Three Stations ar-7 Page 13

  "Not to me. Was there something dirty about the bag? You thought it was drug money, didn't you?"

  "I had no idea one way or the other."

  "But with fashion people there are a lot of drugs."

  "With police too."

  "You're so fair-minded."

  "I'm trying." Arkady didn't know how she had turned the conversation around, but she had.

  "So it could be drug money?"

  "Who knows?"

  "And I could be a whore."

  "I never said that."

  "Some whore who writes about other whores who wear the latest fashions. Fuck her, you say. Let her be robbed. Keep her busy all night answering the same questions over and over while the bag gets lighter and lighter. I hear that you're cozy with Prosecutor Zurin."

  "Like brothers."

  "Do you share your cut with him?"

  Arkady swung out of bed. Anya tried to see him as he disappeared in the living room and reappeared in the kitchen. She watched him approach with something white and she flinched as he thrust it at her.

  "What is it?"

  "A letter from my friend Prosecutor Zurin. There's a lamp on the end table. Feel free to search the apartment. If you find a hundred thousand dollars, it's yours."

  He didn't wait to see if she read it. Arkady woke briefly. In the darkness he became aware of another person not just nearby but radiating warmth. The scent of her was all-enveloping and he was so aroused it hurt. He could tell by her shifting on the sofa that Anya was also awake and anticipation and frustration hung in the air in equal amounts until he brushed them aside as products of his imagination.

  When Arkady woke again, at noon, and spread the drapes, Anya was gone. On the pavement umbrellas were open. At his end of the street the pothole was expanding. A battery of workers, all women, shoveled hot asphalt down its maw. He watched a rubber boot go under.

  Banners for the Nijinsky Fair sagged like shrouds. Arkady wondered what luxury or sensation was left. A diamond-studded elephant? Human sacrifice? Or would Sasha Vaksberg himself be an added attraction as a defender of the moneyed class? Arkady admitted to himself that he had assumed Vaksberg would protect Anya and that assumption was proving to be wrong. Smug, in fact.

  Arkady phoned Willi, who said he couldn't talk. "We've got two boys who crashed on the Ring Road, a sniffer, an indigent pneumonia, a fall from a height, a slashed neck and now this threesome of gunshot victims and they've pressed me back into service."

  Arkady asked, "Is one of the three a dwarf?"

  Willi took his time answering. Arkady heard the snap of a rib cutter in the background.

  "A remarkable guess."

  "Tell me about him."

  "It's no less work. People think, oh, a dwarf should be fast. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are different types of dwarfs and unusual factors."

  "I thought he was shot."

  "Yes."

  "Isn't that the main factor?"

  "Don't get smart. I'm not even supposed to talk to you."

  "Who told you that?"

  "The director. And Prosecutor Zurin. Zurin said that he was going to dismiss you. Did he?"

  "Not yet," Arkady said.

  This had to be done delicately. He had no authority. It was like casting a small lure on a lightweight line to a dimple in the water where there might be fish.

  "What do you mean?" Willi asked.

  "I mean that ordering someone to alter an autopsy report is serious business. You have the power-"

  Willi hung up.

  Well, that was feeble, Arkady thought. He had used psychology when he should have used blackmail.

  His cell phone vibrated. Willi was back.

  "Sorry, I had to get a cigarette."

  "Take your time."

  "This is what happened. Zurin and the director had me cut the girl's lung again. By then the smell of ether had dissipated. They said if I couldn't replicate my findings, the autopsy report had to be revised."

  "Couldn't you detect it by other means?"

  "Not after they're cremated."

  "Already?"

  "It was the wish of the family."

  "Where's the dwarf?" Arkady asked.

  "Here under a sheet. We're waiting for a table."

  "Has he been identified?"

  "No. We know nothing about him."

  "Lift the sheet."

  "Oh. Okay," said Willi. "We know something now. He's blue with tattoos from head to toe. He's a con."

  Prison tattoos were done with a sharp hook and "ink" made out of urine and soot. Once under the skin, the pigment was blue and slightly blurred, but behind bars, tattoos were more than art; they were autobiography. For anyone who could read the symbols, a tattooed man was an open book.

