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Victor, the detective from the street, finally made it up. He was a sleep-deprived man in a sweater that reeked of cigarettes. He held up a sandwich bag containing a saltshaker. "This was on the pavement under Ivanov. Maybe it was there already. Why would anyone jump out a window with a saltshaker?"

  Bobby Hoffman squeezed by Victor. "Renko, the best hackers in the world are Russian. I've encrypted and programmed Pasha's hard drive to self-destruct at the first sign of a breach. In other words, don't touch a fucking thing."

  "You were Pasha's computer wizard as well as a business adviser?" Arkady said.

  "I did what Pasha asked."

  Arkady tapped the CD tray. It slid open, revealing a silvery disk. Hoffman tapped the tray and it slid shut.

  He said, "I should also tell you that the computer and any disks are NoviRus property. You are a millimeter from trespassing. You ought to know the laws here."

  "Mr. Hoffman, don't tell me about Russian law. You were a thief in New York, and you're a thief here."

  "No, I'm a consultant. I'm the guy who told Pasha not to worry about you. You have an advanced degree in business?"

  "No."

  "Law?"

  "No."

  "Accounting?"

  "No."

  "Then lots of luck. The Americans came after me with a staff of eager-beaver lawyers right out of Harvard. I can see Pasha had a lot to be afraid of." This was more the hostile attitude that Arkady had expected, but Hoffman ran out of steam. "Why don't you think it's suicide? What's wrong?"

  "I didn't say that anything was."

  "Something bothers you."

  Arkady considered. "Recently your friend wasn't the Pasha Ivanov of old, was he?"

  "That could have been depression."

  "He moved twice in the last three months. Depressed people don't have the energy to move; they sit still." Depression happened to be a subject that Arkady knew something about. "It sounds like fear to me."

  "Fear of what?"

  "You were close to him, you'd know better than I. Does anything here seem out of place?"

  "I wouldn't know. Pasha wouldn't let us in here. Rina and I haven't been inside this apartment for a month. If you were investigating, what would you be looking for?"

  "I have no idea."

  Victor felt at the sleeve of Hoffman's jacket. "Nice suede. Must have cost a fortune."

  "It was Pasha's. I admired it once when he was wearing it, and he forced it on me. It wasn't as if he didn't have plenty more, but he was generous."

  "How many more jackets?" Arkady asked.

  "Twenty, at least."

  "And suits and shoes and tennis whites?"

  "Of course."

  "I saw clothes in the corner of the bedroom. I didn't see a closet."

  "I'll show you," Rina said. How long she had been standing behind Victor, Arkady didn't know. "I designed this apartment, you know."

  "It's a very nice apartment," Arkady said.

  Rina studied him for signs of condescension, before she turned and, unsteadily, hand against the wall, led the way to Ivanov's bedroom. Arkady saw nothing different until Rina pushed a wall panel that clicked and swung open to a walk-in closet bathed in lights. Suits hung on the left, pants and jackets on the right, some new and still in store bags with elaborate Italian names. Ties hung on a brass carousel. Built-in bureaus held shirts, underclothes and racks for shoes. The clothes ranged from plush cashmere to casual linen, and everything in the closet was immaculate, except a tall dressing mirror that was cracked but intact, and a bed of sparkling crystals that covered the floor.

  Prosecutor Zurin arrived. "What is it now?"

  Arkady licked a finger to pick up a grain and put it to his tongue. "Salt. Table salt." At least fifty kilos' worth of salt had been poured on the floor. The bed was softly rounded, dimpled with two faint impressions.

  "A sign of derangement," Zurin announced. "There's no sane explanation for this. It's the work of a man in suicidal despair. Anything else, Renko?"

  "There was salt on the windowsill."

  "More salt? Poor man. God knows what was going through his mind.

  "What do you think?" Hoffman asked Arkady.

  "Suicide," Timofeyev said from the hall, his voice muffled by his handkerchief.

  Victor spoke up. "As long as Ivanov is dead. My mother put all her money in one of his funds. He promised a hundred percent profit in a hundred days. She lost everything, and he was voted New Russian of the Year. If he was here now and alive, I would strangle him with his own steaming guts."

  That would settle the issue, Arkady thought.

