Stalin’s Ghost (7 page)

“You know what.”

Snow had stifled the usual twenty-four-hour assault of construction crews across the city. The drive along the Boulevard Ring’s white-trimmed trees felt like passage through a more intimate town.

“There were atrocities on either side,” Platonov went on. “The main thing is that your father was a successful commander. Especially in the beginning of the war, when all seemed lost, he was superhuman. If anyone deserved a field marshal’s baton it was him. In my opinion he was smeared by hypocrites.”

“So, who is trying to kill you?” Arkady changed the subject. He was, after all, supposedly trying to find out.

“New Russians, mafia, reactionaries in the Kremlin. Most of all, real estate developers.”

“Half of Moscow. Have there been threatening phone calls, ominous notes, stones through the windows?”

“I told you before.”

“Remind me.”

“They threaten on the phone, I hang up. They send a poison pen letter, I throw it away. No stones yet.”

“The next note, don’t open it. Handle it by the corners and call me. Can you give me any names?”

“Not yet, but all you have to do is find out who is trying to have the chess club shut down. They’ll probably turn it into a spa or worse. What we need are the names of the developers. Not the public names, but the silent partners in City Hall and the Kremlin. I don’t have the means to do that. You do. I was afraid that the prosecutor was fobbing off some incompetent, but I’m pleased to say that after tonight I have great faith in you. Boundless faith. Not that I don’t have my own ruses. We’ll have a little exhibition soon and get some publicity.”

“At the chess club?”

“At that dump? No. At the Writers’ Union. In fact, we’re off to see the sponsor right now.”

“At this hour?”

“A friend of the game.”

Arkady’s cell phone rang. It was Victor.

“What the devil were you doing picking a fight with Urman? He and Isakov cover a domestic homicide and you run their pricks through a wringer.”

“Are you all right?”

“Well, I’m at the morgue. I got here on my own, if that’s a good sign.”

“Just don’t fall asleep.” Around a morgue, Victor might look deposited. “Why are you there?”

“Remember Zoya, the wife who wants her husband dead? Who dialed Urman’s phone? She keeps calling me demanding progress, so I’m using my imagination.”

“Wait for me. Don’t do anything until I get there.” Arkady hung up. He desperately wanted to get into dry shoes and socks but Victor’s imagination was a frightening thing.

“Stalin loved the snow,” Platonov said. Both men pondered that information while wipers swept the flakes on the windshield. “In the Kremlin they had snowball fights. Like boys. Beria, Molotov and Mikoyan on one side, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov on the other and Stalin as referee. Grown men in hats throwing snowballs. Stalin egging them on.”

“I’m trying to picture that.”

“I know that some innocents died because of Stalin, but he made the Soviet Union respected by the world. Russian history is Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin and since then, pipsqueaks. I know you feel the same because I saw you rescue Stalin from those so-called Russian Patriots. This corner will do.”

Platonov heaved himself out under a streetlamp. Arkady leaned across to say that Stalin killed not “some,” which sounded incidental, but in cold blood sent millions of Russians to their death. However, Platonov was enveloped by a redheaded woman in a fur coat and high heels. She was a well-maintained sixty or seventy years old, a whirlwind of lipstick and rouge. A foaming bottle of champagne swung from her hand.

“Magda, you’ll catch your death.”

“Ilya, Ilyusha, my Ilyushka. I’ve been waiting.”

“I had business.”

“My genius, dance with me.”

“Upstairs, we’ll dance.” To Arkady, Platonov said, “Pick me up at noon.”

“This is the sponsor?” Arkady asked.

“Better make it two o’clock,” Platonov said.

She peered at the car. “You came with a friend?”

“A comrade,” Platonov said. “One of the best.”

Arkady had intended to set the record straight. Instead, he drove off as fast as possible.

W
hen Arkady arrived, Victor had the morgue’s body drawers open to a biker with long matted hair, an old man as green as verdigris and a young man fresh from a gymnastics accident.

“I’ve been here too long. They’re starting to look like family.”

