Her lips were easy to read because her promise was in Russian.
Chapter Eleven
* * *
'I don't know,' Jaak said. 'You saw her better than I did. I was driving.'
Arkady drew the curtains so that his office was lit only by the glow of the beer garden. On the monitor a glass was lifted and held by the 'Pause' button of the VCR.
'The woman who was in Rosen's car looked at us.'
'She looked at you,' Jaak said. 'My eyes were on the road. If you think she's the same woman, that's good enough for me.'
'We need stills. What's the matter?'
'We need Kim or the Chechens; they killed Rudy. Rudy as good as told you they would. If she's German, if we drag foreigners in, we have to spread the circle and share with the KGB. You know how that goes: we feed them and they shit on us. You told them?'
'Not yet. When we have more.' Arkady turned off the monitor.
'Like what?'
'A name. Maybe an address in Germany.'
'You're going to run this one around them?'
Arkady handed Jaak the tape. 'We just don't want to bother them until we have something definite. Maybe the woman is still here.'
Jaak said, 'You've got brass balls. You must ring when you walk.'
'Like a belled cat,' Arkady said.
'The bastards would just take all the credit anyway.' Jaak reluctantly accepted the tape, then brightened and waved a pair of car keys. 'I borrowed Julya's. The Volvo, naturally. After I run your errand, I'm headed for the Lenin's Path Collective. Remember the lorry that sold me the radio? It's possible they saw something when Rudy was killed.'
'I'll bring the radio,' Arkady promised.
'Bring it to Kazan Station. I'm meeting Julya's mother at the "Dream Bar" at four.'
'Julya won't be there?'
'She wouldn't be caught dead at Kazan Station, but her mother's coming in on the train. That's how I got the car. Unless you want to keep the radio.'
'No.'
When he was alone, Arkady opened his closet and locked the original Munich tape in his safe. He had come to the office early to make a duplicate. Who was paranoid?
He opened the windows. The rain had stopped, leaving weepy stains around the windows of the courtyard. The skyline was a ring of damp chimneypots upraised like spades. Perfect weather for a funeral.
The man at the Ministry of Foreign Trade said, 'A joint business venture requires a partnership between a Soviet entity – a cooperative or a factory – and a foreign company. It helps if there is sponsorship from a Soviet political organization –'
'Meaning from the Party?'
'Yes, to be plain, but it's not necessary.'
'This is capitalism?'
'No, this is not pure capitalism; this is an intermediate stage of capitalism.'
'Can the joint venture take rubles out?'
'No.'
'Can it take dollars out?'
'No.'
'This is a very intermediate stage.'
'It can take oil. Or vodka.'
'We have that much vodka?'
'For sale abroad.'
Arkady asked, 'All joint ventures must be approved by you?'
'They should be, but sometimes they aren't. In Georgia or Armenia they tend to make their own arrangements, which is why Georgia and Armenia don't ship anything to Moscow anymore.' He giggled. 'Fuck them.'
His office was on the tenth floor with a view of squalls moving east to west. No factory smoke, though, because parts hadn't arrived from Sverdlovsk, Riga, Minsk.
'What did TransKom register as its purpose?'
'Importation of recreational equipment. It is sponsored by the Leningrad Borough Komsomol. Boxing gloves, things of that nature, I suppose.'
'Like slot machines?'
'Apparently.'
'In trade for what?'
'Personnel.'
'People?'
'I guess so.'
'What kind of people? Olympic boxers, nuclear physicists?'
'Tour guides.'
'Touring where?'
'Germany.'
'Germany needs Soviet guides?'
'Apparently.'
Arkady wondered what else the man would believe. That the baby Lenin left coins under pillows in exchange for teeth?
'TransKom has officers?'
'Two.' The man read from the file in front of him.
'Many positions, but all filled by two people, Rudik Abramovich Rosen, Soviet citizen, and Boris Benz, a resident of Munich, Germany. TransKom's address is Rosen's. There may be any number of investors, but they're not listed. Excuse me.' He covered the file with Pravda.
'The Ministry has no names for the tour guides?'
