Wolves Eat Dogs (9 page)

“They’re like a boys’ club,” she told Arkady. “Greedy little boys.”

“And Pasha?”

“President of the club.”

“Rina straightened him out,” Kuzmitch said.

“If I could meet a woman like Rina, I would settle down, too,” said Maximov. “As it is, all this wine, women and song could be fatal.”

“Where were you when you heard about Pasha’s death?” Arkady asked.

“I was playing squash. My trainer will tell you. I sat down on the floor of the court and cried.”

Kuzmitch said, “I was in Hong Kong. I immediately flew back out of concern for Rina.”

“All these questions. It was suicide, wasn’t it?” Maximov said.

“Tragically, yes.” Zurin slipped up to the table. He held Zhenya firmly by the shoulder. “My office looked into matters, but there was no reason for an investigation. Just a tragic event.”

“Then why…” Kuzmitch glanced at Arkady.

“Thoroughness. But I think I can assure you, there will no more questions now. Could you excuse us, please? I need a word with my investigator.”

“Istanbul,” Kuzmitch reminded Arkady.

“Give this man a day off,” Maximov told Zurin. “He’s working too hard.”

The prosecutor steered Arkady away. “Having a good time? How did you get in?”

“I was invited, me and my friend.” Arkady took Zhenya.

“To ask questions and spread rumors?”

“You know what rumor I heard?”

“What would that be?” Zurin kept Arkady and Zhenya moving.

“I heard they made you a company director. They found you a chair in the boardroom, and now you’re earning your keep.”

Zurin steered Arkady a little faster. “Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve gone too far.”

Ozhogin caught up and gripped Arkady’s shoulder with a wrestler’s thumb that pressed to the bone. “Renko, you’ll have to learn manners if you ever want to work for NoviRus Security.” The colonel patted Zhenya on the head, and Zhenya clenched Arkady’s hand in a hard little knot.

“How dare you come here?” Zurin demanded.

“You told me to ask questions.”

“Not at a charity event.”

“You know the disk that Hoffman was holding out on us?” Ozhogin let Arkady peek at a shiny CD.

“Ah, that must be it,” Arkady said. “Are you breaking arms today, or legs?”

“Your investigation is over,” Zurin said. “To sneak into a party and drag in some homeless boy is inexcusable.”

“Does this mean I will be reassigned?”

“This means disciplinary action,” Zurin said wearily, as if setting down a heavy stone. “This means you’re done.”

Arkady felt done. He also felt he might have gone a little too far with Zurin. Even sellouts had their pride.

Back he and Zhenya went, away from the circle of important men, past the cosmonauts, cotton candy and smoky grills, the telegenic faces and blue llamas and aliens on stilts. A rocket shot up from the tennis court, rose high into the blue sky and exploded into a shower of paper flowers. By the time the last of the petals had drifted down, Arkady and Zhenya were out the gate. Meanwhile, Bobby Hoffman was waiting at Arkady’s car, stuffing a bloody nose with a handkerchief, head tilted back to protect the jacket bequeathed him by Ivanov.

On the drive, Zhenya regarded Arkady with a narrow gaze. Arkady had gone with dizzying speed from the heights of New Russia to a boot out the door. This descent was swift enough to get even Zhenya’s attention.

“What’s going to happen?” Hoffman asked.

“Who knows? A new career. I studied law at Moscow University, maybe I can become a lawyer. Do you see me as a lawyer?”

“Ha!” Hoffman thought for a second. “It’s funny, but there’s one thing about you that reminds me of Pasha. You’re not as smart, God knows, but you share a quality. You couldn’t tell whether he found things funny or sad. More like he felt, What the hell? Especially toward the end.”

Arkady asked Zhenya, “Is that good, to share qualities with a dead man?” Zhenya pursed his lips. “It depends? I agree.”

