Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) (29 page)

The tanker’s deck was an intricate maze of valves painted red. Squeezed against the deckhouse was a table and ice buckets of Champagne.

Arkady recognized Abdul, the Shagelmans, Ape and his two sons. Abdul was dressed in black Chechen chic, as if he might drive a Porsche during the week and a tank on weekends. The Shagelmans looked like old folks staying up late. Arkady couldn’t put names to the coterie of deputy ministers and naval officers gathered around the table but he knew their types. A pair of Chinese businessmen in stovepipe suits played at being invisible. They all froze as Arkady and Maxim stepped into the open.

Alexi recovered nimbly, as cool as a croupier. “I guess this means your friends figured out the notebook. It doesn’t matter. As you can see, everything is going ahead.”

Bodyguards who had been stationed at a respectful distance on the dock came running. Ape motioned for them to slow down. In the notebook, Grisha had been the first among equals, the Man in the Hat with a Line Underneath. That title would have gone to Ape by seniority now.

Arkady could see that Alexi wished for nothing more than to have him and Maxim shot where they stood. However, for the moment at least, it might have seemed a breach of good manners. A little pushy. Premature. With his hairy wrists and single brow, Ape might have seemed primitive and bent by age but he was a
stickler for manners. Waiting for a cue, the navy brass held their Champagne glasses at half-mast, ready to be raised as soon as this hiccup was over. It was a simple ceremony. No caviar. More like a first shovel breaking ground for a new enterprise.

“Welcome,” Ape said. He skipped introductions except to add, “And this must be the famous poet Maxim Dal.” Maxim was flattered. What greater recognition than a nod from a legendary criminal? “Do you think you could write a poem about this? Obviously, you can’t write with a gun in your hand. See, this is an amicable meeting of friends from far and wide. Give me that. It’s a pop gun, anyway. Please.” Ape took the pistol.

“Let me handle them,” Alexi said.

“Why? We’re not doing anything illegal,” Ape said.

“They know about Curonian Amber,” Alexi said in a stage whisper to help the old man along.

“Let them.”

Arkady said, “The notebook left behind by your interpreter wasn’t as impossible to decode as people thought. We know that a Russian nuclear submarine that failed its sea tests is going to be refitted in China.”

“Yes. It’s called outsourcing,” Ape said.

“And we know that half the money for the refit will be raked off the top by you and your cronies in the Defense Ministry and the Kremlin. It’s criminal.”

“Business costs. Totally normal. Administration of a task of this magnitude is often fifty percent of a budget. Anything else?” Ape asked.

“Murder.”

Signs of anxiety started to appear among the guests. No introductions had been made, but Arkady had seen them and their
species in newspaper photos standing at attention or adorned by military caps. The two Chinese gentlemen traded significant glances.

Alexi said, “That’s a lie.”

Arkady shook his head and said, “The correct response is ‘Who?’ ”

“That’s true,” Ape said. “But, Investigator Renko, you’re playing a dangerous game. My partners in Curonian Amber have already invested time and money.”

“You have great expectations?”

“You could say that.”

That was good but not enough, Arkady thought. He needed a clear admission of a crime recorded on tape.

“What if the
Kaliningrad
becomes another
Kursk
? That would be a disaster for you and the Kremlin.”

“Accidents happen.”

“But you’re loading the odds when a nuclear submarine is built by thieves at a cut rate. The downside, as they say, would be enormous.”

“There’s a risk.”

“Would Grisha have taken it?”

“Grisha was a risk taker,” Abdul said.

“Now he’s dead.” Arkady turned to Ape. “Didn’t you once advise me to ask, ‘Whose ox is gored?’ ”

“Circumstances are different. In Moscow you were a man with authority. Now you’re away from home.”

Again, good to have on tape, but not enough.

Alexi said, “I’m not going to listen to this bullshit anymore. What are we waiting for?”

“We want to hear more,” one of the Chinese said.

Doubt had been raised. In the eyes of the visitors from the Red Dawn Shipyard, Arkady could practically see the beads of an abacus sliding on a rack calculating the risks one way and the other. Isaac Shagelman looked toward his wife, Valentina, for a decision, as if the question were about putting down a dog. She looked at the ship’s ladder and gasped.

