Stalin’s Ghost (16 page)

T
he ring-shaped pillow that protected the incision in the back of Arkady’s head allowed one position only.

Into that restricted view loomed Elena Ilyichnina.

“I understand from the nurses that you are asking about going home. After all, it’s been four whole days since brain surgery, four days since you arrived here half strangled and shot in the head. No wonder you want to get back into the swing of things.”

He whispered, “I want a mirror.”

“Not yet. When you can walk there is a mirror in the men’s room.”

“Put me in a chair and roll me over.”

“You’re all hooked up.”

“Do you carry a mirror on you?”

“Not on my rounds, no. Did you sleep well?” she asked.

Arkady mentioned a tapping he had heard half the night, an irregular tap that seemed to emanate from one side of his bed and then the other. The doctor said it was in his head. He had to admit, she should know.

“I need a phone.”

“Later. With your throat I don’t want you talking overly much or turning this into an office.”

“I’d still like a mirror.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“Tomorrow.”

He exercised his memory by reading a page in a magazine,
Men’s Health
or
Russian Baby
, whatever was available, waiting five minutes and testing his recall, when he remembered to. Or recollecting telephone numbers and connecting them to names. The oldest numbers came to the fore, reestablishing their precedence: passport, army service, phone numbers for faces he hadn’t seen for years. More recent numbers like Eva’s cell phone were wisps of fog.

Time nibbled at the afternoon. Motes rose and sank in steady circulation.

The man in the opposite bed died. His neighbor, a tracheotomy, urgently squeezed a call button. In the corner of Arkady’s eye, further down the floor, doctors made their rounds, always asking about the liver; care of the liver was paramount in the land of vodka.

He continued to wrestle with his memory. Some telephone numbers emerged whole, some in part: 33-31-33, for example, was most of a phone number or a complete combination to a safe.

Whose phone?

Whose safe?

“We checked your incision and white blood cell count and determined that you have excellent healing and no infection. You want to chance all that for a walk?”

“I need a stroll, Elena Ilyichnina. A little exercise.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you for an exercise fanatic. Let me tell you about exercise. We are concerned about your balance and, God forbid, a fall. So your first ‘stroll,’ when you are detached from your IV, will be in a wheelchair. Then a perambulation indoors with someone ready to catch you if you trip. Then short walks in your neighborhood with friends.”

“And then?”

“Stay away from the Metro, don’t drive, don’t drink, don’t swim, don’t run, don’t play football, don’t get strangled, don’t get hit on the head. Perhaps you should consider a different line of work. For someone in your condition I can hardly think of a worse one. The problem is that you don’t know who you are. You will encounter unexpected gaps and changes in different faculties. Mood swings. Changes in your sense of smell or taste. Limits in problem solving. You don’t know yet what you don’t have. The bullet sent a shock wave through the entire brain. You have to let it mend.”

“I’ll hardly use it.”

Elena Ilyichnina was not impressed.

“Did I ask about depression?”

“No. Aren’t things bad enough?”

“Is there any history of depression in the family?”

“The normal.”

“Any suicide?”

“The usual.”

“Attitude has a great deal to do with your recuperation.”

“I will recuperate if no one else shoots me.”

At night the ward slipped into a narcotic torpor. Nurses on duty rubbed their eyes and rustled through paperwork. A microwave tone announced that something was warm.

Arkady raised himself as slowly as a deep-sea diver rising to the surface of the water. The bed hardly spun at all and when the nausea was manageable he slid to a standing position on the floor, from which he laid his ring-shaped pillow on the bed and let his head become accustomed to the altitude. He pulled the IV from his arm and, except for a few drops, stemmed the blood with his thumb. For quiet he set out without slippers, although he slid his feet as much as walked. The distance to the toilet was an endless void. His legs shook. Who knew that staying upright was such a feat?

