Martin Smith - Three Stations

He called Victor.

"The ticket is from the Hippodrome. Not the circus, not a film. I don't know whether Dopey played the horses, but the crowds out here have been getting sparse and a dwarf would stand out."

"You're there now?" Victor asked.

"In the royal box."

"You've moved up in the world."

Sasha Vaksberg spotted Arkady. He looked puzzled but put on a big smile and waved.

Looking down at the tents, Arkady was impressed by how quickly Sasha had mustered his troops of caterers, waiters and bodyguards. He should feel good, Arkady thought, like Napoleon returning from Elba.

The luncheon seemed to take forever. Finally, there was a last bear hug and a last guest to push out the door. The caterers began clearing tables and breaking down the tents and buffets. After a flurry of mobile phone calls, Sasha held up a bottle of champagne and waved Arkady to come down to the rail. Vaksberg was exuberant.

"You should have joined the party and let them see us together. I get blessed by the pope, you get blessed by the cardinal. That's the way it works." Sasha caught his breath. "The place is a miracle. You know the rationale for its existence? Horses for the cavalry. In a nuclear war, we'll all be issued sabers and a horse."

"I take it you're launching a new venture?"

"Looking for investors, yes. This is the way it's done. Money attracts money. And they all love being with a hero."

"That's you?"

"That's me now. Have some champagne, for Lord's sake."

"Is it good?"

"These people expect the best. They have built their dacha, own a town house in London, an island in the Caribbean and a private jet to take them there and they still can't spend it fast enough. They ski, sail, buy a football or basketball team and still can't spend it fast enough. The answer is obvious. Own a racehorse. Better yet, own a stable of racehorses."

"Horse racing is for the working class."

"That's harness racing. We have to drive home the idea that there's nothing more prestigious than losing money on your own string of Thoroughbred horses."

A blast of patriotic music on the PA system announced the last race of the day. The crowd was male, largely pensioners who gathered every Sunday during the racing season to study the form. The most serious were known as the Faculty. They could not lose a fortune, because the largest bet allowed was ten rubles. Play money. Arkady wondered why they didn't just watch ants at an anthill.

"Is this your next project?"

"It might be," Vaksberg said. "I'm back in the game, that's the main thing. By the way, where is Anya? It's been days since she called. She said she'd be staying with a friend. She doesn't answer her cell phone and she didn't leave a number."

"I suppose when she wants to get hold of you, she will."

Sasha said, "My relationship with Anya is complicated. Has she told you that she has a contract to do a book on me? It's her great chance and she is an ambitious girl. And she may have some confidential internal company papers and I may have to sue her to keep her from publishing, but that's down the line. The main thing is I own her. Did she tell you that?"

They were interrupted by a call on Arkady's phone. It was Victor.

"Your Dopey is, or was, Pavel Petrovich Maksimov, thirty-two, resident of Moscow, never missed a day at the track unless he was in jail. Everyone at the Hippodrome will know him."

"Present employment?"

"Legitimate? He ran the 'Whack-a-Mole' concession in Gorky Park. Let's assume that he was dealing drugs. Before that, he was a croupier at the Peter the Great Casino at Three Stations. He must have had a hell of a long rake."

Arkady hung up. There was silence in the royal box until Sasha said, "Ask around all you want. Criminals in Moscow casinos? What a shocker."

The last race got off to a rolling start behind a gate truck that folded its ungainly wings on the run. Six trotters followed, running stiffly on in their traces, unnatural and beautiful. On the PA system the world cheered.

"I gave you too much credit, Renko. I took you for a man of the world. What you call skimming was a normal transfer of funds within different parts of a corporation. I can see why someone who is not from the business world might misinterpret some transactions. It will all be repaid with interest, no harm done."

"You skimmed ninety percent off a fund for children."

"Totally legal. A luxury fair is an expensive, complicated operation. I did create a reserve fund for unexpected costs. It's normal business practice. In other words, we can tie you up in the courts forever and sue you for libel to boot. Look, I'll be honest with you. It was going to be a simple robbery. Maksimov and I agreed there wouldn't be any shooting. I admit I underestimated the little bastard's greed, but we have to move on. It's your word against mine. Renko's word against mine. I never pulled a trigger."

"That's not what you told the police," Arkady reminded him. "You can't change your story now. You're a hero."

Since Emma was the youngest member of the family, she was given the job of finding the baby a new home. She could leave it in a park, a box, a bench, a public toilet, anywhere as long as she didn't involve the police.

"What about Itsy?" Emma pulled on her jacket inch by inch.

Klim was taking over. He said, "She's dead. And Tito and Leo and Peter. You're lucky you're not dead too. Just dump the baby and do it fast before it wakes up."

"She has one more bottle of formula."

"So?"

"What if nobody finds her?"

"Then she's out of luck."

The way people talked about luck, it sounded to Emma like a spoonful of water in the desert. There just wasn't enough to go around.

But as she made her way through the cars parked in front of Kazansky Station, she came upon a huge sedan with a rear door open to a leather seat as soft as a mother's lap. Emma slid the baby in and it looked so peaceful that Emma laid her own head down for just a second. The next thing Emma knew, she was waking up in the rear seat and a woman behind the wheel was shouting, "Get out! Get out, you filthy girl!"

Dizzy and exhausted, Emma wanted to join Klim and the others. The problem was that the underground passage to the other side of Three Stations was blocked by a scuffle between skinheads and Tajiks. She had been uneasy about her mission from the beginning and it wasn't all that easy to leave a baby. She had expected to prop the baby up in a trash basket where it would be seen and rescued and all she could find were plastic modules for the collection of recyclables-green for paper goods and blue for plastics and glass. She didn't want people throwing empty bottles on the baby. Most of the traffic was speeding through the square. A yellow Volvo station wagon trolled around the parked cars and came to a halt in front of Emma and the baby. A Gypsy with a baby at her breast stopped alongside Emma. The car moved on.

The baby stretched and pursed its lips and made all the signs usual to waking and crying. Emma felt she had to take cover soon, and when traffic passed, the empty street lured her out. She was halfway across when the next wave of cars caught up. It was like stepping into the sea up to her neck, the cars so huge and black and their lights so blinding that Emma dropped the baby. It was just too heavy and floppy. But when she remembered that Itsy never abandoned anyone, she rushed back to cover the baby with her own body even as the lights of a flatbed truck rose over her. The truck shuddered to a stop amid the explosive popping of straps and the release of a plastic tarp that lifted like a great bat ray. Two men climbed down from the cab, faces white with anxiety. All traffic had stopped. Their load of exotic mammoth tusks was strewn over four lanes and stopped traffic as effectively as tank traps. The tusks represented months of trekking across Siberian permafrost, power-hosing tusk after tusk to bring back collector-quality finds, hand sawing the final lot in a Moscow bathtub.