Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) (25 page)

“You’re no better than him,” Lotte said. “You just need a better excuse.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Then what is it?”

“A game.” Zhenya put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. “A shell game. I unloaded the clip and only reloaded two rounds. I’m not a killer, just a hustler.”

•  •  •

Victor found babysitters.

Detectives Slovo and Blok should have been in Sochi, but two days after retirement they had returned. In Moscow they were men of authority. In Sochi they were paunchy, middle-aged nobodies in sandals joining other nobodies in sandals filling supermarket carts with bargains on Australian wine, hoping for a smile from the cashier, slathering imitation caviar on sodden crackers, passing out on the sofa with a glass in their hand. They were happy to keep Fedorov handcuffed to a bunk at Victor’s favorite drunk tank.

Communicating with Arkady was not so easy.

“You know what would make me happy?” Victor asked. “If he bothered to call us. Where is he? Is he in a hole or out to sea? Because his friends from Moscow, they’re all headed his way.”

Arkady and Tatiana stole away from the slumbering bikers before dawn and picked up the road with their headlights. The air carried the taste of salt and made the birches bow and sigh. She led and he followed.

As the sun rose the resort town of Zelenogradsk began materializing out of the dark with an array of fish-and-chips stands, video arcades and, along a promenade, the silhouettes of prewar hotels with spiked German roofs. On the beach a few early risers watched waves march in and die on the sand.

“It’s out of season now,” Tatiana said as they rode. “The only ones who come are birders. It’s a flyway for hawks and eagles. Ludmila and I used to come here all the time.”

Zelenogradsk dwindled down. Arkady recognized the kiosk and tattoo posters he had seen with Maxim. The same beachcomber dragged his sledge along the shoulder of the road.
Headed north, the road itself became a single lane. Cottages turned to fishing shacks and became fewer and fewer, while the beach narrowed to a spit of sand with a lagoon on one side and ocean on the other. Not a single car. Only the sound of surf.

“It’s still magic.” Tatiana sounded refreshed in spite of herself.

When the cottages were truly far apart, she stopped at one with weathered paint and gingerbread trim, like the home of an indigent witch. Arkady recognized it from a photo he had seen in Ludmila’s kitchen.

“Sometimes nobody comes out here for months at a time. Ludmila had the only key.”

She searched under an array of gnomes, starfish and abalone shells. Arkady watched for a minute, then found a beachcombing rake and jimmied open a window.

“This is your cabin, isn’t it?” he said.

The cabin had a living room with a fireplace, a kitchen with a wood-burning stove, a water closet, two bedrooms and a screened sleeping porch. Water for bathing came from a pump. Board games filled a chest, paperback novels overflowed a bookshelf and the pantry was down to canned sausages and pickled herring. A ring with more keys than seemed necessary hung on the wall.

“There is a storage shed too,” Tatiana said.

She led him outside and unlocked a wooden structure not much larger than a sauna. Bicycles hung from a central rack. Security cables ran through their wheels. The bikes were serviceable, nothing special, an intelligent choice, Arkady thought, considering the cottage was unoccupied for months at a time. Shelves were stocked with everyday hammers and saws, jars of nails and screws arranged by size, hand-labeled cans of caulking and paint and the sort of esoteric hardware that only a handyman could
appreciate. Outdoor furniture tied together by cable gathered dust in the corner. There wasn’t much in the way of fishing gear.

When they returned to the cabin, Arkady dropped into a wicker chair. His legs told him it had been years since he had bicycled.

Tatiana ducked from room to room.

“My father loved this place.”

“What was he like?”

“He was a historian. He used to say, ‘Sometimes, the less you know the better.’ ”

“What kind of historian is that?”

“A Russian historian. He said that in a normal country, history moves forward. History evolves. But in Russia it can go in any direction or disappear completely, which makes us the envy of the world. Imagine a Kaliningrad anywhere else.”

“Was your father depressed?”

“Totally.” She returned and dropped into a rocking chair. “That was all he wanted Russia to be. Not perfect, just normal. What about your father?”

