Stalin’s Ghost (12 page)

“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 by 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.

A
t 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.

Arkady headed for the yard behind his building. The parking area consisted of three rows of metal sheds smacked up side by side and so narrow that a driver had to squirm to emerge. Cutoff plastic bottles shielded padlocks from snow and ashes had been thrown on the ground for walking but the lamp that usually lit the yard was dark. Arkady hesitated beside a playground set of monkey bars sheathed in ice. He stayed still; the stiffness of his neck worked for him and the burns on his neck kept him warm. No blinding headlights rose. Merely, a dot like a moth’s eye swirled in a car: a cigarette brought to the mouth, inhaled and released. The driver had parked at the far end of the row opposite Arkady’s shed. Had Arkady driven in as usual he never would have spotted it.

Arkady backtracked from the yard and went to the front of the building, pausing at the corner. He did not feel up to a physical confrontation or even conversation. All he saw under the streetlamps was an early-morning road crew morosely assembled around a heavy roller sunk in the same pothole they had been working on for a week.

Arkady took the elevator two stories above his own floor and waited for any movement below before descending the stairs. Finally his neck hurt enough for him not to care whether vipers were waiting on the other side of the door and he went in.

He left the lights off. The first thing he did was go to the kitchen and make an ice bag with ice cubes and a dish towel and chew a handful of painkillers for the throat. Still in the dark he checked the closet by feel whether Eva’s suitcase and tapes were still there. They weren’t and he wondered whether she had heard about him and Tanya. News that bad traveled fast.

His last hope was the tiny blinking light of the answering machine. There was a message. Three messages.

“This is Ginsberg. I’m at Mayakovsky Square, in the sidewalk café, a little early because I finished the pizza trial story faster than I thought. And now I need a drink. In fact, what I really need to do is take a pee. I could step between cars and no one would be the wiser. (A nervous cough.) I’m sorry to use your home phone, but the card you gave me got messed up and I don’t have the number of your cell. Look, Renko, I don’t think it’s such a great idea, the two of us getting together. This is all about a woman, isn’t it? That’s what people say. It doesn’t sound as if it has much to do with Chechnya. It sounds personal. So I’m going to pass on this.”

The second call, received five minutes later, was a hang-up from the same number.

The third was from the same number ten minutes later but it was not a hang-up.

Ginsberg said, “It’s me again. Did you know that when Mayakovsky shot himself he left a cautionary note about suicide. He wrote, ‘I do not recommend it to others.’ So, Renko, you should be happy. I apologize for my spell of cowardice and, although I would not recommend it to anyone, I will help you. Not face to face. Phone only.” Ginsberg went silent for a moment and Arkady was afraid the message machine would disconnect but it kept turning. “I don’t have to find any old notebooks. Of course, I know who was with Isakov and Urman the day of the so-called Battle at Sunzha Bridge. I saw them all from the helicopter and I checked the roster again when we returned to the base. I’ll take those names to the grave.” Arkady heard Ginsberg light another cigarette. “The roster of heroes: Captain Nikolai Isakov, Lieutenant Marat Urman, Sergeant Igor Borodin, Corporal Ilya Kuznetsov, Lieutenant Alexander Filotov, Corporal Boris Bogolovo. All OMON officers from Tver and all on their second or third tour in Chechnya. Six Black Berets either beat off an assault by forty or fifty heavily armed terrorists or slaughtered a dozen rebels in the camp. As I said before, you choose. Either is possible. I’ve seen Isakov in action. With bullets flying he’s the calmest man I’ve ever seen and his men would follow him anywhere. Especially Urman. They make an unusual team. Isakov’s philosophy is, ‘Immobilize your enemy and he is yours.’ Marat’s is, ‘Cut off his balls, fry his balls, make him watch.’ We were friends then. Now I’m jumping at shadows.” It was a long message, as if the journalist was calling in a story while he could. “Isakov said I was his mirror. He said I was made the way I was so that I wouldn’t be wasted in the army, that I could watch and report the truth. When he waved off the helicopter I put my camera down because I thought, ‘He doesn’t want a mirror anymore. He doesn’t want to see himself.’ I still don’t understand. Given the worst possibility, that at Isakov’s order his men murdered rebels he had allowed to stay in the camp, I ask myself why the Chechens were there to begin with. Anyway, Fate has a way of settling scores, right?
Insh’Allah
—,” Ginsberg was saying as the tape ran out.

Kuznetsov and his wife were dead and Ginsberg hadn’t jumped at shadows high enough. Arkady gingerly touched his neck. People didn’t have to go to Chechnya to be killed; they could do it right here in Moscow.

Arkady’s cell phone rang. He answered and Victor said, “Are you in a drunk tank with inebriates and addicts puking on your shoes?”

“No.”

“Well, I am. They picked me up outside the Gondolier. Police arresting police, what is the world coming to? I’m the one who suffers the hangovers, isn’t that enough? Children ask me, ‘Why do you drink?’”

“I can imagine.”

“You sound awful.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, I tell the children I drink because when I’m sober I see that life is not a primrose path, no, life is shit. Well, a road with bumps.”

“Potholes.” Arkady edged closer to the window. The women of the road crew had harnessed themselves to the roller handle and were slowly pulling the roller free of the pothole while the foreman urged them on. He looked like he wouldn’t refuse the loan of a whip.

“So I was at the Gondolier when who comes in but Detectives Isakov and Urman, along with some politicians handing out free T-shirts that say ‘I am a Russian Patriot.’ I got one.”

“Eva?” Despite the ice against his neck Arkady’s voice was a croak.

“She wasn’t there. But can you picture it, politicians in our bar? You know what this means? Isakov’s picture will be everywhere and our little plot with Zoya Filotova is over, after all we did.”

“We didn’t do much.”

“Some did more than others.”

Arkady let that enigmatic statement die; he was good for maybe four more words.

“You think Eva will come home?” Victor asked.

“Yes.”

“And Zhenya?”

“Yes.”

“Hope springs eternal?”

“It’s pathetic.”

As Arkady turned off the phone an ice cube squirted out of the dish towel and pinged the windowpane. The foreman on the street looked up. One of the women stumbled. Coins and keys spilled from her jacket and the roller began rolling back into the hole, dragging the women behind, but the foreman only stood and watched the window.

Arkady’s intention had been to stumble to the mattress and collapse, but it occurred to him that Eva had not left her key to the apartment. Eva tended to approach life in an all-or-nothing way. She may have taken the suitcase, but if she had been actually leaving for good she would have locked the door from the outside and slid the key under the door. He found himself on his knees searching the parquet with a penlight. What could have happened, he told himself, was that Isakov came for the suitcase and kept the key so he could get back in when he wanted, a possibility that Arkady was willing to call good news.

The little beam swept the floor like hope at the bottom of a well.