“No, why would I want anything like that on my machine? Anyway, what does it matter? I can give you each two hundred dollars.”
“How do we know this isn’t a trap?” Arkady asked. “This phone thing bothers me. This could be a case of entrapment.”
Zoya had a throaty, smoker’s laugh. “How do I know you won’t simply keep the money? Or worse, tell my husband?”
Victor said, “Any enterprise demands a certain amount of trust on both sides. To begin with, the price is five thousand dollars, half before and half after.”
“I can get someone on the street to do it for fifty.”
“You get what you pay for,” Victor said. “With us, your husband’s total disappearance is guaranteed and we’ll handle the investigation ourselves.”
“It’s up to you,” Arkady emphasized. “Your decision.”
“How will you do it?”
Victor said, “The less you know about that the better.”
Arkady felt he had a front row seat to the snow, to the way it tumbled in foamy waves over parked cars. If Zoya Filotova could afford an SUV, she could pay five thousand dollars to eliminate her husband.
“He’s very strong,” she said.
“No, he’ll just be heavy,” Victor assured her.
Zoya counted out a stack of much-handled American bills, to which she added a photograph of a man in a bathrobe at the beach. Alexander Filotov was alarmingly large, with long, wet hair and he was showing the camera a beer can he had apparently crushed with one hand.
“How will I know he’s dead?” Zoya asked.
Victor said, “We’ll give you proof. We take a picture.”
“I’ve read about this. Sometimes so-called killers use makeup and catsup and pretend the ‘victim’ is dead. I want something more solid.”
There was a pause.
“More solid?” asked Victor.
“Something personal,” Zoya said.
Arkady and Victor looked at each other. This was not in the script.
“A wristwatch?” Arkady suggested.
“More personal.”
“As in…?” He didn’t like where this was going.
Zoya finally picked up her brandy and sipped. “Don’t kidnappers sometimes send a finger or an ear?”
There was another silence in the booth until Arkady said, “That’s for kidnapping.”
“That wouldn’t work anyway,” she agreed. “I might not recognize his ear or his finger. They all look pretty much alike. No, something more particular.”
“What did you have in mind?”
She swirled her glass. “He has a pretty large nose.”
Victor said, “I am not cutting off anybody’s nose.”
“If he’s already dead? It would be like carving a chicken.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Then I have another idea.”
Victor put up his hand. “No.”
“Wait.” Zoya unfolded a piece of paper with a photograph of a drawing of a tiger fighting off a pack of wolves. The photo was murky, taken in poor light, and the drawing itself had an indistinct quality. “I thought of this.”
“He has a picture?”
“He has a tattoo,” Arkady said.
“That’s right.” Zoya Filotova was pleased. “I photographed the tattoo a few nights ago while he was in a drunken stupor. It’s his own design.”
A sheet covered one corner of the tattoo but what Arkady could see was impressive enough. The tiger stood majestically on its hind legs, one paw swiping the air as the wolves snarled and cringed. A pine forest and mountain stream framed the battle. On the white arm of a birch were the letters
Victor asked, “What does that mean?”
“He’s from Tver,” Zoya said.
“There are no tigers in Tver,” Victor said. “No mountains either. It’s a flat, hopeless dump on the Volga.”
Arkady thought that was a little harsh, but people who made it to Moscow from places like Tver usually shed their hometown identity as fast as they could. They didn’t have it inked on them forever.
“Okay,” Victor said. “Now we can definitively ID him. How do you propose we bring the proof to you? Do you expect us to lug a body around?”
Zoya finished her brandy and said, “I need only the tattoo.”
Arkady hated Victor’s Lada. The windows did not completely close and the rear bumper was roped on. Snow blew in through floorboard holes and swayed the pine scent freshener that hung from the rearview mirror.
“Cold,” Victor said.
“You could have let the car warm up.” Arkady unbuttoned his shirt.
“It will, eventually. No, I’m talking about her. I felt my testicles turn to icicles and drop, one by one.”
“She wants proof, the same as us.” Arkady peeled adhesive tape from his stomach to free a microphone and miniature recorder. He pushed Rewind and Play, listened to a sample, turned off the recorder, ejected the cassette, and placed it in an envelope, on which he wrote, “Subject Z. K. Filotova, Senior Investigator A. K. Renko, Detective V. D. Orlov,” date and place.
Victor asked, “What do we have?”
“Not much. You answered the phone on another officer’s desk and a woman asked about doing in her husband. She assumed you were Detective Urman. You played along and set up a meeting. You could arrest her now for conspiracy but you’d have nothing on the detective and no idea who gave her his phone number. She’s holding out. You could squeeze her harder if she pays for what she thinks is a finished assassination, then you’d have her for attempted murder and she might be willing to talk. Tell me about Detective Urman. It was his phone you answered?”
“Yes. Marat Urman. Thirty-five years old, single. He was in Chechnya with his buddy Isakov. Nikolai Isakov, the war hero.”
“
Victor waited a beat. “I thought you’d like that. The file’s in back.”
Arkady covered his confusion by fishing a ribbon-bound folder out of the dirty clothes and empty bottles on the back seat.
“Is this a car or a laundry chute?”
“You should read the newspaper articles. Urman and Isakov were with the Black Berets, and they killed a lot of Chechens. We fucked up in the first Chechen war. The second time we sent in people with, as they say, the proper skills. Read the articles.”
“Would Isakov know what Urman was doing?”
“I don’t know.” Victor screwed up his face with thought. “The Black Berets make their own rules.” He kept his eyes on Arkady while he lit a cigarette. “Have you ever met Isakov?”
“Not face to face.”
“Just wondering.” Victor snuffed the match between two fingers.
“Why did you pick up Urman’s phone?”
“I was waiting for a snitch to call. He’d called Urman’s number by mistake before; it’s one digit off. These guys on the street, in the wintertime they drink antifreeze. You’ve got to catch them while they’re able to talk. Anyway, it might be a good mistake, don’t you think?”
Arkady watched a group leave the cafe and head for an SUV. They were heavyset, silent men until one of them built up speed and slid on the ice that covered the parking lot. He spread his arms and moved as if his shoes
