The Siberian Dilemma

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “But I haven’t come all this way just to check on the health of my number one investigator,” Zurin said. “And, let’s be honest, I haven’t come just to pay my respects to Benz.”

  “You knew him, though.”

  Zurin waved a hand. “I know lots of people. So, if not Benz, then Kuznetsov. What do you know about him? You were supposed to report back to me on what he was up to.”

  “I only know what I see on the news.”

  “Your girlfriend has the inside track, right?” Arkady was silent. “Or is she no longer your girlfriend?” Zurin mimicked a weighing motion with his hands. “An investigator, washed up and burnt out, or a billionaire who fancies himself the next president.”

  Zurin clapped his hands together, a child suddenly bored with his game.

  “Right. You know who I work for: Louis the Sixteenth, ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

  “The Fourteenth.”

  “Whatever. I’m just the prosecutor. The state is the president.”

  “Who will be returned to office in March.”

  “Of course. But Kuznetsov… Kuznetsov is a problem.”

  “Kuznetsov has no chance of victory. You know that. I know that. He knows that,” Arkady said.

  “Of course. He won’t win. But he will gain support. Not just here but in the West too.”

  “The West can’t vote for him.”

  “Don’t be so literal, Renko. No, they can’t vote for him, but they can put him on the front page of the New York Times; they can make him a poster boy for the movement against Putin. They can help him. Pressure through diplomatic channels. Propaganda pieces on the internet. Dark arts.”

  “The same dark arts they accuse us of,” Arkady said.

  “Of course. But whichever way you cut it, we’re back at the same place. Kuznetsov is a problem.”

  “A problem for whom?”

  “A problem for the president, of course. How would you do it, if you were me?” Zurin continued.

  “Well, you can’t buy him off.”

  “Why not?”

  “First, he’s too rich. Second, this isn’t about money.”

  “Correct on both counts.” Zurin wasn’t asking him for advice, Arkady realized. He was leading Arkady down a path that he’d already mapped out. And where did that path end? Arkady wondered. Zurin, Kuznetsov, and Benz. How were they connected? He finally understood.

  “You put Benz up to destroying Kuznetsov’s oil rigs.”

  “Right.”

  “You backed Benz against Kuznetsov.”

  “Very good.”

  “You hoped that would be enough to dissuade Kuznetsov from running, while to the outside world it looked like another dispute between oligarchs.”

  “Ever since he’s come out of prison, he’s had this idea that he’s a reformer, the new Tolstoy,” Zurin said.

  “There are worse ideas.”

  “Not where oil and politics are involved.”

  Zurin developed a smile.

  “You want to kill Kuznetsov?” Arkady asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “I want you to kill Kuznetsov.”

  39

  When Arkady tried to grasp the insanity of Zurin’s proposition, he had to laugh.

  “What makes you think I would do that?”

  Zurin stepped aside to let a busboy with a room service cart rattle by. “I know that Zhenya and his girlfriend are staying in your apartment, and my men know when they leave and where they go. I can make them disappear at any time.”

  “You’re serious. You would have them killed?”

  Zurin shrugged and made a phone call.

  “Put Zhenya on the phone,” he said.

  Zurin turned the phone over to Arkady.

  “Arkady?” said Zhenya. “Are you there?”

  Arkady tried very hard to keep his voice from wavering. “Yes, Zhenya, I’m here. Where are you?”

  “I’m playing chess in Gorky Park with two thugs hanging over me. They took away our phones and they follow me wherever I go. Sosi too.”

  “How long have they been following you?”

  “For the last two days. Can you tell these apes not to be such pussies and play me at chess? I’ve kicked their asses, like, a hundred times, and now they’re refusing to play again even when I give them odds of a queen.”

  Arkady heard the fear behind the bravado. It was pure Zhenya.

  Before Arkady had left Moscow for Siberia, Zhenya asked him what to do if the police came around. No guns, Arkady said, no guns and no resistance.

