Stalin's Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  The cat leapt up to a shelf of Nazi helmets, some whole and some punctured. On a work counter, a metal canister with instructions in German was the explosive end of a “potato masher” hand grenade. The foggy eyes of an ancient gas mask peeked from a cabinet. A camouflage tunic on a hook had the same shoulder emblem—star, helmet and rose—that Arkady had seen at the rally in Tver.

  “Did you go to the rally today?” Arkady asked Rudi.

  “For Isakov? He’s a fucking fascist.”

  “He seems popular.”

  “He’s still a fucking fascist.”

  “I met Stalin,” Rudi’s grandfather said.

  Arkady took a second to adjust to such a broad change of subject. It was possible, Arkady thought. Big Rudi was old enough.

  “When?” Arkady asked.

  “Today.”

  “Where?”

  “On the hill in back. Look out the window, he’s there now.”

  Enough light was cast by the window for Arkady to see there was no Stalin and no hill, only the stubble of winter grass.

  “I was too slow. He’s gone. Did he say anything?” Arkady asked.

  “To go to the dig.” The old boy became excited. “Come with us tomorrow. Stalin will be there.”

  “Will Isakov?”

  “Maybe. It doesn’t matter,” Rudi said. “You’re not a Digger. It’s members only.”

  “Why?” Arkady asked.

  “One, you’d be in the way. Two, since you don’t know what you’re doing you might get hurt or hurt someone else. Three, it’s strictly against the rules. Four, no fucking way. Why do you even ask? What did you expect to see there?”

  That Arkady did not know. Signs? Maybe revelations?

  “The monster not only knocked down an invading Fascist plane,” Zhenya said, “it came out of Lake Brosno and chased away the invading Mongols hundreds of years ago. Now scientists have to find out if it’s the same monster or a descendant. That’s what the expedition is all about. They have a picture of it, a photograph, not a drawing. I saw it on the television.”

  Arkady switched his cell phone to the other ear; when Zhenya was excited his voice tended to be shrill. Nothing had excited him more than the Lake Brosno monster.

  “What did it look like?” Arkady asked.

  “It was kind of blurred. It could have been a form of apatosaurus. Definitely. The scientists went out in a boat with special equipment and detected something really strange underneath the surface.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They dropped a grenade on it.”

  “Any man of science would.” Arkady looked out the apartment window at the roofs of Tver. He saw church spires but no onion domes to lend the city grace or fantasy. On the other hand, Arkady appreciated the local monster for turning Zhenya from a virtual mute into a chatterbox. “What did the monster do then?”

  “Nothing. It escaped. It would have been great if it swallowed the boat.”

  “And it would have been proof.”

  Zhenya said, “I’d like to see a video of that.”

  “Wouldn’t we all?”

  Pushkin’s statue had a top hat, iron poise, perhaps a smirk. Arkady had no such style. Every few minutes, different men would come out of the dark, pass him and the statue in a speculative fashion and continue on their way. Fifteen minutes late Rudi rode the Ural up the embankment to Pushkin’s statue, followed by another biker on Rudi’s red bike.

  Rudi climbed off, removed his helmet and shook his ponytail free. For the cool of the evening he wore camos, army green, not OMON blue. “Sorry, I’m late. I had to take back roads and alleys so no one would see me on a tricycle.”

  “I understand. You have a reputation to protect.”

  Rudi’s fellow rider was a heavyset man upholstered in leather and chains. His name was Misha. Misha rattled impatiently while Arkady counted out money.

  “The helmet?” Arkady asked.

  “In the sidecar. I filled the fuel tank.”

  That was more than Arkady had expected. He unsnapped the sidecar cover and found a scuffed but uncracked motorcycle helmet with a visor.

  “Thanks.”

  “You know my granddad.”

  “Big Rudi with the pitchfork?”

  “Right. He is really sure he saw Stalin. He heard there was a man in Moscow who was shot in the head. Stalin appeared and the guy got up and walked away.”

  “That’s quite a story.”

  Misha said, “Rudi, are we going or what?”

  Rudi waved him off and told Arkady, “I gave you a new tire. A knobby, for off-the-road action.”