  By the time Arkady had delivered a hand truck of NoviRus files to the prosecutor's office and driven home, it was two in the morning.

  His apartment was not a glass tower shimmering on the skyline but a pile of rocks off the Garden Ring. Various Soviet architects seemed to have worked with blinders on to design a building with flying buttresses, Roman columns and Moorish windows. Sections of the facade had fallen off, and parts had been colonized by grasses and saplings sowed by the wind, but inside, the apartments offered high ceilings and casement windows. Arkady's view was not of sleek Mercedeses gliding by but of a backyard row of metal garages, each secured by a padlock covered by the cutoff bottom of a plastic soda bottle.

  No matter the hour, Mr. and Mrs. Rajapakse, his neighbors from across the hall, came over with biscuits, hard-boiled eggs and tea. They were university professors from Sri Lanka, a small, dark pair with delicate manners.

  "It is no bother," Rajapakse said. "You are our best friend in Moscow. You know what Gandhi said when he was asked about Western civilization? He said he thought it would be a good idea. You are the one civilized Russian we know. Because we know you do not take care of yourself, we must do it for you."

  Mrs. Rajapakse wore a sari. She flew around the apartment like a butterfly to catch a fly and put it out the window.

  "She harms nothing," her husband said. "The violence here in Moscow is very bad. She worries about you all the time. She is like a little mother to you."

  After Arkady chased them home, he had half a glass of vodka and toasted. To a New Russian.

  He was trying.

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  Evgeny Lysenko, nickname Zhenya, age eleven, looked like an old man waiting at a bus stop. He was in the thick plaid jacket and matching cap that he'd been wearing when he was brought by militia to the children's shelter the winter before. The sleeves were shrinking, but whenever the boy went on an outing with Arkady, he wore the same outfit and carried the same chess set and book of fairy tales that had been left with him. If Zhenya didn't get out every other week, he would run away. How he had become Arkady's obligation was a mystery. To begin with, Arkady had accompanied a well-intentioned friend, a television journalist, a nice woman looking for a child to mother and save. When Arkady arrived at the shelter for the next outing, his mobile phone rang. It was the journalist calling to say she was sorry, but she wasn't coming; one afternoon with Zhenya was enough for her. By then Zhenya was almost at the car, and Arkady's choice was to either leap behind the wheel and drive away, or take the boy himself.

  Anyway, here was Zhenya once again, dressed for winter on a warm spring day, clutching his fairy tales, while Olga Andreevna, the head of the shelter, fussed over him. "Cheer Zhenya up," she told Arkady. "It's Sunday. All the other children have one kind of visitor or another. Zhenya should have something. Tell him some jokes. Be a jolly soul. Make him laugh."

  "I'll try to think of some jokes."

  "Go to a movie, maybe kick a ball back and forth. The boy needs to get out more, to socialize. We offer psychiatric evaluation, proper diet, music classes, a regular school nearby. Most children thrive. Zhenya is not thriving."

  The shelter appeared to be a healthful setting, a two-story structure painted like a child's drawing with birds, butterflies, rainbow and sun, and a real vegetable garden bordered by marigolds. The shelter was a model, an oasis in a city where thou
sands of children went without homes and worked pushing outdoor market carts or worse. Arkady saw a circle of girls in a playground serving tea to their dolls. They seemed happy.

  Zhenya climbed into the car, put on his seat belt and held his book and chess set tight. He stared straight ahead like a soldier.

  "So, what will you do, then?" Olga Andreevna asked Arkady.

  "Well, we're such jolly souls, we're capable of anything."

  "Does he talk to you?"

  "He reads his book."

  "But does he talk to you?"

  "No."

  "Then how do you two communicate?"

  "To be honest, I don't know."

  Arkady had a Zhiguli 9, a goat of a car, not prepossessing but built for Russian roads. They drove along the river wall, past fishermen casting for urban aquatic life. Considering the black cloud of truck exhaust and the sluggish green of the MoscowRiver, for optimism fishermen were hard to beat. A BMW shot by, followed by a security team in an SUV. In fact, the city was safer than it had been in years, and chase cars were largely for form, like the retinue of a lord. The most ferocious businessmen had killed one another off, and a truce between the Mafias seemed to be holding. Of course, a wise man took out all forms of insurance. Restaurants, for example, had both private security guards and a representative of the local Mafia at the front door. Moscow had reached an equilibrium, which made Ivanov's suicide all the harder to understand.