  “Try to stay calm, they are just trying to scare you and me,” he said.

  Zurin was watching Arkady. He grabbed the phone and turned it off.

  “A simple quid pro quo,” Zurin said. “You kill Kuznetsov, the lovebirds go free.”

  There was no point in Arkady asking what would happen if he refused.

  “Why me?” Arkady asked.

  “Because you’re the perfect candidate,” Zurin said. He bounced on the balls of his feet, pleased with his own cleverness. “First, you can get close to him. Tatiana trusts you; therefore Kuznetsov trusts you. Second, you have a motive.”

  “I do?”

  “Of course. Jealousy. You’re crazed by love and unable to bear the thought of your woman going off with someone else.”

  There were times when that might have been true, Arkady conceded.

  “Not to mention the fact that your struggle with the bear has left you mentally unbalanced.”

  “And then?”

  “You’ll be arrested and charged. A state psychiatrist will declare that you were temporarily insane at the time of the offense. You’ll be sentenced and rehabilitated in a treatment center.”

  “An asylum, you mean.”

  “Always so blunt, aren’t you? Yes, if you insist, an asylum. Then, after a year or two, you’ll be released.”

  “And Tatiana?”

  “Nothing happens to her. I doubt she’d ever speak to you again, of course, but you know: omelets and eggs and all that.”

  Shoot a man in cold blood, even knowing that Zhenya and Sosi’s lives depended on it? He wasn’t sure he could do it. In fact, he was sure he couldn’t do it. Raising a gun, taking aim, pulling the trigger—all that required conscious volition. And it wasn’t as if Kuznetsov’s bodyguards would just be hanging around. They’d be on him in a second, probably less, even assuming he could get a weapon past them.

  Zurin put his hand on Arkady’s shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking, Renko.”

  “You do? I don’t.”

  “You’re thinking one of two things.”

  “Go on.”

  “First, you’re wondering whether you could arrange to have Kuznetsov arrested for something so that he would be out of reach. He could be arrested for Benz’s murder, for a start. He was involved, I’m sure of it. I’m equally sure you know more than you’re telling. But it doesn’t matter. Arresting him just makes him a martyr. He will say it’s a trumped-up charge, politically motivated. He has been in prison once, and he knows how well that plays to his supporters. So that’s not going to happen.”

  “What’s the other thing?”

  “You’re wondering how you could fake it. Make me think that Kuznetsov’s dead, at least long enough to let Zhenya and the girl with purple hair go unharmed.”

  “I doubt you’d fall for that.”

  “You’re right. No fuzzy photographs, no tomato sauce splashed around the place. This isn’t amateur dramatics. When I’m satisfied that Kuznetsov’s dead, I’ll take away my men. Not before. You don’t go through with it, then you know what happens. Same if you tell anyone about this.” He smiled. “Come. Assassination is the natural order of things in politics. It’s what people expect. Let’s go back to the reception. They’ll be wondering where we are.”

  * * *

  It was neatly conceived, Arkady had to admit. Kuznetsov out of Putin’s way, Arkady out of Zurin’s. W
as there a way out of it? He had no idea. Perhaps one would come to him in time, but right now he couldn’t see how.

  He remembered the Siberian dilemma he had discussed with Tatiana and Bolot around the fire that night in the snow. To stay underwater or to leap out? Well, this was another dilemma, and Zhenya had the word for it: “Zugzwang,” a chess term meaning that any possible move would be fatal.

  It could be the title of his memoirs written in the asylum, he thought.

  40

  The day after Benz’s funeral, Tatiana, Arkady, and Bolot returned to Chita. Bolot and Aba drove his car from the airport, dropping Tatiana off at the Montblanc and Arkady at the Admiral Kolchak.

  Saran hurried across the hotel lobby to greet Arkady.

  “Dorzho called. He wanted to know if I had led you to him.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it was a friendly call.”

  “For him it was.”

  “That’s good. Has he always liked bees?”

