Three Stations

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Peter said he was going to get his shit together. He had a plan to get off of the streets, study the martial arts, join the army, win some medals and become Putin’s bodyguard. He would need his parents’ consent to enlist early. That should be no problem; they would sign anything for a bottle of vodka.

  A power sweeper rolled into the shed. The rider was a Tajik from the station chasing paper cups and soda cans. He not only had a headlight; he aimed a flashlight into the corners of the shed.

  What the boys saw was a Mongol on a shaggy horse, a warrior of the Golden Horde in plate armor traveling from another time with arrows of blinding light. He maneuvered around the trench and approached the trailer and played the beam over Leo and Peter, over the bags and cans loose in their hands.

  Tito the dog had been trained not to bark. He approached to the limit of his leash with his ears back and eyes burning while the warrior floated to the stack of fruit crates that Itsy’s group had been breaking up to use as firewood. The pile was halfway down. He lifted a crate and examined a taut plastic sack of brown Afghan heroin. He removed and counted every sack, then replaced each sack and crate as it was.

  When he was done he returned to the trailer. He lifted Peter by his forelock as if he were lifting a rat by the tail and slid open the blade of a box cutter. Peter’s eyes rolled back. The Tajik’s gaze only happened to follow and catch Emma at the window before she ducked down. Jostled, the baby began to cry.

  Emma didn’t need to think what to do next. It was as if a devil took over her body and she found herself functioning with cold selfishness, placing the baby as bait at one end of the trailer and crouching behind cots at the other. She was astonished and horrified at herself, but there was no stopping. While the Tajik entered the trailer and went to the baby, Emma slipped out the door and hid in the trench. The baby cried and cried. Emma closed her eyes, held her breath and clamped her legs together tight to keep from peeing.

  The baby’s crying abruptly stopped. Emma was sure she was next. Any second the devil would find her in the trench and slit her throat. Eventually she became aware that the sweeper was gone and Leo and Peter were drowsily comparing hallucinations.

  “Tough. You missed out,” Peter told Emma.

  “It was wild,” said Leo.

  Emma said nothing. She rushed to the rear of the trailer. There the baby was sucking on a small, leather amulet like those worn by Tajik women passing through Three Stations. Inside the amulet would be a quotation from the Koran as protection for the bearer.

  27

  The café at Kazansky Station was becoming a regular haunt for Arkady and Victor. Arkady wondered how many times in a row Victor could escape paying the check.

  “At this point you’re not just challenging Zurin, you’re taking on the apparatus of the state, and the state may have the brain of a sea slug but it reacts to threats and it protects itself. Certain people will come to your apartment and they won’t be boys with stage fright and they will break some bones. And what do you do? You pick a fight with Zurin. By the way, when is your billionaire friend, Vaksberg, going to pick up his car? I got a call from the evidence clerk. It’s pretty shot up.”

  “He’ll probably just buy himself a new one. I’m not going to drive all the way to the highway to look at holes in a car. Is that your eau de cologne I smell?”

  This was a twist; Victor used to drink eau de cologne.

  “It’s for men,” Victor said.

  “Some, maybe.”

  Victor lit a cigarette and played with a matchbox.

  “May I?” Arkady took the matchbox away.

  Although the box was yellow with age, a portrait of a young Anna Furtseva on the cover was unmistakable. All that was missing was the combustible wolfhound.

  “You went back.”

  “She called and said she had found a photograph she wanted me to have. That’s it in your hand. It was a joke, just a means of invitation. When I got there she had made borscht and put out smoked fish and bread and beer. Then she gave me a corduroy jacket barely worn. Some toiletries that were never used. It was like visiting Granny.”

  “A granny who wants you to shoot her downstairs neighbors. And the jacket fit?”

  “Yes. She knew my size.”

  “It sounds that way.”

