Stalin's Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Your name?” Arkady asked the cameraman.

  “Petrov. Don’t you think we should—”

  “Your flashlight and papers, please?”

  “But—”

  “Flashlight and papers.”

  Arkady matched the cameraman to the ID photo of a clean-shaven Pyetr Semyonovich Petrov; age: twenty-two; residence: Olympic Village, Moscow; ethnicity: Russian through and through. Petrov was a pack rat. Arkady delved deeper into the holder and came up with a business card for Cinema Zelensky, membership in Mensa, video club cards, a second mini cassette, a matchbook from a “gentlemen’s club” called Tahiti and a condom. A telephone number was scribbled inside the matchbook. Arkady pocketed the matchbook and tape and gave the ID back.

  Bora squeezed his face against the ice. He was moving less.

  Arkady put his arm around the cameraman. “Pyetr, may I call you Petya?”

  “Yes.”

  “Petya, I am going to ask you a question and I want you to answer as if your life depended on it. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Be honest. When passengers on the Metro think they see Stalin, what are they really seeing? What is the trick?”

  “There’s no trick.”

  “No special effects?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do people see him?”

  “They just do.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” Arkady took a snow shovel from the oil barrel, raised it high, walked onto the ice and chopped at the ice over Bora’s head. The blade skipped and sang. No other effect. Petya aimed the flashlight at Bora’s eyes. They had the flat stare of a fish on ice. A second chop. A third. Bora didn’t flinch. Arkady wondered whether he might have waited a little too long. Platonov gaped from the edge of the pond. Arkady swung the shovel and the first cracks showed as prisms in the flashlight’s beam. Swung again and as the ice split Arkady sank halfway to his knees in water, no worse than stepping into a tube of ice cubes. He worked from the head down until he got a hold under Bora’s arms and hauled him out onto land. Bora was white and rubbery. Arkady turned him face down, straddled him and pushed on his back. With all of his weight, he pushed and relaxed while his own teeth chattered. Pushed and relaxed and chattered. When Arkady had come to Chistye Prudy as a kid, he was always watched by Sergeant Belov, who taught Arkady to catch snow on his tongue. The sergeant would tell Arkady, this delicious one has your name on it. Here’s another. And another. When Arkady skated, he chased snowflakes like a greedy swallow.

  Bora gagged. He doubled up as pool water spewed from his mouth. Caught a deep breath draped with saliva. Retched again, wringing himself out. Sodden and freezing, he shivered not in any ordinary way but violently, as if he were in the grip of an invisible hand. He twisted his eyes up toward Arkady.

  “It’s a miracle,” Petya said.

  “Back from the dead,” said Platonov. He hovered, blocking half the light.

  Bora turned onto his back and laid a knife against Arkady’s throat. He had returned from the dead with a trump card. The blade scraped a hair Arkady had missed when shaving.

  “Thank you…and now…I fuck you,” Bora said.

  But the cold overwhelmed him. His shivering grew uncontrollable and hard enough to break bones. His teeth chattered like a runaway machine and his arms wrapped straitjacket-style tight around his body.

  “Find the knife,” Arkady told the boy with the flashlight.

  “What knife?”

  Arkady got to his feet and took the flashlight. “Bora’s.”

  “I didn’t see one,” Platonov said.

  “He had a knife.” Arkady nudged Bora over not with a kick, but firmly. No knife. Arkady played the beam in and around the water where Bora had fallen through, where he had freed Bora from the ice and finally, trying to reverse time, on Bora’s tracks across the snow.

  “A magnificent night,” Platonov declared. “A night like this you can only find in Moscow. This is the most fun I’ve had for years. And that you had your car parked here by the pond? Brilliant! Thinking two moves ahead!” He slapped the Zhiguli’s dashboard with satisfaction. The lamps of the Boulevard Ring rolled by; Platonov still hadn’t said where he wanted to go.

  Arkady said, “Make up your mind. My feet are wet and numb.”

  “Want me to drive?”

  “No, thanks.” He had seen Platonov walk.

  “You know who I saw tonight? I saw your father the General. I saw him in you. The apple does not fall far from the tree. Although I’m sorry you let that hooligan go.”

