“Is that it?” Arkady asked. “Is that the list of criminal activities for a Moscow investigator? Can I then retire to a tropical island like a toothless crocodile?”
Benz sat back and crossed his arms. “I have to say, for prickliness, you’re a match for Tatiana.”
“Probably.”
“How long have you known Tatiana?”
“Over a year,” said Arkady.
“She’s like a monkey that falls into a fruit bowl,” Benz said. “I’m afraid that one day she’ll go after a grape and never come back up.”
“Not the analogy I would have picked.”
“So I hear you actually shot a bear,” Benz said. “That’s something you can tell your grandchildren.”
“I tagged a bear at the zoo would be more accurate.”
“Still, you stood up to the charge of an eight-hundred-pound brown bear. Not many men can say that. You know, while you’re in Chita, we should go bear hunting. The company has its own cabin.”
“Won’t they be hibernating?”
“We can always stir one up. It will be great fun. We can helicopter in and out.”
“You’ve done it before?”
“For friends. Americans love it.”
“Can you track in the snow?”
“More fun that way.”
“Don’t you need a license for this sort of thing?”
“Where we’re going, no one will even know we’re there.”
“Sounds enticing. I’ll have to think about that.”
“A once-in-a-lifetime event, I guarantee.” Benz opened the menu of the Montblanc and studied what was offered. “Anyway, let’s order. I’m famished. I recommend the liver.”
23
Kuznetsov was the last person Arkady expected to admire. However, he had a certain perspective on life—the long view, some would call it. His book, Prisoners, was not a self-aggrandizing account of his own time in prison but portraits of other men who were serving sentences of five or ten or fifteen years.
For example, Arkady was intrigued by the story of a violent prisoner called the Butcher. He had a reputation that lived up to his name, and the only creature that dared approach him was his beloved pit bull. However, the dog was accidentally shot with a bow and arrow, and someone had to relay the news to the Butcher. Instead of reacting with violence as expected, the Butcher turned into a meek shadow of himself. Easy prey. Now, that was a storyline, Arkady thought.
The book was a compilation of stories like that, each one no more than a few pages. He told tales about murderers and thieves who understood how important it was to defend even a shred of honor. Some were heroic, others pathetic, all full of rue. One man had amassed a fortune in cigarettes. The moment he stepped out of the prison gate and was a free man, his treasure was worthless. The stories tended to be obsessed with perceived insults, letters from home, days left to serve. Reading was taken seriously, and learning was respected. One man beat his cellmate to death for tearing out the last fifty pages of A Tale of Two Cities.
Kuznetsov learned that there were more than two ways to flip a coin. He played the honest broker for cigarettes and circulated books like a lending library. By the time he came out of prison, he had developed the skills of a negotiator and politician. He stayed on the good side of both the Russian penal system and the “black camps” of career criminals. He was a shrewd criminal lawyer.
* * *
Lenin Square was Mikhail Kuznetsov’s choice for a rendezvous. In the middle of a vast open space, mothers walked around fountains with their children, wrapped in voluminous scarves. Old couples held hands to steady themselves, while others walked quickly, with determination. In Chita, walking had its dangers, however. Some cars were right-hand drive, some cars were left-, and all were driven like racecars.
Arkady and Kuznetsov made their way to the giant statue of Lenin. One bodyguard followed their progress from a Jeep Cherokee; another walked behind them.
“I liked your stories,” Arkady said. “They’re honest and well written, but you could get professional opinions from real editors to tell you what they think. You could even ask Serge Obolensky.”
“Publishers will say anything to land this book. With you, I get an honest reading.”
“You mean, everyone wants to know what you’re up to, and I don’t give a damn?”
“That’s what appeals to me. You don’t care.”
“But I do care about Tatiana’s safety,” Arkady said.
“She’s been my good-luck charm and she’s a great journalist who never reveals her sources. I’d hate to lose her.”
“Is she in any danger?”
“Probably, but, as you know, she loves a good cause.”
What Tatiana loved even more, Arkady thought, was a desperate cause.
“And what is today’s good cause?” Arkady asked.
Kuznetsov broke into a grin. “That’s the interesting part. All I ask is that people follow their conscience, not their fears. No political party, nothing they can pin down.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“You know. The Kremlin.”
Kuznetsov’s cause was exactly the kind of political groundswell that the Kremlin feared most.
“Is Boris Benz involved?” Arkady asked.
“No, not Boris.”
“How can you still be friends?”
“We’ve been friends for years. We met in prison: I was in for my politics; he was in for forgery. By the I time I got there, he had already surrounded himself with thugs who protected him in exchange for future jobs in the oil business. He had one or two supposedly dry wells that were actually pumping oil without the Kremlin’s knowledge. He called it a ‘resurrection.’ It has a nice, biblical ring to it, don’t you think?” Kuznetsov allowed himself a smile. “I understood I needed his protection in prison and told him I had a plan to accumulate oil mines over time. He liked my plan and we joined forces. Once out of prison, we dug new wells on land north of Lake Baikal. You know what I did when I made my first hundred thousand? Set up a charity. I was thinking ahead. And you know what surprised me? It made me feel like a better person.”
