Stalin's Ghost

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “Not flying through the air, but waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?” Eva asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe political consultants.” He reached to the floor and refilled two glasses of the professor’s Bordeaux. “Today is the last day of the campaign. Is Isakov confident?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, but I don’t want to talk about him. This is good wine.”

  “French. Everything here is French. In fact, even our situation is extraordinarily French. Until someone dies, then it’s Russian. Pushkin had over a hundred lovers and then died in a duel defending his wife’s honor. She was a flirt. Is that irony or justice?”

  Eva said, “We had a seminar on Pushkin at the hospital.”

  “Poetry in the workplace. Excellent.”

  “They said that the bullet that killed him penetrated Pushkin’s right pelvic bone and traversed his abdomen.”

  “I think he would have preferred one through the heart.” He set down his glass and pulled her close to draw in the scent of her neck. “Have you ever noticed that when one lover leaves the bed, the other rolls into that space?”

  “Is that true?”

  “Absolutely true.” Something struck him. “Are you aware that Isakov gets up in the middle of the night to pace up and down Sovietskaya Street?”

  Eva took a moment to adjust to the change in subject. Her voice flattened a little. “I didn’t know he did. Marat mentioned once when we were driving on Sovietskaya that Nikolai’s father used to work there.”

  “Where was ‘there’?”

  “I didn’t notice. You don’t like Nikolai.”

  “All I know for certain about Nikolai Isakov is that he’s a poor detective.”

  “He’s a different man here. You don’t see the real Nikolai in Moscow or Tver; his natural setting is a battlefield. Do you want to know how we met?”

  Arkady didn’t want to know.

  “Sure.”

  “The Russians were shelling a Chechen village of absolutely no military value. All the village men were in the mountains and only women and children were left, but I think the Russian artillery had a daily quota of houses to destroy. I was picking hot shrapnel out of a baby when Nikolai and Marat arrived with their squad. It was a situation I always dreaded, caught giving aid to the enemy. I half expected to be shot. Instead, Nikolai shared his medical supplies and when the Russians began shelling the village again Nikolai got on the radio and told them to stop. The colonel in charge of the guns said orders were orders. Nikolai asked his name so he could personally punch his teeth in and the shelling stopped at once. All I can tell you, Arkasha, is that Nikolai and I met under strange circumstances. Perhaps we were both at our best. We were people who couldn’t exist in the real world. Anyway, this was all before I met you. It has nothing to do with you. Don’t get involved with Nikolai.”

  Something rustled at the front door. Arkady rose from the bed, pulled on pants and looked through the peephole. No one was in the hall but on the apartment floor was a string-tied envelope. He turned on a lamp.

  “What is it?” Eva sat up.

  He opened the envelope and drew out two glossy photographs. Major Agronsky had delivered and fled.

  “Pictures.”

  “Of what? Let me see.”

  He brought them to the daybed. The first photo was taken from about a hundred meters in the air and included a stream and a stone bridge with a van on one side and an armored personnel carrier on the other. By the APC was a campfire. The picture was grainy and enlarged to the max, but Arkady counted half a dozen bodies slumped around the fire. The Chechens were in sweaters, sheepskin vests, woolen caps, running shoes, boots. Skewers of meat, flatbread and bowls of pilaf were scattered with them. Six more bodies were facedown on the road.

  The Black Berets had grown beards and wore a mix of Russian and rebel gear, but their characters shone through. Urman held a Kalashnikov and a skewer of kabobs, Borodin and Filotov waved off the helicopter, Kuznetsov lay wounded and Bora kicked bodies, his pistol ready for a coup de grâce. Treetops bowed in the wash of the rotors. In a corner the camera conveniently tagged the time at 13:43. The second photo, tagged 13:47, was virtually identical. The bodies around the campfire were arranged a little differently. There was food enough for a welcome, but not for a feast. The van was gone. Urman had dropped the skewer and aimed his rifle at the helicopter.

  “The Sunzha Bridge.”

  Eva said, “I thought we were past this.”

  “I had some questions.”

  “You have an obsession about Nikolai.”

  “I want to know what happened.”

  “Why? This was war. Are you going to investigate everything that happened in Chechnya? I’m in your bed, but you’re in love with questions.”

  Arkady wanted to drop the subject but was drawn by an irresistible gravitational pull. “So I won’t have any more questions, tell me from your point of view what happened. Forget the official report. What happened at the bridge?”

  “You know, Nikolai wasn’t even at the bridge. My motorcycle broke down and he drove me on my rounds of the villages, mainly because you never knew where the Russian checkpoints were or how nasty and drunk the men would be. If they thought you were with the rebels they would rape you and kill you. There were times that would have happened without Nikolai’s protection. That’s why neither of us is in the photographs.”

  “Isakov deserted his post to serve as your personal driver?”

  “I suppose you could put it that way.”

  “Did you recognize any of the rebels?”

  “They were in bags when we returned to the bridge.”

  “You never saw them before?”

  “No. I said they were in bags.”

  “Then the man in charge at the bridge was Marat Urman? He led the fight?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “All this time Nikolai Isakov has been taking the credit for Urman’s deeds?”

