Stalin’s Ghost (20 page)

Arkady U-turned and coasted back to a playground of seesaws, gnomes and kiosks opposite the hotel. The Porsche was in the driveway. The Hotel Obermeier was a fortress of brick. The ground floor, however, was plate glass and fountains, and Arkady had a sweeping view of the reception desk, concierge’s podium, elevator bank, bar and restaurant. All was dark except for a table by the restaurant window, where Urman joined Isakov, Eva and Prosecutor Sarkisian. Two waiters slumped over a corner table.

The party had reached the brandy and cigar stage, had possibly reached it hours ago but Sarkisian was holding forth. Urman laughed and filled a snifter. Was the subject humorous homicides or the election odds of the hometown hero? Isakov listened stoically, while Eva made no effort to hide her distaste. Sarkisian put his finger by his nose, signifying Armenian powers of insight. When he raised a glass, Isakov and Urman followed suit, while Eva rose from her chair and stood by the window to smoke a cigarette. Arkady trusted that on her side the plate glass had to be a mirror. Isakov waved to her to return to the table. She ignored him and rested her forehead against the pane. It wasn’t a happy scene.

Isakov motioned Eva again to rejoin the group at the table and she continued to ignore him. Urman covered the moment by humoring Sarkisian until, finally and without a word, Eva went to the elevator bank, pushed a button and disappeared behind metal doors. The men sat stupefied by her desertion. A room lit in the middle of the second floor. The waiters went on sleeping, heads deep in their arms.

Sarkisian pointed in the general direction of Eva and apparently said something less than complimentary, because Isakov picked up a fork and pressed it against the prosecutor’s neck. Arkady remembered what Ginsberg had said about Isakov’s calm; the detective’s move was unhurried and he didn’t appear to raise his voice, but he conveyed conviction. He seemed to tell Sarkisian what he probably should not do or say ever again and the prosecutor nodded in emphatic agreement. The waiters slept on.

Urman went to the window where Eva had stood and cupped his eyes against the glass. He saw something because he moved through the restaurant and lobby and out to the front steps of the hotel to scan the playground. Gnomes were bigger at night and more menacing, as if they were on the march. What seemed smaller was the kiosk. Was the Ural’s front tire showing? The rear? Arkady realized that Urman was waiting for a car to pass by. He was waiting for headlights.

Urman had to break off when Isakov came out of the hotel, half jollying, half carrying Sarkisian to the Porsche. They were all pals again, although the prosecutor’s eyes were white with terror. Together, the two detectives loaded Sarkisian into the convertible and belted him in.

Arkady heard the prosecutor say, “…every effort.”

Isakov said, “He can’t be far.”

Sarkisian sputtered something Arkady didn’t catch.

“I’d rather find him first,” Urman said.

Urman got behind the wheel and started the Porsche, which drowned further conversation. The car took off, gear changes whining the length of the street.

Isakov turned wearily to the hotel. He paused in the restaurant to wake the waiters and pay them, generously by their expressions, and took the elevator. The room on the second floor was still lit. It brightened briefly as a door opened and closed, and Arkady got a sense of bodies in motion.

More he didn’t want to know.

A
drab world came out of the dark: an abandoned field of winter wheat bordered by scrub and brambles on three sides and, along the bottom, a dirt road that led to willows and fog.

The Rudenkos left their truck at a broken-down gate. Arkady had followed on the Ural and the three marched with flashlights and a wheelbarrow full of hemp sacks and tools to a mound of loose earth. Big Rudi seemed rejuvenated by the morning air: perhaps crazy, Arkady thought, but not the befuddled grandfather of the night before. The old man aimed the flashlight on the mound while Rudi selected a shovel and set to work, moving the loose dirt aside. The Ural had nothing as fancy as an odometer, but Arkady guessed that they were about fourteen kilometers south of Tver.

