Stalin's Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  He listened for the sound of an elevator; elevator bays were always lit and gave directions. Or of a floor being mopped; the cleaning person might be a kindly soul who would point the way. Instead, he heard tapping, the sound that had slipped in and out of his consciousness for the better part of a week.

  Arkady followed the sound two more doors. The knob turned easily and opened to a room with an examining table, sink and charts of the human digestive system. Zhenya was on the floor in a nest of hospital blankets playing chess on a plastic computerized board by the light of a desk lamp he had carried down with him. He stared up at Arkady. Another boy might have screamed.

  “Go ahead.” Arkady settled into a wheelchair. “Finish. I have to sit.”

  Playing black, Zhenya was down to an endgame. White had more pieces but they were scattered, while Zhenya’s knight drove white’s king into a panic. Zhenya finished with a pinned rook, a swindled pawn, and a series of rapid checks, each move quickly accompanied by the simulated tap of a game clock, click-click, click-click, click-click. Mate.

  Zhenya’s face hovered over the small pool of light cast by the lamp. His eyes were wide and lit from below. He was still in his anorak.

  “What are you doing here?” Arkady asked.

  “Visiting.”

  “At night?”

  “I’m here at the hospital, I might as well stay. It’s easy. I just go from one waiting room to another. They have Coke machines.”

  That was a speech coming from Zhenya.

  “Next time visit me during visiting hours, when I’m awake.”

  “Are you angry?”

  “Because of the…” Arkady gestured to the general mess that was his head. “Not at you.”

  “I ran. My father shot you and I ran.”

  “I’ve done worse.”

  Arkady’s eye fell on a telephone. When he picked up the receiver he heard a dial tone.

  “Who are you calling?” Zhenya asked. “It’s pretty late.”

  “It’s not just late, it’s the hour when men with heads like eggplants walk the earth.” Arkady punched in 33-31-33, waited, and hung up. He was exhausted.

  “Like Baba Yaga.”

  “The witch who ate small children? Sure.”

  “Like my father.”

  Baba Yaga lived in the woods in a house that stood on chicken legs in a yard surrounded by a fence of human bones. Zhenya used to say nothing at all and Arkady would make up adventures about the children who escaped.

  “What do you mean? Every weekend we used to go looking for your father.”

  Zhenya said nothing.

  The mute routine. Zhenya could play that like an artist; it might be a week before he said another word.

  “Your father tried to kill me and he would have killed you, but you had us search for him every weekend. Why?”

  Zhenya shrugged.

  “Did you know what he was going to do?”

  Zhenya dropped the chess pieces into a chamois sack in order of value starting with black pawns, another of his rituals. Arkady remembered how in Gorky Park the younger Zhenya would walk around the fountain a magical four times.

  “You take good care of your pieces.”

  Zhenya placed the rook in the bag.

  “It’s like they’re alive, isn’t it?” Arkady said. “You’re not just playing them, you’re helping them. And it’s not just you thinking, it’s them too. They’re your friends.” Zhenya’s eyes shot up, although Arkady was simply using the key that Zhenya had given him. “You said your father was Baba Yaga? Is that who your friends are fighting?”

  It was two o’clock in the morning by the digital watch on Zhenya’s thin wrist. An hour suspended in the dark.

  “They’re not alive,” Zhenya said. “They’re just plastic.”

  Arkady waited.

  “But I take care of them,” Zhenya added.

  “How do you do that?”

  “By not losing.”

  “What happened if you lost?”

  “I didn’t get supper.”

  “Did that happen often?”

  “In the beginning.”

  “He was pretty good?”

  “So-so.”

  “How old were you when you beat him in chess for real?”

  “Nine. He said he was proud. I broke a dish and he whipped me with a belt. He said it was on account of the dish, but I knew.” Zhenya allowed himself a tiny smile.

  “Where was your mother?”

  The smile disappeared.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I understand your father liked to ride trains. He must have been gone a lot of the time.”

