“Who are you calling?” Zhenya asked. “It’s pretty late.”
“It’s not just late, it’s the hour when men with heads like eggplants walk the earth.” Arkady punched in 33-31 -33, waited, and hung up. He was exhausted.
“Like Baba Yaga.”
“The witch who ate small children? Sure.”
“Like my father.”
Baba Yaga lived in the woods in a house that stood on chicken legs in a yard surrounded by a fence of human bones. Zhenya used to say nothing at all and Arkady would make up adventures about the children who escaped.
“What do you mean? Every weekend we used to go looking for your father.”
Zhenya said nothing.
The mute routine. Zhenya could play that like an artist; it might be a week before he said another word.
“Your father tried to kill me and he would have killed you, but you had us search for him every weekend. Why?”
Zhenya shrugged.
“Did you know what he was going to do?”
Zhenya dropped the chess pieces into a chamois sack in order of value starting with black pawns, another of his rituals. Arkady remembered how in Gorky Park the younger Zhenya would walk around the fountain a magical four times.
“You take good care of your pieces.”
Zhenya placed the rook in the bag.
“It’s like they’re alive, isn’t it?” Arkady said. “You’re not just playing them, you’re helping them. And it’s not just you thinking, it’s them too. They’re your friends.” Zhenya’s eyes shot up, although Arkady was simply using the key that Zhenya had given him. “You said your father was Baba Yaga? Is that who your friends are fighting?”
It was two o’clock in the morning by the digital watch on Zhenya’s thin wrist. An hour suspended in the dark.
“They’re not alive,” Zhenya said. “They’re just plastic.”
Arkady waited.
“But I take care of them,” Zhenya added.
“How do you do that?”
“By not losing.”
“What happened if you lost?”
“I didn’t get supper.”
“Did that happen often?”
“In the beginning.”
“He was pretty good?”
“So-so.”
“How old were you when you beat him in chess for real?”
“Nine. He said he was proud. I broke a dish and he whipped me with a belt. He said it was on account of the dish, but I knew.” Zhenya allowed himself a tiny smile.
“Where was your mother?”
The smile disappeared.
“I don’t know.”
“I understand your father liked to ride trains. He must have been gone a lot of the time.”
“He took us with him.”
“Did you play chess on the train?”
No answer.
“Did you play chess with other passengers?”
“My father wanted me to bring them down a peg or two. That’s what he always said, bring them down a peg or two.”
“Did anyone ever ask why you weren’t in school?”
“On a train? No.”
“Or why you didn’t have a little color in your cheeks?”
“No.”
“Did you ever lose?”
“A few times.”
“What did your father do?”
No answer.
“Finally some gold miners recognized you.”
“They beat my father and threw my chess set under the wheels.”
“Of a train?”
“Yeah.”
“Your father retrieved the set?”
“He sent me. I would have gone anyway.”
“So, you spent a year going back and forth from Moscow to Vladivostok playing chess in a train compartment? A year of your life?”
Zhenya looked away.
“Did you and your father ever have a holiday, go to the beach, run on the grass?” Arkady asked.
Zhenya said nothing, as if such a childhood was a fantasy. But Arkady felt that there was something else missing.
“When I first asked about your father traveling, you said, ‘He took us.’ Who besides you?”
Zhenya said nothing and showed no expression at all.
“Was it your mother?”
Zhenya shook his head.
“Who?”
Zhenya maintained his silence but his eyes grew alarmed as Arkady took the white king from the chamois sack. Arkady turned the piece over in his fingers and hid it in his fist, opened his hand and let the boy snatch the piece back.
“Dora.”
“Who was Dora?”
“My little sister. She wasn’t good at chess. She tried but she lost.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t get her supper.”
Clarity descended on Arkady and clarity was crushing. For a year he thought he had been helping Zhenya search for a loving father, and all that time Zhenya had been stalking a monster.
“So all those times we were searching for your father, what did you want me along for?”
“To kill him.”
Arkady had to rethink everything.
16
Zurin gave a going away party for Arkady, a quiet affair in the prosecutor’s office, just espressos and pastries with other investigators. That Senior Investigator Renko was being bundled off was all the staff knew. Not really demoted, but certainly not promoted. Moved sideways. Reassigned.
“The choice of his post,” Zurin said. “The choice of his post in some beautiful-”
“Backwater,” said a wit.
The prosecutor continued, “Some historical town like Suzdal, a quiet setting far from the stress of Moscow. It
