The doctor used both hands to turn to a new page. ‘You would be amazed at the experiments being conducted now at the Serbsky Institute. We now have proof that the nervous system of a criminal is different from that of a normal person. When they were first brought to the clinic different subjects may have displayed wildly various behavior, sometimes mouthing irrational statements, sometimes appearing as normal as you or I. Yet all, after a few days in an isolated cell, lapsed into catatonia. I myself have placed a needle two centimeters deep into the skin of such a pathoheterodox personality and observed a total absence of pain.’
‘Where did you place the needle?’ Arkady asked.
A phone rang in his office, and Arkady slipped out to the stairs. Chuchin spoke into the ear of the doctor, who made a note.
‘I had a cat once when I was a girl.’ Natasha Mikoyan smoothed the mohair blanket that covered her legs. ‘So soft, light as fluff, you could hardly feel her little ribs. I should have been a cat.’
She curled against the end of the sofa, the blanket tucked up to the ruffled collar of her nightgown, her small toes bare on the sofa cushions. The curtains of the apartment were drawn, no lights lit. Her hair was loose, wisps making dark commas along her neck. She sipped brandy from an enameled cup.
‘You said you wanted to talk about a murder,’ Arkady said. ‘What murder?’
‘My own,’ she replied possessively.
‘Who do you suspect of trying to kill you?’
‘Misha, of course.’ She suppressed a little giggle, as if he’d asked a stupid question.
Despite the faint light of the room, he saw changes from the week before when he’d come to dinner. Nothing much, a picture askew, ashtrays filled with the chalk ends of cigarettes, dust in the air and a smell like rotting flowers. A purse lay on the table between the sofa and his chair; lipstick and a mirror were beside it, and when she shifted and her knee touched the table the lipstick rolled back and forth.
‘When did you first suspect Misha wanted to kill you?’
‘Oh, for years.’ She added as an afterthought, ‘You can smoke. I know how you like to smoke when you’re nervous.’
‘We’ve known each other for a long time,’ he agreed, and felt for a smoke. ‘How do you think he’s going to kill you?’
‘I’ll kill myself.’
‘That’s not murder, Natasha, that’s suicide.’
‘I knew you’d say that, but it’s not the case here. I’m only the instrument, he’s the murderer. He’s a lawyer, he doesn’t take any chances.’
‘You mean he’s trying to drive you crazy, is that it?’
‘If I were crazy, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what he’s doing. Besides, he’s already taken my life. We’re just talking about me now.’
‘Ah.’
She didn’t appear crazy. In fact, her tone had the undertone of a daydream, and a surface of acquiescence. Now that he thought about it, he and Natasha had always been great friends, but never close.
‘Well,’ he asked. ‘What do you want me to do for you? I’ll certainly talk to Misha—’
‘Talk to him? I want you to arrest him.’
‘For murder? Don’t kill yourself and there won’t be one.’ He tried to smile.
Natasha shook her head. ‘No, I can’t take any chances. I have to have him arrested now, while I can.’
‘Be reasonable.’ Arkady lost patience. ‘I can’t arrest anyone for a crime he hasn’t committed, especially on the word of a victim who’s going to take her own life.’
‘Then you’re not a very good investigator, are you?’
‘Why did you call me? Why talk to me? Talk to your husband.’
‘I like the sound of that.’ She tilted her head. ‘ “Your husband.” It has a nice judicial ring.’ She curled up warmly. ‘I think of you and Misha as one and the same. So does he. He always calls you his “good side.” You do all the things he wishes he did; that’s why he admires you so. If I can’t tell his “good side” he’s trying to kill me, I can’t tell anyone. You know, I’ve often wondered why you weren’t interested in me when we were at university. I used to be very attractive.’
‘You still are.’
‘Are you interested now? We could do it here; we wouldn’t have to go to the bedroom, and I promise you it would be absolutely safe, no danger at all. No? Be honest, Arkasha, you’re always honest, it’s your charm. No? Don’t apologize, please; I must tell you that I’m not interested either. What’s happened to us’ – she laughed – ‘when we’re not even interested anymore?’
On impulse, Arkady reached and upended her purse, spilling its contents, mainly paper packets of Pentalginum, a pain-killer containing codeine and phenobarbital, sold over the counter, the housewife’s addiction.
