“It isn’t. But to be fair, no one.”
“The woman who was living here, the doctor…”
“Is in Africa. Or Asia.”
“You and women,” Anya said.
“Not a success story, I’m afraid.”
“Why did she leave?”
“Because she wants to save the world. I don’t.”
“That’s not who I see.”
“Who do you see?” He expected a gibe.
“I see a man who didn’t desert me.”
Anya kissed him and pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Please don’t be.”
Things were in motion, some secret word had been spoken, because they kissed again. There was still time for Arkady to walk away from a case he did not fathom and a woman he did not understand. He knew there was no case and no investigation. What were the chances of a happy outcome? He could stop now. Instead, he moved around the table and gathered her up. She was incredibly light and he discovered while her body was small it was deep enough for the rest of the world to disappear.
Afterward, still in bed, she dipped a sugar cube into her cup and sucked the sweet tea through.
29
As soon as Itsy saw the amulet in the baby’s basket, she mobilized the family, no matter that it was in the dark of night. They had encroached on a Tajik cache of heroin hidden under the crates they had been using as firewood for the trailer stove. The amulet was an eviction notice. A parade of runaways with a crying baby was likely to interest people. However, few people were likely to be outside on such a damp night. Besides, the baby had become too precious to Itsy to give up. She had little concept of the long term. At heart she knew that the long term did not apply to her. All she had were day-to-day survival skills but she had no complaints. School, office, a comfortable old age held no appeal for her. In many ways her life was perfect.
Leo and Peter lagged behind. They were in the heavy eyelids phase of sniffing. Everyone had different stuff. Aerosol, model glue or shoe polish. Itsy wanted the boys along because they were big enough to provide some protection; otherwise, the responsibility fell on Tito, who had trotted along one side of the group and then the other until they reached Kazansky Station, where they huddled and waited for the boys to catch up. A three-week-old baby, even one as well swaddled as Itsy’s, was not meant to be out in the damp and cold.
“The boys left their gear,” Milka said.
Their sniffing gear, Itsy thought. Their stupid cans and bags.
“Stay here.” Itsy handed the baby over to Emma.
Itsy ran back the way she had come, with every step rehearsing the things she was going to say to Leo and Peter when she found them.
The railway shed was a shadow set in a field of rails. She paused on the tracks to listen for a footfall or voice. Although she had a flashlight, she kept it dark. Her senses had been educated by living on the run and she saw the deeper, darker trench for undercarriage repairs, caught the scents of ashes and urine and heard the drip of rainwater from the open sleeve of a drainpipe. There was no sign of magical Tajik warriors astride either thunderclouds or floor sweepers. All the same, she was uneasy about being near Tajik goods.
The trailer stove still held embers and a diminishing nub of warmth. As Itsy maneuvered between bunk beds she remembered the grandiose plans she had had for a portable crib. It could still happen once she established a new base. It was just a matter of getting through the night.
Itsy smelled blood. She stepped down from the trailer and looked under the wheels. Then she returned to the lip of the trench and this time turned on the flashlight. Leo and Peter were facedown on the bottom of the trench, each with a hole of not much account in the back of the cranium. Their caps had been tossed in afterward. Itsy had promised Leo a new pair of used basketball shoes. A cigarette was still stylishly cocked behind Peter’s ear, the cigarette he never smoked. A buzz in Itsy’s head was faint at first but growing to monumental dimensions. Her mother said, “Isabel is a beautiful name,” and the flashlight died.
The second shot dropped Itsy into the trench and a pair of silhouettes took her place.
“And one more for good luck.”
His gun made a dull pop.
There was a moment of quiet satisfaction, terminated by the sound of padded feet approaching fast.
“What’s that?”
“A fucking dog.”
Tito hit the nearer shooter chest-high. Both landed in the trench, the dog on top.
“Get him off me.”
“Stay still.” A second figure looked down from the edge of the trench.
“Off me.”
“Don’t move.”
“God!”
“I don’t have an angle.”
“Mother of…”
“You have to stop moving.”
“Neck.”
The man on the edge aimed as best he could and fired. The tussling continued in a one-sided way.
“Ilya, you all right? Ilya?”
The second shooter found Itsy’s flashlight and shined it into the trench.
His brother said nothing because his carotid artery was torn and the dog was pulling him without resistance one way and then the other. Blood everywhere.
“Ilya!”
As Tito looked up, his eyes lit. He dropped the man from his jaws and started for the steps, gathering speed as he came. The second shooter emptied the rest of his clip on the dog and was still squeezing the trigger when the animal rolled back down the steps, dead ten times over.
Decisions had to be made. In ordinary circumstances, the shooter would never leave his brother behind. Ilya had been a master at tying up loose ends. Dead, Ilya was the biggest loose end of all. Just the logistics. Getting Ilya to the Volvo or the Volvo to Ilya. Finding a cartridge for every round he had fired. Digging two more graves. For the sweat alone he deserved a bonus.
Something flitted across the shooter’s face. An orange laser that moved as erratically as a butterfly came to rest on the nameplate of his coveralls. He felt the coolness of the air.