“And Boris Benz—is he a better person, or is he still working with his old prison mates?” Arkady asked.
“I’m afraid he’s still in touch with them, and I don’t like it. I’ve tried to get him to stop taking stupid risks, but I’m not going to bring the law in. You don’t betray a friend. That’s the lesson we learn in prison.”
“And you can keep your political life separate from your business interests?”
“Our business relationship has nothing to do with my politics.”
“How do your followers get together? How do you know where to meet?”
“Word gets out.”
Arkady shivered, just enough to adjust the internal thermostat of his body.
“Boris has invited me to go bear hunting with him,” Arkady said.
There was a pause, no more than a ripple on water, before Kuznetsov asked, “What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t say yes or no.”
“We’ve had a problem with bears up there. Once they get into the garbage, they think they’re entitled; and once they’re entitled, they become possessive. It can really be a problem. In general, the less human contact, the better.”
“I heard there are some oil rigs that are virtually under siege by bears.”
“That’s an exaggeration. In the fall we have streams that run red with salmon, and that’s what bears prefer. We have to keep in mind that we’re in the oil business, not the fish business, and not in the hunting business either. My problem is not bears; my problem is finding out why my oil tank on the train blew up.”
“The explosion that happened a few days ago?”
“That’s the one. I suggest you stay away from Boris Benz for the time being.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Arkady said.
“Well, I’ve enjoyed our conversation. I’ll have more pages for
you soon,” he promised. He waved, and the Grand Cherokee rolled forward.
* * *
Arkady was virtually alone in the square, trudging and freezing and trying to get a signal on his phone. He had planned to meet Bolot in front of the government buildings in Lenin Square once he landed, but Bolot was late.
Bolot finally arrived in a white van, the kind used for delivering flowers or meat. “It took forever to get this van. No cars available at the airport. I think there’s a gold rush or something. I’m sorry, it’s a little beat-up. It was just in an accident.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not superstitious.”
“That’s easy for you to say: you have an amulet.”
“Do you want to take it back?” Arkady asked.
“No, that’s really bad luck. I’m starving,” Bolot announced.
“We’ll stop for something.” Arkady remembered that Bolot was ruled by his stomach. “But first we’re going to the train station. That’s close, isn’t it?”
Five minutes later Bolot pulled up in front of a pink train station adorned by white Doric columns. They walked through the station and out the other side, where they hopped across the tracks.
Arkady asked a worker in coveralls directions to where the explosion had taken place.
The man walked backwards and pointed west. “Well, there’s not much left to see, but it’s that way.”
“Did they say what caused it?”
“They say human error. But they always say that, don’t they? Blame the workmen. There was an explosion, but only a couple of them were killed. You just don’t see that very often.”
“See what?”
“A fireball. Burned the oil tanker right down to the wheels, lost thirty thousand gallons of crude oil.”
The man turned back and shouted something while Arkady and Bolot walked in the opposite direction.
“What did he say?” Arkady asked.
“Train’s coming.”
“I don’t see it.”
“I can feel it,” Bolot said.
“There’s plenty of clearance between trains, right?”
“I’m sure there is.” A horn blasted and suddenly the train turned a curve and was barreling toward them. They jumped over several tracks to get out of the way of a red behemoth surrounded by purple haze. The train rolled on and on; perhaps a hundred oil tankers, containers, and freight cars passed by at a low rumble.
Arkady and Bolot trudged on until they finally reached a semaphore that stood between the tracks like a solitary witness. The smell of oil still hung in the air, and a shadow of black extended in all directions except where new tracks were laid.
“Well, was it a blast or just a fire?” Bolot asked.
“It was an explosion that started the fire. Those fires are nasty and black.”
Bolot started writing in his notepad to show his worth.
“How long did it take to burn out?” Arkady asked.
“Good question.”
“Was it contained and analyzed?”
“Another good question.” Bolot kept writing.
Arkady looked at the husk of the oil tanker and came to a decision. “Let’s go back,” he said.
“Isn’t it time for dinner? Distances are longer when you haven’t eaten,” said Bolot as they got back to the car. “You never eat, do you? I’ve noticed that when you do, you just rearrange your food. You know, you need calories to stay warm.”
Arkady took the wheel and drove toward the hills, stopping once to pick up burgers.
“Where are you going? This looks like rugged territory.”
“I have an idea,” Arkady said.
“You never let on that you spent so much time in Chita.”
Ever since Arkady had arrived in Chita, the city had been filtering back to him. His favorite picture as a boy was of Cossacks overwhelming the Mongols. The Cossacks were little more than pirates, but they had muskets and won Siberia for the tsar.
The faster he drove, the more the van bucked, until he was forced to slow down. As they crept along, he had the feeling he had been at this same geographical point before, perhaps even with the same vortex of snow spinning overhead.
