By the time Victor returned, Arkady was outside in the Lada, which proved unredeemed by soap. A wind bent the advertising banners along the highway and snapped the canvas. Each car that buzzed past rocked the Lada.
Victor got behind the wheel. "I'll drive you back to your car. You paid the whole thing? What a friend!"
"You know, with the money you've saved eating with me, you could buy a new car."
"Come on, I'm worth it, getting the mobile phone and sharing my repository of knowledge. My head is a veritable Lenin Library."
Mice and all, Arkady thought. As Victor pulled onto the highway, Arkady told him about the return call to Anton, which amused the detective immensely.
"Butyrka! Now, there's an alibi."
Chapter Four
* * *
The address on Butyrka Street was a five-story building of aluminum windows, busted shades and dead geraniums, ordinary in every way except for the line that snaked along the sidewalk: Gypsies in brilliant scarves, Chechens in black and Russians in thin leather jackets, mutually hostile as groups but alike in their forlorn bearing and the parcels that, one by one, they dutifully submitted at a steel door for the thousands of souls hidden on the other side.
Arkady showed his ID at the door and passed through a barred gate to the underbelly of the building, a tunnel where guards in military fatigues lounged with their dogs, Alsatians that constantly referred to their handlers for orders. Let this one pass. Take this one down. The far end opened onto the morning light and – totally hidden from the street – a fairy-tale fortress with red walls and towers surrounded by a whitewashed courtyard; all that was missing was a moat. Not quite a fairy tale, more a nightmare. Butyrka Prison had been built by Catherine the Great, and for over two hundred years since, every ruler of Russia, every tsar, Party secretary and president had fed it enemies of the state. A guard carrying an elongated sniper rifle watched Arkady from a turret and could have been a fusilier. The satellite dishes lining the battlements could have been heads on pikes. In Stalin's era, black vans delivered fresh victims every night to this same courtyard and these same blood-red walls, and questions about someone's health, whereabouts and fate could be answered in a single whispered word: Butyrka.
Since Butyrka was a pretrial prison, investigators were a common sight. Arkady followed a guard through a receiving hall where new arrivals, boys as pale as plucked chickens, were stripped and thrown their prison clothes. Wide eyes fixed on the hall's ancient coffin cells, barely deep enough to sit in, a good place for a monk's mortification and an excellent way to introduce the horror of being buried alive.
Arkady climbed marble stairs swaybacked from wear. Nets stretched between railings to discourage jumping and passing notes. On the second floor, light crept from low windows and gave the impression of sinking, or eyelids shutting. The guard led Arkady along a row of ancient black doors with iron patchwork, each with a panel for food and a peephole for observation.
"I'm new here. I think it's this one," the guard said. "I think."
Arkady swung a peephole tag out of the way. On the other side of the door were fifty men in a cell designed for twenty. They were sniffers, lifters, petty thieves. They slept in shifts in the murk of a caged lightbulb and a barred window. There was no circulation, no fresh air, only the stench of sweat, pearl porridge, cigarettes and shit in the single toilet. In the heat they generated, everyone stripped to the waist, young ones virginally white, veterans blue with tattoos. A tubercular cough and a whisper hung in the air. A few heads turned to the blink of the peephole, but most simply waited. A man could wait nine months in Butyrka before he saw a judge.
"No? This one?" The guard motioned Arkady to the next door.
Arkady peeked into the cell. It was the same size as the other but held a single occupant, a bodybuilder with short bleached-blond hair and a taut black T-shirt. He was exercising with elastic bands that were attached to a bunk bed bolted to the wall, and every time he curled a bicep, the bed groaned.
"This is it," Arkady said.
Anton Obodovsky was a Mafia success story. He had been a Master of Sport, a so-so boxer in the Ukraine and then muscle for the local boss. However, Anton had ambition. As soon as he had a gun, he began jacking cars, peeling drivers out of them. From there, he took orders for specific cars, organizing a team of carjackers and then stealing cars off the street in Germany and driving convoys across Poland to Moscow. Once in Moscow, he diversified, offering protection to small firms and restaurants he then took over, cannibalizing the companies and laundering money through the restaurants. The man lived like a prince. Up by eleven a.m. with a protein smoothie. An hour in the gym. A little networking on the phone and a visit to the auto-repair shops where his mechanics chopped cars. He shopped in clothing stores that wouldn't take his money, dined in restaurants for free. He dressed in Armani black, partied with the most beautiful prostitutes, one on each arm, and never paid for sex. A diamond ring in the shape of a horseshoe said he was a lucky man. At a certain level of society, he was royalty, and yet – and yet – he was dissatisfied.