Arkady lit a cigarette but the reek of death was overwhelming. Cigarette butts littered the red concrete floor under a sign that said No Smoking. Walls were white tiles, although the hall to the autopsy room was uphill and dark, awaiting new light fixtures. From the far end came the sound of a door being punched open by a gurney and feet stamping off snow.

Victor considered the three bodies. “It makes you think.”

“About mortality?”

“It makes me think I should open a flower shop. People are always dead or dying. They need flowers.” Victor pushed in the gymnast, green man and biker and rolled out a crisply burned body in a fetal position. Pushed it in and rolled out a woman on a bed of gray hair. Rolled her in and pulled out a male punching bag of cuts and contusions. Rolled him in and rolled out a goose-necked suicide, pushed him in and balked at the next shelf’s pong of decay. “Anyway, it occurred to me that maybe we’re taking the wrong approach. Our problem isn’t necessarily the tattoo—we can always find an artist who can copy that—but the skin.” Victor pulled out a body with a morose face and a deep wound across the back of the neck. Kuznetsov.

Arkady looked at his watch: four in the morning. He was cold and wet and a little dizzy. Maybe he was dreaming. He hadn’t noticed in the dead man’s apartment that Kuznetsov’s right knee looked as if it had been shattered and badly reconstructed.

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we need a more proactive approach.”

“You mean, you want to take the skin from one of these bodies?”

“I talked to a tattoo artist. He says all he needs is the canvas, so to speak, if we just keep the skin hydrated.”

“Wet?”

“Moist.”

“You would do this?”

Was it possible to enter negative hours? Arkady wondered. Extra time that was entirely off the clock? Because skinning the dead wasn’t done in any normal twenty-four hours.

Before Victor answered Arkady said, “What do we know about Zoya’s business? Wasn’t the husband a partner? Why don’t we find out more about that before we start on poor souls at the morgue? Autopsies are enough. Do you know how this would sound in court?”

“Skin is skin.”

“Whose skin?” Marat Urman approached from the dark of the hallway, emerging from silhouette to solid reality, armored in his red leather jacket but amiable, ready to join the conversation once he knew the subject. “Whose skin are we talking about?”

Arkady said, “Anyone’s. It’s wise to keep it.”

“Good idea. The chief of the morgue doesn’t like detectives tampering with the evidence, dead or not.” Urman stopped at the open drawer and gazed down at its occupant. “Why it’s our friend, Kuznetsov. He’s not wearing a cleaver anymore, but I recognize him.” He looked up at Arkady. “Why are you so interested in this case? His wife tried to chop off his head. We have her confession and the weapon she used. We make a good case and you try to screw us.”

Arkady said, “I’m not trying to do anything.”

“Then why is the drawer open? Why are you here in the middle of the night looking at the body? Is there a chance you’re just trying to fuck Detective Isakov? This looks, how to say, personal. This is about Doctor Kazka, right?”

“We were looking at all the bodies.”

“For head lice? I understand. What’s worse than losing a woman is finding out how little you know about her.”

“I know Eva.”

“No, you don’t, because you don’t know Chechnya. The three of us saw shit you can’t imagine. It’s natural that Eva and Nikolai gravitate to each other. It’s only human. You should step back and let them work it out. Don’t go sneaking around. If she chooses you, so be it. Be civilized. I’m sure you’ll see her again.” Urman let a smile develop. “In fact, I can see her right now. Isakov is fucking her and fucking her and she’s saying, ‘Oh Nikolai, you are so much bigger and better than that loser Renko.’”

“Do you want me to shoot him?” Victor asked Arkady.

“No.”

“No,” Urman said, “the investigator doesn’t want a brawl. He’s not the brawling type. I wish he was.”

“Piss off,” Victor said.

Urman looked down at the corpse that was Kuznetsov. “You want to see bodies? These are nothing. They look like a swim team. Now in Chechnya the rebels left Russian bodies by the road for us to find. They were rigged, so that when you picked up a dead mate a bomb or a grenade would go off. The only way to retrieve a body was to tie it to a long rope and drag it. What was left after the bomb detonated you scraped up with a shovel and sent home in a box.” Urman rolled the drawer shut. “You think you know Eva or Isakov? You know nothing.”

