Tatiana ar-8

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Arkady visited the computer repair shop where Zhenya sometimes worked. The technicians said that he had been in earlier to borrow a laptop.

  As Arkady drove away, he kept an eye out for the boy’s skulking figure. Zhenya had not picked up any of Arkady’s calls, in itself a form of negotiation.

  Victor had called and left a message to meet at the cemetery where Grisha Grigorenko was buried. Two men had been shot execution-style and dumped like offerings at Grisha’s headstone. The War of Succession had begun.

  • • •

  Detectives Slovo and Blok had partnered so long they had come to look like each other, with similar steel glasses and jowls of white stubble. They had plans to retire together and live in a dacha and garden in Sochi, and they were not about to be dragged into a shooting war. They had produced the outer semblance of an investigation-the immediate site was cordoned off-but the forensic van had not arrived.

  Victor led Arkady through the cemetery gate. “Blok and Slovo are old-school. As far as they’re concerned, if two gangs want to fight it out, fuck ’em, let them kill each other. Two dead is a good start.”

  “Welcome, gentlemen,” Slovo said. “Do you know how much I’m going to miss your two ugly mugs? Zero. We’re having a good-bye party. You’re not invited. And neither are these two.”

  The victims had bloody hair and a Nordic pallor. Arkady recognized them from the Den as Alexi’s men; they had swaggered then, released from a murder charge for lack of evidence. Arkady wanted to see if they were armed but didn’t dare move the bodies before the forensic van arrived. Slovo and Blok were happy to do nothing. Their attention had moved on to their next life. Blok’s clipboard carried an article on “planning a subtropical garden.” “Did you know that there are two hundred sixty-four days of sunshine annually in Sochi?” he asked Victor.

  “Amazing.”

  Slovo indicated a grave digger who stood at attention with a shovel. “Here’s the man who found them.”

  It was one of the grave diggers that Arkady had talked to two weeks before, on the night of the demonstration. It occurred to Arkady that there was no one else in sight.

  “Where is everybody?”

  Slovo said, “The workers are celebrating Sanitary Internment Day.”

  “What does that mean? ‘Sanitize’ what? It’s a cemetery.”

  “It means they’re taking the day off,” Victor said. “That’s why it took so long for the bodies to be discovered.”

  The angles of the entry wounds suggested that the men had died on their feet. In both cases the bullet entered through the right rear quadrant of the skull and exited through the opposite eye. Been executed, not died. The lack of blood on the headstone and on the ground around them indicated that the victims had been shot somewhere else and brought to Grisha’s headstone to add insult to injury.

  “Like bookends,” Blok said.

  “Like a gang war,” Slovo said. “Well, we’ll be out of it soon.”

  “Counting the days.”

  “Peace and quiet.”

  Arkady played the beam of his penlight on one body and then the other. Revolvers were reliable and Glocks were in style, but real artistes used a pistol with a.22 slug that would carom like a billiard ball within the cranium and even stay inside. Nothing was so tidy about the dead men themselves. Bloodstains and gray matter speckled them from head to toe, as if they had shared one last, enormous sneeze.

  Arkady said, “It makes no sense. Who would want to start a gang war now? The pot is always simmering, but there’s a rough understanding now. A parity. Everyone is making money.”

  “That doesn’t change the fact they’re killers,” said Slovo.

  “They’d shoot their mother if she was standing on a dollar bill,” said Blok.

  “It looks like a gang war to me,” said Victor. “Now Alexi has to do something.”

  Arkady took in Grisha’s headstone and its life-size portrait etched in granite. Was this a gangster’s pyramid, his landmark for the ages? Or a biography with just the good parts: the civic leader, bon vivant, generous donor, rugged sportsman, family man standing with one foot up on the bumper of a Jeep Cherokee, a ski slope in the background, with a yachtsman’s cap cocked on his head and on his face the grin of a man who had it all. Yet something was missing or out of place.

  “The car key is gone,” Victor said.

  It was snapped off at the surface of the headstone, a message that anyone could understand.