  “He only likes bees, but the interesting thing is he hates wasps, and it’s very difficult to tell them apart. The greatest experts in the field can’t tell bees and wasps apart, but Dorzho can and he hates them.”

  “You can tell the difference, right?”

  “Don’t worry, he also told me to keep my mouth shut and stay out of his life.”

  * * *

  Back in his hotel room, Arkady continued to worry about Kuznetsov. He remembered a funeral he’d attended in Moscow in his early years: a gang lord who’d been killed by his main rival, not on his orders but by him personally, by his own hands, strangled in a banya where the two of them had been trying to parcel out their businesses. Tradition dictated that gang leaders had to kiss the corpse of a fallen peer, and failure to do so equaled an admission of culpability. It was a charade that was followed even when everyone knew who the guilty party was.

  This particular funeral had been attended by pretty much every oligarch, most of them with colorful noms de guerre, like Ivan the Hand, Cyclops, the Scar, and Zhivago. They all kissed the corpse—everyone but the man responsible—and a shootout followed.

  Arkady wondered whether Kuznetsov would have kissed Benz’s corpse had it been there. Maybe customs seemed different now, but, deep down, Russia was still the same.

  The schemes that ran through Arkady’s mind were so convoluted that he felt the onset of vertigo. Every plan he considered meant that too many things had to happen at just the right time.

  He wanted to talk to someone—anyone—but he knew that telling another person about Zurin’s threat would merely implicate him without alleviating any of his own angst. In other words, a problem shared was a problem doubled rather than halved.

  Victor, however, was someone he could talk to, someone who would understand and had a talent for scheming.

  Arkady called him.

  “That bastard Zurin,” Victor said. “I guess he’s closer to Putin than we thought. I wish we could send him back to Cuba. Let me take care of the thugs following Zhenya.”

  “That will get you killed. These men have automatic weapons,” Arkady said.

  “Can you fake Kuznetsov’s assassination?”

  “Zurin won’t buy it. And part of the problem is that people around here are so in love with Kuznetsov, they won’t let it go; they’ll demand answers.”

  “Tatiana faked her own murder in Moscow.”

  “Yes, but that was a long time ago, and the two cases are totally different. A journalist can skip town and lay low, but a presidential candidate is another matter. I don’t think it can be done.”

  “Well, with that attitude, you’re fucked.”

  * * *

  He knew that he could assassinate Kuznetsov. He’d been in his presence often enough to be accepted as part of the furniture. Kuznetsov’s bodyguards no longer stopped him, let alone patted him down. Perhaps the solution was to kill Zurin, but that wouldn’t solve anything, because it wasn’t Zurin who wanted Kuznetsov dead. The order to kill him had come from the Kremlin.

  * * *

  The next morning Bolot joined Arkady for a stroll around Chita, stopping for a coffee here and a bracing glass of brandy there.

  “How is the investigation going?” Bolot asked.

  “Not very well,” Arkady said. He didn’t feel like lying to Bolot. Generally, when people asked, he told them he was digging into Benz’s affairs and hoped that no one realized that he was going through the motions.

  He changed the subject. “Do you think Aba would like to go back to Moscow with me? Or is his brother, Bashir, still a threat?”

  “According to Aba’s mother, he’s fled Moscow, so I think Aba might want to go back. I know his mother wants him back.”

  They stopped for lunch in the lobby of the Montblanc, where Tatiana invited them to watch the opinion polls come in. A wave of support was apparently building. The whole thing seemed like some form of performance art. Arkady wondered whether any of it was true or, perhaps more precisely, whether any of it mattered.

  Did a woman in Kazan feel positively about a Kuznetsov video? Did either candidate really impact her life? Would she vote for Kuznetsov on polling day? Would she encourage others to vote? Would any of those votes be counted, or would they just be ignored? “Seventy-seventy” was what Kuznetsov had told him and Tatiana. The authorities wanted a seventy percent turnout and a seventy percent vote for Putin.