The man folded the newspaper in halves and quarters. 'No. You know, people come here to register a venture to import penicillin, and the next thing you know they're bringing in basketball shoes or building hotels. Once conditions exist here for a free market, it will be like watering the ground.'
'What will you do when capitalism is in full swing?'
'I'll find something.'
'You're inventive?'
'Oh, yes.' From a drawer he took a ball of string, bit off an arm's length and put it and Pravda in his jacket. 'I'll walk you out. I was on my way to lunch.' Bureaucrats survived on the butter, bread and sausage they took home from cafeterias. The jacket was loose and its pockets were jowls dappled with grease.
VagankovskoyeCemetery was lovingly but casually tended. A coverlet of wet leaves lay unswept around limes, birches, oaks; dandelions were allowed to line the walk, and overall spread the soft embrace of natural decay. Many of the gravestones were busts of Party stalwarts hewn from granite and black marble: composers, scientists, writers of Socialist Realism with broad brows and commanding gazes. More timid souls were represented by photographs set like cameos on their stones. Since the graves were surrounded by iron fences, the faces on the tombstones seemed to peer from black birdcages. Not all, though. The first grave inside the gate belonged to the roughneck singer-actor Vysotsky, and was heaped so high with daisies and roses freshly watered by the rain that it stirred with the hum of bumblebees.
Arkady found his father's funeral procession halfway down the central path. Cadets bearing a star of red roses and a cushion covered with medals were followed by a porter pushing a handcart and coffin, then a dozen shuffling generals in dark-green dress uniforms and white gloves, two musicians with trumpets and two with dented tubas playing a funeral march from a sonata by Chopin.
Belov was in the rearguard, wearing civilian clothes. His eyes lit when he saw Arkady. 'I knew you would come.' Solemnly he pumped Arkady's hand with both of his. 'Of course, you couldn't stay away, it would have been disgraceful. You saw Pravda this morning.'
'Being used as food wrap.'
'I knew you'd want this.' He gave Arkady an article that seemed to have been meticulously torn from the newspaper with a ruler.
Arkady stopped to read the obituary. 'General of the Army Kyrill Ilyich Renko, a prominent Soviet military commander...' It was a long piece and he read it in small handfuls. '... after completing the M.V.FrunzeMilitaryAcademy. K. I. Renko's active involvement in the Great Patriotic War was a brilliant page in his biography. Commander of a tank brigade, he was cut off by the first rush of the Fascist invasion but joined partisan forces and mounted raids behind enemy lines... fought successfully in battles for Moscow, in the Battle of Stalingrad, the campaign in the steppes and operations around Berlin... After the war, he was responsible for stabilizing the situation in the Ukraine and then for command of the Urals Military District.' Or to put it another way, Arkady thought, the general, now numbed to slaughter, was responsible for a mass execution of Ukrainian nationalists so bloody that he had to be exiled to the Urals. '... Twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded four Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, three Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of Suvorov (First Class), two Orders of Kutuzov (First Class)...'
Belov had pinned a plaque of fading ribbons on his jacket. His white crewcut was a sparse stubble and badly-shaved wattles covered his collar.
'Thanks.' Arkady put the obituary in his pocket.
'You read the letter?' Belov asked.
'Not yet.'
'Your father said it would explain everything.'
'That would be quite a letter.' It would take more than a letter, Arkady thought; it would take a heavy tome bound in black leather.
The generals marched ahead in creaky lock step. Arkady had no desire to catch up. 'Boris Sergeyevich, do you remember a Chechen named Makhmud Khasbulatov?'
'Khasbulatov?' Belov adjusted slowly to the change of subject.
'What's interesting is that Makhmud claims he's been in three armies: White, Red, and German. According to the records, he's eighty. In 1920, during the Civil War, he would have been ten years old.'
'It's possible. There were plenty of children on each side, White and Red. Those were terrible times.'
'Let's say that at the time of Hitler Makhmud was in the Red Army.'
'Everyone served, one way or another.'
'I was wondering: in February 1944, was my father in the Chechen military district?'
'No, no, we were pushing to Warsaw. The Chechen operation was completely rear echelon.'
'Hardly worth the time of a Hero of the Soviet Union?'
'Not worth a second of his time,' Belov said.
