Stalin’s Ghost (14 page)

Playing black, she immediately challenged Zhenya for control of the center of the board. Her style was as cold-blooded as his, sacrificing a pawn to gain tempo and reach level ground with white. Blitz was a sprint and it was hard to distinguish the beginning from the middle game and the middle game from the end. Forty moves in five minutes. No draws. On the other board still in action—the university champion versus a grizzled veteran—the need for speed encouraged exchanges for simplification’s sake. In contrast, Zhenya and the girl developed an intricate structure of poison pawns, veiled threats and phantom attacks. The slightest push could bring it all down. She studied the board with a penetrating gaze. Zhenya closed his eyes. He liked to play blindfolded; Arkady had seen him do it many times. In his mind, Zhenya once told him, he saw all the variations in three dimensions. Not analyzed. Saw.

Zhenya opened his eyes. He pushed. Starting equal in material, he and the girl machine-gunned the board for the next five moves, ending in positions that were identical with one exception: she attacking his king with a bishop while he attacked hers with a knight. A bishop had more sweep than a knight, but a knight jumped enemy lines and in crowded quarters that was the edge.

She saw it. “Mate in five,” she said and set her king on its side.

“The girl has possibilities,” Platonov said.

“We have our finalists!” the presenter announced. “Moscow University undergraduate champion Tomashevsky and our tournament surprise.”

“What did you think of Zhenya’s game?” Arkady asked.

“What did you think?” Platonov threw the question back. “You’ve wondered for days what he’s been doing. He’s been preparing.”

Lydia pulled Tomashevsky and Zhenya in front of the camera and asked what they would do with a thousand dollars if they won.

“Buy a new road bike,” Tomashevsky said. He looked athletic. “And beer.”

“And you?” Lydia asked Zhenya.

“A tricycle,” suggested Tomashevsky.

Zhenya said nothing. He looked at a cage of gaudy parrots that huddled together and blinked their leathery eyelids.

“It must be a secret,” the presenter let him off the hook.

“This is the truth about chess,” Platonov said. “People don’t win a match, they lose. They find a way to lose. Chess is one choice after another and people get tired of choosing. The body gets tired and the brain gives in. The brain says, what are you doing here pulling your wad when you could be out in the midst of life, with women and song and good champagne?”

“How do you think the university champion will do?” Arkady asked.

“Against Zhenya? He doesn’t stand a chance.”

Platonov was right. The game was an anticlimax. Although they played under the overhead camera, the finalists revealed no original or interesting strategy. Television viewers watched the systematic demolition of a university scholar by a boy who did nothing but rapidly offer him choices, one after another. With each wrong choice the scholar’s position deteriorated a little bit. After twenty moves he was only down a pawn but he had nowhere to go. Every move involved some small loss. He was bound by invisible knots that tightened with resistance because he saw that with every succeeding move his situation would be more obvious. Before his friends and admirers. Professors. On television. He did the only rational thing and moved the same piece twice.

“A double move, disqualified!” said the producer, Platonov, all the players and half the people in the gaming hall.

“What a shame,” said the presenter. “The match is decided by a disqualification, a mistake on the part of Tomashevsky, accidentally handing the match to his opponent, Evgeny Lysenko. What a terrible way to lose the tournament when he was doing so well.”

The student Tomashevsky rose from his chair in disbelief, like a man betrayed by nothing more than eagerness and stunned by the magnitude of his error. He’d gotten ahead of himself was all. It happened to the best players and there was nothing to do but be a good sport, although when he offered his hand to Zhenya the boy regarded him with contempt.

“Anyway, we have a champion.” The presenter tried to be bright. “And, fortunately, we also have a bonus match between young Evgeny Lysenko and Grandmaster Ilya Platonov.”

“Are you all right?” Arkady asked.

“A little lightheadedness,” Platonov said. “Have you got a smoke?”

Arkady accompanied him out of the van into the cold bite of a wind that drove flakes across curlicues of ice. Both men sucked fiercely on their cigarettes.

