“Were the Chechens armed?”

“No doubt, Chechens usually are. And if they weren’t, Isakov’s squad had been searching houses and confiscating arms for weeks. They had plenty of weapons to add.”

“Were there any surviving witnesses?”

“No. I arrived by helicopter minutes after the killing because I was scheduled to ride with Isakov’s unit again. I’d been invited by Isakov personally. As we approached I could see Marat Urman directing Borodin and the others running around a truck. Half the Chechens were around a campfire. It wasn’t like any firefight I ever saw before. When we came in to land Marat waved us off. They canceled from the ground. No interviews, no joining the squad. It was a complete turnaround. Suddenly even I took up too much room.”

“What about the rest of the squad? There were six Black Berets at the bridge. Isakov, Urman and Borodin make three. Who were the other three?”

“I don’t know. They were new to me. Men were being rotated in and out.”

“Were they here today?”

“No, but I have their names in my notes.”

“You kept the notes?”

“A reporter always keeps his notes.”

“Did you ever hear about death squads in Chechnya?”

Ginsberg had to laugh. “Chechnya was nothing but death squads. That was how soldiers got by.”

“Russian troops hired themselves out?”

“When necessary. But in that bloodbath there’ll never be a charge. We’re the winners and we don’t hang our dirty laundry in public. If you are after Isakov you’d better act fast because if he wins this election for the Senate he’ll be immune. You’d have to catch him standing over a body, a knife in his hand and blood pooling at his feet, to arrest him.”

Arkady asked in as flat a voice as possible, “Do you remember, when you were in Chechnya, hearing about a doctor named Eva Kazka?”

“No, although there was a doctor on the wrong side.”

“What do you mean?”

“On the Chechen side. I never got her name. She didn’t take up arms but she worked in the hospital in Grozny. They say she showed up on a motorcycle; can you believe that? We were shelling the city and there wasn’t much hospital left, but supposedly she treated rebels and Russians alike. Then she disappeared. OMON looked for her but never found her. Maybe she was a fantasy.”

The number of Black Berets in the lobby was thinning out, moving back to the courtroom. Isakov and Urman were gone. Arkady was late for picking up Platonov, and here he was out in the snow with a small, crooked drunk.

Ginsberg said, “I have pictures from the helicopter. Just two.”

“Can I see them?”

“Why not? Mayakovsky Square at eleven. Is that agreeable?” He took Arkady’s card, dropped it, clumsily picked it out of the snow. “What do you think? Do you think the pizza deliveryman was a terrorist? I hope so because I got him killed by not turning in Isakov or Marat or Borodin.” He stared vacantly at the pile of saplings. Anyone could see that they had just been tossed off the back of a truck. “But if it’s my word against Isakov’s, who’s going to believe me? Marat said if he heard I was telling stories, he was going to come and straighten me. Apparently some people he straightens, some people he bends. I deserve it.” He snapped out of his reverie. “Anyway, there you are, two versions of the truth from one man. You choose.”

9

Time in a refrigerated drawer had altered Kuznetsov. He looked as if a four-year-old had colored him, crayoned his face, belly and feet a livid maroon and the rest of his body a cool blue sewn up in front with heavy twine. He’d flattened a little, sucked in his eyes and let his jowls hang loose. Because of the sugar in alcohol he smelled of spoiled fruit.

His wife occupied the adjoining table. His and hers. Arkady took off his jacket and pulled on latex gloves while Platonov stood aside, like a man waiting to be properly introduced.

“You’re poaching.” A junior pathologist came chugging. He was small, with a damp, freshly hatched quality. “It’s no bother, but the detectives said these were finished. I’d just hate to get on the wrong side of Isakov and Urman.”

“As would we all. Busy night?” Arkady asked. All six granite tables were occupied, spigots running, although he didn’t see any autopsies under way.

“Hypothermics. It’s a cold night. We pick them up but we don’t perform autopsies unless they’re violent deaths.”

“Which you did for the two Kuznetsovs.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re done?”

“Unless someone claims them.”

“If not?”

“It’s the potter’s field.”

“So you have time to help us.”

“Do what?”

“Get the flute.”

Platonov’s ears pricked up. “A flute in a morgue? See, that’s the sort of thing I only encounter with you, Renko.”

The grandmaster had arrived at Arkady’s apartment in a foul mood, having waited hours to be picked up and full of complaints about old paramours. “At a certain age women don’t want the lights on for sex, they want pitch-dark.” He had shown Arkady the bruises and scratches suffered from crossing the bedroom. “Whereas a man that age has to visit the bathroom during the night fairly often. Between the champagne bottles, the fucking cat and the coffee table it was an obstacle course.”

Platonov seemed invigorated to see the morgue’s dead, the day’s hypothermia cases, a windfall of frail, bleached bodies that were old but not as old as he. “This is the House of the Dead, the ferry on the River Styx,” Platonov announced. “The final checkmate!” In his disheveled coat and shapeless hat he wandered among cadavers, reading charts, pleased with himself and saying, “Younger…younger…younger…younger. It makes a man philosophical, doesn’t it, Renko?”

“Some it makes philosophical, some just throw up.”

The pathologist returned with a hair dryer and a flute case. From the case he took a velvet cloth and unwrapped a glass cylinder more the dimensions of a pennywhistle than a flute. The cylinder was packed with purple crystals. Each end had a rubber stopper.

“This is the flute.” Arkady put the cylinder in Platonov’s hands. “Your task is to warm it up.”

“What’s inside?”

“Iodine crystals. Try not to breathe the fumes.”

“Such interesting evenings with you, Renko. Sincerely.”

With the pathologist’s help Arkady rolled Kuznetsov onto his face. The cleaver wound on the back of the neck gaped to the bone.

“One swing; quite a feat for a woman too drunk to stand,” Arkady said.

The pathologist said, “I heard that she confessed twice, once at the murder scene and once in her cell.”

“And then swallowed her tongue.”

Kuznetsov’s back was dotted with moles, and tufts of wiry hair that sprouted on the shoulder blades, where angels had wings.

Between the shoulder blades was a tattoo the size of a hockey puck of a shield with OMON written across the top, TVER across the bottom and, in the center, the tiger’s head emblem of the Black Berets.

Arkady unfolded a copy of the photo Zoya had given him of her husband’s tattoo of a tiger facing down wolves. The head of Filotov’s tiger and the OMON tiger were identical. Now that he had a reference point, Arkady saw that the rest of Filotov’s more elaborate tattoo-the craven wolves, deep woods and mountain stream-was a later addition, including the city name TVER, which the tattoo artist had inscribed on a branch.

The pathologist turned on the hair dryer and ran warm air up and down the dead man’s arms. “Fingerprints on skin are tricky because skin is always growing, shedding, sweating, stretching, folding, rubbing off. This is just a demonstration, right?”

“Right,” Arkady said.

The pathologist inserted a plastic tube into the rubber stopper at one end of the cylinder, removed the stopper from the other, slipped the loose end of the tube between his lips and blew. He blew smoothly while he moved the open end of the flute up and down the dead man’s arms, forcing out warm iodine fumes that would combine with skin oils to make a latent print visible, a simple task that demanded care because iodine fumes could corrode metal, let alone the soft tissues of the mouth.