Wolves Eat Dogs (4 page)

When Arkady got to the sofa, Hoffman wrapped his pudgy hands around Arkady’s. “Okay, I took a disk with confidential data from Pasha’s computer: shell companies, bribes, payoffs, bank accounts. It was going to be my insurance, but I’m spending it on you. I agreed to give it back when you’re done. That’s the deal I made with Ozhogin and Zurin, the disk for a few days of your help. Don’t ask me where it is, it’s safe. So you were right, I’m a venal slob. Big news. Know why I’m doing this? I couldn’t go back to my place. I didn’t have the strength, and I couldn’t sleep, either, so I just sat here. In the middle of the night, I heard this rubbing. I thought it was mice and got a flashlight and walked around the apartment. No mice. But I still heard them. Finally I went down to the lobby to ask the receptionist. He wasn’t at his desk, though. He was outside with the doorman, on their hands and knees with brushes and bleach, scrubbing blood off the sidewalk. They did it, there’s not a spot left. That’s what I’d been hearing from ten stories up, the scrubbing. I know it’s impossible, but that’s what I heard. And I thought to myself, Renko: there’s a son of a bitch who’d hear the scrubbing. That’s who I want.”

I
n the black-and-white videotape, the two Mercedeses rolled up to the street security camera, and bodyguards—large men further inflated by the armored vests they wore under their suits—deployed from the chase car to the building canopy. Only then did the lead car’s driver trot around to open the curbside door.

A digital clock rolled in a corner of the tape. 2128. 2129. 2130. Finally Pasha Ivanov unfolded from the rear seat. He looked more disheveled than the dynamic Ivanov of the apartment photo gallery. Arkady had questioned the driver, who had told him that Ivanov hadn’t said a word all the way from the office to the apartment, not even on a mobile phone.

Something amused Ivanov. Two dachshunds strained on their leashes to sniff his attaché case. Although the tape was silent, Arkady read Ivanov’s lips:
Puppies?
he asked the owner. When the dogs had passed, Ivanov clutched the attaché to his chest and went into the building. Arkady switched to the lobby tape.

The marble lobby was so brightly lit that everyone wore halos. The doorman and receptionist wore jackets with braid over not too obvious holsters. Once the doorman activated the call button with a key, he stayed at Ivanov’s side while Ivanov used a handkerchief, and when the elevator doors opened, Arkady went to the elevator tape. He had already interviewed the operator, a former Kremlin guard, white-haired but hard as a sandbag.

Arkady asked whether he and Ivanov had talked. The operator said, “I trained on the Kremlin staircase. Big men don’t make small talk.”

On the tape, Ivanov punched a code into the keypad and, as the doors opened, turned to the elevator camera. The camera’s fish-bowl lens made his face disproportionately huge, eyes drowning in shadow above the handkerchief he held against his nose. Maybe he had Timofeyev’s summer cold. Ivanov finally moved through the open doors, and Arkady was reminded of an actor rushing to the stage, now hesitating, now rushing again. The time on the tape was 2133.

Arkady switched tapes, back to the street camera, and forwarded to 2147. The pavement was clear, the two cars were still at the curb, the lights of traffic filtering by. At 2148 a blur from above slapped the pavement. The doors of the chase car flew open, and the guards poured out to form a defensive circle on the pavement around what could have been a heap of rags with legs. One man raced into the building, another knelt to feel Ivanov’s neck, while the driver of the sedan ran around it to open a rear door. The man taking Ivanov’s pulse, or lack of it, shook his head while the doorman moved into view, arms wide in disbelief. That was it, the Pasha Ivanov movie, a story with a beginning and an end but no middle.

Arkady rewound and watched frame by frame.

Ivanov’s upper body dropped from the top of the screen, shoulder hitched to take the brunt of the fall.

His head folded from the force of the impact even as his legs entered the frame.

Upper and lower body collapsed into a ring of dust that exploded from the pavement.

Pasha Ivanov settled as the doors of the chase car swung open and, in slow motion, the guards swam around his body.

Arkady watched to see whether any of the security team, while they were in the car and before Ivanov came out of the sky, glanced up; then he watched for anything like the saltshaker dropping with Ivanov or shaken loose by the force of the fall. Nothing. And then he watched to see whether any of the guards picked up anything afterward. No one did. They stood on the pavement, as useful as potted plants.

