Tatiana ar-8

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “What does this have to do with Natalya Goncharova?”

  “This is the cute part,” Zhenya said. “There’s no mention of where or when the meeting in the notebook took place. None. I think it might be Grisha’s yacht, the Natalya Goncharova, which would be a brilliant stroke. It would have established for everyone that Grisha was in charge.”

  “Does it matter? It’s in the past, isn’t it?”

  “Not from the way Alexi acts. He acts like it’s a matter of life and death. He takes it personally.”

  “Name something that isn’t,” Lotte said.

  “Chess.”

  “You’ve obviously never had a male opponent stare at your breasts for an entire game. Anyway, I hope this was in the past. What worries me is on the fifth page, a face with nothing but an ‘X’ for a mouth. That means nobody talks. I think that includes us.”

  • • •

  It wasn’t a matter of most trust as least distrust. Now that Alexi had tried to have him assassinated, Maxim seemed willing to cooperate. Until they came to the next bend in the road. Besides, where else would Arkady stay but Maxim’s apartment? Kaliningrad felt more and more an island, with hotels and terminals watched by the Mafia and police. And Arkady had not slept, it seemed, for days. He closed his eyes and dreamed that a bottle of vodka rolled back and forth beneath the couch, that a worm of lead ate into his brain, that a small monkey-faced dog licked his face until he woke to the sunrise chirps of sparrows and found Anya sitting opposite him in a chair.

  She said, “You have a cut.”

  Arkady touched his scalp.

  “Ow.”

  “Maybe next time, you’d like to try an ice pick.”

  “Where’s Maxim?”

  “He left to rent a car.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “What a lovely welcome.”

  Arkady ignored the cup of tea she offered him. Her face was scrubbed clean, although she still was dressed in the tight party gear of red sequins.

  He asked, “Where is Alexi?”

  “In Moscow, in Kaliningrad, I don’t know. He zips back and forth in Grisha’s company jet. At the moment, I think he’s hiding his face, but maybe you know that better than anyone. You’ve made a very bad enemy in Alexi.”

  “I never found him charming. He brought you to Kaliningrad, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but now we’ve gone our separate ways.”

  “Is this a recent tiff? You became tired of each other?”

  “He dropped me.”

  “You? That’s hard to believe. The two of you seemed to be getting on.”

  “Arkady, you can be such a son of a bitch sometimes.”

  “How is the research going for your article on Tatiana?” he asked.

  “Moving ahead.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “And your investigation?” Anya asked.

  “Coming along.”

  “Yes, well, any time I see you with broken glass in your hair, I know your investigation is making progress.”

  Arkady shifted and a stack of records slid off the end of the couch to the floor. He didn’t know what she was waiting for. For Alexi to return and sweep her off her feet again? Arkady realized that he had experienced one other dream, or not so much a dream as the memory of sharing his bed with Anya, of her sleeping in his shirt, of his breath caught in her hair. Strange to see that same woman through another man’s eyes. An eerie displacement.

  “Have you heard from Zhenya?” Arkady asked.

  “No. Sometimes he goes into hiding, like you.”

  “You don’t happen to know if he still has the notebook?”

  “Maybe. It’s useless.”

  “Then why does Alexi want it?”

  She shrugged.

  Alexi probably dropped her when he discovered she no longer had the notebook, Arkady thought. Well, here she was, no worse for wear after her nights with the rich and dangerous.

  Anya asked, “Are you going back to Moscow?”

  “After I take care of some loose ends.”

  “Such as?”

  “Did Alexi ever have access to the keys for my apartment?”

  “I never gave them to him.”

  Arkady said, “That’s not what I asked. Was there ever a situation when he could have gotten into your handbag?”

  “It’s possible. You don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who you are. Am I talking to you or am I talking to Alexi’s dancing partner?”

  Arkady’s cell phone rang. It was Vova, the boy from the beach. Arkady listened for a minute before hanging up.

  “I have to go.”

  “No one is stopping you.”

  “May I have the keys?”

  “Certainly.” She dug into her handbag and slapped them into his hand.

  “Thank you.” Arkady edged past her and headed for the door.

  Anya dropped into the chair. What had she expected from Arkady? You could push him only so far. She listened to flies browse on the windowpane, stared in an unfocused way at the jazz albums littering the floor, opened a pillbox for a handful of aspirin that she chewed and swallowed. She pulled up a hem of red sequins to look at a cigarette burn applied on her inner thigh.

  24

  Arkady rented a Lada, a tin can compared to the ZIL, and drove to the sand spit where he had first seen Vova and his sisters searching for amber. Vova was waiting, barefoot again, ready to wade or run for his life. When Arkady asked where he lived, Vova pointed to a shack half-engulfed by a dune.

  “It moans at night. We have beams holding it up. Someday it’s just going to cave in but until then, it’s all ours.” He gave Arkady a sideways look. “You ran into Piggy.”

  “The man with the butcher’s van? He’s pretty frightening.”

  “Yeah. But nobody will believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  Vova continually scanned the beach, a lookout’s habit. He had found the business card that Arkady left in the biking shoe of Joseph Bonnafos and had something to tell. Or sell, would be more likely, Arkady thought.

