Three Stations

by Martin Cruz Smith

“Did you expose them?” Arkady asked.

  Madame Borodina told Sergei, “There is no witness. It’s a hoax. Renko wants to extort money from innocent people.”

  Arkady had left it up to Anya when to make her appearance. Everything stopped as she entered the kitchen. She was paler than usual, which made the shadows under her eyes appear darker than ever, and she had taken care to dress in the cotton nightgown Sergei had seen her in last.

  Sergei looked ready to burst from his skin. Arkady wondered if the family of Lazarus hadn’t reacted with the same horror when he rose from the dead.

  “Don’t say anything,” Madame Borodina said.

  Sergei said, “When I left her she was blue!”

  That was a start but not complete enough, Arkady thought.

  “Shut up, Sergei!” Madame Borodina said.

  Arkady said, “Sergei Borodin, did you try to murder the journalist Anya Rudikova?”

  “I did.” He added, “We can’t help it. We’re monsters.”

  “What do you mean?” This wasn’t quite what Arkady had in mind.

  “Have you noticed that Moscow is full of monsters?”

  “What kind?” Arkady asked.

  “All kinds. Don’t you see them? They’ve been summoned.”

  “Sergei, please, I’ve heard all this,” Madame Borodina said.

  “Peter the Great had a museum of freaks, children with horns and hooves, the half formed and deformed. He sent out a decree that all such monsters in Russia be brought to him. It was called the ‘Monster Decree.’ It’s happening again, only this time money rules. Monsters are gathering in Moscow. Whores, millionaires, like dung beetles rolling dollar bills. God is dog, Dog is shit, I am God.” He turned to Anya and said, “If you’re back from the dead, you are the greatest monster of all.”

  The room was silent.

  “I killed them,” Sergei finally said.

  “How many?” Arkady pressed.

  “Does it matter?”

  Madame Borodina dragged Sergei away. “We’re going. These crude theatrics will never stand up in court.”

  The Borodins retreated to the landing, but the stairs were blocked by Victor in work coveralls and reeking of tar.

  32

  Elsewhere horse racing was the sport of kings. In Russia it was the sport of the lower class. Workers used to come from nearby factories to catch the last half of the card. Now the factories were closed and the few who came were pensioners measuring vodka in plastic cups. The totalizator that stood on the infield was an antique. Losing tickets accumulated in drifts, food stalls were closed, urinals overflowed, devotees in the stands were all men and all of gray age. Yet they continued to bet. That, Arkady thought, said something about the human spirit.

  If the sun shined on Moscow, it shined doubly on Sasha. He was a hero and a billionaire, an attractive combination. He liked to say, “He who steals my purse steals trash.” It occurred to Arkady that Sasha had accumulated a lot of trash.

  Today the Hippodrome felt Sasha’s golden touch. Party tents were set up along the rail. Waitresses shuttled back and forth from catering trucks to the tents bearing champagne, salmon, grilled langoustines, for what was to all effects a club of millionaires with grease on their chins.

  Senators, ministers and chief executives who would have avoided Sasha a week before were willing to accept Sasha’s largesse now that he was back in the good graces of the Kremlin. He had his passport and a return ticket to the financial stratosphere. The table chatter was intense, only interrupted every twenty minutes or so by a horse race. Pacers and trotters.

  Although the day was clear, the track was slop. Mud exploded under the horses, drivers cracked their whips and drove blindly, goggles caked with mud, urging their horses, “Come on, you fucking cow,” while over the PA system, the recorded sound of cheering crowds poured over the nearly empty stands.

  Arkady nursed his hangover in the umbra of red velvet curtains. Petals of plaster fell on his shoulders from a ceiling mural that incorporated horses, hammers and sickles. Folding chairs huddled under a plastic sheet. A mini-refrigerator was unplugged and empty.

  His eye fell on a thrown-away bet. It took a moment for his brain to kick in. He took an envelope from his jacket, and tapped out the half ticket he found in the trunk of the Mercedes. The two tickets were printed on the same cheap paper, but the ticket from the floor had a complete name: Central Moscow Hippodrome, and was stamped from the Sunday before.