The doorman on duty kept looking up. He said, “I was in Special Forces, so I’ve seen parachutes that didn’t deploy and bodies you scraped off the ground, but someone coming out of the sky here? And Ivanov, of all people. A good guy, I have to say, a generous guy. But what if he’d hit the doorman, did he think about that? Now a pigeon goes overhead and I duck.”

“Your name?” Arkady asked.

“Kuznetsov, Grisha.” Grisha still had the army stamp on him. Wary around officers.

“You were on duty two days ago?”

“The day shift. I wasn’t here at night, when it happened, so I don’t know what I can tell you.”

“Just walk me around, if you would.”

“Around what?”

“The building, front to back.”

“For a suicide? Why?”

“Details.”

“Details,” Grisha muttered as the traffic went by. He shrugged. “Okay.”

The building was short-staffed on weekends, Grisha said, only him, the receptionist and the passenger elevator man. Weekdays, there were two other men for repairs, working the service door and service elevator, picking up trash. Housecleaners on weekdays, too, if residents requested. Ivanov didn’t. Everyone had been vetted, of course. Security cameras covered the street, lobby, passenger elevator and service alley. At the back of the lobby Grisha tapped in a code on a keypad by a door with a sign that said
STAFF ONLY
. The door eased open, and Grisha led Arkady into an area that consisted of a changing room with lockers, sink, microwave; toilet; mechanical room with furnace and hot-water heater; repair shop where two older men Grisha identified as Fart A and Fart B were intently threading a pipe; residents’ storage area for rugs, skis and such, ending in a truck bay. Every door had a keypad and a different code.

Grisha said, “You ought to go to NoviRus Security. Like an underground bunker. They’ve got everything there: building layout, codes, the works.”

“Good idea.” NoviRus Security was the last place Arkady wanted to be. “Can you open the bay?”

Light poured in as the gate rolled up, and Arkady found himself facing a service alley wide enough to accommodate a moving van. Dumpsters stood along the brick wall that was the back of shorter, older buildings facing the next street over. There were, however, security cameras aimed at the alley from the bay where Arkady and Grisha stood, and from the new buildings on either side. There was also a green-and-black motorcycle standing under a No Parking sign.

Something about the way the doorman screwed up his face made Arkady ask, “Yours?”

“Parking around here is a bitch. Sometimes I can find a place and sometimes I can’t, but the Farts won’t let me use the bay. Excuse me.” As they walked to the bike, Arkady noticed a cardboard sign taped to the saddle:
DON’T TOUCH THIS BIKE. I AM WATCHING YOU.
Grisha borrowed a pen from Arkady and underlined “watching.” “That’s better.”

“Quite a machine.”

“A Kawasaki. I used to ride a Uralmoto,” Grisha said, to let Arkady know how far he had come up in the world.

Arkady noticed a pedestrian door next to the bay. Each entry had a separate keypad. “Do people park here?”

“No, the Farts are all over them, too.”

“Saturday, when the mechanics weren’t on duty?”

“When we’re short-staffed? Well, we can’t leave our post every time a car stops in the alley. We give them ten minutes, and then we chase them out.”

“Did that happen this Saturday?”

“When Ivanov jumped? I’m not on at night.”

“I understand, but during your shift, did you or the receptionist notice anything unusual in the alley?”

Grisha took a while to think. “No. Besides, the back is locked tight on Saturdays. You’d need a bomb to get in.”

“Or a code.”

“You’d still be seen by the camera. We’d notice.”

“I’m sure. You were in front?”

“At the canopy, yes.”

“People were going in and out?”

“Residents and guests.”

“Anyone carrying salt?”

“How much salt?”

“Bags and bags of salt.”

“No.”

“Ivanov wasn’t bringing home salt day after day? No salt leaking from his briefcase?”

“No.”

“I have salt on the brain, don’t I?”

“Yeah.” Said slowly.

“I should do something about that.”

The Arbat was a promenade of outdoor musicians, sketch artists and souvenir stalls that sold strands of amber, nesting dolls of peasant women, retro posters of Stalin. Dr. Novotny’s office was above a cybercafe. She told Arkady that she was about to retire on the money she would make selling to developers who planned to put in a Greek restaurant. Arkady liked the office as it was, a drowsy room with overstuffed chairs and Kandinsky prints, bright splashes of color that could have been windmills, bluebirds, cows. Novotny was a brisk seventy, her face a mask of lines around bright dark eyes.

