Three Stations ar-7 Read online

  "Sure. You have to let your opponent win at the start to raise the stakes. It's not about winning the game; it's about taking their money. That's the game inside the game." He ducked under a display of condoms that promised long-lasting pleasure in a variety of colors and certainly were an improvement over the old Soviet galosh. The words popped into his mouth. "Who is the baby's father?"

  "It could be anybody."

  It was the one answer that Zhenya had not anticipated.

  10

  This wasn't Arkady's Moscow anymore. The Golden Mile-the area between the Kremlin and the Church of the Redeemer-had been a neighborhood of workers, students and artists. The local restaurants were stand-up cafeterias that served steamed cabbage. The streets glittered not with diamonds but broken glass. But that population was gone. Bought out, sold out, "developed" out, they had been relocated and replaced by boutiques and leggy women with Prada bags who circulated from Pilates class to tapas bar, from tapas bar to sushi, from raw fish to meditation.

  Since the Lada's muffler sounded like a snare drum, Arkady pulled to the curb to call Zhenya. Sometimes the boy withdrew for weeks and what Arkady feared was his isolation. Besides the chess players he hustled, Zhenya had no regular human contact that Arkady knew of except for a gang of runaways led by a dangerous young thug named Yegor who was suspected of setting homeless people on fire.

  Ten rings without an answer was Arkady's limit. He no sooner gave up than a white SUV loomed alongside and a woman with sunglasses perched on her forehead motioned for him to roll down his window. A silk scarf was knotted casually around her neck and a gold chain dangled from her wrist.

  She said, "This is a 'No Lada Zone.'"

  "A what zone?"

  "Ladas."

  "Like this car?"

  "Correct. No Ladas are allowed to park in the zone, let alone to sleep in."

  Arkady looked at Victor snoring in a rubbery fashion.

  "We are in Russia?" Arkady asked.

  "Yes."

  "In Moscow?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "And the Lada is a Russian car?"

  "One Lada can reduce the value of an entire city block."

  "I had no idea."

  "I mean, were you towed here?"

  "Passing through."

  "I knew it. 'Through traffic' is the worst. Why did you stop?"

  "We're releasing rats."

  "That's it. I'm alerting Security."

  Arkady's cell phone rang. Because he expected a callback from Zhenya, he answered without checking the caller.

  "Thank you," Zurin said. "You actually picked up for once. This will be like a birthday present but better."

  Arkady rolled up his window. When the woman started another diatribe, he held up his ID. A moment later the SUV melted and she was gone.

  "What would be better?"

  "Your letter of resignation."

  "I haven't given you one."

  "No hurry, Renko, you have all day."

  For Arkady, Prosecutor Zurin exemplified the modest ambition of a cork. It floated. In regime after regime, policy after counterpolicy, Zurin floated and survived.

  "Why would I resign?"

  "Because the last thing you want is a departmental hearing for suspension."

  "Why should I be suspended?"

  "You disregard orders and overstep your authority and regularly hold the office of the prosecutor up to ridicule."

  "Could you be more specific?"

  "The business with a dead unidentified prostitute. You were told not to initiate any investigations."

  "I didn't. I was with a militia officer who responded to the radio call of an overdose after the local precinct failed to answer. I assisted the officer when, with the exception of forensic technicians, no support arrived."

  "What support do you need for an OD? You gave me your head on a silver platter. All you had to do was stay in the car."

  "It's not an OD," Arkady said. "According to the pathologist, the girl was administered-"

  "You miss the point. You ignored my orders. You were not authorized to order an autopsy."

  "Detective Orlov is and it's his case, not mine."

  "Orlov is an irredeemable alcoholic."

  "Today he's a whirlwind."

  Victor opened his door and threw up.

  "We only order autopsies when there are suspicious circumstances."

  "A healthy young woman was dead. If that doesn't make you suspicious, what does?"

  "That's enough. I want you here in the office. Where are you now?"

  "I don't know. There's a Starbucks on the corner."

  "That's no help. Renko, you can resign gracefully or be put out with the trash. Stick with your friend Orlov. You'll sink together."

