Stalin's Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “There’s dried blood in the nostrils,” Arkady said.

  “She didn’t die of a nosebleed.”

  “Then what happened to her? She doesn’t look happy.”

  “Between congestive heart failure, pneumonia, diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and her level of alcohol, who knows? Her heart stopped. Should I fume her the same as him?”

  “Please.”

  The pathologist played the flute around her arms and found no prints, smudged or otherwise. But her eyes said something, Arkady thought.

  “Her face,” he said. “Try her face.”

  The pathologist bent over her with the flute and when he stood back the print of a hand appeared across her nose and mouth. Individual prints were blurred; still there was that shadow hand sealing her face shut.

  Arkady said, “If someone kept her mouth closed and pinched her nose, maybe from behind, a big man trained in hand-to-hand, who lifted her off the ground first and squeezed the air from her lungs…”

  “Then the tongue might fall back and, yes, obstruct the airway to some degree. I don’t know how significant.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “If she lost her breath at the start, with her heart and alcohol content, no time at all. But I thought she was in a holding cell in militia custody.”

  “She was. We want to get some pictures of these prints before they fade.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” Platonov asked.

  “Probably nothing.”

  All the same, Kuznetsov had been a Black Beret from Tver, as were Isakov and Urman, and all three served in Chechnya. It was hard to believe the detectives had not recognized their old comrade even with a cleaver in his neck.

  What was left of the Communist Party fit into a two-story gray stucco building off Tsvetnoy Boulevard opposite the circus. On the ground floor was a security desk with a gray-haired guard and a hall of stockrooms of pamphlets and mailing materials. On the second floor were Party headquarters: offices, secretary pool, conference room and coats everywhere, coats hung and boots piled, in the rush to the conference table where sweet champagne was poured and platters offered red caviar, silvery smoked fish, fatback so fine it was translucent, black bread and slices of seasoned horsemeat. On the wall hung a portrait photograph of Lenin, a red Soviet flag and a campaign banner that demanded, Who Stole Russia?

  “Like the old days,” Platonov said. “Pigs to the trough.” He stacked sausage on a pamphlet of “Marx: Frequently Asked Questions.” “Have some?”

  “No, thanks.”

  Arkady hadn’t seen such a concentration of Homo Sovieticus for years. Supposedly extinct, here they were unchanged, with their bad suits, dull eyes, self-important frowns. These were bellies that had never missed a meal. He saw none of the elderly that picketed Red Square in the bitter cold for their miserable pensions.

  Arkady moved back to the hall. “I’m going. You’re safe now you’re surrounded by friends.”

  “These freeloaders and cretins? The smart ones, my real friends, left the Party years ago. This is what’s left, nothing left but the stupid rats swilling wine on a sinking ship.”

  “Why didn’t you leave?”

  “I was a son of the Revolution, which means I was illegitimate. A bastard, if you will. I tagged along with a regiment—that’s how I picked up chess—and when Hitler and his gang invaded Russia I volunteered for the army. I was fourteen. My first battle, out of two thousand men, twenty-five survived. I survived the war and then I represented the Soviet Union in chess for forty years. I am too old a leopard to change my spots. Stay and eat and give me someone to talk to.”

  “I’m meeting a colleague for dinner.” If that described having a drink with Victor, Arkady thought. And after, meeting the journalist Ginsberg for a list of Black Berets who had served with Isakov in Chechnya.

  Arkady flattened himself to let latecomers through. Among them was Tanya, the harpist from the Metropol, in the same white gown. With her golden hair she looked like a figure from a fairy tale. She whispered apologies as she squeezed by, not at all the reckless skier that the Cupid photo had made her seem.

  “You’ll come back?” Platonov asked Arkady. “It will be an early night; I have to be sharp tomorrow.”

  “Our grandmaster Ilya Sergeevich is going to a chess tournament and do the honor of playing the winner.” A plump little man bobbed at Platonov’s elbow. “It will be televised, won’t it?”

  “Taped. Taped and burned, hopefully,” Platonov said.

  “Surkov here, chief of propaganda.” The man offered Arkady a damp hand to shake. “I know who you are. You need no introduction here.”

