Stalin’s Ghost (23 page)

“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.”

T
he 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.

All of this was preliminary to opening the ground beneath the pines, marked off-limits by a red tape on stakes 30 meters from the camp. The general mood was one of solemn excitement, and enough snow fell to add an auspicious sparkle to the day.

Big Rudi tugged at Arkady’s sleeve. The old man had polished his medals and donned a moth-nibbled army fore-and-aft cap in honor of the occasion.

“My grandson Rudi told them where to look, but they won’t put him on television.”

“It’s all horseshit.” Rudi appeared at Arkady’s other side. The biker’s fashion note was a bulletproof vest. “They’re amateurs and they resent a professional.”

“I thought you were a Red Digger.”

“Do I look like the sort of fuckless wonder who’s going to dig up dead bodies for free? If they want to play around mines, let them.”

“You don’t like mines.”

“They’re so…I can’t even find the word for it.”

“Perverse,” said Arkady.

“Yeah, that’s the word. Or mind-fucking. A landmine is just as happy disabling you as killing you. Happier. When you see your pal blow up and come down screaming without a leg, you don’t check for tripwires. You rush in to help and trip more mines and disable more men. You can’t outrun it either.” Rudy hitched up his armor and shirt to show his back, an expanse of mixed colors.

“The German spoon you found?”

“On the Internet, thank you.”

“Have you seen Stalin?” Big Rudi asked Zhenya.

“The one that skinheads talk about? I thought he was dead.”

Big Rudi patted Zhenya on the head. “He was. Now he’s back.”

Nikolai Isakov wore camos with the tiger head emblem and the red star shoulder patch of the Red Diggers. He didn’t give a speech so much as share stories of battles won and lost. In the war against terror sacrifices had to be made. But sacrifices by whom?

“Has Mother Russia abandoned her children? Or have we been led astray by a superrich elite so devoid of spiritual values that it would steal the coins off the eyes of our dead heroes? The men whose remains lie on the fields around us answered with their lives the order ‘Not one step back!’ The question is, who will stand fast for Russia now?”

Every word was taped by the television crew that had been at the chess tournament. Arkady remembered the name of the young, upbeat presenter was Lydia something. Bits of that day were filling in, although he still remembered nothing about being shot. With her raincoat and undimmed smile Lydia put Arkady in mind of a doll wrapped in cellophane. Zhenya was transfixed by a charred and twisted chessboard and pieces made of tin. There was no sign of Eva.

A visitors’ tent with brandy, cheese cubes and pistachios was set up for the television people. Pacheco waved Arkady and Zhenya in.

“It’s a hell of a combination, Stalin’s spectral visit and a new Nazi atrocity. You don’t get those opportunities every day,” Pacheco said. He and Wiley were outfitted in camos but marked by their white, unsullied hands.

“Do you mind?” Arkady speared cheese with a toothpick from a glass.

“Go ahead.”

“Thanks.” Arkady introduced Zhenya and filled his hand with cheese.

Wiley said, “We have a bit of a coup, an election eve news event that will feature Detective Isakov. We may have a genuine upset here. Isakov may be the real thing.”

“Well, he is the only candidate endorsed by both the living and the dead. I doubt you can do better than that,” Arkady said. “There are a few loose ends, though, a homicide here and there.”

Wiley said, “Those suspicions seem to be limited to you. Anyway, an image of strength is not a problem. Weakness is a problem. A mass grave is a perfect example of what happens when a threat is ignored.”

“And good television?”

“He’s catching on,” Pacheco said.

Arkady looked around. “Where is Urman?”

“Who knows?” Pacheco said. “Urman is like a genie. I think he hides in a magic lamp.”

Wiley said, “He’s impulsive. He might be a liability down the line.”

They were thinking ahead, Arkady thought. Isakov really had a chance.

“Time to cut the cake,” Pacheco said.

All work came to a halt as Diggers with metal detectors crossed the field to the pine trees. The men moved at the pace of mushroom hunters and Arkady heard one mutter over and over, “If treasure be hidden here, make the Devil give it back without shaming myself who am a servant of God. If treasure be hidden…” Wherever their gauges spiked or earphones squawked, the men planted a red plastic flag on a wire.

Zhenya wormed his way through the Diggers to Arkady and showed him the tin chess set.

Arkady said, “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to put that back.”

“Nikolai said I could keep it.”

Zhenya pointed to Isakov, who was watching them in return.

“Do you know him?” Arkady asked.

“He’s Eva’s friend from Moscow. Nikolai’s famous. He’s my friend too.”

Isakov acknowledged Zhenya with a wave and the boy swelled. The detective was growing into his role of a media hero. Lydia and a camera moved in for an interview.

“What do you expect to find here?” she asked Isakov.

“We will find Russian prisoners of war who were slaughtered by their German captors at the onset of the great counteroffensive of December ’forty-one.”

“Will the spirit of Josef Stalin then walk the land?”

“That’s not for me to say. What will walk the land is a spirit of patriotism. The heroes brutally murdered and buried here symbolize the sacrifice of millions of Russians.”

By the time the Diggers with minesweepers emerged from the trees they had no red flags left. One man balanced on his shoulder a long-nosed skull that looked like driftwood.

“Moose!” he shouted ahead. “The whole skeleton’s in there.”

“Our first find. Shot by a hunter?” Lydia was instantly excited.

The man with the moose skull let it slide off his shoulder to the ground. The antlers were grainy, the skull was smooth. “I don’t think so. No signs of it being dressed. It could be ten or twenty years old. Nobody goes in those gloomy trees. Why would they?”

“Maybe it died of old age,” Lydia said.

“Maybe it stepped on something,” said Rudi.

