Tatiana ar-8

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Her voice hollowed out. “Yes. My sister was mistaken for me and she died. Now I’m alive pretending to be her.” Although she clearly despised tears, she wiped her eyes before she changed the subject. “Maxim told me about your adventure on the beach. So you met the boy called Vova.”

  “He drives a hard bargain.”

  “I know. I paid fifty dollars for the notebook.”

  “What’s in it?”

  She said, “I confess, I don’t know.”

  Arkady almost laughed. “You don’t know? People are being shot and thrown off balconies for this notebook, and you don’t know why?”

  “Joseph, the interpreter, was going to translate it for me.”

  “And this was going to be a big story, as big as a war in Chechnya or a bomb in Moscow?”

  “That’s what Joseph said. And the proof was in the notebook.”

  “He didn’t give you any idea?”

  “Only that it couldn’t be understood by anyone but him.”

  “Why was he willing to help you? Why was he willing to put his life in danger?”

  “He wanted to be somebody. He wanted to be something besides an echo, which is what he had been all his life. Besides, he thought that keeping everything in notes that only he could read would keep him safe.”

  “Instead it’s poison passed from hand to hand.”

  “Have you got the notebook?” she asked.

  “It’s with a friend.”

  “An interpreter?”

  “You could say that.”

  The tea had gotten cold. Tatiana stared out the screen door at a row of watermelons that had swollen and split open.

  “It’s my fault,” Arkady said. “If I had just kept my nose out of it and not questioned the identification of Ludmila’s body, you might be safe.”

  “Now you have to follow through. You’re the investigator.”

  Arkady heard a noise. The pug had nudged open a cabinet and spilled the box of dog biscuits.

  Tatiana swept them up. “What a little pig.”

  “That reminds me, how did Polo get here?”

  “Maxim brought him later.”

  “That’s a long drive. You have to go through Lithuanian and Polish customs and all. Maxim was happy going back and forth?”

  “He seemed to be.”

  Arkady wondered what they would do to her, those censors who follow journalists with a pistol or a club. Just as she must have been wondering.

  “Do you know Stasov?” Tatiana asked.

  “We’ve talked on the phone.”

  The gate was open. Arkady pulled a window shade aside to see a man in a weathered Audi parked across the street at a travel agency that promised romance in Croatia. He didn’t look like someone planning holiday.

  “Do you have a gun?” Arkady asked.

  “Do you?” She read his pause. “What a helpless pair of human beings.”

  Arkady shrugged. So it seemed.

  He went to the other rooms. The house was small and snug, feeding off one narrow hallway. The furniture was prewar oak. Ancestors looked out from oval frames. The back room had been made into a photography darkroom with a back door that did not open.

  “You’re not going to find anything. Stasov took my laptop.”

  “But he still thinks you’re Ludmila?”

  “So far. I erased everything.”

  On the bed was a backpack stuffed to the gills. It wasn’t the sign of someone resigned to being trapped.

  “Where is your canary? She seems to have taken her cage with her.”

  “With a friend.”

  “Then you’re ready to go.”

  She took a second to say, “I suppose so.”

  “Where?”

  She fixed Arkady with a look that told him he was asking for more trust than he had earned. After all, how long had she known him? Fifteen minutes? And what could he do for her while she was trapped?

  • • •

  Arkady went first with Polo and rolled the pug’s rubber ball underneath the detective’s car. The dog set in yapping hysterically enough that Arkady had to shout, “Don’t move.”

  Stasov rolled down his passenger window. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “My dog is under your car. If you move, you’ll run over him.”

  “Then get him out.”

  “I’ll try if you don’t move.”

  “I’m not moving, for God’s sake.”

  “He was chasing a ball.”

  “Just get the fucking dog. What an idiot.”

  “Do you have the emergency brake on?”

  “Hurry up or I’ll run you both the fuck over.”

  “He’s only a puppy.”

  “He’s roadkill if you don’t get him out.”

  “Can you reach his leash from your side?”

