Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) (12 page)

“Excuse me.”

“What?” Zhenya was startled when a boy spoke to him. He was the largest in the group and wore a Stanford sweatshirt.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you, but aren’t you the Chess Creep?”

“I’m what?”

Other conversations died down.

“We’ve seen you at different train stations hustling games. You’re doing the same thing here. What’s the deal?”

Zhenya felt like an insect under a microscope.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. You’re doing it now. That’s why we call you the Chess Creep.”

Zhenya stood, his face burning. Even so, the Stanford boy loomed over him and said, “Relax, I’m not picking on you. I just want to know, are you the Chess Creep? From your lips. No?” Mr. Stanford turned toward the redhead. “Lotte, is this the Creep or not?”

She said, “The word I used was—”

At that moment a swan came out of the water, hissing, wings spread, neck stretched like a snake, to chase the same brat who had bedeviled him before. As the architecture students bolted, the chessboard was knocked off the bench, scattering pieces in all directions.

Zhenya found himself alone, searching the path and grass and fallen leaves for kings and queens. He found all the pieces except a black pawn that bobbed in the pond out of reach.

Creep
rang in Zhenya’s head.

He stuffed everything into his backpack, pushing aside the notebook he had taken from Arkady’s desk. It was a puzzle without a clue but it served a purpose if it forced Arkady to sign the forms for early enlistment in the army. Zhenya had been truant so long he was off the books and going nowhere. How long could he survive by cadging games with weary travelers? Most young people coming through the stations were connected to iPhones. Some didn’t even know basic openings in chess, the most Russian of intellectual tests. Without a diploma, Zhenya would be vying with Tajiks and Uzbeks to push a broom. His other options were the army or the police. He certainly wouldn’t do the latter. The solution rate for professional murders was 4 percent. How could they even call themselves police?

A pathologist was no respecter of men. To him, heroes, tyrants, holy men were all meat on a slab. Alive, they may have been draped in military decorations or a professor’s robes. Dead, their secrets poured out as cheesy rolls of fat, blackened liver, the tender brain exposed in its bowl. Nothing more.

That Willy Polenko was still alive was a relief to the other pathologists, because nobody wanted to carve up a colleague. He had done his part, lost a hundred pounds, huffed and puffed around the dim halls of the morgue for exercise, a half-deflated balloon moving in slow motion. Tatiana’s body had been found—not only found, but burned, and her ashes resided in a cardboard box labeled “Unknown Female #13312.”

Willy told Arkady, “You can upgrade to an urn of ceramic or wood. Most people choose the wood.”

“I told you there was to be no cremation.”

“I know, I know, it happened when I wasn’t here. Half the assistants are Tajiks. If you give them orders and they nod their heads, it means they haven’t understood a word you said. On the other hand, they don’t drink the disinfectant. Anyway, with this and that, she was two weeks unclaimed and you know how it is, the lowest fruit is picked first.”

“But cremated?”

Willy consulted a folder. “She was identified by her sister, her only sibling. She made the request.”

“Her sister was here in Moscow?”

“No. She wasn’t well enough to travel from Kaliningrad, so she performed the identification by phone from her home.”

“On a cell phone? We’re in a tunnel here and the reception is impossible.”

“We took the picture here and went up to the street and transmitted it.”

“Who took the picture?”

“Someone.”

“Was it saved?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Teeth?”

“You might find some pulverized in the bottom of the box.”

“Enough for DNA?”

“Not after cremation. What can I tell you, I’m surrounded by incompetents.”

“Did they, at least, get any corroborating identification?”

“By a Detective Lieutenant Stasov of the Kaliningrad police.” Willy patted the folder. “It’s all in here.”

“One last question. If this is Tatiana Petrovna, why is the box labeled ‘Unknown Female’?”

“It could mean we’re running out of boxes. Do you want it? Her sister said we should dispose of it any way we want.”

“You’re not serious.”

“It’s you or the trash bin.”

“Have you tried her magazine or her friends?”

“I can’t dash around scattering ashes like salt and pepper. You know these people.”

“And the folder?”

