broadswords.

Sedentary editors were no match for young thugs whose days were spent lifting weights and practicing karate blows to the kidney or the back of the knees. Professors backpedaled, taking their dignity with them, trying to fend off blows. Placards toppled into chaos as appeals were answered with kicks. A whack to the back took the air away. A brick to the head peeled back the scalp. Rescue seemed imminent when a police bus arrived and unloaded riot police. Arkady expected them to come to the aid of the demonstrators; instead, they waded into the marchers with batons.

Arkady was challenged by a mountainous policeman. Overmatched, he hit the man in the windpipe, more a cheap shot than a knockout blow, but the policeman staggered in circles searching for air. Anya was in the middle of the fray taking photographs while Maxim protected her, swinging the megaphone like a club. Arkady glimpsed the editor, Obolensky, also holding his own.

Arkady, however, went down. In a street fight the worst place to be was on the ground and that was where he was headed. Whose foot tripped him he did not know, but two riot police began dancing on his ribs. Well, he thought, in Victor’s words, this was truly fucked.

He got to his feet, how he didn’t know, and displayed his investigator’s ID.

“He’s with us?” A policeman dropped his fist. “He fooled me.”

In minutes the battle was over. Skinheads slipped over the fence and disappeared. Police circulated among the casualties, gathering IDs. Arkady saw split lips and bloody noses, but the real damage had been to the spirits of the demonstrators. All afternoon they had relived and rekindled the passion of their youth, stood again with Yeltsin on a tank, again defied the apparatus of the KGB. Those heady days were gone, deflated, and all they had reaped was bruises.

Arkady’s eye was swollen shut and from Anya’s reaction he was glad he couldn’t see himself. She, on the other hand, looked as if she had been on nothing more dangerous than a roller coaster. Obolensky had slipped away. The poet Maxim was also gone. Too bad. It had been like having a yeti fight on your side.

A police captain bellowed, “Assembly without a permit, spreading malicious rumors, obstructing officers of the law.”

“Who were assaulting innocent civilians,” Arkady said.

“Did they have a permit to assemble? Yes or no? See, that’s where the trouble starts, with people who think they are special and above the law.”

“People who were being beaten,” Arkady said. Somehow, by virtue of his rank, he had become spokesman for the demonstrators.

“Troublemakers who viciously attacked police with bricks and stones. Who did you say your chief was?”

“Prosecutor Zurin.”

“Good man.”

“One in a million. I apologize, Captain. I haven’t made myself clear. The people here are the victims and they need medical care.”

“Once we have affairs sorted out. The first thing is to gather up all the cameras. All the cameras and cell phones.”

“In a trash bag?”

“That way we’ll be able to view and objectively evaluate any violations. Such as-”

Arkady winced because it hurt to laugh. “Do these people look as if they could assault anyone?”

“They’re writers, artists, intellectual whores. Who knows what they’ll get up to.”

The trash bag returned and the captain held it open for Anya. “Now yours.”

Arkady knew that she wanted to drive a dagger into the captain’s heart. At the same time, she was paralyzed by the threat of losing her camera.

“She’s with me,” Arkady said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, she’s not an investigator or militia.”

“On special orders from Prosecutor Zurin.”

“Really. I tell you what, Renko, let’s call the prosecutor’s office. Let’s ask him.”

“I doubt he’s in his office now.”

“I know his cell phone number.”

“You’re friends?”

“Yes.”

Arkady had walked into a trap of his own devising. He was light-headed and heard a fluty wheeze in his chest. None of this was good.

A phone at the other end rang and rang until it finally produced a message. The captain clicked off. “The prosecutor is at his golf club and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

The issue was still undecided when a massive sedan slid out of the dark. It was a dumbfounding sight, Maxim Dal in a silver ZIL, an armored Soviet-era limousine with double headlights, tail fins and whitewall tires. It had to be at least fifty years old. In an authoritative voice Dal ordered Anya and Arkady to get in.

It was like boarding a spaceship from the past.