  “You didn’t see his knife.”

  “Neither did the boy with the flashlight. I take your word for it.”

  “That’s what I mean. All you could testify to is that Bora fell through the ice.”

  “Anyway, you taught him a lesson. He’ll be frozen solid for a day or two.”

  “He’ll be back.”

  “Then you’ll finish him off, I’m confident. It is a shame about the knife. You think it will turn up in the pond?”

  “Tomorrow, next week.”

  “Maybe when the ice melts. Can you hold a man in prison until the snow melts? I like the sound of it.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  Platonov said, “You know, I met your father during the war on the Kalinin Front.”

  “Did you play chess?”

  Platonov smiled. “As a matter of fact, I was playing simultaneous games to entertain the troops when he sat down and took a board. He was very young for a general and so covered in mud I couldn’t see his rank. It was extraordinary. Most amateurs trip over their knights. Your father had an instinctive understanding of the special mayhem caused by that piece.”

  “Who won?”

  “Well, I won. The point is he played a serious game.”

  “I don’t think my father was ever on the Kalinin Front.”

  “That’s where I saw him. He was cheated.”

  “Out of what?”

  “You know what.”

  Snow had stifled the usual twenty-four-hour assault of construction crews across the city. The drive along the Boulevard Ring’s white-trimmed trees felt like passage through a more intimate town.

  “There were atrocities on either side,” Platonov went on. “The main thing is that your father was a successful commander. Especially in the beginning of the war, when all seemed lost, he was superhuman. If anyone deserved a field marshal’s baton it was him. In my opinion he was smeared by hypocrites.”

  “So, who is trying to kill you?” Arkady changed the subject. He was, after all, supposedly trying to find out.

  “New Russians, mafia, reactionaries in the Kremlin. Most of all, real estate developers.”

  “Half of Moscow. Have there been threatening phone calls, ominous notes, stones through the windows?”

  “I told you before.”

  “Remind me.”

  “They threaten on the phone, I hang up. They send a poison pen letter, I throw it away. No stones yet.”

  “The next note, don’t open it. Handle it by the corners and call me. Can you give me any names?”

  “Not yet, but all you have to do is find out who is trying to have the chess club shut down. They’ll probably turn it into a spa or worse. What we need are the names of the developers. Not the public names, but the silent partners in City Hall and the Kremlin. I don’t have the means to do that. You do. I was afraid that the prosecutor was fobbing off some incompetent, but I’m pleased to say that after tonight I have great faith in you. Boundless faith. Not that I don’t have my own ruses. We’ll have a little exhibition soon and get some publicity.”

  “At the chess club?”

  “At that dump? No. At the Writers’ Union. In fact, we’re off to see the sponsor right now.”

  “At this hour?”

  “A friend of the game.”

  Arkady’s cell phone rang. It was Victor.

  “What the de
vil were you doing picking a fight with Urman? He and Isakov cover a domestic homicide and you run their pricks through a wringer.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Well, I’m at the morgue. I got here on my own, if that’s a good sign.”

  “Just don’t fall asleep.” Around a morgue, Victor might look deposited. “Why are you there?”

  “Remember Zoya, the wife who wants her husband dead? Who dialed Urman’s phone? She keeps calling me demanding progress, so I’m using my imagination.”

  “Wait for me. Don’t do anything until I get there.” Arkady hung up. He desperately wanted to get into dry shoes and socks but Victor’s imagination was a frightening thing.

  “Stalin loved the snow,” Platonov said. Both men pondered that information while wipers swept the flakes on the windshield. “In the Kremlin they had snowball fights. Like boys. Beria, Molotov and Mikoyan on one side, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov on the other and Stalin as referee. Grown men in hats throwing snowballs. Stalin egging them on.”

  “I’m trying to picture that.”

  “I know that some innocents died because of Stalin, but he made the Soviet Union respected by the world. Russian history is Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin and since then, pipsqueaks. I know you feel the same because I saw you rescue Stalin from those so-called Russian Patriots. This corner will do.”

