“Conan. He may have been headed to Central Asia, but he only got as far as the drunk tank. They know me there. He had my card and I got him out.”
“Nicely done.”
“So now you can fly to Kaliningrad and bring her back. That way we keep the investigation contained. Just us, just Moscow, right?”
“Actually, it’s getting a little complicated. The scope of the investigation has broadened.”
Victor said, “I don’t like
“Two days before she was killed, Tatiana went to Kaliningrad and came back with a notebook. So far, nobody can read it because the notes are written by a professional interpreter in a kind of personal code. He could help us but he’s dead, shot on the same beach where the notebook was found. We have his name: Joseph Bonnafos, Swiss, an interpreter. Who knows, the notebook may tell us everything we need to know.”
“Where is it now?”
“It’s locked in a drawer of my desk.”
“You don’t know what the notes are for?”
“Some sort of international event, I assume, since they needed the services of an interpreter.”
“Can’t the local police take care of business there?”
“The case is being torpedoed by a Lieutenant Stasov, who seems to regard the hotels in Kaliningrad as his slice of the pie. There hasn’t been any real investigation into Bonnafos’s death.”
Victor said, “Wait, all we signed on for was to find Tatiana’s body. Just find her, not who killed her, if she was killed. Now you’re phoning people in Kaliningrad? She wasn’t killed in Kaliningrad and her body isn’t in Kaliningrad. I’m saying this as a sober man: we should stay with what we know.”
“There’s also a missing Italian custom bicycle,” Arkady said.
By then, Victor had hung up.
• • •
How does a man know when he becomes obsessive? Who can tell him except a friend? More specifically, how could two men cover one city, let alone two cities, hundreds of miles apart? He would need a dozen detectives and police dogs, none of which the prosecutor would authorize. All Zurin would support was a game of musical chairs in the morgue. At this point, if Tatiana had been moved from drawer to drawer, her body would be light blue with a film of crystals. Perhaps the person hiding her was waiting for the first mantle of snow to lay her down properly, when outrage was spent and she was just one saint out of many. The strange thing was Arkady looked forward to listening to the other tapes, not because Tatiana’s voice was especially mellifluous, but because it was clear, and not because the events she described were dramatic but because she underplayed her part. And because, listening to the tapes, he thought he knew her and that they had met before. Was that obsessive?
11
“The moon will float up in the sky, / Dropping the oars into the water. / As ever, Russia will get by, / And dance and weep in every quarter.”
“So nothing changes,” Tatiana said. “The poet Yesenin knew it a hundred years ago. Russia is a drunken bear, sometimes an entertainment, sometimes a threat, often a genius, but as night falls, always a drunken bear curled up in the corner. Sometimes, in another corner lies a journalist whose arms and hands have systematically been broken. The thugs who do such work are meticulous. We don’t have to go to Chechnya to find such men. We recruit them and train them and call them patriots. And when they find an honest journalist, they let the bear loose.
“Is it worth it? The problem with martyrdom is the waiting. Sooner or later, I will be poisoned or nudged off a cliff or shot by a stranger, but first I will put a torpedo under their waterline, so to speak.
“Also, why does heaven seem so dull? There’s love in heaven but is there passion? Do we really have to go barefoot and wear those robes? Are we allowed high heels? I have always envied women in high heels. I would like to spend my first thousand years in heaven learning to tango. In the meantime, I’ll stay ahead of the bear as long as I can.”
It wasn’t so much that he was listening to her, it was more a sense of being alone with her, and if they were alone, he would have been so bold as to offer her a cigarette.
When Arkady heard a key in the door, his first impulse was to gather the tapes and recorder and put them in a kitchen cabinet. He didn’t. Then wished he had.
Anya came in and Alexi Grigorenko piled in after. They were flushed with pre-party hysteria and the first bottle of Champagne. If it was bad taste for him to celebrate so soon after a father’s death, there also was a message to men of his father’s generation that old manners, even between thieves, were out of date. He seemed to think he was a prince. In fact, he was a sitting duck. They made a handsome pair of boutique darlings, Arkady had to admit. In comparison, he looked as if he had dressed from a stranger’s clothesline.
Anya said, “Alexi said he wanted to see my apartment, then I thought I heard Tatiana in yours.”
“She’s an interesting woman,” Arkady said.
“She’s seductive even dead, apparently.” Anya walked back and forth, almost sniffing the air.
“I hope we’re not disturbing you,” Alexi said.
Anya said, “Arkady is always up, like a monk at his prayers.”
“Is that how you solve your cases?” Alexi asked. “Prayer?”
“A good deal of the time.”
Alexi’s eyes were slightly hooded. Hands quick and delicate as a croupier’s. Under his jacket the hitch of a gun.
“Can I offer you a drink? Something to eat?” Arkady asked, as if there were any food in the refrigerator.
“No thanks,” Anya said. “He’s going to show me his new apartment. It’s a penthouse.”
“Penthouse?” That was a word Arkady never expected to hear on Russian lips. “You’re moving to Moscow?”
“Why not?” Alexi said. “Grisha left a number of properties and investments here and in Kaliningrad.”
“He left the makings of a war. Things were quiet until your father was killed. Quiet like a jungle, but quiet. Why don’t you cash out and live peacefully on some tropical island?”
“Perhaps I have more faith and less negativity than you do.” Alexi’s gaze lit on Tatiana’s cassette tapes, still on the table. “For instance, how can you stand to listen to this garbage?”
Alexi reached for the cassettes and Arkady seized his wrist.
“Don’t.”
“Okay, relax.” Alexi straightened up and rubbed his arm. “I had no idea they meant that much to you. My mistake.”
Arkady knew it was a moment that distilled the day. Alexi’s ambition compared to his own isolation. He didn’t dare look at Anya.
• • •
One in the morning was a territory as much as a time, and Victor Orlov and Arkady were long-term residents. Victor dropped into a chair and contemplated the recorder and cassettes on the kitchen table.
“Is this what you’ve been listening to?”
“Tatiana.”
“Huh. She’s the one who’s been fucking you over.”
“Victor, she’s dead.”
“Doesn’t matter. She has you ready to make a swan dive into a bucket of shit. Just because you got authority to go to Kaliningrad doesn’t mean you have to do it. This is not exactly hot pursuit. She’s been dead for ten days and my only hope is that whoever got her has her on ice.”
“There’s a connection-”
“There’s no connection. Tatiana Petrovna jumped off her apartment balcony in Moscow, was autopsied in
