So the boy lived at Three Stations in a bubble, alone, above the crowd. Every day he explored the count room, the cashier’s cage, the corridor behind one-way mirrors, the security room with its elastic restraints. Black jackets and bow ties hung in the dealers’ lounge. Zhenya wore a tie loose around his neck and imagined the envy of VIPs and the awe of beautiful women as he approached the roulette table with the long, confident strides of a new Bobby Fischer.
The rain continued. Zhenya spent half the day by the casino window before he saw Maya standing on the curb in front of Leningrad Station. Something wayward about her made him think that she didn’t know or care where she was. She pushed the hood of her jacket back and lifted her face to the sky, her scalp a naked blue.
She wasn’t Zhenya’s problem. It only irritated him that he had confided in her enough to reveal his access to Peter the Great and break his own rules about not entering or leaving the casino in the daytime, no lights at night and, most of all, no visitors. The casino was his realm as long as he was alone.
The militia no longer posted men at the casino. Police cars cruised by from time to time and tugged on the padlock on the front entrance but they never bothered with the courtyard in back. Zhenya concluded that the militia had been kept ignorant of the combination to prevent everything that wasn’t bolted down from disappearing in the middle of the night.
In the meantime the ventilation system automatically cleaned the air. Champagne was chilled and the icemaker filled to the brim. The owners could walk in and have their casino up and running within an hour.
For Zhenya the casino was a theme park. In the daytime he could lie down on the carpet and take in sparkling chandeliers and murals of virgins preparing for a visit from Peter, who claimed a monarch’s right to sample the beauties of his empire, from hot-eyed Circassian exotics to buxom, blue-eyed girls of the Ukraine. The painter had captured each in a state of high anticipation.
At night the carpet was softer than some beds he had known. The slot machines were musketeers in caftans with recorded encouragement like, “One more for the czar!” Zhenya lifted the cloth off the roulette table and found everything in place: blue baize, plaques, winning markers, croupier rakes.
He spun the wheel and tossed a silvery ball counter to the blur of red and black numbers. While the ball rode the rim the sound was circular, and as the ball lost momentum it clicked off diamond-shaped studs, hopped erratically from one slot to another and finally came to rest on “0,” the house’s number.
He picked up the ball again and threw it the length of the gaming room. Swept a stack of candy-red $50,000 plaques to the floor. Kicked a box that exploded into poker chips.
8
Arkady expected that when he returned to Yaroslavl Station he would find the trailer lit like a circus tent. Instead, his headlights found only Victor with a bloody nose.
“The trailer’s gone.” Victor pressed a handkerchief against his nose. “It was Colonel Malenkov and his men. They towed it away. Malenkov said it was a public nuisance.”
“Did Malenkov know he was towing away a crime scene?”
“The colonel says there was no crime. That you can sit on your dick and spin, because he is still carrying our Olga on the books as an overdose. He likes his statistics the way they are. How does the nose look?”
“Crusting up nicely. What happened?”
“Some pushing and shoving.”
“The colonel can’t make all the evidence disappear. Willi found clonidine in her stomach and a lethal dose of ether in her lungs. What’s the matter?”
“I don’t see a lot of official backup around here. I just see you and me out on a limb.”
“This is a good case, Victor.”
“Then why are we alone?”
“It’s an advantage.”
“An advantage? Do you appreciate the futility of one man talking to a hundred prostitutes and crazies to find a single sober, reliable witness? If I’d asked, ‘Has anyone seen a giant lizard?’ I might’ve gotten somewhere. We have no identification, no witness, no scene of the crime and no support.” Victor looked wistfully toward a kiosk with shelves of vodka. Arkady felt the plunge in Victor’s mood and could feel the power of his thirst.
“Have you got a good suit?” Arkady asked.
“What?”
“Do you have something appropriate to wear to the Nijinsky Fair tonight? We have an invitation but we have to blend in.”
“You and me with millionaires?”
“I’m afraid so. They’ve had some bad times lately.”
“Huh. What should I say to a bloodsucker who’s lost a million dollars?”
“You express compassion.”
“I could kill him and feed him to the pigs.”
“Well, something in between.”
Apartment lights came on in the high-rise across from the station. Wives would be dressing themselves, pulling clothes on children, making breakfast. Men would be sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking the first cigarette of the day and wondering what had happened to their lives.
Eva, for example, had disappeared from Arkady’s life like an actress who, in the middle of a play, decided that if her lines in Act I were poor, her lines in Act II were no better. She sent Arkady a note that said, I will not wait around until they kill you. I won’t be the grieving widow of a man who insists on teasing the executioners of the state. I will not be there when someone shoots you in your car or answering the doorbell and I won’t walk in your funeral cortege.
Arkady thought that was a little harsh. Backward even, considering she was a medical volunteer who answered the siren call of every disaster. That they had met at Chernobyl was a bad sign. They loved each other, only the half-life of that love was shorter than he had supposed.
Victor said, “We’re back where we started with Olga. I checked with Missing Persons. Nobody’s missed her yet.”
“We can cover the apartments together.”
“Do we have to? I mean, what’s the point? No one cares about a dead prostitute.”
