The rowboat was tied to the raft.

“She swam back?” someone suggested.

The General pulled off his boots and dove into the water. Holding the flashlight high, he swam one-handed to the raft, where he treaded water and directed the beam underneath the barrels of the raft. He hauled himself up the ladder and said, “Not here.” His voice carried across the water. He played the flashlight around the pond and its fringe of cattails and reeds. “Not there.”

“Where are the stones?” Arkady asked. “I helped her find stones.”

“Stones for what?”

“I don’t know.”

His father looked to the heavens and then brought the flashlight down to the white buoy. As the raft rocked the barrels made a gulping sound. Arkady wished to be somewhere else, anywhere else. His father climbed down to the boat and rowed to the dock.

“Just the boy.”

Arkady sat in the stern as his father rowed.

“Take the flashlight.”

They coasted the last few meters.

His mother floated upside down beneath the surface, one arm tied by a cotton strip to the buoy anchor of a cinder block and rope. The light on her white dress made her milky and luminous. She was still barefoot. Her eyes and mouth were open, her hair stirred and, with motes moving by, she looked like an angel flying. She had taken no chances. Not only had she tied a hand to the cinder block, but she had weighted the hand with butterfly netting full of stones.

“Are those the stones?”

“Yes.”

“You gathered them?”

“I helped.”

“And you didn’t come tell me?”

“No.”

Without another word, his father turned the boat around and rowed to the dock, where his staff officers waited, stripped to their pants. Sergeant Belov helped Arkady out.

His father said, “Get him up to the house, anywhere, before I kill him.”

0830. ICP: 17 mm Hg. BP: 120/83. HR: 75.

“Those are good numbers, aren’t they?”

“No thanks to you, detective. Someone visited the ICU last night. Fortunately, they must not have noticed that you were in an alcoholic stupor.”

“Totally pissed. So, Renko is through the crisis? He’s okay?”

“He’s alive. As what, no one can say.”

14

Arkady was in a ward with eight beds, each with a curtain for privacy, a night table without a light and a call button that was disconnected. On the other hand, Elena Ilyichnina came every morning to check his incisions. She was a big woman with beautiful eyes and in her lab coat and high white toque she looked like a master baker.

“Don’t talk. Your airway is still raw. Nod or shake your head or write on the pad. Are they giving you enough water? Chicken broth? Good.” She smiled sweetly, but Arkady had seen her terrorize the nursing staff with threats of what she would do if any patient of hers was left unattended. “You’re healing nicely.”

He pointed to his forehead.

“So you have a little hole in your head. Don’t be a baby. In three months no one will be able to tell. You have much bigger holes in the back of your head, believe me. Also a little titanium. When your hair grows back no one will know. Look at the bright side. Practically no brain death, and because the trauma was a bullet, not a tumor, the recovery should be straightforward.”

Arkady wrote, “Headache.”

“Two days after brain surgery, what a surprise. It’ll go away. In the meantime, don’t sit up too fast. There is a risk of seizure; in your case, very small. We’ll give you something for the pain. The main thing now is no sneezing. Then you’ll know about a headache.”

Arkady wrote, “Mirror.”

“No, not a good idea.”

He underlined “Mirror.”

“You’re not a princess in a fairy tale. How to put this kindly? You’re a man with a hole in his head, a black bruise around his neck, and no hair. You will not like what you see. I know your type. You’re the dedicated investigator who goes right back to work. Bullets bounce off you.” She held up a box of tissues. “What shape is this? Write it down.”

Arkady went blank.

“It’s a square,” she said.

She put the tissue box down and pulled an orange from her lab coat.

“What shape is this?”

It was familiar to him, but he couldn’t put a name to it.

“What color is it?” she asked.

The word was on the tip of his tongue.

“The area of the brain that the bullet impacted processes visual information, that is, shapes and colors. If your brain cells are only damaged they can gradually repair themselves.”

Arkady looked at the patient in the next bed, an accident victim with a leg in traction. He had a something-shaped cast and he was sipping something-colored juice through a something. The words were right there, behind a pane of glass.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

He wrote, “Going to casino.”

“You have no memory of the man who shot you?”

He shook his head. He recalled arriving at the casino and getting into the television van with…Who was it? What kind of brain was this? He started to get out of bed and was stopped by nausea and dizziness. Elena Ilyichnina caught him and helped him fall back against his pillow.

“That was ambitious. There is a problem. The bullet also insulted the cerebellum, which controls balance. I had no idea how difficult a patient you are going to be. You survive a bullet in the head and think you’re the same man you were before.” She held up the orange. “What shape did I say this was?”

It didn’t come to Arkady’s mind.

“What color did I say?”

The answer was a fog.

“By the way, when I was sitting with you and your friend Victor in intensive care, the elevator opened and I had the distinct impression someone came to the ICU. I didn’t hear footsteps, I simply had the impression that they were at the door and then gone. They must have noticed Victor. Victor was drunk and passed out, but I suppose they couldn’t tell.”

Often the case with Victor, Arkady thought.

“Back to work,” Arkady wrote on the pad.

She balanced the orange on his chest. “Practice.”

Victor asked, “Did Elena Ilyichnina tell you about the other night? I was like El Cid, dead, strapped to my saddle, riding out to face the Moors one last time.”

Arkady wrote, “Shitfaced?”

“Yeah. But it worked. Whoever it was took off.”

“Dead man,” Arkady wrote. The man who shot me.

“The assailant at the casino was Osip Igorivich Lysenko. Recently out of incarceration, eighteen months for dealing methamphetamine. His first employment on getting out was road repair. Worked all over the city. I interviewed the women on his crew. They said that they were doing a patch on your block when Lysenko started to act strangely, as if he was in charge. He was weird to begin with, believe me. I went to his digs, a filthy rat hole with plates of garbage and stacks of books on chess by Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer, all the champions. Scribbled in all the books? Better moves. At least, he thought so. He was a meth-head, though, so he might have thought a lot of things.”

“Zhenya.”

“There was a picture of the two of them playing chess, what else? That was the family scam, the Trans-Siberian scam. Osip Lysenko used to take little Zhenya on the train. You know what a long train trip is like. You get bored of looking out the window. You get bored of reading. Two days down and four more to go and you’re bored. Then you notice the door to one compartment is open and inside a father and son are playing chess. It’s a cute scene and you stop for a second to watch.

“The kid wins and the father informs you and everyone else around that the kid never loses. You’re amused. You’re a hydrologist or an engineer or a gold miner from Kamchatka. The father says, ‘If you don’t believe me, play him yourself.’ The kid’s eight, nine, looks younger. And he fucking hands you your head. You, a man of science or a rugged outdoorsman, have your ass kicked in public by a boy because by now the corridor is crowded. This is entertainment, the only entertainment for thousands of kilometers. Lysenko must have made an arrangement with the carriage attendant to stay by her samovar and out of the way.