Stalin's Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Platonov said, “You see how outrageous it is for the Russian Patriots to claim Stalin. Stalin is and always will be ours. Don’t you think that if he was going to be resurrected on the Moscow Metro, he’d let us know?”

  Things were getting a bit rich for Arkady. “We have to go.”

  Tanya said, “Take off your jacket and stay awhile. Don’t leave me with these stiffs.”

  “After all the trouble I had getting you through security,” Surkov said. He told Arkady, “She attempted to smuggle in a roll of steel wire under her coat.”

  “Wire for my harp.”

  Arkady said, “Tanya plays the harp at the Metropol. I’ve seen her. I just never know when she’s going to pop up next.”

  “Steel?” Platonov asked her.

  “It lasts longer than sheep gut and it’s cheaper than silver or gold.”

  Surkov said, “Before you go I wanted to tell you that I was a great admirer of General Renko’s campaigns and never put any stock in those rumors. War is terrible, but no Soviet general collected enemy ears.”

  Arkady said, “They were dried and strung like apricots. He had pilots drop the ears with flares over German lines. If you’re a boy from Berlin and it’s your first night in the trenches and ears start falling from the sky, you may not be there in the morning.”

  “You saw them?”

  “He brought souvenirs home.”

  “Well, the main thing is that he came home and God knows what he saw out there on the front. Being who you are, I have something here that you might appreciate. Something very special.”

  On his desk the propaganda chief set a gramophone with black enameling, a felt turntable, and an arm and horn decorated in silver arabesques. From a record album with no title, notes or credits he slipped out a stiff and heavy 78 rpm disk. He handled the record on its edge with his fingertips and let it settle on the spindle.

  “The label is blank,” Arkady said.

  “A pressing of one, not for release to the general public.” Surkov set the needle in a groove.

  “Will I know the performer?” Tanya asked.

  “Before your time,” Platonov said.

  The acoustics of the office seemed to expand and tap into another room’s nervous coughs, shuffling feet and stage fright. Finally a piano picked out a tune.

  “Beria on piano,” Surkov said.

  Beria, who had signed death orders for perhaps millions of his countrymen as head of state security, was tentative at first, but gained confidence as he played.

  “Faster!” someone ordered and Beria immediately picked up the tempo.

  Tanya was surprised. “I know this. It’s ‘Tea for Two.’ I play this.”

  “Beria was also quite the dancer,” Surkov said.

  Tanya whispered to Arkady, “I remember you, too. You were sitting with Americans at breakfast at the Metropol.”

  “I thought your eyes were closed.”

  “It makes people nervous if you watch while they eat. Why were you with Americans?”

  “We had a mutual friend.” Using the term loosely for Petya.

  “Dance?” Surkov offered her his hand.

  She shrugged and let him drag her into a seesaw sort of polka around the desk. Platonov watched wistfully, missing a playmate his own age.

  “How well do you know her?” Arkady asked.

  “Not a bit, but a pretty woman always dresses up a place.”

  “Any more threats?”

  “Not since I placed myself in your hands. You’re doing an excellent job.”

  The needle hissed. A hymn followed and Tanya released herself with an audible sigh.

  Orthodox hymns were a slow blending of voices, repetitive and hypnotic. Arkady wondered who was in such a butchers’ choir. Brezhnev? Molotov? Khrushchev? A strong baritone carried them all through the crackling of scratches.

  “That’s Marshal Budyoni, the Cossack,” Surkov said.

  As Arkady recalled, his father had considered Budyoni the stupidest man in the Red Army, an old cavalryman who never made the transition from horses to tanks, and worth at least a battalion to the Germans.

  Tanya said, “Communists singing hymns?”

  Platonov said, “In wartime you pray, whether you’re an atheist or not.”

  None of the songs had introductions, but as if by command the hymn gave way to a single voice singing, “I searched for the grave of my beloved while grief tore at my heart. The heart aches when love has gone. Where are you, Suliko?”

