“Did you?” Arkady asked.

Zhenya nodded. “Then he told me to give it to him to keep it safe and that we’d pick up where we left. ‘Partners again,’ he said. That’s when I ran. He was in rubber boots, but he slipped on the ice and went down. He yelled. He said ‘I’ll wring your neck like a chicken! The judge will give you to me and I’ll wring your neck like a chicken!’ I heard him for blocks.”

“Where did you go?”

“Where Eva works. She told me to stay away from the apartment.”

“That makes sense.”

“And not to tell you because it would end badly. She knew people who could arrange things so that no one got hurt.”

“That’s a special skill. Who did she have in mind?”

“I don’t know.”

Arkady let the lie go by. Zhenya had unloaded quite a lot.

“Eva was right,” Arkady admitted. “It didn’t end well.”

And it wasn’t getting better. He had no memory of writing 33-31-33. Perhaps it was an imaginary number and his notebook was a fiction concocted to smear a better man. He considered the lengths he’d gone to, casting suspicion on the Kuznetsov investigation and, on no evidence, trying to tie Isakov to Borodin’s solitary death in the woods.

Even drunk, Victor had nailed it. Eva had left him. What made him think she wasn’t happy?

The Great Patriotic War paused for the evening news. Five minutes in, Arkady realized that a Russian Patriot demonstration in Tver was being covered. Nikolai Isakov was in the front rank helping to carry a banner that read Restore Russian Pride! At Isakov’s side Marat Urman continuously scanned the crowd, and in the second row stood Eva, sharp and exotic among round faces.

Through a bullhorn Isakov announced, “I was a lad in Tver, I served in the Tver OMON, and I will faithfully represent Tver in the highest levels of government.”

The day was warm enough for many to wear Patriot T-shirts, making the Americans, Wiley and Pacheco, all the more conspicuous in their parkas. As Arkady entered pages for the two political consultants he remembered breakfast in the Hotel Metropol, the harpist’s closed eyes and the hotel phone number scribbled in ballpoint pen inside a matchbook.

Arkady went to the closet and tore through the cardboard box he had brought from the office until he found the matchbook he had taken from Petya, Zelensky’s all-purpose cameraman. “Tahiti-A Gentlemen’s Club” was printed in red letters against a plastic field of pink. The Metropol number was handwritten inside the flap. There was no phone number for the club itself, initially, but as it warmed in his fingers the imprint of an open hand appeared on the front and the back divulged the phone number 33-31-33. Like a mood ring. One digit less than Moscow. He had no conscious memory of seeing the number before; his mind, out of habit, had collected it. The Tver area code was 822.

He called on his cell phone. On the tenth tone a deep voice said, “Tahiti.” Arkady heard a background of heavy metal, laughs, arguments, the sociable clatter of glasses.

“In Tver?”

“Is this a joke?”

On the chance, Arkady asked, “Is Tanya there?”

“Which Tanya?”

“The one who plays the harp.”

“She’s on later.”

“Her nose is better?”

“They don’t come here to see her nose.”

Arkady hung up. He got a short glass of vodka and a cigarette. He was starting to feel like himself. Zhenya watched the war again. The Hitlerites were in full retreat. Their trucks and caissons wallowed in mud. Dead horses and burnt tanks lined the road. Arkady picked up his cell phone and called a Moscow number.

“Yes?”

“Prosecutor Zurin.”

“It’s you, Renko? Damn it, this is my emergency line. Can’t this wait?”

“I made up my mind about my next post and I want to get there as soon as possible. Not linger, as you say.”

Zurin reorganized himself. “Oh. Well, that’s the right spirit. So, Suzdal it is. I envy you. Very picturesque. Or perhaps you have some other quiet destination in mind. What will it be?”

“Tver.”

A long pause. Both men knew that if in their long professional association the prosecutor could have found any excuse to send Arkady to Tver, Zurin would have seized it. Now that Arkady volunteered for the abyss the prosecutor audibly held his breath.

“You’re serious?”

“Tver is my choice.”

Isakov was from Tver. The Black Berets at the Sunzha Bridge were all from Tver. Tanya was from Tver. How, Arkady asked himself, could he go anywhere else?

“What are you up to, Renko? No one goes to Tver by choice. Are you on a case?”

“How could I be? You haven’t given me one.”

“That’s right. Very well, Tver it is. Don’t tell me why. Just say good-bye to Moscow.”

On the television screen a victorious Red Army carried Nazi standards upside down and hailed the man on Lenin’s Tomb.

Feeling expansive, Arkady added Stalin to his notebook, for good measure.

17

On the way to Tver, Arkady left Moscow and entered Russia.

No Mercedes, no Bolshoi, no sushi, no paved-over world; instead mud, geese, apples rolling off a horse cart. No townhouses in gated communities, but cottages shared with cats and hens. No billionaires, but men who sold vases by the highway because the crystal factory they worked at had no money to pay them, so paid them in kind, making each man an entrepreneur holding a vase with one hand and swatting flies with the other.

For a winter day the weather was freakishly warm, but Arkady drove with the windows up because of the dust pouring off trucks. The Zhiguli had no air conditioning or CD player, but its engine could run on vodka if need be. From time to time the land was so flat the horizon opened like a fan, and meadows and bogs stretched in all directions. A dirt road would branch off to a handful of cottages and a tilted Easter cake of a church framed by birches.

From the passenger seat Elena Ilyichnina looked sadly at the passing countryside. To Arkady’s astonishment she had accepted the offer of a ride to her hometown to visit her mother. Villages on the way were dying, hollowed out by the mass evacuation of the young, who went to Tver, to Moscow or St. Petersburg rather than suffer what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life.” A village shop sold gum boots and canvas jackets. Moscow offered supermodels and video arcades. An entire generation went to the city to make a fortune, gain computer skills, to hang, to temp, to wear a paper cap and fry chicken, to-one way or another-take part in the future. The death of a village could be tracked by the number of houses that, unpainted, turned to gray and disappeared among the trees; in most villages gray was epidemic.

During the war Tver had been called Kalinin, in honor of Russia’s president. Kalinin had a distinguished goatee and, more important, was an organ grinder of secretary praise. In Kalinin’s estimation, Stalin was “our best friend, our best teacher, the pathfinder of the ages, the genius of science, brighter than the sun, the greatest military strategist of all time.” Stalin tried to get Kalinin to please stop, no more, but he wouldn’t. As soon as the Soviet Union fell apart Tver reclaimed its ancient name.

Although the day was warm Elena Ilyichnina’s ears were a vivid pink and it struck Arkady that she was many men’s ideal: a big woman, Victor often said, was a rock in stormy seas. She had organized a lunch of sausage and bread to eat on the way.

Conversation never really got started. They were like two dancers so out of synch that they finally abandoned the floor. Also, Elena Ilyichnina had worked one shift in Moscow and was about to start a shift in Tver and she took the opportunity to nap, which was fine with Arkady. She made a companionable presence as long as she didn’t talk.

As they neared Tver he became aware that she was awake and watching him. She said, “I hear that you are an investigator who doesn’t carry a gun. What is the philosophy behind that?”