  He called Victor.

  “The ticket is from the Hippodrome. Not the circus, not a film. I don’t know whether Dopey played the horses, but the crowds out here have been getting sparse and a dwarf would stand out.”

  “You’re there now?” Victor asked.

  “In the royal box.”

  “You’ve moved up in the world.”

  Sasha Vaksberg spotted Arkady. He looked puzzled but put on a big smile and waved.

  Looking down at the tents, Arkady was impressed by how quickly Sasha had mustered his troops of caterers, waiters and bodyguards. He should feel good, Arkady thought, like Napoleon returning from Elba.

  The luncheon seemed to take forever. Finally, there was a last bear hug and a last guest to push out the door. The caterers began clearing tables and breaking down the tents and buffets. After a flurry of mobile phone calls, Sasha held up a bottle of champagne and waved Arkady to come down to the rail. Vaksberg was exuberant.

  “You should have joined the party and let them see us together. I get blessed by the pope, you get blessed by the cardinal. That’s the way it works.” Sasha caught his breath. “The place is a miracle. You know the rationale for its existence? Horses for the cavalry. In a nuclear war, we’ll all be issued sabers and a horse.”

  “I take it you’re launching a new venture?”

  “Looking for investors, yes. This is the way it’s done. Money attracts money. And they all love being with a hero.”

  “That’s you?”

  “That’s me now. Have some champagne, for Lord’s sake.”

  “Is it good?”

  “These people expect the best. They have built their dacha, own a town house in London, an island in the Caribbean and a private jet to take them there and they still can’t spend it fast enough. They ski, sail, buy a football or basketball team and still can’t spend it fast enough. The answer is obvious. Own a racehorse. Better yet, own a stable of racehorses.”

  “Horse racing is for the working class.”

  “That’s harness racing. We have to drive home the idea that there’s nothing more prestigious than losing money on your own string of Thoroughbred horses.”

  A blast of patriotic music on the PA system announced the last race of the day. The crowd was male, largely pensioners who gathered every Sunday during the racing season to study the form. The most serious were known as the Faculty. They could not lose a fortune, because the largest bet allowed was ten rubles. Play money. Arkady wondered why they didn’t just watch ants at an anthill.

  “Is this your next project?”

  “It might be,” Vaksberg said. “I’m back in the game, that’s the main thing. By the way, where is Anya? It’s been days since she called. She said she’d be staying with a friend. She doesn’t answer her cell phone and she didn’t leave a number.”

  “I suppose when she wants to get hold of you, she will.”

  Sasha said, “My relationship with Anya is complicated. Has she told you that she has a contract to do a book on me? It’s her great chance and she is an ambitious girl. And she may have some confidential internal company papers and I may have to sue her to keep her from publishing, but that’s down the line. The main thing is I own her. Did she tell you that?”

  They were interrupted by a call on Arkady’s phone. It was Victor.

  “Your Dopey is, or was, Pavel Petrovich Maksimov, thirty-two, resident of Moscow, never missed a day at the track unless he was in jail. Everyone at the Hippodrome will know him.”

  “Present employment?�
�

  “Legitimate? He ran the ‘Whack-a-Mole’ concession in Gorky Park. Let’s assume that he was dealing drugs. Before that, he was a croupier at the Peter the Great Casino at Three Stations. He must have had a hell of a long rake.”

  Arkady hung up. There was silence in the royal box until Sasha said, “Ask around all you want. Criminals in Moscow casinos? What a shocker.”

  The last race got off to a rolling start behind a gate truck that folded its ungainly wings on the run. Six trotters followed, running stiffly on in their traces, unnatural and beautiful. On the PA system the world cheered.

  “I gave you too much credit, Renko. I took you for a man of the world. What you call skimming was a normal transfer of funds within different parts of a corporation. I can see why someone who is not from the business world might misinterpret some transactions. It will all be repaid with interest, no harm done.”

  “You skimmed ninety percent off a fund for children.”