‘How many of these a day do you take?’
‘The modus operandi, that’s what catches your eye. You’re so professional. Men are so professional, so quick with the stomach pump. But I’m boring you,’ she said brightly, ‘and you’ve got some dead of your own to attend to. I was only thinking of expanding your horizons. You were the only man I knew who might possibly care to. You can get back to work now.’
‘What will you do?’
‘Oh, I’ll just sit here. Like a cat.’
Arkady stood and took a couple of steps to the door. ‘I hear you’re going to testify against me in a divorce court,’ he said.
‘Not against you. For Zoya. Frankly,’ Natasha said with gentleness, ‘I never saw the two of you as a couple, never.’
‘You’ll be okay? I have to go.’
‘I’ll be perfect.’ She raised the cup demurely to her lips.
At the hall elevator Arkady met Misha, who was just arriving, flushed with embarrassment.
‘Thanks for calling. I couldn’t get away sooner.’ Misha tried to brush past.
‘Wait, you better get her to a doctor,’ Arkady said. ‘And get those pills away from her.’
‘She’ll be fine.’ Misha backed toward his apartment. ‘She did this before, she’ll be fine. Why don’t you worry about your own affairs?’
Arkady spent the afternoon with paperwork, checking Hans Unmann’s registry of a Zhiguli sedan and rechecking Osborne’s visas. The American had traveled from Paris to Leningrad by rail, arriving January 2. Such a trip, even going “soft class” through France, Germany and Poland, must have been tedious, especially for such a high-powered businessman as Osborne. Leningrad was iced in to shipping during the winter months, though, and an airport search might have discovered the Mannlicher.
Late in the afternoon Arkady attended the cremation of Pasha Pavlovich, whose body had finally been released so that it could be placed in a pine box and rolled onto gas jets.
Hooligans had kicked down all the words of the red sign except for one: HOPE.
The chimneys of the Likhachev works vanished at night. On the street the stores were shut, the one that sold vodka protected by an iron gate. Drunks yelled after a militiaman. ‘You fucking garbage prick-twister!’ And the militiaman left the sidewalk for the street, looking for a patrol car.
Arkady walked into the cafeteria where he had met Swan before. Patrons huddled at round tables, honest hands on their bottles, sweat-stiff jackets over their chairs, raw onions and knives on their plates. The illegal entertainment of a television set was placed on the bar counter: Dynamo vs. Odessa. Arkady went right to the rest room, where Kirwill was urinating down the hole provided. He wore a leather jacket and cloth cap. Despite the bad light, Arkady could see on Kirwill’s face, besides the usual dangerous tautness, a bloom of capillaries.
‘Having fun?’ Arkady asked.
‘Standing in someone else’s piss? Sure.’ He zipped himself up. ‘Just like the Lower Fucking Depths. You’re late.’
‘Sorry.’ Arkady took his turn at the hole, standing two feet away and out of the puddle. He wondered how much Kirwill had already drunk.
‘Mannlicher check out?’
‘It looks as if it will.�
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‘What the hell else have you been doing today? Perfecting your aim?’
‘You could do worse.’ He glanced at Kirwill’s shoes.
They went to a table Kirwill had claimed in a corner of the bar. A half-empty bottle of vodka stood in the center of the table.
‘Renko, you a drinking man?’
Arkady considered leaving. Kirwill was unpredictable enough sober, and Arkady had always heard that Americans couldn’t hold their liquor. But Swan was coming, and he didn’t want to miss him.
‘What do you say, Renko? Later on we’ll have a pissing contest – distance, time, aim and style. I’ll take a handicap. One leg. That’s not enough? No hands?’
‘You’re actually a police officer?’
‘The only one I see here. Come on, Renko, I’m buying.’
‘You’re quite an insulting character, aren’t you?’
‘When inspired. You’d rather I punched you around like I did before?’ Kirwill leaned back, crossed his arms and looked around appreciatively. ‘Nice place.’ His eyes returned to Arkady and restlessly mimicked a childish hurt: ‘I said it was a nice place.’
