Serebryaniy Bor, and too late for races at the Hippodrome. But there was the airport. Evening flights from Sheremetyevo headed in all directions, and Hoffman had been in and out of the airport often enough to grease half the staff there. He would have a ticket to Egypt or India or a former-Soviet-stan, any place without an extradition treaty with the United States. He would be whisked through security, ushered to first class and offered champagne. Bobby Hoffman, veteran fugitive, was stealing the march again, and once he was through security, he would be beyond Arkady's reach.
Not that Arkady had any authority to stop Hoffman. He simply wanted to ask him what was buried. And what he had meant when he said that Pasha had somehow been killed? Was Pasha Ivanov pushed or not? Hoffman's driver reached up to place a blue light on the car roof and plowed ahead in the express lane. Arkady slapped on his own official light and swung from lane to lane to stay close. No one slowed. Russian drivers took an oath at birth to never slow, Arkady thought, just as Russian pilots took off no matter what the weather.
But traffic did brake and squeeze around a bonfire in the middle of the road. Arkady thought it was an accident until he saw figures dancing around the fire, executing Hitler salutes and smashing the windshields and headlights of passing cars with rocks and steel rods. As he drew closer, he saw not wood but a blackened car shifting in the flames and spewing the acrid smoke of burning plastic. Fifty or more figures rocked a bus. A woman jumped from the bus door and went down screaming. A three-wheeled Zaporozhets hardly larger than a motorcycle cut in front of Arkady and rammed his fender. Inside were a man and woman, perhaps Arabs. Four men with shaved heads and a red-and-white banner swarmed the car. The largest lifted the car so that its front wheel spun in the air, while another stove in the passenger window with the banner pole. Arkady lifted his eyes to the light towers of Dynamo Stadium blazing ahead and understood what was happening.
Dynamo was playing Spartak. The Dynamo soccer club was sponsored by the militia, and Spartak was the favorite of skinhead groups like the Mad Butchers and the Clockwork Oranges. Skinheads supported their team by stomping any Dynamo fans they found on the street. Sometimes they went a little further. The skinhead holding the front of the Zaporozhets had ripped off his shirt to show a broad chest tattooed with a wolf's head, and arms ringed with swastikas. His friend with the pole beat in the last of the windshield and dragged the woman out by her hair, shouting, 'Get your black ass out of that Russian car!' She emerged with her cheek cut and her hair and sari sparkling with safety glass. Arkady recognized Mrs. Rajapakse. The other two skinheads beat in Mr. Rajapakse's window with steel rods.
Arkady was not aware of getting out of the Zhiguli. He found himself holding a gun to the head of the skinhead clutching the bumper. 'Let go of the car.'
'You love niggers?' The strongman spat on Arkady's raincoat.
Arkady kicked the man's knee from the side. He didn't know whether it broke, but it gave way with a satisfying snap. As the man hit the ground and howled, Arkady moved to the Spartak supporter who was pinning Mrs. Rajapakse to the hood. Since skinheads filled the street and the clip of Arkady's pistol held only thirteen rounds, he chose a middle course. 'If you-' the man had begun when Arkady clubbed him with the gun.
As Arkady moved around the car, the skinheads with the rods gave themselves some swinging room. They were tall lads with construction boots and bloody knuckles. One said, 'You may get one of us, but you won't get both.'
Arkady noticed something. There was no clip in his gun at all. He'd removed it for the drive with Zhenya. And he never kept a round in the breech.
'Then which one will it be?' he asked and aimed first at one man and then the other. 'Which one doesn't have a mother?' Sometimes mothers were monsters, but usually they cared whether their sons died on the street. And sons knew this fact. After a long pause, the two boys' grip on the bars went slack. They were disgusted with Arkady for such a low tactic, but they backed off and dragged away their wounded comrades.
Meanwhile, the general melee spread. Militia piled out of vans, and skinheads smashed bus-stop displays as they ran. The Rajapakses brushed glass from their seats. Arkady offered to drive them to a hospital, but they nearly ran over him in their haste to make a U-turn and leave the scene.