  “That reminds me,” Slovo told Arkady, “Abdul Khan wants to see you.”

  “The Abdul Khan?”

  “Actually, he wants to talk to whoever is handling the Tatiana Petrovna case. I told him there was no case anymore but he refused to take no for an answer. I said you’d be in touch.”

  “Abdul is one of your players in the Tatiana case,” Victor said.

  “So far as I can see, there is no Grigorenko case or Tatiana case,” Arkady said.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” said Blok.

  “It’s a double negative,” said Slovo.

  Victor said, “It’s a dog chasing his fucking tail.”

  15

  Millions of Russians are terrified by a few Chechens.

  Why?

  Because when they are brutal, we are ten times as brutal.

  For every blow delivered to us, ten blows will rain down on them.

  You say, I don’t know whom to strike.

  I say, strike them all.

  You say, I don’t know whom to strike.

  I say, strike them all.

  Abdul wore a black T-shirt with his name written in white across the chest and he delivered his video rap on a burned-out Russian tank, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. Next, Abdul was in an iron cage, beating another man’s face to a pulp. Then he raced a BMW, a “Boomer” as they were known, in and out of high-speed traffic. Next, he carried the limp figure of a woman to a four-poster bed. Abdul had thick black hair and yellow eyes and Arkady would not have been surprised to see him lean back and howl like a wolf.

  You say you don’t know whom to fuck,

  I say fuck them all,

  Fuck them all,

  Fuck them all.

  The screening room went dark and when the lights came up, Abdul was bent over a video console scribbling notes. An entourage of beefed-up guards stood with arms crossed. Beautiful women as listless as mannequins sprawled in leather chairs. They all wore black “Abdul” T-shirts. Arkady planned to interview major Mafia chiefs about Tatiana. Admittedly, there was no case, but maybe this was the best time.

  “What do you think?” Abdul asked.

  “Of the video? I’m really not a critic.” Arkady hoped he seemed impressed. The soundproofed walls, minibar, audio mixer and video console the size of a spaceship bridge were symbols of success. They were also subtle reminders of Abdul’s enterprises: the demolition business in Grozny, the cars he stole in Germany, the prostitutes he ran in Moscow’s finest hotels, all advertised to the insistent beat of rap.

  “Your honest opinion?”

  “Well, a bit. .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Over-the-top.”

  “Over-the-top?”

  “A touch.”

  “Fuck you. My last DVD sold five hundred thousand copies worldwide. I get a thousand hits on my website in a day. Does that sound over-the-top?”

  “It sounds frightening.” It seemed to Arkady that they were getting off track. “You told Detectives Slovo and Blok that you knew Tatiana Petrovna?” It still seemed unlikely to Arkady.

  “Yeah.”

  “On a friendly basis?”

  “You find that unbelievable. A policeman should know that no one is one hundred percent saint or sinner.”

  “And now you’re a good citizen?”

  “Why not?”

  Victor had selected Abdul, “Ape” Beledon and Valentina Shagelman as the Mafia heads most likely to order a bullet for Grisha Grigorenko. Otherwise, they were all good cit
izens.

  “During the war Tatiana was a friend to the Chechen people and tried to make peace. Every time there was an atrocity-and, believe me, there were atrocities on a daily basis-she would show up, unbidden as it were.” He heard a snicker run through his entourage. “Get out. What the fuck are you sitting around for? All of you. Out!”

  The men appeared used to their leader’s mercurial changes in attitude. They sighed and left and the women stumbled after. Abdul paused to let the dust settle.

  “Cretins.”

  “No problem. It sounds as if you and Tatiana got along.”

  “Got along? You could say so. Twice in Chechnya I had my sights on her. The first time I noticed she was carrying a child covered in blood. The next time I had her in my sights, she was carrying a grandmother to safety. I decided that before I pulled the trigger I should try to discover who this person was.”

  Was the story true? Abdul was an expert at creating his own legend.

  Abdul dug into his minibar. “Would you like some water, beer, brandy?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “So I sought her out.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I learned she was a woman.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You figure it out, you’re the investigator. I’ll only say this: Tatiana Petrovna was a fighter. She never jumped from any balcony.”