Tatiana appeared from nowhere, shining from the water that dripped off her. She climbed onto the deck but she could as well have landed like a Valkyrie. She had come in the second dinghy and must have swum to collect its oars. Arkady thought he should have anticipated this. She had warned him that she was not the sort of woman to miss the fun.

“It’s not so simple,” she said.

Ape said to Alexi, “You led us to believe that Tatiana Petrovna was dead.”

“It was my sister that Alexi killed,” Tatiana said.

“And your sons killed Maxim’s ZIL,” Arkady added. “Maxim and I happened to be inside it at the time. They like to play
Scarface
. Did they do that on your orders or are they taking orders from somebody else?”

Ape shook his head. “A classic car. I would never do that.”

“It doesn’t matter who ordered it,” Alexi said. “Our plan is still good.”

Arkady said, “You weren’t even in the plan while your father was alive.”

“I’ve been watching you for years,” Tatiana said to Ape. “I’ve been following your corruption of the state.”

“And I’ve read your articles,” Ape said. “They’re very good but they’re all in the past.”

“Not Curonian Amber. Not building a deathtrap of a nuclear
submarine. We’ll print it, and if you try to stop us we will see you in court.”

Alexi said, “So what? We’ll buy the court. We’ll buy the Kremlin if need be.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Arkady asked. “Who killed Grisha?”

The deck was like a chessboard, Arkady thought, except that all the pieces were moving at the same time. The partners from the ministry set down their glasses and rose to their toes. The Chinese were no longer playing invisible; they were gone.

Ape turned to Maxim. “I liked your poem.”

“What?”

“That poem. It was years ago. ‘F Is for Fool.’ ”

“Yeah.” Maxim had to laugh.

“I don’t remember all of it. Something like, ‘F is for fool, the man who returns home early and finds himself replaced. Another man is in his bed, folded like a jackknife around his wife.’ Is that it?”

“Close enough.”

“I could never get over the image of the jackknife. Would you say the poem is about betrayal?”

“I was inspired.”

“I can believe it. We’re all betrayed at one time or another and we never forget.” Ape asked Arkady, “
Scarface,
huh?”

“I’m afraid so.”

The old man said, “Renko, remember how we talked about Grisha? We couldn’t understand how he let his killer get so close. There’s a word for it. It’s a big one.”

“Patricide.”

Ape whispered and nodded to his sons. “Let one boy get away with it and you encourage the others.”

Tatiana was on her own tangent. She aimed a pistol at Alexi and asked, “Remember my sister?”

It was her moment, but the trigger pull of a cheaply manufactured pistol could be stiff and hard to gauge. So Alexi shot first. Maxim, who had seemed adrift, stepped in between and took a bullet in the shoulder. Ape fired. Alexi’s head rang like a cracked bell. He dropped facedown and Ape stood over him and shot him twice more in the back.

“You crazy Russians,” said Abdul. The Wolf of the Caucasus bolted to the gangway ramp and the Shagelmans hustled after him.

Ape turned the gun on Arkady. “Why shouldn’t I shoot you too?”

“Because we’re still recording.” With elaborate care, Arkady brought out his cell phone.

“Are you? Well, maybe you are and maybe you aren’t.” After consideration, Ape let his gun hang. “As it is, all you can charge us with is saving your miserable lives. Get out of here. Next time, you may not be so lucky. Sometimes it’s more important to teach my boys a lesson than to make another hundred million dollars. We’ll pack away the Champagne for another day.”

As Maxim struggled to his elbows Ape pressed his gun into Maxim’s hands. “Congratulations. By the evidence, you just killed your first man. Now that’s something to write about.”

Sand.

Arkady let it pour from his fist to the valley of her back and when she turned over Arkady let it run off her stomach to the hollow of her hip, scattering over her skin like grains of salt. It got in every crevice, into her hair and into the corners of his mouth.

Wind.

Constant breezes played like spirits on the cabin’s steps. There were dead dunes and live dunes, according to Tatiana.

Time.

A live dune remade itself and changed from day to day. The entire spit moved like the sweep hand on a watch.

“Have you ever looked at sand through a magnifying glass?” Tatiana asked. “It’s many different things. Quartz, seashells, miniature worm tubes, spines.”

The cabin had its small discomforts—the thin mattress and rough wooden floor—but they lent a sharpness to the senses. The heat within her made up for a cold stove. The cabin creaked agreeably like an ancient ship.