“Where are we?” Bolot asked.
“At an army tank graveyard.” Arkady stopped the van and got out. Headlights from the van picked out a pair of signs, one so pocked by bullet holes it was illegible, and another that said, PROPERTY OF THE STATE. Target practice. Wind whistled through the bullet holes.
Arkady and Bolot walked between rows of tanks, nothing less than a thousand T-26s and T-34s, decapitated monsters with treads extravagantly wrapped around their bodies and with armored skirts and cannons pointed in all directions.
“You remember this?” Bolot asked.
“My father was stationed here for several months, and some places you never forget. This was my playground,” Arkady said. He remembered how he and his friends used to play war, dropping through open hatches, hurling stones and clots of mud instead of Molotov cocktails.
Bolot pulled off a glove and held out his hand to catch flakes and watch them melt. “A storm is coming. I can taste it,” he said. “If we want to get back to the hotel, we should start moving.”
24
They entered the lobby of the Admiral Kolchak and Arkady introduced Bolot to Saran.
“My friend needs a room and a sauna. Maybe a vodka too.”
Factotums had to rest now and then, and Bolot hadn’t had a chance to relax since he arrived in Chita. Saran produced towels for Arkady and Bolot. She was all business.
“The banya is out back. Temperatures should range between 150 and 175 degrees, no higher and no longer than six minutes. You will have to share with the miners.”
Steam exploded as water was ladled onto hot stones. Barely visible, Chinese laborers sat knee to knee along pine benches. Someone slapped Arkady’s back with a small branch of pine. There were certain rituals a man needed to alleviate the rigors of life, and this was one of them. For many, this was as close to heaven as they would come.
“Is good?” A young miner laughed with delight.
“Is good.” Bolot leaned back with his glass of vodka.
Arkady’s eyes were closing, he was so tired. He needed to rouse himself, dress, and make contact with Tatiana.
* * *
When he reached the lobby of the Montblanc, he heard the voices of Tatiana and Kuznetsov. They were sitting at a banquette, drinking champagne, when Tatiana raised her eyes and saw him.
“Arkady, come join us.”
“What are you celebrating?”
“The book,” she said.
“After I met with you this morning, I called a publisher in Moscow and he seems interested in publishing the book. He will want to see the chapters I’ve written before he decides.”
“That’s reason to celebrate. And you are still writing your article for Obolensky?” Arkady asked Tatiana.
“Of course.”
More champagne arrived at the table. Arkady had not eaten and felt lightheaded from the sauna. He threw back his champagne. Then another.
“Whose comes out first?” Arkady asked.
“First my book about political prisoners comes out,” Kuznetsov said. “Then Tatiana’s article will appear in Russia Now, making a connection with me and other prisoners, exposing the political nature of arrests and Siberia’s prison system.”
“Why are you always the one taking chances?” Arkady asked Tatiana.
“What do you mean?” asked Kuznetsov.
“By writing a book about prisoners, you humanize them and the reader sympathizes with them. Rightly so. Then Tatiana comes out with an article that, among other things, describes how the government puts oligarchs who dare question Putin in prison. She becomes the target and lands in jail.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Kuznetsov said.
“Then why not let her article come out before the book?”
“It can only cause trouble,” Kuznetsov said.
“I love listening to men talk about me in the third person. If publishing my article second helps his book, I’m happy to do it.”
“I’ll change the subject,” Arkady said. “Today I visited the scene of your oil tanker explosion. Maybe I should say ‘snow wreck,’ because it could have been caused by a blizzard.”
“It was disastrous,” Kuznetsov said.
“Have you looked at the rails? Yesterday I took a walk along the track. They were never switched for the approach to the station,” Arkady said. “Do you think they were unable to switch the tracks because of the snow, or were they intentionally not switched?”
“That is to be determined,” Kuznetsov said. “If I were paranoid, I’d think someone was trying to ruin me.” He offered to pour more champagne.
“No more for me,” Tatiana said.
Arkady pushed his glass forward. “Are we still celebrating?” he asked.
“No,” Tatiana said. “I don’t think so.”
* * *
At two in the morning Arkady walked back to the Admiral Kolchak under the mistaken assumption that brisk exercise would revive him. He flopped down on a chair in the dark of the lobby, unaware that Saran was watching him from her perch behind the desk.
“Can I get you something?” she asked. “Vodka? Tea? The samovar is hot.”
“Hot tea would be nice.”
She brought him a cup and returned to her desk, sitting and crossing her feet.
“Sarangerel, it seems to me that you’re here day and night,” Arkady said.
“I start around six in the morning. In the afternoon my mother takes over until I come on again for the evening guests.”
“That sounds tedious.”
“No, no. It gives me a chance to read and it gives my mother a chance to play mahjong with her club. She wins, but not too much. She wants them to come back.”
“How are the sea serpents?” he asked.
“Well-behaved.”
The Siberian Dilemma Page 10