  “That’s generous of you.” Arkady did not plan to go off the road.

  “You realize you’re coming out ahead on this deal, Renko.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You’re so fucking suspicious.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, my granddad wants to see you again. It would mean a lot to him and I’d personally consider us even. He’s positive he saw you here during the war.”

  “I wasn’t even born.”

  “Humor him. He lives in the past and he remembers old stuff better than new. Sometimes he gets mixed up. He sees you and now he’s all wound up. Big deal, you drop by the shop for a visit. A fucking hour of your precious time.”

  “At the dig.”

  “I can’t do that. Like I said before, you’re not a Digger.”

  “I’ll talk to Big Rudi at the dig. Nowhere else.”

  “I explained, it’s not allowed. You have to be a Digger.”

  “Too bad,” said Arkady.

  “What a son of a bitch.”

  “The dig.”

  Rudi and Misha got on the red bike, which came to life with a vibrato that warned the world to move aside while Rudi went in circles around Arkady.

  “You know, Pushkin’s not the only one here with brass balls.”

  Rudi made another turn.

  “We leave for the dig at six.”

  As soon as Rudi had gone Arkady checked out his new acquisition. New to him. The Ural had to be thirty years old, at least. A spare tire was secured on the back of the sidecar, which looked like a large sandal and had the major amenities: a shovel and a windshield. The machine-gun mount had been cut off. Arkady had noticed when he first saw the bike that it was stamped in various places with a star, meaning it had come off a military assembly line.

  Stalin’s engineers got their hands on some German BMWs, took them apart, strengthened this, simplified that and when they put the bikes back together they were Russian. Cossacks might be a lowly transporter of potatoes now, but they had once carried heroes to Berlin.

  Arkady rolled through Tver. The Ural’s engine wasn’t symphonic but it was steady, its power dedicated not to speed but to traction, and since the sidecar was connected to the bike it drove like a car. No leaning. He rode by one dark restaurant after another, from one empty square to the next, like a chess piece alone on a board. If half the city was on the crawl, he was looking under the wrong rocks. He swung back toward the embankment, gathered speed along the river and had yet to see an open enterprise apart from an all-night casino that, compared to Moscow’s, had the allure of a pachinko parlor.

  He was stopped at a traffic light when a Porsche convertible rolled alongside. Urman was at the wheel, looking more like a detective from Miami than one from Moscow. He was too occupied with smoothing his wind-whipped hair to give Arkady more than a glance; he might not have seen the bike at all. When the light turned green the Porsche took off like a rocket. Six blocks further on, Urman was entering a hotel as Arkady rode by.

  Arkady U-turned and coasted back to a playground of seesaws, gnomes and kiosks opposite the hotel. The Porsche was in the driveway. The Hotel Obermeier was a fortress of brick. The ground floor, however, was plate glass and fountains, and Arkady had a sweeping view of the reception desk, concierge’s podium, elevator bank, bar and restaurant. All was dark except for a table by the restaurant
window, where Urman joined Isakov, Eva and Prosecutor Sarkisian. Two waiters slumped over a corner table.

  The party had reached the brandy and cigar stage, had possibly reached it hours ago but Sarkisian was holding forth. Urman laughed and filled a snifter. Was the subject humorous homicides or the election odds of the hometown hero? Isakov listened stoically, while Eva made no effort to hide her distaste. Sarkisian put his finger by his nose, signifying Armenian powers of insight. When he raised a glass, Isakov and Urman followed suit, while Eva rose from her chair and stood by the window to smoke a cigarette. Arkady trusted that on her side the plate glass had to be a mirror. Isakov waved to her to return to the table. She ignored him and rested her forehead against the pane. It wasn’t a happy scene.

  Isakov motioned Eva again to rejoin the group at the table and she continued to ignore him. Urman covered the moment by humoring Sarkisian until, finally and without a word, Eva went to the elevator bank, pushed a button and disappeared behind metal doors. The men sat stupefied by her desertion. A room lit in the middle of the second floor. The waiters went on sleeping, heads deep in their arms.

