Tatiana ar-8

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Why the pillow?”

  “That I don’t remember. Are you hungry?” In a cabinet Maxim scouted out glasses, blood sausage and a baguette as stiff as a cane. He had to shout over his sawing. “I’m not a Slav. No offense intended, but a Slav drinks to get drunk.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Whereas a civilized person in a normal country drinks with cordial company, hearty food and a decent interval between toasts.”

  Which compared nicely with Victor’s weakness for eau de cologne, Arkady had to admit.

  They started solemnly.

  “To Tatiana.”

  “To Tatiana.”

  Followed by the first beads of sweat across the forehead.

  Arkady asked, “What do you mean, there’s no Kaliningrad?”

  “Just what I said. No past, no people, no name.”

  Maxim explained that Kaliningrad had been Koenigsberg, the seat of German kings. But the British bombed it flat during the war, and after the war, Joseph Stalin forced the entire German population to leave. All the people, their homes and memories, were erased. In their place, Stalin trucked in a new population of Russians and gave it a new name, Kaliningrad, after his lickspittle president, Kalinin.

  “Kalinin was a little shit, you know. There he was, the head of state, and Stalin sent his wife to a prison camp. Stalin had her brought from her cell to dance on the table. I suppose when you’ve broken a man that way, you’ve broken him for good. My God, my mouth is dry.” Maxim refilled the vodka. “And here’s the joke. No one admits to being a Kaliningrader. They call themselves Koenigs. But it has the worst crime rate in Europe. So you know it’s Russian.”

  • • •

  The visitor had a bruise under his eye the size of a fist. Otherwise, he looked to Zhenya like the sort of overdressed and overconfident New Russian who had already scored his first million dollars. Before Zhenya could steer him out the door, the man was into the apartment.

  “Excuse me, my name is Alexi. I thought this was the home of Investigator Renko.”

  “It is. I live here too,” Zhenya said.

  “And. .” Alexi turned to Lotte, who sat at the chessboard and returned his stare.

  “A friend,” Zhenya said.

  “Is anyone else here?”

  “No.”

  “You’re having a private party.”

  “We were in the middle of a game.”

  “Look at this place. It’s like a museum.” Alexi took in the heavy Soviet drapes, parquet floor, mahogany table and wardrobe big enough to go to sea on. He fixed on Lotte.

  “When the cat’s away the mice will play. Is that what you are? Two little mousies? I don’t mean to spoil the fun, only to pick up a notebook like this. In fact, a notebook just like this.” He tapped the notebook that lay open by the board. “What are you writing?”

  Zhenya said, “When you play chess, you write down the moves to study later.”

  “Sounds exciting.” Alexi dropped down on the couch next to Lotte. When she moved to get up he clamped his hand around her arm. “I’ll wait for Renko.”

  “Arkady is in Kaliningrad,” Zhenya said.

  “Kaliningrad? Isn’t that ironic? In that case, we’ll have to start without him.” He let go of Lotte and placed a gun in the middle of the chessboard, toppling pieces black and white. “New game.”

  The bruise on his face was raw. Zhenya wanted to believe that Arkady had administered the punch but couldn’t picture it.

  “How can I help you?” Zhenya said.

  “That’s more like it. I’m looking for an ordinary spiral notebook of no value and no use to anyone. Like this one, only the language is a little different. I’m pretty sure it’s of a meeting. When you see it, you’ll know. I’ll give you fifty dollars for its return.”

  “No.”

  “One hundred dollars. You look like you could use the money.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “A thousand dollars.”

  “No.”

  Alexi asked Lotte, “Is your boyfriend serious?”

  “Totally.”

  She was fearless, Zhenya thought.

  “He’s turning down a thousand dollars for a notebook he claims to know nothing about? I’m sorry, I just don’t believe him.” He picked up his gun. “This is my X-ray machine. It can tell if someone is lying or not. What kind of gun is it?” he asked Zhenya.

  “I think it’s a Makarov.”

  “A what Makarov?”

