Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) (22 page)

“Well, let’s give you an incentive. The temperature at the core of a burning cigarette is seven hundred degrees.”

“So?”

“And your girlfriend has tender, virginal skin.”

“What do you mean?”

“Two plus two. A couple of geniuses ought to be able to work out who’s most vulnerable. The slowest zebra. The tenderest girl.” Alexi collected their cell phones.

Zhenya’s heart pounded. Lotte shivered so hard her teeth chattered.

“I’ll give you ten hours,” Alexi said.

“That’s not reasonable.”

“Do I look like a reasonable man?”

“But it’s impossible,” Zhenya said.

“I’ll give you ten hours. I’m leaving a man at the door.”

“Who is Anya?” Lotte asked.

Alexi said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t worry about another woman. Where are the scissors?” Zhenya found a pair in the desk and was still as a statue as Alexi cut the cord of the apartment phone.

In a fairy tale Zhenya might have surprised and overpowered Alexi. It wasn’t so in reality. It wasn’t the convenient appearance of ashtrays and blunt instruments that won the day for heroes, it was willpower and nerve. How did he propose to be a soldier for Mother Russia if he couldn’t defend himself? He knew where Arkady’s gun was. Where were the bullets? Another puzzle.

Lotte watched Alexi leave and whispered to Zhenya, “You did shoot somebody, didn’t you?”

Zhenya nodded, afraid of horrifying her sensibilities, but she seemed to find it a comfort.

“The bullets are in the bookcase,” Lotte said.

“Yes.” He wondered where she was going with this.

“We just have to find the right book. Something appropriate.”

“Renko has thousands of books. He’s mental about books.”

“What kind of books?”

“His father’s war books. Fairy tales.
Alice in Wonderland, Ruslan and Ludmila, Oz.
He used to read them to me.”

“Then he’d choose the right book carefully.” She walked along the shelves of fiction and scanned the authors—Bulgakov, Chekhov, Pushkin—sliding each volume forward to search the space behind.

“That must be it.” She pointed to a title too high for her to reach. “Hemingway.
A Farewell to Arms.
”

“Are you feeling clever?”

“Very.”

But when Zhenya pulled the book off the shelf all he found was a single lonely cartridge.

•  •  •

Arkady waited until the other car was out of sight before sitting up. He felt a sting on his forehead from a sliver of glass but the car’s inner shell of armor plate had not been breached and the bulletproof windows were cracked but not shattered.

He reached across to unbuckle Maxim and push him out the door. With a pocketknife blade he popped the lid of the glove compartment that Maxim had been so desperate to open. Inside were two ferry tickets and a gun.

Maxim shook from outrage. “They tried to kill us.”

“That’s right. You have to choose your friends more carefully.” Arkady climbed out and dragged Maxim down a pathway.

“My beautiful ZIL.”

“Well, it was an armored car built for Kremlin duty and I have to say that for an antique, it held up very well.”

“What about the car rally?”

“You have a way with words. I’m sure you’ll think up something.”

“And what do you mean by ‘choose my friends more carefully’?”

“I mean you agreed to be at this spot at this time. How else could they find us in an entire city?”

“I thought they wanted to talk to you.”

“Instead they tried to shoot us.”

“I thought—”

“And you have two one-way tickets for tomorrow’s ferry for Riga. Who was the other ticket for?”

“I know it seems that way—”

“Shut up.” Arkady walked around Maxim as if he were a specimen. “Alexi saw your disappearing act at the marina when he tried to flatten me under a barge. When he needed you to help him, you ran. That’s the sort of thing that a killer takes personally.”

“You’re spinning this out of whole cloth.”

“There was a dog at the marina, a heroic pug named Polo. There aren’t that many pugs in Moscow.”

“Pure fantasy.”

“Did Alexi offer you money? What about the wonderful American fellowship and the fifty-thousand-dollar prize?”

Maxim was deflated. “It’s over. They chose someone else.”

Arkady gave the big man a push to get him moving.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I wanted to know what was in the notebook.”

“Why?”

“For Alexi.”

“Why help him?”

“I was afraid.”

Arkady wondered if that was the truth, half truth or poetic license.