“What if she’s not?” Arkady asked. “What if Olga was not a prostitute?”
“You’re joking.”
“What if she’s not?”
“Excuse me, but the only thing we know for certain about this case is that Olga was a prostitute. She dressed like a prostitute, was tattooed like a prostitute and she pulled off her panties like a prostitute in a trailer no normal person would set foot in.”
“What everybody notices about her is that she doesn’t have a scratch or a bruise. No needle tracks. Victor, show me a prostitute here that isn’t damaged one way or the other.”
“She was new in the game is all. See, I know what you’re up to. You’re trying to keep me too busy to drink. I’m not a dog you keep busy chasing a ball.” Victor had a vicious grin. “I’d kill for a drink.”
“Where are her rings? From her tan lines she had five rings on her fingers. They weren’t in her bag.”
“Probably the man she was with took them. Maybe that’s what was going on, a robbery.”
“For a streetwalker’s jewelry? Did you get any pictures?”
Victor produced a pocket-size video camera.
“Enjoy.”
The first image on the view panel was Olga as she was found half naked on the mattress, her head turned, her legs crossed so that her right heel touched her left toe. Her right arm was raised overhead as if she were a bride tossing her bouquet over her shoulder. Victor had carried out some interviews. The prostitutes were righteously pleased that an interloper had been eliminated. Pimps turned away. Street boys were disappointed that the body was not on display. The homeless asked for loose change. Drunks screwed up their faces in confusion. All in all, they constituted a human menagerie, not a witness pool.
Arkady rewound back to Olga.
“That’s an unnatural position.”
“So?”
“As if he killed her and arranged her body. He pulled her panties off so that w
e would gape. Gape and not see.” Arkady thought there was just a chance that someone in the dark glowed with pride. He looked up at the apartment building on the other side of the station, at balconies with a perfect view.
The building was eight stories high, six one-bedroom apartments to a floor. Victor and Arkady only called on the five apartments that had been lit when they first answered the radio call.
Apartment 2C. Volchek and Primakov, bear-size Siberians with furtive eyes. Both loggers, thirty-five years of age, in rooms so cold the air conditioner shivered. The scent of something rotten was coated by the floral spray of an air freshener. A saw lay in the bathtub. In the refrigerator, mold and a case of beer. They said they had played cards and watched DVDs all night. Arkady pictured them swatting salmon in a stream.
Apartment 4F. Weitzman, ninety, widower, retired metallurgist, observant Jew who took seriously the Torah’s injunction against operating equipment during Shabbos. From sunset Friday to sunset Saturday even flicking an electrical switch or turning a dial was forbidden. If he wanted to take the elevator, he had to ride it until someone went to his floor. He had shaped his life to take into account every possible misstep, but he had nodded off during a television documentary on Putin’s early years— Just Another Boy! —and awoke to a rebroadcast of the same show. He had seen the documentary six times so far. When Arkady turned off the set it was like cutting a man down from the rack.
Apartment 4D. Army General Kassel, forty-two, answered the door in a civilian raincoat and shoes.
The general was a resident of Petersburg in Moscow on what he claimed was military business, although Arkady saw expended champagne bottles on the floor and heard a woman sobbing in the bedroom.
In a whisper Kassel said he was only passing through and hadn’t noticed a black trailer in the dark at a hundred meters and knew nothing about any activity there.
Arkady asked the general how long he had been awake.
“You woke me up.”
Victor asked, “Were you here all night?”
“With my wife.”
“Who besides your wife?”
“No one.”
A bad lie poorly told unless Kassel slept half dressed. And the array of dirty glasses and full ashtrays were the remains of a larger party than two. Also Kassel’s weight was forward on the balls of his feet, waiting for something, anticipating something.
But if Kassel was hiding something, who wasn’t? As Victor liked to say, “That’s the problem with interrogations, so many lies, so little time.”
Apartment 3C. Anna Furtseva at eighty-eight was a living legend. Arkady and Victor didn’t know she was that Anna Furtseva until the door was opened by a small, imperious woman in a rich caftan, lips mainly lipstick and eyes outlined in kohl. Behind her stood life-size photographs of black men with penis sheaths and hair adorned with feathers of birds of paradise. Of Masai warriors mixing a drink of milk and blood. Of Russian convicts covered in tattoos.
“You’ll have some tea,” Furtseva said. It was a statement, not a question.
While she bustled to the kitchen Arkady took in the rest of the apartment, a magpie’s nest of the exotic and almost junk: a Persian carpet, ottomans with split leather, Mexican serapes, Balinese puppets, stuffed monkeys and photographs on every surface. Across the room an ancient wolfhound sighed.
Victor saluted photographs of a young Furtseva with Hemingway, Kennedy, Yevtushenko and Fidel.
“The major cocksmen of our time.”
“Pardon?” Furtseva returned with a tray of tea, sugar and jam.
“Your photographs are a major comment on our time,” Arkady said.
“Ahead of its time,” Victor maintained.
Furtseva poured. “Yes. We called the show of the three men Evolution. It was 1972. The KGB tore it down the same day we put it up. We resisted but we were goldfish against sharks. I am surprised you even heard of it.”
