by A. D. Miller
Finally I said, “Terrible. Just terrible.”
He looked up and at me, opened his mouth, swallowed, and looked down again.
There were five or six policemen standing around the car. Two or three of them were talking on mobile phones. They were wearing those funny blue shirts—stretched over the belly and elasticated around the waist, the gun slapping against the thigh below—that the Moscow police go in for in the summer. They looked like guests at a slow Russian barbecue. On the other side of the car, sitting on the bonnet and smoking, was the teenage detective who I’d gone to see and refused to bribe a few months before, when I’d been trying, albeit not very hard, to help Oleg Nikolaevich find his doomed friend.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Englishman,” he said. He seemed pleased to see me. He was wearing black jeans, a linen jacket, and a dark T-shirt with a picture of a pint of Guinness on the front.
“Do you know who did it?” I asked him.
He laughed. His acne had got worse. “Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Why did they leave the body here?”
“I don’t know,” the detective said. “Probably they were moving it, and someone disturbed them. Probably they decided it was too dangerous to drive around with the old man in the boot. Maybe they meant to come back later but never got round to it. It looks like he’s been in there a while. Maybe since last year.”
I remembered what Steve Walsh had told me about the amateur hitman/professional hitman murder method. I asked the detective whether that might have been how it went with Konstantin Andreyevich.
He thought for a few seconds. “Could be something like that,” he said. “It was a lousy job. Hammer, I think, or maybe a brick. Do you want to see?”
“No, thanks.”
I walked a little way off, up to the churchyard fence. Yellow grass was trying to make a life for itself in the mud. I called Steve.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“Are you going to be late? I thought we’d go to Alfie’s Boarhouse afterwards.” Alfie’s was a dive near the zoo where Russian girls pretending to be hookers, and hookers pretending not to be, went to dance on the tables and be ogled by middle-aged expats. I’d always liked Alfie’s.
“Konstantin Andreyevich,” I said, “my neighbour’s friend. He’s dead.”
I told Steve about the foot and the hammer (or brick).
“Told you he was dead,” Steve said. And then he said, “It was probably for his apartment.”
“What?”
“His apartment. Does he own an apartment?”
“Yes,” I said. “He does. He did.”
“So,” Steve said, “that’s it. That’s the story, I’m telling you. It’s always for the apartment, except when it’s drink or adultery. Someone whacked him for his apartment.”
Property crime had been even more brutal in the nineties, Steve explained, with the tone of nostalgia Moscow veterans always adopt to talk about that cherished decade of larceny and lust. After communism, the Moscow government gave away most of the flats in the city to whoever was living in them for next to nothing. The scams started immediately, Steve said. Sometimes the crooks married the owners, then brought their cousins or brothers up from Rostov or wherever to get rid of them so they could inherit. Or they just tortured the poor fucks into signing over their titles, then dissolved them in acid or dropped them into the Moscow River.
“But now that Russia’s gone civilised,” Steve said, “they’ve worked out a cleaner way. They find some lonely old-timer, whack him, and get a bent judge to certify that they’re the dead guy’s lawful heirs. That’s it, the place is theirs.”
“Don’t they need a body?” I said. “I mean, to prove he’s dead. Wouldn’t they need him to be found?”
“Jesus, Nick, I thought you were the lawyer. No, no body necessary. In Russia, after you’re gone for five years, you’re dead. Finito. But—and this is the beautiful part—a friendly court can pronounce someone dead six months after he disappears. The claimant just has to show that the missing person was last seen in a dangerous situation. Which isn’t difficult. Could be ice fishing. Could be swimming in the river while drunk. Could be picking the wrong mushrooms in the forest. Six months, he’s dead and the apartment’s theirs. When did Konstantin Whateverovich get lost?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t remember. October maybe. Something like that.”
“Long enough. And long enough for them to sell it on.”
