by D. R. Bell
I get to Malaya Sadovaya in the late afternoon. Despite this being a workday, the street is full of people, locals and tourists. I climb the stairs, open the door. The flat is exactly as I left it. Well, almost exactly. Someone was here. One of the chairs is placed at an angle. I am compulsive about pushing chairs all the way in under the table. It drove Karen nuts.
I spend an hour going through things, to make sure I have not missed anything on my previous visit. I now know why my father was reading all these books on offshore banking and money laundering. I look for notes in the margins, anything that would give me extra clues, but come up empty.
The kitchen window overlooks the courtyard. Five kids, three boys and two girls, are playing hide and seek. Another memory crosses my mind. I am ten now, facing a fresh beat down at the hands of Vasya Proshkin, my nemesis. Vasya is two years older and at least twenty pounds heavier. He is a bully and for the past few months he’s been taking a particular pleasure in beating me up. The usual sequence was: Vasya knocks me down, sits on top and pummels me. But he is careful to not hit me in the face, to avoid drawing blood. This way the adults don’t get involved.
The difference today is that Vasya’s father came out. He is not stopping his son, he is enjoying Vasya being a man. Vasya pushes me especially hard; I fall face down and stay there, expecting to feel Vasya’s weight on top of me and blows to my sides. But nothing happens. I hear steps, look up. It’s my father; he must have come from work earlier. My father stops about ten feet away, stands there saying nothing.
I turn over, get up. Vasya is standing there not sure what to do, his father behind him. I am not sure what to do either, but I have to do something. I step up to Vasya and hit him. He seems stunned for a moment, then hits me back. I fall, but this time I am not waiting to be pummeled, I turn around and meet Vasya with a kick to the groin. He doubles over, I get up, jump on him, and we roll on the ground, kicking and hitting each other until we are pulled apart. Before we leave, my father says a few words to Vasya’s dad. I don’t know what is said, but Vasya stays away from me from then on. I am bleeding from the nose and the mouth, my white shirt is ruined. Mother cusses at my father for not preventing the fight; he is not responding.
If I were in a similar situation, would I have interfered on my son Simon’s behalf? Probably. But then, I don’t recall Simon ever coming home with a bloody nose. Private schools, tennis lessons, summer camps, the latest games, and electronics…Why do I feel like we lost Simon along the way?
There is a knock on the door. As can be expected, it’s Zorkin. He welcomes me as if I am his best friend:
“Pavel Vladimirovich, I thought I heard you. Welcome back!”
“Thank you, Evgeny Antonovich.”
“How long are you back in town for?”
“I am not sure yet, a few days. I’d like to thank you for finding Anton Rimsky for me. “
“Oh, I am happy to help. As I mentioned, I am resourceful and well-connected. Pavel Vladimirovich, have you given any thought to my earlier question? You know, the one about the apartment?”
I mull his question over, to make Zorkin uneasy. “Evgeny Antonovich, I had to travel a lot since we spoke and did not have the time to properly think things through. But I will promise you that I won’t look for other buyers if you help me with a small matter.”
Zorkin slumps visibly; he must have been hoping for a more definitive action. “Pavel Vladimirovich, please understand that this is not an easy sale for you. Your father’s death is still under investigation. I am not sure you’ll be able to find many buyers under the circumstances.”
“Evgeny Antonovich, I can wait if needed.”
Zorkin takes a deep breath, the greed wins out. “How do I know you are not negotiating with someone else?”
I raise my voice in indignation. “Mr. Zorkin, I just promised you!”
“OK, OK, what can I help you with?”
“I had a childhood acquaintance, Grisha Voronezhsky. He went to university here in the 1990s, probably St. Petersburg State University, but I am not completely sure. I can’t find anything on the Internet; can you check for me which university and faculty he studied at?”
Zorkin shakes his head. “You understand this won’t be easy. I possibly have to send someone to multiple universities, pay bribes to get access to the records…”
“Evgeny Antonovich, I will gladly reimburse you for any expenses.”
Zorkin leaves with a sour expression, not sure whether he got any tangible value for his promise to help but too afraid to refuse.
I pull out the piece of paper that “Ivan” gave me and dial the second number there. My lucky streak of phones being answered ends with, “You have reached the number of Konstantin Mershov, please leave a message.”
I dictate my name and phone number.
I call Detective Rozen. He answers after two rings. “Hello, hold on a minute.” The microphone is covered, and I hear indistinct voices, then Rozen comes back, “Pavel, I walked out of interrogation, I have maybe ten minutes. Where are you?”
“In St. Petersburg.”
“Figures.”
“Sal, can you recommend a private investigator in California?”
“Why, do you need to follow someone?”
“No, it’s not that, more of a corporate investigation. I am trying to gather information on a few companies.”
“Like that Hardrock Security Company that you asked me about before?”
“Yes, kind of like that.”
“OK, give me the names.”
“Sal, I don’t want you to be involved. I just need someone to hire, has to be in California.”
Sal must be getting frustrated because he carefully spits out each word as if throwing them at me. “Pavel, I checked on you. I know you are practically broke. So don’t act with me like you have the money to burn on private investigators.”