  “Totally legal. A luxury fair is an expensive, complicated operation. I did create a reserve fund for unexpected costs. It’s normal business practice. In other words, we can tie you up in the courts forever and sue you for libel to boot. Look, I’ll be honest with you. It was going to be a simple robbery. Maksimov and I agreed there wouldn’t be any shooting. I admit I underestimated the little bastard’s greed, but we have to move on. It’s your word against mine. Renko’s word against mine. I never pulled a trigger.”

  “That’s not what you told the police,” Arkady reminded him. “You can’t change your story now. You’re a hero.”

  33

  Since Emma was the youngest member of the family, she was given the job of finding the baby a new home. She could leave it in a park, a box, a bench, a public toilet, anywhere as long as she didn’t involve the police.

  “What about Itsy?” Emma pulled on her jacket inch by inch.

  Klim was taking over. He said, “She’s dead. And Tito and Leo and Peter. You’re lucky you’re not dead too. Just dump the baby and do it fast before it wakes up.”

  “She has one more bottle of formula.”

  “So?”

  “What if nobody finds her?”

  “Then she’s out of luck.”

  The way people talked about luck, it sounded to Emma like a spoonful of water in the desert. There just wasn’t enough to go around.

  But as she made her way through the cars parked in front of Kazansky Station, she came upon a huge sedan with a rear door open to a leather seat as soft as a mother’s lap. Emma slid the baby in and it looked so peaceful that Emma laid her own head down for just a second. The next thing Emma knew, she was waking up in the rear seat and a woman behind the wheel was shouting, “Get out! Get out, you filthy girl!”

  Dizzy and exhausted, Emma wanted to join Klim and the others. The problem was that the underground passage to the other side of Three Stations was blocked by a scuffle between skinheads and Tajiks. She had been uneasy about her mission from the beginning and it wasn’t all that easy to leave a baby. She had expected to prop the baby up in a trash basket where it would be seen and rescued and all she could find were plastic modules for the collection of recyclables—green for paper goods and blue for plastics and glass. She didn’t want people throwing empty bottles on the baby. Most of the traffic was speeding through the square. A yellow Volvo station wagon trolled around the parked cars and came to a halt in front of Emma and the baby. A Gypsy with a baby at her breast stopped alongside Emma. The car moved on.

  The baby stretched and pursed its lips and made all the signs usual to waking and crying. Emma felt she had to take cover soon, and when traffic passed, the empty street lured her out. She was halfway across when the next wave of cars caught up. It was like stepping into the sea up to her neck, the cars so huge and black and their lights so blinding that Emma dropped the baby. It was just too heavy and floppy. But when she remembered that Itsy never abandoned anyone, she rushed back to cover the baby with her own body even as the lights of a flatbed truck rose over her. The truck shuddered to a stop amid the explosive popping of straps and the release of a plastic tarp that lifted like a great bat ray. Two men climbed down from the cab, faces white with anxiety. All traffic had stopped. Their load of exotic mammoth tusks was strewn over four lanes and stopped traffic as effectively as tank traps. The tusks represented months of trekking across Siberian permafrost, power-hosing tusk after tusk to bring back collector-quality finds, hand sawing the final lot in a Moscow bathtub.

  The driver got down on one knee to look under his truck. And then shot to his feet.

  “Little fucks, where are you?”

  Emma was already squirming between cars and making her exit, heading toward the statue of Lenin alongside Kazansky Station. The baby was crying at the top of her lungs.

  No one was there. She had no money, no friends and nowhere to put the baby. Around her, she saw nothing but ominous shadows and heard nothing but curses and blows of men fighting for possession of a doorway.

  The baby was a fire siren, and there was nothing Emma could do to comfort her. She pulled out her final bottle of premixed formula. One arm around the baby, she tried to open the bottle. It danced perversely on her fingertips, fell, and shattered. Scavengers approached to see if there was anything worth stealing. Hands snatched her bag and ran off with it.

  An old woman in a cape asked, “Boy or girl?”

  The baby was so startled by the woman’s appearance she was momentarily silent.

  “Girl,” Emma got out.