  Arkady said, "Tell me what you see."

  "All kinds. Madonna and Child, teardrops, cats, spiderweb, Iron Cross, bloody dagger, barbed wire. The works."

  "As soon as we hang up, I want you to take pictures of Dopey's tattoos with your cell phone and send them to me. I have an expert."

  20

  Itsy's original family was an addicted mother and abusive father. Their house had been like a listing ship, filthy clothes and empty bottles rolled to one side, bills underfoot and electricity cut off half the time.

  The old man raised guard dogs for security agencies. Alsatians. Rottweilers. Money in that, but it went down her father's throat. Any money that made it home was an oversight. He smelled like the dogs. Man's best friend. Loyal.

  By the time Itsy was twelve, her older brothers had run off. Lost out on the family business, a thriving enterprise that would have gone to them if, God forbid, anything happened to their father. Good real estate too, if Moscow spread in his direction. So he informed anyone trapped between him and a wall.

  Times Itsy missed school were when she had no shoes. It didn't bother her father or mother that she didn't know much more than the alphabet and numbers, and when the school sent people to check on her well-being, she hid rather than be seen in rags.

  Her job from the age of six was to clean the pens and dog run. Her father fed them. His credo was that "Him what feeds 'em is their muvver." And then he would stagger out in a suit of plastic armor and train them to attack.

  With no companions and little else to do, Itsy spent hours with the dogs, playing with them or simply lying with them in a heap. Each dog had his own personality. The dogs were supposed to be kept apart in their own pens, but Itsy let them mix. Their eyes followed everything she did.

  One winter evening her father came home early, drunk and bruised, the sullen loser of a street fight, when he found the dogs milling freely around Itsy. The dogs read his mood and drew closer to her.

  "Growl at me?" He pulled out his trouser belt and bawled, "Out of the way!"

  He might have cowed the pack and gained control if Itsy had not been present, if the first swing of the belt had not drawn a stripe of blood across her cheek.

  One moment he was up and the next he was just a pair of legs kicking at the bottom of a frenzy that Itsy could not have stopped if she tried.

  After, when the dogs tired of dragging her father's body back and forth, she put each in its pen, washed and dried the bloody money she found in her father's pocket and put on as many clothes as possible. He was too heavy to move, and the ground too hard to dig a grave, however shallow.

  Her mother had slept through it all. Itsy would have left a note if she knew how to write. She would have written, "Please Feed the Dogs." Petra had stopped her cart at Aisle 3-Coffee amp; Tea, apparently undecided between bags of Sumatran or Colombian, whole bean or ground. She was nine years old and had the straight hair and broad face of a Romanian princess. She put the Colombian back on the shelf and picked up a French roast.

  Strolling on Aisle 5 — Biscuits amp; Cookies, a cigarette cocked by his ear, Leo couldn't help but look like imminent trouble. He carried a "maybe"; a "maybe" was a mesh bag that everyone used to carry in case they saw anythi
ng for sale. Leo had long legs and loved to run. He was eleven.

  Lisa was in Frozen Foods. She had bow lips, blue eyes, a halo of golden hair and a blank expression. Her best friend, Milka, was in Produce comparing cantaloupes, giving each the sniff test, the knock test, the squeeze. Milka was as plain as Lisa was beautiful, but she wore braces on her teeth, a sign of relative affluence. The girls were ten.

  The supermarket was part of a French chain and there was a special emphasis on dishes with Gallic style like pate, cheeses and duck a l'orange ready for the microwave. Rabbits fluffy and skinned hung in a meat department designed to look like a true boucherie. A cafe served crapes and croque-monsieur.

  Behind a one-way mirror over the lamb chops the floor manager flipped through a face book until he found a match with Lisa. Uniformed security guards were stationed at the entrance and emergency exits, wine department and caviar bar. When the chief counted four runaways, he went out on the floor. Although none of the kids had as yet done anything illegal, he wanted them to know he was keeping an eye on them, so he was looking the wrong way when the automatic door opened and a black Alsatian police dog on a loose leash bounded down Aisle 1-Breads amp; Baked Goods, followed by a girl.

