Stalin’s Ghost (4 page)

A
rkady and Eva lay in a gray light that spread through rooms mostly bare of furniture. Arkady had inherited the apartment from his father; it was huge in comparison to his old flat, which they had left because there she felt the presence of Irina. “I won’t compete with a ghost,” she said. A table here, a portable television there were more like claims of residence than actuality. Arkady had disposed of all his father’s possessions, any toehold the dead man might retain, except for his books and pictures, which were boxed and sealed in the office closet.

From the outside the building was an architectural collision of Gothic buttresses and Moorish arches, but, inside, the digs were fairly grand, with high prewar ceilings and parquet floors. The apartment house had been built for Party and military elite, who were proud of their address, although during Stalin’s time it was also where the most people were taken away in the middle of the night, not to be seen again for years, if ever. Residents had listened with dread for a knock on the door or even the ascent of an elevator. Rumor claimed that special passages had been built into the walls to accommodate the agents of the state. What Arkady found interesting was that, even knowing the building was a chopping block, no one had dared decline the honor of moving in.

The truck with all their earthly possessions was a week late and they had been living in a makeshift way, their base a mattress they laid directly on the parquet floor. A quilted coverlet spilled off the bed, but Arkady and Eva were warm because the building was a prodigy of heat. They had slept the day away next to a tray crammed with bread, strawberry jam and tea. The wind had died and snow fell in thick, feathery clumps that drifted as shadows down the curtains.

Her body could have been a girl’s, her breasts small and her skin so pale and unlined that he half expected it to carry an imprint of him. With her black hair, she was the perfect creature of dusk. At night when she couldn’t sleep, which was often, she walked around the apartment in a robe and bare feet. Some rooms, like the office, they didn’t use at all, except for storing boxes of photographs of his father and Irina he had brought by car. At night the parquet floor would groan; she preferred sleeping in the daytime, when fewer ghosts were about.

Eva didn’t need his ghosts, she had her own. She had been a schoolgirl in Kiev, marching in the May Day parade four days after the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor station because the authorities assured the public that the situation was under control. A hundred thousand children marched into an invisible rain of radioactive plutonium, potassium, strontium, cesium-137. No one in the parade curled up and died on the spot, but she was labeled a survivor, it being generally understood that survivors, especially women, were both barren and contagious.

In Moscow she had found a position at a medical clinic. Eva was good with the younger patients, especially those who couldn’t sleep. She recorded them and sent the tapes to their families. Her portrait, Arkady often thought, could be painted in just black and white, although lately more and more in black alone and with sharper angles.

The further apart they grew, the more the bed was their mutual safe haven. Words were their enemy, the expression of failed hopes. Sex was performed in silence and it was difficult to say how much of their lovemaking was passion and how much the desperate scraping of a dead match.

The phone rang. Neither Arkady nor Eva wanted to connect with reality, so the caller talked to the answering machine.

“Where are you, Renko? We have a situation that has to be dealt with. If just anyone dead popped up on a Metro platform, it could be a hoax. Stalin is different. To use a likeness of Stalin is a clear provocation. Somebody is behind it. Why did you turn off your cell phone? Where the devil are you? Call in!”

“That was Prosecutor Zurin. What was he going on about?” Eva asked.

“Stalin has been seen a couple of times late at night at a Metro station.”

“Stalin in the Metro? Really? Just what does this Metro Stalin do?”

“Not much. He stands on the platform and gives passengers a wave.”

“Doesn’t execute anyone?”

“No, not a single one.”

“What will Zurin do?” Zurin generally bored Eva, but now she hiked herself up on her elbows.

Arkady was encouraged. This was more conversation than they’d had in a week.

“Well, as the prosecutor says, Stalin is different. Stalin is a minefield and there are no good moves. Call anything about Stalin a hoax and Zurin will have superpatriots to deal with. Do nothing and let rumors spread and he’ll have a shrine on his hands. When the tsar’s bones were found, pilgrims showed up the following day. The Metro will be a mob scene and Zurin will go down as the man who brought the Moscow subway system to a stop. Or—Zurin’s third choice—embrace the situation, announce that the sightings are genuine visions and be left high and dry as a raving lunatic if no more sightings occur.”