Wasn't it wonderful, Arkady thought, how completely some people retired? Belov had only recently left the prosecutor's office; now Arkady had asked him about the head of the Chechen mafia and the old sergeant had not made the connection at all, as if his mind had already retreated forty years.
They started walking again in silence. Arkady felt watched. In marble and bronze the dead stood over their graves. A dancer whirled dreamily in white stone. An explorer paused, compass in hand. Against a bas-relief of clouds, a pilot pulled aviator goggles from his eyes. They shared a sombre, communal gaze, restless and restful at the same time.
'It was a closed coffin, of course,' Belov muttered.
Arkady was distracted because moving in the opposite direction on a parallel path was another, longer procession with an empty cart, a larger battery of horns and tubas and, among the mourners, some familiar faces. Bolstering a widow on either side were General Penyagin and Rodionov, the city prosecutor, both of them with black bands on their sleeves. Arkady remembered that Penyagin's predecessor at CID had died only days ago; presumably the woman was the dead man's wife. The three were trailed by a slow-moving entourage of militia officers, Party officials and relatives parading fixed expressions of boredom and grief. None of them noticed Arkady.
His own cortege had turned down an alley of shaggy pines and stopped at a gate open to a fresh hole in the ground. Arkady looked around. Since Soviet tombstones were not anonymous slabs, he felt introduced to his father's new neighbours. Here was a statue of a singer listening to music inscribed in granite. There, a sportsman with bronze muscles shouldered an iron javelin. Behind the trees gravediggers hunkered over cigarettes, hands on their shovels. Beside the open grave was a small marker of white marble almost flush with the ground. Space was tight at Vagankovskoye, and sometimes husbands and wives were stacked on top of each other, but not this time, thank God.
As the generals formed ranks by the grave, Arkady recognized the four he had seen in Red Square. Shuksin, Ivanov, Kuznetsov and Gul looked even smaller in the daylight, as if the men he had feared and detested as a child had been magically bent and shrunk into beetles with carapaces of green serge and gold brocade, their sunken chests stiffened by tiers of campaign medals, honours and orders, a dazzling clatter of ribbons, brass stars and coins. They were all weeping bitter vodka tears.
'Comrades!' Feebly Ivanov unfolded a piece of paper and began to read. 'Today we say goodbye to a great Russian, a lover of peace, yet a man forged...'
Arkady was constantly amazed at people's faith in lies. As if words had the remotest relationship to the truth. This band of veterans were nothing but little butchers bidding a mawkish farewell to a great butcher. Take the arthritis from their joints and they would drive the knife home as vigorously as in their glorious youth, and they believed every lie they uttered.
By the time Shuksin took Ivanov's place, Arkady wanted his own cigarette and a shovel.
' "Not one step back!" Stalin ordered. Yes, Stalin. His name is still sacred to my lips...'
'Stalin's favourite general' was what his father had been called. When they were surrounded and without food and ammunition other generals would dare surrender their men alive. General Renko never surrendered; he wouldn't have surrendered if he'd had nothing but dead to command. Anyway, the Germans never caught him. He broke back through the lines to join the defence of Moscow, and a famous photograph showed him and Stalin himself, like two devils defending hell, studying an underground map to plot the shifting of troops from station to station.
The round Kuznetsov took his turn and balanced on the lip of the grave. 'Today, when every effort is made to libel our Army's glorious duty...'
Their voices had the hollow tremor of busted cellos. Arkady would have felt sorry for them if he didn't remember how they would troop into the dacha, like so many lesser shadows of his father, for the midnight dinners and drunken songs that ended in the Army roar, 'Arrrrrrrraaaaaaaaagh!!!'
Arkady wasn't sure why he had come. Perhaps for the sake of Belov, who had faithfully maintained the hope of a reunion between father and son. Perhaps for his mother. She would have to lie side by side with her own murderer. He stepped forward to brush dirt off the white marker.
'Soviet power, built on the holy altar of twenty million dead...' Kuznetsov droned on.
No, not metamorphosed into beetles, Arkady thought. That was too kind, too Kafkaesque. More like hoary, three-legged dogs, senile but rabid, baying at a pit.
