Stalin s Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Something happened in Chechnya.”

  “Horrible things, no doubt; it’s war. But why would heroes like Isakov and Urman come back to Moscow and kill their friends and former comrades in arms? Do you know what this notebook adds up to? Wishful thinking. Ask yourself what you’re after, Isakov or Eva? I speak as the man who killed the man who shot you. What makes you think Eva is unhappy with him?” When Arkady said nothing Victor dredged up half a smile. “Fuck, forget about all this. I’m rambling. I’m drunk.”

  “You sound sober to me. Think about thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three. I just wonder why my brain chose this number to fix on.”

  “Maybe at this point your brain hates your guts.”

  With the thaw a moving truck had finally delivered Arkady’s furniture and earthly goods, including a cot, although Zhenya maintained his independence by sleeping on the couch with a backpack ready for instant departure. He still bore the stamp of early malnutrition but he had started lifting weights and developed hard little muscles like knots in a rope.

  He did schoolwork quickly so that he could turn on the television and watch a nostalgia channel that ran grainy wartime documentaries on the siege of Leningrad, the defense of Moscow, the carnage and valor of Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd but forever Stalingrad. Also, war films about pilots, tank crews and riflemen who shared snapshots of mothers, wives and children before attacking a machine gun bunker, piloting a burning plane, crawling with a Molotov cocktail toward an enemy tank.

  “I’m sorry,” Zhenya said.

  Arkady was a little startled. He was at the desk writing in the notebook and hadn’t heard Zhenya approach.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “No, not actually.”

  “You don’t remember it?” Zhenya asked.

  “No.”

  Zhenya nodded, as if that were a good option.

  “Do you remember going to Gorky Park?”

  “Of course.”

  “Remember the Ferris wheel?”

  “Yes. Your father ran it.”

  Osip Lysenko had hit on a perfect situation for dealing drugs: young people paying in cash for a five-minute ride in the open-air privacy of a gondola. That no one tried to fly from the top of the wheel was a miracle.

  “He was never there,” Zhenya said.

  Thank God, Arkady thought. Each had gone to the park with a false assumption. Arkady thought that the boy sought a missing father. The boy thought Arkady carried a gun.

  One minute was usually the time limit on discourse with Zhenya, but he stood his ground and brightened. “Winter is a bitch.”

  “It certainly can be.”

  “In the rail yard you could freeze to death. Sniff glue during the day and turn blue at night. That’s when you go to the shelter.”

  “Like wintering in the Crimea.”

  “The problem is, if a parent shows up they hand you over, even to my father. He said the law was on his side; I’d never get away.”

  “You saw him here?”

  “Right across the street. He was with a crew filling in a hole.”

  “Just bad luck.”

  “It was snowing. I didn’t see him when I went out the building. I walked right by him. The wind pushed my hood back and he said my name. He said, ‘Do you still play chess?’ And then he saw my book bag and said, ‘Do you have your chess set with you?’”

  “Did you?” Arkady asked.

  Zhenya nodded. “Then he told me to give it to him to keep it safe and that we’d pick up where we left. ‘Partners again,’ he said. That’s when I ran. He was in rubber boots, but he slipped on the ice and went down. He yelled. He said ‘I’ll wring your neck like a chicken! The judge will give you to me and I’ll wring your neck like a chicken!’ I heard him for blocks.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Where Eva works. She told me to stay away from the apartment.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “And not to tell you because it would end badly. She knew people who could arrange things so that no one got hurt.”

  “That’s a special skill. Who did she have in mind?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Arkady let the lie go by. Zhenya had unloaded quite a lot.

  “Eva was right,” Arkady admitted. “It didn’t end well.”

  And it wasn’t getting better. He had no memory of writing 33-31-33. Perhaps it was an imaginary number and his notebook was a fiction concocted to smear a better man. He considered the lengths he’d gone to, casting suspicion on the Kuznetsov investigation and, on no evidence, trying to tie Isakov to Borodin’s solitary death in the woods.

