Three Stations ar-7 Page 12

  The problem was that his wife was so high-strung. She wasn't meant for the army life of moving from one dreary outpost to another, living in cold-water housing and forced to be grateful for that at a time when thousands of officers of the highest ranks were being shoved into early retirement. She said a million times that the only thing that would make her happy was a child.

  Toward the end of the stalls, militia officers were stopping people at random to check their papers and search their bags. It was a fishing expedition for bribes and Kassel's impulse was to backtrack because he had forgotten his ID. If he had been in uniform, he would have been waved through. Instead the flow of foot traffic trapped him and pushed him toward an officer who was already reaching for the bag when a gang of street kids, none older than eight, squirmed through. They came and went like a swarm of gnats and collapsed the line, and by the time order was restored, the general was safe on the other side.

  Now that he believed that luck was on his side, he marched directly to the boarding platforms, where he joined a crowd of passengers. He set the shopping bag down and stared down the track with a cigarette between his teeth, the picture of impatience, moving only to avoid the giant suitcases of day peddlers and the sharp edge of porters' carts. The baby was silent. No kicking, no fuss. Although the general took no pleasure in harming a baby in any way, he felt he had kept damage to a minimum.

  Simple plans were the best, the general thought. When the train pulled in, he would join the disembarking riders and leave the shopping bag and baby behind. At this point it seemed providential that he hadn't had an ID to show the militia. There was no way to identify him. It was as if the baby had passed through the world as undetected as a gamma ray. As if it had never existed at all, not officially.

  People stirred as a commuter train approached across a field of rails. This was the end of the line. As it drew closer the general saw riders standing in the aisles, folding their newspapers, closing their cell phones. He was in the perfect position to slip among them.

  Only where was the Italian bag?

  The bag had been at his feet and he hadn't strayed more than a few steps, yet it had disappeared. In the press of riders leaving the train and others boarding, the bag had vanished.

  He melded with the stream of arrivals. Either the bag had been kicked into the gap between the platform and the train or a thief had unwittingly done him a favor. The general felt a guilty relief and could barely keep from running.

  The scare came later, in the middle of the night, when two detectives knocked on the apartment door. Kassel felt that someone at the platform must have seen him with the bag. But the detectives only asked questions about a dead prostitute in a totally unrelated case and he honestly said he couldn't help. So, overall, he felt he had done fairly well. In fact, the memory of the baby was already starting to fade. At sunrise a half-dozen runaway kids hit a twenty-four-hour supermarket on the same street as police headquarters. They came like a gang of mice and created as much nuisance as possible, stuffing jars of Spanish olives and tins of tuna fish into their pockets, picking over organic fruit and avocados with their dirty hands. Some days ice cream was the target, other days any aerosol to sniff.

  Security cameras tried to follow them, although grown men and women chasing homeless six-year-olds did not make a pretty picture. The staff ejected the kids as discreetly as possible and took a quick inventory of stolen items, petty stuff not worth reporting to the police, including sliced bread, strawberry jam, orangeade, energy bars, baby formula, nappies and a bottle.

  18

  Things were never what they seemed. Maya had the face of an angel, but when Zhenya opened his eyes, she was gone and with her his money.

  He searched the casino, the bank and security rooms, the restrooms and dealers' lounge. Whispering her name, he searched among the slots, the one-armed guards of the Kremlin, as if they were carrying her off to a tower and some jolly bacchanal. There were no signs of resistance, not a stack of chips toppled, not a single plastic pearl spilled from the crown jewels. He tried to sleep but his anger was a match struck before a mirror and he saw what a fool he had been.

  Bitch!

