Martin Smith - Three Stations

A digital clock on the wall flipped to 2400.

Midnight. Victor was four hours late for his shift.

Arkady gathered his clothes from a dimly lit recovery area, moving among the beds of sedated men and urine-soaked sheets. The legs of the beds were sawed off to allow for falls. All the figures were still except for one who twisted against restraining belts and urgently whispered to Arkady, "I am God, God is shit, I am shit, God is shit, God is dog, I am God," over and over.

"You see, we get all types," Swan said. He had Victor's ID, keys, cell phone and handgun waiting when Arkady returned to the desk.

They dried and dressed Victor, trying to keep him from unraveling.

"He's not registered, right?" Arkady just wanted to check.

"He was never here."

Arkady laid fifty dollars on the desk and maneuvered Victor toward the door.

"I am God!" said the voice from the bed.

God is drunk, Arkady thought. Arkady drove Victor's Lada because his own Zhiguli was in the shop awaiting a new gearbox and Victor had lost his license for drunk driving. It didn't matter that Victor had been washed and wore a change of clothes, the smell of vodka came off him like heat from a stove and Arkady cranked a window open for fresh air. The short nights of summer had begun, nothing like the white nights of St. Petersburg but enough to make sleep difficult and aggravate relationships. The police radio maintained a constant squawk.

Arkady handed Victor the walkie-talkie. "Call in. Let Petrovka know that you're on duty." Petrovka was shorthand for militia headquarters on Petrovka Street.

"Who cares? I'm fucked."

But Victor pulled himself together to call the dispatcher. Miraculously no one in his district had been murdered, raped or assaulted all evening.

"Bunch of fairies. Do I have my gun?"

"Yes. We'd hate to see that fall into the wrong hands."

Arkady thought Victor was nodding off but the detective muttered, "Life would be wonderful without vodka, but since the world is not wonderful, people need vodka. Vodka is in our DNA. That's a fact. The thing is, Russians are perfectionists. That's our curse. It makes for great chess players and ballerinas and turns the rest of us into jealous inebriates. The question is not why don't I drink less, it's why don't you drink more?"

"You're welcome."

"That's what I meant. Thank you."

Other cars, beefed-up foreign monsters, roared up behind them but didn't tailgate for long. The Lada's exhaust pipe and muffler hung low and occasionally dragged a rooster tail of sparks, fair warning to keep a safe distance.

If the Lada was a wreck, so were the men in it, Arkady thought. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. Who was this graying stranger who rose from his bed, usurped his clothes and occupied his chair at the prosecutor's office?

Victor said, "I read in the paper about two dolphins trying to drown a man in Greece or someplace. You always hear about noble dolphins saving someone from drowning. Not this time; they were pushing him out to sea. I asked myself what was different about this poor bastard. It turned out he was Russian, naturally, and maybe a little drunk. Why does the reverse of the normal always happen to us? Maybe the dolphins had rescued him a dozen times before. Enough was enough. What do you think?"

"Maybe we should make it official," Arkady said.

"Make what official?"

"Russia is upside down."

Arkady was neither up nor down. He was an investigator who investigated nothing. The prosecutor made sure Arkady followed orders by giving him none to defy. No investigations meant no runaway investigations. Arkady was ignored, welcome to spend his time reading novels or arranging flowers.

Although he had time he hadn't spent it with Zhenya. At fifteen the boy was at the peak of sullen adolescence. Was Zhenya absent from school? Arkady had no say. His status with the boy was not official. All he could offer Zhenya was a clean place to spend the night. Arkady might not see him for a week and then by chance spot Zhenya in his other, secretive life trudging along in a hooded sweatshirt with a street gang. If Arkady approached, Zhenya froze him with a look.

The director of the children's shelter that Zhenya originally came from claimed that the boy and Arkady had a special relationship. Zhenya's father had shot Arkady. If that wasn't special, what was?

The day before, friends brought champagne and cake to celebrate Arkady's birthday, and then gave such rueful, eloquent speeches about the cost of integrity that the women cried. Some of the drunker men too, and Arkady had to go from person to person and reassure them that he was not dead.

He had written a letter of resignation. As of noon today I resign my position in the Prosecution Service of the Russian Republic. Arkady Kyrilovich Renko, Senior Investigator of Important Cases.

But to afford Zurin so much satisfaction was unbearable. Arkady had burned the letter in an ashtray.

And the days marched on.

Arkady had a new neighbor across the hall, a young woman who was out all hours and sometimes needed help finding her latchkey in her voluminous bag. A journalist young enough to burn the candle at both ends. One night she showed up at his door with a black eye and a boyfriend in hot pursuit. The light on the landing was out, as usual, and Arkady did not get a good look at his face. However, the man could see Arkady in the open doorway, gun in hand, and vanished down the stairs in bounds.

"I'm fine. It was nothing," Anya said. "Really, thank you so much, you're the hero of the hour. I must look a mess."

"Who was it?"

"A friend."

"That was a friend?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to report this to the militia?"

"The militia? You must be kidding. Oh, you must be the investigator in the building. I heard about you," she said. "I take back any insinuation about the honesty and integrity of our brave men in their battle against the criminal element in our society."

He heard her whooping and laughing as soon as she was in her apartment. The following night she knocked on Arkady's door and saw the bottles and plates of his birthday celebration scattered around the living room.

"A party?"

"It wasn't the Sack of Rome, just a few friends."

"Next time let me know." From her bag she gave him two tins of Osetra caviar, 125 grams each, together worth almost a thousand dollars.

"I can't."

"We're even. I get these all the time and I hate caviar. Where's the woman who lived here?"

"She left."

"Are you sure you didn't chop her into small pieces and mail her around the country? Just joking. You scared the shit out of my friend. Served him right."

Her name was Anya Rudikova. Oddly enough, he saw her a week later on television, black eye and all, discussing violence in film with the objectivity of a sociologist.

The radio dispatcher called and Arkady picked up on Victor's behalf.

"Orlov."

The dispatcher was cautious. She demanded to know whether he was fit for duty.

"Yes," Arkady said.

"Because when you called earlier you didn't sound so good. People are talking about you."

"Fuck them."

"Well, you do sound better. Can you handle an overdose? The ambulances are running late."

"Where?"

While Arkady listened he executed a satisfying U-turn in the face of oncoming traffic. What tourist maps called Komsomol Square, the people of Moscow called Three Stations for the railway terminals gathered there. Plus the converging forces of two Metro lines and ten lanes of traffic. Passengers pushed their way like badly organized armies through street vendors selling flowers, embroidered shirts, shirts with Putin, shirts with Che, CDs, DVDs, fur hats, posters, nesting dolls, war medals and Soviet kitsch.