Rajapakse shouted out his broken window, 'Thank you, now go away, please. You are a crazy man, as crazy as they are.'
Holding his ID high, Arkady walked up to the burning car. Victims of the skinheads sprawled on the road and sidewalk, sobbing amid broken side mirrors, torn shirts, shoes. He went as far as a line of militia barricades being rapidly, belatedly erected at the stadium grounds. Hoffman was nowhere in sight, but everywhere was shining glass, in coarse grains and small.
The elevator operator was the former Kremlin guard Arkady had interviewed before. As the floors passed, he looked Arkady up and down. 'You need a code.'
'I have you. You know the code.' Arkady pulled on latex gloves.
The operator shifted, exhibiting the training of an old watchdog. At the tenth floor, he was still uncertain enough to take a mobile phone from his pocket. 'I have to call Colonel Ozhogin first.'
'When you call, tell the colonel about the breakdown in building security the day Ivanov died, how you shut down the elevator at eleven in the morning and checked each apartment floor by floor. Explain why you didn't report the breakdown then.'
The elevator whined softly and came to a stop at the tenth floor. The operator swayed unhappily. Finally he said, 'In Soviet days we had guards on every floor. Now we have cameras. It's not the same.'
'Did you check the Ivanov apartment?'
'I didn't have the code then.'
'And you didn't want to call NoviRus Security and tell them why you needed it.'
'We checked the rest of the building. I don't know why the receptionist was worried. He thought maybe he'd seen a shadow, something. I told him if he missed anything, the man watching the screen at NoviRus would catch it. In my opinion, nothing happened. There was no breakdown.'
'Well, you know the code now. After you let me in, you can do whatever you want.'
The elevator doors slid open, and Arkady stepped into Ivanov's apartment for the fourth time. As soon as the doors closed, he pressed the lock-out button on the foyer panel. Now the operator could call anyone, because the apartment was, as Zurin had said, sealed from the rest of the world.
With its white walls and marble floors, the apartment was a beautiful shell. Arkady removed his shoes rather than track dirt across the foyer. He turned on the lights room by room and saw that other visitors had preceded him. Someone had cleaned up the evidence of Hoffman's vigil on the sofa; the snifter was washed and the cushions were plumped. The photo gallery of Pasha Ivanov still graced the living room wall, although now it seemed sadly beside the point. The only missing photographs were the ones of Rina with Pasha from the bedroom nightstand. And no doubt Ozhogin had been to the scene, because the office was stripped clean of anything that, encrypted or not, possibly held any NoviRus data: computer, Zip drive, books, CDs, files, phone and message machine. All the videotapes and disks were gone from the screening room. The medicine cabinet was empty. Arkady appreciated professional thoroughness.
He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, but this was the last chance he would have to look at all. He remembered the Icelandic fairy, the imp with nothing but a head and foot, who could be seen only out the corner of the eye. Look directly, and he disappeared. Since all the obvious items had been removed, Arkady had to settle for glimpsed revelations. Or the lingering shadow of something removed.
Of course, the home of a New Russian should be shadow-free. No history, no questions, no awkward legalities, just a clear shot to the future. Arkady opened the window that Ivanov had fallen from. The curtains rushed out. Arkady's eyes watered from the briskness of the air.
Colonel Ozhogin had removed everything related to business; but what Arkady had seen of Pasha Ivanov's last night among the living had nothing to do with business. NoviRus was hardly on the point of collapse. It might be soon, with Timofeyev at the helm, but up to Ivanov's last breath, NoviRus was a thriving, ravenous entity, gobbling up companies at an undiminished rate and defending itself from giant competitors and small-time predators alike. Perhaps a ninja had climbed down the roof like a spider, or Anton had slipped through the bars at Butyrka; either was a professional homicide that Arkady had little realistic hope of solving. But Arkady had the sense that Pasha Ivanov was running from something more personal. He had banned virtually everyone, including Rina, from the apartment. Arkady remembered how Ivanov had arrived at the apartment, one hand holding a handkerchief and the other clutching an attache case that seemed light in his hand, not laden with financial reports. What was in the