“Fucking Tajiks.”
That much he figured out before the bullet hit.
30
Morning at a sobriety station meant the time had come for all the zombies to dress and shuffle out the door, for station attendants to hose the floor and remake the beds with rubber sheets, and for Swan, the medic, coming to the end of a twenty-four-hour shift, it was time to drop into a chair and light a cigarette as if his life depended on it. Swan was not quite a doctor and not quite a pirate. He talked with his eyes closed. “God is dog. Dog is God. God is shit.”
“It’s catchy,” Arkady said. “I heard it a few days ago when I came for Sergeant Orlov.”
“As long as they’re not hurting themselves or anyone else, they can say what they want. We take care of our guests. If they’re bleeding, we put on a plaster. If they throw up, we make sure they don’t choke to death. We even saw the legs off their beds so they won’t be injured if they fall out. They fall out of bed a lot. We also afford them privacy.”
Surely such a bed had a future in the furniture department, Arkady thought. The “Moscow Model,” for shorter falls.
“The station log?” he asked.
Swan lifted a ledger-size book from his desk.
The log was simple: name, time of admission, time of release, condition and, in some instances, in whose custody or to what hospital. The fine of 150 rubles for disorderly conduct was picayune, but demotion at the workplace and grief at home could be serious. A hundred dollars could make all that disappear and Arkady would have expected Sergei Borodin to take that route, yet there was his signature boldly written in ink. Admitted three nights before at 20:45, released 23:00. Arkady noticed that according to the log, Roman Spiridon was admitted at the same time.
“Borodin said he wanted privacy, and then he gets the ward in an uproar with his ‘God is shit’ routine. That’s all I need, trouble with the church.”
>
“Did Borodin get drunk often?”
“Who said he was drunk?”
“He admitted himself?”
“It’s like any club. There are special arrangements for regulars.”
When Victor was brought in, a courtesy call went to Arkady to come fish him from the tank. It was an arrangement some might call collusion. More and more Arkady found he was deviating from the straight and narrow.
“So Sergei Borodin came to be alone.”
“Who said he came alone?”
Arkady was befuddled. “Why would a sober man bring anyone to a drunk tank?”
The medic inhaled hard enough to make his cigarette spark. “Sometimes I think the sexual revolution completely passed you by. If you think about it, it’s an intimate situation, isn’t it? The nudity. The dark. The beds.”
It took forever for the coin to drop.
“Here?” Arkady had never considered the drunk tank right for an erotic rendezvous.
“It’s ideal for rough trade, for a customer who likes a touch of squalor and a little risk.”
“Who with?”
Swan went back through the log. Every other week or so, the names of Sergei Borodin and Roman Spiridon arrived and left together. The one time Borodin came alone was the night Spiridon stayed home, slipped into the bath and opened a vein.
Swan said, “I noticed old scars on Borodin’s wrist. He’d tried to harm himself before. It’s really a call for help, you know.”
“You mean Spiridon’s wrist.”
“No, look in the log. Spiridon came here alone, got half the drunks here shouting they were God and went his merry way.”
That was at the same time Roman Spiridon was slipping into his bathtub, Arkady thought. Two Spiridons, two separate places. It worked for electrons but not for any larger entity.
Arkady showed the medic the photograph he had taken from Madame Spiridona. “Who is this?”
“Borodin. Sergei Borodin.”
Arkady took it back. Maybe there were two Borodins.
“How well do you know him?”
“Just from here. To be honest, I sometimes have trouble telling them apart.”
“You never talked to him?”
“The usual. He was kind of sad and shy. A suicide is a suicide.”
No, Arkady thought. In the proper hands, suicide was murder.
31
A male voice answered the phone.
“Hello. Who is this?”
“Anya’s neighbor.”
“Anya who?”
“The dead Anya, who else. Think about it. I’ll call back in a minute. Talk to Mother.”
Arkady hung up.
He took a bottle of vodka out of the refrigerator and poured it into a glass. When people used to propose a toast to world peace, his father would say, “I’m sick of toasting world peace. What about world war?” To the old son of a bitch.
Arkady drained the short glass in one go and let its warmth spread through him like water down a chandelier. He stood the bottle and glass on a counter.
He took ten minutes and called again.
This time the voice said, “Renko, what do you think you have?”
“A witness.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?” When there was no reply, Arkady said, “See? You can’t deny it without admitting you were there.”
“Where would that be?”
“Where ‘God is shit.’”
A thoughtful pause. “Something can be arranged. Where are you?”
“I told you, I’m in the apartment across from hers. This will cost a hundred thousand dollars.”
There was a whispered consultation at the other end. Sergei came back on the line and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stay there. I’ll come by in three hours with at least a hundred thousand.”
“Here in one hour.” Arkady rang off.
It had sounded like Sergei was calling on a mobile phone. He was already on his way.