  “A 9mm Makarov.”

  Alexi ran his fingers lightly over the crosshatching of the grip. “That’s right. And if you put a gun like this in front of most people, they act as if you put a snake on their lap. How many can stay cool? I hear rumors.” Alexi turned to Lotte. “Honestly, did you think he was some ordinary boy? He’s like Renko, a time bomb.”

  “What do you want?” Zhenya said.

  “I want the notebook. Find the notebook.”

  “I don’t know what it looks like.”

  “You’ll know.”

  “Look for yourself.” Zhenya moved to the wardrobe and opened it up. Shoe boxes poured out, and from every box notebooks spilled onto the floor. “I have hundreds and hundreds of chess games, openings, situations. What do you like? Ruy Lopez, Sicilian, Queen’s Gambit Accepted, Queen’s Gambit Declined? I like the Sicilian, myself.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alexi said.

  “We don’t have your fucking notebook.” Zhenya reached into the wardrobe and threw more boxes onto the floor. He knew he should have been intimidated. But for the moment, he was brave and saw the world through Lotte’s green eyes.

  • • •

  The power had gone out in Maxim’s building and he recited by candlelight.

  Horses are aristocrats.

  Heads high and dressed in silk,

  Kicked, whipped, ears pricked

  For fear of leopards

  While their true enemies at the Ministry of Light Industry call out, “More glue!”

  “Lovely,” Arkady said.

  “Thank you,” Maxim said. “I used to do an animal for each letter of the alphabet. Remember? I need a fresh wind.”

  Arkady opened a window. “You need a fresh liver.”

  He helped Maxim off the floor and steered him toward the bedroom. Although the vodka bottle was half-full, Arkady declared it the winner and kicked it under the sofa.

  “How did you like the blood sausage?” Maxim asked.

  “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “How are we doing?” Maxim groped his way toward the dark hallway.

  “Making progress.”

  “Missed your plane. Sorry about that.”

  “That’s all right. This way you can keep an eye on me. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

  If Maxim’s living room was a tunnel, his bedroom was a pit of male funk, a heady blend of drawn shades, sour beer and aftershave. He was a big man and doubled in weight as he passed out. Arkady searched the blackness for someplace to deposit him, finally tipping him onto the outline of a bed.

  Arkady dug a hole for himself on the couch, getting comfortable after he swept aside books, loose change and dog biscuits.

  • • •

  Zhenya gathered notebooks and Lotte sorted. An hour after Alexi had left the apartment their hands still shook. There was more to cleaning up than merely stuffing notebooks into the proper box, but the task was in itself a healing process. The chess pieces seemed comforted to return to their velvet sack.

  The one notebook untouched was the one on the chessboard, where it had lain open all evening. When Lotte closed the notebook she found herself looking at the back cover and it took her a moment to understand that the notebook had been flipped and reversed. Front was back, up was down and, read in the right direction, the pages were full of circles, arrows, stick figures with elements of hieroglyphics, maps and traffic signs in an apparently meaningless jumble of shorthand and code.

  21

&
nbsp; His pea jacket buttoned tight against the wind, Arkady took giant steps down the face of a dune to the beach. Maxim slogged behind, lurching through a morning fog as thick as cotton batting.

  “You’re indecently happy,” Maxim said.

  The beach was a mix of pebbles and sand strewn with driftwood and seaweed. In tide pools miniature crustaceans danced on pinpoints back and forth. The kree of gulls rose above the sound of the surf. What was not to like?

  Arkady asked, “Don’t you like the beach? Didn’t your father ever take you?”

  “My father was rarely caught outdoors. This is the kind of fog he called ‘pea soup.’ ‘Pea soup’ is what this is. Why did you insist on coming here?”

  “Just trying to get an idea of the place.”

  “It’s all the same. Sand, water, more sand.”

