Stalin's Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “I was Sergeant Borodin’s commanding officer for ten months. In that time OMON spearheaded Russian forces in Chechnya, which meant constant engagement with rebels. Sometimes with four hours sleep out of forty-eight, sometimes so far ahead of logistical support that we went days without food, fighting an enemy that hid in the population and observed none of the rules of war. The enemy could be a hardened soldier, a religious fanatic or a woman transporting a bomb in a child’s stroller. We made friends where we could and tried to build lines of trust and communication with village elders; however, we learned from experience to trust no one except the men in our own unit. In ten months in those conditions, Borodin never failed to carry out an order. I can’t ask more from a man.”

  Borodin sat up for the highest accolade in his life and opened his collar. At the base of his neck was a tattoo of the OMON shield. Arkady felt the dry swallowing of the veterans and the way they leaned forward to catch every word.

  “He was involved in the famous Battle of Sunzha Bridge?”

  “More a skirmish, I’d say, but yes, he was.”

  “More than a skirmish, I’m sure. Could you recount for the judge and jury the events of that day?”

  “Our assignment that day was to control and check traffic at the bridge. An attack in force was not anticipated and when we heard about the terrorist raid on the OMON field hospital it was too late to bring up reinforcements.”

  “But you stood firm.”

  “We carried out our orders.”

  “Sergeant Borodin stood firm.”

  “Yes.”

  “Against odds of eight to one.”

  “Yes.”

  “In that fight, was there any communication between the terrorists and your men? Not radio communication, but shouts or insults.”

  “Not from us. We were too few and didn’t want to give away our positions. The Chechens shouted a number of insults.”

  “Such as?”

  “‘Russians, you came a long way to die!’ ‘Ivan, who is seeing your wife?’ although they didn’t say ‘seeing.’ ‘Dogs will eat your bones.’ Things of that nature.”

  “Again, how many terrorists were there?”

  “Approximately fifty.”

  “How many in your squad?”

  “Six including me.”

  “And including Borodin?”

  “Certainly, Borodin too.”

  “Under attack, outnumbered, with bullets flying, Igor Borodin heard, ‘Dogs will eat your bones.’ Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “I refer to the transcript of the testimony of Borodin’s neighbors, who heard a heated argument on the landing and Makhmud Saidov shout, ‘May dogs eat your bones!’ At which point, Borodin snapped. He was again Sergeant Borodin back at the Sunzha River, protecting his country.”

  The woman in the shawl turned her dark eyes to Arkady. She whispered, “And then he ate the pizza.”

  Lunch break.

  Ginsberg was a short, angular figure in a black coat and cap who walked with his huge head leading the rest of his body. Arkady followed him out of the courthouse and down a raw path between saplings with roots wrapped in burlap to a sidewalk ice cream cart. Up close, the reporter’s beard and brows were a disheveled gray, his eyes slightly scrambled and Arkady realized that the man was drunk. At noon. Arkady had a chocolate ice cream cone; Ginsberg had an orange popsicle and a cigarette. They ate as snow swirled around them, like a pair of Eskimos, Arkady thought.

  Ginsberg said, “Give me fresh air, nicotine, sugar and artificial color. A cappuccino wouldn’t hurt. Although it is important to keep foam and artificial color out of the beard so as not to be too comical. What do you want, Investigator Renko?”

  “A little information.”

  “A little information is a dangerous thing.” Ginsberg slipped off the curb and would have fallen if Arkady hadn’t grabbed his sleeve.

  “You wrote an article for Izvestia on the battle that helped make Nikolai Isakov a national hero.” Looking into Ginsberg’s eyes, Arkady saw intelligence try to surface.

  “Yes.”

  “You interviewed him?”

  “I traveled with his unit for a month on his first tour of duty. I was the only journalist along. He said regular-size journalists took up too much room.”

  “The two of you became friendly?”

  “Russians generally have two reliable reactions: beat a Jew and laugh at a hunchback. Which makes me doubly vulnerable. Isakov was free of all that.”

  “So you were friends.”

  “Yes.”

  “You admired him.”