“Sal, please, I don’t want to put you in any danger.”
“I appreciate that you are trying to protect me. I will be careful, and there are people that owe me favors. Now, give me the names.”
I hesitate, but Sal is right, I am broke. I give him the names of the California-based companies that Eastern Cottonwood purchased and hear Sal writing.
“And what do they have in common?”
“They are owned by the same investment company.”
“The one that owns Hardrock Security?”
“Yes, the same one.”
“All right, give me a couple of days.”
Wednesday, June 21
My phone rings early in the morning.
“Allo, this is Konstantin Mershov returning your call.”
“Mr. Mershov, my name is Pavel Rostin. I understand you knew my father.”
“Yes, of course I knew your father. I’ve met you, too, but you might not remember, you were only a child.”
“Mr. Mershov, do you know about my father?”
“Yes, I do. I am sorry.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Pavel, where are you?”
“Here, in St. Petersburg.”
“Staying on Malaya Sadovaya?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t we meet tomorrow? I will arrange with my son to pick you up, I no longer drive. We’ll come between ten and eleven.”
I call for voicemails in New York. The usual suspects: Jack, Sarah, Jennifer. Jack wants to meet. Sarah is hoping that I am OK. Jennifer loves me.
I am about to go for a walk in the afternoon when there is a knock on the door. I open without asking, figuring Zorkin must be back. Instead, it’s a slightly hunched old man with a small beat-up suitcase. He has a deeply lined and wrinkled face, a fringe of white hair around his balding scalp. A long pale scar crosses his right cheek. I instantly recognize the man from the picture with my father.
“Hello, Pavel. There were seats on the first flight from Ufa, so I got here quickly.” Andrei’s smile is both disarming and sad.
“Please, com
e in,” I say. I am not sure what to do or say. Am I supposed to hug him? Shake hands?
He follows me inside, looks around. “Last time I was here in 2002, four years ago. It looks exactly the same; our father did not change a thing.”
It hits me when he says “our father.”
Andrei must sense it because he puts down his suitcase. “I am sorry, it must be awfully strange.”
“It is.”
“Why don’t we go take a walk?”
I nod. And then I realize why he looked familiar in the photo: He was here in 1984, when my mother died.
Andrei walks slowly, with a limp, his breathing is heavy.
“I am sorry,” he says. “I am not in a good shape. Too much smoking; doctors say my lungs are bad. As if I don’t know without them. My right leg was broken in ’69 in the camps, never quite healed right. Father was twelve years older, but he was a young man compared to me. Do you mind if we walk to the Bronze Horseman? That’s my favorite place in the city.”
This would be at least a twenty-minute walk for me, probably an hour for him.
“Should we get a taxi?” I ask.
“If you don’t mind, I would prefer to walk. I am not sure when will be the next time that I can walk this city during white nights. I know I am slow, but we have a lot to talk about, and I did not want to do it in the apartment.”
“Why, do you think it’s bugged?”
“Possibly, possibly.”
We resume our walk. “Why did not our parents tell me about you?”
“It’s a long story. You see, I was arrested in 1956 in Budapest. When Stalin died and Nikita Khrushchev made that speech about the personality cult, many people thought that things were really changing. These silly Hungarians imagined that they were free to replace the Moscow puppets and put in their own government. So we sent 200,000 troops to show them the extent of their freedom. Marshal Konev himself, the hero of the World War II, led the invasion. He fought the Germans at Moscow, defeated them at Kursk. In 1945, his armies took Berlin. Now, he was fighting Hungarian civilians. It was war, but they had rifles and we had tanks. They were killing us by hundreds, and we were killing them by thousands. There was a fight for one building in the working-class neighborhood of Csepel, where the resistance fighters managed to burn two of our tanks. When they ran out of ammunition and tried to surrender, the officer ordered them shot. I refused. Under Stalin, they would have put a bullet in the back of my head, but instead they court-marshaled me and gave me ten years.”
Andrei leans against the parapet of Kazanskiy Bridge, wipes his brow with a handkerchief, catches his breath.
“My first camp was in the north, near Barents Sea,” he says. “Prisoner number R-3725. Half of the year temperatures below thirty degrees. Never enough food, never enough warm clothing. Trying to stay out of the hole, the solitary confinement. Survival of the fittest. I came back from the camps early, in ’63 and was even able to return to St. Petersburg. All thanks to the father and his boss, Ivan Mershov. Usually you did the whole time and they made you stay somewhere near the camps. I never had a chance to thank Mershov; he died before I came back. I got a job at Kirov’s Works heavy industry plant, a bed in their dormitory. You don’t remember, you were little, but I would come over from time to time. But I did not last long. In a sense, I was freer in the camp. When you have nothing to lose, you are free. There were some very smart, well-educated people there. So when I came back, I became involved with the writers, the ones that were rebelling against the totalitarian state. Of course, they were not being published so I was helping to copy and distribute prohibited works via samizdat. I tried writing myself, but did not have the talent or the patience. In ’66, they arrested me again. It was almost a relief, like pulling a tooth and getting it over with.”