“And Zurin called you. So he wants to send you into the minefield first.”

“Something like that.”

“But you’re staying here? I didn’t know you were going to be here all day.”

“I am. Did you have other plans?”

“Except you’re always thinking about work, so you’re not really here when you are here.”

“Not all the time.”

“Yes, all the time. Which is good, I suppose, in an investigator. I know when a ghost joins us. I feel the company.” This was a loaded statement, because there were ghosts and there were ghosts. “I suppose you can’t help becoming involved.”

“Actually, it’s better not to get involved.”

“You can do that?”

“I have to. I can’t spend my life brooding on the dead.”

He closed his eyes and saw the man with the cleaver in his neck. The odds were astronomical against a drunken woman’s dispatching her husband with a single, perfect swing of a cleaver between the vertebrae and through the spinal cord, as Isakov and Urman maintained. A woman so drunk she most likely wouldn’t remember anything she said, let alone a confession. However, the blood spatter pattern on the kitchen walls did seem to match the stains on her housedress. The cleaver handle pointed to the victim’s left shoulder, indicating a right-handed attack; she was right-handed. The fact that no neighbors called the militia about the noise of the fight suggested that the husband and wife had gone toe to toe before. Had they argued over who had the dragon? Enough snow, enough vodka, a ready blade? With that combination you didn’t need professional killers.

Either way, Arkady was annoyed at himself for drawing the attention of Isakov and Urman. Asking questions was the last thing he should have done, although it was instructive watching the captain and his eager lieutenant.

“You’re doing it now,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“I know your secret,” she said.

“What’s my secret?”

“In spite of everything, at heart you’re an optimist.” She amended that. “In spite of
me
, you’re an optimist.”

“We have our moments.”

“I have proof. It’s all on tape.” When Eva and Arkady were first together she would take a pocket-size tape recorder and cassettes to record what they were doing, whether it was a day of skiing or a simple walk, to play back later and laugh at. When was the last time he heard her laugh?

He held her heartbeat in her breast. With her he was always half aroused. If that wasn’t cause for optimism, what was?

Outside the day faded, the sun a bonfire in the snow.

Down on the street, a road crew was attempting the repair of a pothole. Four sturdy women dug while a man supervised and occasionally held a lamp. Each day for a week they had poured steaming asphalt that settled into a widening hole, a daily demonstration of futility.

The phone rang. A sugary Zurin talked to the answering machine this time, apologizing for disturbing Arkady on his day off and hoping that Arkady wasn’t using his machine to avoid calls. “You wouldn’t be as low as that.”

No problem, thought Arkady. He pulled the phone line from the jack, then remembered Zhenya and reconnected.

Eva watched. “You still expect Zhenya to call?”

“He might.”

“He will be fine. He’s a fish in water.”

“It’s cold out.”

“Then he’ll find someplace warm. Are you sure you saw him?”

“No, but I’m sure he was there. Did he say anything to you?”

“Two words:
He’s here
. Then he raced out the door.”

Nobody knew how many homeless kids there were in Moscow. Estimates ranged from ten to fifty thousand, in age from four to sixteen. Few were orphans; most were running from alcoholic, abusive families. The kids ate and wore what they could steal or beg. They slept on heating pipes or in unwatched trains. They sniffed glue, bummed cigarettes, sold themselves for sex outside the Bolshoi, and the closest thing to a steady roost was Three Stations. The week before, the militia had collared Zhenya, along with his friends Georgy and Fedya. Zhenya was released to Arkady, but Georgy and Fedya had simply been released for lack of shelter space. The president himself called homeless kids a threat to national security. Now that Georgy had a gun, maybe the president was right.

“Arkasha, open your eyes. Your little Zhenya wins more money playing chess than you earn risking your life. You think he’s like you, a sweet, agreeable soul. He’s not.”

“He’s twelve years old.”

“He’s somewhere between twelve and a hundred years old. Have you seen him play chess?”

