were aware of Arkady’s pariah status; he was the golden example of how not to run a career. No matter, Arkady liked working at night when the staff was gone and the light of his lamp seemed to cover the known world.
He tried calling Eva on her cell phone. It was off, which didn’t necessarily mean she was with Isakov. More likely, he told himself, she was dealing with a patient in the emergency room and didn’t want to be interrupted. He checked the apartment phone for messages. Nothing from her or Zhenya, and Arkady fought off the dark allure of masochism. To clear his head he wrote a report on the events at the Chistye Prudy Metro station, making it as objective as possible; let Zurin sweat over the fact that an investigator of his had rudely disrupted a seance with Stalin. It was one thing to close down a simple hoax, it was another to interfere with superpatriots, and the entire affair illustrated how out of the loop Zurin was. Arkady suspected that when Zurin was put into the loop the prosecutor’s bowels would experience a sudden loosening.
Arkady was more circumspect about what transpired at the skating pond. He had looked through Bora’s pockets and found sodden papers for Boris Antonovich Bogolovo, age thirty-four, ethnic Russian, resident of Tver, electrician, former honored sportsman. A newspaper clipping of a boxing match and a condom seemed to sum up Bora’s past triumphs and hopes for the future. Arkady noted in the report that Bora had followed him and fallen through the ice, but there was nothing to be gained by mentioning a knife when there was no knife to offer in evidence. Arkady had been unable to find it, Platonov and the cameraman Petrov never saw it, and without the knife the report might sound as if Arkady had, for no good reason, lured Bora onto thin ice and almost let him drown. Arkady had to admit to himself that he couldn’t describe the knife. He had seen something shine in Bora’s hand and felt something sharp against his throat. “The investigation is not concluded,” Arkady wrote. Finding a weapon would make a big difference.
Arkady’s eyes rested on his closet. Bolted inside was a combination safe that held his video camera, notebooks, snitch money, a war-era Tokarev pistol and a box of bullets. He kept the gun in the office ever since he found Zhenya stripping it at home. Where Zhenya learned how to take apart and assemble a Tokarev Arkady didn’t know, although the boy claimed he had learned from watching Arkady, and it was true that Arkady took good care of a gun he never used. If he had had the gun would he have shot Bora? Was the difference between him and a killer simply a matter of remembering to carry a gun?
Arkady turned to the file from Victor. A skilled suborner of clerks, Victor had assembled enough information to cover the desk, starting with a photocopy of the internal passport for Nikolai Sergeevich Isakov, an ethnic Russian born in Tver. Again, Tver. A Ministry physical found Isakov to be a thirty-six-year-old male; hair, brown; eyes, blue; height, 200 cm; weight, 90 k. Education: two years at the Kalinin Engineering Institute. A five-star student who dropped out of school for no reason. No degree. Military service: army, infantry, trained as a marksman with VSS sniper rifle. Two tours, no disciplinary problems, reaching the grade of warrant officer before segueing smoothly into OMON, a select police force also known as the Black Berets. The Black Berets were hostage rescuers, not negotiators. Their training included rappelling, marksmanship and the subtleties of silent hand-to- hand combat. Only one in five candidates made it through. The instructor notes on Isakov called him “at the top of his class.” A special note mentioned that Isakov’s father had been NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB.
Starting on a far-off but converging track was Marat Urman, half Tatar with a first name from the French Revolution. The product was a combustible 35-year-old male; hair, black; eyes, black; height, 190 cm; weight, 102 k. Arrest records as a juvenile for assault and public disturbance. One year of university. Six years in the army, with repeated disciplinary issues, rising no higher than corporal. In his last year he and Isakov were at the same base and somehow the cool Nikolai Isakov and wild Marat Urman became fast friends.
Black Beret candidate school appreciated Urman’s proclivity for aggression. Much of the training was done as duels; a candidate might fight five opponents one after the other. When Urman broke an opponent’s jaw, the instructor had noted with approval that Urman “continued to beat his foe unconscious.” He might not be officer material, but he was “an excellent battering ram.” Besides, his friend Nikolai Isakov was there to rein in Marat, in case he got out of control. In their black-and-blue fatigues, black boots and berets, the two made a formidable unit.
