and Maxim opened the gate to a vegetable garden where sunflowers peered over the wall, fat tomatoes drooped from wooden stakes and eggplants lay fat and lazy on the ground.
When Ludmila didn’t answer her doorbell, Maxim tossed pebbles up against a window. Arkady saw no lights inside but the window creaked open and a woman hung a cage with a canary. She wore a scarf babushka style, gardening gloves and wraparound dark glasses, and she teased the bird for fluffing up in the cold.
“Always complaining, always looking for sympathy. Just like our old friend Maxim. Always the center of attention.”
“Hello, Ludmila,” Maxim said.
“And with a disreputable friend,” she added when Arkady introduced himself.
“I’m sorry about your sister.”
“Then I’m sure you have some scheme to make money out of her death. You and Obolensky, so ready to make her a martyr.”
“Did you identify Tatiana Petrovna’s body?” Arkady asked.
“From a photograph. There was no use going to Moscow.”
Maxim said, “Ludmila is sensitive to light. It makes traveling difficult.”
“Didn’t you want to identify her body?”
“The picture was enough.”
“Weren’t you concerned with what happened to her body?”
“Frankly, I’m more concerned about my body.”
“Did you ask to have her cremated?”
A minute before the rain had almost stopped; now it was drumming. Arkady heard the bustle of the market beyond the garden wall as racks were pulled under cover. Anyone else would have invited Arkady and Maxim in.
“Poor Juliet is getting wet.” She stroked the canary under its beak. “They don’t sing, you know, after they’ve lost their mate.”
“You don’t remember whether you asked to have your own sister cremated?”
“I have my own life to live.”
A circumspect one between the vegetables and the bird, Arkady thought.
“What other animals do you have?”
“Well, we can’t have any cats. That would make Juliet too nervous.” She pulled in the cage.
Arkady asked, “Didn’t Tatiana have a dog?”
“Yes, a nasty little thing. You know what my favorite pets are? Vegetables.” She closed the window, only to reopen it a second later. “Don’t steal any either,” she added, and shut the window for good.
“Sorry,” said Maxim. “Like I told you, Ludmila is hard.”
Arkady lingered between tomato plants. He had counted on Ludmila Petrovna’s outrage or, at least, curiosity about the death and ill handling of her sister.
“You can catch the evening flight to Moscow,” Maxim said. “Too bad you came all this way for nothing. What’s that?”
Arkady waved him over, and the two of them stood over a small dog turd that was liquefying in the rain. Headlines raced through his mind. SHIT BRIGADE CALLED OUT. TURD DISCOVERED IN VEGETABLE GARDEN. EVIDENCE LOST IN DOWNPOUR.
It was not nothing, but laughably close.
19
Her name was Lotte. This time she didn’t let Zhenya off the hook. Being a pawn down to her was a slow descent into the grave. He knew what she was going to do; he simply couldn’t stop her. By the end of the match, her cheeks were flushed and Zhenya was as sweaty as a wrestler. Mr. Stanford was gone. Almost all the onlookers were gone because they had expected a quick victory for Lotte, and the match had run into class time. It was the first game Zhenya had lost in weeks, yet he was strangely exhilarated.
She lived in an artistic household across from the conservatory, where music drifted from floor to floor. Her grandfather was Vladimir Sternberg, the most famous portrait artist of his time. Sternberg had cannily decided to paint only one subject: Stalin. Stalin addressing the Sixteenth Congress of the Soviets, Stalin addressing the Seventeenth Congress of the Soviets, and on and on, painting a Stalin a little taller, a bit more substantial, without a withered arm and never, ever with another Party leader, those fatuous demi-tyrants who sooner or later were erased from pictures and marched to a cell. Sternberg avoided them as if they were contagious, while the stature of the Beloved Leader only grew until all that surrounded him were silvery clouds and the beams of a radiant sun.
Sternberg was little more than bones and blue veins dressed in a lounge robe and slippers, but he maneuvered his rattan wheelchair around easels draped with cloths. Smaller works of art, also covered, hung on the wall.
“Lotte, sweetheart, get this young man some tea. You’ve put him through the wringer.”
Zhenya took his cue and sat.
“Lotte has told me all about you,” Sternberg said.
Zhenya didn’t know what the artist was talking about. He was still surprised that Lotte had even noticed him, and he felt as out of place as a bird that had flown haphazardly in an open window. He had been sleeping on a mattress behind a video arcade, enduring the relentless chatter of machine guns and the whoosh of rockets long into the night. In comparison, the easels were silent and solemn in their drop cloths. Palettes and tables were daubed in colors. He had never noticed before that paint smelled and never seen cloths so mysterious.
“Go ahead, take a look,” Sternberg said.
“Which one?”
“Any one.”
Zhenya cautiously pulled a cloth from an easel and stepped back to study the painting. Stalin was waving; it wasn’t clear at whom or why, only that he was watching out for his people below. Zhenya unveiled a second portrait and a third, each painted with the forceful edge of propaganda. Stalin was a quick-change artist, in army green one moment and summer whites the next, and perpetually waving.
Sternberg said, “I could do five a day.”
Zhenya supposed that was “pretty good.”
“Good?” Sternberg almost rose from his chair. “That’s faster than the school of Rubens. Of course, the market for portraits of Stalin suffered for some time.”
Lotte delivered tea to Zhenya and whispered, “Ask my grandfather about his other paintings.”
“He’s not interested,” Sternberg said.
“Whatever,” Zhenya said.
“It’s not interesting. I painted them privately.”
“Look.” Lotte unveiled a painting of a village in banks of blue snow.
It was a rustic night scene, and the more Zhenya looked, the more he saw. Rendered in agitated strokes, embers from the fireplaces turned to imps of fire. Frozen shirts flew through the air. Windows lit so late at night suggested gaiety or disaster, and Zhenya crossed his arms for warmth.
The rest of the paintings-half a dozen-were the same and different. Each promised a rural subject and each, on examination, was at the point of explosion. A barn about to be a tinderbox, a skater under the ice, a horse’s eye rolling in panic.
“You hid these?” Zhenya asked. “Why?”
“A bold question from a first-time guest, but I like that.”
“So?”
“What do you think? To save my head. Lotte, would you bring some cookies too? Thank you, dear. You are too good.” To Zhenya, he said, “She loves her grandfather. So, tit for tat, what are you going to do with your chessboard? What are your plans?”