  Platonov heaved himself out under a streetlamp. Arkady leaned across to say that Stalin killed not “some,” which sounded incidental, but in cold blood sent millions of Russians to their death. However, Platonov was enveloped by a redheaded woman in a fur coat and high heels. She was a well-maintained sixty or seventy years old, a whirlwind of lipstick and rouge. A foaming bottle of champagne swung from her hand.

  “Magda, you’ll catch your death.”

  “Ilya, Ilyusha, my Ilyushka. I’ve been waiting.”

  “I had business.”

  “My genius, dance with me.”

  “Upstairs, we’ll dance.” To Arkady, Platonov said, “Pick me up at noon.”

  “This is the sponsor?” Arkady asked.

  “Better make it two o’clock,” Platonov said.

  She peered at the car. “You came with a friend?”

  “A comrade,” Platonov said. “One of the best.”

  Arkady had intended to set the record straight. Instead, he drove off as fast as possible.

  6

  When Arkady arrived, Victor had the morgue’s body drawers open to a biker with long matted hair, an old man as green as verdigris and a young man fresh from a gymnastics accident.

  “I’ve been here too long. They’re starting to look like family.”

  Arkady lit a cigarette but the reek of death was overwhelming. Cigarette butts littered the red concrete floor under a sign that said No Smoking. Walls were white tiles, although the hall to the autopsy room was uphill and dark, awaiting new light fixtures. From the far end came the sound of a door being punched open by a gurney and feet stamping off snow.

  Victor considered the three bodies. “It makes you think.”

  “About mortality?”

  “It makes me think I should open a flower shop. People are always dead or dying. They need flowers.” Victor pushed in the gymnast, green man and biker and rolled out a crisply burned body in a fetal position. Pushed it in and rolled out a woman on a bed of gray hair. Rolled her in and pulled out a male punching bag of cuts and contusions. Rolled him in and rolled out a goose-necked suicide, pushed him in and balked at the next shelf’s pong of decay. “Anyway, it occurred to me that maybe we’re taking the wrong approach. Our problem isn’t necessarily the tattoo—we can always find an artist who can copy that—but the skin.” Victor pulled out a body with a morose face and a deep wound across the back of the neck. Kuznetsov.

  Arkady looked at his watch: four in the morning. He was cold and wet and a little dizzy. Maybe he was dreaming. He hadn’t noticed in the dead man’s apartment that Kuznetsov’s right knee looked as if it had been shattered and badly reconstructed.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we need a more proactive approach.”

  “You mean, you want to take the skin from one of these bodies?”

  “I talked to a tattoo artist. He says all he needs is the canvas, so to speak, if we just keep the skin hydrated.”

  “Wet?”

  “Moist.”

  “You would do this?”

  Was it possible to enter negative hours? Arkady wondered. Extra time that was entirely off the clock? Because skinning the dead wasn’t done in any normal twenty-four hours.

  Before Victor answered Arkady said, “What do we know about Zoya’s business? Wasn’t the husband a partner? Why don’t we find out more about that before we start on poor souls at the morgue? Autopsies are enough. Do you know how this would sound in court?”

  “Skin is skin.”

  “Whose skin?” Marat Urman approached from the dark of the hallway, emerging from silhouette to solid reality, armored in his red leather jacket but amiable, ready to join the conversation once he knew the subject. “Whose skin are we talking about?”

  Arkady said, “Anyone’s. It’s wise to keep it.”

  “Good idea. The chief of the morgue doesn’t like detectives tampering with the evidence, dead or not.” Urman stopped at the open drawer and gazed down at its occupant. “Why it’s our friend, Kuznetsov. He’s not wearing a cleaver anymore, but I recognize him.” He looked up at Arkady. “Why are you so interested in this case? His wife tried to chop off his head. We have her confession and the weapon she used. We make a good case and you try to screw us.”

  Arkady said, “I’m not trying to do anything.”

  “Then why is the drawer open? Why are you here in the middle of the night looking at the body? Is there a chance you’re just trying to fuck Detective Isakov? This looks, how to say, personal. This is about Doctor Kazka, right?”

  “We were looking at all the bodies.”

