Independence square, p.1
Independence Square, page 1
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For my dear friend Andrew Nurnberg
MOSCOW
1
“You know what the two most depressing words in the Russian language are?” Arkady asked.
“How long have I got?”
Victor’s voice sounded thick with gravel, which was always a sign that the previous night he hadn’t so much fallen off the wagon as plunged from it.
“ ‘Desk job,’ ” Arkady said. “In a country which clasps tragedy to its breast, nothing is more tragic than a man with a ‘desk job.’ ”
“As always, Investigator, you zero in on the truth.”
“Investigator.” Arkady sighed. “The only inquiry I’ve made in the past three months has been into the quality of the coffee here in Petrovka.”
Petrovka 38 was the police headquarters where Arkady worked as investigator for the Office of Prosecution, and Victor was his good friend and assistant detective.
“What did you decide?”
“That when the devil came to seduce Margarita in Patriarch Ponds, he stopped off on the way to install vending machines. Come on, Victor, what do you call an investigator who doesn’t investigate?”
“A crime,” said Victor.
It was, of course, Prosecutor Zurin who had confined Arkady to office duties. He had, over the years, sent Arkady to various extremities of the country on cases: to Kaliningrad, hard up against the Polish border in the west, and to Lake Baikal, halfway to the Far East, across endless rolls of Siberian tundra. Perhaps, Arkady thought, he could complete the compass by going to the far north or the far south. The Northern Fleet in Murmansk was always a hotbed of scandal, and any time spent there would play havoc with Arkady’s circadian rhythms to an extent which would please even Zurin. The sun didn’t rise for six weeks in the winter and didn’t set for six weeks in the summer. Men went mad with monotonous regularity up there, and sometimes Arkady felt he had less far to go than most. As for the south—well, Crimea was Russian again now, and it was very nice at this time of year. Arkady had been there once with his first wife, Zoya, back in the days when every woman on the beach wore the same leopard-print swimsuit because that was the only one on sale that year. As the saying went, the past was another country.
Papers were stacked in ziggurats on Arkady’s desk. He picked up a sheet off the tallest one and waved it vaguely in Victor’s direction. “Departmental liaison officer. Do you know what that means?”
“That you attend endless meetings where you’re neither wanted nor needed.”
“Right,” said Arkady.
The ziggurat slid and toppled as Arkady put the paper back. A solitary sheet floated gently downwards like a snowflake. Victor stretched out a hand and caught it lightly between thumb and forefinger.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The handwriting is so tiny, it’s illegible. I can’t read a word of it. Can you read it?”
“Of course. It’s my handwriting.”
“Go on, then.” He handed the paper to Arkady. “Read it to me.”
Arkady hesitated.
“I can’t read a word of it either,” Arkady said.
“You should transcribe it onto the computer while it’s still fresh in your mind.
“It’s called age, Victor. Everything starts going with age.”
2
It was June, warm enough for Arkady to take his jacket off and sling it over his shoulder. As he walked, he kicked up what looked like snow but wasn’t. It was pukh, fluff from poplar trees, which at this time of year could fall in blizzards. Moscow had hundreds of thousands of poplar trees, the planting of which was blamed on Stalin, or Khrushchev, or both. Piles of pukh burned like gunpowder, so street cleaners trained high-pressure hoses on the flakes wherever they gathered. In Arkady’s early days as an investigator, he heard the tale of the American ambassador who had such a bad allergic reaction to the stuff that he’d been evacuated to a hospital in Germany. Arkady regarded pukh in the same way he regarded Moscow’s traffic: as an annoyance so commonplace that acceptance was the path of least resistance.
Zhenya was where Arkady knew he would be, because it was where he always was, at the chess tables in Gorky Park. Looking like a novitiate monk in his maroon hoodie, Zhenya crouched low over his table and stared at the board with such intensity that Arkady thought the king might give himself up through sheer fright.
Zhenya’s opponent was an old man in a flat leather cap, a thick tweed jacket, and a pullover, a man in whose bones the long cold winters clearly lingered even once summer had come. He sat back in his chair, pondered, then slowly moved his piece. Zhenya was a dervish, hands dancing over the pieces, crashing a bishop down here, slapping the chess clock there. Each move was designed to set a trap. The old man’s queen was skittish and isolated.
“Mate in five,” Zhenya said.
“Let’s play it out.”
“Why? I check here, your king goes there, check, check, pawn cuts off your flight.”
“Let’s play it out.”
Zhenya shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
He made a show of impatience as the old man took his time over each move, until eventually it was done. Zhenya pocketed the two one-hundred-ruble notes tucked under one side of the board. He showed not the slightest trace of embarrassment. This was how he made his living.
“I could have been halfway through my next game by now,” Zhenya said.
The old man got to his feet as though uncoiling. “I know.”
Arkady stopped his smile just short of a laugh.
