The night manager was pleased. “Martinez. His name was Martinez.”

“He butted you, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, no one remembers that, only that I lost.”

There was a general contemplation of the unfairness of life. Arkady thought about his gun, safely locked away in Moscow.

The night manager had to shake his head. “You have some kind of memory.”

“Off and on. So this is what you do now, break bones?”

“Sometimes.” The night manager was embarrassed, like a master carpenter ordered to build a birdhouse. He slipped brass knuckles over his hand. “Arthritis.”

“Is it painful?”

“A little.”

“Well, this may sting.” Arkady picked up the can of insecticide and sprayed the night manager’s face.

“Shit!”

Arkady hit him on the head with the can. Blood spread over the manager’s face. He did cut easily.

“Bastard!”

The night manager took tentative half steps and got tangled in the plastic sheet.

“Son of a bitch!”

From the Boatman Hotel Arkady drove to the railway station, one place where a man waiting in a car would not draw attention. The insecticide’s cloying scent followed him and he rolled the windows down. He didn’t know what the night manager had intended-a mere scare, some rib work, a split lip. Arkady did feel that a threshold had indeed been crossed. In one day he had gone from being a senior investigator in Moscow to homeless in Tver. He had wanted to provoke a reaction and he got his wish.

The cell phone rang. It was Eva.

“I don’t believe this,” she said. “You gave the man a towel?”

“I suppose I did.”

“You spray a man who is attacking you and then throw him a towel to wipe his eyes? Did it make you feel better?”

“A little.” He wrote the caller ID in his notebook while he remembered it. The number and “Hotel Obermeier.” “How did you hear about it?”

There was silence on the other end before Eva said, “The main thing is for you to leave Tver.”

“Not yet.”

“Nikolai has promised hands off. It won’t happen again.”

“Hands off me or hands off you?”

“You. Until the election, at least.”

“Do you think he’ll win?”

“He has to win.”

“For the glory or the immunity from prosecution?”

Again a pause.

“Please, Arkady, go home.” She hung up.

Immunity would be the icing on Isakov’s cake. Senator Isakov would be bulletproof. The law protected lawmakers from arrest for any crime unless they were caught in the actual commission of, let’s say, a murder or rape. As for old cases like the Kuznetsovs, Ginsberg and Borodin, there would be no sifting through the ashes. Their cases were already closed and would soon be forgotten.

The cell phone rang. He hoped it was Eva, but the ID panel said Zhenya, the last person Arkady wanted to talk to. He was not in the mood to talk about chess and with Zhenya everything related to chess, chess books or chess tournaments. So he let the phone ring. He did not want to be Zhenya’s chess coach or father or uncle. Being a friend would do. The phone rang. Why was Zhenya so persistent? It was midnight. And rang until Arkady surrendered and picked up.

Zhenya whispered, “Are you near Lake Brosno?”

“I have no idea.”

“Find out if you’re near Lake Brosno,” Zhenya said.

“Okay.”

“There was a program on television last night that said Lake Brosno was near Tver.”

“Then it is, I suppose,” Arkady said. “What about it?”

“Lake Brosno has a monster like the Loch Ness monster but better. They have pictures and all the old people have seen it.”

“What makes it better?”

“The Lake Brosno monster comes out on land.”

“Well, there you are.”

“During the war it came out and snatched a Fascist plane out of the air.”

“A patriotic monster.” Not only had Stalin enlisted the Orthodox Church and all its saints, Arkady thought, but the nation’s monsters as well. “How big is it?”

“Big as a house,” Zhenya said.

“Does it have legs?”

“No one knows. Some scientists are going to take some electronic gear out in a boat and test for anomalies.”

“Anomalies?” A good word.

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if the monster came out?”

“And laid waste to the countryside and spread panic and fear?”

“We’d have to bomb it. That would be so cool.”

“Zhenya, we can only hope.”

After the call Arkady was too on edge to sleep. The trams had shut down. He left the car at the train station and walked toward nowhere in particular. There was little point in checking into another hotel; there weren’t that many in Tver, and Sarkisian could alert them in minutes. Or Arkady could drive back to Moscow.

The street led, as all streets in Tver seemed to lead, to the river. The Volga gathered two smaller rivers in the center of the city and, fed by them, rushed against the embankment in a hurry to a faraway Caspian Sea. It was no wonder why he was drawn. Palace, parks, statues, two illuminated bridges, almost everything in Tver looked toward the river, homely faces gazing at a silver mirror.

There were two approaches: attack Isakov or pursue Eva. Both were shameless but in different ways. Since he didn’t have the evidence or the authority to go after the detective in any official manner, he would have to provoke Isakov into a misstep. Or he could forget Isakov and justice and concentrate on Eva. She had slept with another man? At his age that meant less and less. People had histories.

He could keep either his dignity or her.

His choice.

18

Sofia Andreyeva said, “I don’t show nice apartments to just anyone. I always look at their shoes. If they don’t take care of their own shoes, how will they take care of an apartment?”

“Absolutely,” Arkady said, although he could take no credit for it; any son of an army general automatically kept his shoes polished.

She winked at Arkady as she drove and hummed to herself. Her car was the tidiest Lada that Arkady had ever been in. No cigarette wrappers, beer cans, wilted newspapers or rust in the floor. A bit like Sofia Andreyeva herself. What once was a distinguished nose had, with age, become a beak, but she had a fresh bloom of rouge on her cheeks and, wrapped in a black shawl, she looked cheerfully bereaved. She was a real estate agent, meaning she met each train as it arrived at Tver Station and studied the disembarking passengers before offering, “Apartments to let. Best choice guaranteed.” Other real estate agents wore sandwich boards, which she considered declasse. She liked Arkady at first sight. Clean shaven, no apparent hangover even early in the day. And she was pleased that, although he had his own car, he had gone to the train station instead of some stuffy, overpriced office.

Sofia Andreyeva showed him a studio apartment with Danish details and wireless connection and took him to a spacious flat on Sovietskaya Street, the city’s central boulevard. For Arkady’s purposes neither would do. As they walked down Sovietskaya, Sofia Andreyeva surprised Arkady by casually, deliberately, spitting at a gate. Before he could ask why, she said, “There’s one more apartment, a dear friend’s. He is taking a leave of absence from the university. He phoned me yesterday to say that with the euro being what it is, he could use some extra income. Anyway, the apartment is not ready to be shown, and his personal effects are everywhere, but with new sheets you could move in today. Do you speak French?”

“No. Is that a requirement?”

“Not at all, not at all.” She sighed. “It’s just, well, a shame.”

The apartment was on the second story of a housing block that flew laundry on the balconies. The lobby was filthy and mailboxes were ripped open. The apartment, however, harbored a fantasy. Posters of Piaf and Alain Delon hung on the walls. Michelin guides filled the shelves. A pack of Gitanes lay on the desk, and the smell of forgotten cheese overpowered all. She had Arkady change into slippers at the front door.