Tatiana

Moscow, and if the fuck-ups in the morgue lost her, they did it in Moscow.”

“I visited her apartment twice,” Arkady said. “The first time, it was turned upside down by someone searching for something, maybe the notebook. The second time, it was absolutely bare, to take no chances.”

Victor said, “I asked around. The first time was skinheads trashing the place just for the fun of it. The second time the apartment was bare because the developer wants to build a shopping mall. Those are the facts. I have to ask, Arkady, are you feeling okay?”

“I talked to the prosecutor. He agreed that I could search in Kaliningrad.”

“Of course he did. Kaliningrad is like Siberia. He’d like it if you spent the rest of your life searching for bodies in Kaliningrad.”

“Just a day trip.”

“To Kaliningrad? No such thing, you’ll see. Chasing a body from town to town, calling a bicycle maker in Milan? That’s too crazy even for me.”

Too crazy for Victor? That was worrisome, Arkady thought.

He said, “The bicycle maker led us to Bonnafos, who, I believe, was a source for Tatiana. We can’t question him because, unfortunately, he was shot and killed on the same beach where the notebook was found. It was important enough for Tatiana to make a special trip to Kaliningrad. I don’t know what she was after, but the notebook is the key.”

“Only you can’t read it.”

“That’s right. We’ll have to call in some experts.”

“Didn’t you try with Professor Kunin?”

“We’ll try again.”

Victor said, “I just don’t get it. Why are you so hooked by a notebook no one can read? I’m with you, but I want you to know how I feel.”

“Now I know.”

“That we’re covering two cities. This should be interesting.”

“Do you want to see the notebook? See what the fuss is all about? It’s in the desk.”

Victor dug his hands into his coat pockets. “I’ll pass. It’s late and I can already feel the blade of the guillotine. We’re so fucked.”

• • •

It was a shameful thing for Arkady to admit, but he couldn’t wait for Victor to leave so he could return to the tapes and listen to the voice within the words. He had read that auditory hallucinations were more subtle and more powerful than their visual counterparts. He still occasionally heard his wife, Irina. Which was crazy, since she was dead.

On the last cassettes, Tatiana sounded tired, her guard down.

“I am supposed to be so grave but I am sick of gravity. Of being Our Lady of the Sorrows. Of being Tatiana Petrovna. In fact, I’d rather steal away with the Gypsies. Perhaps I’m insane. I ache for a man I haven’t met.”

That said enough, Arkady thought. Yet there was the last cassette with a metallic tapping so faint it was hardly worth recording. Arkady dug into Zhenya’s box of castaway computer gear, USB connections, tapes, headphones, discs, electrical chessboards. Monkey see, monkey do. He had seen Zhenya attach the sound- enhancer system to his earphones a hundred times. Arkady plugged them into the recorder and listened.

Silence. Vacuum. An amplified three taps of metal on metal. Then three scrapes. Silence. Tap, tap, tap.

Arkady’s father had taught him a number of useful skills. How to field-strip a gun, signal with flags, send Morse code.

The tapping and scraping was in Morse code and said over and over, “We are alive.”

Who was alive? For how long? Why would Tatiana keep such a faint recording? The realization came with a cold sweat. How could he not know?

The nuclear submarine Kursk had been carrying one hundred and eighteen officers and sailors to war games in Arctic waters when, for unexplained reasons, its forward torpedoes exploded, setting off fires the length of the ship. The crew had operated in the highest tradition of the Russian navy and were posthumously awarded Orders of Courage. Families were reassured that the entire crew died almost instantaneously.

Tap. Tap. Scrape.

The chief of rescue operations reported that he heard knocking in the submarine’s Compartment 9 at the rear of the hull.

“Everything is being done. People should remain calm and stay at their position,” the prime minister said, and hosted a barbecue at a Black Sea villa.

Tap. . Tap. .

At a press conference, the mother of a crewman demanded the truth. She was forcibly sedated and dragged from the hall. The chief of operations decided that he must have misinterpreted signs of life from Compartment 9.

The tapping came to an end.

Finally, ten days after the accident, Norwegian divers breached the hatch and found a scribbled note wrapped in plastic on the body of a seaman dredged from Compartment 9. He had marked his note 15:15, four hours after the explosion. Some experts thought that the twenty-three submariners may have lived another three to four days.

The label on the cassette said “Grisha,” although the connection to the Kursk escaped Arkady like a fish between his hands.

12

His wife, Irina, had died years ago. Still, whenever Arkady heard a voice like hers in the hubbub of the metro or saw a beautiful woman in full stride, he remembered her. While she was alive, the mystery had been why a woman as intelligent as Irina would cast her lot with a man as lacking in prospects as Arkady. Later, he didn’t talk about her for fear of turning her death into a “story” inevitably altered by the telling, the way a gold coin handled year after year is rubbed smooth and effaced.

Arkady remembered every detail.

They were going out for dinner and a film. Irina had a minor infection and it was Arkady’s inspiration to stop at the local polyclinic for an antibiotic. The waiting room was full of skaters, drunks and grandmothers with sniffling children in hand. Irina asked Arkady to step out and find a newsstand. She was a journalist, and for her, going without a newspaper was like going without oxygen.

He remembered a balmy evening, cottonwood fluff gathering in the air and, stapled to trees, notices that offered medicines for sale.

Meanwhile the waiting room emptied and Irina was taken in to see the doctor, who prescribed Bactrim. On the books, the polyclinic had an ample supply. In reality, the cupboard was bare, the drugs having vanished out the back door.

Was Irina allergic to penicillin? So much so that she underlined the words on her chart. But the nurse’s mind was on a letter she had received that day informing her that her son had sold her apartment and she had a week to pack. The only word she heard was penicillin. Since the polyclinic was out of oral doses, she gave Irina an injection and left the room. By the time Arkady returned with a newspaper and a magazine, Irina was dead.

Wrapped in a damp sheet, she looked as if she had washed up on shore. Apparently, as her windpipe began to close in anaphylactic shock, Irina recognized the nurse’s error and came out of the examining room with the vial in her hand. A counterinjection of adrenaline would have saved her. In a panic, the doctor snapped off the key to the pharmacy cabinet, sealing her fate. She saw. She knew.

When Arkady closed her eyes the doctor warned him not to touch the “corpus.” Arkady’s face went dark, his hands became grappling hooks and he threw the doctor against a wall. The rest of the staff retreated to the