Gogol would have gotten a novel out of that, Arkady thought: the man who wanted to abolish himself. More likely a novella. A short story, definitely.
They touched down in Irkutsk ahead of time, which had everything to do with the ludicrously flexible timetable and nothing to do with the plane or the pilot. Outside the terminal building, they bargained a taxi driver down to a third of his asking price.
* * *
Dorzho lived in a district of tower blocks that came in every shade of gray.
Dorzho lived on the fourth floor of one of the identikit tower blocks. The elevator, predictably, stank of urine. Equally predictable, it didn’t work. Arkady wondered when it had last worked. About the same time as it hadn’t reeked of piss, he figured, the day it had been installed.
They climbed the outside stairs. Arkady took them steadily and they discussed what to do next. Arkady let them talk while he caught his breath.
“Let’s kick the door down,” said Aba. “It would give us the element of surprise.”
“Or just annoy them,” said Bolot.
“Where’s a bear when you need one?” Aba said. He looked anxiously at Arkady the moment he said this, but Arkady just laughed.
“We knock,” Arkady said. “No point starting things off on the wrong foot.”
They knocked. There was no answer.
“Now can we kick the door down?” asked Aba.
Arkady gave him the smile of an indulgent uncle. “No need.”
Bolot looked around anxiously as though expecting Dorzho to come around the corner with a posse of fellow boxers.
Aba said nothing. If he’d been a dog, Arkady thought, he’d have had his tongue hanging out in anticipation. Arkady reached into his pocket and brought out a small leather kit, which he opened to reveal a series of small tools.
“Lock picks?” Aba asked.
“Investigator issue.”
The picks were small and fiddly, hard enough to use under normal circumstances, let alone with a broken arm. He handed them to Aba like a graduation gift and told Aba which one to take out and how to insert it in the lock. Only then, with his good hand, did Arkady manipulate it the way he’d been taught so long ago that Brezhnev and his eyebrows were still running the place.
He felt rather than heard the click of the tumblers disengaging. He withdrew the pick from the lock.
“Ah,” said Aba.
He insisted on going in first. He was the largest, the strongest, the youngest, which made him the most qualified to deal with Dorzho. Arkady followed, with Bolot bringing up the rear.
The apartment was small and just the right side of squalid. Dirty dishes were piled high in the kitchen sink. Boxing magazines were spread across the floor. Sheets, duvet, and pillows were all russet brown, a shade that could hide any number of stains.
“Right,” Arkady said. “Let’s see what we can find.”
What he found was ten thousand dollars in a variety of denominations under the mattress, a hiding place so unoriginal that he had almost not bothered to look there. In the bedroom closet were a pair of outdoor boots crusted with cement. On the kitchen table Aba picked up three maps that, between them, covered most of Kuznetsov’s and Benz’s oil fields. Kuznetsov’s wells were rings in red marker.
“Look at this,” Bolot said. He handed Arkady a bull sniper rifle.
“This is promising,” Arkady said. “It’s chambered for subsonic rounds. It could be the rifle that shot at me at the ice festival.” He thought at the time that the shooter had been either the best shot in the world or the worst. Obviously, he was a real marksman if this was the gun that had killed Benz and Georgy.
He sensed rather than saw Dorzho emerge through the door and lunge toward him. He raised his arm in defense knowing that it was the one that had been broken and that it was going to hurt.
Aba came from seemingly nowhere to knock Dorzho off-balance. Down they went, Dorzho flailing with punches, but he couldn’t quite get enough weight behind them. Aba sensibly chose to fight dirty. Bolot hopped around them, trying to get close enough to help Aba.
Aba jabbed with hard fingers, going for the eyes. Dorzho clutched his hands to his face.
Aba took advantage of the momentary lull to sit on Dorzho’s chest, allowing Bolot to pin Dorzho’s legs to the floor.
“We just want to talk,” Arkady said.
“Fuck you. I can’t see.”