“More murderous than depressed. You could say that the war allowed him to vent.”

Light framed her. Arkady thought she wasn’t beautiful in a conventional way. Her forehead was too broad, her eyes too gray and her attitude far too provocative.

He said, “Maxim claims you would rather be a bright meteor than a steady little moon.”

“Maxim says a lot of stupid things.”

“Does he know about this place?”

“I brought him here once.”

“Perfect.”

“He wants to do something grandiose.”

“He’s still in love with you, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do. He was willing to watch Alexi crush me under a ton of ballast at the marina in Moscow.”

“You’re lying.”

Arkady described the scene. “I have a witness. Polo. He saved my life. Maxim probably thought they were just going to throw a scare into me and he could call Alexi off. Old poets lose their timing. I suppose that goes first, like the legs of a fighter. Anyway, I don’t think Maxim was doing it to get at me. He was trying to protect you, to prevent me from finding out you were alive.”

“Now he wants to risk his life. I told him that at his age it no longer matters.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, you are a difficult person to be in love with.”

“And you?” Tatiana asked. He didn’t know what she meant by that, and she changed the subject as if she sensed they were approaching an abyss. “Ludmila and I used to run up and down the dunes. Every day they were different. Different place, different shape. And, of course, our father taught us how to search for amber. He thought the only real history was geology; everything else was opinion. Did you know that the youngest ocean in the world is the Baltic Sea?”

“Is that why we’re here, to watch the sea grow old?”

“Not quite.” She rocked forward to offer him a cigarette.

“No thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

She tapped the pack and caught a computer memory stick as it dropped out. It was plastic, about the size of a restaurant matchbook.

“What’s on there?” Arkady asked.

“What do you want? The murder of journalists, the beating of protesters, corruption at the top, the rape of natural resources by a circle of cronies, a fraudulent democracy, the erection of palaces, a hollow military. If you had been a source, the mention of any of this could earn you or someone close to you a bullet in the head. It’s all here in single-spaced articles.”

“But they’ve all been published, haven’t they? There’s nothing new?”

“The notebook. The notebook is new. Only I don’t have it. I have all this data leading to the top of a pyramid but I can’t reach it without knowing what Grisha was doing, and that’s in the notebook. I know who but I don’t know what. Your experts may know what but they won’t know who. Tell me about the people working on it. They’re linguistic experts or military analysts?”

“They’re two kids who play chess.”

She sat back. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. They’re good at games.”

“They’re children?”

Arkady nodded.

“Joseph . . .” She had to laugh, stunned. “Joseph was sure the notebook would be impossible to decipher because you would have to live his life to understand his personal vocabulary. His sophisticated music, books, films and so on.”

“To be a middle-aged Swiss male who probably doted on Mozart? No. He’s lucky to have these two.”

“Poor Joseph. He got in over his head.”

“Where you led him.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she said after a moment. “Do you think I have led you in over your head?”

“Without a doubt.”

•  •  •

Victor maneuvered an easy chair to face the front door of Arkady’s apartment. Anyone coming in would have to go through him. Every few minutes he checked his cell phone in case Arkady had texted or left a message. Victor hated the Internet.

“Tell him,” Lotte said.

“There’s a nautical theme,” Zhenya said. “Navy, ship, submarine, torpedo, water, sea.”

“I’ll tell you what’s a theme,” Victor said. “A lot of money changing hands and every crook watching every other crook. Nobody trusts anybody else. That’s why they’re meeting.”

“Explain it to him,” Lotte said.

“Please,” said Victor.

“This is what I think the notebook says: ‘The Red Dawn Shipyard in China agrees to pay Russia two billion to repair and refit a submarine to seaworthiness. Maybe fifty percent to the Russian Ministry of Defense and fifty percent to certain anonymous partners of . . .”

“Amber something,” Lotte said. “It has to be.”

Zhenya was disconcerted but he continued. “And there will be no public accounting. The parties will meet on the
Natalya Goncharova
.”

“You mean Grisha’s yacht.”

“I guess so.”