“It’s not a tournament that Zhenya prepared for,” Platonov said. “There was never any doubt about the tournament.”

At the club door, the security squad waved and called Platonov’s name.

“They’re waiting for you.”

“It’s hard to explain to someone who is not a player,” Platonov said. “There is a time in your life when you imagine chess so perfectly that your intuition is as solid as any game from any book. Like music, if you can hear the entire suite in one moment. You may seem to move your pieces in a hurry but you’re simply following a score. And then one day this magical ear disappears and you find yourself hawking chess sets to schoolboys for a living. Or worse.” The door of the television van popped open, and the producer yelled for Platonov to move inside the club. Platonov hunched his shoulders. “One day it’s just gone.”

Platonov played white. Between the parking lot and the chessboard he seemed to have found his usual arrogance and wrapped it around himself like a cape. In rapid moves he sacrificed three pawns, opened up the center and developed his pieces while black was still digesting its easy prizes. For the first time since the opening round, Zhenya seemed surprised. Arkady stood in the shadow of a column, out of the boy’s line of sight, and followed the game on a screen from the overhead camera. If Arkady had expected the old man to play it safe and eke out a win he was wrong. Platonov had given Zhenya a huge material advantage. On the other hand, Zhenya’s power pieces hadn’t moved, while the grandmaster’s bishops and knights were already on the battlefield. It was an assault that was too reckless for chess. It was pure blitz.

Zhenya rested his chin in his hand and, with the calm of a young gargoyle at a height, looked down on the pieces on the board. Arkady tried to imagine what it would be like to see the game as Zhenya must. The bishop slyly insinuating himself on the diagonal, the knight leaping barricades, the queen a diva, the king anxious and nearly useless. Or was that too romantic? Did Zhenya see the game merely in bytes, like a computer?

Zhenya pushed his forward pawn closer to the fray, a provocation, and the assault began. As fast as they could hit the clock, Platonov attacked and Zhenya defended. They shuttled pieces in, snatched prizes out, castled under pressure, offered and declined gambits. The thought process could not have been involved, Arkady thought; reason wasn’t enough. This was tempo, pressure, intuition. The shape of the board changed and changed again. Even on the club’s large game screen it was hard to follow the game’s ebb and flow, and just when Arkady expected the entire match would be over in less than a minute Platonov paused to assess the damage. Half the pieces were off the board and somehow, as if Zhenya had reshuffled a deck of cards, the situation was reversed. Platonov had an extra pawn and Zhenya, on the strength of doubled rooks, controlled the center.

Seconds went by. Platonov looked like a man trying to hold a gate closed against a greater force. Arkady wondered whether the grandmaster was trying to find, in the hundred thousand games stored in his mind, a similar position. His precious pawn was an isolated pawn but it was his only winning chance and he assigned a rook to protect it, which opened a hole that Zhenya’s knight immediately filled. Platonov covered up like a hedgehog, which was effective in chess. Blitz, however, was not meant for hedgehogs because moves had to be made at once, at once, at once. He fended off one threat after another and, at the same time, nursed his pawn toward the eighth rank and possible transformation into a second queen. The black king took up the hunt, angling across open squares toward the pawn. The white king was smothered by its own defenses.

While Platonov paused again someone sneezed and Zhenya glanced at the rows of seated spectators. He drew his head in between his shoulders and looked again. The grandmaster was still studying the board when Zhenya laid down the black king.

Platonov was astonished. “What are you doing? You have the advantage.”

“I counted moves. You’d win.”

The teacher in Platonov was outraged. “You counted wrong. How could you do that?”

“You win.”

“Hit me,” said a parrot.

The television van was gone. The tournament participants and their supporters had left. The girl who played Zhenya had waited for half an hour in the cold but, shivering, had given up. Arkady waited by his car at the street end of the casino parking lot and Victor and Platonov stayed with him. They’d tried sitting in the car but the windows fogged up.

“The little shit gave me the game,” Platonov said. “It’s insulting. Then he goes to the restroom and disappears.”