  Surkov mouthed, “It’s him.”

  Stalin’s everyday voice was as dry and ironic as a hangman’s. Singing brought out a pleasant tenor and a sentimental feel for melody. It was a solo, just Stalin and the piano, with Beria, presumably, back at the keyboard. The Great Leader had a Georgian accent, but then the song had originally been Georgian, and the tale was classic. A forlorn lover discovers that the girl he seeks has been transformed by death. When he calls, “Are you there, my Suliko?” a nightingale answers, “Yes.”

  Surkov said, “He could be standing here with us, he sounds that close.”

  “Then it’s definitely time to go,” Arkady said.

  Tanya begged a ride. “The people I came with are gone and my coat is right downstairs.”

  “Stay with me, Tanyushka.” Surkov reached out.

  She took Arkady’s arm. “Save me from this crazed Bolshevik. It’s International Women’s Day. Protect me.”

  “Coming?” Arkady asked Platonov.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  The stockroom was outlined in white by the light of a streetlamp. Inside the stockroom coat hangers, a copying machine, scanner, and shredder sat in the dark. Platonov had yet to come downstairs; instead, “Suliko” was playing again and the sentimental tenor sang, “I saw a rose drip dew that fell like tears. Are you crying too, my Suliko?”

  “Dance with me,” Tanya said.

  “Haven’t you danced already?”

  “Surkov doesn’t count.” She eased Arkady’s pea jacket off his shoulders and took his hands in hers. “You know how to dance.”

  Arkady was capable of a waltz. It was an appropriate interlude on such a night: Stalin singing, the windows shivering, Tanya resting her head on Arkady’s chest. What a ridiculous couple they made, he thought; she was the belle of the ball and he looked like he should be shoveling snow. There were calluses on her fingertips, but they were from stroking a harp.

  “I’m sorry I’m in the same dress you saw me in this morning. I played for receptions all day long. I must look like a pressed cabbage.”

  “A bit.”

  “You’re supposed to say I look like a white rose. You don’t say much, do you?”

  He considered opening gambits. “Do you really want to marry an American?”

  Her head lifted briefly.

  “How did you know?”

  “The Cupid agency. They described you as a dancer. What sort of dance?”

  After a moment, “Modern. What else did they say about me?”

  “That you weren’t my type.”

  “You see, their problem is they don’t like spontaneity. I believe when an opportunity comes you have to seize it. How do you feel about adventure?”

  “It’s almost always uncomfortable. Tell me, what sort of friends would bring you here and then leave without you?”

  “Well, now I can tell them I heard Stalin.” The name provoked a sibilant s.

  “It’s amazing. I know some people who just saw Stalin.”

  “Are they crazy?”

  “I don’t know.” They brushed against the sleeves of a coat rack. “You deserve a better partner.”

  “You’re exactly who I wanted. Are you lucky with women?”

  “Not lately.”

  “Maybe your losing streak is at an end.”

  When the song ended Tanya let go reluctantly. “Suliko” was replaced by a speech, one of Stalin’s harangues, which could go on forever because the Great Instructor was always interrupted b
y applause described in the newspapers as “steady and thunderous.” Anyway, nothing to dance to, Arkady thought and although he sensed that Tanya was disappointed, he pulled on his jacket.

  “We must smash and overthrow the theory that proclaims that the Trotskyite wreckers do not have the use of large resources.” Here was the other Stalin, a voice like a hammer and words like a carpenter’s nails. “This is untrue, comrades. The more we move forward, the more successes we enjoy, then the more hateful become the remnants of the exploiter classes. We must smash and overthrow them!”

  Applause broke out as Surkov turned up the volume and let the high tide of adulation pour from the gramophone. Arkady said nothing because Tanya had slipped a garrote around his neck and pulled it tight. Arm strength was where playing the harp paid off. The garrote was steel harp wire attached at each end to a wooden handle. Tanya stood behind Arkady, but he wasn’t going anywhere and all she had to do was lean back to stop him in his tracks. The wire dug into his neck and crossed in back to her strong hands. If he hadn’t turned up the collar of his jacket, the wire would have been a circular knife.