  “No, I can’t reach his fucking leash.”

  “Oh good, we have more people to help.”

  “We don’t need more people.”

  “You can’t blame a puppy.”

  “I will fucking shoot you if you don’t get away from the car.”

  “Well, he seems to have disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Oh, I see him. It’s all right, thank God.” Arkady pulled Polo out by the leash and picked him up. By then Tatiana had slipped out the garden gate and joined the shoppers in the stalls.

  • • •

  “Six letters, a breed of dog, starting with the letters Af.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Zhenya said.

  “Come on, don’t be such a stick. You’re doing a puzzle, I’m doing a puzzle. We can help each other. Okay, favorite television show, two words, starting with Da. It’s not like you’re going anywhere. Okay, have it your way.”

  Half an hour passed before the man in the hall pressed his mouth to the door again. “Don’t be such a hard-ass. Two words, starting with Da.”

  “Dating Game,” Lotte said.

  “It fits. See, that wasn’t so bad. Now you can ask me one.”

  “Ask you?”

  “Fair is fair.”

  Zhenya wondered what the man on the other side of the door looked like. Tall or short? Thin or fat? In between murdering people did he bounce a baby on his knee? Zhenya and Lotte waited with one shot from Arkady’s gun and ski poles under the table.

  “It’s a different kind of puzzle,” Zhenya said.

  “You have a very superior air. I’m only trying to help.”

  “Do you have children?” Lotte asked.

  “No, no. Nothing personal. Personal is verboten. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

  “Then don’t,” Zhenya said.

  “Suit yourself. You’ve got about an hour, according to my watch. Look, I’ll just talk to the girl. She doesn’t even have to say anything. Write it on a piece of paper, slide it under the door.”

  “This is a total waste of time,” Zhenya said. “The man is a killer. He’s just torturing us.”

  “I’m only talking to her.”

  Lotte took a piece of stationery from the desk and wrote the letter L. She slid it under the door.

  “That’s it?” the man asked.

  “This should be beautiful,” Zhenya said. “He wouldn’t know an Afghan dog if it bit him.”

  The page came back. The man on the other side of the door said, “The Roman numeral for fifty. It’s only in every fucking crossword puzzle ever written.”

  Lotte went down the list of interpretations for the letter L and looked at Zhenya. “We missed that one.”

  “It could be fifty thousand, fifty million, fifty percent.”

  “For what? And what about the face with an X-or is it a wasp?”

  Zhenya found himself looking at her breasts. “The wasp,” he said. “If it’s a wasp caught in amber, then amber is the clue, not the wasp.”

  A cell phone rang in the hall. The puzzle man took it and sounded unhappy.

  Zhenya asked, “Everything okay?”

&nb
sp; There was silence on the other side of the door.

  “Is Alexi coming back? We still have half an hour,” Zhenya said.

  Again, nothing.

  “You just told us we had almost an hour,” Lotte said.

  Nothing.

  “You can’t kill somebody ahead of time,” Zhenya said, even as he knew how ridiculous he sounded. “Is he still on the phone? Let me talk to him.” He opened the door a chain’s length and the puzzle man held the phone up to the crack. “Alexi, we’re making progress.”

  “What have you got?”

  “It’s not like the usual notebook or minutes of a meeting. There’s no date. I just know that a submarine will be repaired and that considerable Russian rubles will change hands.”

  Alexi said nothing, but the silence was significant. This was the point in a chess match when a player had no choice but to bring his king out from the protection of the back row and plunge it into the center of the board.

  “There is going to be another meeting,” Zhenya said.

  “On board the Natalya Goncharova?”

  “Yes.” What else could he say?

  “Thank you, that’s all I needed to hear. Give the phone back to my man.”

  Zhenya returned the phone and closed the door.

  Lotte asked, “Did it work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  All he got from the other side of the door was silence. No “You did it, kid!” Only a clammy feeling and a dry mouth.

