Arkady had ceased packing.
“How did you meet Zhenya?”
“He saw me stealing bread at a restaurant and followed me outside. He brought me food.”
Arkady was reminded of Victor feeding stray cats. What if every assumption you made throughout life was wrong? Or even ten degrees off? It would add up.
“Have you ever been married?” Sosi asked.
That was out of the blue, Arkady thought. “Years ago.”
“Do you have any kids?” Sosa asked.
Hesitantly, Arkady said, “I suppose you could say Zhenya is my child.”
With a sweep of her hand, she asked, “Who are you going to leave all this to? All these flags and stuff. They must be worth a lot.”
“I’ve never thought about that.”
“Don’t you think you should? What if the worst people got your best things?”
“That’s one way to look at it. I suppose I think that maybe it’s a time for letting go, not holding on. Because you can’t, you know.”
“All I know is you’ve packed that little bag ten times since I’ve been sitting here.”
13
Arkady slept most of the flight to Irkutsk. As soon as he stirred, his seatmate pounced.
“I hope you don’t mind that I ate your omelet. You were asleep.”
“That’s all right.” Arkady had a vague memory of declining something yellow and rubbery.
“You should have taken the train. The food is much better.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Arkady said.
His new friend was a native Buryat, one of the Mongolian peoples who had survived Ivan the Terrible, Genghis Khan, and Joseph Stalin, which took some resilience, Arkady thought. His father had been posted in Siberia and liked to say that Buryat men were built for wrestling. This one seemed affable enough. He was about fifty years of age, with a wispy mustache and a muskrat coat that made him look a little like a tree stump.
“Pardon?” Arkady pulled out his earphones.
The man took out a business card that he formally presented to Arkady. “Rinchin Bolot, factotum.” He vigorously shook Arkady’s hand.
“Thank you, but what does that mean?” Arkady asked. “What does a factotum do?”
“Well, he does everything. That’s the point. Anything and everything: driver, translator, hunting guide. A factotum can even arrange romantic liaisons. At your command.” Bolot beamed.
“A man of many talents,” Arkady said.
Across the aisle, teenage girls huddled over a flashlight and a scented letter. Tall, blond flight attendants floated by like Viking royalty.
“Let’s tackle your first problem,” Bolot said. “Let’s find you a place to stay.”
“I’ve already taken care of that, thank you.”
“Okay, but remember, my advice is free of charge. You know, according to Chekhov, Irkutsk was, at one time, the Paris of Siberia.”
“I never knew that. Do you own a car?”
“A percentage of a car.”
“About three tires’ worth?”
Bolot giggled. He dove into a briefcase and fished out glossy real estate brochures. “Would you be interested in a residential or commercial property in Irkutsk?”
“Neither.”
This was where the usual salesman might have given up. Bolot persevered.
“I’ll pick one for you. Residential.” He sorted through splashy pages of great rooms and grand staircases, billiard and screening rooms, wine cellars and indoor pools. “You see, they have everything a man could wish for. A real fantasy land with lots of style.”
“ ‘Late Oligarch’?” More than a man could wish for in one lifetime, Arkady thought. “All the furniture is twice normal size. Are your clients real people or cartoons?”
Bolot giggled again. “You’re too funny.” Arkady wouldn’t have been surprised if he had pulled a monkey from his sack.
The plane hit an air pocket and the girls across the aisle squealed.
“Relax, children. It’s always like this around Irkutsk,” Bolot said. “Pilots call it the ‘Bermuda Triangle of Siberia.’ ”
“Why is that?” Arkady asked.
“Crashes. It’s a difficult landing because the runway slopes and planes overshoot. Or they’re overloaded or they use faulty parts or the plane simply explodes. It’s always something. Usually I take the train,” Bolot said. “Is this your first time in Siberia?”
“Once before, as a boy,” he said. “My father was posted at a uranium mine. The first words in Buryat I learned were ‘Does your dog bite?’ ”
At the next bump, Bolot’s real estate brochures spilled from their folders onto the floor in front of him. As Arkady helped retrieve them, he noticed that they were all offered by Global Real Estate. Boris Benz’s gold embossed signature was printed at the bottom.
He handed the pictures back. “So that’s Boris Benz’s company?”
“It is.”
“Do you work for him?”
“No, would that I did. Do you know what the sales commission for a house like this would be? It would turn your knees to jelly.”
The thought inspired Bolot to summon one of the Vikings and ask for one last vodka. “You too?” he asked Arkady.
“It’s a little early in the morning for me.”
“What I need is an introduction to Benz. Perhaps it’s intuition, but I am a strong believer in karma and I have to ask: Do you happen to know him?”
“We’ve met. I can’t say I know him.”
“You’ve met him and you still have your tail feathers? Now I have to say that I am impressed. I’m very, very impressed.”
The flight attendant returned. Vodka rose and fell as a liquid column in Bolot’s glass. He drank it in one go and the air smelled purified—“sanctified,” Victor would have said.
“You want to work for Boris Benz, yet you think he’s dangerous?” Arkady asked.
“Is it dangerous to walk across a crocodile? Maybe so, but worth it if there is a pot of gold at the other end.”