“But it was historic,” Victor said.
“With history goes age. Age is overrated. Do notice the portraits of dancers on the piano. From Nijinsky to Baryshnikov.” They were all male and captured in midair, except for an older man in a white suit hanging back in the shadow of a doorway. “I’m afraid Nijinsky was a little gaga by the time I caught up with him.”
He and Victor sank into ottomans while Furtseva settled in a chair, her legs tucked up in a girlish fashion. It struck Arkady that if Cleopatra had lived to eighty-eight she would have looked a little like Furtseva. Everything was done with a flourish. When the wolfhound farted Furtseva lit a match and burned off the methane in the air with a royal wave. “Now tell me what this is all about. I’m on pins and needles. I saw an ambulance take someone from the trailer. Did somebody die?”
“A girl,” Victor said. “Probably from an overdose, but we have to consider every possibility. Were you awake at midnight?”
“Of course.”
“Do you suffer from insomnia?”
“I benefit from insomnia. However, I have developed a problem with sunlight. I can’t let any into the apartment. I have to draw these ridiculous blue shades during the day and I can only go out at night. The joke is on me since I’m a photographer.”
Victor said, “So you do still take photographs.”
“Oh, yes. Such interesting characters to see at Three Stations. Like creatures at a watering hole.”
Victor politely dunked his sugar cube. “Did you see the trailer being taken away?”
“Of course.”
“Did you notice anyone go in or out of the trailer before it was taken away?”
“No. Was the girl a prostitute?”
“That’s all we know for sure.”
“I suppose the trailer was taken away for more analysis?”
Near the Arctic Circle, Arkady thought.
The dog hiccuped and Furtseva opened a fresh box of matches.
Victor asked, “You saw nothing unusual tonight?”
“Apart from the removal of the trailer, no. I’m sorry, gentlemen.”
Victor stood and almost bowed. “Thank you, Madame Furtseva, for the excellent tea. If you remember something else, anything at all, please call me. I’m leaving you my card.” He laid it by his cup.
She hesitated. “There is one thing. I suppose it’s totally unrelated.”
“Please. You never know.”
“Well, my downstairs neighbors, the two Siberians…”
“Volchek and Primakov. We’ve met them.”
“Not tonight but the night before they snuck into the building with body bags. Full bags. Yesterday I got off on the wrong floor—they all look the same, you know—and before I put my key in the door, I heard them talk about dismembering a body.”
Furtseva’s eyes shined.
Arkady joined the conversation. “You were snooping.”
“Not intentionally.”
“Did you try your key in the lock?”
“No.”
“How long were you at the door?”
“A few seconds. Ten at the most.”
“Did they open the door?”
“Yes, but I sent the elevator to the top while I took the stairs holding my shoes.”
“A close call.”
“Yes.”
“You’re very pleased with yourself.”
“You don’t have to whisper. My hearing is excellent.”
“Do you wear eyeglasses?”
“For reading.”
“For reading but not for distance? Do you understand what I mean by distance?”
“I was a filmmaker in the war. I learned how to calculate distance at Stalingrad.”
This was dangerous, Arkady thought. He and Victor were walking on their knees from lack of sleep. Thanks for the tea, but the last thing they needed was a legend aching for adventure. From the alarm on Victor’s face he finally grasped the peril they were in.
Arkady said, “Very well, Madame Furtseva, please tell me carefully what Volchek and Primakov said. Their exact words.”
“Exactly?”
“Exactly.”
“In that Siberian drawl of theirs one said, ‘Where do I bury her fucking head?’ The other said, ‘Up your ass, where your head is.’ The first one said, ‘She’s going to leave a real mess in the fucking van.’ The second one said, ‘Stop shitting your pants. She’s been dead long enough; she’s not going to bleed.’ Then they suddenly stopped talking and that’s when I left the door.”
She lit a match as if for punctuation.
Arkady said, “These are not men to fool around with. Have you seen them since then?”
“No, but I certainly heard them.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Could you put a time to that?”
“Since dinner. I heard them swearing and drinking beer and watching football.”
Victor asked, “You’re absolutely sure, Madame Furtseva? All night? Here?”
“Every minute.”
“Did they seem to show any interest when the trailer was removed?”
“No.”
“Did they ever show any interest in the trailer anytime?”
“No.”
Victor spread his arms in relief. The Siberians could slaughter victims left and right, but as long as they had no connection to the trailer, this was somebody else’s mess.
9
Watching Maya was agony. Zhenya watched her futile attempts to accost passengers as they stepped off the morning train from Yaroslavl. Now the isolation she had maintained during the trip worked against her. No one remembered her red hair or her baby. No one had ever heard of Auntie Lena. She mentioned the card game and arguments. Like every other ride in hard class, people said. They were going to work. No time to talk. She ran after a priest she remembered by the crumbs on his beard. This time he wore a faint dusting of confectioners’ sugar. He had no recollection of her.
Zhenya saw Maya wilt under the maddening interrogation of babushkas. Darling, how could you lose a baby? Did you pray to Saint Christopher, dear? Was it your little brother? This never would have happened in the old days. Are you on drugs? At least when a Gypsy begs you see the baby.