Arkady looked toward the bar. In the main, detectives tended to be older men who were fairly silent, often overweight, with cigarette ash on the front of their sweaters and a pistol tucked in back. By comparison, the Black Berets in their black-and-blues and holstered guns were young and pumped with muscle. There were also civilians, women as well as men, who liked to rub shoulders with police, buy them a drink and hear a story.
“Quite a crowd tonight.”
“It’s Friday.”
“Right.” Always good to keep track, Arkady thought. “International Women’s Day, in fact.”
“I don’t think I know any women.”
“What about Luba?”
“My wife? You have me on a technicality.”
Arkady checked his watch. He was supposed to meet Ginsberg in five minutes. “You haven’t scalped anyone today, I hope.”
“No, thank you. I reviewed the Zelensky tapes-”
“The Stalin tape or the porn?”
“-and circulated a still of the four prostitutes who saw Stalin on the Metro platform among my colleagues in Vice. No one recognized them. Prostitutes and pimps are pretty strict about their territory. These girls must have parachuted in.”
“Good.” Victor could have told him as much over the phone, but Arkady wanted to be encouraging.
“Also I suspected that someone as virtuous as you hadn’t looked at the porn as closely as I would.”
“I’m sure you didn’t miss a thing.”
“Remember Skuratov?”
“Yes.” Skuratov was a prosecutor general who threatened to investigate corruption in the Kremlin. He was undermined by the release of the videotape of him or someone who looked like him frolicking in a sauna with a pair of naked girls.
“Skuratov denied he was the guy getting the ultimate massage, but a spy chief named Putin analyzed the tape and declared Skuratov was the man. Soon we have a new prosecutor general and the spy is president. Once again, history turns on a woman’s ass. The moral is, examine all the evidence. You never know when or how your chance will come.”
Arkady checked his watch. “I have to go.”
“Wait.” Victor untied the office folder and drew out a photograph of a couple tangled in bed. “The man is Boris Bogolovo, called Bora, from Tver. You had an encounter with him outside the Chistye Prudy Metro.”
“He slipped on the ice.” Arkady recognized the schoolgirl Marfa, but what caught his eye was the tiger’s head tattoo on Bora’s chest. “OMON.”
“Correct. Here’s the kicker, though.” Victor produced a still of a man whose long hair hid his face. On his shoulder was a tattoo of the OMON tiger facing down a pack of wolves. The words OMON and TVER were set in an intricate background of a stone bridge, willows and a mountain stream. Next to the photo Victor placed the photo supplied by Zoya Filotova. “It’s Alexander Filotov, her husband. And the tattoo, I have to say, is a masterpiece.”
“Or a bull’s-eye.”
As Arkady left he had to push through Black Berets drinking at the bar. They were sizable men, and they drank in unison, rapping their glasses on the counter, letting the bartender pour vodka to the brim and on “Go!” downing the drink in one swallow. Warm work; every man was sweating and red-faced.
“Pizza delivery!” the loser shouted; it never ceased being funny.
10
The first reaction of many Russians when Chechnya declared itself an independent nation was to laugh. The Moscow criminal world was so dominated by the Chechen mafia that the announcement was viewed as nothing more than a gang declaring itself a government. The problem was that Chechens believed the declaration and, more than ten years later, the war went on.
Arkady had never tried to extract Eva’s past in Chechnya, not forcefully enough; when the war came up in conversation she always fell silent. All she would say was that she rode a motorcycle from village to village to make her rounds. She made it sound like a Sunday drive. Others called the route Sniper Alley. Certain questions demanded attention. If she entered the conflict on the rebel side, how did she end up with Russian troops? How long had she been with Isakov? How ridiculous a figure had Arkady become? Late for his meeting, would he by running to Mayakovsky Square cause his lungs to explode?
There was no sign of Ginsberg at Mayakovsky’s statue. The brawny poet of the Revolution loomed overhead, a bronze arm raised against the snow. Arkady wondered whether the journalist was coming by Metro or by car. The crush in the subway might be unbearable for a hunchback and a taxi would be sitting in the traffic Arkady had escaped by parking his car in the middle of the street and telling traffic police to guard it. Still, he was half an hour late and anxious that Ginsberg might be the first Russian ever to be punctual.
Arkady pulled up the collar of his pea jacket. The heat lamps of outdoor cafes were inviting. He and Ginsberg could sit under one and turn themselves like toast. On Arkady’s second tour of the square he noticed two militia cars with their lights off blocking a corner where a snowplow operated. The plow went back and forth over the same spot. As Arkady approached, an officer jumped out of the near car to intercept him.
“An accident?” Arkady showed his ID.
“Yeah.” With a hint of fuck off.
“Where are the cars?”
“No cars.”
“Then why don’t you let traffic through?”
“I’m not supposed to say anything.”
Arkady saw no metal parts or sparkling glass on the street.
“A pedestrian?” Arkady asked.
“A drunk. He was lying in the street when the plows came through. With snow falling and snow coming off the blade, the drivers don’t see much. They just rolled right over him. Rolled him flat.”
The other patrol car hit its headlights. The beams illuminated mounds of rosy snow.
“Did you hear his name?”
“I don’t know. A yid, I think.”
“That’s it?”
“A midget. A midget yid. Who’s going to see that on a night like this?”
“Was he carrying anything?”
“I don’t know. The detectives say it was an accident. The detectives-”
“Isakov and Urman?”
The officer returned to his car to check. The plow packed and scraped the snow into rosy marble. He shouted back over the roof of the car, “Yeah, Detectives Isakov and Urman. They say it’s a shame but it was an accident, nothing to make a fuss about.”
“Well, they’re busy men.”
By the time Arkady returned to Party headquarters the celebration had dwindled down to Platonov, the propagandist Surkov and Tanya. Why she had stayed wasn’t clear, although it was obvious that Surkov was desperate to impress-beautiful women who wandered into Party headquarters generally had the wrong address-and the group had squeezed into his office so that he could show off his four phones, three televisions, and all the remote controls that a media-wise professional would need. A laptop open on the desk emitted an azure glow. The walls were covered with photos of past Soviet glory: the Russian flag lifted to the roof of the Reichstag, a cosmonaut in the space station Mir, a mountain climber exulting on Everest. A glass case held a gilded saber from Syria and a silver plate from Palestine, final tributes rendered to the Party.
Arkady wanted to say something about Ginsberg, to register the journalist’s death in some manner. It was possible that Ginsberg was drunk and had fallen under a plow; Arkady himself had seen the man stumble off the curb outside the courtroom. And it was possible that Isakov and Urman only happened to get the call. It was possible the moon was made of cheese. It was certain only that the two detectives were always a step ahead of him and that whatever Ginsberg had wanted Arkady to see was gone.
Everyone else’s attention was fixed on a white uniform tunic that Surkov lifted out of a wooden crate stamped Classified Archives of the CPSU.