Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

“How far can he go?”

“Hard to say.” Platonov dropped his voice. “He’s like a boy born with perfect pitch. He may lose it when his voice changes. He’s of ordinary intelligence. His idols are the Black Berets, which is normal for a boy his age. At the chessboard he is a different creature. Where more intelligent players analyze a situation, Zhenya sees. He’s a bratty little Mozart who composes music as fast as he can write because it’s already complete in his head.”

“Any Black Beret in particular?”

“A Captain Isakov seems to be the main hero. Did you know that he led six Black Berets against a hundred Chechen terrorists?”

“Do you believe it?”

“Why not? At Stalingrad we had snipers who killed Germans by the score. Look it up. We had the Volga River at our back. Stalin said, ‘Not one step back!’ One step back and we would have been in the drink. So how has the recuperation been going? You’re looking well, everything considered. Are you yourself?”

“How would I know?”

Arkady had mineral water and Victor a beer at a sidewalk cafe under a leafless tree on the Boulevard Ring. Arabs swept by to their embassies. Babies rolled by in their strollers. Victor read Arkady’s spiral notebook and when he was done he waved to the waiter.

“This is not a notebook of beer-sized insanity; this merits vodka. To begin with, Arkady, are you crazy? Maybe this is a result of the shooting?”

“These notes are just to jog my memory of certain cases.”

“No. These notes cover cases that were never yours. Kuznetsov chopped by a cleaver, his wife stuffed with her own tongue, the journalist Ginsberg run down and Borodin drunk. These cases were disposed of by Detectives Isakov and Urman as a domestic squabble, a slip on the ice, the dangers of drinking alone and not sharing. But you insinuate murder.”

“Just suggesting they were inadequately investigated.”

“Did you see Ginsberg run down?”

“No.”

“Was there any evidence of foul play with Borodin?”

“No.”

“What have they got to do with the Kuznetsovs?”

“Isakov and Urman.”

“Do you hear the circularity of your argument?”

“The notes are just for me.”

“You had better hope so, because if Isakov and Urman get wind of it your body will be found, but the notebook will not. I feel bad. I got you involved with Zoya Filotova killing and scalping her husband. That blew up in our face.”

“The notes aren’t well organized.”

“Well, you just tossed everyone in.”

“I tried to give everyone their own page and a list of facts and near-facts. Isakov and Urman to start with. Then the Russian Patriot video crew-Zelensky, Petya, and Bora-each got a page.”

“They’re campaigning in Tver today.” Victor paused reverently as a short carafe of vodka arrived, then reached across to flip pages. “You gave Tanya a page.”

“Urman’s girlfriend and handles a garrote well. Bonus points for playing the harp.”

“Here’s Zhenya’s father, Osip Lysenko? What the devil has he got to do with this?”

“Anyone who shoots me automatically earns a page.”

“If you keep this up you will get shot again. Who knows? Isakov and Urman may be the ones to find your body. I thought you had a ticket out of town.”

“So they say.”

Victor turned another page. “The rest of the notes are crazy. Arrows, diagrams, cross-references.”

“Connections. Some are sketchy.”

“You worry me, Arkady. I think you’re coming undone.”

“I wanted to be complete.”

“Is that so? You know whose name I haven’t seen? Eva. Doctor Eva Kazka. I think she deserves a page.”

Arkady was startled by the omission. He wrote Eva’s name on a fresh page and wondered what else about her he had missed.

“I think you have it all now,” Victor said.

Arkady watched a bus roll by advertising a day trip to Suzdal. “See the Soul of Russia.” The trip included lunch.

“There’s a number,” he said.

“What number?”

“I don’t recall the shooting and there are some other blank patches, so I’ve been working on phone numbers, addresses, names. What does thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three mean to you?”

“You’re serious? It means nothing.”

“What could it mean?”

Victor took a first sip of vodka like a butcher whetting his knife.

“Not a phone number; that would be seven digits. Maybe the combination to a padlock or a safe. Right twice to thirty-three, left to thirty-one, right to thirty-three, turn latch and open, only…”

“Only I don’t know whose safe or where it is.”

“Visualize the number. Typed? Handwritten? Who wrote it, you or somebody else? A man or a woman’s hand? What was the number originally written on? A paper napkin or a bar coaster? Is it a license plate number? The winning number of a lottery? How can you remember and not remember?”

“Elena Ilyichnina says that bits of my memory will come back. I have to go.”

Arkady paid for Victor’s vodka, the price of his expertise.

“Do you think I drink too much? Be honest.”

“A touch.”

“It could be worse.” Victor looked right and left. “Did Elena Ilyichnina say anything about me?”

“No.”

“Did she recognize me?”

“Why should she?”

Victor pulled back the hair at his temples and revealed a small puckered scar on each side.

“You always astonish me,” Arkady said. “You too?”

“A little different. I had a tiny drug addiction problem about ten years ago, so I had myself drilled.”

“Drilled?”

“On local anesthetic. I talked to the doctor while he took some brain tissue from each hemisphere. A dab. The procedure was a wonderful example of Russian ingenuity. It’s outlawed now because Elena Ilyichnina turned him in, but it worked. I’ve been drug-free since.”

“Congratulations. And the drinking?”

Victor patted his hair down. “It fills the gap. It completes me. It’s my veneer. Everyone has a veneer, even you, Arkady. Everyone sees a peaceful man. There’s nothing remotely peaceful about you. We started off, you and I, investigating two detectives. Now you’re after the Black Berets.”

“Something happened in Chechnya.”

“Horrible things, no doubt; it’s war. But why would heroes like Isakov and Urman come back to Moscow and kill their friends and former comrades in arms? Do you know what this notebook adds up to? Wishful thinking. Ask yourself what you’re after, Isakov or Eva? I speak as the man who killed the man who shot you. What makes you think Eva is unhappy with him?” When Arkady said nothing Victor dredged up half a smile. “Fuck, forget about all this. I’m rambling. I’m drunk.”

“You sound sober to me. Think about thirty-three, thirty-one, thirty-three. I just wonder why my brain chose this number to fix on.”

“Maybe at this point your brain hates your guts.”

With the thaw a moving truck had finally delivered Arkady’s furniture and earthly goods, including a cot, although Zhenya maintained his independence by sleeping on the couch with a backpack ready for instant departure. He still bore the stamp of early malnutrition but he had started lifting weights and developed hard little muscles like knots in a rope.

He did schoolwork quickly so that he could turn on the television and watch a nostalgia channel that ran grainy wartime documentaries on the siege of Leningrad, the defense of Moscow, the carnage and valor of Stalingrad, renamed Volgograd but forever Stalingrad. Also, war films about pilots, tank crews and riflemen who shared snapshots of mothers, wives and children before attacking a machine gun bunker, piloting a burning plane, crawling with a Molotov cocktail toward an enemy tank.