Up ’til that moment I think I’d managed to tell myself, to the extent that I really thought about it at all, that it wasn’t so terrible, the thing with Masha and Katya and Tatiana Vladimirovna—that it might not be nice, might even be bad, but it wouldn’t be that bad. Not like this. I should have listened. I could have guessed. Perhaps I did guess and carried on as if I hadn’t. But when Konstantin Andreyevich stepped out of the boot of the Zhiguli, and Steve gave me his brief history of apartment fraud, I couldn’t pretend not to understand anymore.
“But to arrange the judge,” I said, “the con men would need money, right? They’d need friends. What if you don’t have them? I mean, the criminals. What if they’re small-time, they’re from out of town, just a couple of youngsters?”
“There are other methods,” Steve said. “You need a dupe, preferably with no relatives. You need a bit of patience and ingenuity, I suppose, but you can still do it. It happens all kinds of ways. It’s the perfect Moscow crime. Privatisation plus rocketing property prices plus no scruples equals murder. Anyway, what makes you think they’re small-time?”
“I don’t,” I said, backtracking. “I don’t know.” After a few seconds I said, “He was in a car, Steve. In my street. In the snow. I mean, the car was in the snow. It looks like he was there all winter. He was buried in the snow.”
“Snowdrop,” said Steve. “Your friend is a snowdrop.”
That’s what they call them, he told me—that’s what they call the bodies that come to light with the thaw. Drunks mostly, and homeless people who give up and lie down in the snow, and the odd vanished murder victim. Snowdrops.
“Like I told you, Nicky,” Steve said, “when the end of the world comes, it will come from Russia. Listen, you coming to Alfie’s?”
I hung up and walked back over to Oleg Nikolaevich. He’d straightened up but he hadn’t moved.
“Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said, “I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry.”
“God is in his heaven,” said Oleg Nikolaevich, looking at the foot, “and the tsar is far away.”
I COULD SAY it was my conscience that made me do it. I’d like to tell you it was my conscience. Maybe it even was conscience, as well as curiosity, and also something else, something uglier, a sort of awe at what I’d been part of that was a distant relative of pride. I’d also like to be able to say that I did it immediately, that it was the same evening, the night of the foot. But the truth is that it wasn’t that night, or maybe even the next day. It was soon though, I’m sure it was soon, within a week, maybe only a week, that I went to look for Tatiana Vladimirovna. Even though I wasn’t at all sure I’d find her.
I hadn’t spoken to Masha or Katya since the day we’d all gone to the bank for the money counting and the signing. That was something I wasn’t expecting—the suddenness of the end. I’d called Masha’s number over and over, but I only got the Russian out-of-order signal—three sharp notes, starting at a pitch high enough to shatter glass or derange dogs, then getting higher—and a demoralising network message that said her phone was switched off or out of coverage. I tried again when I started to think about the old woman. In the end I went round to Tatiana Vladimirovna’s and buzzed.
I buzzed for a minute, maybe two, standing in the shadows of her courtyard on a lovely warm Saturday. Finally a Japanese woman opened the door from the inside, I smiled at her and went in and up the stairs. I knocked on Tatiana Vladimirovna’s front door, quietly at first, like there might be a baby inside sleeping, or as if I didn�
�t really want whoever was there to answer. Then I knocked louder and louder, faster and faster, like I was the KGB on a busy night. But no one came, except a fat blonde woman in a dressing gown and hair curlers who rolled halfway down the stairs from the floor above, clung to the banister, and stared at me until I left.
Outside, I stood on the path around the pond. By then it was parched and dusty, an off-white dust that rose in puffs, blurring my trousers and tasting of chalk. I walked up to the Metro and through the glass swing doors, the heavy doors that lash back at passengers like their history. I’d given up holding them open, as I once had, for whoever came after me, instead letting them go without looking, turning down that free chance to show some mercy in that gladiatorial city.
I rode the Metro out to Butovo: in theory there might have been time for Tatiana Vladimirovna to have moved there. This time the taxi driver I flagged down outside the station was a breezily aggrieved Uzbek, who explained to me that soon, any minute now, the Muslims would rise up against the Russians and the rest for the final war. When we turned the corner at the edge of the city I saw that the other side of the road had become a jungle, the trees and bushes erupting with their Russian summertime urgency. I could see people trickling into the forest between the old wooden houses, carrying babies and bottles. We pulled up outside the building on Kazanskaya—Tatiana Vladimirovna’s building, or Stepan Mikhailovich’s, or MosStroiInvest’s, or nobody’s.