Victor wiped his nose and regarded the minarets of the Golden Khan. “Does it snow in Samarkand? Sounds like the title of a song, doesn’t it? ‘When It Snows Again in Samarkand.’”

In spite of his throat, Arkady had to ask Victor, “Did you sneeze? When Zhenya looked up, was it at you?”

“I have allergies.”

“To what?”

“Things. Certain colognes.”

Which begged the question, wearing or drinking, Arkady thought.

“Anyway, Zhenya did not see me,” Victor said.

“I don’t need charity,” Platonov said. “And they never did let me talk about the chess club.”

“That would have made gripping television.” Victor stamped his feet to stay warm. “Oh, look. Someone actually has to do some work. Front door security has been issued snow shovels. Work beneath their station. So sad.”

The throat was closing Arkady down to a whisper. He asked Platonov, “How good is Zhenya?”

“You saw.”

“Really?”

“Complicated.”

“Speak of the devil,” Victor said.

Zhenya came out of the Golden Khan in the grip of a man who hustled him past security, who bent over their shovels and gave him no more than a glance. At fifty yards Arkady could see that one side of Zhenya’s face was deep red. The man wore a mismatched canvas work coat over suit pants and pointed shoes.

The scene was wrong. Zhenya’s face was starting to swell and turn one eye into a slit. Arkady had never seen him cry before. It was hard to believe no one at the door asked why. Halfway to Arkady, the man reached into a trash can, took out a dirty hand towel, and unwrapped a gun. Security cameras topped poles all around the lot; someone was bound to notice. Victor and Platonov stayed by Arkady’s side.

The man had a thin face, long nose and stringy blond hair. Exactly what Zhenya would grow up to look like, Arkady realized. This was the missing father, Lysenko père. The man’s eyes were different, charred, as if he’d looked too long at the sun and at close range his canvas jacket gave off the acrid smell of tar. He was the Tar Man, the foreman of the road crew that had labored so futilely all week on the street that ran before Arkady’s building. Zhenya tried to squirm free and the man shook him like a goose held by the neck.

The Tar Man shouted as he marched up to Arkady, “He tore up the check. He saw me and quit the game and when they gave him the check he tore it up. Part of that thousand dollars is mine. I’m the one who taught him.”

“Then the money is yours. Fifty-fifty?” Arkady was agreeable. He wanted to negotiate before too much help showed up.

“Five hundred dollars, right now.”

“Give me the gun.” It was another antique Nagant, like Georgy’s.

“First the money.”

“First the gun,” Arkady insisted. “We have to go to the bank for the money.”

“I need it now.”

Then he needs it now, Arkady thought. He heard shouts from the casino. The last thing he wanted was Zhenya in the middle of a standoff between a madman and heavily armed guards.

“We’ll leave the boy here and you and I will go directly to the bank. I’ll vouch for you.”

“I know who you are. You’re the one that hid him.”

Hid him? Arkady had thought Zhenya was trying to find his father. Anyway, this was not a direction Arkady wanted to take.

“You and I will get the money and then we’ll have some vodka.” Arkady moved closer.

“I looked for a year.”

“First give me the gun because the guards are coming, and if they see you waving it, you know how they’ll react.” Arkady reached out. “You don’t want to be shot down in front of your son.”

“A son who runs away?”

“It’s not working,” Victor said.

Zhenya’s father pressed the gun against Arkady’s head. The muzzle tickled his hair.

Platonov tried to make himself as small as possible, perhaps the size of an atom. This was the difference, Arkady thought, between reality and chess. No next game. Traffic tore blindly by. His car, a couple of meters away, was too far for cover. Victor’s hand snaked forever to his holster.

“Give me the gun.”

“This is bullshit,” Zhenya’s father said after consideration, and fired.

Arkady had the sensation of a ripple on a lake, but one expanding at incredible speed, on and on and on.

T
he brain is intact, but it’s bleeding. Massively.