  “You said there’s a border on the spit?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “How long a drive?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes. The northern half of the spit is Lithuanian, the southern half is Russian. They say there are elk. I’ve never seen any. Fog, yes. Elk, no.” Maxim stamped his feet. “You were just going to talk to Tatiana’s sister and return to Moscow. Instead, here we are stranded on a spit of sand with a one-lane road. During the summer, there are sunbathers, children with kites, nudists with volleyballs. But at this time of year it’s empty and miserable. Why are we here?”

  “We’re here because both Joseph Bonnafos and Tatiana came here. They weren’t in Moscow.”

  “So?”

  “So if you drop your house keys at the back door, do you search for them at the front door because the light is better? Besides, I just like to see.”

  “You look more like a hunting dog sniffing the wind.”

  Arkady took that as a compliment. “Why don’t you go back to the car?”

  “You’ll get lost.”

  “It’s hard to get lost on a sand spit. Why did you volunteer to be my guide?”

  “I was drunk at the time. Take my word for it, nobody comes here at this time of year.”

  “So it’s a good place to meet somebody.”

  “Meet who? Meet for what? I don’t know if I can take so much speculation on an empty stomach.”

  They were good questions, Arkady had to admit. Lieutenant Stasov of the Kaliningrad police had never sent photographs of the body or site as he had promised. Hopefully, he didn’t know that Arkady was in Kaliningrad.

  Maxim said, “The Curonian Spit is narrow but it’s long. You can hide anything in the sand. In fact, the sand will do the job for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “These are called wandering dunes. They wipe out roads, invade houses and hide evidence.”

  The idea of a shifting landscape was intriguing. The only structure Arkady saw on the beach was a shuttered kiosk plastered with posters for rock bands and discos, but who knew what had been claimed by nature? Besides Maxim the only other person in sight was a beachcomber so wrapped in scarves he could have been a pilgrim from the Middle Ages. He dragged a sledge with a haul of driftwood, bottles and cans.

  The shoreline lured Arkady on. He couldn’t tell whether fog was collecting or burning off and whether he imagined or saw movement in the pines that bordered the dunes. An elusive elk? With a blink, binoculars trained on him. The glasses shifted and aimed down the beach to lacy seaweed left by an ebb tide. Two young girls oblivious to the approach of Arkady and Maxim stood ankle-deep in the water and combed the sand with rakes. Barefoot, with sun-bleached hair and skimpy dresses, they looked like survivors of a shipwreck, and, although they shivered from the cold, they examined pebbles by candlelight.

  “Amber,” Maxim said.

  A boy emerged from the pines and crossed the beach, waving binoculars in one hand and a flare gun in the other. He ignored Maxim and Arkady and called for the girls to hurry.

  Arkady intercepted him. “Can we talk?”

  The boy raised the flare gun. Flare guns were not designed for accuracy but red phosphorus in a flare cartridge burned at 2,500 degrees, which made it weapon enough.

  “Vova!” one of the girls shouted.

  “Coming!” the boy shouted. His attention turned to the kiosk and, passing by it, a van with an illuminated pig that seemed to float on its roof. It was a pink and happy piggy. Arkady couldn’t see the driver but it was someone who had let enough air out of the tires to roll softly on sand.

  As the girls ran, the van followed, tipping like a small boat over the uneven surface of the beach. When the van turned on its headlights and cast their shadows, the girls spilled their tools. The boy pushed them toward the pines but the van herded them to the water’s edge until Arkady and Maxim stepped into the headlights. The van came to a halt, pausing thoughtfully as fog drifted by.

  The driver would have to make up his mind, Arkady thought. Time and tide waited for no man. Every second spent at the water’s edge, the van was settling in wet sand.

  Maxim said, “ ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Home again, home again, jiggety jig.’ ”

  Cold water crept into Arkady’s shoes. Soon enough, it would reach the exhaust pipe and kill the engine. Before that, the sand would give way and provide no traction at all. The boy called Vova and the pair of girls slipped away while the van concentrated on Arkady and Maxim. Arkady wondered how many options the driver was considering. Then, without a hint of a problem, the van backed up to more solid footing and left in the direction of the kiosk as the pig rolled with the undulations of the beach, slowly to begin with, then at a trot.

