blade.
Hysterical applause, everyone on their feet, shouting themselves hoarse, waving their fists and again applauding with burning hands.
He could cut her at the wrist. Across the palm. The middle knuckles. Perhaps, for a harpist, fingertips would do.
Arkady found himself stepping into the picture, taking in the blood coursing from Tanya’s broken nose, her outstretched hand and the way she stared at the cropping blade.
“Behave,” he said in not much more than a croak.
She dropped the scissors and sank to the floor, shook as if she had the chills and let him tie her hands together behind her back with an extension cord.
“My God!” Surkov stood at the door. He turned on the lights and a blood red picture jumped to life. “My God! My God!”
Platonov followed Surkov in, each step slower than the one before. “What happened here? Did you slaughter a pig?”
Shelves, paper, overturned copier lay in a pudding of blood and broken glass. Tanya sat against a printer, legs splayed from gown smeared red. She held her head back to stanch the flow of blood.
“My pamphlets.” Surkov tried to peel one blood-soaked “Frequently Asked Questions” from another. “Are you crazy, Renko? What have you done to Tanya?”
Arkady’s throat hurt too much to waste words on Surkov. Hoping for an address book, he laid the contents of Tanya’s handbag on the worktable: cigarettes, lighter, house keys, change purse, Metro card, memberships in fitness and foreign film clubs and an Internet cafe, a pass for the Conservatory, a calendar of saints from the Church of the Redeemer and identification papers for Tatyana Stepanovna Schedrina, an innocent who wouldn’t harm a fly. He was looking at the only snapshot she carried when headlights swept across the courtyard. Arkady ran outside but only caught a glimpse of a blue or black sportscar. Of course there would be transportation for her to leave in; he would have thought of that if he hadn’t poured all his attention into the photograph. It was the same picture of Tanya he had seen enlarged in the Cupid album. Same snow princess on the same black diamond slope. However, the agency photo had been only half the picture. Tanya’s photo included her skiing partner, a barrel- chested man in daredevil red and, although Arkady suffered the surprise people experience from seeing familiar faces in unfamiliar settings, he had no trouble recognizing Detective Marat Urman.
He looked up at flakes crossing the light of a streetlamp. He opened his jacket to let the cold in. Later every turn of the head would be agony.
Right now, numb was good.
11
At five in the morning a table and chairs were brought into a basement room at Petrovka. The room was maroon, no windows, only a toilet, a mop sink and an oversized drain in the floor. Arkady sat facing Prosecutor Zurin and a major of the militia. The major’s cap was the size of a saddle, gray with red trim. He removed it to take notes because taking notes was a serious business; more careers were built by going to meetings and taking notes than by triumphs on the battlefield. They all stood as a deputy minister arrived with a pair of Kremlin guards and took the last chair. He did not introduce himself and didn’t need to. He relieved the major of his pad and pencil and when Zurin started to tape-record the session the man shook his head and, poof, the recorder disappeared.
“It didn’t happen,” he said.
“What didn’t?” the major asked.
“Any of it. The Communists do not want their headquarters to be known for drunken debacles. There will be no militia report. The accounts of what happened last night are so contradictory it would take a trial to sort them out, and a trial is the last thing we will allow. There will be no medical report. The girl and Renko will receive medical attention but the official cause of injuries is their choice. She ran into a door and you, Renko, I suppose, accidentally scratched yourself shaving. It won’t go on your record, but in a few weeks you will be quietly cashiered and an appropriate occupation will be found for you. Tending a lighthouse, something like that. In the meantime, there will be no mention of Stalin. No mention of Stalin sightings or Stalin singing or anything having to do with Stalin at all. This is considered a matter of state security. If and when Stalin is reintroduced to the public we will do it on our own terms, not as part of a brawl or an attempted rape.” He stood to go. “This meeting did not happen.”
Arkady said, “I won’t go.” He had to push each word through his throat.
“You won’t go?”
“I won’t leave Moscow.”
“We will ship you in a railway car for pigs.”
“I can’t go.”
“You should have thought about that before you attacked the girl.”
“I didn’t.”
Zurin and the major shifted their chairs, putting some distance between themselves and Arkady. In the Vatican, did priests defy a message from the pope? The deputy minister slapped a dossier.
“You killed a prosecutor.”
“Long ago. Self-defense.”
“So who am I to believe, a man with a history of violence or a girl? You’re getting off very lightly. You broke her nose.”
“In self-defense.”
“So you did attack her? That’s what the witness Surkov said.”
“He didn’t see.”
“Didn’t see what? That she led you on and then stopped? Naturally, you got angry. It got a little rough, a little out of control. Did you threaten to cut off her hands? The hands of a harpist?”
Arkady meant to say he never would have done it but his throat seized up.
“And you say you didn’t attack her. A girl has a broken nose and you hardly have a scratch. Let’s see this famous neck of yours.”
Arkady stood still while the bodyguards braced him and the deputy minister undid the top button of Arkady’s jacket, spread the collar wide and involuntarily sucked air. Even the guards flinched, because despite the fact that Arkady’s collar had been turned up during the attack, his neck bore the deep blue bruising and red rope burn of a hanged man.
“Oh.” The deputy minister covered his confusion with the last of his outrage. “At any rate, you should be ashamed to drag your father’s name through the mud. Renko was a respected name.”
Snow had stopped falling and had left a bell-like resonance in the air. Traffic lights blinked awake and the noise of plows subsided, but halfway home the pain of driving-turning his head to look right and left-was more than Arkady could bear and he left his car by the river and walked the rest of the way, head down, following his feet, letting the few flakes of snow lifted by the breeze settle in his hair, melt and cool his neck.
At least the search for Stalin was over. Which meant, presumably, that Arkady no longer had to listen to the imaginary threats that Grandmaster Platonov concocted to stall real estate developers. An American-style apartment house with a spa and sushi bar could soon rise from the ashes of the chess club. To Platonov’s credit the old Bolshie had stoutly defended Arkady in his police statement. Anyway, Arkady was free to rest up for his next assignment, which sounded as if it might be east of the Urals and north of the Arctic Circle.
Arkady headed for the yard behind his building. The parking area consisted of three rows of metal sheds smacked up side by side and so narrow that a driver had to squirm to emerge. Cutoff plastic bottles shielded padlocks from snow and ashes had been thrown on the ground for walking but the lamp that usually lit the yard was dark. Arkady hesitated beside a playground set of monkey bars sheathed in ice. He stayed still; the stiffness of his neck worked for him and the burns on his neck kept him warm. No blinding headlights rose. Merely, a dot like a