  Sarkisian pointed in the general direction of Eva and apparently said something less than complimentary, because Isakov picked up a fork and pressed it against the prosecutor’s neck. Arkady remembered what Ginsberg had said about Isakov’s calm; the detective’s move was unhurried and he didn’t appear to raise his voice, but he conveyed conviction. He seemed to tell Sarkisian what he probably should not do or say ever again and the prosecutor nodded in emphatic agreement. The waiters slept on.

  Urman went to the window where Eva had stood and cupped his eyes against the glass. He saw something because he moved through the restaurant and lobby and out to the front steps of the hotel to scan the playground. Gnomes were bigger at night and more menacing, as if they were on the march. What seemed smaller was the kiosk. Was the Ural’s front tire showing? The rear? Arkady realized that Urman was waiting for a car to pass by. He was waiting for headlights.

  Urman had to break off when Isakov came out of the hotel, half jollying, half carrying Sarkisian to the Porsche. They were all pals again, although the prosecutor’s eyes were white with terror. Together, the two detectives loaded Sarkisian into the convertible and belted him in.

  Arkady heard the prosecutor say, “…every effort.”

  Isakov said, “He can’t be far.”

  Sarkisian sputtered something Arkady didn’t catch.

  “I’d rather find him first,” Urman said.

  Urman got behind the wheel and started the Porsche, which drowned further conversation. The car took off, gear changes whining the length of the street.

  Isakov turned wearily to the hotel. He paused in the restaurant to wake the waiters and pay them, generously by their expressions, and took the elevator. The room on the second floor was still lit. It brightened briefly as a door opened and closed, and Arkady got a sense of bodies in motion.

  More he didn’t want to know.

  20

  A drab world came out of the dark: an abandoned field of winter wheat bordered by scrub and brambles on three sides and, along the bottom, a dirt road that led to willows and fog.

  The Rudenkos left their truck at a broken-down gate. Arkady had followed on the Ural and the three marched with flashlights and a wheelbarrow full of hemp sacks and tools to a mound of loose earth. Big Rudi seemed rejuvenated by the morning air: perhaps crazy, Arkady thought, but not the befuddled grandfather of the night before. The old man aimed the flashlight on the mound while Rudi selected a shovel and set to work, moving the loose dirt aside. The Ural had nothing as fancy as an odometer, but Arkady guessed that they were about fourteen kilometers south of Tver.

  As the sun broke from the horizon the field developed contour and dimensions, about two soccer fields’ worth of flattened grass and sodden earth, a reminder that winter had started heavy with snow. The men’s shadows seemed to stand on stilts and a massive shadow spread from a stand of pine trees in the middle of the field. The trees must have been an impediment to farm machinery; Arkady wondered why they hadn’t been pulled as saplings.

  Military camos were the dress code of the day and Arkady had borrowed a uniform from Rudi, who said, “Renko, you look like a POW.”

  “No, a general,” Big Rudi insisted.

  The sun up an hour, Rudi was using a pick to pry the earth around a skeleton lying on its side.

  “Ours or theirs?” Big Rudi asked.

  “Can’t tell yet,” said Rudi. He added for Arkady’s benefit, “This weather is fantastic. This time of year the ground is usually frozen solid. This is like cutting cake.”

  “Check the teeth.”

  “Present and accounted for.”

  “But you think it’s December ’forty-one?” Big Rudi asked.

  Every schoolboy knew that in December ’41 Stalin performed his greatest miracle. The Red Army had lost four million men dead and wounded. The Germans were on the outskirts of Moscow. Leningrad was under siege, its population starving to death. Tver, which was the center of the entire front, had already fallen. And then, incredibly, the Russians counterattacked. Stalin had secretly moved hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops from Siberia to the low hills outside Tver. This new army, seemingly created out of thin air and launched in the middle of a snowstorm, was a total surprise to German intelligence. The Red Army crossed the frozen Volga and chased the Wehrmacht for two hundred kilometers. Not only was Tver liberated and thousands of Germans killed and captured, they no longer resembled a superrace. The shape of the front changed. The nature of the war changed. The enemy stalled outside Moscow, never to threaten it again.