“Only Grisha is dead and the notes are two weeks old.”

“Then they’re meeting again, everyone but Grisha,” Zhenya said.

“Who is meeting?” Victor asked.

“We don’t know,” Lotte admitted.

Victor opened a fresh bottle of Fanta. “Amateurs.”

Arkady and Tatiana sat on the porch and watched waves rip and roll as foam up the beach. In the eaves, cobwebs billowed with each blast of wind. Tatiana wrote nonstop on a yellow pad. She looked so slight, a moth in lamplight, it was hard to believe she inspired anger and fear among armed men.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing?”

“It’s an
opus horribilis
. Or a chronicle of corruption, whatever you want to call it. There’s so much corruption to choose from it’s hard to know where to begin. Imagine a defense contractor embezzling three billion rubles out of its budget for building docks for nuclear submarines. That’s a hundred million dollars in real money that was invested into real estate. The police say when they raided the apartment of one of the alleged embezzlers they found art, jewelry and, guess what, the defense minister himself with his mistress.

“But that’s nothing compared to the siphoning of seven billion rubles from our satellite navigation system, which might account for all our failed satellite launchings. The list goes on and on. The Defense Ministry admits that a fifth of the military budget is stolen. One can only imagine what an independent investigation would find.”

She wrote effortlessly, but it struck him that there was something guarded, omitted, incomplete.

“That’s it?”

“In a nutshell, yes.”

“Do you have a tape recorder?”

“A journalist always has a tape recorder.” She reached into her backpack and handed the recorder to him. “Why?”

From his pea jacket he took a cassette. “I’ve been carrying this around for days for no good reason except that I found it in your apartment and, in very small letters, the label says ‘Again.’ Again what?”

He pushed “Play.” The tape was tinny but distinctive, a continuous metallic tap, tap, tap, scrape, scrape, scrape until Tatiana turned it off.

“An SOS from the submarine
Kursk,
” she said. She could as easily have said hell.

“Why should you care about an accident at sea that took place a dozen years ago?”

“Nothing has changed,” she said.

Arkady waited.

She said, “When the torpedoes on the
Kursk
exploded, our navy press office reported that the submarine had encountered ‘minor technical difficulties.’ By that time it had plunged to the ocean floor. Altogether, we made fourteen futile attempts to
rescue the men inside before Norwegian help was accepted. The entire crew of one hundred eighteen men died. How could this happen to a submarine in the Red Navy? What did we learn? That the torpedoes were volatile and the hatches refused to close and, most important, when reporters revealed the truth they could be threatened with criminal libel. That’s what we learned.”

“That’s the past.”

“No, that’s the future. We have a new nuclear submarine, with much the same problems as the
Kursk
.”

“What is it called?”

“The
Kaliningrad
.”

“Of course.”

“Only there’s a problem. The
Kaliningrad
didn’t pass muster. They don’t dare let it operate. It has to be refitted from top to bottom. The original construction costs were a hundred billion rubles and the refit will cost just as much, yet the Kremlin and the Ministry of Defense are happy.”

“How is that possible?”

“It’s all in the notebook. All I know is that we don’t have a government anymore, just thieves.”

“Is that what you’re writing about? The
Kaliningrad
is just one more example?”

“No, this is not the same. The
Kursk
was an example of incompetence. The
Kaliningrad
is an example of incompetence and greed. It carries a blood curse. It’s a black mark that can never be erased.”

“Maybe the submarine’s problems can be reengineered or remedied, at least?”

“Maybe. My experience is that it’s easier to put reporters into the ground. The interpreter Joseph knew and he’s dead.”

“Who knew about your connection to Joseph?”

“No one aside from my editor.”

Arkady’s impression of Sergei Obolensky was that he was a gossip, but no one needed to have talked. The interpreter Joseph Bonnafos had served his purpose. Once the meeting was over, he was a loose string fated to be clipped.

She said, “You’re playing investigator again.”

“I make a stab at it from time to time.”

“What does it matter? You have no authority here.”

“I have no authority anywhere, but I like to understand things.”