Arkady stood at the kitchen window. The sun lingered, a wan spectator to twilight. The road workers on his street had filled the pothole, again. They loaded their tar pot and compactor onto a truck and left the repair guarded by pylons with reflective stripes and a sign with the international symbol of a man digging, although on this detail all the crew were women. The crew supervisor was a man who seemed unfamiliar with a shovel. For his part, Arkady had taped one voice-activated recorder on the underside of the kitchen table and another recorder in the small of his back. At the end of the block, a black Hummer parked and took up the space of two ordinary cars. Sergei Borodin got out swinging a briefcase as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Arkady cracked the door. He heard footsteps climb the stairs until they reached the landing below.
“Renko?”
“Yes?”
“No emotions. We’re all grown-ups. Just business, right?”
“Just business,” Arkady agreed.
Out of his Petrouchka costume, Borodin looked like an average athlete in designer sweats, but Arkady recalled being impressed by Sergei’s daring as he flew on wires in the Club Nijinsky. Physical courage Sergei had. What murderers usually lacked was empathy. He recalled Sergei sitting on a catwalk and dropping lit matches on the dancers below.
And what did Sergei see in Arkady besides a former investigator, bitter, cashiered and out of shape?
Arkady said, “Do you mind if we talk in the kitchen? At parties, people always end up in the kitchen.” He kept Sergei in the corner of his eye as he led the way. “I want you to set the briefcase on the table. If there’s a gun inside, and you don’t tell me right now, I’ll kill you.”
“That’s a joke?”
“No.”
Sergei put the briefcase on the table and drew his hands back. “There’s a gun inside.”
“Thank you. I’m glad you told me. Push it over.”
Sergei slid the case with his fingertips.
Arkady opened it and tucked the gun, a Makarov, under his belt. There was a newspaper for ballast. Nothing else. “You know, this is disappointing.”
“Banks are closed. You gave me an hour. My money’s tied up.”
“In what?”
“What do you mean?”
“In what fields have you invested?”
“What do you care?”
“I have a stake in this too. When I was dismissed I was penalized half of my pension. Now you’re my pension.”
“Okay. People want me to do a martial arts film. East meets West, violence meets meditation and tons of ‘wire fu.’”
“I remember. You’re very good at flying on the wire, but you’ve killed at least one woman that I know of, probably more. What makes you think you’ll be making movies?”
“You said that, not me. Besides, you’re no hero yourself. They dismissed you.”
“That’s true.”
Arkady turned his back on Sergei to pour two glasses of vodka. In the cabinet’s reflection, he saw Sergei steal a look toward the door. Arkady filled a third glass and said, “Go ahead, ask her in. We don’t want to leave Mother out.”
“I came alone.”
“Or I’ll shoot you in the foot.”
“Wait!”
There was no greater threat to a dancer.
Madame Borodina glided into the apartment, imperious and tanned, with little difference between her leather pants and jacket and her skin. Arkady thought she would have made a great pharaoh, the kind that demanded pyramids. He remembered two people had left Anya’s apartment the night she was attacked. Madame Borodina he wouldn’t turn his back on.
“Do you mind?” He spilled the contents of her evening bag onto the kitchen table: house and car keys, lady’s compact, tissue, small bills, bank card, Metro pass and a .22-caliber pistol. He was uneasy. The Borodins might be amateurs, but they were not idiots. They followed orders but they weren’t cowed.
Madame Borodina said, “Sergei, keep in mind that everything you say here
is undoubtedly being recorded and that former investigator Renko is a desperate man ready to twist anything you say.”
“Cheers,” Arkady said.
They each drained their glass. Arkady felt warm. He didn’t necessarily want the Borodins drunk. Loose and boastful would do. A little terror wouldn’t hurt.
Madame Borodina said, “Now that you’re not an investigator anymore, you will have to obey the law.”
“Actually, you have it backward,” Arkady said. “Now I don’t.”
“So who is this so-called witness?”
But Arkady slapped his forehead. “Sergei, I just realized what your film will be about. Not martial arts. Nijinsky! You will dance. You will play Nijinsky.”
“I am Nijinsky.”
Arkady raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
Everyone had to drink to that. Arkady thought the tea party was going well. “So, if you play Nijinsky, who will play your mother? She was so dedicated. She picked his lovers, male or female, on the basis of whether they could promote his career. A lot of mothers wouldn’t do that. Do you have anyone in mind?”
“You’re funny,” Sergei said.
“We’re getting off the subject,” Madame Borodina said. “I want to see this so-called witness.”
Arkady said, “The subject is that Sergei didn’t come with the money, he came with a gun. We have to work together.” He refilled the glasses and, without explanation, added a fourth. “You were saying about Nijinsky’s mother…”
Sergei laughed. “She was a controlling bitch.”
“Sergei, don’t play his game.” Madame Borodina was not amused.
“So if you play Nijinsky, who will play the other women in your life? They must be difficult to cast.”
“Very difficult,” Sergei said.
“How many have you tried out?”
“Five.” Sergei and his mother exchanged glances.
“Does she have to be a dancer?”
“Not if she has the right quality.”
“They all fell short? Did they all turn out to be whores? What do you do to whores?”
“I don’t understand.”
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