We can drain it, but we can’t stop it. As simply as I can possibly put it, the brain is a gelatinous mass and the skull is bone. The brain expands, the skull does not. Right now, our patient’s tender brain is trapped and compressed against the sharp ridges of the interior of his cranium. Which is the least of his problems, because pressure alone brings more bleeding, which only increases the pressure and brings yet more bleeding until his brain physically shifts to one side or herniates, in which case the game is pretty much over. We can keep his head up, pump in oxygen, drain and mop, but we won’t know more until he reaches the peak of the bleeding in, we estimate, twelve hours. If he survives that, then we can start worrying about his faculties. He may be the man he was or he may not be able to count to ten. While I probe, Natasha, take the drill, please, and give me the fiber optic.”

“Can he hear?”

“Yes, but it will mean nothing to him. He is in a void. No doubt he is losing brain cells. As the brain deconstructs, who knows what is uncovered? Greatest joys, worst fears? He was not conscious when he came in, and that is not a good sign. The vitals?”

“Heart rate seventy-five. ECG normal. Blood pressure one sixty over eighty.”

“When will the neurosurgeons arrive?”

“They are all occupied. Children, you are the team. With brain trauma we do not wait for anyone or anything. Seek and you shall find. Here inside the entry wound, between the occipital bone and the dura, a bullet, bone fragments and a good-sized clot. Gauze, please. This is not a hopeless case. Maria, now that you have the tube in, please keep this man asleep.”

“I have no halothane. I’m using ether.”

“Ether? Wonderful, the choice of the nineteenth century.”

“Elena Ilyichnina, this is not what I trained for.”

“You are all doing an excellent job. We want to be sure everything is nice and clean. We will have to remove the clot before we secure the bleeding point. I stand corrected, bleeding points. Valentina, step in or step out.”

“I’ll stay.”

“You do it, then. Delicately. You’re not drilling for oil.”

“I don’t understand. When he was prepped there was gunpowder in his hair. He was shot at point-blank range, but the bullet only penetrated the skull?”

“Evidently he is a hard nut to crack.”

“Did you see the ligature marks on his neck? I understand that strangulation can sometimes be a sexual game.”

“How do you know these things, Tina?”

“Only saying, he’s been hung by the neck and shot in the head and he’s still alive. He’s a lucky man.”

A silence.

“We will see. It depends on what you call lucky.”

Snipping and the ping of monitors.

“Good. Drill, please. Remember, the brain has no nerve endings; it feels no pain. Suction, please, and for the forehead a smaller bit on the drill.”

“The forehead?”

“To monitor pressure on the brain. Not pretty, but accessible.”

“Are you sure he doesn’t understand?”

“Let’s hope not. He would be very discouraged.”

Arkady started by wandering among picnic blankets looking for Zhenya. Instead he saw his parents, who were sitting with an open hamper on a quilt weighted with bottles of champagne.

“Reporting in?” the General asked.

Arkady saluted. “Reporting in, sir.”

“Is the camp secure?”

“The camp is secure.”

“You hear that, Belov? Arkasha is going to be my new aide de camp. You’re out of a job.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.

“But we’d better check, hadn’t we?” He easily swung Arkady up onto his shoulders and ran across the lawn. They called it a lawn even though it was mostly an untended meadow of wildflowers bounded on one side by the dacha—a four-room cabin and porch—and, at the lower end, birches and willows and the bright glints of a river.

His father whipped through high grass and the white heads of daisies and Arkady, even in short pants, felt like a Cossack with a saber.

“You’re getting too big.” His father let Arkady down and they were at the quilt with Arkady’s mother and Belov enjoying tea sandwiches. They had champagne, he had lemonade. The lawn was covered with the blankets and hubbub of officers and their families. None were as handsome as Arkady’s father in a tailored uniform with stars on his shoulder boards or as beautiful as his young wife, Arkady’s mother. In white lace, her black hair falling to her waist, she was wrapped in a dreamy aura.

“You know what you remind me of?” his father said to his mother. “During the war I spent a few days in a nondescript place with a beautiful legend of a lake where all the swans go. A lake that only the truly innocent can find, hence no one has seen it for hundreds of years. But you are my swan, my redeeming swan.” He leaned across the blanket to collect a kiss and then turned to Arkady.