  Meanwhile, Zhenya read aloud his favorite fairy tale, about a girl abandoned by her father and sent by her stepmother into the deep woods to be killed and eaten by a witch, Baba Yaga.

  " 'Baba Yaga had a long blue nose and steel teeth, and she lived in a hut that stood on chicken legs. The hut could walk through the woods and sit wherever Baba Yaga ordered. Around the hut was a fence festooned with skulls. Most victims died just at the sight of Baba Yaga. The strongest men, the wealthiest lords, it didn't matter. She boiled the meat off their bones and when she had eaten every last bite she added their skulls to her hideous fence. A few prisoners lived long enough to try to escape, but Baba Yaga flew after them on a magic mortar and pestle.' " However, page by page, through kindness and courage, the girl did escape and made her way back to her father, who sent away the evil stepmother. When Zhenya was done reading he gave Arkady a quick glance and settled back in his seat, a ritual completed.

  At Sparrow Hill, Arkady swung the car in sight of MoscowUniversity, one of Stalin's skyscrapers, built by convict labor in such a fever for higher learning and at such wholesale cost of life that bodies were said to have been left entombed. That was a fairy tale he could keep to himself, Arkady thought.

  "Did you have some fun this week?" Arkady asked.

  Zhenya said nothing. Nevertheless, Arkady tried a smile. After all, many children from the shelter had suffered negligence and abuse. They couldn't be expected to be rays of sunshine. Some children were adopted out of the shelter. Zhenya, with his sharp nose and vow of silence, wasn't a likely candidate.

  Arkady himself would have been harder to please, he thought, if he'd had a higher opinion of himself as a child. As he remembered, he had been an unlovable stick, devoid of social skills and isolated by the aura of fear around his father, an army officer who was perfectly willing to humiliate adults, let alone a boy. When Arkady came home to their apartment, he would know whether the general was in just by the stillness in the air. The very foyer seemed to hold its breath. So Arkady had little personal experience to draw on. His father had never taken him for outings. Sometimes Sergeant Belov, his father's aide, would go with Arkady to the park. Winters were the best, when the sergeant, tramping and puffing like a horse, pulled Arkady on a sled through the snow. Otherwise, Arkady walked with his mother, and she tended to walk ahead, a slim woman with a dark braid of hair, lost in her own world.

  Zhenya always insisted on going to GorkyPark. As soon as they'd bought tickets and entered the grounds, Arkady got out of the way while Zhenya made a slow perambulation of the plaza fountain to scan the crowd. Fluffs of poplar seed floated on the water and collected around the stalls. Crows patrolled in search of sandwich crusts. GorkyPark was officially a park of culture, with an emphasis on outdoor performances of classical music and promenades among the trees. Over time, the bandshell had been claimed by rock bands and the promenades covered by amusement rides. As ever, Zhenya returned from the fountain dejected.

  "Let's go shoot something," Arkady said. That generally cheered boys up.

  Five rubles bought five shots with an air rifle at a row of Coke cans. Arkady remembered when the targets had been American bombers dangling on strings, something worth blazing away at. From there they went into a fun house, where they followed a dark walkway between weary moans and swaying bats. Next came a real space shuttle that had truly orbited the earth and was tricked out with chairs that lurched from side to side to simulate a bumpy descent.

  Arkady asked, "What do you think, Captain? Should we return to earth?"

  Zhenya got out of his chair and marched off without a glance.

  It was a little like accompanying a sleepwalker. Arkady was along but invisible, and Zhenya moved as if on a track. They stopped, as they had on every other trip, to watch bungee jumping. The jumpers were teenagers, taking turns soaring off the platform, flapping, screaming with fear, only to be snapped back the moment before they hit the ground. The girls were dramatic, the way their hair rippled on the way down and snapped as the plunge was arrested. Arkady couldn't help but think of Ivanov and the difference between the fun of near death and the real thing, the profound difference between giggling as you bounced to your feet, and staying embedded in the pavement. For his part, Zhenya didn't appear to care whether the jumpers died or survived. He always stood in the same spot and glanced cagily around. Then he took off for the roller coaster.

