Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) (3 page)

“Go home, Arkady,” Anya said.

Obolensky returned to put a proprietary grip on her arm and led her to a bench where a man with a bullhorn was haranguing the wind. Arkady thought Tatiana Petrovna would have smiled to see who had come to pay their last respects. It was a middle-aged intellectual crowd. Publishers who abandoned their writers, writers who wrote for the drawer, artists who had become wealthy by turning Social Realism into kitsch.

He wondered what other accusations could be hurled at them. That they once were a special generation that had overthrown the dead weight of an empire? That they were romantics who lamented a rendezvous with history that never took place? That they had gone as soft as rotting pumpkins? That they had rallied around Tatiana when she was dead but stayed at arm’s length when she was alive? That they were old?

It seemed to Arkady that Obolensky didn’t need hundreds of marchers, he needed thousands. Where were the kids who Twittered and texted and organized a march of thousands with their iPhones? Where were the liberals, communists, anti-Putins, lesbians and gays? In comparison, Obolensky’s march was a garden party. A geriatric ward.

If it had been up to Arkady, he would have sent everyone home at this point. Nothing that he could point to in particular, only an electric imbalance in the air waiting to be discharged. A protest was fitting because Tatiana was indeed a troublemaker. She attacked corruption among politicians and police. Her favorite targets were the former KGB who dwelled like bats in the Kremlin.

Arkady separated from the crowd and walked around the building. On one side was a row of derelict apartment houses, on the other, a chain-link fence and a construction site that had barely gotten off the ground. Stacks of rebar were covered with rust. Work trailers were abandoned, their windows punched in and swastikas spray-painted on the doors. A circle of men gathered around a cement mixer. They had shaved heads and wore red, the totemic color of the Spartak football club. At Spartak games they were often kept in a caged section of the stands. Arkady watched one pick up an iron rod and take a test swing.

By the time he returned to the demonstration it was well under way. There was no format. People shared the megaphone and poured out their guilt. Each had, at some point, advanced his or her career by pulling an article that Tatiana Petrovna had written at the risk of her neck. At the same time, they recalled, she knew what her end would be. She didn’t own a car because, as she said, it would only be blown up, and what a waste of a
perfectly good car. She could have moved to a larger flat—could have blackmailed her way to material luxury—but was content with her dead-end apartment, its rickety lift and insubstantial doors.

“Every snail prefers its own shell,” Tatiana had said. But she knew. One way or another, it was just a matter of time.

Afternoon faded into twilight and the television news team had gone before the poet Maxim Dal stepped forward. Maxim was instantly recognizable, taller than anyone else, with a yellow-white ponytail and sheepskin coat and so heroically ugly that he was kind of beautiful. As soon as he got his hands on the megaphone, he condemned the investigation’s lack of progress.

“Tolstoy wrote, ‘God knows the truth, but waits.’ ” Maxim repeated, “God knows the truth, but waits to rectify the evil that men do. Tatiana Petrovna did not have that kind of patience. She did not have the patience of God. She wanted the evil that men do to be rectified now. Today. She was an impatient woman and for that reason she knew this day might come. She knew she was a marked woman. She was small but so dangerous to certain elements in the state that she had to be silenced, just as so many other Russian journalists have been intimidated, assaulted and murdered. She knew she was next on the list of martyrs and for that reason, too, she was an impatient woman.”

One of the demonstrators fell to his knees. Arkady thought the man had tripped until a streetlight shattered. A general intake of breath was followed by cries of alarm.

From the edge of the crowd, Arkady had a clear view of the skinheads scaling the chain-link fences like Vikings boarding a ship. Just a handful, no more than twenty, wielding iron rods like broadswords.

Sedentary editors were no match for young thugs whose days were spent lifting weights and practicing karate blows to the kidney or the back of the knees. Professors backpedaled, taking their dignity with them, trying to fend off blows. Placards toppled into chaos as appeals were answered with kicks. A whack to the back took the air away. A brick to the head peeled back the scalp. Rescue seemed imminent when a police bus arrived and unloaded riot police. Arkady expected them to come to the aid of the demonstrators; instead, they waded into the marchers with batons.