Andrei has to stop and pause again. A young couple bumps into him, the boy swears.
“This time they sent me to a camp in the southeast, not far from Chelyabinsk. It was a much better camp than during my first term. We worked on oil fields, that’s where I learned the business.”
“Why did father write a letter denouncing you?”
“Ah, you found out about that. You understand, I had already destroyed any chances of him rising up in the ranks. You know what they say about the apple not falling far from the tree. My being a political recidivist made my father automatically unreliable. And he was fine with that. It’s you that he wanted to protect.”
“Me?”
“Yes. They did not expect to have you; doctors told mother that she was not likely to get pregnant. I read somewhere that older mothers tend to have smarter children. It was true in your case. Even when you were little, it was clear you were a gifted child. The way you learned arithmetic, the way you learned chess. There were not many schools for talented kids like you. But you had no chance of getting into one with a brother like me. It did not matter to them that I was not a biological son; I grew up with your parents, and that marked them and, by extension, you.”
“My father denounced you so I could go to the school for the gifted?”
“It made no difference for me, I was already in the camps. It made no difference to our parents, as their lives were not going to change. But by writing the letter, father was giving you a chance for something better.”
“Did you see the letter?”
“Yes. The camp commander showed it to me, rubbing it in. But I knew why it was written; father did the right thing. He tried to apologize for it later, but there was nothing to apologize for. That was the only time I saw tears in his eyes, that’s how badly writing this letter hurt him.”
“Why did you not come back to St. Petersburg after the second term?”
“They released me in ’76, but there was no way they would allow me to have the propiska in St. Petersburg this time. You remember what it was like, you had to be registered and have a propiska in order to live somewhere. We were like modern serfs, able to live only where the government let us. And I have not tried to return. In ’71, they transferred me to another camp, this one near Ufa, to work on an oil pipeline. I ended up settling there. Your parents wanted to tell you about me after my release, then your father wanted to introduce us in ’84, when I came here after the mother died. Both times I asked not to.”
“But why?”
“Pavel, you were young and brilliant, with all that promise ahead of you. Even though I was only forty when they released me the second time, I was an old zek. I don’t know if you remember the expression, zek for zaklyutcheniy, a prisoner. Seventeen years in camps. I thought your parents sacrificed so much to save me during the war, and I wasted it all. I belong to a different era, the period of time that Russia is trying to erase as if it did not happen. Why saddle you with this?”
“Do you want to come back now? Did they not cancel the propiska system about ten years ago?”
“They did cancel it. There is still a registration requirement if you want to stay somewhere for more than ninety days, but it’s much easier for people to move now. No, I don’t want to come back. I like Ufa. I don’t know anybody here. People I knew, they are all dead. No reason for me to return to Peter. But I’d like to go to Paris one day.”
“Why Paris?”
“Father told me that’s the only city that can compare to St. Petersburg. I saw pictures, it looks beautiful. Just would like to see the place before I die, to compare for myself.”
“Father’s been to Paris?” I can’t hide my surprise.
“Yes, he went early this year. In January, I think. Have you been to Paris?”
I nod. “It’s true, Paris is the only city that would compare.”
What was my father doing in Paris in January? It was right before my fund came under attack.
We finally make it to the statue and find an empty bench. Peter the Great is astride his horse, pointing to the west. The horse is trampling a serpent of his enemies, riding on top of the enormous Thunder Stone. It took two years to move the stone, twelve to
build the monument. The Bronze Horseman, named so by Pushkin, is still riding, protecting his city.
Andrei recites Pushkin’s verses:
To spite our neighbor
Here I shall found a great city
By Nature we’re destined
To cut a window to Europe.
Two young couples are being wed, one placing flowers at the statue and taking pictures, the other waiting its turn.
“When did you last see our father?” I feel strange saying this, referring to my father as also his father.
“Last summer. He came to Ufa to talk about UfaNeft, the local oil and gas company that I worked for since 1971.”
“That was one of the companies on Brockton’s list!” I react involuntarily.
“Yes, he mentioned this name. Also a few others. He brought some pictures for me to look at.”
“Did you recognize anybody?”
“Yes, I did. You see, I am an old zek and I could have never become a part of the upper management, but I was there for a long time and close enough to know what’s going on. When the Moscow reformers started privatizing everything, there was a brutal battle to control UfaNeft. One executive was found floating face down in the local river, another was blown up in his car. There were at least three different oligarchs fighting for the spoils until one group won in ‘96.”
“And who were the people that father was asking about?”
“Two brothers, I think the last name was Crossman or something like that. They showed up around ’95 or so, set up kiosks where their people were buying privatization vouchers for vodka. That was also a cut-throat business; some kiosks got burned with people inside. The father wanted to understand how the scheme worked, and I helped to provide some missing pieces. Brockton and Crossmans struck a deal with the UfaNeft insiders. The ownership of the company’s shares was split between the two groups, and Brockton and his helpers were manipulating the prices upwards, while the insiders were cashing in. We re-created our vision of the West, only we took the worst of it. The father was an experienced investigator, but this was completely new to all of us; he was trying to learn how they were rigging the market.”