  “He was a well-read man. Not what you’d expect from a Black Beret in a combat zone. Of course, I admired him and now he’s a candidate for the Russian Patriots. He’s changed.”

  “I thought as much, so it struck me as odd that today you weren’t sitting with him or even offering each other a few words. You ignored each other. Why is that?”

  “That’s your question? What is my personal relationship now with Detective Isakov?”

  “Him and Marat Urman.”

  “You want my official opinion? Isakov and Urman are Black Beret veterans and respected Russian Patriots, and the Battle of Sunzha Bridge exemplified the fighting spirit of OMON. How’s that?”

  “Then why did OMON keep Isakov at the rank of captain?” Arkady asked. “Why wasn’t he promoted after a victory like that? What was wrong?”

  “Ask Major Agronsky. He was head of the commendation panel.”

  Ginsberg swayed off the curb and laughed. “Maybe Agronsky could count. Can you? Fifty rebels against six Black Berets. No, I never said it. Salute the red flag. Oorah! Oorah! Oorah!”

  The entrance to the new courthouse was plate glass; Arkady saw Black Berets gathered in the lobby. Bottles of beer appeared from nowhere. Alcohol was banned on the courthouse grounds, but the guards had made a sensible retreat. From the lobby Urman returned Arkady’s gaze.

  Ginsberg saw Urman too. “Marat calls me a dwarf. What I really am is abridged. An abridged version of a reporter, not only in height but in what I write. They say only the grave can correct the hunchback. Not true! My editors correct me all the time. And the editors say that in these troubled times we need heroes to defend us from terrorists. We need riot police even if that means that OMON runs riot and beats every ‘black’ they find on the street, a ‘black’ being anyone darker than delicate Russian pink. Chechens, Caucasians, Africans, a Jew or two. I’m not saying that OMON is following orders, no, worse, following the darker impulses of the Kremlin. So some blood flows and the police don’t touch OMON because Black Berets are the police. Although, a person might ask how good these supermen are. As for rescuing hostages, remember the school siege in Beslan? OMON botched that operation and hundreds of schoolchildren died. Hundreds!”

  “Do you want to go someplace and sit?”

  “No. I’m not saying they’re all rotten. A lot are good. He was the best.” Ginsberg nodded toward the lobby, where Isakov had arrived and seemed to be offering calming words. “All in their black-and-blues here. In Chechnya they looked like pirates with beards, bandannas, tattoos, and Isakov was the pirate captain. They loved Isakov.”

  “But there’s more?”

  “There’s always more. That’s war. It’s like being dipped in acid. Sooner or later it gets to you. It eats you.” Ginsberg lit one cigarette off the butt end of another, a delicate operation. “What’s your interest in Isakov?”

  Envy, Arkady thought. He said, “Isakov’s name came up in an investigation. It doesn’t necessarily incriminate him.”

  “Is it an internal matter of the militia?”

  “I can’t say anything more.”

  “If it is, let me warn you, Isakov has powerful friends.”

  “Let’s just say I want the truth.”

  Ginsberg stepped back to take in Arkady whole. “A seeker of truth? I was afraid of that. You’ll want a unicorn next. There is no truth. No two people agree on any
thing; there are only versions. I am a prime example. I can’t even agree with myself. For example, the Battle of Sunzha Bridge. One version describes a stand by six Black Berets against fifty Chechen terrorists. In this version the battle ranged up and down the Sunzha, the opposite sides firing across the river until the Chechens beat an ignominious retreat. The end result: fourteen rebels killed by our sharpshooters and only one of our men more than scratched. The second version says that of the fourteen dead rebels, eight were shot in the chest or the head at point blank range, two in the back, two with food in their mouths. And not a wasted bullet. Unbelievable marksmanship. No nonfatal shots in the arms or legs. In other words, in the second version, what took place at the Sunzha Bridge was not a battle but an execution of any Chechens who happened to be in Isakov’s camp that day. It was revenge. It was a slaughter.”

  “Were the Chechens armed?”

  “No doubt, Chechens usually are. And if they weren’t, Isakov’s squad had been searching houses and confiscating arms for weeks. They had plenty of weapons to add.”