Only now did Zhenya even seem to notice that Arkady was there. He gave a sheepish grin and placed his hand awkwardly on Arkady’s shoulder. For Zhenya, this represented unbridled affection. “Hi.”
“How have you been? Haven’t seen you for a while.”
They were father and son, officially if not biologically. Arkady had adopted Zhenya after finding him living in a casino off Three Station’s Square, and now they did all the things normal fathers and sons did. They argued their way toward common ground, sighed that the other didn’t understand them, and wrangled over money both owed and needed. Zhenya had moved out of Arkady’s apartment a few months back.
“I’ve been here.”
“How’s Lotte?”
“She’s okay.”
Arkady knew Zhenya, so he waited.
“Ah,” Zhenya said, “things aren’t so good.”
“Why not?”
“She thinks I’m wasting my time here.”
“She’s right.”
“Don’t start.”
“Zhenya, you have all the talent in the world, and you’re using a fraction of it. Hustling pensioners for a couple of hundred rubles, that’s not a job.”
“It’s a living.”
“Not the same thing.”
“It is.”
“You should study six hours a day, play in real tournaments. If that’s what you want to do, and you commit to it, then I’ll help you.”
“How could you help me? You don’t even know basic openings.”
“Financially, I mean.” Arkady gestured to the tables, listened to the clack of the pieces in the warm air. “The money you win here is cheap tricks, nothing more.”
Zhenya flapped a hand as though batting away flies. “How’s Tatiana?” he asked.
Arkady took the change in conversation for what it was. “Gone to St. Petersburg.”
“For how long?”
“Gone as in gone. She’s taken a job there. Correspondent for the New York Times.”
“But you’re still together?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Seeking the right words was almost a physical effort for Zhenya. “Are you okay?”
Arkady shrugged. “We had some good years.”
“Why did she leave? And don’t say—”
“For the job.”
“—for the job.”
Arkady had infinitely more experience than Zhenya did, but sometimes he thought that they both knew next to nothing about women, and while that was forgivable for Zhenya, it wasn’t for Arkady.
Tatiana had given a dozen reasons for leaving. Arkady chose one of the more palatable ones.
“She told me I lacked ambition.”
“Ha! Then fix yourself before lecturing me.”
Arkady was still searching for a reply when a young man came over from a nearby bench. He slouched just the same way Zhenya did, barely picking up his feet as he walked. Arkady supposed he should be thankful that neither of them wore his pants halfway down his ass, a trend which as far as he could make out was still popular long after he thought it would have died out, or maybe it had faded and then come back into fashion again, like dictatorship and war.
“This is Alex,” Zhenya said.
Alex was carrying a laptop in one hand. He shook Arkady’s hand. “Alex Levin,” he said.
“Did you read Meduza this morning?” Alex asked Zhenya. “Putin just sent ten thousand troops and an armada down to Crimea.”
“W
“To block Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.”
“Of course,” said Zhenya.
“What’s Meduza?” Arkady asked.
“It’s where we get all our news. The writers are Ukrainian but reporting out of Latvia,” Alex said.
“Where do you get your news?” Zhenya asked Arkady.
“Remember my old friend Sergei Obolensky? Tatiana worked for him on the magazine Now—or, as Sergei called it, Now and Then. His magazine was shut down but I’m still in touch with him and he’s been telling me about Zelensky and what he’s doing in Ukraine. He’s become a real hero.” He turned to Alex. “Do you play chess?”
“I play with Zhenya just for fun, not money. I could never beat him.”
“Alex is a hacker,” Zhenya remarked. Alex looked alarmed. “Oh, don’t worry. My father’s an investigator, but there’s no one less interested in computers.”
That at least was true, Arkady conceded. “A hacker?” he said out loud.
“I prefer the term ‘computer expert,’ ” Alex said.
“Who do you hack?”
“I identify weaknesses in a company’s online security.”
“And charge them for the privilege of fixing them.”
“Of course. But better I find those weaknesses than someone else.”
“Really?”
“Really. My fees are less and my scruples are greater. You’d be surprised how many people still put more locks on their doors than on their computers. The other day we helped 428 American hospitals.”
“ ‘We’?”
“I’m part of a loose collective of computer experts. We divided it up and took a couple of dozen each. Hospitals always pay. Especially American ones. I think of it as my little revenge for the moon landings.”
“The moon landings were long before you were born.”
“The moon landings never happened.”
“You think they faked them?”
“Of course they faked them! Think about it. First satellite in space—Soviet. First dog in space—Soviet. First man, first full twenty-four hours, first woman, first multiple crews, first spacewalk—all Soviet. So how come the Americans suddenly get to the moon first?”
“Because Korolev died, and no one was a genius designer like him.”
“No. Because they faked it. Stanley Kubrick filmed it on a soundstage in the desert.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s all online.” Alex looked triumphant.