Arkady went to the counter and returned with a bottle and glass for himself. He laid two matches on the table between his bottle and Kirwill’s, snapped one match in half, covered both so that only the match heads peeked out from his hand, and said, ‘Short match pours from his bottle.’
Frowning, Kirwill pulled one out. The short match.
‘Shit.’
‘Good Russian, wrong expression.’ Arkady watched Kirwill pour. ‘Also, you should trim your hair closer at the sides. Don’t put your feet up on the chair. Only Americans put their feet up.’
‘Oh, I see we’re going to work well together.’ Kirwill emptied his glass in one gulp, head back, the same as Arkady. Again they drew matches, and again Kirwill lost. ‘Fucking etiquette of the Lumpen-proletariat. Cute, Renko. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing besides letting your blood go from your brain to your butt.’
Arkady wasn’t going to tell him about Osborne, and he didn’t want Kirwill going after Irina Asanova, so he talked about the reconstruction of the dead girl’s skull.
‘Wonderful,’ Kirwill said when Arkady was done. ‘I’m dealing with a fucking nut. A face from a skull? Christ. Well, this is fascinating, like seeing police procedure in ancient Rome. What’s next, entrails from birds, or do you throw bones? Reconstructing ikons, that’s what Jimmy was up to. Your own notes mentioned a chest of ikons.’
‘To be stolen or bought, not reconstructed.’
Kirwill scratched his chin and his chest; then his hand wandered into a jacket pocket and dangled a postcard before Arkady. On the blank side was a short description of a ‘Religious chest, Cathedral of the Archangel, the Kremlin.’ The other side showed a color photograph of a gilded chest bearing sacramental goblets of crystal and gold. Around the chest, ikon panels illustrated a battle between white and black angels.
‘How old, Investigator, would you say that is?’
‘Four hundred years old, five hundred,’ Arkady guessed.
‘Try 1920. That’s when the Cathedral and everything in it was renovated, Comrade. Who said Lenin didn’t have taste? Now, I’m just talking about the chest frame. The panels are original. They’d go as a set for a hundred thousand dollars and up in New York. And they do; panels get out of here all the time, but sometimes they just don’t leave as ikons. Maybe a dealer exports a mediocre chest built around ikons doctored to look bad. So I spent the day following this clever idea of mine to every goddamn embassy in town, trying to find out who’d exported ikons, or a chest or a chair of ikons, in the last six months. Got nowhere. Went back to the American embassy, to the political attaché, who’s the local CIA chief and a man who couldn’t find his asshole with a mirror, so he could tell me in secret that smuggling a decent ikon was a good hedge against inflation. You could get a hernia trying to lift a diplomatic pouch over there. Only, no private dealers are allowed. Then I realize, of course, that you can’t do any reconstruction without gold, and you can’t buy or steal gold in this country, so the whole idea is out the window, and, a little thirsty, I stumbled onto this toilet you so cunningly chose to meet at.’
‘Kostia Borodin could,’ Arkady said.
‘Buy gold here?’
‘Steal gold in Siberia. But wouldn’t it be too obvious, putting a new chest around old ikons?’
‘They antique it. Rub off some gold to let the red bole show through. Rub in some umber. Send a detective to every art store in town to check on anyone buying Armenian bole, gesso, granulated gelatin, whiting, carpenter’s hide glue, cheesecloth, extrafine sandpaper, chamois—’
‘You seem to have some experience.’ Arkady made a list.
‘Any New York cop knows this. Also, cotton, alcohol, punches and a flat-faced burnisher.’ Kirwill poured another glass for himself while Arkady scribbled. ‘Surprised you didn’t find sable hair on Jimmy’s clothes.’
‘Sable? Why?’
‘That’s the only kind of brush for laying gilt, a red sable brush. What the hell is this?’
Swan had arrived with a Gypsy, an old man with the face of an ancient monkey, shrunken and alert, a misshapen hat on grayed curls, a dirty bandanna tied at the neck. In every statistical survey of the Soviet Union there were no unemployed, except Gypsies. Despite every effort to raise them up or ship them out, every Sunday they could be found selling charms at the farmers’ market, and every spring they would appear as if out of the ground in the city parks, brown babies at an open breast, begging for coins.