  Arkady got in the car, turned on the engine and realized that he had no place to go. He was a former senior investigator. He could try to pursue the killer of Vera but he had no authority. The case would turn into the hobby of a harmless eccentric.

  He had parked in the ranks of official cars in front of the station, one of the small perks that would be denied him in the future. He would also have to surrender his blue roof light and the right to use the official lane.

  Brooding, it took him a minute to notice that Anya was arguing with a militia officer at the station’s Oriental double door. On one side, a militia officer; on the other, a dozen kids in cloth caps and ragged sweaters, their wrists and necks ringed with dirt. They gathered around Anya like cats at a bowl of milk. The militia officer pushed them aside to get at the athletic bag. Arkady got out of the Lada as a tug-of-war over the bag developed. It was the sort of thing, he thought, that could end badly. Half of him wanted to walk away. Instead, he waded through the crush and whispered in an official tone, “Let her go or I will have your balls on a plate.”

  The officer automatically stepped back because people who spoke softly in such situations were used to giving orders.

  Arkady followed up by asking Anya, “What’s the problem?”

  “I only asked to look in the bag,” the officer said.

  “He wants to steal my bag.”

  Arkady said, “I will open the bag.”

  Anya burned, but she handed over the bag. He unzipped it to display energy bars, medical kits, condoms, soap and woolen socks.

  “Satisfied?” Anya asked.

  “You’re going to sell these,” the officer said.

  “No, it’s for children, homeless children. The Vaksberg Foundation gives them clothes, blankets, bedrolls. It’s hardly going to improve the welfare of homeless children, but it shows them that somebody cares.”

  “To give away.”

  “Yes, to give away.”

  The officer went off disappointed, already searching for fresh prey.

  Arkady pulled Anya into the station.

  “What are you doing out of bed?”

  “You think I should lie there all day long?”

  “Yes,” said Arkady. “Bed rest is the standard treatment for almost getting killed. Why are you acting this way? What happened?”

  Street children filtered back in and she tried to say nothing, but the words came out: “Vaksberg has been skimming.”

  “You just found this out?”

  “This morning. He’s bankrupt.”

  “But he’s a billionaire.”

  “Billionaires go bankrupt all the time. This morning I was trying to write. I read a Vaksberg Group memo I was never supposed to see. That’s the danger of giving a writer total access. It was from Sasha to the chief financial officer instructing him how to inflate the valuation of the company as if all his casinos were operating. He’s bankrupt.”

  “Then how did he fund the luxury fair?”

  “There’s only one way. He paid out what he took in. He’s been skimming for months.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing. Nobody would give to any children’s fund again. They want a reason not to.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Oh, yes. You can advise ten-year-old girls how to put a condom on a grown man’s dick.” Louder she said, “Everyone wave to Uncle Arkasha because he’s going away.”

  At first Arkady simply drove to escape Anya’s scorn. Then he drove aimlessly because he didn’t want to be anywhere.

  Except the dacha.

  The dacha passed to him from his father was no more than two hours from the city. It was a ramshackle cabin overgrown with lila
cs and brambles but it had springwater and a path through a stand of black pines to a lake not much larger than a pond. An elderly neighbor looked in from time to time to check the house for leaks or hornet nests. Boris had to be almost ninety now. Whenever he discovered that Arkady had arrived, he would show up at the door as busy as a badger in a long scarf carrying a tray of pickles and bread and a jar of samogon. Moonshine. Arkady always invited him in for a glass. Eyes shining, Boris would pour samogon until it quivered with surface tension above the brim of the glass.

  “Such a small glass,” he said every time. Later they would walk to the church and visit his wife’s grave. The cemetery was a maze of white crosses and black wrought iron fences, some grave sites so “landlocked” that they were beyond reach.

  Boris would set a jar of pansies or daisies at his wife’s cross. He changed the flowers every day in summer. There was a bench at the grave site so a person could really visit. Nothing had to be said aloud. In the winter Arkady thought of it as ice fishing with God. There were times, however, when he felt one with the world, when his breath was a cloud and the birches brushed one against the other like a line of dancers curtsying in turn.