  “Would you like to come with me to Olkhon Island tomorrow?” Tatiana asked. “We’re taping another commercial. In front of a crowd this time.”

  Arkady had no interest in watching Kuznetsov play to another crowd.

  “If that’s the only way I can see you, then yes.”

  41

  A train shimmered on the horizon.

  “Don’t worry,” Bolot said. “I see it too.”

  Arkady wondered how many of his thoughts Bolot could read. “You do?”

  “Sure. It’s a mirage.”

  “I thought mirages were only found in deserts.”

  “A meteorologist explained it to me. Something to do with layers of air that distort the light off ice.”

  “Or they could just be glimpses of another world.”

  Bolot smiled. “Maybe I can make a shaman out of you after all.”

  Arkady, Tatiana, and Bolot were going back to Olkhon Island, this time to watch photographers take photos and videos of Kuznetsov.

  * * *

  “Today I pledge a billion rubles to the people of Siberia, to do for you what Decembrists did for your ancestors. Where you need schools, I will build them. Where you need hospitals, I will build them. Where you need houses, and sports facilities, and theaters, I will build them.”

  They stood five meters from Kuznetsov. The bodyguards were farther away, making sure they weren’t in the video.

  Tatiana took notes. “He’s going to repeat the same campaign speech three more times today.”

  Kuznetsov continued, “The Decembrists were not idle in exile. They established schools, a foundling hospital, and a theater for the local population. They saw what I have seen, what every true Russian can see: that here, in Siberia, lies the soul and the future of Russia.”

  Meaning oil, thought Arkady. The depth of Kuznetsov’s ambition was far greater than Arkady had given him credit for. Then came the masterstroke.

  “Today I also renounce my interests in all Siberian oil fields. Oil, the source of our wealth, is being drained by vultures. We must change that.

  “Our country needs energy in the future, but we also need to preserve our ecology. In particular we need to preserve this, the largest and purest lake in the world.”

  Arkady looked at Tatiana, a half smile on her face.

  * * *

  Kuznetsov’s part was done. His next stop was at the north end of the lake. It was one of the places he’d earmarked for building a school, and there was no time like the present for getting on with that.

  The film crew would stay to take some footage of the island and add
special effects that would give Kuznetsov a heroic cast. Really, a billion rubles ought to make anyone look heroic, Arkady thought.

  “Will I see you later?” Tatiana asked Arkady as she followed Kuznetsov toward the helicopter.

  “What time will you be back?” he asked.

  She laughed. “Who knows? All this time following Mikhail around, and you still ask me that? How long is a piece of string? I’ll be back when I’m back. Wait for me.”

  Arkady luxuriated in a cigarette and watched as Tatiana and Kuznetsov climbed up into the helicopter. Then he joined Bolot for the long ride back to Chita.

  * * *

  Bolot drove off the island and was steering the car carefully onto the ice, when Arkady’s cell phone rang.

  “Tatiana?” he said.

  “Arkady.” She had to shout to be heard over the noise of the engine.

  “The helicopter. Something’s wrong.”

  “What’s the pilot doing?”

  “I don’t know. Arkady, I’m…” Her voice faded in a hiss of static, but he knew what she’d been about to say: that she was scared. Her voice was bouncing in and out of range and suddenly she was back, so clear that she could have been right there in the car with them. “…says the tail rudder is stuck.”

  There was shouting in the background, voices urgent with fear.

  “Where are they?” asked Bolot. “Ask her where they are.”

  “Where are you?” Arkady asked.

  Silence for long seconds. Bolot was still driving, but at a crawl. “I know where they are,” he said.

  Arkady thought back. On the plane to Irkutsk, with Bolot leaning across him to point at the lake below. “See that place? The pilot will give it a wide berth.”

  “Tatiana? Are you still there?”

  “Yes. We’re going down!”

  “Are you over Cape Ryty?”

  “Where?”

  “Ask the pilot.”

  “He’s trying to…”

  “Ask him!”