  “Excellent choice. Have you ever seen a piece of bread make it to the bottom of a pond?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right, because things that sink to the bottom of a pond get eaten. I’ve been watching you.”

  “Where?”

  “From up there.” She pointed to an apartment building that rose at the end of the Kazansky Station grounds.

  “How can you see in the dark?”

  “I’ll show you. That baby shouldn’t be out in the rain.”

  “It’s a warm rain.”

  “Maybe God’s pissing on us. Ready?”

  “Thank you.” Emma remembered her manners.

  “You can call me Madame Furtseva, although Madame will do.”

  Madame Furtseva was the closest thing to a witch Emma had ever met. Also, she believed in rice. She made rice water for the baby and rice pudding for the girl. As Emma ate she gawked at the variety of photographs, artifacts and souvenirs from around the world. And Madame Furtseva did not ask questions, although she knew a great deal.

  “I can’t get to water holes in Africa anymore, so I photograph the water holes that are here. It’s not so different. There are lions and buffalo and jackals, many jackals. I take pictures of them using an infrared filter. They can’t see me but I can see them.”

  Madame Furtseva opened a portfolio and showed Emma a landscape of pink trees under a dark sky, a portrait of milky round-faced Yegor and a group of girls running with a dog. Motion swirled around them.

  “Itsy and Tito and Milka and me.”

  She looked at that one a long time.

  34

  Arkady felt as though he were in a small boat on a large sea. Great struggles took place far below on the ocean bottom, creating waves on the surface and casting up myriad strange creatures. The how or why he didn’t know. Everything powerful was hidden. Every order was silent. Why had he been given his gun back? Those who knew, knew.

  Traffic on Mira usually crawled, but at this time of night, cars were bold and loud. A roar ran along the front of the Agricultural Ministry, not the whisper of a Mercedes but the wild tones of the Maserati and Ferrari.

  Traffic police stood helplessly by their police-issue Ladas. Giving chase to a Porsche or BMW ended up as a sobering demonstration of how outclassed they were. Audis and hypertuned Mazdas came in waves like surfers. They had raced, illegally, around the Peripheral Road. Downtown Moscow was their victory lap.

  When Arkady felt the
nudge from behind, he took it as a cue to get out of the way. He was already at the speed limit and the Lada was beginning to sound like a biplane. He let a black Hummer go by and ventured out onto the Boulevard Ring. Upscale then, upscale now. A smooth ride by the House of Music. And then a nudge from behind again, this time harder. Another Hummer. Or the same one. Arkady couldn’t see the driver because the windshield was tinted. The front end had high chrome bumpers. When Arkady tried to stop, the Hummer pushed the Lada along. He shifted to neutral before the gearbox broke.

  Arkady felt around for his sacred blue roof light, his safe passage to the city. It was usually on the dash. Not now. The Lada’s temporary door did not lock. Someone had just reached in and plucked the light like an apple on a low-hanging branch. The Hummer shoveled the Lada along, and a trickle of sweat moved down the back of his neck. If he could only see who was driving, he could get some grasp of what he was contending with. Before he knew it, they were in a tunnel, and the air imploded. As they emerged, a Hitachi sign greeted them. Illuminated panels extolled the beaches of Orlando, Florida, spearfishing in the Red Sea, swimming in the turquoise waters of Croatia, places he’d love to go to if he could get untangled from the car behind him. A straightaway along the Kremlin wall. Not a single guard. Wasn’t anyone protecting our leaders? Finally, blessed centrifugal force. At the bottom of the Alexander Garden, the Lada made a tighter turn and slid off the Hummer’s bumper. Arkady put the car into third gear as two hubcaps rolled freely alongside.

  Traffic police in shiny slickers waved Arkady to a stop. For the first time in his life he was happy to see them.

  “You don’t deny you were racing?”

  “I wasn’t racing; I was running for my life.”

  “Racing or running, that’s going to cost you five hundred rubles. And your car, we’ll have to confiscate your car.” The officer took a good look at it. “You have to take your car.”

  The second officer said, “We’ll take five dollars.”