“Take your hands away from your eyes.”
Dorzho did, slowly and reluctantly. His left eye was red.
“If they get off you, will you talk to us?” Arkady asked.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Investigator Arkady Renko. This is Aba, a friend, and this is Bolot, my factotum.”
“Your what?”
“My associate,” Arkady said. Bolot looked pleased at the promotion.
“How did you know where to find me?” Dorzho asked.
“Kuznetsov told me.”
Even prone, Dorzho seemed to slump slightly. “Okay.”
This in itself told Arkady that Kuznetsov hadn’t warned Dorzho in advance.
Arkady motioned for Bolot and Aba to let Dorzho go. They climbed off warily. “There’s vodka in the kitchen,” Dorzho said.
Fair bet there was also botulism, listeria, and the basic materials for a biological weapon, Arkady thought.
“We’re fine,” he said. “Mind if we go outside and talk?” He needed to get some air.
“Maybe you would like to see my beehives.”
“You have hives?” Aba asked.
“Yes. Come see. They’re wintering now.”
They walked to the backyard, where hives stood under a thin layer of snow. Two or three bees flew in and out of the hives.
“Those are drones, on constant patrol,” Dorzho said. “So, what did Kuznetsov tell you?”
Arkady bluffed. “That you killed Boris Benz and Georgy and left us for dead.”
“Do you think that’s true?”
“I don’t know.”
“I didn’t know you were going to be there,” Dorzho said after what could only have been half a minute. “I swear to you, that’s the truth. I thought Benz was coming up alone.”
Oddly enough, Arkady believed him.
Dorzho brought out a tray from his beehive to show Aba. Most of the bees slept in a wax comb, while a few stirred. They were honeybees, glossy creatures with bands of black and yellow.
“You need to move slowly around bees. The queen is always protected by worker bees, who will sting you if you move quickly. Otherwise, they’re cool.”
“Does she need protecting if no one’s around?” Aba asked.
“Of course. There are always fucking wasps.”
“Where did you learn about bees?” Aba asked.
“Young Pioneers.”
Arkady needed to change the conversation from bees. “You knew Benz, obviously.”
“Everyone knows Benz. I worked for him for almost a year.” Dorzho’s eyes narrowed. “How much did Kuznetsov tell you?”
“He’s a busy man. Besides, I’d rather get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”
Dorzho shrugged. “Benz came to me in Chita last year and asked if I wanted to work for him.”
“Why you?”
Arkady watched the honeybees climb over each other.
“Why does a man like that ever need a man like me? Muscle. Protection. Doing the jobs others turn their noses up at. I did my time in the army, you know.” He curled his lip slightly as he looked at Aba. “Never got to go to Chechnya.”
Arkady shot Aba a look, but Aba simply smirked.
“What kind of jobs?” Arkady asked.
“You know the kind. When people need a little persuasion.”
“What about Saran?”
“What about her?”
“You left her the moment Benz came calling?”
“I’m surprised she noticed.”
Arkady waited for Dorzho to blame Saran or to insult her i
n some way, but he did neither.
“You didn’t tell her you were going?” Arkady asked.
“No.”
“Just walked out and never came back?”
“Yes.”
Here in Irkutsk, Arkady thought, there was little chance of Dorzho bumping into Saran by chance. “So, what happened with Benz?”
“First few months, no problem. I did my job; he seemed happy with it.”
“Had you ever met Kuznetsov?”
“A few times, when they did business together. Then, in the summer, Benz started to change.”
“Change how?”
“He and Kuznetsov had been close. But then Benz put it out that Kuznetsov was ripping him off, and going back on agreements they’d made, and all that.”
In other words, Arkady thought, standard criminal behavior. The surprise wasn’t that Kuznetsov and Benz had fallen out. The surprise was that they’d worked harmoniously as long as they had.
“Do you have any evidence for this?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Documents?”
“Do I look like an accountant? A lawyer?”
