Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

“Like the old days,” Platonov said. “Pigs to the trough.” He stacked sausage on a pamphlet of “Marx: Frequently Asked Questions.” “Have some?”

“No, thanks.”

Arkady hadn’t seen such a concentration of Homo Sovieticus for years. Supposedly extinct, here they were unchanged, with their bad suits, dull eyes, self-important frowns. These were bellies that had never missed a meal. He saw none of the elderly that picketed Red Square in the bitter cold for their miserable pensions.

Arkady moved back to the hall. “I’m going. You’re safe now you’re surrounded by friends.”

“These freeloaders and cretins? The smart ones, my real friends, left the Party years ago. This is what’s left, nothing left but the stupid rats swilling wine on a sinking ship.”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“I was a son of the Revolution, which means I was illegitimate. A bastard, if you will. I tagged along with a regiment-that’s how I picked up chess-and when Hitler and his gang invaded Russia I volunteered for the army. I was fourteen. My first battle, out of two thousand men, twenty-five survived. I survived the war and then I represented the Soviet Union in chess for forty years. I am too old a leopard to change my spots. Stay and eat and give me someone to talk to.”

“I’m meeting a colleague for dinner.” If that described having a drink with Victor, Arkady thought. And after, meeting the journalist Ginsberg for a list of Black Berets who had served with Isakov in Chechnya.

Arkady flattened himself to let latecomers through. Among them was Tanya, the harpist from the Metropol, in the same white gown. With her golden hair she looked like a figure from a fairy tale. She whispered apologies as she squeezed by, not at all the reckless skier that the Cupid photo had made her seem.

“You’ll come back?” Platonov asked Arkady. “It will be an early night; I have to be sharp tomorrow.”

“Our grandmaster Ilya Sergeevich is going to a chess tournament and do the honor of playing the winner.” A plump little man bobbed at Platonov’s elbow. “It will be televised, won’t it?”

“Taped. Taped and burned, hopefully,” Platonov said.

“Surkov here, chief of propaganda.” The man offered Arkady a damp hand to shake. “I know who you are. You need no introduction here.”

Platonov informed Arkady, “This is one of the cretins I was telling you about.”

Surkov said, “The grandmaster is one of our most renowned and respected members. A link to the past. He’s always joking. The fact is, we’re a completely different Party these days. Streamlined, open and willing to adjust.”

“Ever since we went in the shit can,” Platonov muttered.

“See, that sort of talk doesn’t really help. We have to be upbeat. We’re giving people a choice,” Surkov called after Arkady, who was headed for the door.

Arkady’s only regret was that by the time he returned Tanya would be gone. He wasn’t so much attracted as curious. Something about her was familiar, something besides skiing or plucking the strings of a harp.

As Arkady drove away he passed a statue of a clown on a unicycle planted on the boulevard to mark the circus. With the snow spinning around the clown he seemed to Arkady to pedal toward the circus entrance one moment and to the Party offices the next, bowing to slapstick and then to farce.

The Gondolier offered murals of the Grand Canal, but the restaurant was on Petrovka Street, half a block from militia headquarters, and the regular customers were detectives who came to get hammered. The usual order was a hundred milliliters of vodka for a good day, two hundred milliliters for a bad. The regulars at the bar were reinforced by OMON officers in blue and black camos celebrating the acquittal for homicide of their former colleague Igor Borodin. Shouts of “Pizza delivery!” drew great laughs and the clamor had driven Victor to a back booth, where he sat like a brooding spider.

As Arkady joined him Victor indicated the vast distance to the bar and said, “I feel I’m too far from my mother’s tit.”

“You seem to be set up.”

Victor’s forearm protected a bottle.

“You have no sympathy at all, Investigator Renko. You’re an unsympathetic person. If you’re drinking at the bar the bottle is right there within your reach. Sit back here at a table and you could die of thirst waiting to be served. Vultures could pick at your bones, nobody would notice.”

“It is a sad picture. This is what you’ve been doing all day?”

Victor asked someone invisible, “Have you ever noticed how smug sober people can be?”

Arkady looked toward the bar. In the main, detectives tended to be older men who were fairly silent, often overweight, with cigarette ash on the front of their sweaters and a pistol tucked in back. By comparison, the Black Berets in their black-and-blues and holstered guns were young and pumped with muscle. There were also civilians, women as well as men, who liked to rub shoulders with police, buy them a drink and hear a story.

“Quite a crowd tonight.”

“It’s Friday.”

“Right.” Always good to keep track, Arkady thought. “International Women’s Day, in fact.”

“I don’t think I know any women.”

“What about Luba?”

“My wife? You have me on a technicality.”

Arkady checked his watch. He was supposed to meet Ginsberg in five minutes. “You haven’t scalped anyone today, I hope.”

“No, thank you. I reviewed the Zelensky tapes-”

“The Stalin tape or the porn?”

“-and circulated a still of the four prostitutes who saw Stalin on the Metro platform among my colleagues in Vice. No one recognized them. Prostitutes and pimps are pretty strict about their territory. These girls must have parachuted in.”

“Good.” Victor could have told him as much over the phone, but Arkady wanted to be encouraging.

“Also I suspected that someone as virtuous as you hadn’t looked at the porn as closely as I would.”

“I’m sure you didn’t miss a thing.”

“Remember Skuratov?”

“Yes.” Skuratov was a prosecutor general who threatened to investigate corruption in the Kremlin. He was undermined by the release of the videotape of him or someone who looked like him frolicking in a sauna with a pair of naked girls.

“Skuratov denied he was the guy getting the ultimate massage, but a spy chief named Putin analyzed the tape and declared Skuratov was the man. Soon we have a new prosecutor general and the spy is president. Once again, history turns on a woman’s ass. The moral is, examine all the evidence. You never know when or how your chance will come.”

Arkady checked his watch. “I have to go.”

“Wait.” Victor untied the office folder and drew out a photograph of a couple tangled in bed. “The man is Boris Bogolovo, called Bora, from Tver. You had an encounter with him outside the Chistye Prudy Metro.”

“He slipped on the ice.” Arkady recognized the schoolgirl Marfa, but what caught his eye was the tiger’s head tattoo on Bora’s chest. “OMON.”

“Correct. Here’s the kicker, though.” Victor produced a still of a man whose long hair hid his face. On his shoulder was a tattoo of the OMON tiger facing down a pack of wolves. The words OMON and TVER were set in an intricate background of a stone bridge, willows and a mountain stream. Next to the photo Victor placed the photo supplied by Zoya Filotova. “It’s Alexander Filotov, her husband. And the tattoo, I have to say, is a masterpiece.”

“Or a bull’s-eye.”

As Arkady left he had to push through Black Berets drinking at the bar. They were sizable men, and they drank in unison, rapping their glasses on the counter, letting the bartender pour vodka to the brim and on “Go!” downing the drink in one swallow. Warm work; every man was sweating and red-faced.