  He and Lotte no longer looked at each other. It wasn’t fair. If anyone should hew to a schedule, it should be an executioner. They took in the sounds of the street, the emptiness of the building, the sound of a silencer being screwed onto the muzzle of a gun. He was only seventeen. Chess, he found, was no longer that important to him. He had fantasized about having a chess opening named for him. Now all games seemed trivial. He had other ambitions. This was unjust. Oddly enough, he thought it wouldn’t be so bad to be an investigator like Arkady.

  Lotte decided to give up chess for music. Her family had always been artistic. She heard a bow drawn across the strings of a double bass. Something grim from Wagner. Götterdämmerung. The Twilight of the Gods.

  Zhenya brought out the gun from the back of his belt but Lotte was in his way, trying to hold the door shut. He reached for her hand and they leaned together against the door.

  The puzzle man heaved into it at full force. The chain snapped and Zhenya glimpsed a thin man with a vein-lined beak of a nose trying to insert a gun. The door slammed shut and was opened by an elderly man in a bathrobe and slippers.

  “Lotte! I found you!” Lotte’s grandfather, the coward, struggled for the gun. “You must run!” The puzzle man swiped him away.

  The door shut. Zhenya heard a head being cracked against the doorjamb. The door opened again like a reshuffled deck of cards as Victor Orlov rammed the puzzle man two more times against the doorjamb and threw him down the stairs.

  26

  White lights in front, red in back, a line of bikers wound through the early evening chasing streetlights, swerving in and out of streets and parks.

  Arkady and Tatiana had signed on for one of the bike shop’s overnight excursions and left Polo in a neighbor’s care.

  Joining the group had been Tatiana’s idea. She had batted down every means of escape he suggested. He merely mentioned the bike shop excursion and she seized on it. She rented a bike and gear. Arkady’s pea jacket counted as unusual attire and Karl, the shop owner, asked him when he last rode.

  “It’s been a while. I suppose I could use a pants clip.”

  Karl looked him up and down. “As long as you have money for a taxi.”

  The bikers were not a political crowd. Half were female. Most carried a bedroll and tent and although the route was only fifty kilometers, hardly a tour at all, there was an air of anticipation, especially once the bikers cleared the city.

  Arkady wobbled at first, but traffic was light and he regained his sense of balance. Tatiana bit into the wind and plainly enjoyed herself. Military trucks went by, but that was to be expected so close to the home port of the Baltic Fleet.

  Karl was in the lead. At a signal from him, the bikes peeled onto a nearly invisible path between spindly birches and pushed through waist-high ferns to a black palisade of firs. Finally the group came to a stop at a charred circle of stones. At once women gathered wood and men set up tents. Arkady was given a flimsy two-person affair of nylon and plastic hoops. By the time a campfire was flaming, a feast of vodka, wine, sausages, fatback and bread was spread out on newspapers.

  All the other bikers seemed to know each other. Karl leaned across the campfire to tell Arkady, “Your friend should take her helmet off. We’re all friends here.”

  Tatiana removed her helmet. No one gave a hint of recognizing the famous journalist from Moscow.

  “Much better,” Karl said, as if a threshold of friendship had been crossed.

  Appetites set in. The bikers were in their thirties and forties, attractive mainly because they were fit. Klim was an accountant, Tolya a fireman, Ina a schoolteacher, Katya a beautician. Arkady couldn’t keep track of all their names, especially as their faces danced in the light of the campfire.

  Ina passed a glass of vodka to Arkady. “What do you do?”

  “I’m an investigator.”

  “And this lady, I suppose, is a femme fatale?”

  “Exactly,” said Tatiana.

  Karl said, “Well, there is a campfire tradition of tall tales, but there is also a tradition of songs.” From out of the dark, he produced a guitar.

  They sang about women with dark eyes, wolves with yellow eyes, Gypsies, sailors, tearful mothers, train tracks that stretched far into the horizon, each song accompanied by a round of vodka. Cheeks grew flushed and as the fire mellowed, Arkady became aware that Ina, the schoolteacher, had stripped to the waist.