  “Taking responsibility in case there were problems.”

  “Why should there be problems?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If the Chechens were attacking, why were the bodies in the road shot in the back? Why were the others eating? Where are their weapons?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t Isakov unzip the bags to look at the bodies?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Urman resent losing the credit?”

  “Marat worships Nikolai.”

  “Everyone in the squad went along with that story?”

  “Everyone worshipped Nikolai.”

  “What about you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Arkady felt his heart race with hers. Well, they were working at something both perverse and difficult, the killing of love. That could raise a sweat.

  “But this was all before I met you,” Eva said. “If you want to we can get in your car and go. We can do it now, while it’s dark. Take the car and go to Moscow.”

  “I can’t,” Arkady said. “I can’t miss Stalin.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “No, I’m getting closer. I have a feeling this time I might see him.”

  “Seriously?”

  “He knew my father.”

  “Why are you suddenly so mean?”

  “Eva, I have a reliable witness who places Isakov at the bridge with bodies on the ground immediately after the fight. In fact, he’s so reliable he’s dead.”

  Eva got out of bed and collected her clothes without looking in Arkady’s direction.

  “I have to go.”

  “I’ll see you at the dig.”

  “I won’t be there.”

  “Why not? It’s the big event.”

  “I’m leaving you and Nikolai.”

  “Why both? Choose one.”

  “I don’t have to choose, since one of you will kill the other. I don’t want to be here for that. I don’t want to be the prize.”

  His father sai
d, “I loved her but your mother was a bitch. She came from a stuck-up family. Intelligentsia.” He said the word as if it were a species of insect. “Musicians and writers. You and I, we live in the real world, right?”

  “Yes sir.” Arkady, fourteen, blindfolded with his own Young Pioneers scarf, was assembling a pistol. It was a game his father had invented. As Arkady raced the clock the General would try to distract him, because noise and confusion were an ordinary part of battle. Or move pieces around the table so that Arkady had to relocate them by feel.

  “She was very young and wanted to know about women, so I told her in detail. I afforded her a view of sex that was more animal than her fainthearted friends were used to. One evening was devoted to Pushkin. It was a salon. Everyone brought in their favorite verse. Very artsy. I brought Pushkin’s diary. It had all the women he shagged in intimate detail. The man could write. You agree?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You like that gun?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The gun, a Tokarev, came together in Arkady’s hands. He held the slide upside down, inserted the barrel into the recoil spring assembly, one end of the spring hanging loose, cradled the frame into the slide, turned the gun right side up and he was nearly done.

  His father said, “I knew a man who swore by the Walther. Now here was an expert. He worked at night in a special room insulated for sound with a felt-lined door. His assistants would bring in a prisoner and he would shoot the prisoner in the back of the head. No conversation or nonsense about last words. All night, every night, one at a time, one hundred executions, two hundred executions, whatever the quota was. The workload was intense and halfway through the night the room was an abattoir. To keep him working, he was given a bottle of vodka. Every night, vodka and blood. The point is, the Walther never misfired, not once.” The General kicked the table. The recoil spring and barrel bushing flew off the table and under the couch he was sitting on. Arkady heard the spring roll over the parquet floor and felt his father’s boots in the way.

  “Excuse me,” Arkady said.

  His father didn’t move. “‘Excuse me’? Is that what you plan to say when you meet the enemy? One minute left. You’re running out of time.”

  The punishment for running out of time varied from a cold stare to standing with arms outstretched, a gun in each hand. The guns were loaded and Arkady occasionally thought his father was trying to goad him into rage.

  Arkady dove under the couch, found the spring and felt for the bushing to hold the spring in. It was at his fingertips, but every time he touched the bushing it moved. From the other direction his father was too much in the way.

  “I met this expert on guns because I got the dirty work, the assignments no one else would carry out. Stalin himself would take me aside and say there was an error here or there that demanded correction, something that the fewer knew about the better and that he would remember me when batons were handed out. I thought I was the elephant in the parade. It turned out I was the man who followed the elephant with a shovel and a pail full of shit. Ten seconds. Haven’t you got that damn gun together yet?”

  Arkady extended his reach with the gun to haul in the bushing. He backed out from the sofa, inserted the spring, rotated the bushing into place, slapped the magazine home in the grip and whipped off his blindfold.

  “Done!”

  “Well, are you? That’s the question. Give it.”

  The General took the gun, put it to his temple and squeezed the trigger. The hammer didn’t move.

  “It’s on half cock.” Arkady took the gun and thumbed the hammer back a notch. He returned the gun to his father. “Now it’s on full cock.”

  In his father’s eyes was desolation.

  “I have homework,” Arkady dismissed himself.

  It was the last time they played that game.

  Victor said, “A New Russian goes into an expensive boutique and asks the clerk what to get his wife for her birthday. Cost is no problem. He’s already given her a Mercedes, diamonds from Bulgari, a full-length sable coat.”

  Arkady asked, “How long is this joke?” It was six a.m. by his watch. A little early for a call.