  The dog had a deep bark and the impact of a cannonball. In Produce he brushed a table and spilled lemons across the floor. Cans of stewed tomatoes rolled in his wake. A security man attempting to block Aisle 7-Pet Food grasped air as the dog leaped into the meat bin and came out with a filet mignon hanging from his jaws. Two guards who tried to corner the dog between Ice Cream and Frozen Foods were left in a tangle of overturned carts.

  For the dog, it was a game. It crouched like a sprinter, barked and allowed the guards to get only so near before it made a feint in one direction and took off in another. When the floor manager approached with a can of pepper spray, the dog instantly retreated. Meanwhile regular customers abandoned their carts and made an exodus to the street. All the runaways vanished and, suddenly, so did the dog.

  What confused the floor manager was that after a physical count and an inventory of receipts, nothing had been taken from the floor except the steak. It was hard to bring charges against a dog. A day later, however, the stockroom manager noticed what else was missing.

  While his staff had watched the antics taking place on the other side of the one-way mirror, someone had walked in the backdoor of the stockroom and left with six cases of dry baby formula, four jumbo bags of disposable diapers and two cartons of premixed formula in bottles for babies on the move. Itsy said, "She likes the bottle."

  "I'd rather breast-feed. Yum yum."

  "Shut up."

  "What a dirty mind."

  "Boys are disgusting."

  Leo said, "That was so great when Tito smashed into the lemons."

  "Tito's a good dog."

  "Tito's the best."

  The dog raised his massive head at the sound of his name and cast a loving gaze toward Itsy.

  Emma, the youngest, looked like a rag doll. She was the most fascinated. "Did she cry much?"

  "Not a lot."

  "We should send Tito back for more steaks."

  "They never saw us," Peter said.

  Klim said, "We could have gone back to the storeroom and taken twice as much. We could have cleaned them out." With their pallor he and Peter looked like junior convicts. Klim was nine and Peter was ten.

  "I changed the baby three times. She was kind of runny," Itsy said.

  "She looks tired. Did she sleep?"

  "She fussed."

  "Is this her name, Itsy?" Emma held up an embroidered corner of the blanket.

  "Read it yourself." There was a polite silence because everyone knew Itsy couldn't read.

  "Katya," Emma said in a small voice.

  "Can we turn on the radio?"

  "Keep it low."

  "How long can we stay here?"

  "We'll see."

  The situation seemed ideal: a workers' trailer that had suddenly appeared in an unused repair shed in the yard of Kazansky Station. The trailer had bunks, however stained and filthy, and a potbellied stove. The trailer wasn't going anywhere. Its tires had been flat; now they were shredded.

  The shed itself was a steel hangar open at one end to the station's yard. Rails led to trenches deep enough for a man to stand in for undercarriage repair. Or had at one time. Waist-high grass suggested a long spell of inactivity.

  "It's spooky."

  "Tito will let us know if anyone comes."

  Lisa asked, "What if Yegor comes?"

  Milka opened a knife. "If he comes anywhere near you again, I'll cut his balls off."

  Itsy had no such illusions. She preferred to stay one step ahead of Yegor. Yegor was a grown-up by comparison with anyone in her crew.

  "Why would they want a trailer in a train shed?"

  "I don't know, but they did and we're going to use it. We can take care of ourselves. And we have Tito. And now we have a baby and that makes us a family."

  21

  Victor expounded on tattoos in the cafe at Yaroslavl Station. He touched the screen on Arkady's phone and enlarged the picture as he went.

  "Think of a criminal's tattoos as a painting by the School of Rubens, a painting done by different hands at different times, with sections or faces added or obscured, some areas left blank in anticipation of notable events or cramped by bad planning.

  "Let's begin with the Madonna and Child. This domestic scene tells us that Dopey was not born to a family of the bourgeoisie but to a family of honest criminals. The tattooing is primitive, although the faces were retouched later. The cat tattoos celebrate an early career as a burglar, and you can imagine from the spryness of these cats how a dwarf can get into all sorts of spaces.