  Platonov informed Arkady, “This is one of the cretins I was telling you about.”

  Surkov said, “The grandmaster is one of our most renowned and respected members. A link to the past. He’s always joking. The fact is, we’re a completely different Party these days. Streamlined, open and willing to adjust.”

  “Ever since we went in the shit can,” Platonov muttered.

  “See, that sort of talk doesn’t really help. We have to be upbeat. We’re giving people a choice,” Surkov called after Arkady, who was headed for the door.

  Arkady’s only regret was that by the time he returned Tanya would be gone. He wasn’t so much attracted as curious. Something about her was familiar, something besides skiing or plucking the strings of a harp.

  As Arkady drove away he passed a statue of a clown on a unicycle planted on the boulevard to mark the circus. With the snow spinning around the clown he seemed to Arkady to pedal toward the circus entrance one moment and to the Party offices the next, bowing to slapstick and then to farce.

  The Gondolier offered murals of the Grand Canal, but the restaurant was on Petrovka Street, half a block from militia headquarters, and the regular customers were detectives who came to get hammered. The usual order was a hundred milliliters of vodka for a good day, two hundred milliliters for a bad. The regulars at the bar were reinforced by OMON officers in blue and black camos celebrating the acquittal for homicide of their former colleague Igor Borodin. Shouts of “Pizza delivery!” drew great laughs and the clamor had driven Victor to a back booth, where he sat like a brooding spider.

  As Arkady joined him Victor indicated the vast distance to the bar and said, “I feel I’m too far from my mother’s tit.”

  “You seem to be set up.”

  Victor’s forearm protected a bottle.

  “You have no sympathy at all, Investigator Renko. You’re an unsympathetic person. If you’re drinking at the bar the bottle is right there within your reach. Sit back here at a table and you could die of thirst waiting to be served. Vultures could pick at your bones, nobody would notice.”

  “It is a sad picture. This is what you’ve been doing all day?”

  Victor asked someone invisible, “Have you ever noticed how smug sober people can be?”

  Arkady looked toward the bar. In the main, detectives tended to be older men who were fairly silent, often overweight, with cigarette ash on the front of their sweaters and a pistol tucked in back. By comparison, the Black Berets in their black-and-blues and holstered guns were young and pumped with muscle. There were also civilians, women as well as men, who liked to rub shoulders with police, buy them a drink and hear a story.

  “Quite a crowd tonight.”

  “It’s Friday.”

  “Right.” Always good to keep track, Arkady thought. “International Women’s Day, in fact.”

  “I don’t think I know any women.”

  “What about Luba?”

  “My wife? You have me on a technicality.”

  Arkady checked his watch. He was supposed to meet Ginsberg in five minutes. “You haven’t scalped anyone today, I hope.”

  “No, thank you. I reviewed the Zelensky tapes—”

  “The Stalin tape or the porn?”

  “—and circulated a still of the four prostitutes who saw Stalin on the Metro platform among my
colleagues in Vice. No one recognized them. Prostitutes and pimps are pretty strict about their territory. These girls must have parachuted in.”

  “Good.” Victor could have told him as much over the phone, but Arkady wanted to be encouraging.

  “Also I suspected that someone as virtuous as you hadn’t looked at the porn as closely as I would.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t miss a thing.”

  “Remember Skuratov?”

  “Yes.” Skuratov was a prosecutor general who threatened to investigate corruption in the Kremlin. He was undermined by the release of the videotape of him or someone who looked like him frolicking in a sauna with a pair of naked girls.

  “Skuratov denied he was the guy getting the ultimate massage, but a spy chief named Putin analyzed the tape and declared Skuratov was the man. Soon we have a new prosecutor general and the spy is president. Once again, history turns on a woman’s ass. The moral is, examine all the evidence. You never know when or how your chance will come.”

  Arkady checked his watch. “I have to go.”

  “Wait.” Victor untied the office folder and drew out a photograph of a couple tangled in bed. “The man is Boris Bogolovo, called Bora, from Tver. You had an encounter with him outside the Chistye Prudy Metro.”

