“Back from the dead,” said Platonov. He hovered, blocking half the light.
Bora turned onto his back and laid a knife against Arkady’s throat. He had returned from the dead with a trump card. The blade scraped a hair Arkady had missed when shaving.
“Thank you…and now…I fuck you,” Bora said.
But the cold overwhelmed him. His shivering grew uncontrollable and hard enough to break bones. His teeth chattered like a runaway machine and his arms wrapped straitjacket-style tight around his body.
“Find the knife,” Arkady told the boy with the flashlight.
“What knife?”
Arkady got to his feet and took the flashlight. “Bora’s.”
“I didn’t see one,” Platonov said.
“He had a knife.” Arkady nudged Bora over not with a kick, but firmly. No knife. Arkady played the beam in and around the water where Bora had fallen through, where he had freed Bora from the ice and finally, trying to reverse time, on Bora’s tracks across the snow.
“A magnificent night,” Platonov declared. “A night like this you can only find in Moscow. This is the most fun I’ve had for years. And that you had your car parked here by the pond? Brilliant! Thinking two moves ahead!” He slapped the Zhiguli’s dashboard with satisfaction. The lamps of the Boulevard Ring rolled by; Platonov still hadn’t said where he wanted to go.
Arkady said, “Make up your mind. My feet are wet and numb.”
“Want me to drive?”
“No, thanks.” He had seen Platonov walk.
“You know who I saw tonight? I saw your father the General. I saw him in you. The apple does not fall far from the tree. Although I’m sorry you let that hooligan go.”
“You didn’t see his knife.”
“Neither did the boy with the flashlight. I take your word for it.”
“That’s what I mean. All you could testify to is that Bora fell through the ice.”
“Anyway, you taught him a lesson. He’ll be frozen solid for a day or two.”
“He’ll be back.”
“Then you’ll finish him off, I’m confident. It is a shame about the knife. You think it will turn up in the pond?”
“Tomorrow, next week.”
“Maybe when the ice melts. Can you hold a man in prison until the snow melts? I like the sound of it.”
“I’m sure you do.”
Platonov said, “You know, I met your father during the war on the Kalinin Front.”
“Did you play chess?”
Platonov smiled. “As a matter of fact, I was playing simultaneous games to entertain the troops when he sat down and took a board. He was very young for a general and so covered in mud I couldn’t see his rank. It was extraordinary. Most amateurs trip over their knights. Your father had an instinctive understanding of the special mayhem caused by that piece.”
“Who won?”
“Well, I won. The point is he played a serious game.”
“I don’t think my father was ever on the Kalinin Front.”
“That’s where I saw him. He was cheated.”
“Out of what?”
“You know what.”
Snow had stifled the usual twenty-four-hour assault of construction crews across the city. The drive along the Boulevard Ring’s white-trimmed trees felt like passage through a more intimate town.
“There were atrocities on either side,” Platonov went on. “The main thing is that your father was a successful commander. Especially in the beginning of the war, when all seemed lost, he was superhuman. If anyone deserved a field marshal’s baton it was him. In my opinion he was smeared by hypocrites.”
“So, who is trying to kill you?” Arkady changed the subject. He was, after all, supposedly trying to find out.
“New Russians, mafia, reactionaries in the Kremlin. Most of all, real estate developers.”
“Half of Moscow. Have there been threatening phone calls, ominous notes, stones through the windows?”
“I told you before.”
“Remind me.”
“They threaten on the phone, I hang up. They send a poison pen letter, I throw it away. No stones yet.”
“The next note, don’t open it. Handle it by the corners and call me. Can you give me any names?”
“Not yet, but all you have to do is find out who is trying to have the chess club shut down. They’ll probably turn it into a spa or worse. What we need are the names of the developers. Not the public names, but the silent partners in City Hall and the Kremlin. I don’t have the means to do that. You do. I was afraid that the prosecutor was fobbing off some incompetent, but I’m pleased to say that after tonight I have great faith in you. Boundless faith. Not that I don’t have my own ruses. We’ll have a little exhibition soon and get some publicity.”
“At the chess club?”
“At that dump? No. At the Writers’ Union. In fact, we’re off to see the sponsor right now.”
“At this hour?”
“A friend of the game.”
Arkady’s cell phone rang. It was Victor.
“What the devil were you doing picking a fight with Urman? He and Isakov cover a domestic homicide and you run their pricks through a wringer.”
“Are you all right?”
“Well, I’m at the morgue. I got here on my own, if that’s a good sign.”
“Just don’t fall asleep.” Around a morgue, Victor might look deposited. “Why are you there?”
“Remember Zoya, the wife who wants her husband dead? Who dialed Urman’s phone? She keeps calling me demanding progress, so I’m using my imagination.”
“Wait for me. Don’t do anything until I get there.” Arkady hung up. He desperately wanted to get into dry shoes and socks but Victor’s imagination was a frightening thing.
“Stalin loved the snow,” Platonov said. Both men pondered that information while wipers swept the flakes on the windshield. “In the Kremlin they had snowball fights. Like boys. Beria, Molotov and Mikoyan on one side, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov on the other and Stalin as referee. Grown men in hats throwing snowballs. Stalin egging them on.”
“I’m trying to picture that.”
“I know that some innocents died because of Stalin, but he made the Soviet Union respected by the world. Russian history is Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin and since then, pipsqueaks. I know you feel the same because I saw you rescue Stalin from those so-called Russian Patriots. This corner will do.”
Platonov heaved himself out under a streetlamp. Arkady leaned across to say that Stalin killed not “some,” which sounded incidental, but in cold blood sent millions of Russians to their death. However, Platonov was enveloped by a redheaded woman in a fur coat and high heels. She was a well-maintained sixty or seventy years old, a whirlwind of lipstick and rouge. A foaming bottle of champagne swung from her hand.
“Magda, you’ll catch your death.”
“Ilya, Ilyusha, my Ilyushka. I’ve been waiting.”
“I had business.”
“My genius, dance with me.”
“Upstairs, we’ll dance.” To Arkady, Platonov said, “Pick me up at noon.”
“This is the sponsor?” Arkady asked.
“Better make it two o’clock,” Platonov said.
She peered at the car. “You came with a friend?”
“A comrade,” Platonov said. “One of the best.”
Arkady had intended to set the record straight. Instead, he drove off as fast as possible.
