Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

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 seance 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.