  All the same, the wire dug too deep for Arkady to pull it off or loosen. When he tried to reach back or turn she applied more pressure the other way. He couldn’t draw air or call out because his windpipe was closed.

  Mounting applause and shouts of “Root them out!” and “Throw them to the dogs!”

  Arkady felt his face balloon. She kept him moving backwards and off balance, letting him flail and spill pamphlets off a copier. “Marx: Frequently Asked Questions.” Arkady had a question or two. She missed a kick toward the back of his knee. If he did fall she could drag him by his neck and he’d be dead all the faster.

  Sustained applause and calls of “Bullets are too good!”

  Strangulation came in stages. First, disbelief and a wild thrashing of resistance. Second, dawning recognition of dwindling resources. Third, spasms, limpness, and acceptance. He was well into stage two. He kicked the copier and propelled himself backwards. In the momentary slackness, he snapped his head into hers and heard the crack of bone.

  Swelling applause and shouts of “Beat them and beat them and beat them again!”

  They began skidding on blood. He got one hand on hers, eased the wire enough to find a straw’s worth of breath, plunged backwards and sandwiched her into the shelves and a cascade of light-bulbs, poster board, markers and scissors. She abandoned the wire and snatched a scissors as it flew by.

  Thunderous applause and demands to “Stamp on them like vermin!”

  She stabbed him in the neck but the raised collar befuddled penetration. When she swung for his eyes he blocked her arm and threw her over the worktable. She came up scissors first over the photo cropper, where he caught her by the wrist and, with one hand, held her hand secure over the cropping deck while he raised the blade.

  Hysterical applause, everyone on their feet, shouting themselves hoarse, waving their fists and again applauding with burning hands.

  He could cut her at the wrist. Across the palm. The middle knuckles. Perhaps, for a harpist, fingertips would do.

  Arkady found himself stepping into the picture, taking in the blood coursing from Tanya’s broken nose, her outstretched hand and the way she stared at the cropping blade.

  “Behave,” he said in not much more than a croak.

  She dropped the scissors and sank to the floor, shook as if she had the chills and let him tie her hands together behind her back with an extension cord.

  “My God!” Surkov stood at the door. He turned on the lights and a blood red picture jumped to life. “My God! My God!”

  Platonov followed Surkov in, each step slower than the one before. “What happened here? Did you slaughter a pig?”

  Shelves, paper, overturned copier lay in a pudding of blood and broken glass. Tanya sat against a printer, legs splayed from gown smeared red. She held her head back to stanch the flow of blood.

  “My pamphlets.” Surkov tried to peel one blood-soaked “Frequently Asked Questions” from another. “Are you crazy, Renko? What have you done to Tanya?”

  Arkady’s throat hurt too much to waste words on Surkov. Hoping for an address book, he laid the contents of Tanya’s handbag on the worktable: cigarettes, lighter, house keys, change purse, Metro card, memberships in fitness and foreign film clubs and an Internet café, a pass for the Conservatory, a calendar of saints from the Church of the Redeemer and identification papers for Tatyana Stepanovna Schedrina, an innocent who wouldn’t harm a fly. He was looking at the only snapshot she carried when headlights swept across the courtyard. Arkady ran outside but only caught a glimpse of a blue or black sportscar. Of course there would be transportation for her to leave in; he would have thought of that if he hadn’t poured all his attention into the photograph. It was the same picture of Tanya he had seen enlarged in the Cupid album. Same snow princess on the same black diamond slope. However, the agency photo had been only half the picture. Tanya’s photo included her skiing partner, a barrel-chested man in daredevil red and, although Arkady suffered the surprise people experience from seeing familiar faces in unfamiliar settings, he had no trouble recognizing Detective Marat Urman.

  He looked up at flakes crossing the light of a streetlamp. He opened his jacket to let the cold in. Later every turn of the head would be agony.