  “He slipped on the ice.” Arkady recognized the schoolgirl Marfa, but what caught his eye was the tiger’s head tattoo on Bora’s chest. “OMON.”

  “Correct. Here’s the kicker, though.” Victor produced a still of a man whose long hair hid his face. On his shoulder was a tattoo of the OMON tiger facing down a pack of wolves. The words OMON and TVER were set in an intricate background of a stone bridge, willows and a mountain stream. Next to the photo Victor placed the photo supplied by Zoya Filotova. “It’s Alexander Filotov, her husband. And the tattoo, I have to say, is a masterpiece.”

  “Or a bull’s-eye.”

  As Arkady left he had to push through Black Berets drinking at the bar. They were sizable men, and they drank in unison, rapping their glasses on the counter, letting the bartender pour vodka to the brim and on “Go!” downing the drink in one swallow. Warm work; every man was sweating and red-faced.

  “Pizza delivery!” the loser shouted; it never ceased being funny.

  10

  The first reaction of many Russians when Chechnya declared itself an independent nation was to laugh. The Moscow criminal world was so dominated by the Chechen mafia that the announcement was viewed as nothing more than a gang declaring itself a government. The problem was that Chechens believed the declaration and, more than ten years later, the war went on.

  Arkady had never tried to extract Eva’s past in Chechnya, not forcefully enough; when the war came up in conversation she always fell silent. All she would say was that she rode a motorcycle from village to village to make her rounds. She made it sound like a Sunday drive. Others called the route Sniper Alley. Certain questions demanded attention. If she entered the conflict on the rebel side, how did she end up with Russian troops? How long had she been with Isakov? How ridiculous a figure had Arkady become? Late for his meeting, would he by running to Mayakovsky Square cause his lungs to explode?

  There was no sign of Ginsberg at Mayakovsky’s statue. The brawny poet of the Revolution loomed overhead, a bronze arm raised against the snow. Arkady wondered whether the journalist was coming by Metro or by car. The crush in the subway might be unbearable for a hunchback and a taxi would be sitting in the traffic Arkady had escaped by parking his car in the middle of the street and telling traffic police to guard it. Still, he was half an hour late and anxious that Ginsberg might be the first Russian ever to be punctual.

  Arkady pulled up the collar of his pea jacket. The heat lamps of outdoor cafés were inviting. He and Ginsberg could sit under one and turn themselves like toast. On Arkady’s second tour of the square he noticed two militia cars with their lights off blocking a corner where a snowplow operated. The plow went back and forth over the same spot. As Arkady approached, an officer jumped out of the near car to intercept him.

  “An accident?” Arkady showed his ID.

  “Yeah.” With a hint of fuck off.

  “Where are the cars?”

  “No cars.”

  “Then why don’t you let traffic through?”

  “I’m not supposed to say anything.”

  Arkady saw no metal parts or sparkling glass on the street.

  “A pedestrian?” Arkady asked.

  “A drunk. He was lying in the street when the plows came through. With snow falling and snow coming off the blade, the drivers don’t see much. They just rolled right over him. Rolled him flat.”

  The other patrol car hit its headlights. The beams illuminated mounds of rosy snow.

  “Did you hear his name?”

  “I don’t know. A yid, I think.”

  “That’s it?”

  “A midget. A midget yid. Who’s going to see that on a night like this?”

  “Was he carrying anything?”

  “I don’t know. The detectives say it was an accident. The detectives—”

  “Isakov and Urman?”

  The officer returned to his car to check. The plow packed and scraped the snow into rosy marble. He shouted back over the roof of the car, “Yeah, Detectives Isakov and Urman. They say it’s a shame but it was an accident, nothing to make a fuss about.”

  “Well, they’re busy men.”

  By the time Arkady returned to Party headquarters the celebration had dwindled down to Platonov, the propagandist Surkov and Tanya. Why she had stayed wasn’t clear, although it was obvious that Surkov was desperate to impress—beautiful women who wandered into Party headquarters generally had the wrong address—and the group had squeezed into his office so that he could show off his four phones, three televisions, and all the remote controls that a media-wise professional would need. A laptop open on the desk emitted an azure glow. The walls were covered with photos of past Soviet glory: the Russian flag lifted to the roof of the Reichstag, a cosmonaut in the space station Mir, a mountain climber exulting on Everest. A glass case held a gilded saber from Syria and a silver plate from Palestine, final tributes rendered to the Party.