Zhenya hadn’t eaten. They pulled in at a pirozhki stand and found, on the far side of the stand, an inflated fun house of a homely cabin standing on chicken legs. An inflated fence of bones and skulls surrounded the hut, and on the roof stood the witch, Baba Yaga, with the mortar and pestle on which she flew. In Zhenya’s fairy tales, Baba Yaga ate children who wandered to her cabin. This cabin was full of children jumping on a trampoline floor covered with balls of colored foam. Boys and girls slid out one door and ran in another while the mechanical witch cackled hideously above. Zhenya left his chess set and walked into the witch’s cabin, spellbound.

Hoffman said, “Thanks for the ride. I don’t drive in Russia. Driving here is like endlessly circling the Arc de Triomphe.”

“I wouldn’t know. How is the nose?”

“Ozhogin pinched it. Wasn’t even a punch. Showed me the disk, reached up and popped a blood vessel, just for the humiliation.”

“It’s a day for bloody noses. Timofeyev had one, too.” Now that Arkady thought about it, on the videotapes, Ivanov had held a handkerchief the same way.

Hoffman hunched forward. “Did I mention he likes you just as much as me?”

“I don’t know why.” The prospect of running into Ozhogin again made Arkady want to lift weights and work out regularly. He lit a cigarette. “Where did you hide the disk?”

“I knew Ozhogin would look in my apartment, so I put it in my gym locker. I actually taped it upside down. It was invisible. I don’t know how he found it.”

“How often do you go to the gym, Bobby?”

“Once a…” Hoffman shrugged.

“There you are.”

“Oh, and now that they have the disk, the offer is ‘Leave the country or go to jail.’ I pissed them off. Fuck them, I’ll be back.”

“And Rina?”

“Let me tell you about Rina.” Bobby picked pirozhki crumbs off his jacket. “She is a lovely kid, and Pasha left her well set up, and within a year the most important thing in her life will be fashion shows. And she’ll run Pasha’s foundation, that’ll keep her busy. Everyone wins except you and me. And I’ll bounce back.”

“Which leaves me.”

“At the bottom of the food chain. I’ll tell you this much: the company’s dead.”

“NoviRus?”

“Kaput. All that held it together was Pasha.” Bobby gently touched his nose. “Maybe Timofeyev was a good scientist once upon a time, but in business he is a total dud. No nerve, no imagination. I never understood why Pasha kept him on. Not to mention that Timofeyev is falling apart in front of everyone’s eyes. Six months, you know who’ll run the show at NoviRus? Ozhogin. He’s a cop. Only you can’t run a complicated business entity like a cop, you have to be a general. Kuzmitch and Maximov can’t wait. When they’re done with Ozhogin, you won’t be able to find his bones. It’s the food chain, Renko. Figure out the food chain, and you figure out the world.”

Arkady watched Zhenya bounce in and out of sight. He asked Hoffman, “What do you know about Anton Obodovsky?”

“Obodovsky?” Bobby raised his eyebrows. “Tough guy, local Mafia, jacked some of our trucks and drained some oil tanks. He has balls, I’ll give him that. Ozhogin pointed him out on the street once. Obodovsky made the colonel nervous. I liked that.”

When Zhenya finally emerged from the fun house, they started home. Hoffman and Zhenya played chess without a board, calling out their moves, the boy piping “e4” from the backseat, followed quickly by Hoffman’s confident “c5” up front. Arkady could follow through the first ten moves, and then it was like listening to a conversation between robots, so he concentrated more on his own diminishing prospects.

It was virtually impossible to be dismissed for incompetence. Incompetence had become the norm under the old law, when prosecutors faced no courtroom challenges from upstart lawyers, and convenient evidence and confessions were always close at hand. Drinking was indulged: a drunken investigator who curled up in the back of a car was treated as gently as an ailing grandmother. Corruption, however, was tricky. While corruption was the lubrication of Russian life, an investigator accused of corruption always drew public outrage. There was a painting called
The Sleigh Ride,
of a troika driver throwing a horrified girl to a pursuing wolf pack. Zurin was like that driver. He compiled files on his own investigators, and whenever the press got close to him, he tossed them a victim. Arkady had no reason to be horrified or surprised.