  “For head lice? I understand. What’s worse than losing a woman is finding out how little you know about her.”

  “I know Eva.”

  “No, you don’t, because you don’t know Chechnya. The three of us saw shit you can’t imagine. It’s natural that Eva and Nikolai gravitate to each other. It’s only human. You should step back and let them work it out. Don’t go sneaking around. If she chooses you, so be it. Be civilized. I’m sure you’ll see her again.” Urman let a smile develop. “In fact, I can see her right now. Isakov is fucking her and fucking her and she’s saying, ‘Oh Nikolai, you are so much bigger and better than that loser Renko.’”

  “Do you want me to shoot him?” Victor asked Arkady.

  “No.”

  “No,” Urman said, “the investigator doesn’t want a brawl. He’s not the brawling type. I wish he was.”

  “Piss off,” Victor said.

  Urman looked down at the corpse that was Kuznetsov. “You want to see bodies? These are nothing. They look like a swim team. Now in Chechnya the rebels left Russian bodies by the road for us to find. They were rigged, so that when you picked up a dead mate a bomb or a grenade would go off. The only way to retrieve a body was to tie it to a long rope and drag it. What was left after the bomb detonated you scraped up with a shovel and sent home in a box.” Urman rolled the drawer shut. “You think you know Eva or Isakov? You know nothing.”

  While Urman made his exit Arkady was stock-still. He tried to erase the image of Isakov and Eva together, but it returned because the suggestion was poison and the taste lingered.

  “Are you okay?” Victor asked.

  “Yes.” Arkady tried to rouse himself.

  “The hell with this place. Let’s go.”

  “Why was he here?”

  “To shake you up.”

  Arkady tried to think straight. “No, this was an opportunity Urman seized; it wasn’t planned.”

  “Maybe he followed you.”

  Arkady thought back. “No, I heard
a delivery.”

  He headed up the ramp toward the sound of water. Water ran from spigots all the time on the autopsy room’s six granite tables. Half were occupied by a blue-tinged threesome, all male, who had shared a fatal liter of ethyl alcohol. They held their organs in their open bellies. The new arrival was a woman still in a gray prison gown. She was joyless gray from head to toe and her head arched back so strangely that Arkady recognized Kuznetsov’s wife only because he had met her just the night before. Her eyes bulged in their sockets.

  Victor was impressed. “Fuck!”

  Arkady pulled aside a pathologist working the last of the drunks and asked about the woman’s cause of death.

  “Asphyxiation.”

  “I don’t see any bruises around the neck.”

  “She swallowed her tongue. It’s rare. In fact, it’s been long debated whether it’s even possible, but it happens now and then. She was arrested last night and did it in her cell. We have her husband in a drawer. She killed him and then she killed herself.”

  “Who brought her here?”

  “Detective Urman followed the van from the prison. Apparently he’d just finished questioning her when she did it.” The pathologist spread his arms in awe. “Some women, you never know.”

  Signs of the prosecutor’s disfavor: A red carpet that did not quite reach Arkady’s door. A small office so crammed by a desk, two chairs, locker and file cabinet that it was difficult to turn around. A mere two phones, white for the outside line, red for Zurin. No electric teapot. No plaque on the door. No partner. Other investigators were aware of Arkady’s pariah status; he was the golden example of how not to run a career. No matter, Arkady liked working at night when the staff was gone and the light of his lamp seemed to cover the known world.

  He tried calling Eva on her cell phone. It was off, which didn’t necessarily mean she was with Isakov. More likely, he told himself, she was dealing with a patient in the emergency room and didn’t want to be interrupted. He checked the apartment phone for messages. Nothing from her or Zhenya, and Arkady fought off the dark allure of masochism. To clear his head he wrote a report on the events at the Chistye Prudy Metro station, making it as objective as possible; let Zurin sweat over the fact that an investigator of his had rudely disrupted a séance with Stalin. It was one thing to close down a simple hoax, it was another to interfere with superpatriots, and the entire affair illustrated how out of the loop Zurin was. Arkady suspected that when Zurin was put into the loop the prosecutor’s bowels would experience a sudden loosening.