  “It doesn’t matter. There’s no case and no body.”

  “I know. People say you’re crazy.” Abdul threw punches in the air. “They really do. They say you’re nuts. I saw you at Grisha’s funeral giving his son, Alexi, a tough time. And you don’t carry a gun? That’s lunatic.”

  “There’s no case.”

  “If you care, there’s always a case. Hey, I want your opinion. I have a second DVD.”

  “Another?”

  “Tatiana thought the video needed, maybe, a little balance. To expand my base, you know.” He nodded toward the door. “My friends are my friends but artistically, they’re bricks.”

  “Go ahead.” Why not another bath of testosterone? Arkady thought. So far as he could tell, the only information that Abdul had provided was an insinuation that he had slept with Tatiana, a boast she was too dead to deny.

  It was the same DVD with the same combination of vanity and gore. Identical, except for a closing shot of Abdul looking directly at the camera as a tear coursed down his cheek.

  “Empathy,” Abdul said.

  “By the ton.”

  • • •

  Shagelman did a good imitation of a cretin. His shirt and suit were a size too small, so that his tattoos seemed to creep out of his cuffs. His smile was a simpleton’s grin, lit by two gold teeth. He said virtually nothing. At Mafia councils, he was mute. Later, he would go home to the kitchen of his apartment and report every word to his wife, Valentina, while she sharpened her knives and sliced meat, peppers and onions for shish kebab. Shagelman always cried when she cut the onions.

  Valentina did not approve of Tatiana. “A woman’s place is in the home, listening to a husband, helping him, guiding him, not drawing attention to herself.”

  Without drawing attention to herself, Valentina had built a fortune out of public construction done in her husband’s name.

  She insisted on serving Arkady and her husband black tea and cookies in the living room that was a nest of tapestries and Persian rugs. With her hair drawn in a bun she looked like a tea cozy herself.

  “I can’t say I’m sorry that Tatiana Petrovna has passed. She always had good things to say about the Chechens and bad things to say about Russia. It’s a terrible thing to say, but good riddance.”

  “Do you think someone might have actually felt the same and harmed her?”

  “I’m only saying that Tatiana Petrovna was a traitor and a whore.”

  Isaac Shagelman kept his gaze down and out of trouble.

  Valentina stirred strawberry jam into her tea. “Don’t you think Grisha Grigorenko had a dignified funeral service?”

  Well, yes, Arkady thought. Except for the bullet hole in the back of his head. “Were Grisha and Tatiana friends?”

  The question took Valentina by surprise.

  “People said so. I don’t pay attention to such rumors. Grisha liked to take chances. He took up waterskiing. I told him, waterskiing is for grandchildren. Him and his boat!”

  “What was it called?”

  “Natalya Goncharova. Such a boat.”

  On a side table, Arkady noticed a short stack of glossy calendars from something called the Curonian Bank. He had never heard of it but the Shagelmans were known for setting up banks that were little more than slick catalogs and shell games. The cover photo was of a pelican swallowing a fish.

  “A pretty picture.” He picked up a calendar.

  “Take one, please.”

  “Is there any connection to Curonian Renaissance, the real estate developer?”

  “Hmm.” Valentina found something at the bottom of her cup to stir.

  “Wasn’t Curonian Renaissance trying to develop the building where Tatiana Petrovna lived?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Wasn’t she holding up the project?”

  “You know, people like Tatiana Petrovna act as if gentrification is a dirty word. We are going to build a beautiful shopping mall with over a hundred stores. Chips fly when you’re chopping wood.”

  “That’s what everybody tells me,” Arkady said.

  • • •

  Ivan “Ape” Beledon was proud of living in a dacha that had once been a country residence of the KGB. No rustic cabin this, instead a spa with a pool, tennis court, masseur, mud bath, billiard table, cigar humidor and bodyguards indoors and out.