  She had turned him from a hustler into an easy mark. It wasn't as if there was anything romantic or sexual between him and Maya. Zhenya wouldn't have presumed. But he thought they had a good relationship. He brought Moscow know-how and intellect, while Maya contributed physical daring, sexual experience and, by virtue of being a mother, adulthood. Assuming that her name really was Maya or there really was a baby or that anything she said was true. Where was she now? In his mind's eye he saw Maya and Yegor on a bed of twisted sheets. When he imagined Yegor's grunts and her submissive whimper, Zhenya covered his ears. Or perhaps Yegor wanted to show Maya who was boss and was giving her a rough ride over the fender of a car. Zhenya had never appreciated how masochistic his imagination was. It was like setting a house on fire and choosing to sit in the flames.

  There was a more practical problem. If Maya switched sides, she was sure to tell Yegor about the Peter the Great. The casino's stock of liquor alone was worth thousands. Yegor would rip out what he could carry and trash what he couldn't, which was a shame because there was a certain perfection about a casino. The brushed felt of the tables. The chips neatly stacked by color. The new dice. The sealed decks of cards.

  He spent the day waiting for night, watching the clouds grow thick and dark, and he remembered how once when he was four years old he and the other kids in the shelter were taken to a petting zoo. The only animal Zhenya was interested in petting was the sheep, because their fleece was always described in children's books as so soft and white. Instead their fleece turned out to be gray and greasy and knotted with shit. For a long time he thought that was what clouds were like. In the daytime Yegor might be anywhere but in the evening he could reliably be found around Lubyanka Square. One entire side of the square was taken up by the Lubyanka itself, a handsome eight-story building of yellow brick with a subtle illumination like votive candles. There was a time when vans arrived at the Lubyanka every night with a haul of bewildered professors, doctors, poets, even party members accused of being foreign agents, wreckers, saboteurs.

  Now no one lingered in front of the Lubyanka, any more than they would walk under a ladder or let a black cat cross their path. Not that anything could happen, but why wake the devil?

  Directly across the square was a toy store, the biggest in Russia, with an indoor carousel that turned under chandeliers fit for a palace. Now the store was dark and gutted, ready for renovation and efficiency. Whimsy was the first item to go.

  Children still came. They vamped in doorways, bummed cigarettes, trotted beside slow-moving cars. At eleven years of age, some of the boys already had the heavy gaze and sullen slouch of rough trade.

  Zhenya looked straight ahead rather than meet the predatory gazes of drivers cruising by. Lubyanka Square was not top browsing for pedophiles-that honor went to Three Stations and the streets around the Bolshoi-but it was a fair start for a pimp as young as Yegor.

  Zhenya was determined not to let Maya walk all over him. Yegor would interpret that as weakness and an invitation to double the price of "protection." Zhenya wasn't going to wait. He knew from chess that the player who moved first had an advantage.

  Nevertheless, he shied away when a Volvo station wagon came to a stop and the man on the passenger side called him over to the curb.

  Zhenya said, "I'm not…"

  "Not what?" The voice was flat.

  "For… you know."

  "Know what?" The man's face was a gray shadow. The same with the driver, as if they had been shaped from the same clay. Their station wagon bore dents and creases of rust, suggesting that the vehicle had been rolled, left for dead and resurrected.

  "I don't know," Zhenya said.

  The man said, "We're looking for a girl. She ran away from home and her mother and father are very worried about her. There's a reward for helping us."

 
He showed Zhenya a photocopy of Maya sitting with the baby in the bus shelter. The baby existed and Maya smiled as if she could hold it forever. Zhenya made much of trying to see the picture in better light.

  "It's her baby?"

  "Yeah. That's another reason to find her. Her parents are worried sick about the baby."

  "Who are you?"

  "Not that it matters, but we're her uncles. It's family business."

  "What's her name?"

  "Maya. Maya Ivanova Pospelova. The person who delivers her gets a reward of a hundred dollars. The last time anybody saw her she dyed her hair red. Keep the picture. There are two cell-phone numbers on the other side."

  "She's pretty."

  The driver said, "She's a whore."