By the time he reached the toilet door the paper envelope that was his hospital gown had adhered to the sweat on his body. First he was afraid a light might come on automatically when he opened the door and then he was afraid of the pitch black when he closed the door behind him. He felt his way with both hands until he found a switch.

The room had a toilet stall, sink and mirror. He urinated and on the way out noticed a creature with a shaved scalp of blue and a violet ring around his neck. Arkady turned enough to show the tip of a black suture and the clown displayed one just the same. Together, Arkady and the clown peeled off the bandages on their foreheads to reveal an eyelash row of sutures.

Arkady staggered away from the mirror and through the door, one hand against the wall of the corridor for balance. He went some distance before he realized he had gone the wrong direction, that he wasn’t in the ward but in some totally different area of the floor. He wasn’t even clear which way he had come.

What were his choices? Left, right or stay where he was in a paper gown for the rest of the night until there was enough light to find his way back. Wouldn’t a nurse notice his empty bed before then? If this was the best his new brain could do he was badly disappointed.

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.

Z
urin 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, younger 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, diagrams, 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.”

“Drilled?”

“On local anesthetic. I talked to the doctor while he took some brain tissue from each hemisphere. A dab. The procedure was a wonderful example of Russian ingenuity. It’s outlawed now because Elena Ilyichnina turned him in, but it worked. I’ve been drug-free since.”

“Congratulations. And the drinking?”

Victor patted his hair down. “It fills the gap. It completes me. It’s my veneer. Everyone has a veneer, even you, Arkady. Everyone sees a peaceful man. There’s nothing remotely peaceful about you. We started off, you and I, investigating two detectives. Now you’re after the Black Berets.”

“Something happened in Chechnya.”

“Horrible things, no doubt; it’s war. But why would heroes like Isakov and Urman come back to Moscow and kill their friends and former comrades in arms? Do you know what this notebook adds up to? Wishful thinking. Ask yourself what you’re after, Isakov or Eva? I speak as the man who killed the man who shot you. What makes you think Eva is unhappy with him?” When Arkady said nothing Victor dredged up half a smile. “Fuck, forget about all this. I’m rambling. I’m drunk.”

“You sound sober to me. Think about thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three. I just wonder why my brain chose this number to fix on.”

“Maybe at this point your brain hates your guts.”

With the thaw a moving truck had finally delivered Arkady’s furniture and earthly goods, including a cot, although Zhenya maintained his independence by sleeping on the couch with a backpack ready for instant departure. He still bore the stamp of early malnutrition but he had started lifting weights and developed hard little muscles like knots in a rope.

He did schoolwork quickly so that he could turn on the television and watch a nostalgia channel that ran grainy wartime documentaries on the siege of Leningrad, the defense of Moscow, the carnage and valor of Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd but forever Stalingrad. Also, war films about pilots, tank crews and riflemen who shared snapshots of mothers, wives and children before attacking a machine gun bunker, piloting a burning plane, crawling with a Molotov cocktail toward an enemy tank.

“I’m sorry,” Zhenya said.

Arkady was a little startled. He was at the desk writing in the notebook and hadn’t heard Zhenya approach.

“Thank you. I’m sorry about your father.”

“Did you see it?”

“No, not actually.”

“You don’t remember it?” Zhenya asked.

“No.”

Zhenya nodded, as if that were a good option.

“Do you remember going to Gorky Park?”

“Of course.”

“Remember the Ferris wheel?”

“Yes. Your father ran it.”

Osip Lysenko had hit on a perfect situation for dealing drugs: young people paying in cash for a five-minute ride in the open-air privacy of a gondola. That no one tried to fly from the top of the wheel was a miracle.

“He was never there,” Zhenya said.

Thank God, Arkady thought. Each had gone to the park with a false assumption. Arkady thought that the boy sought a missing father. The boy thought Arkady carried a gun.

One minute was usually the time limit on discourse with Zhenya, but he stood his ground and brightened. “Winter is a bitch.”