As Diggers with probes moved into the trees Arkady realized how gray the day was getting and what a black palisade the pines made against the sky.

“Why don’t you go home and sit at your computer and make more money from death?” a Digger asked Rudi.

Rudi said, “Because I’m the one who found this gold mine, asshole.” Arkady pulled him away, although he wondered why Rudenko had told anyone else; this could have been his private gold mine. Rudi shook free. “Amateurs.”

One by one the probers replaced red flags with yellow flags. Pacheco asked, “Renko, why does Detective Isakov look as if he’d like to plunge a dagger into your heart? I want my candidate positive and personable. Would you mind taking a walk? Pretty please?”

Arkady intended to search for Eva anyway. As he moved around the perimeter he was joined by Petrov and Zelensky. The filmmaker was furious. “They had us up the ass. As soon as a network showed any interest we were out the door.”

Arkady asked, “How did you pull off the Stalin sighting on the Metro?”

“Let me tell you something else about old age: the dick goes first, but when Tanya gets on the train in a wet fuck-me outfit the old boys steam. And when she jumps up and says she sees Stalin, the geezers swear they see him too. Without a law being broken.”

“Why the Chistye Prudy Station?”

“It’s a wartime station. We couldn’t have Stalin show up at a station with a shopping mall.”

Petya said, “By the way, watch out for Bora. First you almost drown him dead and then you spray his older brother and almost blind him.”

“The boxer with sore knuckles? Interesting family.”

Arkady disengaged and watched for Eva. She had come to him and all he’d had to do was be an agreeable lover and keep his questions to himself and he and Eva would be in Moscow now. People said that good marriages were built on honesty. Arkady suspected that as many solid relationships were based on a lie shouldered by two.

After the top layer of needles and earth was declared safe other Diggers moved in with wheelbarrows and shovels. Arkady completed his circuit and found that Zhenya had moved beside Isakov, who rested his hand lightly on the boy’s shoulder. Zhenya was honored, as any lad would be, although Arkady heard Wiley ask Pacheco, “Is this the most photogenic kid we could find?”

A shout from the trees indicated that a body had been found. Lydia and a camera followed as the remains were carried on a litter to the examination tent, which was outdoor theater. Onlookers jockeyed for position to observe a pathologist in a lab coat and surgical mask separate bones, boots and a pot-shaped helmet. She turned the skull and untangled a metal disk—a Wehrmacht ID—on a chain.

“German!” the doctor declared, and expressions of satisfaction went around the crowd.

Marat Urman arrived and Isakov passed him possession of Zhenya, who basked in their attention. The three of them made their way to Arkady.

Isakov said, “Zhenya wants to go to Lake Brosno and look for sea serpents. I told him that as soon as the election is over Marat and I will take him. We might plug the beast and mount it.”

“Arkady doesn’t carry a gun,” Zhenya said. “I remind him but he always forgets.”

Urman said, “That’s because he’s a member of the hole-in-the-head club. Anything you say goes right through.”

Zhenya snickered although his face was red with embarrassment.

The topsoil around the trees yielded a few rusty cartridges, food tins and mess kits. Word came back, however, that when metal detectors were set for a lower level they got more response. Arkady was surprised since execution victims were usually stripped of arms, helmets, watches and rings before they were shot and afterwards of gold fillings. What else would cause a metal detector to spike?

Lydia was a shade paler when she returned with her camera crew from the examination tent, but she was game. “Nikolai Isakov and Marat Urman, as detectives and former OMON officers, people here are talking about the possibility of finding a mass grave at this site. How is this sort of atrocity carried out?”

Isakov said, “Victims are either forced to dig their own grave and then machine-gunned, or killed somewhere else and brought to a grave. If we find Russian prisoners of war, they were probably killed here by German guards afraid of being overwhelmed by the counteroffensive.”

Urman added, “You can tell the difference because a machine gun chews up a body, bones and all. If you’re going to transport dead bodies you want as little mess as possible, so you just pop them in the back of the head. Sometimes you have to pop them twice.”

It was a reflective moment. A digger raised high a CD player and the wartime anthem rang out across the dig:

Everyone sang. Zhenya sang with Isakov and Urman. Arkady was sure that when the song was over Big Rudi would point to a shadow or a stirring bough and see Stalin. Before the song ended, however, a voice called from the pines, “A helmet! A Russian helmet!”

“Show time,” Pacheco said.

The first helmet was joined by more helmets, bottles, boots, razors, all stained, broken or disintegrating Russian junk. No weapons. Bodies, though, there were. As the day warmed, snow became a soft rain that revealed a cranium here, a kneecap there.

“A two-point bump,” Wiley told Pacheco. “If Uncle Joe shows, ten.”

The plan was for no retrieval until every red flag was investigated, but the promise of so many Russian heroes waiting to be found was too much. Red Diggers were neither military nor pathologists; when one got a wheelbarrow and started toward the trees he was followed by another and another.

“In an upwelling of patriotism, the people mobilize,” Lydia told a camera. “Ignoring red danger flags they are rushing to exhume lost martyrs of the Patriotic War.”

Zhenya said, “Let’s go with them.”

“No one investigated the flags,” Arkady said. “They didn’t investigate a single one.”

Wiley said, “The flags are theater. Decoration. Any ammunition here is sixty years old. It’s not going to do anything.”

“Can my crew and I get closer?” Lydia asked. “I feel the viewers would want to get closer.”

“You’d better have this.” Rudi ripped open his vest and handed it to Lydia.

“I can’t take it from you.”

“Why not?” Rudi said. “I’m not going there.”

Pacheco told her, “A little advice. Any time, anywhere you have an excuse to wear body armor on television, you grab it.”