Stalin’s Ghost (10 page)

“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.”

T
ime 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.”

“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.