  “Are you the police?”

  “In Moscow, not here.”

  “Because the police will just steal whatever I’ve got.”

  They were known for that, Arkady thought. He watched air holes appear in the sand as water retreated, evidence of an unseen world.

  “Vova, so far as I’m concerned this is a private affair.”

  “Me too.”

  “What are your sisters’ names?”

  “Lyuba and Lena. Lyuba’s ten. Lena’s eight.”

  “On the phone you said you had a bike.”

  “A special bike. Black with a red cat.”

  A constant wind sculpted sand and whipped Vova’s hair around his brow. Arkady had to wonder what it would be like to live in such a relentless element.

  Arkady asked, “Have you shown the bike to anyone else?”

  “I told the guys at the bike shop.”

  “How much did they offer you?”

  “Fifty dollars.”

  “That’s a lot.” Maybe a six-hundredth the value of a Pantera, Arkady thought. “Sight unseen?”

  “I know these guys, they’d keep the money and the bike.”

  “That’s true.”

  Vova walked in a tight circle.

  “Is there something else?” Arkady asked.

  “Piggy.”

  “What about him?”

  “We saw Piggy kill the biker. We watched from the trees.”

  Most eyewitnesses, young or old, tried to re-create the intensity and horror of a murder, like crayoning over the lines of a coloring book. Vova was cool and matter-of-fact. The biker was still alive when Piggy threw him into the butcher’s van. There was a brief sound like feet drumming on the side of the van and then a gunshot. Piggy emerged and went through the biker’s jersey, seeming to become more frustrated as he went and finally tossing it aside.

  “Did he see you?”
r />   “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why is he after you?”

  “We took the bike.”

  That altered the situation. “You stole the bicycle from Piggy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he know?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Kind of?”

  “He saw Lyuba wearing the helmet and tried to run her down, but he couldn’t drive up the dunes.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  “They’re coming back.” It sounded less a boast than a wish.

  “What about you? Who takes care of you and your sisters?”

  “Our grandmother. She lives back toward town.”

  “Does she feed you?”

  “We get by.”

  “What’s your full name?” Vova was short for Vladimir.

  Vova shut his mouth. No parents, no last name.

  “Okay,” Arkady said. “Besides the bike and the helmet, what else did you take?”

  “Just a notebook I found in the grass. It was full of gibberish.”

  “Then why take it?”

  “We found a card too with a cell phone number. When people put a cell phone number on something, they want it back, right?”

  “That’s smart.”

  “And the lady who answered was nice. She came right away.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She looked brainy.”

  “Did she say her name?”

  “No. She had a little dog.”

  “What kind?”

  “It had buggy eyes.”

  “Buggy eyes? What about the tail?”

  “Short and twisty. She was pretty.”

  “The dog?”

  “The woman.” Vova added man to man, “And she had nice legs.”

  “You noticed that?”

  “You asked.”

  “How much did she give you for the notebook?”

  “Fifty dollars. What I really need is a gun.”

  What kind of world was this, Arkady wondered, where children lived in holes in the ground and casually asked for a gun?

  Arkady said, “I tell you what. I’ll give you fifty dollars if you and your sisters stay off the beach.”

  “You’re serious?”

  Arkady opened his billfold. “Stay off the beach for a week, can you do that?”

  “No problem.” Vova cheered up. “I wish you were here during the Amber War. Bodies washed up on the beach every day.”

  “You’ll be rich after you sell the bike.”

  “There’s a problem. Lena took the bike out and forgot where she left it. The sand shifted and now it’s disappeared.”

  • • •

  Zhenya and Lotte had a plan that, much like a chess game, depended on the opponent’s moves, on whether the man in the hall would call them out onto the landing or step into the apartment, be alone or have accomplices. Zhenya would take the gun and if he missed, Lotte could follow through with the ski poles, assuming the man obliged and came within reach. Four hours of Alexi’s deadline had already passed and fear and exhaustion were wearing them down.

  In Zhenya’s hands the gun was a leaden question mark, a loss of control rather than control, a sense of doom instead of decision. Lotte couldn’t help staring at the door as if blood were already seeping over the threshold. One idea about a symbol was haltingly followed by another and sometimes minutes would pass without a word being spoken.

  Lotte tried. “Two interlocked rings could mean cooperation.”

  “Or two eyes, two eggs, two cymbals, two wheels,” Zhenya said.

  “So you think it’s a bad idea.”

  “No, but we don’t have time to be an encyclopedia.”

  “It goes with the equals signs, the ears for a fair hearing and the ‘blah blah’ of the opening.”

  Zhenya said nothing.

  “So you think this is possible?” Lotte asked.

  “Tricky,” he conceded.

  “Except for a chess hustler, I suppose.”

  “Yes.” Zhenya wasn’t a psychiatrist, but he felt that he could read the character and skill level of anyone who sat across from him at a chessboard. What he saw in the notes of the interpreter suggested vanity. What he saw in Lotte was that she was scared but game.