  Ape Beledon and Arkady sat by the tennis court. The Mafia chief had stripped to swim trunks and showed off spindly arms and a back of thick hairs that wafted in the breeze. No one called him Ape in his presence, and although he specialized in the trafficking of drugs, he dismissed anyone in his organization who “tasted the goods,” as he put it.

  His two sons were playing on the court and Ape looked benignly in their direction from time to time. “They have it so easy, they don’t know. Respect is dead.”

  “Do you ever play them?”

  “Do I look crazy? They hang out a lot with Grisha’s son, Alexi. Ambitious kids. I once saw Yeltsin play Pavarotti on this tennis court. Now, that was a game.” Beledon sorted through an array of vitamins and fruit on a silver tray. “Boris hit every ball hard, no matter what. Pavarotti’s weight was misleading. He could have been a professional soccer player. The look on Yeltsin’s face when Pavarotti played a drop shot. I wiped away tears. The question is, what was the look on Grisha’s face when someone put a pistol to his head? Was it surprise or resignation? To die is one thing; to be betrayed is another. It all depends on who the ‘someone’ is, right? The relationship.” Ape stopped to applaud an ace. “Don’t you love kids? Not a care in the world. Remember Brando in The Godfather? Has a heart attack playing with his grandson. That’s the way to go. Family. Of course, it helps if the kid’s an earner. Develops business. Shows a little ambition. Although there’s such a thing as too much ambition too soon. That can create conflicts. Take you, for example. So far as I can tell, the only thing you were supposed to be doing was finding the body of Tatiana Petrovna, who, by the way, I always held in high regard despite the fact we were on opposite sides of the fence, so to speak. Okay. But she’s been found, at least her ashes. What are you after now? You tell me.”

  “I’m after whoever killed her,” Arkady said.

  “See? An honest answer. I like that. No official authority, no waiting for a prosecutor to find his dick, just stubborn determination. Whose ox is gored? That’s what to look for. Who benefits. Here, take some pills with you. You look like you could use a little vitamin C. And D.” Ape got to his feet. “The boys will show you out.”

  “I thought we were going to talk about Tatiana Petrovna.”

  �
��We did.”

  • • •

  Victor still hadn’t answered his phone. He wasn’t at the Den or any of the half dozen bars or stand-up cafeterias with steamy windows that he frequented. Finally, Arkady tried the Armory, a watering hole for frontier guards. Victor was in a rear booth, ashamed at being found but-as if his legs had been sawed off-unable to leave his new comrades.

  “Wait, these are very educated gentlemen.”

  “Let’s go,” Arkady said.

  “Their words are few but profound.”

  Two faces with lopsided grins looked up at Arkady.

  “He’s our buddy.”

  “He’s going to join us on Frontier Guards Day.”

  That was a rash promise. On their day, the Frontier Guards were famous for drinking and mobbing Red Square.

  “One more glass,” Victor begged Arkady.

  “Stand up.”

  “I can do it. I don’t need any help. For God’s sake, leave a man a little dignity.” Victor bowed theatrically and slid off the bench in a heap.

  Arkady managed to get him to the car.

  As they drove, Arkady noticed that the Natalya Goncharova, Grisha’s superyacht, was no longer anchored off the Kremlin Pier. In which case, where was Alexi staying? He had boasted to Anya about having a penthouse. Either way he was out of Arkady’s reach.

  Victor hung his head out the window and sniffed like a connoisseur. “Fresh air.”

  16

  Whose ox was gored?

  The question had a biblical resonance. Arkady imagined an ancient Sumerian standing in a field of trampled grain and asking the same question. Who suffered? Who gained?

  Beledon and Valentina were established organizations, doing very nicely, thank you, and not likely to see any benefit in upsetting the apple cart. Or the ox.

  Abdul observed no such niceties. You say, I don’t know whom to strike. I say, strike them all. But was a Chechen organization going to take on every Russian gang? Abdul seemed more involved with the sales of his DVDs than he was with revolution.

  Alexi Grigorenko thought that he could inherit his father’s enterprises by making a public claim on them. Just by his ignorance, he was dangerous.