  Even drunk, Victor had nailed it. Eva had left him. What made him think she wasn’t happy?

  The Great Patriotic War paused for the evening news. Five minutes in, Arkady realized that a Russian Patriot demonstration in Tver was being covered. Nikolai Isakov was in the front rank helping to carry a banner that read Restore Russian Pride! At Isakov’s side Marat Urman continuously scanned the crowd, and in the second row stood Eva, sharp and exotic among round faces.

  Through a bullhorn Isakov announced, “I was a lad in Tver, I served in the Tver OMON, and I will faithfully represent Tver in the highest levels of government.”

  The day was warm enough for many to wear Patriot T-shirts, making the Americans, Wiley and Pacheco, all the more conspicuous in their parkas. As Arkady entered pages for the two political consultants he remembered breakfast in the Hotel Metropol, the harpist’s closed eyes and the hotel phone number scribbled in ballpoint pen inside a matchbook.

  Arkady went to the closet and tore through the cardboard box he had brought from the office until he found the matchbook he had taken from Petya, Zelensky’s all-purpose cameraman. “Tahiti—A Gentlemen’s Club” was printed in red letters against a plastic field of pink. The Metropol number was handwritten inside the flap. There was no phone number for the club itself, initially, but as it warmed in his fingers the imprint of an open hand appeared on the front and the back divulged the phone number 33-31-33. Like a mood ring. One digit less than Moscow. He had no conscious memory of seeing the number before; his mind, out of habit, had collected it. The Tver area code was 822.

  He called on his cell phone. On the tenth tone a deep voice said, “Tahiti.” Arkady heard a background of heavy metal, laughs, arguments, the sociable clatter of glasses.

  “In Tver?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  On the chance, Arkady asked, “Is Tanya there?”

  “Which Tanya?”

  “The one who plays the harp.”

  “She’s on later.”

  “Her nose is better?”

  “They don’t come here to see her nose.”

  Arkady hung up. He got a short glass of vodka and a cigarette. He was starting to feel like himself. Zhenya watched the war again. The Hitlerites were in full retreat. Their trucks and caissons wallowed in mud. Dead horses and burnt tanks lined the road. Arkady picked up his cell phone and called a Moscow number.

  “Yes?”

  “Prosecutor Zurin.”

  “It’s you, Renko? Damn it, this is my emergency line. Can’t this wait?”

  “I made up my mind about my next post and I want to get there as soon as possible. Not linger, as you say.”

  Zurin reorganized himself. “Oh. Well, that’s the right spirit. So, Suzdal it is. I envy you. Very picturesque. Or perhaps you have some other quiet destination in mind. What will it be?”

  “Tver.”

  A long pause. Both men knew that if in their long professional association the prosecutor could have found any excuse to send Arkady to Tver, Zurin would have seized it. Now that Arkady volunteered for the abyss the prosecutor audibly held his breath.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Tver is my choice.”

  Isakov was from Tver. The Black Berets at the Sunzha Bridge were all from Tver. Tanya was from Tver. How, Ark
ady asked himself, could he go anywhere else?

  “What are you up to, Renko? No one goes to Tver by choice. Are you on a case?”

  “How could I be? You haven’t given me one.”

  “That’s right. Very well, Tver it is. Don’t tell me why. Just say good-bye to Moscow.”

  On the television screen a victorious Red Army carried Nazi standards upside down and hailed the man on Lenin’s Tomb.

  Feeling expansive, Arkady added Stalin to his notebook, for good measure.

  17

  O n the way to Tver, Arkady left Moscow and entered Russia.

  No Mercedes, no Bolshoi, no sushi, no paved-over world; instead mud, geese, apples rolling off a horse cart. No townhouses in gated communities, but cottages shared with cats and hens. No billionaires, but men who sold vases by the highway because the crystal factory they worked at had no money to pay them, so paid them in kind, making each man an entrepreneur holding a vase with one hand and swatting flies with the other.