"It's the bankers who are the real thieves. People bring the money to you, you fuck them and no one lays a hand on you. I make a hundred thousand dollars, but bankers and politicians make millions. I'm a worm compared to them."
"You're doing pretty well," Arkady said. The cell had a television, tape player, CDs. A Pizza Hut box lay under the bottom bunk. The top bunk was stacked with car magazines, travel brochures, motivational tapes. "How long have you been here?"
"Three nights. I wish we had satellite. The walls of this place are so thick, the reception is shit."
"Life is tough."
Anton looked Arkady up and down. "Look at your raincoat. Have you been polishing your car with that? You should hit the stores with me sometime. It makes me feel bad that I'm better dressed inside prison than you are out."
"I can't afford to shop with you."
"On me. I can be a generous guy. Everything you see here, I pay for. Everything is legal. They allow you anything but alcohol, cigarettes or mobile phones." Anton had a restless, sharklike quality that made him pace. A man could get a stiff neck just having a conversation with him, Arkady thought.
"What's the worst deprivation?"
"I don't drink or smoke, so for me it's phones." No one consumed phones like the Mafia; they used stolen mobile phones to avoid being tapped, and a careful man like Anton changed phones once a week. "You get dependent. It's kind of a curse."
"It's led to the demise of the written word. You look in the pink."
"I work out. No drugs, no steroids, no hormones."
"Cigarette?"
"No, thanks. I just told you, I keep myself strong and pure. I am a slave to nothing. It's pitiful to see a man like you smoke."
"I'm weak."
"Renko, you've got to take care of yourself. Or other people. Think of the secondary smoke."
"All right." Arkady put away the pack. He hated to see Anton get worked up. There were actually three Antons. There was the violent Anton, who would snap your neck as easily as shake your hand; there was Anton the rational businessman; and there was the Anton whose eyes took an evasive course when anything personal was discussed. Most of all, Arkady didn't like to see the first Anton get excited.
Anton said, "I just think at your age, you shouldn't abuse your body."
"At my age?"
"Look, go fuck yourself, for all I care."
"That's more like it."
A smile crept onto Anton's lips. "See, I can talk to you. We communicate."
Arkady and Anton did communicate. Both understood that Anton's prize cell was available only because of a belated effort to bring Butyrka's ancient chamber of horrors up to modern European prison standards, and both understood that such a cell would obviously go to the highest bidder. Both also understood that while the Mafia ruled the streets, a subcaste of tattooed, geriatric criminals still ruled the prison yards. If Anton were stuck in an ordinary c
ell, he would be a shark in a tank with a thousand piranhas.
Anton couldn't sit still without twitching a pec here, a deltoid there. "You're a good guy, Renko. We may not see eye to eye, but you always treat a person with respect. You speak English?"
"Yes."
Anton picked up a copy of Architectural Digest from the bunk and flipped to a picture of a western lodge set against a mountain range. "Colorado. Beautiful nature and, as an investment, relatively inexpensive. What do you think?"
"Can you ride a horse?"
"Is that necessary?"
"I think so."
"I can learn. I'll give you the money. Cash. You go and negotiate, pay whatever you think is fair. It could be a beautiful partnership. You have an honest face."
"I appreciate the offer. Did you hear that Pasha Ivanov is dead?"
"I saw the news on television. He jumped, right? Ten stories, what a way to go."
"Did you know him?"
"Me know Ivanov? That's like knowing God."
"You left a message on his mobile phone three nights ago about cutting off his dick. That sounds like you knew him fairly well. It might even sound like a threat."
"I'm not allowed a phone here, so how could I call?"
"You bribed a guard and called from the guards' room."
Anton got to his feet and threw punches as if hitting a heavy bag. "Well, like they say, there's a crow in every flock." He stopped and shook out his arms. "Anyway, if I called Pasha Ivanov, what about?"