“How old are you now, Arkasha?”

“Seven, next month.”

“Since you’re almost seven I have an early birthday gift for you.” The General gave Arkady a leather box.

His mother said, “Kyril, you’ll spoil him.”

“Well, if he’s going to be my bodyguard…”

From the smell of gun oil Arkady knew what the present was before he opened the box, but it was better than he imagined, a revolver his own size.

“You two are a pair,” said his mother.

His father said, “A lady’s gun to start with. Don’t worry; you’ll grow into bigger ones. Try it.”

Arkady aimed at a small, brown bird that trilled on a wooden post.

“A finch is God’s choir,” said his mother.

It exploded into feathers.

“Is it dead?” Arkady was shocked.

“We’ll know more in twelve hours,” his father said.

“I’m going for a walk.” His mother got to her feet. “I’ll hunt for butterflies.”

His father said, “I have to play the host, I can’t go with you.”

“Arkasha will take care of me. Without the gun.”

Arkady and his mother walked along hydrangeas bearing globes of pink blossoms. With a butterfly net for a gun, he shot American agents as they sprang from the bushes. She moved in an absentminded way, eyes down, smiling at something only she heard.

When they reached the river she said, “Let’s gather stones.”

1822. ICP: 18 mm Hg. BP: 160/80. HR: 75.

“What does that mean?”

“May I have the patient’s chart back? BP is blood pressure, HR is heart rate, and ICP is pressure inside the skull. Normal ICP is up to fifteen millimeters of mercury. Damage starts at twenty and fatal starts at twenty-five. Are you a family member?”

“A colleague. I was there when he was shot. I thought he was dead.”

“The bullet penetrated the skull but not the covering of the brain. I don’t know why.”

“Ballistics says the gun was old enough to be from the war and so were the bullets in it. Gunpowder degrades. A round that old might barely clear the barrel. When I heard this I thought Renko would be walking out in a day or two. Then I get here and—”

“You can’t smoke here.”

“Sorry. I get here and he’s on a ventilator, a drip in his arm and tubes running out every side of his head.”

“His brain is bleeding and swelling.”

“Is he going to live?”

“We’ll know more in twelve hours.”

“You’re not going to look at him for twelve hours?”

“He is constantly monitored and observed. He’s lucky to be alive. We’re at half staff because of the weather. When he came in I had to organize a group of interns.”

“Interns?”

“Getting a tube down such a contused windpipe was no simple feat. You can’t drink here either. Put the bottle away. Detective, first let us deliver him to you alive, then you can blow smoke in his face or put him on a vodka drip, whatever you want. Am I clear? Do we understand each other?”

“Okay.”

“Has the family been notified?”

“There’s a woman who’s not his wife and a boy who’s not his son. The boy was at the scene. Is my friend hearing all this?”

“Yes and no. He’s in an induced coma to preserve brain function. Words are mere sounds.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Keep it positive.”

“Arkady, about Zhenya. The little prick took off after you were shot. Nobody’s seen him since. Here’s the kicker: the shooter’s last name was Lysenko. Same as Zhenya.”

“Can you think of something more positive? I assume this assailant Lysenko has been detained.”

“He took three in the chest and two in the head. That sounds positive to me.”

Arkady moved upstream as he hunted so that when he nudged stones with his toes the sediment he raised flowed away. Although the surface of the water was slick with light his shadow unveiled a multitude of guppies dashing back and forth over a bed of rounded stones striped red or blue, green or black.

“Do you prefer hunting butterflies or stones?” his mother asked.

“Rabbits.”

“You used to hate hunting rabbits.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Well, today it’s stones. See, I already have a net full.”

She waded barefoot like Arkady, gathering her frilly dress in one hand and carrying the butterfly net with the other. From time to time she stopped to receive messages. Not from Arkady, but from people only she heard. The tumbling of water covered her conversation.

“What do they say?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The people you talk to.”

She gave him a confidential smile. “They say that the human brain floats in a sea of cerebral fluids.”

“What else do they say?”

