Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

Time in a refrigerated drawer had altered Kuznetsov. He looked as if a four-year-old had colored him, crayoned his face, belly and feet a livid maroon and the rest of his body a cool blue sewn up in front with heavy twine. He’d flattened a little, sucked in his eyes and let his jowls hang loose. Because of the sugar in alcohol he smelled of spoiled fruit.

His wife occupied the adjoining table. His and hers. Arkady took off his jacket and pulled on latex gloves while Platonov stood aside, like a man waiting to be properly introduced.

“You’re poaching.” A junior pathologist came chugging. He was small, with a damp, freshly hatched quality. “It’s no bother, but the detectives said these were finished. I’d just hate to get on the wrong side of Isakov and Urman.”

“As would we all. Busy night?” Arkady asked. All six granite tables were occupied, spigots running, although he didn’t see any autopsies under way.

“Hypothermics. It’s a cold night. We pick them up but we don’t perform autopsies unless they’re violent deaths.”

“Which you did for the two Kuznetsovs.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re done?”

“Unless someone claims them.”

“If not?”

“It’s the potter’s field.”

“So you have time to help us.”

“Do what?”

“Get the flute.”

Platonov’s ears pricked up. “A flute in a morgue? See, that’s the sort of thing I only encounter with you, Renko.”

The grandmaster had arrived at Arkady’s apartment in a foul mood, having waited hours to be picked up and full of complaints about old paramours. “At a certain age women don’t want the lights on for sex, they want pitch-dark.” He had shown Arkady the bruises and scratches suffered from crossing the bedroom. “Whereas a man that age has to visit the bathroom during the night fairly often. Between the champagne bottles, the fucking cat and the coffee table it was an obstacle course.”

Platonov seemed invigorated to see the morgue’s dead, the day’s hypothermia cases, a windfall of frail, bleached bodies that were old but not as old as he. “This is the House of the Dead, the ferry on the River Styx,” Platonov announced. “The final checkmate!” In his disheveled coat and shapeless hat he wandered among cadavers, reading charts, pleased with himself and saying, “Younger…younger…younger…younger. It makes a man philosophical, doesn’t it, Renko?”

“Some it makes philosophical, some just throw up.”

The pathologist returned with a hair dryer and a flute case. From the case he took a velvet cloth and unwrapped a glass cylinder more the dimensions of a pennywhistle than a flute. The cylinder was packed with purple crystals. Each end had a rubber stopper.

“This is the flute.” Arkady put the cylinder in Platonov’s hands. “Your task is to warm it up.”

“What’s inside?”

“Iodine crystals. Try not to breathe the fumes.”

“Such interesting evenings with you, Renko. Sincerely.”

With the pathologist’s help Arkady rolled Kuznetsov onto his face. The cleaver wound on the back of the neck gaped to the bone.

“One swing; quite a feat for a woman too drunk to stand,” Arkady said.

The pathologist said, “I heard that she confessed twice, once at the murder scene and once in her cell.”

“And then swallowed her tongue.”

Kuznetsov’s back was dotted with moles, and tufts of wiry hair that sprouted on the shoulder blades, where angels had wings.

Between the shoulder blades was a tattoo the size of a hockey puck of a shield with OMON written across the top, TVER across the bottom and, in the center, the tiger’s head emblem of the Black Berets.

Arkady unfolded a copy of the photo Zoya had given him of her husband’s tattoo of a tiger facing down wolves. The head of Filotov’s tiger and the OMON tiger were identical. Now that he had a reference point, Arkady saw that the rest of Filotov’s more elaborate tattoo-the craven wolves, deep woods and mountain stream-was a later addition, including the city name TVER , which the tattoo artist had inscribed on a branch.

The pathologist turned on the hair dryer and ran warm air up and down the dead man’s arms. “Fingerprints on skin are tricky because skin is always growing, shedding, sweating, stretching, folding, rubbing off. This is just a demonstration, right?”

“Right,” Arkady said.

The pathologist inserted a plastic tube into the rubber stopper at one end of the cylinder, removed the stopper from the other, slipped the loose end of the tube between his lips and blew. He blew smoothly while he moved the open end of the flute up and down the dead man’s arms, forcing out warm iodine fumes that would combine with skin oils to make a latent print visible, a simple task that demanded care because iodine fumes could corrode metal, let alone the soft tissues of the mouth.

Like a developing photo, the prints of the palm, heel and fingers of large hands appeared in sepia tones around Kuznetsov’s wrists.

Platonov was excited. “You found what you were looking for!”

“Smudged,” the pathologist said. “Too much twisting and torquing, not a single usable print.”

In a way it was the worst possible outcome, Arkady thought, more a matter of fears confirmed than knowledge gained. A call came in on his cell phone, a text message: “Urgent meet, U know where.;)” That had to be from Victor. Arkady acknowledged the call and turned to Kuznetsov’s wife. She was the indeterminate color of an old rug and possibly that was what she had been in life, Arkady thought, with her scabs and bruises, something Kuznetsov had wiped his boots on. Her head arched rigidly back, mouth and eyes agape.

“Can someone swallow their tongue?” Platonov asked.

The pathologist said, “The tongue is a muscle firmly attached to the base of the mouth. You can’t swallow it.”

“There’s dried blood in the nostrils,” Arkady said.

“She didn’t die of a nosebleed.”

“Then what happened to her? She doesn’t look happy.”

“Between congestive heart failure, pneumonia, diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver and her level of alcohol, who knows? Her heart stopped. Should I fume her the same as him?”

“Please.”

The pathologist played the flute around her arms and found no prints, smudged or otherwise. But her eyes said something, Arkady thought.

“Her face,” he said. “Try her face.”

The pathologist bent over her with the flute and when he stood back the print of a hand appeared across her nose and mouth. Individual prints were blurred; still there was that shadow hand sealing her face shut.

Arkady said, “If someone kept her mouth closed and pinched her nose, maybe from behind, a big man trained in hand-to-hand, who lifted her off the ground first and squeezed the air from her lungs…”

“Then the tongue might fall back and, yes, obstruct the airway to some degree. I don’t know how significant.”

“How long would it take?”

“If she lost her breath at the start, with her heart and alcohol content, no time at all. But I thought she was in a holding cell in militia custody.”

“She was. We want to get some pictures of these prints before they fade.”

“What are you going to do with them?” Platonov asked.

“Probably nothing.”

All the same, Kuznetsov had been a Black Beret from Tver, as were Isakov and Urman, and all three served in Chechnya. It was hard to believe the detectives had not recognized their old comrade even with a cleaver in his neck.

What was left of the Communist Party fit into a two-story gray stucco building off Tsvetnoy Boulevard opposite the circus. On the ground floor was a security desk with a gray-haired guard and a hall of stockrooms of pamphlets and mailing materials. On the second floor were Party headquarters: offices, secretary pool, conference room and coats everywhere, coats hung and boots piled, in the rush to the conference table where sweet champagne was poured and platters offered red caviar, silvery smoked fish, fatback so fine it was translucent, black bread and slices of seasoned horsemeat. On the wall hung a portrait photograph of Lenin, a red Soviet flag and a campaign banner that demanded, Who Stole Russia?