He asked Hoffman, “Does Timofeyev have a cold or a bloody nose?”

“He says he has a cold.”

“There were spots on his shirt that looked like dried blood.”

“Which could have come from blowing his nose.”

“Did Pasha have a bloody nose?”

“Sometimes,” Hoffman said. He was still engaged in the chess game.

“Did he have a cold?”

“No.”

“An allergy?”

“No. Rook takes b3.”

Zhenya said, “Queen to d8, check.”

“Did he see a doctor?” Arkady asked.

“He wouldn’t go.”

“He was paranoid?”

“I don’t know. I never looked at it that way. It wasn’t that obvious, because he was still on top of the business end. King to h7.”

“Queen to e7,” said Zhenya.

“Queen to d5.”

“Checkmate.”

Hoffman threw his hands up as if upsetting a board. “Fuck!”

“He’s good,” Arkady said.

“Who knows, with these distractions?”

Zhenya won two more games before they got to the children’s shelter. Arkady walked him to the door, and Zhenya marched through without a backward look, which was both more and less than disdain. Hoffman was closing his mobile phone when Arkady returned to the car.

“He’s Jewish,” Hoffman said.

“His last name is Lysenko. That’s not Jewish.”

“I just played chess with him. He’s Jewish. Can you let me off at the Mayakovsky metro station? Thanks.”

“You like Mayakovsky?”

“The poet? Sure. ‘Look at me, world, and envy me. I have a Soviet passport!’ Then he blew his brains out. What’s not to like?”

As Arkady drove, he glanced at Hoffman, who was not the sobbing wreck he had been the day before. That Hoffman could not have played chess with anyone. This Hoffman went from poetry to boasting lightly, without incriminating detail, about a variety of business scams—front companies and secret auctions—that he and Ivanov had perpetrated together.

“How are you feeling?” Arkady asked.

“Pretty disappointed.”

“You’ve been humiliated and fired. You should be furious.”

“I am.”

“And you lost the disk.”

“That was the ace up my sleeve.”

“You’re bearing up well, considering.”

“I can’t get over that kid. You probably don’t appreciate it, Renko, but that was chess at a really high level.”

“It certainly sounded like it. Keeping the disk, hiding the disk, using me and my pitiful investigation to make the disk seem important, and finally letting Ozhogin find it at your gym, of all places. What did you put on it? What’s going to happen at NoviRus when that disk goes to work?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a computer expert. The disk is poison.”

The sky darkened behind illuminated billboards that used to declaim: The Party Is the Vanguard of the Workers! and now advertised cognac aged in the barrel, as if a madman raving on a corner had been smoothly replaced by a salesman. Neon coins rolled across the marquee of a casino and lit a rank of Mercedeses and SUVs.

“How would you know?” Hoffman twisted in his seat. “I’m getting out. Right here is good.”

“We’re not at the station.”

“Hey, asshole, I said this corner was good.”

Arkady pulled over, and Bobby heaved himself out of the car. Arkady leaned across the seat and rolled down the window. “Is that your good-bye?”

“Renko, will you fuck off? You wouldn’t understand.”

“I understand that you made a mess for me.”

“You don’t get it.”

Drivers trapped behind Arkady shouted for him to move. Horns were rarely used when threats would do. A wind chased bits of paper around the street.

“What don’t I get?” Arkady asked.

“They killed Pasha.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“They pushed him?”

“I don’t know. What does it matter? You were going to quit.”

“There’s nothing to quit. There’s no investigation.”

“Know what Pasha said? ‘Everything is buried, but nothing is buried long enough.’ ”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning here’s the hot news. Rina is a whore, I’m a shit and you’re a loser. That’s as much chance as we had. This whole place is fucked. I used you, so what? Everybody uses everybody. That’s what Pasha called a chain reaction. What do you expect from me?”

“Help.”