  Two women, bent over and, blinkered by their shawls, moved along the far side of the field gleaning stunted potatoes that had been left to rot. Crows strolled behind. When the women saw Rudi they crossed themselves and left. Arkady wondered whether Big Rudi had stood in the same scene with tanks belching black smoke and Siberian riflemen moving across the river.

  “There are Red Diggers and Black Diggers,” Rudi said. “Red Diggers find the bodies of Russian soldiers so they can send the remains home to be reunited with their families. Black Diggers find bodies, German or Russian, and strip them of medals, belt buckles, SS gear, any shit they can sell on the Internet.”

  As the shape of a skeleton became evident at his feet, Rudi probed the bottom of the hole with a metal rod attached to a wooden pole.

  “Remember that you’re not only digging up bones, you’re digging up unexploded shells, mines, hand grenades, booby traps, Molotov cocktails. Before you dig anywhere, take the rod and feel around. You do it enough, you can tell what you hit, wood, metal or glass. Every year somebody gets a big surprise. Well, we’re provoking it, aren’t we? Provoking the past.”

  Satisfied, Rudi exchanged the pole for a spade and shaved the walls of the hole for elbow room. The man was a human power shovel, Arkady thought. Rudi’s friend Misha arrived with a metal detector and began sweeping the field, but not before he pointed to cars and vans arriving on the dirt road. “Diggers.”

  Rudi said, “That’s okay. They had to load up with shish kabobs and beer. We got here early and the early bird got the worm, right?”

  “So to speak,” Arkady murmured.

  “There’s enough to go around, all skeletonized and picked clean.” Rudi scooped dirt with a short spade. “Bodies in trenches, bunkers, outhouses, you never know where. The first one I ever saw was up in a tree. I was out skiing on my own. I guess the body got tangled in the branches and the birch grew and lifted it until the body could grin down from the sky. I was eight years old.”

  Men and boys streamed through the gate onto the field like an army with portable tables and hampers of food, bed rolls and tents, metal detectors and guitars. Not everyone was in camos, but it was the best way to blend in.

  Arkady said, “If they don’t find anything they’re going to be very disappointed. How do they know where to dig?”

  �
�They follow Rudi,” his grandfather said.

  “And how do you know?” Arkady asked Rudi.

  Rudi freed a clavicle and chose an ice pick to work around a tea-colored rib cage. “I study old war plans, maps and combat reports. I ride around on my bike and I know what to look for. A lilac bush where a house once stood. Depressions where the earth settled. Anything out of place, such as pine trees in the middle of a wheat field. Trees were a favorite way to hide a mass grave. Besides, I can feel it.”

  “How big is this grave?”

  “Big. Before they ran, the fucking Germans killed a lot of prisoners. Anyway, the Diggers will scratch around, work up an appetite, build some campfires, get drunk and sing songs. Tomorrow is the big day, when they dig in the trees.”

  “Why wait until tomorrow?”

  “Television. It had to fit their schedule.”

  “Is it Fritz?” Big Rudi stared down at the hole.

  “Well, Granddad, there’s no ID, medals or shoulder bars.” Rudi knelt. The uniform was brown gauze that disintegrated in his hands. “He’s not from a tank crew. Too big. They’re short and broad-shouldered because they have to be small enough to fit in the tank and strong enough to open the hatch. Also, they tend to be fried to a crisp. So, who are you?” Rudi asked the bones directly. “Are you Fritz or Ivan? Do you have a picture of Helga or Ninochka?”

  “Check him for foot wraps,” Big Rudi suggested.

  Russian soldiers had wrapped cloth around their feet instead of wearing socks.

  “No feet,” Rudi reported. “No legs. Cut off at the knees. Not a very neat job, either. Probably blown off and then trimmed. Poor bastard, to go through that in the middle of a battle. That’s what happened.”

  “What you think?” Big Rudi asked Arkady.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Go ahead,” Rudi said. “You’re the investigator from Moscow.”

  “I’m not a pathologist.”

  “Don’t be scared. It won’t bite you.”

  Arkady squatted by the edge of the hole.