Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

In his father’s eyes was desolation.

“I have homework,” Arkady dismissed himself.

It was the last time they played that game.

Victor said, “A New Russian goes into an expensive boutique and asks the clerk what to get his wife for her birthday. Cost is no problem. He’s already given her a Mercedes, diamonds from Bulgari, a full-length sable coat.”

Arkady asked, “How long is this joke?” It was six a.m. by his watch. A little early for a call.

“Not long. The clerk says, ‘There’s nothing left to buy. Do something personal, something intimate. Give her a written certificate good for two hours of wild sex, fulfilling any fantasy or desire.’ The New Russian says, ‘Yeah!’ It sounds like a win-win to him. He pays a calligrapher a thousand dollars for an inscribed certificate worth two hours of sex, all fantasies fulfilled, no questions asked.”

“God, please strike Victor dead.”

“Patience. A certificate for two hours of wild sex. Her birthday comes. He gives her pearls, a new Mercedes, a Faberge egg as usual and finally an envelope with the certificate inside. She takes it out, reads it, her face turns red. A smile breaks out. She clutches the certificate to her breast and says, ‘Thank you, thank you, Boris. This is the most wonderful present I ever got. I love you, I love you!’ She grabs her car keys. ‘See you in two hours!’”

Black as a pit. Arkady stood in the dim illumination from the street, putting himself in a classic dilemma. Look for cigarettes where they most likely were or search where the light was best. A few snowflakes melted on the asphalt.

Victor said, “So, who is the ‘two hours’ in Tver?”

“Your ability to reduce everything to sex is astonishing.”

“It’s the best system I’ve come across.”

A bonanza. Arkady found a pack in his jacket, though no matches.

Victor said, “Zurin called and asked where you were. A prosecutor from Tver, a cretin named Sarkisian, called and asked why you didn’t check in at the office. It’s given me a chance to hone my antisocial skills.”

“Why are you up at this hour?” Arkady remembered seeing matches in the kitchen.

“I’m on a stakeout.”

“You called me to stay awake on a stakeout?” Arkady felt for matches on the kitchen counters and table.

“I want to tuck this guy in. He had company before but he’s alone now. I just wish he would open the refrigerator door, take a piss, strike a match, anything I can report.”

“What’s he done?”

“An army deserter. Which is okay with me, but the little prick took his rifle with him.”

Arkady looked at the one-car sheds across the street. A good push and a row of them would collapse. His car was four sheds in.

“Are the lights out?” Arkady asked.

“The whole flat.”

“What makes you think he’s up?”

“Because he can’t sleep.”

“Maybe somebody called him in the middle of the night.” Arkady found matches on the windowsill. “Have you ever been to Tver?”

“Once or twice. Have you seen any of Isakov’s OMON friends in Tver?”

“Once or twice.”

Cars outside the sheds were parked haphazardly along the curb and on the sidewalk. They all looked cold except for one: there was a steamed-up windshield on a blue compact, Honda or Hyundai; Arkady couldn’t see the license plate. Most likely, the condensation was the heavy respiration of lovers seeking privacy where they could. All the same, he decided he didn’t need a cigarette. What he needed was a gun and he had left that in Moscow under lock and key.

Victor said, “An intelligence test is given at OMON.”

“Is this another joke?”

“The Black Berets are each given ten wooden blocks of different shapes to put in holes of corresponding shapes. Half the men fail but half the men succeed, from which the researchers conclude that fifty percent of the Black Berets are abysmally stupid and fifty percent are really strong.”

“Is that funny?” Arkady asked after a while.

“I suppose it depends on the situation.”

Arkady dreamt of a small, hunchbacked man standing in the open door of a helicopter high up. The wind tried to suck him out or shake him free but he rode the bounces with the calm of an athlete.

“Ginsberg! Watch out!” Arkady shouted from a bench.

Ginsberg, meanwhile, was yelling to the pilot to go lower. The sound of the rotors was enormous and everyone resorted to hand signals.

Through the door was a vista of mountains, villages, cultivated land, a flock of goats, a valley stream with a stone bridge and a campfire and bodies on the ground. Ginsberg clung to the fuselage with one hand and held a camera with the other. He began shouting Arkady’s name and pointed with his camera hand.

Arkady woke and went to the professor’s desk and rummaged through drawers until he found a magnifying glass. What had he missed?

At 13:43, kebabs were cooking on the campfire. In the campfire group three bodies lay on their left side, four on their right. The bodies on the road were facedown because they were shot in the back as they ran for the truck on the other side of the bridge. Altogether they added up to fourteen, meaning none on the far bank of the so-called firefight. No sign of Isakov. The photo was too blurred otherwise by the dust kicked up by the helicopter and its own vibration.

The 13:47 photo was taken from the same position on a pass four minutes later. Urman wore sunglasses as he put the pilot in his rifle sights. The bodies on the road hadn’t moved a millimeter, but all the bodies around the campfire had rolled forward as if praying in the Muslim manner and the kebabs were smoking, half on fire. What else had changed from one picture to the next? Something too obvious to see. He apologized to Ginsberg and returned to bed.

So he would keep things simple. Ride out to the dig and wait for a ghost. What could be simpler than that?

His cell phone rang at seven a.m. from a number new to him. He was dressed in camos, ready to get to the dig before dawn. Night was already fading to gray flecked with snow. The blue car was gone and Arkady didn’t see any unusual activity around the Zhiguli shed. The phone went on ringing while he paused at the professor’s shelves and desk, idly looking for a weapon; all French paperbacks, nothing with heft.

Arkady finally picked up.

“Hello?”

“It’s Zhenya. I came on the train. I’m here.”

The Russian dead sometimes carried plastic cylinders with a scroll of paper bearing a name, rank and blood type, but, otherwise, nature had digested everything but bones and identity was a matter of conjecture. Likely Russian skulls were stacked up in the trenches and German remains piled in a central heap.

Trophies of the first day were as reverently displayed as holy relics. Tables were covered with the flotsam of war: brass cartridges, machine gun belts, aluminum canteens, encrusted bayonets, mess tins, lieutenant’s bars, a crushed bugle and half-sized, withered rifles.

Zhenya lugged a backpack heavy with a chessboard, clothes and rubber boots for wading in Lake Brosno. Arkady had brought him only because there was no alternative. Put Zhenya on a train to Moscow and he’d be on the next train back to Tver. So far Zhenya seemed to consider the dig a worthy detour, lingering at each display with fascination, the monster in Lake Brosno temporarily out of mind. He inserted a finger through a bullet hole in a helmet and stole a glance at Arkady.

Crews digging since the day before exposed a network of bunkers two meters deep and fifty meters long, taking care to keep remains whole and not detach feet or fingers. Two skeletons were found in an embrace, one with a dagger, the other with a bayonet. A tent with the front canvas rolled up was being readied for pathological examination.