As the sun broke from the horizon the field developed contour and dimensions, about two soccer fields’ worth of flattened grass and sodden earth, a reminder that winter had started heavy with snow. The men’s shadows seemed to stand on stilts and a massive shadow spread from a stand of pine trees in the middle of the field. The trees must have been an impediment to farm machinery; Arkady wondered why they hadn’t been pulled as saplings.

Military camos were the dress code of the day and Arkady had borrowed a uniform from Rudi, who said, “Renko, you look like a POW.”

“No, a general,” Big Rudi insisted.

The sun up an hour, Rudi was using a pick to pry the earth around a skeleton lying on its side.

“Ours or theirs?” Big Rudi asked.

“Can’t tell yet,” said Rudi. He added for Arkady’s benefit, “This weather is fantastic. This time of year the ground is usually frozen solid. This is like cutting cake.”

“Check the teeth.”

“Present and accounted for.”

“But you think it’s December ’forty-one?” Big Rudi asked.

Every schoolboy knew that in December ’41 Stalin performed his greatest miracle. The Red Army had lost four million men dead and wounded. The Germans were on the outskirts of Moscow. Leningrad was under siege, its population starving to death. Tver, which was the center of the entire front, had already fallen. And then, incredibly, the Russians counterattacked. Stalin had secretly moved hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops from Siberia to the low hills outside Tver. This new army, seemingly created out of thin air and launched in the middle of a snowstorm, was a total surprise to German intelligence. The Red Army crossed the frozen Volga and chased the Wehrmacht for two hundred kilometers. Not only was Tver liberated and thousands of Germans killed and captured, they no longer resembled a superrace. The shape of the front changed. The nature of the war changed. The enemy stalled outside Moscow, never to threaten it again.

Two women, bent over and, blinkered by their shawls, moved along the far side of the field gleaning stunted potatoes that had been left to rot. Crows strolled behind. When the women saw Rudi they crossed themselves and left. Arkady wondered whether Big Rudi had stood in the same scene with tanks belching black smoke and Siberian riflemen moving across the river.

“There are Red Diggers and Black Diggers,” Rudi said. “Red Diggers find the bodies of Russian soldiers so they can send the remains home to be reunited with their families. Black Diggers find bodies, German or Russian, and strip them of medals, belt buckles, SS gear, any shit they can sell on the Internet.”

As the shape of a skeleton became evident at his feet, Rudi probed the bottom of the hole with a metal rod attached to a wooden pole.

“Remember that you’re not only digging up bones, you’re digging up unexploded shells, mines, hand grenades, booby traps, Molotov cocktails. Before you dig anywhere, take the rod and feel around. You do it enough, you can tell what you hit, wood, metal or glass. Every year somebody gets a big surprise. Well, we’re provoking it, aren’t we? Provoking the past.”

Satisfied, Rudi exchanged the pole for a spade and shaved the walls of the hole for elbow room. The man was a human power shovel, Arkady thought. Rudi’s friend Misha arrived with a metal detector and began sweeping the field, but not before he pointed to cars and vans arriving on the dirt road. “Diggers.”

Rudi said, “That’s okay. They had to load up with shish kabobs and beer. We got here early and the early bird got the worm, right?”

“So to speak,” Arkady murmured.

“There’s enough to go around, all skeletonized and picked clean.” Rudi scooped dirt with a short spade. “Bodies in trenches, bunkers, outhouses, you never know where. The first one I ever saw was up in a tree. I was out skiing on my own. I guess the body got tangled in the branches and the birch grew and lifted it until the body could grin down from the sky. I was eight years old.”

Men and boys streamed through the gate onto the field like an army with portable tables and hampers of food, bed rolls and tents, metal detectors and guitars. Not everyone was in camos, but it was the best way to blend in.

Arkady said, “If they don’t find anything they’re going to be very disappointed. How do they know where to dig?”

“They follow Rudi,” his grandfather said.

“And how do you know?” Arkady asked Rudi.

Rudi freed a clavicle and chose an ice pick to work around a tea-colored rib cage. “I study old war plans, maps and combat reports. I ride around on my bike and I know what to look for. A lilac bush where a house once stood. Depressions where the earth settled. Anything out of place, such as pine trees in the middle of a wheat field. Trees were a favorite way to hide a mass grave. Besides, I can feel it.”