  He said, “Money, China, banks, rubles, dollars, submarines. What does it all add up to?”

  “What does ‘L’ stand for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Black figs?”

  “Teardrops?”

  “Oil,” Lotte said. “When Russia can’t pay in cash, it pays in oil.”

  “And natural gas, the white teardrop.”

  “For what?”

  Zhenya asked, “What if the fence isn’t a fence at all, but stitches? What if they’re repairs?”

  “What about Natalya Goncharova? She has no connection to anything.”

  “She’s an anomaly,” Zhenya conceded.

  “An anomaly is something you don’t know how to deal with. Isn’t the best clue what doesn’t seem to fit?” Lotte asked.

  Scandals of the imperial court had never been Zhenya’s strong point. He said, “As I remember, Natalya Goncharova dragged her husband into a duel and he was killed. That’s about it. The stuff of romance novels.”

  “Or murder,” Lotte said. “Her husband happened to be Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet. The other duelist wore a coat studded with silver buttons. Pushkin’s bullet bounced off. Three days later he was dead and Natalya Goncharova found solace in the arms of the tsar. So, adultery, conspiracy, murder. Where do you want to begin?”

  25

  Since his first visit to Ludmila Petrovna’s garden, her sunflowers had become slightly blowsy, her tomatoes had grown heavy on the vine and her zucchini had gone rogue. Her weeds, on the other hand, were thriving.

  A pug ran out of the cottage door in chase of a rubber ball. The dog seized the ball, shook it furiously and began to race back to a woman who leaned against the doorway with her arms crossed.

  “Polo!” Arkady said.

  The woman looked up. The dog stopped and tried to look in two directions at the same time, then, with an eye to a new playmate, carried the ball to Arkady.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  “I’m afraid so.” Arkady extracted the ball from the dog’s mouth. “I’m sorry to say your friend has no sense of loyalty.”

  She didn’t smile but he had the sense that in some grim way, she was amused. “Every time I try to garden, Polo wants to play.”

  “Maybe that’s the price of friendship.” He looked around the garden. “Your vegetables look ready to burst.”

  “Perhaps I haven’t been paying them enough attention.”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Arkady said. “I’m not a gardener.”

  “It’s supposed to be pretty simple. Plant them and water them.”

  “And keep the dogs out. A lot of your vegetables look ready to pick. I could help you.”

  “What about your investigation?”

  “It can wait,” Arkady said.

  “What makes you think I need help?”

  “When I was here with Maxim, you wore dark glasses because you were sensitive to light.”

  “Maxim is always looking out for me.”

  “That was my impression. And you haven’t weeded since then. Ludmila was the gardener.”

  “How did you know?”

  • • •

  Besides the dog, the derelict garden and the absence of dark glasses? He had listened to Tatiana’s voice on tape for hours. He’d have known her anywhere.

  She turned and walked into the cottage and although there had been no invitation, Arkady followed. The pug followed Arkady, dropping the ball as a suggestion, letting it roll and retrieving it. While she heated water for tea, Arkady looked at knick-knacks that occupied kitchen shelves and cabinets. Family photos of Ludmila Petrovna holding babies and small children of varying ages. Postcards from all over the world. Framed photo
graphs of the same two girls with bright smiles and golden hair biking, kayaking, running down a sand dune with arms outstretched as if they could fly.

  “Who was older?”

  “She was. We were only ten months apart.”

  “Are these pictures of her children?”

  “No. Cousins, friends, children of friends. In spite of her poor eyesight, Ludmila was an avid amateur photographer.” She placed two cups of tea on the table and sat. “Sugar?”

  “No thank you.”

  “All the men I know have their tea plain. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know. Why do all the women I know suck tea through a sugar cube?” He caught her in the act.

  “I told Ludmila not to come to Moscow, but she always had to be the big sister. She hated to worry and I’m afraid I made her life miserable. How did you know? Oh, yes, the dark glasses.”

  “You seemed to have been miraculously cured.”

  “It was as simple as that?”

  “More or less.”

  “Do you think I’m going to get out of here alive?”

  “I doubt it. You could take your chances as Ludmila, but my guess is that they’re suspicious.”

  “Why do you think they’re suspicious?”

  “I noticed on the way in there’s a man in a car watching your door.”

  “That’s Lieutenant Stasov. He’s made me his personal project. He pushed his way in and searched the house. Now he lingers on the street.”

  For a second Arkady had the impulse to touch her and see if she was real and wondered how often she had that effect on men, the creation of a faint vibration.

  He pressed ahead. “Let’s assume the person who killed Ludmila was waiting in your apartment. Where were you?”

  “I was working late at the magazine with Obolensky. Maxim swooped in and said I had been reported dead, that I had jumped from my balcony and we had to get out of Moscow as quickly as possible. Because once you’re officially dead you soon will be. It’s a matter of bookkeeping. We drove all night to Kaliningrad. I didn’t know Ludmila was going to my apartment.”

  “The question is who pushed her. She would have rung the bell when she got to your apartment.”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “But Ludmila had a key of her own, didn’t she?”