Martin Smith: Stalin’s Ghost

“That’s right and every minute has infinite possibilities. You can’t control them all, Arkasha. Zhenya likes to take chances. He likes to hang out with homeless boys at Three Stations. You are not responsible. Sometimes I think your urge to do good is a form of narcissism.”

“A strange accusation coming from a doctor.”

He pictured her in her lab coat sitting in the dark of a clinic office, feet resting on a coffee table, watching the snow. At the apartment she could sit for hours, a sphinx with cigarettes. Or wander out with a small tape recorder and a pocketful of cassettes and interview invisible people, as she called them, people who only came out at night. She didn’t watch television.

“Zurin called,” she said. “He wants you to call him. Don’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because he hates you. He would only call you if he could do you harm.”

“Zurin is the prosecutor. I am his investigator. I can’t totally ignore him.”

“Yes, you can.”

This was an argument they had had before. Arkady knew his lines by heart, and to repeat them by phone struck him as unnecessary misery. Besides, she was right. He could quit the prosecutor’s office and join a private security firm. Or-he had a law degree from Moscow University, after all-become a lawyer with a leather briefcase and business card. Or wear a paper hat and serve hamburgers at McDonald’s. There weren’t a great many other careers open to a senior investigator, although they were all better than being a dead investigator, Arkady supposed. He didn’t believe Zurin would stab him in the back, although the prosecutor might show someone else where the knife drawer was. Anyway, the conversation had not gone as planned.

Arkady heard a rustle, as if she were rising from a chair. He said, “Maybe he’s stuck somewhere until the Metro starts running. I’ll try the chess club and Three Stations.”

“Maybe I’m stuck somewhere. Arkady, why did I come to Moscow?”

“Because I asked you to.”

“Oh. I’m losing my memory. Snow has wiped out so much. It’s like amnesia. Maybe Moscow will be buried completely.”

“Like Atlantis?”

“Exactly like Atlantis. And people will not be able to believe that such a place ever existed.”

There was a long pause. The phone crackled.

Arkady said, “Was Zhenya with homeless boys? Did he sound excited? Scared?”

“Arkady, maybe you haven’t noticed. We’re all scared.”

“Of what?”

This might be a good time to bring up Isakov, he thought. With the distance of a telephone cord. He didn’t want to sound like an accuser, he just needed to know. He didn’t even need to know, as long as it was over.

There was a silence. No, not silence. She had hung up.

As the M-1 became Lenin Prospect it entered a realm of empty, half-lit shopping malls, auto showrooms and the sulfurous blaze of all-night casinos: Sportsman’s Paradise, Golden Khan, Sinbad’s. Arkady played with the name Cupid, which on the lips of Zoya had sounded more hard-core than cherubic. All the time he looked right and left, slowing to scan each shadowy figure walking by the road.

The cell phone rang, but it wasn’t Eva. It was Zurin.

“Renko, where the devil have you been?”

“Out for a drive.”

“What sort of idiot goes out on a night like this?”

“It appears we are both out, Leonid Petrovich.”

“Didn’t you get my message?”

“Say that again.”

“Did you get…Never mind. Where are you now?”

“Going home. I’m not on duty.”

Zurin said, “An investigator is always on duty. Where are you?”

“On the M- 1.” Actually, at this point, Arkady was well into town.

“I’m at the Chistye Prudy Metro station. Get here as fast as you can.”

“Stalin again?”

“Just get here.”

Even if Arkady had wanted to race to Zurin’s side his way was slowed when traffic was narrowed to a single lane in front of the Supreme Court. Trucks and portable generators were drawn up in disorder on the curb and street. Four white tents glowed on the sidewalk. Round-the-clock construction was not unusual in the ambitious new Moscow; however, this project looked especially haphazard. Traffic police vigorously waved cars through, but Arkady tucked his car between trucks. A uniformed militia colonel seemed belligerently in charge. He dispatched an officer to chase Arkady, but the man proved to be a veteran sergeant named Gleb whom Arkady knew.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re not to tell.”

“That sounds interesting,” Arkady said. He liked Gleb because the sergeant could whistle like a nightingale and had the gap teeth of an honest man.

“Well, seeing as how you’re an investigator…”

“Seeing that…,” Arkady agreed.

“Okay.” Gleb dropped his voice. “They were doing renovations to extend the basement cafeteria. A bunch of Turkish workers were digging. They got a little surprise.”

Excavation work had torn up part of the sidewalk. Arkady joined the onlookers on the precarious edge, where klieg lamps aimed an incandescent light at a power shovel in a hole two stories deep and about twenty meters square. Besides militia, the crowd on the sidewalk included firemen and police, city officials and agents of state security who looked rousted from their beds.

In the hole an organized crew of men in coveralls and hard hats worked on the ground and up on scaffolding with picks and trowels, plastic bags, surgical masks and latex gloves. One man dislodged what looked like a brown ball, which he placed in a canvas bucket that he lowered by rope to the ground. He returned to his trowel and painstakingly freed a rib cage with arms attached. As Arkady’s eyes adjusted he saw that one entire face of the excavation was layered with human remains outlined by the snow, a cross section of soil with skulls for stones and femurs for sticks. Some were clothed, some weren’t. The smell was of sweet compost.

The canvas bucket was passed fire brigade style across the pit and pulled by rope up to a tent where other shadowy bodies were laid out on tables. The colonel went from tent to tent and barked at the men sorting bones to work faster. In between orders, he kept an eye on Arkady.

Sergeant Gleb said, “They want all the bodies out by morning. They don’t want people to see.”

“How many so far?”

“It’s a mass grave, who can say?”

“How old?”

“From the clothes, they say the forties or fifties. Holes in the back of the head. In the basement of the Supreme Court yet. March you right downstairs and boom! That’s how they used to do it. That was some court.”

The colonel joined them. He was in full winter regalia with a blue fur hat. Arkady wondered, not for the first time, what animal had blue fur.

The colonel said loudly, “There will be an investigation of these bodies to see whether criminal charges should be brought.”

Heads turned along the line, many amused.

“Say that again,” Arkady asked the colonel.

“What I said was, I can assure everyone that there will be an investigation of the dead to see whether criminal charges will be brought.”

“Congratulations.” Arkady put his arm around the colonel’s shoulders and whispered, “That is the best joke I’ve heard all day.”

The colonel’s face turned a mottled red and he ducked out of Arkady’s grip. Ah, well, another enemy made, Arkady thought.

Gleb asked, “What if the grave runs under the entire court?”

“That’s always the problem, isn’t it? Once you start digging, when to stop?”

Arkady took his time. His relationship with Zurin had deteriorated to a game like badminton, in which each player took mighty swings that feebly propelled loathing back and forth. So instead of racing to Chistye Prudy Metro station, Arkady stopped in a lane of brick buildings hung with banners that filled and emptied in the wind. Arkady couldn’t see all the banners, but saw enough to learn that “Studio Apartments-Concierge Services-Cable” would soon be erected on the site. “Interested Parties Should Subscribe Now.”