  “He took us with him.”

  “Did you play chess on the train?”

  No answer.

  “Did you play chess with other passengers?”

  “My father wanted me to bring them down a peg or two. That’s what he always said, bring them down a peg or two.”

  “Did anyone ever ask why you weren’t in school?”

  “On a train? No.”

  “Or why you didn’t have a little color in your cheeks?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever lose?”

  “A few times.”

  “What did your father do?”

  No answer.

  “Finally some gold miners recognized you.”

  “They beat my father and threw my chess set under the wheels.”

  “Of a train?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your father retrieved the set?”

  “He sent me. I would have gone anyway.”

  “So, you spent a year going back and forth from Moscow to Vladivostok playing chess in a train compartment? A year of your life?”

  Zhenya looked away.

  “Did you and your father ever have a holiday, go to the beach, run on the grass?” Arkady asked.

  Zhenya said nothing, as if such a childhood was a fantasy. But Arkady felt that there was something else missing.

  “When I first asked about your father traveling, you said, ‘He took us.’ Who besides you?”

  Zhenya said nothing and showed no expression at all.

  “Was it your mother?”

  Zhenya shook his head.

  “Who?”

  Zhenya maintained his silence but his eyes grew alarmed as Arkady took the white king from the chamois sack. Arkady turned the piece over in his fingers and hid it in his fist, opened his hand and let the boy snatch the piece back.

  “Dora.”

  “Who was Dora?”

  “My little sister. She wasn’t good at chess. She tried but she lost.”

  “What happened?”

  “She didn’t get her supper.”

  Clarity descended on Arkady and clarity was crushing. For a year he thought he had been helping Zhenya search for a loving father, and all that time Zhenya had been stalking a monster.

  “So all those times we were searching for your father, what did you want me along for?”

  “To kill him.”

  Arkady had to rethink everything.

  16

  Zurin gave a going away party for Arkady, a quiet affair in the prosecutor’s office, just espressos and pastries with other investigators. That Senior Investigator Renko was being bundled off was all the staff knew. Not really demoted, but certainly not promoted. Moved sideways. Reassigned.

  “The choice of his post,” Zurin said. “The choice of his post in some beautiful—”

  “Backwater,” said a wit.

  The prosecutor continued, “Some historical town like Suzdal, a quiet setting far from the stress of Moscow. It has been only a month since Investigator Renko was shot in the line of duty. No one has been more concerned about his recovery than I. I speak for the entire office when I say, Welcome back.”

  “And good-bye, it seems,” Arkady said.

  “For the time being. We will reassess the health situation periodically. I understand it takes a year for a full recovery. In the meantime, you
nger hands will have their turn at the oar and gain some experience. Of course, we all look forward to your return. The main thing for you is to not hang about aimlessly. Not linger.”

  Arkady looked on the faces of the office staff, the time servers who moved at half speed, the spent and bitter, the up-and-comers who aped Zurin’s bonhomie. And what did they see in him but a pale man whose black hair was growing in mixed with gray and a small livid scar on his forehead? Lazarus barely back from the dead and already being shown the door.

  “My choice of reassignment?”

  “It’s been cleared with the prosecutor general.”

  “You don’t think that because of the Stalin sightings anyone would want to keep me away from reporters?”

  “Not at all. To a man we envy you. We’ll be tripping over corpses while you will be reconnecting with the true, authentic Russia.”

  Arkady considered Suzdal as he drove. Suzdal, holy beacon of holiday buses. Suzdal, two hundred kilometers from Moscow. Suzdal, the perfect place for a damaged man to rusticate.

  He stood on the accelerator, forged a new lane between two legal ones, slowed on Petrovka and then plunged into traffic headed for the river. As in chess, position was everything. A cardboard box carrying leftover evidence, personal effects and a spiral notebook with a cheerful cover of daisies bounced on the back seat of the Zhiguli.