  For a winter day the weather was freakishly warm, but Arkady drove with the windows up because of the dust pouring off trucks. The Zhiguli had no air conditioning or CD player, but its engine could run on vodka if need be. From time to time the land was so flat the horizon opened like a fan, and meadows and bogs stretched in all directions. A dirt road would branch off to a handful of cottages and a tilted Easter cake of a church framed by birches.

  From the passenger seat Elena Ilyichnina looked sadly at the passing countryside. To Arkady’s astonishment she had accepted the offer of a ride to her hometown to visit her mother. Villages on the way were dying, hollowed out by the mass evacuation of the young, who went to Tver, to Moscow or St. Petersburg rather than suffer what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life.” A village shop sold gum boots and canvas jackets. Moscow offered supermodels and video arcades. An entire generation went to the city to make a fortune, gain computer skills, to hang, to temp, to wear a paper cap and fry chicken, to—one way or another—take part in the future. The death of a village could be tracked by the number of houses that, unpainted, turned to gray and disappeared among the trees; in most villages gray was epidemic.

  During the war Tver had been called Kalinin, in honor of Russia’s president. Kalinin had a distinguished goatee and, more important, was an organ grinder of secretary praise. In Kalinin’s estimation, Stalin was “our best friend, our best teacher, the pathfinder of the ages, the genius of science, brighter than the sun, the greatest military strategist of all time.” Stalin tried to get Kalinin to please stop, no more, but he wouldn’t. As soon as the Soviet Union fell apart Tver reclaimed its ancient name.

  Although the day was warm Elena Ilyichnina’s ears were a vivid pink and it struck Arkady that she was many men’s ideal: a big woman, Victor often said, was a rock in stormy seas. She had organized a lunch of sausage and bread to eat on the way.

  Conversation never really got started. They were like two dancers so out of synch that they finally abandoned the floor. Also, Elena Ilyichnina had worked one shift in Moscow and was about to start a shift in Tver and she took the opportunity to nap, which was fine with Arkady. She made a companionable presence as long as she didn’t talk.

  As they neared Tver he became aware that she was awake and watching him. She said, “I hear that you are an investigator who doesn’t carry a gun. What is the philosophy behind that?”

  “No philosophy. In some situations the gun becomes an issue. You start worrying about when to show it, when to use it. It’s like a locomotive; it takes you where it wants to go.”

  “And then someone has to pick a bullet out of your head.”

  “It’s not an air-tight system. Are you telling me I’ll need a gun in Tver?”

  “No.”

  “What is Tver like, then?”

  “Patriotic. In Moscow, people pay doctors to concoct reasons why their precious sons can’t serve their military duty. Of course, the army is brutal and stupid, but in Tver, where boys are just as precious, everyone goes.”

  “Moscow sounds unpopular.”

  “I would get a new plate for the car.”

  That sounded unnecessary to him—after all, he didn’t know how long he would even be in Tver—and he changed the subject by asking about her mother’s health.

  “Day to day.” She looked suddenly exhausted. “I’ll be back in Moscow tomorrow. Here’s the hospital now.”

  They drove up to the admissions door of a dismal six-story building, a structure of plate glass and pre-cast concrete that once looked modern. Grit covered the glass and the concrete was stained from the rust of low-grade rebars.

  “It’s better on the inside.” Elena Ilyichnina scribbled on a card and gave it to Arkady. “I’ve added my cell phone number. In case…”

  “Just in case,” he agreed.

  As Arkady got back on the road a group of motorcycles overtook him, maybe twenty bikers in scruffy combinations of dark glasses, facial hair and leather jackets. Their bikes shone like gems set in chrome. With his long red hair and bandanna the lead rider could have passed for a buccaneer. His machine was low set, elongated, the color of rubies and as it cruised by, he signaled Arkady to lower his window.

  “Fuck Moscow!” the biker shouted.

  The pack rolled by.

  Arkady decided to change his license plate.