  Right now, numb was good.

  11

  At five in the morning a table and chairs were brought into a basement room at Petrovka. The room was maroon, no windows, only a toilet, a mop sink and an oversized drain in the floor. Arkady sat facing Prosecutor Zurin and a major of the militia. The major’s cap was the size of a saddle, gray with red trim. He removed it to take notes because taking notes was a serious business; more careers were built by going to meetings and taking notes than by triumphs on the battlefield. They all stood as a deputy minister arrived with a pair of Kremlin guards and took the last chair. He did not introduce himself and didn’t need to. He relieved the major of his pad and pencil and when Zurin started to tape-record the session the man shook his head and, poof, the recorder disappeared.

  “It didn’t happen,” he said.

  “What didn’t?” the major asked.

  “Any of it. The Communists do not want their headquarters to be known for drunken debacles. There will be no militia report. The accounts of what happened last night are so contradictory it would take a trial to sort them out, and a trial is the last thing we will allow. There will be no medical report. The girl and Renko will receive medical attention but the official cause of injuries is their choice. She ran into a door and you, Renko, I suppose, accidentally scratched yourself shaving. It won’t go on your record, but in a few weeks you will be quietly cashiered and an appropriate occupation will be found for you. Tending a lighthouse, something like that. In the meantime, there will be no mention of Stalin. No mention of Stalin sightings or Stalin singing or anything having to do with Stalin at all. This is considered a matter of state security. If and when Stalin is reintroduced to the public we will do it on our own terms, not as part of a brawl or an attempted rape.” He stood to go. “This meeting did not happen.”

  Arkady said, “I won’t go.” He had to push each word through his throat.

  “You won’t go?”

  “I won’t leave Moscow.”

  “We will ship you in a railway car for pigs.”

  “I can’t go.”

  “You should have thought about that before you attacked the girl.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Zurin and the major shifted their chairs, putting some distance between themselves and Arkady. In the Vatican, did priests defy a message from the pope? The deputy minister slapped a dossier.

  “You killed a prosecutor.”

  “Long ago. Self-defense.”

  “So who am I to believe, a man with a history of violence or a girl? You’re getting off very lightly. You broke her nose.”

  “In self-defense.”


  “So you did attack her? That’s what the witness Surkov said.”

  “He didn’t see.”

  “Didn’t see what? That she led you on and then stopped? Naturally, you got angry. It got a little rough, a little out of control. Did you threaten to cut off her hands? The hands of a harpist?”

  Arkady meant to say he never would have done it but his throat seized up.

  “And you say you didn’t attack her. A girl has a broken nose and you hardly have a scratch. Let’s see this famous neck of yours.”

  Arkady stood still while the bodyguards braced him and the deputy minister undid the top button of Arkady’s jacket, spread the collar wide and involuntarily sucked air. Even the guards flinched, because despite the fact that Arkady’s collar had been turned up during the attack, his neck bore the deep blue bruising and red rope burn of a hanged man.

  “Oh.” The deputy minister covered his confusion with the last of his outrage. “At any rate, you should be ashamed to drag your father’s name through the mud. Renko was a respected name.”

  Snow had stopped falling and had left a bell-like resonance in the air. Traffic lights blinked awake and the noise of plows subsided, but halfway home the pain of driving—turning his head to look right and left—was more than Arkady could bear and he left his car by the river and walked the rest of the way, head down, following his feet, letting the few flakes of snow lifted by the breeze settle in his hair, melt and cool his neck.

  At least the search for Stalin was over. Which meant, presumably, that Arkady no longer had to listen to the imaginary threats that Grandmaster Platonov concocted to stall real estate developers. An American-style apartment house with a spa and sushi bar could soon rise from the ashes of the chess club. To Platonov’s credit the old Bolshie had stoutly defended Arkady in his police statement. Anyway, Arkady was free to rest up for his next assignment, which sounded as if it might be east of the Urals and north of the Arctic Circle.