While Urman made his exit Arkady was stock-still. He tried to erase the image of Isakov and Eva together, but it returned because the suggestion was poison and the taste lingered.

“Are you okay?” Victor asked.

“Yes.” Arkady tried to rouse himself.

“The hell with this place. Let’s go.”

“Why was he here?”

“To shake you up.”

Arkady tried to think straight. “No, this was an opportunity Urman seized; it wasn’t planned.”

“Maybe he followed you.”

Arkady thought back. “No, I heard a delivery.”

He headed up the ramp toward the sound of water. Water ran from spigots all the time on the autopsy room’s six granite tables. Half were occupied by a blue-tinged threesome, all male, who had shared a fatal liter of ethyl alcohol. They held their organs in their open bellies. The new arrival was a woman still in a gray prison gown. She was joyless gray from head to toe and her head arched back so strangely that Arkady recognized Kuznetsov’s wife only because he had met her just the night before. Her eyes bulged in their sockets.

Victor was impressed. “Fuck!”

Arkady pulled aside a pathologist working the last of the drunks and asked about the woman’s cause of death.

“Asphyxiation.”

“I don’t see any bruises around the neck.”

“She swallowed her tongue. It’s rare. In fact, it’s been long debated whether it’s even possible, but it happens now and then. She was arrested last night and did it in her cell. We have her husband in a drawer. She killed him and then she killed herself.”

“Who brought her here?”

“Detective Urman followed the van from the prison. Apparently he’d just finished questioning her when she did it.” The pathologist spread his arms in awe. “Some women, you never know.”

Signs of the prosecutor’s disfavor: A red carpet that did not quite reach Arkady’s door. A small office so crammed by a desk, two chairs, locker and file cabinet that it was difficult to turn around. A mere two phones, white for the outside line, red for Zurin. No electric teapot. No plaque on the door. No partner. Other investigators were aware of Arkady’s pariah status; he was the golden example of how not to run a career. No matter, Arkady liked working at night when the staff was gone and the light of his lamp seemed to cover the known world.

He tried calling Eva on her cell phone. It was off, which didn’t necessarily mean she was with Isakov. More likely, he told himself, she was dealing with a patient in the emergency room and didn’t want to be interrupted. He checked the apartment phone for messages. Nothing from her or Zhenya, and Arkady fought off the dark allure of masochism. To clear his head he wrote a report on the events at the Chistye Prudy Metro station, making it as objective as possible; let Zurin sweat over the fact that an investigator of his had rudely disrupted a séance with Stalin. It was one thing to close down a simple hoax, it was another to interfere with superpatriots, and the entire affair illustrated how out of the loop Zurin was. Arkady suspected that when Zurin was put into the loop the prosecutor’s bowels would experience a sudden loosening.

Arkady was more circumspect about what transpired at the skating pond. He had looked through Bora’s pockets and found sodden papers for Boris Antonovich Bogolovo, age thirty-four, ethnic Russian, resident of Tver, electrician, former honored sportsman. A newspaper clipping of a boxing match and a condom seemed to sum up Bora’s past triumphs and hopes for the future. Arkady noted in the report that Bora had followed him and fallen through the ice, but there was nothing to be gained by mentioning a knife when there was no knife to offer in evidence. Arkady had been unable to find it, Platonov and the cameraman Petrov never saw it, and without the knife the report might sound as if Arkady had, for no good reason, lured Bora onto thin ice and almost let him drown. Arkady had to admit to himself that he couldn’t describe the knife. He had seen something shine in Bora’s hand and felt something sharp against his throat. “The investigation is not concluded,” Arkady wrote. Finding a weapon would make a big difference.

Arkady’s eyes rested on his closet. Bolted inside was a combination safe that held his video camera, notebooks, snitch money, a war-era Tokarev pistol and a box of bullets. He kept the gun in the office ever since he found Zhenya stripping it at home. Where Zhenya learned how to take apart and assemble a Tokarev Arkady didn’t know, although the boy claimed he had learned from watching Arkady, and it was true that Arkady took good care of a gun he never used. If he had had the gun would he have shot Bora? Was the difference between him and a killer simply a matter of remembering to carry a gun?