They went to Chechnya together. In the first Chechen war, in the early nineties, the rebels had bloodied a Russian Army of young, poorly trained conscripts. In the second Chechen war, started in the late nineties, the Kremlin sent a spearhead of mercenaries and elite troops, which meant the Black Berets.
Victor had copied an article from
“A squad of Black Berets from Tver, a mere six men led by Captain Nikolai Isakov, a decorated officer on his second tour of duty, had heard news of the attack over a cell phone and were waiting among the willows on the river’s eastern bank. The narrowness of the bridge forced the vehicles to cross single file, directly into the sights of Black Beret rifles. Isakov himself took out the driver of the APC with a single shot, effectively blocking the bridge. A fusillade greeted the other terrorists as they poured out of the trucks, expecting to overrun the small number of Black Beret troops in their way.
“A firefight raged up and down the banks of the picturesque mountain stream as Captain Isakov consistently exposed himself to enemy fire to rally his men. The terrorists first mounted a frontal attack and, when that failed, attempted to outflank the Russian marksmen, who would fire and change position. Eventually the Black Berets were down to their last rounds. Isakov had no ammunition left in his rifle and only two bullets in his handgun when the Chechens suddenly retreated in one truck, leaving behind the other truck, the APC and fourteen dead insurgents. Remarkably, when the smoke lifted, only one Black Beret was hit, shot in the knee. Captain Isakov said, ‘We hope we avenged the cowardly attack on our wounded men. We thought of them and did our best.’”
The name of the reporter was Aharon Ginsberg.
“The army is everything!” Arkady’s father used to say, until he was denied a field marshal’s baton, then it was “The army is shit.” Arkady wished he had such clarity of vision. For a semblance of order, Arkady reassembled the dossier as neatly as he could and slipped it in a drawer.
Before he forgot, he called the phone number he had found on Petrov’s matchbook. It was five a.m., a good time to wake and ponder the fact that there were four more hours of dark.
A voice furred with sleep answered, “Metropol Hotel. Reception.”
“Sorry, wrong number.”
Very wrong. The grand Metropol Hotel and the shaggy cameraman Pyetr Petrov didn’t add up at all.
Arkady had two mini cassettes, one he had taken from Petrov’s video camera at the Metro platform and a second from Petrov’s pocket. He slipped the first mini cassette into the video camera, connected the camera to the television, and sat back to watch.
The tape began earlier than Arkady had anticipated with the filmmaker Zelensky in Red Square. Snow had just started to fall and clouds dirty as cement bags gathered over Saint Basil’s. The format was documentary and the news, according to Zelensky, was dire. Russia had been “stabbed in the back by a conspiracy of ancient enemies, a moneyed oligarchy and foreign terrorists to undermine and humiliate the motherland.” Zelensky had cue phrases. “Idealism was gone.” The Soviet Union had collapsed, “removing the barrier between Russia and the decadent West on one side and Islamic fanaticism on the other.” Russian culture was “globalized and debased.” The camera panned from an old woman begging for coins to a banner for Bulgari. “No wonder patriots so yearn for the firm guidance of another era.” What the videotape would explore, Zelensky gravely told the camera, might be a miracle, a sighting of Stalin on the last train of the night.
Arkady watched the entire event again from a different point of view. Petrov had started recording with an establishing shot of the subway car and its passengers, mainly pensioners like the cronies Mendeleyev and Antipenko, the babushkas, literati from the Lenin Library, but also prostitutes, Zelensky and his golden niece and nephew, the delinquent schoolgirl, Platonov and Arkady, not exactly a cross section of society, but what might be realistically expected at that hour. Arkady was impressed by how little illumination a video camera needed and how the microphone picked up the rush of the train and how those factors combined made a package that seemed more authentic than the actual experience.
“Coming into Chistye Prudy station, what Stalin called Kirov Station,” Petrov whispered to the camera.
Up and down the carriage, riders shifted in anticipation. Mendeleyev and Antipenko were already half to their feet. The babushkas twisted to see sparks, blackness, the approaching light of the platform, and in an extra