“How big is this grave?”

“Big. Before they ran, the fucking Germans killed a lot of prisoners. Anyway, the Diggers will scratch around, work up an appetite, build some campfires, get drunk and sing songs. Tomorrow is the big day, when they dig in the trees.”

“Why wait until tomorrow?”

“Television. It had to fit their schedule.”

“Is it Fritz?” Big Rudi stared down at the hole.

“Well, Granddad, there’s no ID, medals or shoulder bars.” Rudi knelt. The uniform was brown gauze that disintegrated in his hands. “He’s not from a tank crew. Too big. They’re short and broad-shouldered because they have to be small enough to fit in the tank and strong enough to open the hatch. Also, they tend to be fried to a crisp. So, who are you?” Rudi asked the bones directly. “Are you Fritz or Ivan? Do you have a picture of Helga or Ninochka?”

“Check him for foot wraps,” Big Rudi suggested.

Russian soldiers had wrapped cloth around their feet instead of wearing socks.

“No feet,” Rudi reported. “No legs. Cut off at the knees. Not a very neat job, either. Probably blown off and then trimmed. Poor bastard, to go through that in the middle of a battle. That’s what happened.”

“What you think?” Big Rudi asked Arkady.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Go ahead,” Rudi said. “You’re the investigator from Moscow.”

“I’m not a pathologist.”

“Don’t be scared. It won’t bite you.”

Arkady squatted by the edge of the hole.

“Well, a fairly young, fit man, a little less than two meters tall. Good nutrition. The ring finger of the left hand is missing, so I’m supposing that he was married and had a gold ring. As for the legs, I suspect they were taken for their boots.”

Rudi said, “You don’t have to take the legs off to get boots.”

“You do if they’re frozen. You have to warm up the boots at a campfire. Since you don’t want to drag a body around the camp, you saw off the lower legs and carry them. Especially if they’re leather boots made to order. So, I’d say he was a young, newly wed German officer who thought he would be home for Christmas. That’s just a guess.”

Rudi said, “What a shovelful of bullshit that is. From Moscow, too.”

“It probably is,” Arkady agreed. “Tip him over. Misha detected something.”

Rudi pulled on the rib cage. The earth gave reluctantly, but the skeleton rolled away from a metal spoon on a chain attached to the cervical vertebrae. On the chain was a black spoon with a swastika stamped on the handle. Rudi rubbed the spoon with a chamois cloth. Silver shone through. He snapped the neck with his hands, freed the chain and spoon and wrapped both in the cloth. He looked up at Arkady and said, “It’s still bullshit.”

Arkady took a break. He left the hole and walked into the field to try Major Agronsky on the cell phone, only to discover the obvious, that the countryside around Tver was on the fringe of cell coverage and he had to fight waves of static. He shouted his number into the phone a few times and gave up. The major had headed the army commendations panel and Arkady wanted to ask him one question, why were Captain Isakov and his Black Beret squad denied a single medal or promotion for their heroism at the Sunzha Bridge?

Clutching his hat, Big Rudi caught up. “I want to apologize for Rudi. He’s a good boy at heart.”

“There’s no reason to apologize. It is absolute bullshit, I’m sure. Professional bullshit, the best.”

“He was taken advantage of by some bike distributors in Moscow.”

“There you are.”

“He and the Diggers do good work. It’s still important who is who.”

Arkady understood. On Stalin’s orders any Russian soldier missing in action was presumed guilty of going over to the enemy. It didn’t matter whether he was last seen bleeding to death or charging a German tank, he was guilty of treason and his family was punished for associating with a traitor. Widows lost their rations, their jobs and sometimes their children. The family lived under a cloud for generations. Rehabilitation, even sixty years late, was better than nothing. Over the years, said Big Rudi, the Red Diggers had identified and sent home over a thousand Russian dead from the fields around Tver.