  Instead, he drove to a towed-vehicle yard on the Ring Road, where there were no trees, only lamps and rain and a system designed to create the greatest possible inconvenience for anyone retrieving a towed car. The master of the yard negotiated fines and bribes at the window of a caravan while car owners stood in the rain. Cars held as evidence in criminal cases were in a separate, abutting lot that was as still as a graveyard because there was no ransom to be made from cars going nowhere.

  The guard recognized Arkady and waved him through. “Remember, anything you find has to be reported to me.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “She’s all yours,” the guard said, and trotted back to his post.

  Sasha Vaksberg’s Mercedes seemed to be sinking into the mire like an abandoned warhorse. Arkady counted five holes in the right rear fender and door. Otherwise, the car was practically new and likely to disappear if Vaksberg didn’t claim it. A billionaire could just buy a new Mercedes like disposable tissue; use it once and throw it away.

  There was nothing in the car’s cabin, although Arkady went through the glove compartment, side and seat pockets, under the floor pads.

  He opened the trunk. In the spare-tire well was his small reward, a ticket printed on paper so cheap it almost disintegrated in his hand. It was torn on the diagonal and said Central Mosc—ticket #15–100 ru— Ticket to what? A movie? The symphony? The circus? Belonging to Dopey or Vaksberg or his dead driver or bodyguard? Or the last person to change a tire? Arkady had no idea. The tease was worse than finding nothing. This was what he had come down to, a wet stub.

  It began to rain heavily. Arkady waved as he passed through the gate. The guard waved back, thankful that he had not been beckoned from his miserable shelter.

  Rain fell in sheets. Where water pooled, trucks pounded through and cars rooster-tailed. At the height of the downpour, the wiper came half off on Arkady’s side of the windshield. Somehow the clip that attached the rubber blade to the wiper itself had come off. He turned off to the side of the road to reconnect it. What next? Arkady wondered. Snow? Frogs? Snow and frogs? He had only himself to blame. Once Victor mentioned the Mercedes, Arkady was compelled to examine it.

  It wasn’t a totally empty road. The blurred lights of an industrial park lurked a few kilometers ahead. There was plenty of room on the shoulder and Arkady worked by the light of the Lada’s open door. The wiper clip was bent. The trick was to bend it back without snapping it off. He remembered the days when rain would cause general confusion as cars pulled off to put on their precious windshield wipers. In those days, a driver carried a whole toolbox.

  Arkady needed a pair of needle-nose pliers he did not have. He felt that no one should attempt to drive Victor’s Lada unless he was completely outfitted. Say a needle-nose pliers and an inflatable raft. That was what made life an adventure. He worked by the light of the open door and squinted at the oncoming high beams of a truck that straddled the shoulder of the road. He shielded his eyes. Someone’s idea of a joke, Arkady told himself. He felt his whole body light up. Beyond shielding his eyes, he couldn’t move. They would turn any second. Any second.

  Arkady dove into the Lada. With a crack the door of the Lada went sailing. By the time he pulled himself up, all Arkady saw were taillights dissolving in the dark.

  28

  “Have you ever tried to carry a car door in the rain?” Arkady asked.

  Victor said nothing, only circled his car in disbelief. It was parked outside in the morning sun at the upscale Patriarch’s Pond militia station, virtually a “No Lada Zone.”

  Arkady said, “We’re lucky the hinges were a clean break. The man at the body shop never saw one so… immaculate.”

  Victor said, “It’s not my door. This door is held on by wires.”

  “It will need some work. The main thing is, it opens. Shuts, pretty much. They tried to match the color.”

  “A black door on a white car? Next time, why don’t you just drive it off a cliff?”

  “I was on the shoulder of the highway. Someone tried to run me over.”