  “Not long. The clerk says, ‘There’s nothing left to buy. Do something personal, something intimate. Give her a written certificate good for two hours of wild sex, fulfilling any fantasy or desire.’ The New Russian says, ‘Yeah!’ It sounds like a win-win to him. He pays a calligrapher a thousand dollars for an inscribed certificate worth two hours of sex, all fantasies fulfilled, no questions asked.”

  “God, please strike Victor dead.”

  “Patience. A certificate for two hours of wild sex. Her birthday comes. He gives her pearls, a new Mercedes, a Fabergé egg as usual and finally an envelope with the certificate inside. She takes it out, reads it, her face turns red. A smile breaks out. She clutches the certificate to her breast and says, ‘Thank you, thank you, Boris. This is the most wonderful present I ever got. I love you, I love you!’ She grabs her car keys. ‘See you in two hours!’”

  Black as a pit. Arkady stood in the dim illumination from the street, putting himself in a classic dilemma. Look for cigarettes where they most likely were or search where the light was best. A few snowflakes melted on the asphalt.

  Victor said, “So, who is the ‘two hours’ in Tver?”

  “Your ability to reduce everything to sex is astonishing.”

  “It’s the best system I’ve come across.”

  A bonanza. Arkady found a pack in his jacket, though no matches.

  Victor said, “Zurin called and asked where you were. A prosecutor from Tver, a cretin named Sarkisian, called and asked why you didn’t check in at the office. It’s given me a chance to hone my antisocial skills.”

  “Why are you up at this hour?” Arkady remembered seeing matches in the kitchen.

  “I’m on a stakeout.”

  “You called me to stay awake on a stakeout?” Arkady felt for matches on the kitchen counters and table.

  “I want to tuck this guy in. He had company before but he’s alone now. I just wish he would open the refrigerator door, take a piss, strike a match, anything I can report.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “An army deserter. Which is okay with me, but the little prick took his rifle with him.”

  Arkady looked at the one-car sheds across the street. A good push and a row of them would collapse. His car was four sheds in.

  “Are the lights out?” Arkady asked.

  “The whole flat.”

  “What makes you think he’s up?”

  “Because he can’t sleep.”

  “Maybe somebody called him in the middle of the night.” Arkady found matches on the windowsill. “Have you ever been to Tver?”

  “Once or twice. Have you seen any of Isakov’s OMON friends in Tver?”

  “Once or twice.”

  Cars outside the sheds were parked haphazardly along the curb and on the sidewalk. They all looked cold except for one: there was a steamed-up windshield on a blue compact, Honda or Hyundai; Arkady couldn’t see the license plate. Most likely, the condensation was the heavy respiration of lovers seeking privacy where they could. All the same, he decided he didn’t need a cigarette. What he needed was a gun and he had left that in Moscow under lock and key.

  Victor said, “An intelligence test is given at OMON.”

  “Is this another joke?”

  “The Black Berets are each given ten wooden blocks of different shapes to put in holes of corresponding shapes. Half the men fail but half the men succeed, from which the researchers conclude that fifty percent of the Black Berets are abysmally stupid and fifty percent are really strong.”

  “Is that funny?” Arkady asked after a while.

  “I suppose it depends on the situation.”

  Arkady dreamt of a small, hunchbacked man standing in the open door of a helicopter high up. The wind tried to suck him out or shake him free but he rode the bounces with the calm of an ath
lete.

  “Ginsberg! Watch out!” Arkady shouted from a bench.

  Ginsberg, meanwhile, was yelling to the pilot to go lower. The sound of the rotors was enormous and everyone resorted to hand signals.

  Through the door was a vista of mountains, villages, cultivated land, a flock of goats, a valley stream with a stone bridge and a campfire and bodies on the ground. Ginsberg clung to the fuselage with one hand and held a camera with the other. He began shouting Arkady’s name and pointed with his camera hand.

  Arkady woke and went to the professor’s desk and rummaged through drawers until he found a magnifying glass. What had he missed?

  At 13:43, kebabs were cooking on the campfire. In the campfire group three bodies lay on their left side, four on their right. The bodies on the road were facedown because they were shot in the back as they ran for the truck on the other side of the bridge. Altogether they added up to fourteen, meaning none on the far bank of the so-called firefight. No sign of Isakov. The photo was too blurred otherwise by the dust kicked up by the helicopter and its own vibration.

  The 13:47 photo was taken from the same position on a pass four minutes later. Urman wore sunglasses as he put the pilot in his rifle sights. The bodies on the road hadn’t moved a millimeter, but all the bodies around the campfire had rolled forward as if praying in the Muslim manner and the kebabs were smoking, half on fire. What else had changed from one picture to the next? Something too obvious to see. He apologized to Ginsberg and returned to bed.

  So he would keep things simple. Ride out to the dig and wait for a ghost. What could be simpler than that?

  His cell phone rang at seven a.m. from a number new to him. He was dressed in camos, ready to get to the dig before dawn. Night was already fading to gray flecked with snow. The blue car was gone and Arkady didn’t see any unusual activity around the Zhiguli shed. The phone went on ringing while he paused at the professor’s shelves and desk, idly looking for a weapon; all French paperbacks, nothing with heft.

  Arkady finally picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Zhenya. I came on the train. I’m here.”

  23