“All yours.” He handed everything over and gave Arkady a critical opinion. “I really think you should go with wood.”

•  •  •

In his car, Arkady tried calling Ludmila Petrovna again, and got no answer. The same with Detective Stasov. The operator at
Now
said that Obolensky had not come in. The dead were dead. The living marched on.

Arkady visited the computer repair shop where Zhenya sometimes worked. The technicians said that he had been in earlier to borrow a laptop.

As Arkady drove away, he kept an eye out for the boy’s skulking figure. Zhenya had not picked up any of Arkady’s calls, in itself a form of negotiation.

Victor had called and left a message to meet at the cemetery where Grisha Grigorenko was buried. Two men had been shot execution-style and dumped like offerings at Grisha’s headstone. The War of Succession had begun.

•  •  •

Detectives Slovo and Blok had partnered so long they had come to look like each other, with similar steel glasses and jowls of white stubble. They had plans to retire together and live in a dacha and garden in Sochi, and they were not about to be dragged into a
shooting war. They had produced the outer semblance of an investigation—the immediate site was cordoned off—but the forensic van had not arrived.

Victor led Arkady through the cemetery gate. “Blok and Slovo are old-school. As far as they’re concerned, if two gangs want to fight it out, fuck ’em, let them kill each other. Two dead is a good start.”

“Welcome, gentlemen,” Slovo said. “Do you know how much I’m going to miss your two ugly mugs? Zero. We’re having a good-bye party. You’re not invited. And neither are these two.”

The victims had bloody hair and a Nordic pallor. Arkady recognized them from the Den as Alexi’s men; they had swaggered then, released from a murder charge for lack of evidence. Arkady wanted to see if they were armed but didn’t dare move the bodies before the forensic van arrived. Slovo and Blok were happy to do nothing. Their attention had moved on to their next life. Blok’s clipboard carried an article on “planning a subtropical garden.” “Did you know that there are two hundred sixty-four days of sunshine annually in Sochi?” he asked Victor.

“Amazing.”

Slovo indicated a grave digger who stood at attention with a shovel. “Here’s the man who found them.”

It was one of the grave diggers that Arkady had talked to two weeks before, on the night of the demonstration. It occurred to Arkady that there was no one else in sight.

“Where is everybody?”

Slovo said, “The workers are celebrating Sanitary Internment Day.”

“What does that mean? ‘Sanitize’ what? It’s a cemetery.”

“It means they’re taking the day off,” Victor said. “That’s why it took so long for the bodies to be discovered.”

The angles of the entry wounds suggested that the men had died on their feet. In both cases the bullet entered through the right rear quadrant of the skull and exited through the opposite eye. Been executed, not died. The lack of blood on the headstone and on the ground around them indicated that the victims had been shot somewhere else and brought to Grisha’s headstone to add insult to injury.

“Like bookends,” Blok said.

“Like a gang war,” Slovo said. “Well, we’ll be out of it soon.”

“Counting the days.”

“Peace and quiet.”

Arkady played the beam of his penlight on one body and then the other. Revolvers were reliable and Glocks were in style, but real artistes used a pistol with a .22 slug that would carom like a billiard ball within the cranium and even stay inside. Nothing was so tidy about the dead men themselves. Bloodstains and gray matter speckled them from head to toe, as if they had shared one last, enormous sneeze.

Arkady said, “It makes no sense. Who would want to start a gang war now? The pot is always simmering, but there’s a rough understanding now. A parity. Everyone is making money.”

“That doesn’t change the fact they’re killers,” said Slovo.

“They’d shoot their mother if she was standing on a dollar bill,” said Blok.

“It looks like a gang war to me,” said Victor. “Now Alexi has to do something.”

Arkady took in Grisha’s headstone and its life-size portrait
etched in granite. Was this a gangster’s pyramid, his landmark for the ages? Or a biography with just the good parts: the civic leader, bon vivant, generous donor, rugged sportsman, family man standing with one foot up on the bumper of a Jeep Cherokee, a ski slope in the background, with a yachtsman’s cap cocked on his head and on his face the grin of a man who had it all. Yet something was missing or out of place.