  The car moved on to a streetlamp at the end of the block where a convertible with the top down had attracted a circle of boys. The station wagon rolled to a stop and flashed its high beams. The convertible was a BMW, a German driving machine unlikely to make room for a wreck, and its driver made a rude gesture without bothering to turn and look behind. When the Volvo rolled forward and tapped the rear bumper of the BMW, its driver called on the heavens to rain shit on idiots who drove shit cars. The passenger emerged from the Volvo, opened its tailgate and drew out a long-handled shovel. He marched to the front of the convertible and brought the shovel edge down on the hood. The driver of the BMW ducked so quickly he broke his nose on the steering wheel and blood covered his mouth and chin. That was only teeing up. The second swing had sufficient whip to buckle the hood and a third set off the windshield wipers. Three swings were enough. The convertible rode over the curb in its haste to escape and the Volvo took its place at the curb. The boys had retreated but in a minute they crowded the car for pictures of Maya.

  Zhenya had no idea where Maya and Yegor were. All he could do was race up one block and down the next, avoid being hit by the high-speed traffic exiting the roundabout and dart between the cars slowly cruising the side streets. He wasn't used to running and he blamed Arkady as a poor role model. The second time around, the blocks were longer, the air thinner. He was staggering to a stop when he became aware that the Volvo station wagon, its lights out, was immediately behind him. It didn't matter; he couldn't take another step.

  The man on the passenger side got out and opened a rear door for Zhenya. He gave the boy a chance to catch his breath.

  "Where is she?"

  Zhenya had not panicked in a thousand games of chess, which only underlined the difference between fantasy and reality. A multitude of escape scenarios always came to mind over a chessboard but the man had a grip on Zhenya's arm that squeezed his bicep in two.

  "I don't know anything."

  "Then you have nothing to worry about."

  He was pushing Zhenya into the backseat when an older boy skidded up to the Volvo and said they had the wrong guy; the girl they wanted was with a pimp named Yegor only a few blocks away.

  To the men Zhenya no longer existed and he found himself sitting on the curb loathing his newfound cowardice.

  19

  Arkady slept a luxurious two hours and would have stayed in bed longer but for a muffled sound at the front door.

  The apartment originally had fireplaces. They were bricked in and unusable, but the hardware remained and Arkady chose a poker. Wearing only pajama bottoms, he whipped the door open and found one of the up-and-coming young men from the prosecutor's staff on his knees with a letter he had been trying to slip under the door. The up-and-comer saw the poker, jumped to his feet and rushed down the stairs.

  The letter was handwritten, which showed Zurin cared. It was also typical that the prosecutor would have enlisted someone else to deliver it, one of the lads who regarded Arkady as ancient and as unpredictable as a loaded harquebus.

  Suspended for cause… poor judgment… calling into question and undermining the aims… concocting cases… flouting the chain of command… given every chance… forced to take action… deepest regrets… your firearm and identification.

  Zurin's signature was twice as firm and twice as large as usual.

  Arkady turned on the television. Sasha Vaksberg led the newscasts. How could he not? A famous billionaire kills a would-be assassin? And not just any assassin but one disguised as Dopey? A police spokesman solemnly pointed to bullet dents on the limousine's trunk and fender. Unfortunately for the viewers, rain had washed away the blood.

  He turned the set off. This was the sort of case that Petrovka felt two ways about. Three dead bodies drove up the crime rate. On the other hand, they also drove up the solution rate, which had been lagging badly. There was a niggling question of why Vaksberg's driver had ignored construction barriers to park on an unfinished highway ramp. The man was dead and it didn't matter. Keep it simple.

  Zurin's letter, however, had also accused Arkady of "concocting cases." Translated, that meant the prosecutor was closing the investigation of the body found at Three Stations. Forget the obscene pose and the ether in her lungs. Her body had been reduced to ashes and all that was left of Vera Antonova was a death certificate that was moved from a file labeled Open to a file labeled Closed.

  So it was over. Arkady rang Victor to call off the rendezvous at Three Stations, but Victor's mobile phone was off. He tried calling Zhenya. Zhenya didn't answer, and Arkady discovered that the number he had for Eva was no longer in service, meaning the last link of communication he had with her was gone. Or, more likely, that their connection had died long ago and he had been talking to echoes.