  Snow had melted away in weather that was freakishly warm, swinging from one extreme to the other with no stop in between. Caused by global warming? No matter, the city basked in its false spring, in balmy breezes that teased out daffodils and uncovered Igor Borodin.

  Borodin had been found in a culvert in Izmailovo Park, an empty vodka bottle by his side. Forensics found no sign of violence. The contents of his stomach matched what he had consumed after his acquittal for shooting the pizza deliveryman a month before. His doctor confirmed that Borodin suffered from depression and had nearly killed himself binge-drinking twice before. This time, with so much to celebrate, he had succeeded. It seemed only fitting that the investigating detectives, Isakov and Urman, had served with the dead man in OMON.

  So far as Arkady knew, no one drew a connection between the fatal domestic quarrel of Kuznetsov and wife and Borodin’s overindulgence. All they seemed to have in common was alcohol and the crackerjack team of Isakov and Urman, whose solution rate was a thing of joy.

  At an outdoor market Zhenya hopped into the car with a fistful of pirate CDs and DVDs. Arkady hoped the boy hadn’t shoplifted; the mafia had rules about that sort of thing. As they drove to the chess club Arkady worked on his visuals. A blue truck. A rectangular poster. A gray traffic officer. A golden onion dome. A green something. A blue bus. A priest like a black cone. A checkerboard pattern of maroon and something bricks. A black and something-striped something. He remembered Elena Ilyichnina had said that injured brain cells could repair themselves but that dead ones never came back. So, one brain, slightly trimmed.

  They found Platonov sitting on the club’s basement stairs. Although weeks had passed since his five-hundred-dollar celebration, the grandmaster was still a wreck.

  “I am proud that I defied the banality of a savings account but debauchery has come at a cost. I have to say that your friend Victor stood by me shoulder to shoulder in my resolve. Most men would have broken and said, ‘My dear Ilya Sergeevich, set some aside for a rainy day.’ Not Victor. Will you see him soon?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Dear Lord, make him suffer. My liver is as tender as a balloon and I had hoped to make some small improvements around the club. Not that I’m complaining to somebody who was, you know—bang!—in the head.”

  Down the stairs the same unwashed basement window allowed the same murky light. A fluorescent tube sizzled over a dozen games so deep in progress the players seemed somnambulists. In scummy glass cases not a single chess set, time clock or layer of dust seemed disturbed. Heads swiveled, however, as Zhenya took over the board tacitly reserved for the strongest player in the room. He opened his backpack and chamois sack and sniffed the air as if for prey.

  Platonov said, “If the little shit induces any member to play for money he will learn that no member of this club has any. They are carefully screened to be pure and poor.”

  “Like an anticasino.”

  “Exactly. Renko, they’re not going to tax me on the five hundred dollars, are they? It went through my hands so quickly. It’s not even as if I won the money fair and square. Zhenya gave me the game.”

  “How far can he go?”

  “Hard to say.” Platonov dropped his voice. “He’s like a boy born with perfect pitch. He may lose it when his voice changes. He’s of ordinary intelligence. His idols are the Black Berets, which is normal for a boy his age. At the chessboard he is a different creature. Where more intelligent players analyze a situation, Zhenya sees. He’s a bratty little Mozart who composes music as fast as he can write because it’s already complete in his head.”

  “Any Black Beret in particular?”

  “A Captain Isakov seems to be the main hero. Did you know that he led six Black Berets against a hundred Chechen terrorists?”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Why not? At Stalingrad we had snipers who killed Germans by the score. Look it up. We had the Volga River at our back. Stalin said, ‘Not one step back!’ One step back and we would have been in the drink. So how has the recuperation been going? You’re looking well, everything considered. Are you yourself?”

  “How would I know?”

  Arkady had mineral water and Victor a beer at a sidewalk café under a leafless tree on the Boulevard Ring. Arabs swept by to their embassies. Babies rolled by in their strollers. Victor read Arkady’s spiral notebook and when he was done he waved to the waiter.