“The car key is gone,” Victor said.

It was snapped off at the surface of the headstone, a message that anyone could understand.

“That reminds me,” Slovo told Arkady, “Abdul Khan wants to see you.”

“
The
Abdul Khan?”

“Actually, he wants to talk to whoever is handling the Tatiana Petrovna case. I told him there was no case anymore but he refused to take no for an answer. I said you’d be in touch.”

“Abdul is one of your players in the Tatiana case,” Victor said.

“So far as I can see, there is no Grigorenko case or Tatiana case,” Arkady said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Blok.

“It’s a double negative,” said Slovo.

Victor said, “It’s a dog chasing his fucking tail.”

Millions of Russians are terrified by a few Chechens.

Why?

Because when they are brutal, we are ten times as brutal.

For every blow delivered to us, ten blows will rain down on them.

You say, I don’t know whom to strike.

I say, strike them all.

You say, I don’t know whom to strike.

I say, strike them all.

Abdul wore a black T-shirt with his name written in white across the chest and he delivered his video rap on a burned-out Russian tank, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. Next, Abdul was in an iron cage, beating another man’s face to a pulp. Then he raced a BMW, a “Boomer” as they were
known, in and out of high-speed traffic. Next, he carried the limp figure of a woman to a four-poster bed. Abdul had thick black hair and yellow eyes and Arkady would not have been surprised to see him lean back and howl like a wolf.

You say you don’t know whom to fuck,

I say fuck them all,

Fuck them all,

Fuck them all.

The screening room went dark and when the lights came up, Abdul was bent over a video console scribbling notes. An entourage of beefed-up guards stood with arms crossed. Beautiful women as listless as mannequins sprawled in leather chairs. They all wore black “Abdul” T-shirts. Arkady planned to interview major Mafia chiefs about Tatiana. Admittedly, there was no case, but maybe this was the best time.

“What do you think?” Abdul asked.

“Of the video? I’m really not a critic.” Arkady hoped he seemed impressed. The soundproofed walls, minibar, audio mixer and video console the size of a spaceship bridge were symbols of success. They were also subtle reminders of Abdul’s enterprises: the demolition business in Grozny, the cars he stole in Germany, the prostitutes he ran in Moscow’s finest hotels, all advertised to the insistent beat of rap.

“Your honest opinion?”

“Well, a bit . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Over-the-top.”

“Over-the-top?”

“A touch.”

“Fuck you. My last DVD sold five hundred thousand copies worldwide. I get a thousand hits on my website in a day. Does that sound over-the-top?”

“It sounds frightening.” It seemed to Arkady that they were getting off track. “You told Detectives Slovo and Blok that you knew Tatiana Petrovna?” It still seemed unlikely to Arkady.

“Yeah.”

“On a friendly basis?”

“You find that unbelievable. A policeman should know that no one is one hundred percent saint or sinner.”

“And now you’re a good citizen?”

“Why not?”

Victor had selected Abdul, “Ape” Beledon and Valentina Shagelman as the Mafia heads most likely to order a bullet for Grisha Grigorenko. Otherwise, they were all good citizens.

“During the war Tatiana was a friend to the Chechen people and tried to make peace. Every time there was an atrocity—and, believe me, there were atrocities on a daily basis—she would show up, unbidden as it were.” He heard a snicker run through his entourage. “Get out. What the fuck are you sitting around for? All of you. Out!”

The men appeared used to their leader’s mercurial changes in attitude. They sighed and left and the women stumbled after. Abdul paused to let the dust settle.

“Cretins.”

“No problem. It sounds as if you and Tatiana got along.”

“Got along? You could say so. Twice in Chechnya I had my sights on her. The first time I noticed she was carrying a child covered in blood. The next time I had her in my sights, she was
carrying a grandmother to safety. I decided that before I pulled the trigger I should try to discover who this person was.”

Was the story true? Abdul was an expert at creating his own legend.

Abdul dug into his minibar. “Would you like some water, beer, brandy?”

“No, thanks.”

“So I sought her out.”

“And?”

“Well, I learned she was a woman.”

“What does that mean?”