He was stopped at a traffic light when a Porsche convertible rolled alongside. Urman was at the wheel, looking more like a detective from Miami than one from Moscow. He was too occupied with smoothing his wind-whipped hair to give Arkady more than a glance; he might not have seen the bike at all. When the light turned green the Porsche took off like a rocket. Six blocks further on, Urman was entering a hotel as Arkady rode by.

Arkady U-turned and coasted back to a playground of seesaws, gnomes and kiosks opposite the hotel. The Porsche was in the driveway. The Hotel Obermeier was a fortress of brick. The ground floor, however, was plate glass and fountains, and Arkady had a sweeping view of the reception desk, concierge’s podium, elevator bank, bar and restaurant. All was dark except for a table by the restaurant window, where Urman joined Isakov, Eva and Prosecutor Sarkisian. Two waiters slumped over a corner table.

The party had reached the brandy and cigar stage, had possibly reached it hours ago but Sarkisian was holding forth. Urman laughed and filled a snifter. Was the subject humorous homicides or the election odds of the hometown hero? Isakov listened stoically, while Eva made no effort to hide her distaste. Sarkisian put his finger by his nose, signifying Armenian powers of insight. When he raised a glass, Isakov and Urman followed suit, while Eva rose from her chair and stood by the window to smoke a cigarette. Arkady trusted that on her side the plate glass had to be a mirror. Isakov waved to her to return to the table. She ignored him and rested her forehead against the pane. It wasn’t a happy scene.

Isakov motioned Eva again to rejoin the group at the table and she continued to ignore him. Urman covered the moment by humoring Sarkisian until, finally and without a word, Eva went to the elevator bank, pushed a button and disappeared behind metal doors. The men sat stupefied by her desertion. A room lit in the middle of the second floor. The waiters went on sleeping, heads deep in their arms.

Sarkisian pointed in the general direction of Eva and apparently said something less than complimentary, because Isakov picked up a fork and pressed it against the prosecutor’s neck. Arkady remembered what Ginsberg had said about Isakov’s calm; the detective’s move was unhurried and he didn’t appear to raise his voice, but he conveyed conviction. He seemed to tell Sarkisian what he probably should not do or say ever again and the prosecutor nodded in emphatic agreement. The waiters slept on.

Urman went to the window where Eva had stood and cupped his eyes against the glass. He saw something because he moved through the restaurant and lobby and out to the front steps of the hotel to scan the playground. Gnomes were bigger at night and more menacing, as if they were on the march. What seemed smaller was the kiosk. Was the Ural’s front tire showing? The rear? Arkady realized that Urman was waiting for a car to pass by. He was waiting for headlights.

Urman had to break off when Isakov came out of the hotel, half jollying, half carrying Sarkisian to the Porsche. They were all pals again, although the prosecutor’s eyes were white with terror. Together, the two detectives loaded Sarkisian into the convertible and belted him in.

Arkady heard the prosecutor say, “…every effort.”

Isakov said, “He can’t be far.”

Sarkisian sputtered something Arkady didn’t catch.

“I’d rather find him first,” Urman said.

Urman got behind the wheel and started the Porsche, which drowned further conversation. The car took off, gear changes whining the length of the street.

Isakov turned wearily to the hotel. He paused in the restaurant to wake the waiters and pay them, generously by their expressions, and took the elevator. The room on the second floor was still lit. It brightened briefly as a door opened and closed, and Arkady got a sense of bodies in motion.

More he didn’t want to know.

20

A drab world came out of the dark: an abandoned field of winter wheat bordered by scrub and brambles on three sides and, along the bottom, a dirt road that led to willows and fog.

The Rudenkos left their truck at a broken-down gate. Arkady had followed on the Ural and the three marched with flashlights and a wheelbarrow full of hemp sacks and tools to a mound of loose earth. Big Rudi seemed rejuvenated by the morning air: perhaps crazy, Arkady thought, but not the befuddled grandfather of the night before. The old man aimed the flashlight on the mound while Rudi selected a shovel and set to work, moving the loose dirt aside. The Ural had nothing as fancy as an odometer, but Arkady guessed that they were about fourteen kilometers south of Tver.

As the sun broke from the horizon the field developed contour and dimensions, about two soccer fields’ worth of flattened grass and sodden earth, a reminder that winter had started heavy with snow. The men’s shadows seemed to stand on stilts and a massive shadow spread from a stand of pine trees in the middle of the field. The trees must have been an impediment to farm machinery; Arkady wondered why they hadn’t been pulled as saplings.

Military camos were the dress code of the day and Arkady had borrowed a uniform from Rudi, who said, “Renko, you look like a POW.”

“No, a general,” Big Rudi insisted.

The sun up an hour, Rudi was using a pick to pry the earth around a skeleton lying on its side.

“Ours or theirs?” Big Rudi asked.

“Can’t tell yet,” said Rudi. He added for Arkady’s benefit, “This weather is fantastic. This time of year the ground is usually frozen solid. This is like cutting cake.”

“Check the teeth.”

“Present and accounted for.”

“But you think it’s December ’forty-one?” Big Rudi asked.

Every schoolboy knew that in December ’41 Stalin performed his greatest miracle. The Red Army had lost four million men dead and wounded. The Germans were on the outskirts of Moscow. Leningrad was under siege, its population starving to death. Tver, which was the center of the entire front, had already fallen. And then, incredibly, the Russians counterattacked. Stalin had secretly moved hundreds of tanks and thousands of troops from Siberia to the low hills outside Tver. This new army, seemingly created out of thin air and launched in the middle of a snowstorm, was a total surprise to German intelligence. The Red Army crossed the frozen Volga and chased the Wehrmacht for two hundred kilometers. Not only was Tver liberated and thousands of Germans killed and captured, they no longer resembled a superrace. The shape of the front changed. The nature of the war changed. The enemy stalled outside Moscow, never to threaten it again.

Two women, bent over and, blinkered by their shawls, moved along the far side of the field gleaning stunted potatoes that had been left to rot. Crows strolled behind. When the women saw Rudi they crossed themselves and left. Arkady wondered whether Big Rudi had stood in the same scene with tanks belching black smoke and Siberian riflemen moving across the river.

“There are Red Diggers and Black Diggers,” Rudi said. “Red Diggers find the bodies of Russian soldiers so they can send the remains home to be reunited with their families. Black Diggers find bodies, German or Russian, and strip them of medals, belt buckles, SS gear, any shit they can sell on the Internet.”

As the shape of a skeleton became evident at his feet, Rudi probed the bottom of the hole with a metal rod attached to a wooden pole.

“Remember that you’re not only digging up bones, you’re digging up unexploded shells, mines, hand grenades, booby traps, Molotov cocktails. Before you dig anywhere, take the rod and feel around. You do it enough, you can tell what you hit, wood, metal or glass. Every year somebody gets a big surprise. Well, we’re provoking it, aren’t we? Provoking the past.”