  Karl said, “The naturist movement has a long tradition in the Baltic states.”

  “I can see that,” Arkady said.

  “Some do, some don’t.”

  Karl had also brought a balalaika, always an invitation for someone to kick his heels like a Cossack. Halfway through a squat, Klim went down like a wounded deer, a cue for the club members to bank the fire and retire. But not for long. Arkady heard bodies slipping in and out of tents.

  Tatiana zipped the tent shut. “This is crazy.”

  “You wanted to get out of the city.”

  “Not at the cost of all dignity.”

  “You are welcome to mine. It’s battered but you can have it.”

  Arkady unrolled a foam pad that softened a ground cover of needles. Darkness magnified a background of crickets and cicadas.

  Tatiana said, “I have to confess, there was a nudist beach on the spit. When we were girls, Ludmila and I used to sneak in and gape. It’s probably still there.”

  Feet padded by the tent and stubbed a toe. Arkady waited for the visitor to move on.

  “It’s like a badly organized orgy,” Arkady said.

  She almost laughed.

  “And tomorrow?” he asked. “Kaliningrad is dangerous for you and Moscow is no better.”

  “I’ll think about it. Maybe things will calm down.”

  “You’ve already been murdered once. I’d say things have gone far enough.”

  “Not for you. You can return to Moscow.”

  “No,” he said, even though he recognized how seduced he had been and how small his role was. This was her drama and it struck him that she wasn’t interested in escaping. Perhaps escape was the last thing on her mind.

  They slept as far apart as possible within the tent, but the night was cool and he woke to find her curled against his back. The other tents were silent, the campfire reduced to the ping of embers.

  • • •

  The assassin’s name was Fedorov. He was smaller and older than Zhenya expected and had the full suit and pencil mustache of an actor from the silent screen, and although Victor h
ad handcuffed him to a radiator, the man maintained a professional air.

  “I didn’t like the job. Killing kids didn’t sit well with me. I was just supposed to babysit. Alexi said don’t let them get away or start a ruckus or anything. They seemed nice enough.”

  “But you would have shot them?”

  “I would’ve done what I was told. What are you going to do?” He shrugged at Lotte. “Sorry.”

  “That’s the difference between you and us.” She gathered her grandfather to take him to the elevator. The artist’s act of courage had left him a wreck.

  “Maybe.” That was the man’s statement, this assassin who did crossword puzzles to while away the time. Zhenya looked for tells, the marks and blinks that gave away a gambit before it was played. Fedorov was going to cozy up to Victor because that was where the power lay.

  “A smart girl, but unrealistic,” Fedorov said. He managed to free a pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter. “Like one?” he asked Victor. “No? Could I have an ashtray? Don’t you love these old apartments? High ceilings, fireplaces, parquet floor. Frankly, I’m glad nobody got hurt. I’m the injured party, right? This can all be settled. Do you think you can loosen these cuffs?”

  “I don’t think the cuffs are your problem,” Victor said. “Your problem is whether you’re alive ten minutes from now.”

  “Well, to be blunt, you’re a notorious drunk and the kid is a hustler. I think you two are just now realizing what trouble you’re in. Just my opinion.”

  Victor took his time opening a bottle of Fanta; in interrogations, as in comedy, timing was everything.

  He asked, “What is Alexi after?”

  “Revenge, I suppose. Trying to find Grisha’s killer. That’s his filial duty.”

  “What has that got to do with the notebook that the kids are working on?”

  “Beats me. Could I have some ice? I have a terrific headache. You put my head through the fucking wall. I probably should go to the hospital.”

  “What were Alexi’s exact words?”

  “To wait until he got back. Then he calls and says he wants the kids taken care of right away. No loose ends, that sort of thing.”

  “Did he mention Investigator Renko?” Zhenya asked.

  “Who’s Investigator Renko?” Fedorov asked Victor.

  “Answer the kid,” Victor said.