  With the curtains closed, the apartment was a sensory deprivation tank. Once upon a time such a weepy day would have invited self-pity and thoughts of suicide. But his heart wasn't in it anymore. The blackness of mood, the single-mindedness that was demanded for self-destruction was missing. The boy in the morgue who drained himself as white as alabaster had displayed the proper sense of commitment. He deserved more than his mother's dismissive "Burn him." Arkady expected that in his own case, if he did blow his head off, it would please Zurin far too much.

  There was a rap on the door. Arkady assumed that the investigator who delivered the letter had found the courage to return for Arkady's official ID. However, when he opened the door, he was hit in the chest by an empty red-and-white athletic bag. Anya Rudikova marched in. She was in the same black outfit as the night before, only now it clung like wet crepe.

  "You smug bastard."

  "What are you talking about?" Arkady pulled on a T-shirt.

  "What do you think is in the bag?"

  "When I looked, money."

  "How much?"

  "That's not my business."

  "There was over a hundred thousand dollars in cash. Now there's none. The militia got it all because you wouldn't help. They say they have to ascertain the ownership of the money. They won't accept our receipts. All you had to do was take the bag with you. You didn't. You owe me a hundred thousand dollars."

  "Get it from Sasha. He's the billionaire."

  "He didn't leave the money. You did."

  It dawned on Arkady that Anya was in wet clothes and probably had had no sleep at all. If he was exhausted, so was she.

  "We'll talk tomorrow," he said.

  There was a problem. The militia had taken the key to her apartment to search it for other athletic bags stuffed with cash; if she had one, why not more? And they confiscated the key in case they wanted to return and search the flat again.

  "I'm locked out," Anya admitted.

  It was an opportunity for Arkady to be smug, but he let it pass. They were adults. To get into a friend's apartment would have taken Anya an hour at least. Even if Arkady's flat was the last place on earth she wanted to be, logic and a bout of violent shivering made it the only choice.

  "Please," he said.

  After a brief show of resistance, she hurried to the bathroom and shut the door behind her. He sat dumbfounded by the situation. A man and a woman find themselves in an apartment against their will. Why should there be a sexu
al context? There wouldn't be if he were dealing with a male colleague. It was a pro forma fantasy. But when she showered he not only heard her, he could feel the hot pinpricks of water move down her neck, her back, her stomach. He had a glass of vodka and a cigarette.

  Through the door he offered her clothes that Eva had left in a suitcase under the bed. Instead she emerged in a shirt of his with the sleeves rolled up.

  "It's bad enough I'm here, I'm not going to wear another woman's clothes."

  The shirt hung to her knees. He couldn't think of any compliment that covered the situation.

  She said, "Anyway, I just need to close my eyes."

  "Take the bed. I'll take the sofa in the living room." It wasn't much of a sofa and it wasn't much of a living room. He had taken down all the posters and photos that he and Eva had chosen together. The sofa was little larger than a sled.

  "I'm not going to kick you out of your own bed."

  "It's called hospitality," Arkady said.

  "I am not your guest. I'll take the sofa." She sat on it with an air of fait accompli. "It's nearer the front door and you won't even hear me when I leave."

  He gave up. She was impossible. Before she arrived at his doorstep, he had considered the possibility of sleep. Now his eyes were wide open.

  She said from the sofa, "Dopey never had a chance."

  Talking to Anya was like skydiving, Arkady thought. You were at terminal velocity before you knew it.

  She said, "That was why you could walk right up to him. You had the advantage."

  "What advantage?"

  "You didn't care if you died. For you it was a win-win situation."

  "The only advantage is that when a lot of shots are fired, the trigger gets heavy and the kick gets high."

  "Not you. You shot him right between the eyes."

  "And saved your life."

  "Killed Dopey and gained control of the scene. You knew the militia would confiscate the bag."

  "At the time, the bag was a minor issue."