  He took the same rides in the same order: a roller coaster, a giant swing and a ride in a pontoon boat around a little man-made lake. He and Arkady sat back and pedaled, the same as every time, while white swans and black swans cruised by in turn. Although it was Sunday, the park maintained an uncrowded lassitude. Rollerbladers slid by with long, easy strides. The Beatles drifted from loudspeakers: "Yesterday." Zhenya looked hot in his cap and jacket, but Arkady knew better than to suggest the boy remove them.

  The sight of silver birches by the water made Arkady ask, "Have you ever been here in the winter?"

  Zhenya might as well have been deaf.

  "Do you ice-skate?" Arkady asked.

  Zhenya looked straight ahead.

  "Ice skating here in the wintertime is beautiful," Arkady said. "Maybe we should do that."

  Zhenya didn't blink.

  Arkady said, "I'm sorry that I'm not better at this. I was never good at jokes. I just can't remember them. In Soviet times, when things were hopeless, we had great jokes."

  Since the children's shelter fed Zhenya good nutritious food, Arkady plied him with candy bars and soda. They ate at an outdoor table while playing chess with pieces that were worn from use, on a board that had been taped together more than once. Zhenya didn't speak even to say "Mate!" He simply knocked over Arkady's king at the appropriate time and set the pieces up again.

  "Have you ever tried football?" Arkady asked. "Stamp collecting? Do you have a butterfly net?"

  Zhenya concentrated on the board. The head of the shelter had told Arkady how Zhenya did solitary chess problems every night until lights-out.

  Arkady said, "You may wonder how it is that a senior investigator like myself is free on such a glorious day. The reason is that the prosecutor, my chief, feels that I need reassignment. It's plain that I need reassignment, because I don't know a suicide when I see one. An investigator who doesn't know a suicide when he sees one is a man who needs to be reassigned."

  Arkady's move, the retreat of a knight to a useless position on the side of the board, made Zhenya look up, as if to detect a trap. Not to worry, Arkady thought.

  "Are you familiar with the name P
avel Ilyich Ivanov?" Arkady asked. "No? How about Pasha Ivanov? That's a more interesting name. Pavel is old-fashioned, stiff. Pasha is Eastern, Oriental, with a turban and a sword. Much better than Pavel."

  Zhenya stood to see the board from another angle. Arkady would have surrendered, but he knew how Zhenya relished a thoroughly crushing victory.

  Arkady said, "It's curious how, if you study anyone long enough, if you devote enough effort to understanding him, he can become part of your life. Not a friend but a kind of acquaintance. To put it another way, a shadow has to become close, right? I thought I was beginning to understand Pasha, and then I found salt." Arkady looked for a reaction, in vain. "And well you should be surprised. There was a lot of salt in the apartment. That's not a crime, although it might be a sign. Some people say that's what you'd expect from a man about to take his life, a closet full of salt. They could be right. Or not. We don't investigate suicides, but how do you know it's a suicide unless you investigate? That is the question."

  Zhenya scooped up the knight, revealing a pin on Arkady's bishop. Arkady moved his king. At once, the bishop disappeared into Zhenya's grasp, and Arkady advanced another sacrificial lamb.

  "But the prosecutor doesn't want complications, especially from a difficult investigator, a holdover from the Soviet era, a man on the skids. Some men march confidently from one historical era to the next; others skid. I've been told to enjoy a rest while matters are sorted out, and that is why I can spend the day with you." Zhenya pushed a juggernaut of a rook the length of the board, tipped over Arkady's king and swept all of the pieces into the box. He hadn't heard a word.

  The last regular event was a ride on the Ferris wheel, which kept turning as Arkady and Zhenya handed over their tickets, scrambled into an open-air gondola and latched themselves in. A complete revolution of the fifty-meter wheel took five minutes. As the gondola rose, it afforded a view first of the amusement park, then of geese lifting from the lake and Rollerbladers gliding on the trails and, finally, at its apogee, through a floating scrim of poplar fluff, a panorama of gray daytime Moscow, flashes of gold from church to church and the distant groans of traffic and construction. All the way, Zhenya stretched his neck to look in one direction and then the other, as if he could encompass the city's entire population.