  Arkady gathered the tools left by the girls in their escape. Their lamp was ingenious: a biking shoe stuffed with a candle and sand. Arkady added a calling card with his cell phone number and a twenty-ruble note.

  Maxim was steaming. As soon as they were in the car, he said, “A joke. A man is reading a book, and there’s a knock at the door. He answers it, and there’s a snail at his doorstep. The man just wants to read his book, so he kicks the snail out into the dark and goes back to reading. Two years pass. There’s a knock at the door. He opens it and it’s the snail, and the snail asks, ‘What the fuck was that about?’ So I’m asking you, what the fuck was that about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It seemed personal. We’re chased by a lunatic in a butcher’s van and you don’t seem particularly surprised. My shoes are wet, my socks are wet and you’re putting money in a shoe that’s going to go out to sea with the tide. Do you think anybody’s going to see it?”

  “The kids will. They’re pretty bold. As soon as they think the coast is clear, they’ll come back.”

  “What does this have to do with Tatiana?”

  “Tatiana bought the notebook from kids on this beach, maybe from these kids. We wanted to make contact and I think we did.”

  “So it was a great success?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It felt like getting my feet wet.”

  “I can understand that. Sorry about your shoes.”

  Despite the apology Maxim was offended. “Now what?”

  “You said there was a border station on the spit?”

  “Of sorts.”

  “I’d like to see that.”

  • • •

  “Of sorts” overstated the station. A typical Russian checkpoint was staffed by armed Frontier Guards trained to view every document with suspicion. On any pretext, travelers could be led into waiting rooms where the contents of their backpacks would be spilled and poked.

  But the Russian-Lithuanian border on the Curonian Spit was no more than a metal shack beside a spindly communications tower perhaps ten meters high. The station and tower were guarded by whitewashed tires half-buried in the ground and an ancient floodlight that looked as if it hadn’t been activated since the siege of Leningrad. Telephone lines hung on the wire fence and disappeared into a spotty screen of birches. A Frontier Guard in ordinary camos roused himself enough to make a circling motion with his arm and
shout, “Go back! You can’t go any further with a car!”

  “This is it?” Arkady asked.

  “This is the border,” Maxim said. “This time of year they get birders. Otherwise it’s pretty minimal. Do you want to report the maniac in the butcher’s van?”

  “What would we report?”

  “We saw a man menacing children.”

  “Only he’s gone and so are the kids.”

  “They could search.”

  “Guards are not allowed to leave their posts.”

  “They could call.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Arkady said. “From here on, let’s be invisible.”

  • • •

  On the way back the fog was so thick that Maxim pressed his face against the windshield. He glanced at Arkady every few seconds. “You have a very high opinion of yourself, Renko. In two days, you think you’re getting a grasp on Kaliningrad. You know everything there is to know.”

  “Hardly.”

  “But apparently enough to spontaneously wade into the sea. What else do you know?”

  “Not much.”

  “Inform me.”

  “I know that Tatiana Petrovna thought it was worth risking her life to come to Kaliningrad for a notebook that no one can read. That she fell off a balcony the day she returned to Moscow. That honest journalists have enemies and Tatiana had more than most.”

  “I suppose experts and computers have been brought in to decipher the code.”

  “Maybe. That won’t help,” Arkady said.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I don’t think it’s a code. You can no more read it than read someone else’s mind.”

  “Do you have enemies too?”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “People who would push you off a balcony.”

  “Well, I haven’t been in Kaliningrad very long,” Arkady said. “Give me time.”

  Without warning, Maxim turned the ZIL onto a road riddled with potholes. A truck boomed by like a rhino, spilling sand and water.

  “Where are we?” Arkady asked.

  The words had barely left Arkady’s mouth when the horizon rose. The steering wheel of the ZIL twisted over ruts as hard as cement and the car came to a precipitous stop looking down at the spectacle of a strip mine and giant machinery at work.