  "As he gets older and heavier, he graduates to murder. Three tears for three victims, as if he gave a fuck. He's been imprisoned four times. The barbs on barbed wire tell you how many years. The spiderweb on his shoulder means he's addicted, probably to heroin, because there is a surreal quality to the web reminiscent of Dali."

  There was a new vigor to Victor, Arkady thought. For a man who should be struggling with the DTs, he looked surprisingly hale.

  "You can trust a criminal's hide more than a banker's business card. The card says he has offices in Moscow, London and Hong Kong even though he's never been further than Minsk. But when a convict wears a tattoo for a crime he hasn't honestly committed, other cons will tattoo 'Liar' right across his face."

  "It's good to know there is integrity somewhere in the world."

  "The old cachet isn't there. Now every housewife has a tattoo on her ass. Nobody behind bars is satisfied with homemade ink when their girlfriends are trotting around on the outside with their pants half off and a tat that glows in the dark." He broke off to ask, "Worried?"

  "They have to send me a letter of suspension and a letter of dismissal. Zurin only sent one."

  "You're sure? Anyway, I can't believe that I'm with the man who killed Dopey the Dwarf. Does a curse come with that?"

  "Probably," Arkady agreed.

  "Don't worry about it. You are so fucked a curse would be superfluous."

  Victor ducked out before the bill came. Arkady asked the waiter if he had ever noticed a boy hustle chess in the station.

  The waiter leaned in thought.

  "A thin boy?"

  "Yes. Named Zhenya."

  "I don't know about any Zhenya. This one's called 'Genius.'"

  "That's close enough."

  "He's in and out of the station all the time."

  "Has he been in today?"

  "No. He might be taking a day off. He had a big bust-up with his girlfriend last night. Right here."

  Arkady wasn't sure he heard right. "A girlfriend?"

  "A beauty queen."

  "He has a beautiful girlfriend?"

  "With a shaved head."

  "With a shaved head, no less?" The Zhenya that Arkady knew did not hang out with such a trendy crowd. In fact, he hung o
ut with no one at all. "I think we're talking about two different people."

  The waiter shrugged.

  "A shame. She was special but, like I say, a bitch."

  22

  Four men gathered at a round table: Senior Investigator Renko, District Prosecutor Zurin, Assistant Deputy Prosecutor General Gendler and a ministry elder called Father Iosif, who was as silent and motionless as a stuffed owl. He had long since passed the mandatory retirement age of sixty and, presumably, rolled on with year-to-year contracts. No one knew exactly what Father Iosif's status was. No one ever heard him speak.

  Zurin had never looked better; fit and eager for the fray. Under Yeltsin, he had been round and apoplectic; in Putin's regime, Zurin ate sensibly, exercised and lost weight. A stack of dossiers tied with self-important red ribbons stood by him.

  Gendler had placed Arkady's ID and pistol, a nine-millimeter Makarov, in the middle of the table and noted what an ideal setting for Russian roulette it was.

  "Except, you need a revolver," Arkady said. "A cylinder to spin. Otherwise you've pretty much eliminated the element of chance."

  "Who needs chance?" Gendler placed a tape recorder on the table. He pressed Record and identified site, date, time and persons present for a hearing on dismissal.

  It took Arkady a moment to realize what was transpiring. "Wait, this is a hearing on suspension."

  "No, this is a hearing on dismissal."

  "I received the letter for suspension late last night. I have it." He passed the letter to the assistant deputy, who laid it aside without reading it.

  "Duly noted, a typographical error. However, this is the second hearing. For whatever reason, you did not attend the first."

  "I'd like to change the date."

  "Out of the question. The panel is assembled. We have a quorum and we have the supporting dossiers and material that Prosecutor Zurin has brought. We can't ask him to cart those back and forth at your convenience."

  "I need time to prepare materials."

  "It's your second letter. The first letter went out a month ago. Your time for preparation ran out yesterday."

  "I received no first letter."