"Business. Somebody has been jacking NoviRus Oil trucks and draining the tanks. It's happening in your part of Moscow – in your soup, so to speak."
Anton circled again, throwing jabs, crosses, uppercuts. He backed, covered up, seemed to dodge a punch and then moved forward, rolling his shoulders and snapping jabs while the cell got smaller and smaller. Anton may not have been a champion, but when he was in motion, he took up a lot of room. Finally he dropped his fists and blew air. "He has this prick in charge of security, a former colonel from the KGB. They caught one of my boys with one of their trucks and broke his legs. That's overreaction. It put me in a difficult situation. If I didn't retaliate, my boys would break my legs. But I don't want a war. I'm sick of that. Instead, I wanted to go straight to the top, and also make a point about the colonel's bullshit security by calling Ivanov on his personal phone. I said what I said. It was an opening line; maybe a little crude, but it was meant to begin a dialogue. I have body shops, tanning salons, a restaurant. I'm a respectable businessman. I would have loved to work with Pasha Ivanov, to learn at his knee."
"What was the favor? What did you have to offer him?"
"Protection."
"Naturally."
"Anyway, I never got through and never saw him face-to-face. It seems to me, when Pasha died I was right here, and that phone call proves it."
"Pretty lucky."
"I live right." Anton was modest.
"What did they pick you up for?"
"Possession of firearms."
"That's all?"
A firearms charge was nothing. Since Anton always had a lawyer, judge and bail money standing by, there was no good reason for him to spend an hour in jail, unless he was waiting for some bumbling investigator to come along and officially mark how innocent Anton Obodovsky was. Arkady didn't want to provoke the dangerous side of Anton, but he also didn't like being used.
Anton grabbed some travel brochures off the bunk. "Hey, as soon as I'm out, I'm going on holiday. Where would you suggest? Cyprus? Turkey? I don't drink or do drugs, and that leaves out a lot of places. I want a tan, but I burn easily. What do you think?"
"You want creature comforts? Quiet? Gourmet food?"
"Yeah."
"A staff that caters to your every whim?"
"Right!"
"Why not stay in Butyrka?"
• • •
Zhenya stared like a manacled prisoner at what most people would have called an escape to the country. The population of Moscow was pouring into the low hills that couched the city, to rustic dachas and crowded beaches and giant discount stores, and though the highway was designed with four lanes, drivers improvised and squeezed out six.
Arkady wasn't clear on what good cause benefited from Pasha Ivanov's Blue Sky Charity picnic, but he did not want to miss the millionaires Nikolai Kuzmitch and Leonid Maximov. Such dear friends were sure to appear. After all, they had vacationed with Pasha in Saint-Tropez when a limpet mine was discovered on his Jet Ski. Tomorrow they would be scattered to the four winds on their corporate jets, behind their ranks of lawyers. Hence, Arkady's use of Zhenya as a disguise. Arkady tried to shrug off his guilt by telling himself that Zhenya could use the sun.
"Maybe there'll be swimming. I brought you a swimsuit just in case," Arkady said, indicating a gift-wrapped box at the boy's feet. Up till now Zhenya had ignored it. Now he began crushing it with his heels. Arkady usually kept a pistol in the glove compartment. He'd had the foresight to remove the magazine; he patted himself on the back for that. "Or maybe you're a dry-land kind of man."
Even with cars weaving over the median and the shoulder of the road, traffic advanced at a snail's pace. "It used to be worse," Arkady said. "There used to be cars broken down by the side of the road all the way. No driver left home without a screwdriver and hammer. We didn't know about cars, but we knew about hammers." Zhenya delivered a last savage kick to the box. "Also, windshields had so many cracks, you had to hold your head out the window like a dog to see. What's your favorite car? Maserati? Moskvich?" A long pause. "My father used to take me down this same road in a big Zil. There were only two lanes then, and hardly any traffic. We played chess as we went, although I was never as good as you. Mostly I did puzzles." A Toyota went by with a backseat full of kids playing scissors-paper-rock like normal, happy children. Zhenya was stone. "Do you like Japanese cars? I was once in Vladivostok, and I saw stacks of bright new Russian cars loaded for Japan." Actually, when the cars got to Japan, they were turned to scrap metal. At least the Japanese had the decency to wait until they received the cars before crushing them like beer cans. "What did your father drive?"