I buzzed the number of the flat we’d been to during the winter on the intercom panel. No one answered. I pushed all the numbers together and in random combinations. This time that trick didn’t work. After a while I realised that the wires coming out of the intercom, one green, one red, and one blue, were dangling unconnected beneath it. I banged my fist on the metal door. I crossed the road and looked up at the building.
The sun was behind it and I had to squint. As far as I could see there were no lights on anywhere inside. I stared for a long time at the corner window behind the balcony on the seventh floor that was supposed to belong to Tatiana Vladimirovna. Nothing seemed to be alive behind it. I thought I could just make out the kitchen cupboards on the back wall, but nothing else. The balcony was bare. Then I looked farther up and saw that on the top floor the windows hadn’t been fitted yet. One of those fat Moscow crows was perched on a gaping sill in the middle of the penthouse.
I started to walk back in the direction of the Metro station. I decided—what could it cost me?—to ask somebody about the building. I knew I wouldn’t ever be in Butovo again. I marched through the overgrown grass in the yard of the nearest dacha and up to the front door. I didn’t see the gigantic brown dog asleep next to a woodpile until afterwards. I knocked. An oldish man came to the door—he was maybe seventy-five, maybe fifty, it was always hard to tell. He was wearing a winter coat but no shoes or socks on his feet.
I apologised for the intrusion and asked whether he could tell me anything about the new building over the road.
“No,” he said.
“Nothing?”
He studied me for a few seconds, I guess deciding what kind of con man I was. He had blood-flooded eyes, three days’ worth of pale stubble, and intermittent teeth.
“I think,” he said, “that they ran out of money.”
“Who ran out of money?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “The bosses. They say they are going to knock it down.”
“Who says?”
“People.”
“Does that mean that nobody lives there?”
“Nobody,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know. The less you know, the better you sleep.” He offered me a jagged consolatory smile as he closed the door.
I ONLY HAD a vague idea of where Masha and Katya lived, but I went to all the other places I could think of, or almost all. If you’d asked me then, I’d probably have said that I was still looking for Tatiana Vladimirovna, but that was only part of it, and not the main part, truth be told. There was my money, the twenty-five thousand dollars, but that wasn’t really it either.
First I went to the mobile phone shop down by the Tretyakov Gallery. It was a hot day, and the shop was full of overheated customers fanning themselves with special-offer leaflets. The first girl I spoke to told me that Masha had quit and that she was busy. The manager said no, they didn’t have any contact details for Masha, and asked me to leave. I went to the restaurant on Neglinnaya, where I’d found Katya waitressing on New Year’s Eve. They had a lot of Katyas, they joked, I could take my pick, but the one I was looking for was gone.
After Odessa I was pretty sure that Katya had never set foot in Moscow State University in her life. But I went up there anyway, to the manic Stalinist tower up on Sparrow Hills. I remember there was a young couple having their wedding photo taken on the esplanade that runs in front of the university and overlooks the city, above the river and the Kremlin, the churches and the chaos. The bride was in a strappy meringue dress, much less demure than I expect yours will be, if we’re still on after this. Her friends were as colourful as peacocks, the first-boyfriend groom and the other men were in dour gangster suits. They looked touchingly doomed. I heard the guests shouting “Gorka, gorka” (bitter, bitter), the ritual cue for the couple to embrace, and so kiss away all bitterness and make their new life sweet. The statues on the university’s facade, of heroic intellectuals wielding books, patting globes, and staring idiotically into the future, reminded me of the ones on the platform at Ploshchad Revolyutsii station, the platform where I’d first seen Masha. The security guard at the main entrance wouldn’t let me into the green entrance hall, though I’m not sure what I would have done in there even if he had. I stood outside, asking pretty girls in short skirts and boys in cheap jeans if they knew Katya, until I felt ridiculous and humiliatingly old. A Rollerblader almost knocked me over as I was leaving. The star on top of the main spire winked in the fierce sunshine.