•  •  •

Zhenya and Lotte didn’t know if the man that Alexi had stationed outside the apartment was big or short, dressed to the nines or covered in cigarette ash. They heard him shuffle back and forth like a bear in the zoo.

Zhenya had loaded Arkady’s pistol and tucked it into the back of his belt. Lotte had found skiing gear in a closet; she removed discs from the poles and had herself a pair of flimsy spears.

Meanwhile, Zhenya had found a theme.

“If you align them right, the waves are the ocean, the fish are ships or submarines and the star is Russian authority, most likely the navy.”

“Could be.”

“Since there is a dollar sign, RR could be Russian rubles, not railroad. In which case ‘two B’ wouldn’t be Shakespeare but two billion. Even in rubles that’s a lot of money. What do you think?”

“What does this have to do with Natalya Goncharova?”

“This is the cute part,” Zhenya said. “There’s no mention of where or when the meeting in the notebook took place. None. I think it might be Grisha’s yacht, the
Natalya Goncharova,
which would be a brilliant stroke. It would have established for everyone that Grisha was in charge.”

“Does it matter? It’s in the past, isn’t it?”

“Not from the way Alexi acts. He acts like it’s a matter of life and death. He takes it personally.”

“Name something that isn’t,” Lotte said.

“Chess.”

“You’ve obviously never had a male opponent stare at your breasts for an entire game. Anyway, I hope this was in the past. What worries me is on the fifth page, a face with nothing but an ‘X’ for a mouth. That means nobody talks. I think that includes us.”

•  •  •

It wasn’t a matter of most trust as least distrust. Now that Alexi had tried to have him assassinated, Maxim seemed willing to cooperate. Until they came to the next bend in the road. Besides, where else would Arkady stay but Maxim’s apartment? Kaliningrad felt more and more an island, with hotels and terminals watched by the Mafia and police. And Arkady had not slept, it seemed, for days. He closed his eyes and dreamed that a bottle of vodka rolled back and forth beneath the couch, that a worm of lead ate into his brain, that a small monkey-faced dog licked his face until he woke to the sunrise chirps of sparrows and found Anya sitting opposite him in a chair.

She said, “You have a cut.”

Arkady touched his scalp.

“Ow.”

“Maybe next time, you’d like to try an ice pick.”

“Where’s Maxim?”

“He left to rent a car.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What a lovely welcome.”

Arkady ignored the cup of tea she offered him. Her face was scrubbed clean, although she still was dressed in the tight party gear of red sequins.

He asked, “Where is Alexi?”

“In Moscow, in Kaliningrad, I don’t know. He zips back and
forth in Grisha’s company jet. At the moment, I think he’s hiding his face, but maybe you know that better than anyone. You’ve made a very bad enemy in Alexi.”

“I never found him charming. He brought you to Kaliningrad, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but now we’ve gone our separate ways.”

“Is this a recent tiff? You became tired of each other?”

“He dropped me.”

“You? That’s hard to believe. The two of you seemed to be getting on.”

“Arkady, you can be such a son of a bitch sometimes.”

“How is the research going for your article on Tatiana?” he asked.

“Moving ahead.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“And your investigation?” Anya asked.

“Coming along.”

“Yes, well, any time I see you with broken glass in your hair, I know your investigation is making progress.”

Arkady shifted and a stack of records slid off the end of the couch to the floor. He didn’t know what she was waiting for. For Alexi to return and sweep her off her feet again? Arkady realized that he had experienced one other dream, or not so much a dream as the memory of sharing his bed with Anya, of her sleeping in his shirt, of his breath caught in her hair. Strange to see that same woman through another man’s eyes. An eerie displacement.

“Have you heard from Zhenya?” Arkady asked.

“No. Sometimes he goes into hiding, like you.”

“You don’t happen to know if he still has the notebook?”

“Maybe. It’s useless.”

“Then why does Alexi want it?”

She shrugged.

Alexi probably dropped her when he discovered she no longer had the notebook, Arkady thought. Well, here she was, no worse for wear after her nights with the rich and dangerous.

Anya asked, “Are you going back to Moscow?”

“After I take care of some loose ends.”

“Such as?”