  “Were there any surviving witnesses?”

  “No. I arrived by helicopter minutes after the killing because I was scheduled to ride with Isakov’s unit again. I’d been invited by Isakov personally. As we approached I could see Marat Urman directing Borodin and the others running around a truck. Half the Chechens were around a campfire. It wasn’t like any firefight I ever saw before. When we came in to land Marat waved us off. They canceled from the ground. No interviews, no joining the squad. It was a complete turnaround. Suddenly even I took up too much room.”

  “What about the rest of the squad? There were six Black Berets at the bridge. Isakov, Urman and Borodin make three. Who were the other three?”

  “I don’t know. They were new to me. Men were being rotated in and out.”

  “Were they here today?”

  “No, but I have their names in my notes.”

  “You kept the notes?”

  “A reporter always keeps his notes.”

  “Did you ever hear about death squads in Chechnya?”

  Ginsberg had to laugh. “Chechnya was nothing but death squads. That was how soldiers got by.”

  “Russian troops hired themselves out?”

  “When necessary. But in that bloodbath there’ll never be a charge. We’re the winners and we don’t hang our dirty laundry in public. If you are after Isakov you’d better act fast because if he wins this election for the Senate he’ll be immune. You’d have to catch him standing over a body, a knife in his hand and blood pooling at his feet, to arrest him.”

  Arkady asked in as flat a voice as possible, “Do you remember, when you were in Chechnya, hearing about a doctor named Eva Kazka?”

  “No, although there was a doctor on the wrong side.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “On the Chechen side. I never got her name. She didn’t take up arms but she worked in the hospital in Grozny. They say she showed up on a motorcycle; can you believe that? We were shelling the city and there wasn’t much hospital left, but supposedly she treated rebels and Russians alike. Then she disappeared. OMON looked for her but never found her. Maybe she was a fantasy.”

  The number of Black Berets in the lobby was thinning out, moving back to the courtroom. Isakov and Urman were gone. Arkady was late for picking up Platonov, and here he was out in the snow with a small, crooked drunk.

  Ginsberg said, “I have pictures from the helicopter. Just two.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “Why not? Mayakovsky Square at eleven. Is that agreeable?” He took Arkady’s card, dropped it, clumsily picked it out of the snow. “What do you think? Do you think the pizza deliveryman was a terrorist? I hope so because I got him killed by not turning in Isakov or Marat or Borodin.” He stared vacantly at the pile of saplings. Anyone could see that they had just been tossed off the back of a truck. “But if it’s my word against Isakov’s, who’s going to believe me? Marat said if he heard I was telling stories, he was going to come and straighten me. Apparently some people he straightens, some people he bends. I deserve it.” He snapped out of his reverie. “Anyway, there you are, two versions of the truth from one man. You choose.”

  9

  Time in a refrigerated drawer had altered Kuznetsov. He looked as if a four-year-old had colored him, crayoned his face, belly and feet a livid maroon and the rest of his body a cool blue sewn up in front with heavy twine. He’d flattened a little, sucked in his eyes and let his jowls hang loose. Because of the sugar in alcohol he smelled of spoiled fruit.

  His wife occupied the adjoining table. His and hers. Arkady took off his jacket and pulled on latex gloves while Platonov stood aside, like a man waiting to be properly introduced.

  “You’re poaching.” A junior pathologist came chugging. He was small, with a damp, freshly hatched quality. “It’s no bother, but the detectives said these were finished. I’d just hate to get on the wrong side of Isakov and Urman.”

  “As would we all. Busy night?” Arkady asked. All six granite tables were occupied, spigots running, although he didn’t see any autopsies under way.

  “Hypothermics. It’s a cold night. We pick them up but we don’t perform autopsies unless they’re violent deaths.”

  “Which you did for the two Kuznetsovs.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’re done?”

  “Unless someone claims them.”

  “If not?”

  “It’s the potter’s field.”

  “So you have time to help us.”

  “Do what?”

  “Get the flute.”