“Is that why you’re carrying around Benz’s brochures?” Arkady asked.
“Oh, he doesn’t even know I’m alive. All I want is to get his attention, and if I bring him a client or a business lead, maybe he will notice me.”
“What do you know about a friend of Benz named Mikhail Kuznetsov?”
“Ah, the so-called hermit billionaire. I’d be a poor capitalist if I didn’t know about him. They say he’s even harder to get to. Do you know him too?”
“No.”
“There’s the rub in a nutshell,” Bolot said. “It’s like a club. You can’t get in unless you are a millionaire. Worse, oligarchs are moving targets. Someone like Boris or Kuznetsov has a private jet and homes in London, Moscow, the Cayman Islands. They have armies of lawyers and accountants, and whenever they want, they simply disappear.”
That was the way Tatiana had vanished, as if swallowed up by Siberia. He had handled her train schedule so much, he had almost worn it through. He tried to picture where she met her mysterious sources, but all he could imagine was a landscape of prisons.
As the plane began its descent, Arkady made out the first sketchy signs of civilization. Train tracks and semaphores. But also a frozen river that wound through forest so dark, it was black. The plane’s engines began groaning, and Arkady saw the outline of a city half buried in snow.
“If you don’t mind me asking, where are you staying?” Bolot asked.
“The Irkutsk International.”
“Ah, the International. High-class. Boris Benz owns that hotel.” Bolot approved.
The Vikings went to their perches. The airplane’s wheels locked into place. The control tower bucked up and down. The sun as it rose burst the glass of the tower and then broke into a million violet lights, not totally unlike Paris.
14
Tolya was the young police officer assigned to be Arkady’s driver. He met Arkady at the Irkutsk airport before driving him t
o a holding cell. There, they picked up Aba Makhmud, the man accused of trying to shoot Zurin.
The three men started the two-hour drive toward a transit prison outside of Irkutsk where Makhmud would be tried and sentenced. If found guilty, he would be moved to a larger prison where, without hope, he was likely to become a different creature, one tougher and more violent than the one he had started out as.
Tolya and Makhmud had little in common. They were the same age, but the policeman was Russian from his blue eyes to his flaxen hair, while Makhmud was dark and sullen as a wolverine.
“These are our pastel nights, our northern lights and cruel weather,” Tolya intoned. “Where ice floes break with the sound of cannons and heroes march into exile. Where troikas fly overhead and houses turn to tar black. Or do you prefer ‘ebony’?”
“It’s your poem, Tolya,” Arkady said.
“But, being from Moscow you may have a more sophisticated ear.”
“I would no more get between a man and his poems than get between a bear and her cubs.”
Aba let out a derisive snort. Tolya shot Arkady a sideways look and twisted in his car seat to include Makhmud. “What do you think of the poem?”
“Personally, I think it’s shit.”
“I should have expected as much from a someone who only reads the Koran,” Tolya said.
“Fuck you!” said Makhmud.
“No, fuck you!”
“This is erudite,” Arkady said.
“I am not going to say another word to him,” Makhmud said, “let alone help him with his shit poetry. He wouldn’t know poetry if it bit him in the ass.”
They drove in silence and mutual contempt along a street deep in winter ruts.
Tolya had won a Pushkin Day poetry contest and his life had never been the same since. “I enlisted in the police academy so that I could concentrate on my poetry. I ignored the fact that my fellow officers were rascals and thieves.”
“Petty thieves,” Makhmud said. “They probably stole candy bars.”
In the holding cell, Makhmud was charged under Article 295 of the criminal code with trying to kill Prosecutor Zurin. He had been denied his one phone call, stripped of his private attorney, and assigned a public defender who advised him to confess. So he confessed. Did it matter? It was a given that Chechens were incorrigible murderers. Pick any assassination of any political dissident or a contract murder, and Chechens were to some degree involved, according to the police.
In repose, Makhmud was a good-looking boy with dark, curly locks. He stared out the car window as if committing to memory his last free moments.
“I’ve heard about you,” he finally said to Arkady.
“What have you heard?”
“I heard you work for Prosecutor Zurin.”
“He’s my boss.”
“How can you work for a pig like that?”
Arkady had no answer. Which was not good, he thought. He should have a ready answer for embarrassing questions. He should wear armor.
Tolya leaned close as he drove. “I have many more poems, some of a bucolic nature, other memorials to be read at a graveside. I’m sure that, given the chance, I could find a wider audience. In the tradition of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, I’ve chosen a prison theme.”
“Prison poems? That would be interesting,” Arkady said.
“That’s the idea.” Tolya got so close again. “I already have a title. ‘Souls in Transit.’ It evokes the suspension of time.”
Prisoners in transit might wait a day or a year in suspense. A cell designed for four prisoners might hold twenty men with a single pail for slops. The heat, even in the dead of winter, was so stifling that men sometimes passed out on the floor. Misery had an epic quality.
“How far have you gotten?” Arkady asked.
“So far, not a word actually written.”
“Not a word?” Makhmud sneered from the backseat. “The idiot’s never going to write a single word. A poem cannot be suppressed. It erupts.”