  Arkady wanted to say something about Ginsberg, to register the journalist’s death in some manner. It was possible that Ginsberg was drunk and had fallen under a plow; Arkady himself had seen the man stumble off the curb outside the courtroom. And it was possible that Isakov and Urman only happened to get the call. It was possible the moon was made of cheese. It was certain only that the two detectives were always a step ahead of him and that whatever Ginsberg had wanted Arkady to see was gone.

  Everyone else’s attention was fixed on a white uniform tunic that Surkov lifted out of a wooden crate stamped Classified Archives of the CPSU.

  “His uniform.” Surkov opened the tunic and hung it over the back of a chair facing the laptop. The cloth was yellow along the fold lines and gave off a faint scent of camphor.

  Platonov told Arkady, “I told him about the Stalin sighting in the Metro. That set him off.”

  “I’m going.”

  “Just a few more minutes.”

  “His personal effects.” Surkov laid out an antique sewing kit, a snapshot of a freckled girl in an oval frame, a velvet pouch that yielded a briar pipe with a cracked bowl. He tapped the laptop’s cursor pad. “His favorite film.”

  On the screen a man in a leather apron swung on a jungle vine. Tarzan landed high on the limb of a tree and sent out a wild ululating call.

  “We know the human Stalin,” Surkov said.

  The harpist shrugged; she seemed to be more interested in the film. “I don’t think vines grow that way, from the top down.” A faint sibilance touched her consonants, a hint of speech corrected, which only made her more endearing.

  Surkov asked, “Tanya, what is your full name?”

  “Tanya.”

  “Tanya Tanya?”

  “Tanya, Tanechka, Tanyushka,” said Platonov.


  “You’re all drunk. Except for you.” She pointed at Arkady. “You have to catch up.”

  “Wait, this makes it perfect.” From a cabinet Surkov added a white plaster bust of Stalin to the tableau on his desk. “Here he is.”

  Arkady remembered his father saying, “Stalin loved films.” The General and Arkady were polishing boots on the back step of the dacha. Arkady was eight, in a bathing suit and sandals. His father had removed his shirt and let his suspenders hang. “Stalin liked gangster films and, most of all, Tarzan of the Apes. I went to the Kremlin for dinner once with the most powerful men in Russia. He made them all howl like Tarzan and beat their chests.”

  “Did you beat your chest?” Arkady had asked.

  “I was the loudest.” The General suddenly stood and bayed while he thumped his chest. Heads popped out of windows, which put him in a rare good mood. “Maybe I will leave you something in my will after all. Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “At staff meetings Stalin draws wolves, over and over. I got one from a wastebasket and someday that drawing can belong to you. You don’t seem excited.”

  “I am. That sounds nice.”

  His father looked him up and down. “You’re too skinny. Put some meat on your bones.” He pinched Arkady’s ear hard enough to draw tears. “Be a man.”

  “Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable,” Surkov was saying, “those were Stalin’s favorites. And Charlie Chaplin. Stalin had a wonderful sense of humor. Critics say that Stalin was an enemy of creative artists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Writers, composers and filmmakers deluged him with requests for his opinion. ‘Please read my manuscript, Comrade Stalin’ and ‘Look at my painting, Beloved Comrade.’ His analysis was always on the mark.”

  “But no kissing,” said Tanya.

  Surkov said, “Soviet films like The Jolly Guys and Volga! Volga! Volga! didn’t need sex.” He made a stab at holding her hand and missed. He turned to Arkady. “That was your father’s heyday, right? Grandmaster Platonov has told us all about you. Men like you pretend to be neutral or undecided, but as the grandmaster can testify you are not afraid to act. Certain quarters rail against Stalin because they want Russia to fall apart. He’s the symbol they attack because he built the Soviet Union, defeated Fascist Germany and made a poor country into a superpower. Granted, some innocent people suffered, but Russia saved the world. Now we have to save Russia.”