“I first saw Pasha Ivanov a little more than a year ago, the first week in May. He seemed typical of our new entrepreneurs. Aggressive, intelligent, adaptable; the last sort to seek psychotherapy. They are happy to send in their wives or mistresses; it’s popular for the women, like feng shui, but the men rarely come in themselves. In fact, he missed his last four sessions, although he insisted on paying for them.”

“Why did he choose you?”

“Because I’m good.”

“Oh.” Arkady liked a woman who came straight to the point.

“Ivanov said he had trouble sleeping, which is always the way they start. They say they want a pill to help them sleep, but what they want me to prescribe is a mood elevator, which I am willing to do only as part of a broader therapy. We met once a week. He was entertaining, highly articulate, possessed of enormous self-confidence. At the same time, he was very secretive in certain areas, his business dealings for one, and, unfortunately, whatever was the cause of his…”

“Depression or fear?” Arkady asked.

“Both, if you need to put it that way. He was depressed, and he was afraid.”

“Did he mention enemies?”

“Not by name. He said that ghosts were after him.” Novotny opened a box of cigars, took one, peeled off the cellophane and slipped the cigar band over her finger. “I’m not saying that he believed in ghosts.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No. What I’m saying is that he had a past. A man like him gets to where he is by doing many remarkable things, some of which he might later regret.”

Arkady described the scene at Ivanov’s apartment. The doctor said that the broken mirror certainly could have been an expression of self-loathing, and jumping from a window was a man’s way out. “However, the two most usual motives of suicide for men are financial and emotional, often evidenced as atrophied libido. Ivanov had wealth and a healthy sexual relationship with his friend Rina.”

“He used Viagra.”

“Rina is much younger.”

“And his physical health?”

“For a man his age, good.”

“He didn’t mention an infection or a cold?”

“No.”

“Did the subject of salt ever come up?”

“No.”

“The floor of his closet was covered with salt.”

“That
is
interesting.”

“But you say he recently missed some sessions.”

“A month’s worth, and sporadically before then.”

“Did he mention any attempts on his life?”

Novotny turned the cigar band around her finger. “Not in so many words. He said he had to stay a step ahead.”

“A step ahead of ghosts, or someone real?”

“Ghosts can be very real. In Ivanov’s case, however, I think he was pursued by both ghosts and someone real.”

“Do you think he was suicidal?”

“Yes. At the same time, he was a survivor.”

“Do you think, considering everything, he killed himself?”

“He could have. Did he? You’re the investigator.” Her face shifted into a sympathetic frown. “I’m sorry, I wish I could help you more. Would you like a cigar? It’s Cuban.”

“No, thank you. Do you smoke?”

“When I was a girl, all the modern, interesting women smoked cigars. You’d look good with a cigar. One more thing, Investigator. I got the impression that there was a cyclical nature to Ivanov’s bouts of depression. Always in the spring, always early in May. In fact, right after May Day. But I must confess, May Day always deeply depressed me, too.”

It wasn’t easy to find an unfashionable restaurant among the Irish pubs and sushi bars in the center of Moscow, but Victor succeeded. He and Arkady had macaroni and grease served at a stand-up cafeteria around the corner from the militia headquarters on Petrovka. Arkady was happy with black tea and sugar, but Victor had a daily requirement of carbohydrates that was satisfied best by beer. From his briefcase Victor took morgue photos of Ivanov, frontal, dorsal and head shot, and spread them between the plates. One side of Ivanov’s face was white, the other side black.

Victor said, “Dr. Toptunova said she didn’t autopsy suicides. I asked her, ‘What about your curiosity, your professional pride? What about poisons or psychotropic drugs?’ She said they’d have to do biopsies, tests, waste the precious resources of the state. We agreed on fifty dollars. I figure Hoffman is good for that.”

“Toptunova is a butcher.” Arkady really didn’t want to look at the pictures.

“You don’t find Louis Pasteur doing autopsies for the militia. Thank God she operates on the dead. Anyway, she says Ivanov broke his neck. Fuck your mother, I could have told them that. And if it hadn’t been his neck, it would have been his skull. Drugwise, he was clean, although she thought he had ulcers from the condition of his stomach. There was one odd thing. In his stomach? Bread and salt.”