moth’s eye swirled in a car: a cigarette brought to the mouth, inhaled and released. The driver had parked at the far end of the row opposite Arkady’s shed. Had Arkady driven in as usual he never would have spotted it.
Arkady backtracked from the yard and went to the front of the building, pausing at the corner. He did not feel up to a physical confrontation or even conversation. All he saw under the streetlamps was an early-morning road crew morosely assembled around a heavy roller sunk in the same pothole they had been working on for a week.
Arkady took the elevator two stories above his own floor and waited for any movement below before descending the stairs. Finally his neck hurt enough for him not to care whether vipers were waiting on the other side of the door and he went in.
He left the lights off. The first thing he did was go to the kitchen and make an ice bag with ice cubes and a dish towel and chew a handful of painkillers for the throat. Still in the dark he checked the closet by feel whether Eva’s suitcase and tapes were still there. They weren’t and he wondered whether she had heard about him and Tanya. News that bad traveled fast.
His last hope was the tiny blinking light of the answering machine. There was a message. Three messages.
“This is Ginsberg. I’m at Mayakovsky Square, in the sidewalk cafe, a little early because I finished the pizza trial story faster than I thought. And now I need a drink. In fact, what I really need to do is take a pee. I could step between cars and no one would be the wiser. (A nervous cough.) I’m sorry to use your home phone, but the card you gave me got messed up and I don’t have the number of your cell. Look, Renko, I don’t think it’s such a great idea, the two of us getting together. This is all about a woman, isn’t it? That’s what people say. It doesn’t sound as if it has much to do with Chechnya. It sounds personal. So I’m going to pass on this.”
The second call, received five minutes later, was a hang-up from the same number.
The third was from the same number ten minutes later but it was not a hang-up.
Ginsberg said, “It’s me again. Did you know that when Mayakovsky shot himself he left a cautionary note about suicide. He wrote, ‘I do not recommend it to others.’ So, Renko, you should be happy. I apologize for my spell of cowardice and, although I would not recommend it to anyone, I will help you. Not face to face. Phone only.” Ginsberg went silent for a moment and Arkady was afraid the message machine would disconnect but it kept turning. “I don’t have to find any old notebooks. Of course, I know who was with Isakov and Urman the day of the so-called Battle at Sunzha Bridge. I saw them all from the helicopter and I checked the roster again when we returned to the base. I’ll take those names to the grave.” Arkady heard Ginsberg light another cigarette. “The roster of heroes: Captain Nikolai Isakov, Lieutenant Marat Urman, Sergeant Igor Borodin, Corporal Ilya Kuznetsov, Lieutenant Alexander Filotov, Corporal Boris Bogolovo. All OMON officers from Tver and all on their second or third tour in Chechnya. Six Black Berets either beat off an assault by forty or fifty heavily armed terrorists or slaughtered a dozen rebels in the camp. As I said before, you choose. Either is possible. I’ve seen Isakov in action. With bullets flying he’s the calmest man I’ve ever seen and his men would follow him anywhere. Especially Urman. They make an unusual team. Isakov’s philosophy is, ‘Immobilize your enemy and he is yours.’ Marat’s is, ‘Cut off his balls, fry his balls, make him watch.’ We were friends then. Now I’m jumping at shadows.” It was a long message, as if the journalist was calling in a story while he could. “Isakov said I was his mirror. He said I was made the way I was so that I wouldn’t be wasted in the army, that I could watch and report the truth. When he waved off the helicopter I put my camera down because I thought, ‘He doesn’t want a mirror anymore. He doesn’t want to see himself.’ I still don’t understand. Given the worst possibility, that at Isakov’s order his men murdered rebels he had allowed to stay in the camp, I ask myself why the Chechens were there to begin with. Anyway, Fate has a way of settling scores, right?
Kuznetsov and his wife were dead and Ginsberg hadn’t jumped at shadows high enough. Arkady gingerly touched his neck. People didn’t have to go to Chechnya to be killed; they could do it right here in Moscow.
Arkady’s cell phone rang. He answered and Victor said, “Are you in a drunk tank with inebriates and addicts puking on your shoes?”
“No.”
“Well, I am. They picked me up outside the Gondolier. Police arresting police, what is the world coming to? I’m the one who suffers the hangovers, isn’t that enough? Children ask me, ‘Why do you drink?’”
“I can imagine.”
“You sound awful.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, I tell the children I drink because when I’m sober I see that life is not a primrose path, no, life is shit. Well, a road with bumps.”
“Potholes.” Arkady edged closer to the window. The women of the road crew had harnessed themselves to the roller handle and were slowly pulling the roller free of the pothole while the foreman urged them on. He looked like he wouldn’t refuse the loan of a whip.
“So I was at the Gondolier when who comes in but Detectives Isakov and Urman, along with some politicians handing out free T-shirts that say ‘I am a Russian Patriot.’ I got one.”
“Eva?” Despite the ice against his neck Arkady’s voice was a croak.
“She wasn’t there. But can you picture it, politicians in our bar? You know what this means? Isakov’s picture will be everywhere and our little plot with Zoya Filotova is over, after all we did.”
“We didn’t do much.”
“Some did more than others.”
Arkady let that enigmatic statement die; he was good for maybe four more words.
“You think Eva will come home?” Victor asked.
“Yes.”
“And Zhenya?”
“Yes.”
“Hope springs eternal?”
“It’s pathetic.”
As Arkady turned off the phone an ice cube squirted out of the dish towel and pinged the windowpane. The foreman on the street looked up. One of the women stumbled. Coins and keys spilled from her jacket and the roller began rolling back into the hole, dragging the women behind, but the foreman only stood and watched the window.
Arkady’s intention had been to stumble to the mattress and collapse, but it occurred to him that Eva had not left her key to the apartment. Eva tended to approach life in an all-or-nothing way. She may have taken the suitcase, but if she had been actually leaving for good she would have locked the door from the outside and slid the key under the door. He found himself on his knees searching the parquet with a penlight. What could have happened, he told himself, was that Isakov came for the suitcase and kept the key so he could get back in when he wanted, a possibility that Arkady was willing to call good news.
The little beam swept the floor like hope at the bottom of a well.
12
Amid the car lots and body shops that stretched along Leningrad Prospect the Casino of the Golden Khan was a fantasy of Oriental domes and minarets. Outside crouched the Russian winter. Inside spread a hush of luxury, of columns carved from malachite around a pool for golden koi and murals of a dreamlike Xanadu. A gilded statue of a Mongol archer presided over a gaming hall with tables for blackjack, poker and American roulette. Only members and their guests made it through the security check at the door and membership cost fifty thousand dollars. That way the club didn’t have to run a credit check.
Because the Golden Khan was more than a casino. It was a social club for millionaires. More business was done informally in the intimate lobbies and bars of the Golden Khan than in any office, and nothing impressed a client as much as dinner at the Khan; the casino’s restaurant featured steak tartare, naturally, and the most expensive wine list in Moscow, keeping in mind the mafia chief who sent back a bottle because it wasn’t expensive enough. A walk-in humidor stored cigars in mahogany drawers with the millionaire’s name etched in brass. A