I phoned MosStroiInvest. It took a while—I think they were going bust—but eventually I got through. They said they’d never heard of Stepan Mikhailovich or Tatiana Vladimirovna. I figured Stepan Mikhailovich must have had a friend inside the company or among the contractors, someone who could have lent him the keys for Butovo. Maybe the idea started with that, with the bait. They must have had another friend or two who sorted out the phoney documents. That would have been almost all it took, plus me to put together the real ones for Tatiana Vladimirovna’s apartment and keep her happy. They must have thought that giving her the fifty thousand helped to make the whole thing look genuine.
The only place I suppose I could have gone and didn’t was the dacha, the one they said belonged to the old man who used to work for the railway—the one with the wardrobe-sized banya and the magical bedroom in the eaves, the place where I found out that Masha and Katya weren’t sisters. Somehow it just felt too holy, a memory I wanted to freeze in the winter ice and not tarnish in the sweat and letdown of the summer. It just seemed too much. You might think I could have gone to the police, that I should have gone to the police. I can see you thinking that. But what would I have told them? What had happened? A woman had sold an apartment. Some girls had gone away. Nothing had happened. And, anyway, whatever had been done, I had done it too.
There was one time, in those few days when I was looking, when for a minute I thought I’d seen Tatiana Vladimirovna, or maybe I just let or made myself think so. It was on Tverskaya, at the bottom near Red Square. I was walking up to meet Paolo for a nervous lunch at the summer café on the terrace outside the Conservatory. I thought I recognised her shot-putter form, her relentless gait—slow but determined like an advancing army—and her give-a-shit bowl haircut, about fifty metres ahead of me on the pavement. I stopped dead, just for a second, then ran. But the pavement was crowded, and there was a dense mob of tourists around a stall selling Lenin T-shirts and Stalin dolls. It was like in a dream when you run and run but somehow don’t seem to move. By the time I got to the corner where the Central Telegraph building is, I’d
lost her. I looked over the edge of the half wall at the top of the steps down into the underpass. I swerved up Tverskaya as far as the Levis shop. The old woman had gone.
It’s possible that it was her—I’m not saying that it wasn’t. It could have been her. Possibly she’s wandering around Moscow or St. Petersburg right now, with fifty thousand dollars in a plastic bag and that baby smile on her face. Maybe they left it at that. After all, they had her flat and she would never have been able to get it back. The paperwork was all in order, thanks to Olga. There was nothing old Tatiana Vladimirovna could do about it and no one to complain to. Except me, maybe. She would’ve known where to find me if she’d been looking.
But she never came, and I doubt they would have wanted to see her standing on the pavement making a fuss, or just spending the extra money that could have been theirs. “No person, no problem,” an old Russian saying went, and I suspect they would have fixed it so there wouldn’t be any problems. It wouldn’t have been difficult, even without the snow. I’ll never know for certain, but that’s what I think.
I’m not even sure that Tatiana Vladimirovna herself ever expected to move to Butovo, not really. Perhaps she didn’t really think she’d ever get to pick mushrooms in the forest, swim in the pond, run her dishwasher, and gaze at the cupolas of the church from her new balcony. I’m not certain what she expected, but I’ve started to think that all along everyone knew more than me, Tatiana Vladimirovna as well as Masha and Katya. That they kept it from me like you keep a dirty secret from a child, until you can’t cover it up any longer. I sometimes think that in a bizarre way it might, all along, have been a conspiracy against me.
Or maybe not. Maybe instead—probably instead, being as honest as I can be—it was a conspiracy of me against me, to keep the truth from myself. The truth being that I’d crossed a line somewhere, at some moment in a restaurant, in the back of a cab, under or on top of Masha, or in the lift at Paveletskaya Square. I’d somehow become the sort of person who would go along with it, whatever it was, sensing but not caring that it was no good, fixing the forms and smiling so long as I got what I needed. The kind of person I never knew I could be until I came to Russia. But I could be, and I was.