  “Welcome to Tver.” City Prosecutor Sarkisian made a sentence sound like one sibilant word. He maneuvered Arkady around the office, so that he could enjoy professional certificates, oil paintings of Mount Ararat and, in a place of honor, photographs of the prosecutor in judo gear with the President himself. Otherwise the office was the same as Zurin’s, the Soviet red carpet, dark paneling, drapes in deep maroon. A window looked down on a square with a statue of Lenin overdressed for the weather. “Too bad you missed lunch. You’re going to find this is a very friendly city. Having our ups and downs, as who isn’t. Once you’re settled in, though, friendliest place on earth. There are no secrets in Tver.” Sarkisian squeezed Arkady’s shoulder. “You did volunteer for Tver?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had a conversation with Zurin, prosecutor to prosecutor. You have a reputation as a, let’s say, unusually active investigator. You like to get to the crime scene.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I have a different approach. I think of my investigators as editors rather than writers. Let the detectives do the detecting. Your role is to take their findings and edit them into a case I can take to court. It’s like geese flying south. They don’t fly each in a different direction. They fly in formation. Correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Less wear and tear too. The doctors have given you the go-ahead?”

  “Completely healed.”

  “Excellent, but before you come to work, take a few days to learn the lay of the land. I insist. You’ll meet the men later. If I had been given more notice of your arrival we could have prepared a proper ceremony. As it is, we were lucky to organize a room for you to sleep in.”

  “Tver is that full?”

  “Oh, Tver is a busy town. We’ve put you up at the Boatman. I’ll give you directions.” The prosecutor had already printed them out. “So, as I said, take the next few days to settle in. That will give you a chance to really make up your mind whether or not to transfer here. Then we’ll talk about work.”

  Sarkisian steered Arkady into the hall. By the elevator bay a glass cabinet displayed judo medals, trophies, belts.

  “We work together, we play together. Is that how it is in Moscow?”

  “We drink together.” The elevator, a prewar Otis with an armed operator, finally arrived. Arkady stepped in but held the door. “Moscow does not seem to be well-loved here.”

  Sarkisian shrugged at the obvious. “Moscow wants to be the only pig at the trough. The rest of us can starve as far as Moscow is concerned. So, here in Tver, we take care of ourselves.”

  Tver had been an elegant city with an imperial palace and, in the Volga, a r
iver that was an inspiration to poets. Then came the revolution, the war, Soviet implosion and economic pillaging, and, it seemed to Arkady, Tver became a couple of boulevards of classical architecture—the drama theater was a Greek temple trimmed in pink—surrounded by desultory shops, idle factories and gray postwar housing. Arkady drove around to see the city while daylight was left, because Russian maps were one thing and reality often something else. There were detours, road work, one-way streets, guarded streets, streets that did not exist, all sorts of surprises.

  Short-term memory was an issue for Arkady. Three times he found himself unexpectedly at Lenin’s statue. Arkady consumed a pirog he bought at a kiosk while he contemplated Lenin, who studied a pigeon. Finally, Arkady walked down to the river.

  Here the empress Catherine had built a palace for her amours. Here the poet Pushkin had wandered along the river and weaved together “emotion, thought, and magic sound.” Any ordinary winter the Volga would have frozen and Arkady could have walked across the river’s back, but the Volga that he found was swollen with snowmelt and flying through the chute.

  As a boy Arkady had taken piano lessons from his mother, and one of the first pieces he learned was “The Volga Boatmen.” The boatmen hired themselves out as dray animals with straps across their chests to haul barges and ships, pitting their strength against the implacable current of the river. “Heave ho! Yo, heave ho!” Arkady’s left hand would pound dramatically while he picked out the tune with his right, expressing the fatalism of men whose only relief was vodka and whose beds were the rags on their backs.

  At the Boatman Hotel long-haul truckers maintained the tradition, sleeping on greasy sheets, showering in cold water, dressing in front of a broken mirror. The wallpaper was a mural of stains. A spray can of insecticide stood on the bureau like a bouquet of flowers.

  Arkady set down a duffel and athletic bags and asked the night manager, “Prosecutor Sarkisian arranged this?”