“Did Alexi ever have access to the keys for my apartment?”

“I never gave them to him.”

Arkady said, “That’s not what I asked. Was there ever a situation when he could have gotten into your handbag?”

“It’s possible. You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who you are. Am I talking to you or am I talking to Alexi’s dancing partner?”

Arkady’s cell phone rang. It was Vova, the boy from the beach. Arkady listened for a minute before hanging up.

“I have to go.”

“No one is stopping you.”

“May I have the keys?”

“Certainly.” She dug into her handbag and slapped them into his hand.

“Thank you.” Arkady edged past her and headed for the door.

Anya dropped into the chair. What had she expected from Arkady? You could push him only so far. She listened to flies browse on the windowpane, stared in an unfocused way at the jazz albums littering the floor, opened a pillbox for a handful of aspirin that she chewed and swallowed. She pulled up a hem of red sequins to look at a cigarette burn applied on her inner thigh.

Arkady rented a Lada, a tin can compared to the ZIL, and drove to the sand spit where he had first seen Vova and his sisters searching for amber. Vova was waiting, barefoot again, ready to wade or run for his life. When Arkady asked where he lived, Vova pointed to a shack half-engulfed by a dune.

“It moans at night. We have beams holding it up. Someday it’s just going to cave in but until then, it’s all ours.” He gave Arkady a sideways look. “You ran into Piggy.”

“The man with the butcher’s van? He’s pretty frightening.”

“Yeah. But nobody will believe me.”

“Try me.”

Vova continually scanned the beach, a lookout’s habit. He had found the business card that Arkady left in the biking shoe of Joseph Bonnafos and had something to tell. Or sell, would be more likely, Arkady thought.

“Are you the police?”

“In Moscow, not here.”

“Because the police will just steal whatever I’ve got.”

They were known for that, Arkady thought. He watched air holes appear in the sand as water retreated, evidence of an unseen world.

“Vova, so far as I’m concerned this is a private affair.”

“Me too.”

“What are your sisters’ names?”

“Lyuba and Lena. Lyuba’s ten. Lena’s eight.”

“On the phone you said you had a bike.”

“A special bike. Black with a red cat.”

A constant wind sculpted sand and whipped Vova’s hair around his brow. Arkady had to wonder what it would be like to live in such a relentless element.

Arkady asked, “Have you shown the bike to anyone else?”

“I told the guys at the bike shop.”

“How much did they offer you?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“That’s a lot.” Maybe a six-hundredth the value of a Pantera, Arkady thought. “Sight unseen?”

“I know these guys, they’d keep the money and the bike.”

“That’s true.”

Vova walked in a tight circle.

“Is there something else?” Arkady asked.

“Piggy.”

“What about him?”

“We saw Piggy kill the biker. We watched from the trees.”

Most eyewitnesses, young or old, tried to re-create the intensity and horror of a murder, like crayoning over the lines of a
coloring book. Vova was cool and matter-of-fact. The biker was still alive when Piggy threw him into the butcher’s van. There was a brief sound like feet drumming on the side of the van and then a gunshot. Piggy emerged and went through the biker’s jersey, seeming to become more frustrated as he went and finally tossing it aside.

“Did he see you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then why is he after you?”

“We took the bike.”

That altered the situation. “You stole the bicycle from Piggy?”

“Yes.”

“Does he know?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“He saw Lyuba wearing the helmet and tried to run her down, but he couldn’t drive up the dunes.”

“Where are your parents?”

“They’re coming back.” It sounded less a boast than a wish.

“What about you? Who takes care of you and your sisters?”

“Our grandmother. She lives back toward town.”

“Does she feed you?”

“We get by.”

“What’s your full name?” Vova was short for Vladimir.

Vova shut his mouth. No parents, no last name.

“Okay,” Arkady said. “Besides the bike and the helmet, what else did you take?”

“Just a notebook I found in the grass. It was full of gibberish.”

“Then why take it?”

“We found a card too with a cell phone number. When people
put a cell phone number on something, they want it back, right?”

“That’s smart.”

“And the lady who answered was nice. She came right away.”

“What did she look like?”

“She looked brainy.”

“Did she say her name?”