‘People do not buy art supplies in art stores,’ Arkady explained to Kirwill. ‘They buy them at secondhand markets, on street corners, at someone’s apartment.’
‘He says he heard about a Siberian who had gold dust to sell.’ Swan nodded to the Gypsy.
‘And sable skins, I heard.’ The Gypsy had a hoarse voice. ‘Five hundred rubles for a single skin.’
‘You can buy anything at the right street corner,’ Arkady said to Kirwill but looked at the Gypsy.
‘Anything,’ the Gypsy agreed.
‘Even people,’ Arkady said.
‘Like the judge who will die of a slow cancer who sent my son to camp. Did the judge think of the children my son left?’
‘How many children did your son leave?’ Arkady asked.
‘Babies.’ The Gypsy’s throat choked, visibly swollen with emotion. He twisted in his chair to spit on the floor and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘Ten babies.’
The drunks at the nearest table moaned a song about love, arms over each other’s shoulders, heads swaying. The Gypsy wiggled his hips and licked his lips suggestively. ‘Their mother’s very pretty,’ he whispered to Arkady.
‘Four babies.’
‘Eight is the final—’
‘Six.’ Arkady put six rubles on the table. ‘Ten times that if you find out where the Siberians lived.’ He talked to Swan. ‘There was a skinny red-headed guy with them. They all vanished around the beginning of February. Copy the list of art supplies and give one list to the Gypsy. They had to buy their stuff from someone. They probably lived on the outskirts of town, not the center. They didn’t want a lot of neighbors where they holed up.’
‘You’re going to be a very lucky man.’ The Gypsy stuffed his money into a pocket. ‘Like your father. The general was very generous. Did you know we followed his troops all the way through Germany? He always left good pickings. Not like some.’
Swan and the Gypsy left just as Odessa scored on the television on the bar. The Dynamo goalie, Pilgui, stood arms akimbo as if surveying an empty field.
‘Gypsies can find out things,’ Arkady said.
‘I have to go through the same stuff with my own informants, don’t worry,’ Kirwill said. ‘Pick a match.’
Arkady lost and poured.
‘You know’ – Kirwill took his glass – ‘there was a case in Tuxedo Park years back where they put together pie
ces of a girl’s face for identification. And there’s a guy in the New York medical examiner’s office who does work reconstructing faces, mostly from airline crashes. He removes the bones and reshapes the skin. I guess you can work from the opposite direction. Hey, here’s to your dead detective, huh?’
‘Okay. To Pasha.’
They drank, drew matches and drank some more. Arkady felt the vodka insinuating its way from his stomach to his limbs. Kirwill, he was pleased to see, showed none of the feared signs of alcoholic paralysis; in fact – comfortably filling his chair, a glass cradled in one hand – he showed the signs of a practiced drinker. He put Arkady in mind of a long-distance runner just hitting stride, or a barge leisurely riding out the swell of a wave. The stench of the place would have chased away any cultured Muscovite. Better dead on the steps of the Bolshoi than alive in a workers’ bar. But Kirwill seemed genuinely at ease.
‘Is that true about General Renko?’ he asked. ‘The Butcher of the Ukraine was your father? That, as we say, is an outstanding footnote. How did I miss that?’
Arkady looked for an insult in the broad, florid face. Kirwill showed simply curiosity, even a friendly interest.
‘Easy for you,’ Arkady said, ‘very hard for me.’
‘Yeah. How come you didn’t make an Army career? “Son of the Butcher of the Ukraine,” you should have a star of your own by now. What are you, a fuck-up?’
‘Besides incompetent, you mean?’
‘Yeah’ – Kirwill laughed – ‘besides that.’
Arkady thought about it. This was a strain of humor he was unfamiliar with, and he wanted to choose the right answer.
‘My “incompetence” is purely a matter of training; being a “fuck-up,” as you put it, was my own genius. And, I repeat, very hard. The general commanded tanks in the Ukraine. Half of today’s General Staff commanded tanks in the Ukraine. The political commissar for that campaign was Khrushchev. It was a charmed group: future Party secretaries and marshals. So I was sent to the right schools, had the right tutors, the right Party sponsors. If they had made the general a marshal there’s no way I could have escaped. Right now I’d have my own missile base in Moldavia.’
Gorky Park Page 21