Arkady was challenged by a mountainous policeman. Overmatched, he hit the man in the windpipe, more a cheap shot than a knockout blow, but the policeman staggered in circles searching for air. Anya was in the middle of the fray taking photographs while Maxim protected her, swinging the megaphone like a club. Arkady glimpsed the editor, Obolensky, also holding his own.

Arkady, however, went down. In a street fight the worst place to be was on the ground and that was where he was headed. Whose foot tripped him he did not know, but two riot police began dancing on his ribs. Well, he thought, in Victor’s words, this was truly fucked.

He got to his feet, how he didn’t know, and displayed his investigator’s ID.

“He’s with us?” A policeman dropped his fist. “He fooled me.”

In minutes the battle was over. Skinheads slipped over the fence and disappeared. Police circulated among the casualties, gathering IDs. Arkady saw split lips and bloody noses, but the real damage had been to the spirits of the demonstrators. All afternoon they had relived and rekindled the passion of their youth, stood again with Yeltsin on a tank, again defied the apparatus of the
KGB. Those heady days were gone, deflated, and all they had reaped was bruises.

Arkady’s eye was swollen shut and from Anya’s reaction he was glad he couldn’t see himself. She, on the other hand, looked as if she had been on nothing more dangerous than a roller coaster. Obolensky had slipped away. The poet Maxim was also gone. Too bad. It had been like having a yeti fight on your side.

A police captain bellowed, “Assembly without a permit, spreading malicious rumors, obstructing officers of the law.”

“Who were assaulting innocent civilians,” Arkady said.

“Did they have a permit to assemble? Yes or no? See, that’s where the trouble starts, with people who think they are special and above the law.”

“People who were being beaten,” Arkady said. Somehow, by virtue of his rank, he had become spokesman for the demonstrators.

“Troublemakers who viciously attacked police with bricks and stones. Who did you say your chief was?”

“Prosecutor Zurin.”

“Good man.”

“One in a million. I apologize, Captain. I haven’t made myself clear. The people here are the victims and they need medical care.”

“Once we have affairs sorted out. The first thing is to gather up all the cameras. All the cameras and cell phones.”

“In a trash bag?”

“That way we’ll be able to view and objectively evaluate any violations. Such as—”

Arkady winced because it hurt to laugh. “Do these people look as if they could assault anyone?”

“They’re writers, artists, intellectual whores. Who knows what they’ll get up to.”

The trash bag returned and the captain held it open for Anya. “Now yours.”

Arkady knew that she wanted to drive a dagger into the captain’s heart. At the same time, she was paralyzed by the threat of losing her camera.

“She’s with me,” Arkady said.

“Don’t be ridiculous, she’s not an investigator or militia.”

“On special orders from Prosecutor Zurin.”

“Really. I tell you what, Renko, let’s call the prosecutor’s office. Let’s ask him.”

“I doubt he’s in his office now.”

“I know his cell phone number.”

“You’re friends?”

“Yes.”

Arkady had walked into a trap of his own devising. He was light-headed and heard a fluty wheeze in his chest. None of this was good.

A phone at the other end rang and rang until it finally produced a message. The captain clicked off. “The prosecutor is at his golf club and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

The issue was still undecided when a massive sedan slid out of the dark. It was a dumbfounding sight, Maxim Dal in a silver ZIL, an armored Soviet-era limousine with double headlights, tail fins and whitewall tires. It had to be at least fifty years old. In an authoritative voice Dal ordered Anya and Arkady to get in.

It was like boarding a spaceship from the past.

Anya made a terrible nurse. When she tried to cook, Arkady smelled food burning and heard her swearing at pots and pans. When she wrote in his apartment, he smelled her cigarettes and listened to her swear at her laptop. But he was surprised by Anya’s patience. He would have expected her, like a cat, to move on. Although she had assignments—a fashion shoot, a photo essay on the Mafia—she dropped in several times a day to see how he was. “You’d miss me if I didn’t. You’re a secret romantic,” she said.

“I’m a cynic. I believe in car wrecks, airline disasters, missing children, self-immolation, suffocation with pillows.”

“What is it you don’t believe in?”

“I don’t believe in saints. They get people killed.”

