The problem was the conviviality of birders, who pursued each other to verify whether their sighting was a grebe, an eider or a goose, or to compare life lists of birds they had spotted.
He didn’t know what he hoped to see. He didn’t know how he would identify a murderer. They had met at this same beach but it was at night, Arkady had been staring into the headlights of a van and the driver had never said a word.
As the wind picked up birders trudged home. Arkady found a group sharing a flask of brandy under the eaves of Tatiana’s cabin. Ivan, Nikita, Wanda, Boris, Lena. All of the birders boasted over a thousand species on their life lists, fifty from the spit alone.
“But these conditions are impossible,” said Nikita. “Between the headwind and the sand. .”
Wanda agreed. “It makes your teeth rattle. If you’re not having fun, what’s the point?”
A notebook dropped from Arkady’s hand. As Ivan snatched it up the wind flipped through the pages. “Your list seems to be blank.”
“I’m just getting started. So you’re all friends or colleagues? You came to the spit together?”
“Most of us,” Lena said.
“Misery likes company.” Boris slapped his hands together. They were thick hands, slabs of meat.
“Are you looking for any bird in particular?” Nikita asked Arkady.
“I can’t say.”
Boris said, “I can tell you from experience that sometimes when you concentrate on one bird, you miss a better one. I remember in Mexico, I was looking for a particular bird and I almost missed a quetzal, which you know is a rare bird with spectacular plumage sacred to the Aztecs. The Aztecs, you know? Human sacrifice raised to its greatest heights? They would cut out a heart or skin a man alive. At the same time, they were a civilization of great beauty.”
Arkady thought they were getting a little far afield from birding.
“I’ll know what I’m after when I see it,” Arkady said.
“You must be after a special kind of bird.”
“Or a pig,” Arkady said.
Boris’s eyes went as flat as a dead fish.
For the rest of the day, Arkady watched terns fight the wind, twist and plunge headfirst into the water. That was him, only not into water but cement.
At night, pines swayed and sea grass flattened in the wind. Finally, the storm that had been building in expectation all week arrived and waves seethed up to the cabin stairs, sounding like the columns of a temple falling. At the same time, the lagoon flooded the road behind the cabin. Water plowed through the beach and revealed nuggets of golden amber.
Arkady woke and sat up, and although his teeth chattered from the cold, he staggered to the front door and opened it to find that the wind had, in fact, died down and the waves had retreated to the sea.
He wondered how anyone dared sleep. Tatiana hadn’t returned. Just as well, he thought.
The sea grew still. Clouds parted and revealed a moon balanced on the water. The off-season was soon to be the season; birders would be leaving and tourists would be pouring in.
Arkady boiled some instant coffee and took the key ring and lamp to the shed. What was it that Tatiana’s father wanted? A normal country? This little space with its simple tools must have been a refuge for the man.
The security cables that ran through the bikes were vinyl-coated steel with heavy-duty eyelets connected by padlocks, each cable about five meters long. Not long enough. Arkady sorted out the collapsible chairs in the corner of the shed and disentangled them from two more cables. He rummaged through overstocked shelves and found cables still in their plastic cases. Maybe not as many as he wished, but they would have to do.
Because he would have to get close. His only weapon was Tatiana’s pistol. Anything that Piggy carried would be bigger. It helped that Piggy was a conversationalist; that would draw him in. And he craved recognition, something for his own life list.
When Arkady was ready, he put on his poncho, blew out the lamp, slipped out the back door and circled to a patch of sea grass and waited. In summertime, music would be drifting from cabin to cabin. People would exclaim at shooting stars. Now the world was as black as a tunnel and the only sound was the idle lapping of water.
From a distance, he saw an ember that became a bouncing ball, which turned into a glowing pig dancing on the beach. Headlights off, the van rolled to a stop directly in front of the cabin and Piggy swung out to open the back door of the van. One by one, he tossed out Vova and his sisters like freshly caught fish. They were trussed hands and feet and crying hysterically, appealing to be saved.
There was a touch of the ham actor in Piggy; his hair was long and topped by a bowler and his gestures with a gun were exaggerated as he stood over Vova and shot into the sand. The sound mingled with the waves.
He called out, “Did that get your attention?”
The children were stunned into silence. Arkady cradled the Spanish pistol under his poncho.
“Don’t be shy,” Piggy said. “Come on out or I really will put a bullet in boychik’s brain. That’s better,” he said as Arkady stood.
“Let them go. You want me, not them.”
“Such egotism. How do you know what I want?”
“I don’t. What do you want?”
“Horror.”
Arkady did not have an answer for that but didn’t particularly care. From here on it was logistics. He was about twenty paces from Piggy. He hoped to cut that to five.
“What about the biker? Was he on your list?”
“I would say he was on Alexi’s list.”
“How did you know to target him?”
“I watch people in hotels. Butchers go in and out. No one sees us.”
“That’s clever. Your name’s not Boris, is it? And you’ve never been to Mexico, have you?” Arkady started to approach. “I wouldn’t even say you were a bird person.”
“They’re idiots. Get up at five in the morning to see a fucking sandpiper?”
“People do crazy things.”
“Well, you’re the craziest.”
“Did you know I have a bullet in my brain? Do you know what that does to you? Can you imagine? Like a second hand on a watch, just waiting to make one last tick. One tick and everything goes black. That’s how I live my life. Moment to moment.”
Arkady continued moving forward. It was unnerving; a man about to die should retreat, not approach.
“The strange thing is that having a bullet in the brain makes me feel invulnerable,” Arkady said.
“Stay where you are.” Piggy raised his gun.
Arkady took another quick two paces, even forcing Piggy back a step.
“Try it.”
Piggy fired. The shot knocked Arkady to the ground. It felt like being hit with a spike but he rose and Piggy fired a second time, dropping Arkady again. For a second time, Arkady got to his feet. Hesitation showed in Piggy’s eyes and in that moment, Arkady pulled his poncho aside, revealing an armature of steel cables that were coiled in double layers around his chest. In two places the cables were mangled. In his free hand he held the Spanish pistol and at a distance of four paces he couldn’t miss.
34
Seawater and sand were a bicycle’s worst enemies. Arkady and Zhenya disassembled the Pantera and spread the parts like a puzzle on a plastic sheet that covered Arkady’s living room floor. The steel frame and aluminum gears had not been damaged, but the drivetrain had suffered from being thrown around and buried.
It was hard to say whether the bike was salvageable or what it was worth. Lorenzo, on the phone from
