Tatiana

3

Anya made a terrible nurse. When she tried to cook, Arkady smelled food burning and heard her swearing at pots and pans. When she wrote in his apartment, he smelled her cigarettes and listened to her swear at her laptop. But he was surprised by Anya’s patience. He would have expected her, like a cat, to move on. Although she had assignments-a fashion shoot, a photo essay on the Mafia-she dropped in several times a day to see how he was. “You’d miss me if I didn’t. You’re a secret romantic,” she said.

“I’m a cynic. I believe in car wrecks, airline disasters, missing children, self-immolation, suffocation with pillows.”

“What is it you don’t believe in?”

“I don’t believe in saints. They get people killed.”

“It’s no big deal,” Victor said when he visited. “Seems to me that you’re making a lot of fuss for a couple of busted ribs. What the devil is the matter with you anyway?”

“Punctured lung.” A couple of days with a valve in his chest and the lung would reinflate itself on its own.

“It’s like visiting Our Lady of the Camellias. Do you mind?” Victor held up a pack of cigarettes.

For once, Arkady didn’t crave one.

“So it’s suicide.”

“Or murder,” Arkady said.

“No, I heard it on the radio. The prosecutor determined that Tatiana Petrovna threw herself out her window. They say she was depressed. Of course she was depressed. Who isn’t depressed? Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear is depressed. The planet is depressed. That’s what global warming is.”

Arkady wished he had such insights. His mind was hung up on details. What of the neighbor? Who heard her screams? Screaming what?

Arkady felt painkillers lift him up to a dull euphoria. He could tell Zhenya had stopped by because a large chocolate chess piece wrapped in a bow sat on his nightstand. Arkady was a light sleeper but Zhenya was as elusive as a snow leopard.

A man confined to a few rooms becomes a meteorologist. Through the windowpane he charts clouds, tracks the stately passing of a thunderhead, notices the first streaks of rain. The bedroom wall becomes a screen on which he projects, “What if?” What if he had saved this woman? Or been saved? A person in this situation welcomes the clash and bang of a storm. Anything to interrupt a review of his life: Arkady Kyrilovich Renko, Senior Investigator for Very Important Cases, member of the Young Pioneers and a generation of “gilded youth” and, as luck would have it, an expert in self-destruction. His father, a military man, blew his head off. His mother, more genteel, weighted herself with stones and drowned. Arkady had dabbled in the act himself but been distracted at a critical moment and with that his suicide fever had passed. Still, with all this experience and expertise, he considered himself a fair judge of suicide. He defended the honor of people who killed themselves, the commitment that suicide demanded, the isolation and sweat, the willingness to follow through and open a second bottle of sleeping pills or make a deeper slice across the wrist. They had earned the title, and he was offended by the imposture of murder as something it was not. Tatiana Petrovna would no more have killed herself than flown to the moon.

When the tube was removed from Arkady’s chest, the doctor had said, “We will put on a clean bandage every day and tape you up. The hole will heal itself. Your ribs will heal too, if you let them. No twisting, lifting, cigarettes or sudden moves. Think of yourself as a broken cup.”

“I do.”

• • •

Arkady had asked Victor to go through police files and make a list of Tatiana Petrovna’s enemies.

“Incidentally, you look like hell,” Victor said.

“Thank you.”

The courtesies done, Victor sat by the bed and fanned a deck of index cards.

“Pick a card, any card.”

“Is this a game?” Arkady asked.

“What else? Seven people with excellent reasons to kill Tatiana.” He turned a card stapled to a color photo of a man with long bleached hair, evasive eyes and a tan. “Igor Mulovich threatened Tatiana in open court. He had recruited young women as models and sold them like meat in the Emirates.”

Arkady said, “I remember him.”

“You should. We arrested him, but it was Tatiana’s articles that nailed him. He served one year in prison camp. He bought a judge on appeal, got out and gets run over by a truck, so the laugh’s on him.”

Victor turned over another card to another familiar face. Aza Baron, formerly Baranovsky, a broker whose clients had enjoyed phenomenal returns until Tatiana Petrovna exposed his pyramid scheme. “Baron is in Israel fighting extradition.”

He turned over the third card.

“Tomsky. The big fish himself,” Arkady said.

“Himself.”

Kazimir Tomsky, deputy minister of defense. He had barely got his fingers in the pot when a Russian freighter limped into Malta. Its cargo had shifted in a storm and had to be reloaded. In the process, a dockside crane toppled and dropped crates labeled “Domestic Appliances.” What spilled out, however, were rocket-propelled grenades. Everyone knew that the arms had been illegally sold by men high and low in the Defense Ministry. Tatiana named them.

Tomsky spent time in prison. He had been released ten days before Tatiana Petrovna was killed.

“Definitely a candidate,” Arkady said.

“Except he went right to Brighton Beach to live with his mother. Too bad, he made a lovely candidate.”

“Who’s left?”

“The Shagelmans.”

“Husband and wife.”

Victor said, “I hear she’s a terrific cook, if you don’t mind picking fingers out of the stew. A sweet old lady who wants to transform Tatiana’s neighborhood into a shopping mall and spa. Between one court and another, Tatiana was costing the project a fortune in bribes, loans and lawyers. She really knows the law. The Shagelmans want to raze and clear the site before winter sets in, whatever that takes. For them, it’s a business decision, nothing personal.”

“Then there’s the joker.” A blank card popped up on Victor’s fingertips.

“Who is that?”

“I don’t know. Someone she opened her door to. A trusted friend.”

“What about Grisha? She did a piece on him a year ago that about took his hide off.”

“Grisha was dead already.”

“Don’t you find it interesting that they died within a day of each other? That’s quite a coincidence.”

“Coincidence is relative. When I go to a bar, it’s fate. If you’re there too, that’s coincidence.” Victor went back to his cards. “It just gets better. There’s Ape Beledon and Abdul, the Chechen superstar. I’ll nose around.”

“Give me a day and we’ll do it together.”

“As in, when I’m sober? Give me a little trust.”

“All the faith in the world.”

As for himself, Arkady knew he should quit the prosecutor’s office. He should have years ago, but there was always a reason to stay and a semblance of control, as if a man falling with an anvil in his hands could be said to be in control.