“Not to be afraid.”

2322. ICP: 19 mm Hg. BP: 176/81. HR: 70.

“I see, I see. He’s going to die and if he does live he’ll be a vegetable.”

“Not necessarily.”

“But surely, not up to the rigors of criminal investigation.”

“He might get medical permission to return to work. That would also be up to you. You’re the prosecutor.”

“Exactly. My office is not a rehabilitation center.”

“Don’t you think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves? The crisis will come tonight. If he gets through that, then we can assess the damage. Frankly, I’m surprised we didn’t see you here before. Your investigator is shot, perhaps fatally, rescuing a boy from an armed lunatic and no one from your office comes to see how he’s doing?”

“All we know for sure is that he was shot outside a casino. The circumstances of the incident are murky. Can he hear?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the point in coming? Call me in the morning if he’s still alive.”

Arkady and his mother watched from a distance as officers decorated the porch.

She sighed. “Paper lanterns. I hope it doesn’t rain. We don’t want anything to ruin your father’s party.”

“What do we do with the stones?” Arkady asked. His pockets were so full it was hard to walk.

“We’ll think of something.”

“There is no visiting. How did you get in?”

“I am a physician, but not his.”

“Then what is your relationship?”

“Personal. You’ve drilled?”

“And drained.”

“ICP?”

“Five millimeters above normal and we’re nowhere near floodtide. Another five and we’re looking at a fatal outcome or, at the least, permanent damage. Read the chart. Everything that can be done has been done.”

“The other vitals aren’t that bad.”

“Or that good. You said ‘personal,’ but you don’t seem upset. Please do not tell me that you have recently broken off this relationship. Depression would be a very bad element at this point.” Silence. “I see. Are you willing to lie for at least a while?”

“Lying is my specialty.”

“I thought you were a physician.”

“Exactly. I lie all day to dying children. I tell them they have a chance to run and play when I know they won’t live out a week. And I tape-record their voices as a game when really the tape is for their families as a memory. A souvenir. So I have small regard for the truth if a lie serves better. The problem is that an investigator has an excellent ear for lies.”

“You’re Ukrainian?”

“Yes.”

“How did you and the investigator meet?”

“At Chernobyl.”

“Romantic.”

His father’s pride was a pond, sixty by forty meters and deep enough for swimming. Sluices from the river brought water fresh enough for communities of sunfish and perch, frogs and dragonflies, cattails and reeds. A rowboat was tied to a dock. A yellow raft and a white buoy floated in the center of the pond. Every morning the General walked in a bathrobe through a stand of firs down to his pond and swam for half an hour. In the afternoon everyone was welcome. It was a golden time as Arkady’s father waited for his long overdue elevation to marshal of the army, which people said was finally coming. They were days of badminton on the lawn and long tables full of guests and endless toasts.

When they were alone his parents rowed picnics out to the raft. One evening they rowed out with a gramophone and danced on the raft.

0120. ICP: 20 mm Hg. BP: 190/91. HR: 65.

“One hour to go.”

“Maria, all I’ve been doing is staring at that idiotic monitor, trying to will the pressure down and not doing a very good job. Anyway, you children did well; I’m proud of you. Where is Valentina? Weren’t you going home together?”

“She’s out front.”

“Alone?”

“She couldn’t be safer. She’s talking to a detective.”

His mother smiled as she rowed as if she and Arkady were launched into a secret adventure. Wet stones and butterfly netting lay between her feet. The stones in Arkady’s pockets made them bulge uncomfortably and he tossed one in the water.

“Oh, no, Arkasha,” his mother said. “We’ll need every one.”

0403. ICP: 23 mm Hg. BP: 144/220. HR: 100.

“You’re back and you’re drunk.”

“I don’t need a doctor to tell me that. The point is, Elena Ilyichnina, if I may use your patronymic, I’m not drinking on the premises. Not even smoking. Just visiting.”

“Why are you here?”

“Ask my friend Arkady. I’m his shadow. I may be his drunken shadow, but I am still his shadow. So I am not leaving.”