  Five minutes later Arkady sat in a traffic jam on Kutuzovsky while police cleared the way for fleets of government sedans that sped down the center lane and he had time to contemplate the increasing likelihood he was going to be dismissed. Then what? He could cultivate roses. Keep pigeons. Read the great books in their original languages. Exercise. The problem was that being an investigator left a person fit for little else. It was an acquired taste like the Masai's mixture of blood and milk.

  He found the Nijinsky Fair invitation that had fallen from the vodka bottle at the trailer and turned it every which way. It wasn't really like a credit card. A little longer and thicker. More like a roulette plaque. The day before he hadn't noticed the existence of the fair and now banners for it seemed to hang on the scaffolding of every construction site in the center of Moscow, NIJINSKY LUXURY FAIR written in silver against a black field.

  Arkady found a newsstand at a Metro station. The press covered the fair from different points of view. Izvestya approved of its capitalist excess. Zavtra detected a Jewish conspiracy. Readers of the more down-to-earth Gazeta suggested different luxury items, most having to do with private islands, private castles or sexual enhancement.

  To each his dream. Victor lived in yesterday's version of the future: a spiral of units around a central staircase, each unit a cube of exposed cement combining function and grace. One unit had toppled. It lay on its side, stripped of plumbing and wiring. The city and the historical commission had fought over the building for years because at one time the intelligentsia of Moscow regularly met in the Orlov apartment to debate ideas, read poetry and drink. Esenin, Mayakovsky, Blok had attended at a time when, as Victor put it, poetry wasn't romantic slop. Victor could recite them all. Some people called the building the House of Poets. A cat delicately approached across a yard of empty bottles and dandelions. A pair of kittens watched from a bed of dirty towels.

  Victor was refreshed. The shakes had passed and hearing the price of a ticket to Nijinsky Fair snapped him awake.

  "Ten thousand dollars to get in the door? Then there'll be free food?"

  "I think it's likely. By the way, the prosecutor called. He wants me to resign and he wants you to call Olga an overdose and fold the case."

  "Wait. We're in the middle of a homicide case. He's not only fucking you, he's fucking me on the bounce. He's fucking Olga too. I don't mean you, puss." The cat weaved between Victor's feet. "So, what are you going to do?"

  "Go to bed."

  "No letter of resignation?"

  "My heart wouldn't be in it."

  "And then?"

  "And then I think it would be a shame to miss a night with millionaires. Mix. Show as many people as possible the photo of Olga but be on your good behavior."

  "No problem. I can offer them sentiments from Blok: 'John, you bourgeois son of a bitch, you can kiss me where I itch.'" Victor smiled with self-satisfaction. "Poetry for all occasions." Arkady's apartment was a distinctly bourgeois affair of paneled wood and parquet floors inherited from his father. There were no photos on the walls. No family gallery on a piano. The women in his life were irretrievably lost. The food in his refrigerator accumulated until he threw it out.

  He dropped into bed but slept badly and i
n a dream found himself in a white room between a stainless-steel table and a laundry bin. In the bin were body parts. It was his task to reassemble the girl he called Olga. The problem was that the bin also contained parts of other women. He recognized each by her color, texture, warmth. No matter what he switched, however, he couldn't complete any single one.

  11

  In the blaze of crystal chandeliers nothing was too expensive or ridiculous. A child's bird rifle that had belonged to Prince Alexei Romanov, once heir to the Russian empire, was offered at $75,000.

  An emerald necklace once owned by Elizabeth Taylor: $275,000.

  For $25 million, a ride to the International Space Station.

  An 1802 Bordeaux left behind by Napoleon as Moscow burned: $44,000.

  Models as beautiful and silent as cheetahs lined the red carpet and watched for labels: Bentley, Cartier, Brioni. Arkady, on the other hand, looked as if he had been dressed by a mortician. The disappointment he provoked in women made him feel guilty.

  As guests shuffled into the fair Arkady recognized famous athletes, supermodels, marginal celebrities, private bankers and millionaires. Onstage a tennis star giggled through her script. "Welcome to the Nijinsky Fair of luxury goods… top social event… sponsors like Bulgari, Bentley and the Vaksberg Group. All the proceeds to Moscow children's shelters. Really?"

  Their gossip was all about real estate. The Golden Mile was the most expensive real estate in Moscow. In the world, for that matter.