Arkady turned to the file from Victor. A skilled suborner of clerks, Victor had assembled enough information to cover the desk, starting with a photocopy of the internal passport for Nikolai Sergeevich Isakov, an ethnic Russian born in Tver. Again, Tver. A Ministry physical found Isakov to be a thirty-six-year-old male; hair, brown; eyes, blue; height, 200 cm; weight, 90 k. Education: two years at the Kalinin Engineering Institute. A five-star student who dropped out of school for no reason. No degree. Military service: army, infantry, trained as a marksman with VSS sniper rifle. Two tours, no disciplinary problems, reaching the grade of warrant officer before segueing smoothly into OMON, a select police force also known as the Black Berets. The Black Berets were hostage rescuers, not negotiators. Their training included rappelling, marksmanship and the subtleties of silent hand-to-hand combat. Only one in five candidates made it through. The instructor notes on Isakov called him “at the top of his class.” A special note mentioned that Isakov’s father had been NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.

Starting on a far-off but converging track was Marat Urman, half Tatar with a first name from the French Revolution. The product was a combustible 35-year-old male; hair, black; eyes, black; height, 190 cm; weight, 102 k. Arrest records as a juvenile for assault and public disturbance. One year of university. Six years in the army, with repeated disciplinary issues, rising no higher than corporal. In his last year he and Isakov were at the same base and somehow the cool Nikolai Isakov and wild Marat Urman became fast friends.

Black Beret candidate school appreciated Urman’s proclivity for aggression. Much of the training was done as duels; a candidate might fight five opponents one after the other. When Urman broke an opponent’s jaw, the instructor had noted with approval that Urman “continued to beat his foe unconscious.” He might not be officer material, but he was “an excellent battering ram.” Besides, his friend Nikolai Isakov was there to rein in Marat, in case he got out of control. In their black-and-blue fatigues, black boots and berets, the two made a formidable unit.

They went to Chechnya together. In the first Chechen war, in the early nineties, the rebels had bloodied a Russian Army of young, poorly trained conscripts. In the second Chechen war, started in the late nineties, the Kremlin sent a spearhead of mercenaries and elite troops, which meant the Black Berets.

Victor had copied an article from
Izvestia
, datelined Grozny, about a raid by Chechen rebels on a Russian field hospital. The reporter described the horror of wounded men having their throats slit in their beds and the rebels’ dash from the scene. “An estimated fifty terrorists in two stolen trucks and an armored personnel carrier headed east to a small stone bridge that crosses the Sunzha River. There their luck apparently ran out.

“A squad of Black Berets from Tver, a mere six men led by Captain Nikolai Isakov, a decorated officer on his second tour of duty, had heard news of the attack over a cell phone and were waiting among the willows on the river’s eastern bank. The narrowness of the bridge forced the vehicles to cross single file, directly into the sights of Black Beret rifles. Isakov himself took out the driver of the APC with a single shot, effectively blocking the bridge. A fusillade greeted the other terrorists as they poured out of the trucks, expecting to overrun the small number of Black Beret troops in their way.

“A firefight raged up and down the banks of the picturesque mountain stream as Captain Isakov consistently exposed himself to enemy fire to rally his men. The terrorists first mounted a frontal attack and, when that failed, attempted to outflank the Russian marksmen, who would fire and change position. Eventually the Black Berets were down to their last rounds. Isakov had no ammunition left in his rifle and only two bullets in his handgun when the Chechens suddenly retreated in one truck, leaving behind the other truck, the APC and fourteen dead insurgents. Remarkably, when the smoke lifted, only one Black Beret was hit, shot in the knee. Captain Isakov said, ‘We hope we avenged the cowardly attack on our wounded men. We thought of them and did our best.’”

The name of the reporter was Aharon Ginsberg.

“The army is everything!” Arkady’s father used to say, until he was denied a field marshal’s baton, then it was “The army is shit.” Arkady wished he had such clarity of vision. For a semblance of order, Arkady reassembled the dossier as neatly as he could and slipped it in a drawer.

Before he forgot, he called the phone number he had found on Petrov’s matchbook. It was five a.m., a good time to wake and ponder the fact that there were four more hours of dark.