“If anyone is the idiot, it’s you. I bet you think you can gain your freedom by ratting on your friends,” Tolya said.
“I never ratted out anyone and never will.” No accusation could sting a Chechen more.
Conversation ceased as they drew up to a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire where a closed-circuit camera looked them up and down. Everything moved in stages. They rolled by a guard tower to a windowless main building that looked more like a meat locker than a prison. Armed guards studied their identification, waved them into a courtyard, and motioned for them to wait. And wait. Finally, Arkady got out, pulled his hat over his ears, and wrapped his scarf up to his eyes.
A metal gate rolled open and a man in a fur hat stepped out.
“Kostich?” Arkady called out.
“You’re early.” The warden took his time, as if basking in a sunlamp.
“I’m bringing you the prisoner Aba Makhmud for interrogation,” Arkady said.
“Makhmud the cop killer.”
“He didn’t kill a cop and hasn’t been convicted of attempting to kill a cop yet,” Arkady said. “In fact, the dossier is actually skimpy.”
“But enough to proceed. You have the suspect and his confession. It seems to me that most of your work is done. All you have to do is fill in the blank spaces.”
“I need to hear the confession.”
“And my friend Prosecutor Zurin?”
“In the pink.”
“And the prisoner?”
Arkady motioned for Tolya to bring Makhmud from the car.
“Take the handcuffs off him,” Kostich said. “Let’s get a look at this ferocious assassin.” Makhmud looked up at the sky and shivered as the warden circled him. “Take your last look. He won’t look like this when he comes out.”
Arkady was vaguely aware of the muffled sounds of a fight emanating from the main building. What did they do for entertainment in this prison? Arkady wondered. What weapons were available? Kitchen knives? Potato mashers? Pots and pans? In some high-security prisons, men were never released from leg shackles. They fought on their backs like beetles.
“I need this suspect in undamaged condition and available for interrogation in two days,” Arkady said.
The warden bent over to cough up a ball of green phlegm.
He wiped his mouth and said, “Of course, of course. Every formality will be observed.”
Two guards took Makhmud in hand and almost ripped him out of his boots. Stripped of bravado, he cast a desperate look at Arkady.
* * *
On the drive back to Irkutsk, Arkady carried the image of Makhmud with him. How could he sympathize with a would-be murderer? It was a perverse game the mind played.
Tolya asked, “Can we talk?”
Arkady pulled his scarf down from his face. “That’s what we’re doing, shivering and talking.”
“I’m having a problem with one of my partners. He’s stealing from the evidence room and I can’t do anything about it,” Tolya said.
“Why not?” asked Arkady.
“If I make a fuss, he’ll blame me, and it would only be my word against his.”
“That happens a lot in police work. I would advise either say nothing or agree to share the goods. Police veterans can be bullies. Who else have you told about your situation?”
“No one. You’re the first.”
“And you’ve known me for less than two hours. That’s not a strong basis for trust.”
“Sometimes enemies are the best measure of a person’s character.”
“So true.”
“I heard our Prosecutor Nikolai talking to your Prosecutor Zurin on the telephone. They’re birds of a feather. I got the feeling Zurin couldn’t wait to get you out of Moscow because you’re such a pain in the neck.”
“I like to think so,” Arkady said.
* * *
Irkutsk was a city of two minds. It was a modern Soviet city and a quixotic collection of old wooden houses amid colorful onion domes. A
vast public space was taken up by the park where Lenin Prospect met Karl Marx Square. Pedestrians moved with deliberation through drifts of snow, and even the ponies in the park leaned into the cold.
Arkady tried to call Tatiana, Zhenya, and Obolensky from his hotel room, but the calls failed and he’d never felt more isolated. Rather than eat alone, he settled into the hotel’s Irish pub. It seemed every Russian city had one. Arkady chose a booth and ordered something called a “plowman’s lunch.” He didn’t know what it was or what it hoped to be, but cheese and bread and pickled onions were involved.
He picked at his food and studied the meager six pages of Makhmud’s preliminary investigation, the charge so neatly wrapped in advance. What did he know about Makhmud beyond the fact that his brief life was soon to be given a bad twist and that attacks on the police were handled with special fury?
Name:
Aba Makhmud
Age:
20
Height:
2 m.
Weight:
70 kg.
Hair:
Dark brown
Eyes:
Brown
Nationality:
Russian
Marriage Status:
Single
Residence:
Moscow
Ethnicity:
Chechen
Education:
Vocational
Military Service:
Dishonorable discharge
Employment:
Mechanic
Criminal Record:
Hooliganism, car theft, antisocial behavior
A preliminary investigation stated that on January third, without provocation, Aba Makhmud had fired a 9mm Beretta in an attempt on People’s Prosecutor S. I. Zurin in Patriarchal Park in Moscow. He didn’t offer any reason or remorse for the act.
“Naturally you’re having a Guinness with that.” Rinchin Bolot slid into the booth. “I hope you haven’t forgotten me. We had such a good conversation on the plane.”
The Siberian Dilemma Page 5