  Arkady resisted the temptation to point out that Victor owned a car that already looked as though it had been driven over a cliff.

  “I found this.” He opened an envelope and shook out the half ticket from the trunk of Vaksberg’s Mercedes.

  Victor stared. “You got this? What is it?”

  “A ticket of some kind.”

  “Is it?”

  Arkady tried to think of something that would cheer Victor.

  “The wiper works.”

  Victor led Arkady to the squad room even as he shot Arkady a sharp glance. “You know kids race on that highway all the time. It could have been one of them getting out of control. Did you see them?”

  “No.”

  “Did you report them?”

  “No.”

  “Did you shoot at them at least?”

  Victor had set up laptops and old-fashioned paper dossiers to search among the dead. Each disc held a thousand dossiers and each dossier held a detective’s account, interviews, forensic photos and autopsies of women who died of unnatural and unsolved causes in and around Moscow over the last five years. Arkady eliminated domestic squabbles, which still left a crowd since more than twelve thousand Muscovites died of unnatural causes in a year.

  Arkady drew a clumsy version of ballet positions.

  Victor said, “I didn’t know you were such a scholar of the dance.”

  “It’s as if Vera wore a sign saying ‘Victim Number Four.’”

  “Or her limbs happened to lie in a way that you and you alone construe to be a ballet position. What any normal person would notice was her bare ass.”

  Victor took a halfhearted swat at a fly that was making a tour of the room’s fly strips, plastic spoons and take-out cartons.

  “You know this would make some sense if it would do anything for Vera. Her case is closed. There is no corpus and the chances of gaining a conviction without a body don’t exist.”

  “Unless somebody confesses.”

  “No body, no show. All they have to do is outwait us.”

  “For a moment, assume I’m right, far-fetched as that may be. If you have a killer who is counting up to five bodies and he’s reached five in his mind, he’s going to disappear on us. He could go to ground for a year or two and then start all over again with a new set of dance partners.”

  “We’re missing number three.”

  “That’s right. So let’s narrow the search to women eighteen to twenty-two, student, dancer, sexually molested, murdered, OD’d, unknown causes. Make it within the last two years before Vera.”

  “Just two?”

  “If I’m right, this is a compulsive character. He doesn’t have a Five-Year Plan. He can’t wait that long.”

  He watched the fly make
the arduous trek up the wall, across the ceiling and around a light fixture only to reach journey’s end as a buzz on a ringlet of flypaper.

  Arkady got home after midnight and found Anya sitting in the dark.

  She said, “I wanted to apologize for how I acted at the train station.”

  “Well, you seem popular with the kids.”

  “But not with you.”

  “You were exhausted, you should have stayed here. Have you eaten today?” Arkady asked.

  When she had to think, he went directly to the refrigerator and pulled out leftovers from the night before and put the kettle on for tea.

  “I have no appetite,” Anya said.

  “Who would at this hour?” He sliced sausage and black bread.

  “Can I stay one more night?”

  “You can stay as long as you need. Did anyone see you when you were out?”

  “Just the children. I won’t snoop if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m sure you have snooped. You probably opened every drawer in the apartment. You may have opened drawers that haven’t been opened in years. Right now, the main thing is nobody sees you. While you’re dead, you’re safe.”

  “And when I want to be alive?”

  “At the right time. What kind of car does Sergei Borodin drive?”

  “A huge American car. Why do you ask?”

  “Someone tried to run me down today.” Arkady poured two cups of tea. “When a person tries to run me down, I want to know why. Is he a killer or a jealous lover? It makes a difference.”

  “Go to hell.”

  It was good, Arkady thought. Her color was back and she started to pick at her food.

  “So you’re still on the case,” she said.

  “It would help if we had a witness. You don’t have any recollection who attacked you?”

  “None.”

  “But you haven’t answered my question.”

  “First tell me who you are sleeping with,” Anya said. “Or is that none of my business?”