  Platonov’s ears pricked up. “A flute in a morgue? See, that’s the sort of thing I only encounter with you, Renko.”

  The grandmaster had arrived at Arkady’s apartment in a foul mood, having waited hours to be picked up and full of complaints about old paramours. “At a certain age women don’t want the lights on for sex, they want pitch-dark.” He had shown Arkady the bruises and scratches suffered from crossing the bedroom. “Whereas a man that age has to visit the bathroom during the night fairly often. Between the champagne bottles, the fucking cat and the coffee table it was an obstacle course.”

  Platonov seemed invigorated to see the morgue’s dead, the day’s hypothermia cases, a windfall of frail, bleached bodies that were old but not as old as he. “This is the House of the Dead, the ferry on the River Styx,” Platonov announced. “The final checkmate!” In his disheveled coat and shapeless hat he wandered among cadavers, reading charts, pleased with himself and saying, “Younger…younger…younger…younger. It makes a man philosophical, doesn’t it, Renko?”

  “Some it makes philosophical, some just throw up.”

  The pathologist returned with a hair dryer and a flute case. From the case he took a velvet cloth and unwrapped a glass cylinder more the dimensions of a pennywhistle than a flute. The cylinder was packed with purple crystals. Each end had a rubber stopper.

  “This is the flute.” Arkady put the cylinder in Platonov’s hands. “Your task is to warm it up.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “Iodine crystals. Try not to breathe the fumes.”

  “Such interesting evenings with you, Renko. Sincerely.”

  With the pathologist’s help Arkady rolled Kuznetsov onto his face. The cleaver wound on the back of the neck gaped to the bone.

  “One swing; quite a feat for a woman too drunk to stand,” Arkady said.

  The pathologist said, “I heard that she confessed twice, once at the murder scene and once in her cell.”

  “And then swallowed her tongue.”

  Kuznetsov’s back was dotted with moles, and tufts of wiry hair that sprouted on the shoulder blades, where angels had wings.

  Between the shoulder blades was a tattoo the size of a hockey puck of a shield with OMON written across the top, TVER across the bottom and, in the center, the tiger’s head emblem of the Black Berets.

  Arkady unfolded a copy
of the photo Zoya had given him of her husband’s tattoo of a tiger facing down wolves. The head of Filotov’s tiger and the OMON tiger were identical. Now that he had a reference point, Arkady saw that the rest of Filotov’s more elaborate tattoo—the craven wolves, deep woods and mountain stream—was a later addition, including the city name TVER, which the tattoo artist had inscribed on a branch.

  The pathologist turned on the hair dryer and ran warm air up and down the dead man’s arms. “Fingerprints on skin are tricky because skin is always growing, shedding, sweating, stretching, folding, rubbing off. This is just a demonstration, right?”

  “Right,” Arkady said.

  The pathologist inserted a plastic tube into the rubber stopper at one end of the cylinder, removed the stopper from the other, slipped the loose end of the tube between his lips and blew. He blew smoothly while he moved the open end of the flute up and down the dead man’s arms, forcing out warm iodine fumes that would combine with skin oils to make a latent print visible, a simple task that demanded care because iodine fumes could corrode metal, let alone the soft tissues of the mouth.

  Like a developing photo, the prints of the palm, heel and fingers of large hands appeared in sepia tones around Kuznetsov’s wrists.

  Platonov was excited. “You found what you were looking for!”

  “Smudged,” the pathologist said. “Too much twisting and torquing, not a single usable print.”

  In a way it was the worst possible outcome, Arkady thought, more a matter of fears confirmed than knowledge gained. A call came in on his cell phone, a text message: “Urgent meet, U know where. ;)” That had to be from Victor. Arkady acknowledged the call and turned to Kuznetsov’s wife. She was the indeterminate color of an old rug and possibly that was what she had been in life, Arkady thought, with her scabs and bruises, something Kuznetsov had wiped his boots on. Her head arched rigidly back, mouth and eyes agape.

  “Can someone swallow their tongue?” Platonov asked.

  The pathologist said, “The tongue is a muscle firmly attached to the base of the mouth. You can’t swallow it.”