  “This is not a notebook of beer-sized insanity; this merits vodka. To begin with, Arkady, are you crazy? Maybe this is a result of the shooting?”

  “These notes are just to jog my memory of certain cases.”

  “No. These notes cover cases that were never yours. Kuznetsov chopped by a cleaver, his wife stuffed with her own tongue, the journalist Ginsberg run down and Borodin drunk. These cases were disposed of by Detectives Isakov and Urman as a domestic squabble, a slip on the ice, the dangers of drinking alone and not sharing. But you insinuate murder.”

  “Just suggesting they were inadequately investigated.”

  “Did you see Ginsberg run down?”

  “No.”

  “Was there any evidence of foul play with Borodin?”

  “No.”

  “What have they got to do with the Kuznetsovs?”

  “Isakov and Urman.”

  “Do you hear the circularity of your argument?”

  “The notes are just for me.”

  “You had better hope so, because if Isakov and Urman get wind of it your body will be found, but the notebook will not. I feel bad. I got you involved with Zoya Filotova killing and scalping her husband. That blew up in our face.”

  “The notes aren’t well organized.”

  “Well, you just tossed everyone in.”

  “I tried to give everyone their own page and a list of facts and near-facts. Isakov and Urman to start with. Then the Russian Patriot video crew—Zelensky, Petya, and Bora—each got a page.”

  “They’re campaigning in Tver today.” Victor paused reverently as a short carafe of vodka arrived, then reached across to flip pages. “You gave Tanya a page.”

  “Urman’s girlfriend and handles a garrote well. Bonus points for playing the harp.”

  “Here’s Zhenya’s father, Osip Lysenko? What the devil has he got to do with this?”

  “Anyone who shoots me automatically earns a page.”

  “If you keep this up you will get shot again. Who knows? Isakov and Urman may be the ones to find your body. I thought you had a ticket out of town.”

  “So they say.”

  Victor turned another page. “The rest of the notes are crazy. Arrows, dia
grams, cross-references.”

  “Connections. Some are sketchy.”

  “You worry me, Arkady. I think you’re coming undone.”

  “I wanted to be complete.”

  “Is that so? You know whose name I haven’t seen? Eva. Doctor Eva Kazka. I think she deserves a page.”

  Arkady was startled by the omission. He wrote Eva’s name on a fresh page and wondered what else about her he had missed.

  “I think you have it all now,” Victor said.

  Arkady watched a bus roll by advertising a day trip to Suzdal. “See the Soul of Russia.” The trip included lunch.

  “There’s a number,” he said.

  “What number?”

  “I don’t recall the shooting and there are some other blank patches, so I’ve been working on phone numbers, addresses, names. What does thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three mean to you?”

  “You’re serious? It means nothing.”

  “What could it mean?”

  Victor took a first sip of vodka like a butcher whetting his knife.

  “Not a phone number; that would be seven digits. Maybe the combination to a padlock or a safe. Right twice to thirty-three, left to thirty-one, right to thirty-three, turn latch and open, only…”

  “Only I don’t know whose safe or where it is.”

  “Visualize the number. Typed? Handwritten? Who wrote it, you or somebody else? A man or a woman’s hand? What was the number originally written on? A paper napkin or a bar coaster? Is it a license plate number? The winning number of a lottery? How can you remember and not remember?”

  “Elena Ilyichnina says that bits of my memory will come back. I have to go.”

  Arkady paid for Victor’s vodka, the price of his expertise.

  “Do you think I drink too much? Be honest.”

  “A touch.”

  “It could be worse.” Victor looked right and left. “Did Elena Ilyichnina say anything about me?”

  “No.”

  “Did she recognize me?”

  “Why should she?”

  Victor pulled back the hair at his temples and revealed a small puckered scar on each side.

  “You always astonish me,” Arkady said. “You too?”

  “A little different. I had a tiny drug addiction problem about ten years ago, so I had myself drilled.”