Arkady silently conceded the point. “And then?”
“This went on for a while. And it got worse. Benz said he wanted to get back at Kuznetsov, and the best way to do that was to hit him where it hurt. He told me to go to the oil fields and meet Georgy, who was stationed there. He wanted me to mix up some concrete, pour it into the pipes, and cap them.”
“And you did?”
“Of course. That’s what he told me to do, so that’s what I did. Took a long time, I can tell you. Those wells are deep. Georgy said they had drilled down so far that they reached hell.”
“What did Kuznetsov do when he found out?”
“He wasn’t happy, put it that way. Benz said that he’d heard it was the work of some eco-protesters.”
Arkady remembered the story Tatiana had been looking at: the disruption of the razing of the land around prospective wells and displacing people who lived there.
“But the Buryat had nothing to do with it?”
“No. It was just me and Georgy.”
“And Kuznetsov never suspected you?”
“He called me in when I was still working for Benz, and I thought he’d found out. I was ready to stonewall. But all he asked me was what Benz was paying me. I told him. He doubled it on the spot and told me I was now working for him. And then he told me to lay low for a while.”
“And Benz?”
“When he rang, I told him I’d been called to a family emergency in Kaliningrad. It was the farthest place I could think of.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“Never.”
One bee climbed onto Arkady’s coat sleeve. Another circled his collar. He realized they were Dorzho’s weapon. It was almost comical.
“They won’t sting,” Dorzho said.
“What did Benz say when you told him?”
“He wasn’t happy, put it that way.”
Dorzho had used exactly the same phrase about Kuznetsov when he’d discovered the damage to the oil wells. Arkady wondered how elastic Dorzho’s definition of “not happy” was. It probably covered everything from mild irritation to volcanic eruptions.
“Did he worry that you would tell Kuznetsov the truth about the wells?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell him. Shit, I was the one who poured the concrete.”
“And when I came to Irkutsk?”
“What do you mean?”
“You shot at me.”
“I shot to miss. It was a rooftop shot. If I’d wanted to hit you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Why did Kuznetsov order you to shoot at me?”
“He didn’t. It was Benz.”
“It was Benz?”
“It was the last job I did for him.”
One by one the bees flew back to the tray Dorzho was holding.
“Benz ordered you to shoot at me?” Arkady found it hard to believe.
“For the second time, yes. And to miss.”
“To persuade me to go back home, you mean?”
“I guess so.”
“Why?”
Dorzho shrugged and gently slid the bees like a tray of jewels back into the hive. “That I don’t know, but I guess he thought that you might find out something you shouldn’t.”
“Don’t you worry that Kuznetsov will finger you for the murder of Benz and Georgy?”
“If he does that, people will know that he was behind it.”
That wouldn’t stop Kuznetsov. He could stand in Red Square with a megaphone and admit it all and he still wouldn’t go to jail.
Perhaps it was just sensible planning. Murders between oligarchs had been commonplace in the nineties, when the Wild East was well named and the economy rapacious.
Why hadn’t Benz reported that Kuznetsov was cheating him and why hadn’t Kuznetsov revealed his suspicion that Benz was responsible for blocking his well and blowing up his tankers? Was it because they had once been friends?
Finally, Arkady understood. Kuznetsov’s book. That was the lesson of prison, hard gained and never forgotten. You don’t betray a friend.
38
Lisikhinskoe Cemetery was the largest in Irkutsk, a vast necropolis rich with gangsters, artists, and poets. The city had been home to dozens of cemeteries before the Revolution but now this was the only one that survived.
Pallbearers struggled under the weight of the coffin. Arkady knew there wasn’t a body in there, so either the pallbearers were more accomplished actors than he would have given them credit for, or the undertakers had miscalculated the number of sandbags it would take to simulate the weight of Boris Benz. Russian coffins were usually left open, but not in this case. Meanwhile, bears would sooner or later find Benz where they had left him in the snow.