“Hundreds of times.”

“He squeezes his opponent like a python, eats him and digests him alive.”

“He’s good.”

“And you are not responsible for him.”

Arkady had looked into adopting Zhenya. However, with no information about his parents, even whether they were dead or alive, legal adoption was out of the question and an arrangement had evolved. Officially, Zhenya was on the rolls of the shelter where Arkady had first met him. In fact, Zhenya slept on the apartment sofa, as if he had happened by and nodded off. Zhenya was Pluto, a dark object detectable more by its effect on the planets than by direct observation.

“Consider me a python.” Arkady slipped into bed.

They ate in bed. Brown bread, mushrooms, pickles, sausage and vodka.

Eva filled his glass. “Last night at the clinic, one of the other doctors, a woman, asked me, ‘Do you know the curse of Russian men? Vodka! Do you know the curse of Russian women? Russian men!’”

“Cheers.”

They touched glasses and downed the vodka in one go.

“Perhaps I am your curse,” Eva said.

“Probably.”

“Zhenya and I complicate your life.”

“I hope so. What kind of life do you think I had?”

“No, you’re a saint. I don’t deny it.”

Arkady sensed a slide in Eva’s mood and changed the subject. “Zhenya said, ‘He’s here.’ That’s all?”

“He said it as he went out the door.”

“He didn’t say where he’d been or where he was headed?”

“No.”

“He could have seen anyone. A famous chess player, his favorite soccer star. Maybe Stalin. Can we talk about us?” Eva leaned forward and laid her head on Arkady’s shoulder. “Arkasha, I can’t compete with a wife who died young and beautiful and totally normal. Who could compete with that?”

“She’s not here.”

“But you wish she were, is what I mean. You know, you never showed me a picture of Irina; I had to find one on my own. Irina was lovely. If you could, wouldn’t you want her back?”

“It’s not a competition.”

“Oh, it is.”

He set the tray aside and pulled her close. Her breasts were tender from making love but they stiffened again. Her mouth sought out his even though their lips were sore and slightly bruised. This time the rhythm was slow. With each stroke a soft expulsion of air escaped her lips, so much easier than words. They could go on forever, Arkady thought, as long as they never left the bed.

But they were going someplace. The bed was a magical carpet that took an unfortunate plunge into an abyss when he said, “Don’t act as if this is about Irina. It’s a lie to pretend it’s just Irina. A highly skilled investigator notices such things as strange phone calls and mysterious absences.” Well, this is exciting, he thought. They had touched down in the abyss, where the air was thin and the heart bounced around the rib cage.

“It’s not what you think,” Eva said.

“I’m fascinated. What is it?”

“It’s unfinished business.”

“You can’t finish it?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“What does that mean?”

“When I was in Chechnya Nikolai Isakov saved me.”

“Tell me again why you were there. You’re not Chechen or in the Russian Army.”

“Someone had to be there. Doctors had to be there. There were international medical organizations.”

“But you were on your own.”

“I don’t like organizations. Besides, on my trusty motorcycle I was a moving target.”

“Were you trying to be killed?”

“You forget that I’m a survivor. Besides, Nikolai let it be known that he would slit the throat of anyone who touched me.”

“I’m grateful.”

She watched him for a flinch. “And I expressed my gratitude in the traditional manner.”

“Well earned, I’m sure. So Isakov is a hero in bed and out.”

“Everyone had a scheme. Tank commanders sold fuel, quartermasters sold food, soldiers traded the ammunition for vodka and they went home in coffins stuffed with drugs. Nikolai was different.”

“Then why are you wasting your time with me?”

“I wanted to be with you.”

“It’s getting a bit crowded, don’t you think? Two is company and all that. But I appreciate the farewell salute.” It was the meanest thing he could think of to say and he had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes sting.

The phone rang again and a voice—not Zurin’s—said to the answering machine, “Eva, pick up, it’s Nikolai.”

It was Arkady’s turn to burn.

“Eva,” the man said, “can you talk? Did you tell him?”

“Is it Isakov?” Arkady asked.

“I have to take this,” Eva said.