He asked Arkady, “How did you know about frozen boots?”

“I don’t know. It seemed a possibility.”

“This wasn’t the only case like that.” Big Rudi pulled his face in for a shrewd study of Arkady. “Rudi says you weren’t here in ’forty-one.”

“That’s right.”

“So it must have been your father. He told you about the boots.”

“He was never here.”

“He never said his name but I remembered him as soon as I saw you. He made a strong impression on me.”

Arkady did not want to get into an argument with an elderly veteran. Some people worshiped the General. Stalin praised his initiative and willingness to pour blood like a river.

“You wanted to talk about something,” Arkady said. This was his part of the bargain.

“The counterattack was so confusing. First we were on our knees and the next we were beating Fritz to his. It was a madhouse.”

“Fortunes were reversed.”

“That’s right. That’s straight to the point.”

Not exactly, Arkady thought. The old man seemed to be unburdening himself, but of what Arkady couldn’t tell. Big Rudi kept turning as he walked, as if getting his bearings, gazing at the sky one moment and the ground the next. In a distracted way, he said, “When Fritz stalled he froze. He was in his summer uniform; he wasn’t prepared for a Russian winter. His horses dropped dead. The engines of Fritz’s planes froze solid.” The old man halted. “Here! There was a farmhouse right here. Here we are.”

“Where?” All Arkady saw was matted wheat and a few green shoots of grass.

“Five days after the counterattack your father and I sat at the kitchen table right here facing each other. I was wounded from fighting on the front line, but I was detained and brought back because accusations had been made. Someone said I had gone over to the Germans the day before the counterattack began, when things were so grim.”

“Had you?”

“That’s what your father asked.”

“And?”

“In war, everything is upside down. One moment you’re pinned down, your comrades are dead and you shit your pants, and the next you’re running after Fritz, spraying him with a tommy gun, then another and another. You’re behind his lines, he’s behind yours. It’s all confusion.”

More cars and vans pulled off the dirt road to let out an army carrying not weapons but portable grills. Boys marched with the somber faces of inductees to a secret rite, their camos freshly stitched with the Diggers’ emblem of the red star, rose and helmet.

“Were there any witnesses?”

“No. Finally, your father said he calculated there was one chance in seven that I was telling the truth and he emptied his revolver, all but the seventh bullet, spun the barrel and gave me the gun. What could I do? They were, like the General said, better odds than a firing squad. I put the pistol to my head and pulled the trigger. I missed because the action of the trigger was so stiff and the barrel kicked and all I did was burst an eardrum and burn the side of my head. I thought your father was going to fall off his chair from laughing. How he laughed. He gave me a cigarette and we had a smoke. Then he picked up the gun and spun the barrel and said to try again and keep the barrel level. So I put the pistol to my head again and pulled the trigger, determined to do as he said, but the hammer came down on the empty chamber.”

“And then?”

“The General was a man of his word. He had me released.”

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“Yes, how he saved my life. With a burst eardrum I was unfit for frontline service. When you see him next, tell him I was the only one in my group to survive the war.”

The old man was wrong on so many counts, Arkady thought. First, so far as he knew, the General had never been at the Tver front. Second, he owned a Nagant revolver, but he usually carried a Tokarev pistol, so there had been no dramatic spinning of the barrel. Third, when soldiers were executed they were often told to strip, so that their uniforms could be passed without bullet holes to the next man. That was a touch his father never would have missed. But there was no good reason to set Big Rudi straight. What would it gain him?

True, the General did enjoy the occasional game of Russian roulette, especially toward the end. People said he must have been insane. Father and son were so estranged that Arkady claimed what the General was really suffering from was a late onset of sanity, that he finally saw the monster he was.

A sense of organization was taking hold by the time Arkady and Big Rudi returned to the dig. A poster on a stake assigned squads of Diggers by color to sections of the field marked by pegs tied with matching tape; none of the sections were near the trees. A curious thing about the trees: as the day got brighter, they grew darker and more solid.