Arkady studied Benz’s headstones. There was not one stone but three, a triptych of black marble with gold detailing. Each panel pictured Benz in a different aspect. Here he was standing in a double-breasted suit; there, sitting at a table with a cell phone; and, on another, dressed as a Cossack. It was a masterpiece of vulgarity.
The smell of flowers was overwhelming. They were all imported, some presumably from vast distances. Arkady saw orchids, chrysanthemums, hydrangeas, roses, and tuberoses, splashes of color against winter’s gray.
Pallbearers lowered the coffin into the grave. Kuznetsov stood motionless in dark glasses. Tatiana was next to him. To the casual observer, they looked like a couple.
Arkady didn’t let his gaze linger on them too long. Instead he scanned the mourners, trying to work out who they were. Many were businessmen who had come to pay their respects; others were patrons of various social clubs and friends Benz had made in prison. Was the woman weeping silently beneath a black veil his widow? His mistress? His sister?
Arkady almost missed him. Zurin was standing at the end of a row, which was in itself unusual, as he always liked to be at the center of things. Because Arkady wasn’t expecting the prosecutor to be there, it was a moment or two before his brain processed what his eyes told him. Even then, he might have dismissed him if Zurin hadn’t tipped his hat.
* * *
They did not speak until the reception at the Marriott. The walls were edged with tables of blini, fish pie, and piroshki. Arkady could have ducked out, but whatever he did, wherever he went, Zurin would find him, so he might as well get it over with.
Zurin worked the room with the charm of an emissary sent to patronize the natives: a hand on a shoulder here, a whispered aside there. He lingered long enough with each person so they would not feel cheated.
Zurin held a plate of kulich, a cake frosted and dotted with candies.
“You look surprised to see me here,” Zurin said.
“Nothing you could do would surprise me,” Arkady said.
Arkady could see Zurin parsing that sentence word by word for any sign of insolence.
/> “Let’s see how true that is, shall we?” A serpentine playfulness vanished from Zurin’s voice, and it was that change of tone that gave Arkady the sensation of standing on a precipice. He didn’t know exactly what was coming, but he was sure that it wasn’t going to be good.
“Walk with me,” Zurin said. It was a command, not a request. He led Arkady out of the reception room and along a beige corridor. It was standard international hotel décor, all neutral colors and corporate minimalism. A matryoshka doll sat in an alcove, the sole concession to the locale. Hotels like this abounded around the world, all identical save for a single clichéd national identifier: a Maasai shield in Nairobi, a red bus in London, a bonsai tree in Tokyo.
Zurin pulled Arkady close in a bear hug. Arkady was disconcerted. It was a second, no more, before he realized what Zurin was doing. His hands were efficiently working down Arkady’s back.
“I had to check.”
“I didn’t even know you’d be here. Why on earth would I be wearing a wire?”
“Nothing you could do would surprise me.” Zurin tapped a quick text on his phone, sent it, and took a quick appraisal of Arkady’s cuts and bruises. “I came to check on your progress.”
“My progress?”
“Both personal and professional, of course.”
“Well, I’m still here, on both counts.”
“How are you recovering? Bear attacks can be very nasty.”
Arkady doubted Zurin knew the first thing about bear attacks. Zurin’s idea of a hike in the wilderness was walking his dog.
“But now you’re up and about,” Zurin continued, “and if I know you at all, you’ve been trying to find out who killed Boris Benz.”
“I’m out of my jurisdiction here, as you know.”
“Which doesn’t stop you from asking around—unofficially, shall we say?”
Arkady had not survived either office politics or life in general by being free and easy with information that had come his way. He doubted that telling Zurin of his visit with Dorzho would be sensible. He didn’t have any particular reason for this doubt, other than the obvious one; it was Zurin.
Arkady shrugged. “A little. But nothing as yet.”
“I see.”
Silence hung heavy between them.
The Siberian Dilemma Page 16
