Tatiana

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t. Just curious.” An afterthought occurred to him. “How did your cats get on with her dog? I saw a dog in pictures of her.”

“Her pug? Little Polo? What a coward. He didn’t dare come in here.”

• • •

Arkady paused to pull on latex gloves before opening the door. He had high hopes. He expected the apartment to be a reflection of a well-ordered mind, and clean surfaces meant good fingerprints.

The balcony curtains were closed, allowing only chinks of light. He threw a light switch to no effect and remembered that the building’s power had been turned off. The beam of his penlight zigzagged to the dangling wires of a ceiling fixture. He aimed down and found that he couldn’t move without stepping on open books or broken glass. He let the beam crawl across the room to a sofa that was upended and gutted, spilling foam. Next to it was a desk stripped of its drawers. Folders were dumped out of file cabinets. Bookshelves were swept clear and loose papers strewn everywhere. Scattered shoe boxes held audiocassettes that went back twenty years according to their labels. The flotsam and jetsam of a professional reporter.

He took long, cautious steps to the kitchen. Everything that had been in a drawer or cabinet was on the floor. Knives glinted through a mélange of yogurt, melted ice cream and breakfast cereal. Both the refrigerator and the range had been moved aside. Two dog bowls, one upside down. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet had been emptied into the sink. In the bedroom the mattress was filleted, her wardrobe tossed on the floor.

He crossed to the balcony and opened the doors. This was Tatiana’s last view, bleaker than Arkady had anticipated, far from the glass towers of millionaires. Even with the doors folded, there was only room on the balcony for two people. A plaque on the rail said, PLEASE DO NOT PLACE OBJECTS ON LEDGE. Good idea, Arkady thought. In the corner of the balcony lay an ashtray and a shriveled geranium in a pot.

He returned to the living room, crushing a shoe box of tapes on the floor, and picked up a tape recorder. He expected dead batteries. Instead he heard the stutter of machine-gun fire and a woman’s voice say, “Both sides have the same weapons. That’s because our Soviet soldiers have traded their weapons for vodka. Here in Afghanistan, vodka is the great equalizer.” Arkady tried another tape. “The sirens that you hear are ambulances taking children to a hospital already overflowing with casualties, over two hundred so far. It’s now clear there was no rescue plan. The prime minister has yet to visit the scene.” And a third. “The bomb went off during rush hour in the metro. Bodies and body parts are everywhere. We’re trying to move closer but some tunnels are so filled with black smoke it’s impossible to breathe or see.” History rushed by.

He put in a new cassette. At first he thought it was blank and then he picked up her low, soft voice. “People ask me is it worth it.”

A pause, but he knew that Tatiana was there on the other side of the tape. He could hear her breathing.

5

The next morning, Arkady felt curiously well. Part of it was Vicodin and part a sense that he had come into direct contact with Tatiana Petrovna and had an idea where to begin. Sergei Obolensky had been one of the few men who put up a fight outside Tatiana’s apartment building. He had been Tatiana’s closest friend on the magazine Now.

“It’s more like Now and Then,” Obolensky said. “We pulled our latest issue so we could rethink our policy on investigative journalism. Maybe we’ll have to put in a horoscope instead of investigation. Maybe we’ll print only horoscopes. I’m not going to make the magazine’s staff risk their lives. Personally, I’ve decided I’m too old to die. It’s very simple when you’re young and you don’t have a family and financial obligations. At my age, it’s a mess. No story is worth that.” Obolensky rubbed the bruises on his shaved head. “Nothing compared to a punctured lung.” He brought a bottle of vodka and two glasses from a desk drawer. “I normally don’t drink in the middle of the day, but as we are two survivors of the Battle of the Bullhorn, I must salute you.”

“A battle?” Arkady thought that was a little exaggerated.

One wall of Obolensky’s office was covered with citations from news organizations and schools of journalism around the world. Two photographs were of Obolensky and Tatiana Petrovna accepting awards. A leather sofa was worn flat. A dead ficus haunted a corner. Obolensky’s desk was half hidden by a computer and manuscripts and books that overflowed the shelves. All in all, pretty much the professional disorder that Arkady expected in an editor’s office.

“What happened after Anya and I left?” he asked. “Did you get your cameras and cell phones back?”

“After the captain confiscated all the film and memory cards. The captain had his fun. He advised us not to make an issue of the beating because then they would really dish it out. ‘Dish it out’? What does that mean? What’s left after murder? For the meantime he cited us for unlawful assembly and libeling the office of the president. Not a word about the attack on us. I’m responsible for my people. I don’t want their blood on my hands.”

“Did you lodge a complaint with a prosecutor?”

“What would be the point? Prosecutors, investigators, militia, they’re all thieves, present company excepted.” Only two glasses of vodka, and Obolensky was becoming emotional. “Renko, you and I know that our demonstration was about more than Tatiana. It was about all journalists who have been attacked. There’s a pattern. A journalist is murdered; an unlikely suspect is arrested, tried and found not guilty. And that’s the end of it, except we get the message. Soon there will be no news but their news. They say it’s better than a free press, it’s a free but ‘responsible’ press.” He poured a sloppy glass and raised it high. “So the nation moves on, blindfolded.”

“What about Tatiana?”

“Tatiana was fearless. Independent. In other words, I couldn’t stop her. She did what she wanted. She went to America once for a big humanitarian prize, and all she could talk about when she came back was bumper stickers. She said if she had a car, she’d have a sticker that said, ‘So Much Corruption, So Little Time.’ I think she knew her time was up. Why else would she live in a building next to skinheads?”

“Did they ever attack her?”

“No.”

“Is it possible they respected her?”

“Why not? They’re monsters but they’re still human. She was always for the underdog.” Obolensky hunched closer. “The official line is that Tatiana jumped and there will be no investigation. So, what are you doing? The war is over.”

Arkady said, “People don’t know about the demonstration.”

“And they won’t. The television news that night showed Putin petting a tiger cub and Medvedev arranging flowers. Anyway, Tatiana is missing again.”

“Again?”

“First she was in the wrong drawer.” Obolensky refilled the glasses. To the brim. “Now she’s totally disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“They can’t find her. They say they’ve looked everywhere. They’re just twisting our dicks. Apparently, the authorities are concerned that wherever our Tatiana is buried will become some sort of shrine. They’re juggling her until they come up with an answer.”

“Why not cremate her?”

“Maybe they have, who knows? But you’re supposed to ask the family first.”

“Did she have any family?”

“A sister in Kaliningrad that no one can locate. I tried. I went to Kaliningrad myself and knocked on her door, because if the sister doesn’t claim her or they hide Tatiana long enough, she might end up in a grave for the unclaimed. A double disappearance.”