“It’s no big deal,” Victor said when he visited. “Seems to me that you’re making a lot of fuss for a couple of busted ribs. What the devil is the matter with you anyway?”

“Punctured lung.” A couple of days with a valve in his chest and the lung would reinflate itself on its own.

“It’s like visiting Our Lady of the Camellias. Do you mind?” Victor held up a pack of cigarettes.

For once, Arkady didn’t crave one.

“So it’s suicide.”

“Or murder,” Arkady said.

“No, I heard it on the radio. The prosecutor determined that Tatiana Petrovna threw herself out her window. They say she was depressed. Of course she was depressed. Who isn’t depressed? Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear is depressed. The planet is depressed. That’s what global warming is.”

Arkady wished he had such insights. His mind was hung up on details. What of the neighbor? Who heard her screams? Screaming what?

Arkady felt painkillers lift him up to a dull euphoria. He could tell Zhenya had stopped by because a large chocolate chess piece wrapped in a bow sat on his nightstand. Arkady was a light sleeper but Zhenya was as elusive as a snow leopard.

A man confined to a few rooms becomes a meteorologist. Through the windowpane he charts clouds, tracks the stately passing of a thunderhead, notices the first streaks of rain. The bedroom wall becomes a screen on which he projects, “What if?” What if he had saved this woman? Or been saved? A person in this situation welcomes the clash and bang of a storm. Anything to interrupt a review of his life: Arkady Kyrilovich Renko, Senior Investigator for Very Important Cases, member of the Young Pioneers and a generation of “gilded youth” and, as luck would have it, an expert in self-destruction. His father, a military man, blew his head off. His mother, more genteel, weighted herself
with stones and drowned. Arkady had dabbled in the act himself but been distracted at a critical moment and with that his suicide fever had passed. Still, with all this experience and expertise, he considered himself a fair judge of suicide. He defended the honor of people who killed themselves, the commitment that suicide demanded, the isolation and sweat, the willingness to follow through and open a second bottle of sleeping pills or make a deeper slice across the wrist. They had earned the title, and he was offended by the imposture of murder as something it was not. Tatiana Petrovna would no more have killed herself than flown to the moon.

When the tube was removed from Arkady’s chest, the doctor had said, “We will put on a clean bandage every day and tape you up. The hole will heal itself. Your ribs will heal too, if you let them. No twisting, lifting, cigarettes or sudden moves. Think of yourself as a broken cup.”

“I do.”

•  •  •

Arkady had asked Victor to go through police files and make a list of Tatiana Petrovna’s enemies.

“Incidentally, you look like hell,” Victor said.

“Thank you.”

The courtesies done, Victor sat by the bed and fanned a deck of index cards.

“Pick a card, any card.”

“Is this a game?” Arkady asked.

“What else? Seven people with excellent reasons to kill Tatiana.” He turned a card stapled to a color photo of a man with long bleached hair, evasive eyes and a tan. “Igor Mulovich threatened Tatiana in open court. He had recruited young women as models and sold them like meat in the Emirates.”

Arkady said, “I remember him.”

“You should. We arrested him, but it was Tatiana’s articles that nailed him. He served one year in prison camp. He bought a judge on appeal, got out and gets run over by a truck, so the laugh’s on him.”

Victor turned over another card to another familiar face. Aza Baron, formerly Baranovsky, a broker whose clients had enjoyed phenomenal returns until Tatiana Petrovna exposed his pyramid scheme. “Baron is in Israel fighting extradition.”

He turned over the third card.

“Tomsky. The big fish himself,” Arkady said.

“Himself.”

Kazimir Tomsky, deputy minister of defense. He had barely got his fingers in the pot when a Russian freighter limped into Malta. Its cargo had shifted in a storm and had to be reloaded. In the process, a dockside crane toppled and dropped crates labeled “Domestic Appliances.” What spilled out, however, were rocket-propelled grenades. Everyone knew that the arms had been illegally sold by men high and low in the Defense Ministry. Tatiana named them.

Tomsky spent time in prison. He had been released ten days before Tatiana Petrovna was killed.

“Definitely a candidate,” Arkady said.

“Except he went right to Brighton Beach to live with his mother. Too bad, he made a lovely candidate.”