There was no disproving what people had convinced themselves was true. How else had the Soviet Union lasted so long?
“It was the year after 2001 came out, you know? They hardly even bothered to make it subtle. Kubrick loved his coded messages. HAL, the computer in 2001—you know why he called it that?” Alex didn’t even wait for an answer. “Because in English the letters H, A, and L come right before I, B, and M. IBM, see?”
“You know he’s kidding you, right?” said Zhenya.
“Right,” Arkady said. He waved at Alex and Zhenya and started back through the park with a smile on his face.
* * *
As he got closer to his car, he could see that a man was waiting by it, and he didn’t need to get much closer before he made out who it was. Fyodor Abakov was unmistakable, even by Moscow standards. He was a bodybuilder, and his chest muscles were now so pronounced that his arms hung away from his body. Everyone called him “Bronson,” a nickname which had come from his resemblance to the actor Charles Bronson.
He ran protection rackets all over the city—cafes, restaurants, kiosks, nightclubs—and he had been in and out of jail a dozen times over the years Arkady had known him.
Bronson held out a hand. “I should congratulate you.”
“Why?”
“I hear you were fired by that pig Zurin.”
“More or less. I work at a desk now.”
“Consider it a promotion. Can we talk?”
“Sure.”
“I can pay you more than the prosecutor ever did if you’ll do a job for me.”
“I won’t take stolen money.”
“Then maybe you’ll take pity on an old man and help me out.” Bronson looked more pitiable than an outsized gangster had any right to. He took Arkady’s silence as assent, at least to make his proposition. “My daughter Karina has disappeared down a rabbit hole, and the assholes I hired to find her haven’t gotten anywhere.”
Arkady smiled. “You don’t want to go to the police?”
“I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.”
“I should remind you that I’m still technically a police detective.”
“Present company excepted, of course.”
“Of course.”
Bronson fished in his pocket, brought out a photograph, and handed it to Arkady. Karina had curly light brown hair and an abstracted expression. Arkady had never bought the idea that you could tell a person’s main qualities from a photo. People changed and turned to show certain sides at certain times. A snapshot was just that, a temporary pause in time, and misleading didn’t begin to cover it.
“Tell me about her,” Arkady said.
“She plays the violin.”
“She plays the violin?” Arkady was surprised.
“Damn right she plays the violin. In a string quartet. They’re very good.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“You think I’d know? She doesn’t tell me anything. All I know is that she’s been busking in the subways. I have her address, but have I ever been there? Have I met her friends? No. I saw a lot of her when her mother was still alive. I think she’s ashamed of me.”
“Do you think she was snatched in the subway?”
“Who knows? That’s why I need you. These kids have a whole different lifestyle. I have no control. She could be anywhere, but she always has that violin with her. Music is all she really cares about. Music and politics.”
Arkady’s heart sank at the word “politics.” Politics in Russia was for the corrupt, the brave, and the foolish.
“What kind of politics?”
“Some movement called Forum for Democracy. ‘Forum’ for short.”
“Anti-government?”
“Isn’t everybody?”
The wind rippled the river into ridges. Arkady blew at a piece of pukh hovering close to his face, and it danced away as it fell.
“So,” Bronson said. “Will you help me?”
It wasn’t that Arkady trusted Bronson, and he certainly didn’t admire him. But at least Bronson never pretended to be anything other than what he was. Criminals came in all shapes and sizes, and there were two categories Arkady disliked above all: the small-timers who wheedled and sniveled and blamed the system, and the so-called businessmen who thought that putting on a suit and having a chauffeur drive them to work in an office absolved all previous sins in a baptism of respectability.
Bronson was neither of those. He was a man true to himself and the world, and for that—maybe for that alone—Arkady liked him. Besides, he saw that the man loved his daughter and was distraught.
“I’ve got to have a completely free hand in this,” he said. “You can’t interfere, and I don’t want anyone to see us together, or I won’t be able to find your daughter.”
“You’re sure I can’t pay you?”
“I’ll do the same job for you either way, so no.”
Bronson clapped a meaty paw across Arkady’s shoulder. It felt like being cuffed by a bear. “Thank you.”
3
Zhenya was waiting outside Arkady’s apartment building when he returned.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said.
“About Tatiana? That’s all right.”
“Okay if I come up?”
“Of course.”
The apartment was in an old tsarist building with a courtyard. Arkady was always slightly amazed that the developers hadn’t yet come for this, as they seemed to be doing on every other street corner in Yakimanka. He could hardly move for signs proclaiming PAINTERS’ VILLAGE this and COMPOSERS’ VILLAGE that. Entire urban blocks slapped with ersatz history and faux artistry because Gerasimov or Prokofiev had once spent a night there between the wars.
“You’ve still got your key, right?” he said as they climbed the stairs.
“Yes. But I don’t like to use it now that I’m not living here.”