Gul wavered, his green tunic weighted with medals and hanging from his bones. He removed his hat, revealing hair the colour of ashes. 'I recall my last encounter with K. I. Renko a very short time ago.' Gul laid his hand on the coffin of dark wood with brass handles, slim as a skiff. 'We remembered comrades in arms whose sacrifices burn like an eternal flame in our hearts. We talked of the present period of doubt and self-mortification so different from our own iron resolve. I give you now the words the general gave me then. "Those who would shovel dirt on the Party. Those who forget the Jewish historical sins. Those who would distort our revolutionary history, debase and vulgarize our people. To them I say, my banner was, and is and always will be red!'' '
'Well, that's about as much as I can take,' Arkady told Belov and started back down the path.
'There's more.' Belov caught up.
'That's why I'm going.' Gul was still ranting on.
'We were hoping you would say a few words now that he's dead.'
'Boris Sergeyevich, if I had been the investigator of my mother's death, I would have arrested my father. I gladly would have killed him.'
'Arkasha –'
'Just the idea that this monster died quietly in his bed will haunt me for the rest of my life.'
Belov's voice dropped. 'He didn't.'
Arkady stopped. He forced himself to be calm. 'You said it was a closed coffin. Why?'
Belov had trouble drawing breath. 'At the end the pain was so great. He said the only thing holding him together was cancer. He didn't want to die that way. He said he preferred the officer's way out.'
'He shot himself?'
'Forgive me. I was in the next room. I...'
As Belov's knees gave way, Arkady eased him on to a bench. He felt incredibly stupid; he should have seen what was in the old man's face before this. Belov dug into his jacket, twisted around and gave Arkady a gun. It was a black Nagant revolver with four squat bullets as polished as old silver. 'He wanted you to have this.'
'The general always had a good sense of humour,' Arkady said.
�
� • •
There was brisk business at a kiosk beside Vysotsk’s grave when Arkady got back to the gate. Now that the sun was out, fans were buying pins, posters, postcards and cassettes of the singer, dead ten years and more popular than ever. The number 23 tram stopped right across the street; it was the handiest souvenir run in Moscow. Around the gate were beggars, peasant women with white kerchiefs and sun-browned faces, legless men with crutches and carts. They congregated around worshippers leaving the cemetery's little yellow church. Coffin lids dressed in crepe and wreaths of sharp-smelling evergreens and carnations rested against the church front. Seminarians sold Bibles from a card table, asking forty rubles for the New Testament.
Carrying his father's gun in his pocket, Arkady felt a little dizzy and had some difficulty in discriminating. As much as he saw the ceremonies of human grief – a widow polishing the photo on a headstone – he saw just as clearly a robin wrestling a worm from a grave. He had no sense of focus. A funeral bus pulled inside the gate and the family clambered down its front steps. A coffin was slid out of the rear, slipped and hit the ground with a bang. A girl in the family made a comic grimace. That was the way Arkady felt. Outside the gate, the Rodionov-Penyagin party was still milling around the pavement. Arkady didn't feel in decent enough shape to talk to either the prosecutor or the general, so he slipped into the church.
Inside there was a crowd of the worshipful, the bereaved and the spiritual tourists. All standing, no pews. The atmosphere was like a crowded, colourful train station, with incense for cigarette smoke, and instead of a loudspeaker an unseen choir whose voices hovered in the vaulted ceiling singing about the lamb of God. Ikons – Byzantine, age-darkened faces in cut-outs of bright silver – tipped down from the walls painted like pages of an illuminated manuscript. Ikon candles were wicks suspended in glass cups of oil. Strategically placed on the floor were cans of oil to keep the flames alight. Votive candles came in thirty-kopeck, fifty-kopeck and one-ruble sizes. Candles burned and sputtered in pools of pearly wax; candle stands glowed like softly burning trees. Lenin had described religion as a hypnotic flame for a reason. Women in black gathered contributions on brass plates covered with red felt. To the left, a shop sold postcards of miraculous relics. To the right, three women, also in black dresses and scarves, hands crossed on their breasts, lay in open coffins surrounded by candles on arms of wrought iron dripping wax.
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