Martin Smith - Stalin’s Ghost

Arkady asked Isakov, “Why are you telling me this?”

“I think it’s safe with you.”

“I’m cold,” Eva said. “Let’s walk.”

A civilized stroll in a light snow in the middle of the night. With bonhomie.

Isakov put his arm over Arkady’s shoulders. “Marat should have eaten you alive. You don’t look that strong and, frankly, you don’t look that lucky.”

“It wasn’t me; he dug up a mine.”

“Marat knew better than that. He was a Black Beret.”

“The elite?”

“Who else? They sent us down to Chechnya to stiffen the troops. Army officers were too drunk to leave their tents and the soldiers were too scared. They’d call in an air strike if they saw a mouse. If they did go out it was to loot.”

“What is there to loot in Chechnya?”

“Not much, but we have a looter’s mentality. That’s why I was a candidate. I want to revive Russia.”

“You had political plans?” Arkady asked. “Beyond immunity, I mean. You admired Lenin, Gandhi, Mussolini?”

As Eva crossed to the Drama Theater, she sang the old ditty, “Stalin flies higher than anyone, routs all our foes and outshines the sun.”

Arkady couldn’t tell whom she was mocking. Snowflakes on her scarf made him aware more snow was falling, which was a return to normalcy. To hell with warm weather.

Eva returned to her place between the men and put her arms through theirs, the three of them a troika. “Two men willing to die for me. How many women can say that? Will you each claim a half or will you take turns?”

“It’s winner take all, I’m afraid,” Isakov said. He spotted the motorcycle on the theater portico and placed his hand on the engine. “Still warm. I wondered how you were getting around without being seen. Clever.”

The neighborhood was not residential; at this hour of night only a few cars were parked on Sovietskaya and no one else was afoot along the dark offices and shops. A terrific shooting gallery.

Isakov’s mind must have been running in the same direction because he looked across Eva and asked Arkady with a note of idle curiosity, “Do you have a gun?”

“No.”

Actually, for once a gun seemed not such a bad idea. A Tokarev would do, but it was in pieces in Zhenya’s backpack.

“Anyway, no gun could match yours,” Arkady said. “When you think about it, your father’s gun may hold the record for a single handgun killing the most people. A hundred? Two hundred? Five hundred? That makes it at least an heirloom.”

“Really?”

“I feel for him. Imagine shooting people one after the other, head after head, hour after hour. The gun gets hot as an iron and twice as heavy and there must be some uncooperative victims. It had to get messy; he must have had work clothes. And the sound.”

Isakov said, “As a matter of fact, my father had earplugs and he still went deaf. Sometimes he would try to leave the room and they would pour vodka down his throat and push him back in. He was just sober enough to pull the trigger and reload.”

“He gave his eardrums for the cause. Did the gun ever misfire?”

“No.”

“Let me guess. A Walther?”

“Bravo.” Isakov pulled a long-barreled pistol out of a sack. “My father liked German engineering.” Even in the light of streetlamps the gun showed its nicks. It also looked eager.

A blue and white militia van cruised up Sovietskaya and slowed alongside Arkady, who expected an ID check at the very least. Isakov tucked the Walther into his belt, showed OMON printed on his jacket and bent his elbow in a drinker’s salute. The van flashed its head beams and rolled away, purring.

Eva said, “He recognized you. You made his day. You are a hero in their eyes.”

Not to mention a killer, Arkady thought. People were complicated. Who could say, for example, which way Eva would lean? It was like playing chess and not knowing which side his queen was on.

Arkady said, “The fight at the Sunzha Bridge sounds like quite a victory.”

“I suppose so. The enemy left fourteen bodies and we lost none. There was a raid on an army field hospital earlier that same day. Thank God, we got the message in time.”

“You were at the bridge when the attack began?”

“Of course.”

“You got a message that in a few minutes half the Russian soldiers in Chechnya would cross your bridge to chase the rebels. Did you worry what they would think if they saw your squad of Black Berets eating grapes and lounging with the enemy?”

“There were some Chechens at the bridge. They turned on us, but we were ready.”

A reply steeped in humility. Wrong choice, Arkady thought. Outrage and a punch to the mouth was always a safer answer. Of course, Isakov was painting himself a rational man for Eva’s sake. So was Arkady. They were actors and she was their audience. It was all for her.

By the time they arrived back at the wrought iron fence snow was starting to stick and narrow the bars.

“I talked to Ginsberg,” Arkady said.

“Ginsberg?” Isakov slowed for the effort of recollection.

“The journalist.”

“I’ve talked to a lot of journalists.”

“The hunchback.”

“How can you forget a hunchback?” Eva asked.

Isakov said, “I remember now. Ginsberg was unhappy because I wouldn’t let him land in the middle of a military operation. He didn’t seem to understand that a helicopter on the ground is nothing but a target.”

“The military operation was the fight at the bridge.”

“This conversation is boring for poor Eva. She’s heard the story a hundred times. Let’s talk about rebuilding Russia.”

“The operation was the fight at the bridge?”

“Let’s talk about Russia’s place in the world.”

“Ginsberg took photographs.”

“Did he?”

Arkady stopped directly under a streetlamp and opened his pea jacket. Inside was a folder, from which he took two photographs, one behind the other.

“Both from the air, of the bridge, bodies sprawled around a campfire and Black Berets walking around with handguns.”

“Nothing unusual about that,” Isakov said.

Arkady held up the other for comparison.

“The second photograph is of the same scene, four minutes later by the camera clock. There are two significant changes. Urman is aiming his gun at the helicopter, and all the bodies around the campfire have been rolled forward or been moved to one side. In those four minutes the most important goal for you and your men was to ward off the helicopter and get something out from under the bodies.”

“Get what?” asked Eva.

“Dragons.”

“The man has lost it,” Isakov said.

“When Kuznetsov’s wife said you took her dragons I didn’t understand what she was talking about.”

“She was a drunk who killed her husband with a cleaver. Is that your source of information?”

“I wasn’t thinking about Chechnya.”

“Chechnya is over. We won.”

“It’s not over,” Eva said.

“Well, I’ve heard enough,” Isakov said.

Eva asked, “Why, is there more?”

Arkady said, “The rest of the world puts its money in banks. This part of the world puts its money into carpets and the most prized carpets have red dragons woven into the design. A classic dragon carpet is worth a small fortune in the West. You don’t want to spill blood on that and, as you said, there’s not much else worth stealing in Chechnya.”

“The dead men were thieves?”

“Partners. Isakov and Urman were in the rug business. They rolled out the carpet for their partners and then they rolled it up.”

Snowflakes swam across the glossy surface of the photographs, over the coals of the campfire, across Marat Urman’s purposeful stride, around bodies sprawled on bloody sand.