Arkady hoped the boy might mention a car that could somehow be traced, but Zhenya sank into his jacket and pulled his cap low. On the side of the road stretched a memorial of tank traps in the form of giant jacks, marking the closest advance of the Germans into Moscow in the Great Patriotic War. Now the memorial was dwarfed by the vast hangar of an IKEA outlet. Balloons advertising Panasonic, Sony, JVC swayed in the breeze above an audio tent. Garden shops offered birdbaths and ceramic gnomes. That was what Zhenya looked like, Arkady thought, a miserable garden gnome with his flapped cap, book and chess set.
"There'll be other kids," Arkady promised. "Games, music, food."
Every card Arkady played was trumped by scorn. He had seen parents in this sort of quagmire – where every suggestion was a sign of idiocy and no question in the Russian language merited response – and Arkady, for all the sympathy he mustered, had always delivered a sigh of relief that he was not the adult on the cross. So he wasn't quite sure why, now, an unmarried specimen like himself should have to suffer such contempt. Sociologists were concerned about Russia's plunging birthrate. He thought that if couples were forced to spend an hour in a car with Zhenya, there'd be no birthrate at all.
"It'll be fun," Arkady said.
Finally Arkady reached a suburb of fitness clubs, espresso bars, tanning salons. The dachas here were not traditional cabins with weepy roofs and ramshackle gardens but prefabricated mansions with Greek columns and swimming pools and security cameras. Where the road narrowed to a country lane, Ivanov's security guards waved him to the shoulder behind a line of hulking SUVs. Arkady had on the same shabby raincoat, and Zhenya looked like a hostage, but the guards found their names on a list. So as infiltrators, Arkady and Zhenya went through an iron gate to a dead man's lawn party.
The theme was Outer Space. Pink ponies and blue llamas carried small children ar
ound a ring. A juggler juggled moons. A magician twisted balloons into Martian dogs. Artists decorated children's faces with sparkle and paint, while a Venusian, elongated by his planet's weak gravity, strode by on stilts. Toddlers played under an inflated spaceman tethered to the ground by ropes, and larger children lined up for tennis and badminton or low-gravity swings on bungee cables. The guest list was spectacular: broad-shouldered Olympic swimmers, film stars with carefully disarranged hair, television actors with dazzling teeth, rock musicians behind dark glasses, famous writers with wine-sack bellies overhanging their jeans. Arkady's own heart skipped a beat when he recognized former cosmonauts, heroes of his youth, obviously hired for the day just for show. Yet the dominating spirit was Pasha Ivanov. A photograph was set near the entrance gate and hung with a meadow garland of sweet peas and daisies. It was of a buoyant Ivanov mugging between two circus clowns, and it as good as gave his guests orders to play, not grieve. The photograph couldn't have been taken too long before his death, but its subject was so much more impish and alive than the recent man that it served as a warning to enjoy life's every moment. The guards at the gate must have phoned ahead, because Arkady felt a ripple of attention follow his progress through the partygoers, and the repositioning of men with wires in their ears. Children sticky from cotton candy raced back and forth. Men collected at grills that served shashlik of sturgeon and beef in front of Ivanov's dacha, ten times the normal size but at least a Russian design, not a hijacked Parthenon. A DJ played Russian bubble gum on one stage, while karaoke ruled a second. Separate bars served champagne, Johnnie Walker, Courvoisier. The wives were tall, slim women in Italian fashions and cowboy boots of alligator and ostrich. They positioned themselves at tables where they could watch both their children and their husbands and anxiously track a younger generation of even taller, slimmer women filtering through the crowd. Timofeyev was in a food line with Prosecutor Zurin, who expectantly scanned the crowd like a periscope. It was not a positive sign that he looked everywhere but at Arkady. Timofeyev appeared pale and sweaty for a man about to inherit the reins of the entire NoviRus company. Farther on, Bobby Hoffman, already yesterday's American, stood alone and nibbled a plate overheaped with food. An outdoor casino had been set up, and even from a distance Arkady recognized Nikolai Kuzmitch and Leonid Maximov. They were youngish men in modest jeans, no Mafia black, no ostentatious gold. The croupiers appeared real, and so did the chips, but Kuzmitch and Maximov hunched over the baize like boys at play.