A few birders came their way. All in all, however, the beach belonged to Arkady and Tatiana. Their sand castle.

Insomnia arrived in the middle of the night like a tardy guest. Arkady saw a lantern moving through the trees. He chased the light to the road, where it moved too fast to follow. In the morning he found a pair of footprints circling the cabin. The wind had erased them by the time Tatiana woke.

•  •  •

Arkady watched Tatiana walk down the road trying to get a cell phone signal. It was like ice fishing, he thought, not a sport for the impatient, but a hundred meters away, she waved her arm, and when she returned it was with a flush of excitement.

“I talked to Obolensky. He’s coming to Kaliningrad to do a special edition of the magazine about Russia’s most corrupt city.”

“Well, that’s a kind of honor.” Arkady paused in the task of hammering a plank in the cabin’s porch. “Written by you?”

“The main article, yes.”

“I would think so. It’s not every day his favorite journalist comes back from the dead. When?”

“It’s a rush job. I’ll be gone one day, maybe two. What do you think?”

It was the first anxious note he’d heard in her voice.

“I think you’ve got to do it.”

“I told Obolensky I would.”

“You did the right thing.”

“Can you come with me?”

“I’ll find things to do around the cabin.” Arkady tried to sound like a handyman.

He wondered what they looked like from a distance: a man and woman seesawing over something as innocent as a day apart. In fact, Obolensky had done him a great favor. Ever since Arkady had felt Piggy’s presence, he had wanted to remove her from the scene.

“You don’t mind, then,” she said.

“I’ll stay busy.”

•  •  •

The spit was famous for birding. It was home to mergansers and swans and was on a flight path for migrant eagles and kites. Cormorants with crooked necks perched on driftwood, gray herons stalked the lagoon and devout birders with cameras sat for hours to capture the image of a sodden duck.

Arkady dressed for the weather in a poncho and rainproof cap. He walked the beach and climbed the dunes, trying to stay a moving target. His only weapon was Tatiana’s Spanish pistol, as useful as a peashooter in the wind.

The problem was the conviviality of birders, who pursued each other to verify whether their sighting was a grebe, an eider or a goose, or to compare life lists of birds they had spotted.

He didn’t know what he hoped to see. He didn’t know how he would identify a murderer. They had met at this same beach but it was at night, Arkady had been staring into the headlights of a van and the driver had never said a word.

As the wind picked up birders trudged home. Arkady found a group sharing a flask of brandy under the eaves of Tatiana’s cabin. Ivan, Nikita, Wanda, Boris, Lena. All of the birders boasted over a thousand species on their life lists, fifty from the spit alone.

“But these conditions are impossible,” said Nikita. “Between the headwind and the sand . . .”

Wanda agreed. “It makes your teeth rattle. If you’re not having fun, what’s the point?”

A notebook dropped from Arkady’s hand. As Ivan snatched it up the wind flipped through the pages. “Your list seems to be blank.”

“I’m just getting started. So you’re all friends or colleagues? You came to the spit together?”

“Most of us,” Lena said.

“Misery likes company.” Boris slapped his hands together. They were thick hands, slabs of meat.

“Are you looking for any bird in particular?” Nikita asked Arkady.

“I can’t say.”

Boris said, “I can tell you from experience that sometimes when you concentrate on one bird, you miss a better one. I remember in Mexico, I was looking for a particular bird and I almost missed a quetzal, which you know is a rare bird with spectacular plumage sacred to the Aztecs. The Aztecs, you know? Human sacrifice raised to its greatest heights? They would cut out a heart or skin a man alive. At the same time, they were a civilization of great beauty.”

Arkady thought they were getting a little far afield from birding.

“I’ll know what I’m after when I see it,” Arkady said.

“You must be after a special kind of bird.”

“Or a pig,” Arkady said.

Boris’s eyes went as flat as a dead fish.

For the rest of the day, Arkady watched terns fight the wind,
twist and plunge headfirst into the water. That was him, only not into water but cement.

At night, pines swayed and sea grass flattened in the wind. Finally, the storm that had been building in expectation all week arrived and waves seethed up to the cabin stairs, sounding like the columns of a temple falling. At the same time, the lagoon flooded the road behind the cabin. Water plowed through the beach and revealed nuggets of golden amber.