  "With an Anglo-American school right around the corner."

  "Twenty-four-hour security and roller shut windows."

  "Twelve thousand dollars a square meter."

  "And a wonderful small church if they would only get rid of the beggars."

  Ahead of Arkady a man with sloped shoulders and a pockmarked neck confided to a woman so elegant she had no eyebrows, only pencil lines, that the item he was after was an audience with the pope. "It can't hurt."

  Arkady recognized the pilgrim as Aza Baron, formerly Baranovsky, who spent six years in prison for fraud. Upon release, he ran the same scams but called it a hedge fund and became wealthy enough to have his conviction expunged. Voila! A new name, a new history, a new man. Baron was not the only rags-to-riches story. Arkady spied an Olympic official who, as a youth, beat a rival to death with a cricket bat. Another man's shaved head bore the nicks of a grenade attack, reminders that climbing the ladder of success involved a certain amount of ducking.

  A long display case held wristwatches that told time, date, depth, split seconds and time for medication. Up to $120,000. A cello played by Rostropovich. A giant commode employed by Peter the Great.

  Security men in Armani black filtered through the crowd. Arkady wondered how to even begin. He imagined tapping Baron on the shoulder and saying, "Excuse me. I am investigating the death of a cheap prostitute and, for all your money, you seemed a likely candidate to ask." Followed by immediate ejection.

  A woman on the runway announced, "Fifteen minutes before closing the fair for the night. Thanks to you and your demand for only the best, luxury helps the needy, especially all those innocent girls. Fifteen minutes."

  Arkady posed as a man trying to decide between an armored Bentley at $250,000, a Harley-Davidson cruiser studded with diamonds at $300,000 or a Bugatti Veyron as black as a storm cloud at $1.5 million. Security men were definitely coming in Arkady's direction. Someone had checked his name against the VIP list after all. Arkady thought he could live with the social disgrace. He was only angry at himself for failing to show Olga's photo to a single soul.

  "What on earth are you doing here?"

  It was Anya Rudikova, Arkady's neighbor from the apartment across the hall. A leather satchel hung off her shoulder and a camera around her neck.

  To Arkady she was the sort of self-dramatizing journalist who was almost as famous as the people she wrote about. Arkady had seen her on television flushing out a covey of the rich and politically connected. She attacked them and wooed them in equal measure.

  "Browsing," Arkady said.

  "Do you see anything here that you like?"

  "Something that fits my budget. I'm leaning to the Bugatti. One thousand horsepower. Of course, at top speed, you run out of gas in twelve minutes and in fifteen minutes the tires catch fire. That could be exciting."

  She pointed toward the mezzanine. "I've been watching you from up there. You have 'police' written all over you."

  "And what are you doing here? I thought you were a serious journalist."

  "I'm a writer. A writer covers all sorts of stories and this is the social event of the year."

  "If you say so." At least the enforcers of Security were backing off. It also explained why Anya was in a black pantsuit and carried a notebook and pen. She should have brought stilts; she was a head shorter than anyone else.

  She studied him in turn. "You don't care much for high fashion, do you?"

  "I don't know enough about fashion to have an opinion. That's like asking a dog about flying."

  "But everyone has a style. A man answers the door wearing little more than a gun? That's a definite fashion statement."

  As Arkady remembered, he had been merely shirtless, maybe barefoot when he answered her knock. The odd thing was that he rarely carried a gun. He didn't know why he had picked it up that time, except that he must have heard a scuffle in the hall. Anya had not been frightened then and wasn't now; she seemed to be a small person who enjoyed keeping larger people off balance. "You didn't say how you feel about the rich."

  "How rich?" Arkady asked.

  "Millionaires. I don't mean small-time millionaires. I mean at least two hundred or three hundred million or more. Or billionaires."

  "There are actual billionaires here tonight? That makes me feel less like a dog and more like a speck on the windshield."

  "How did you get in?"

  "By invitation," Arkady said.

  "Invited by whom?"

  "I don't know. That's the question."

  Something was happening onstage. Anya stood on tiptoe.

  "I can't see a thing. Come on." She started up the stairs.

  The mezzanine was done up as the diamond mine of the dwarfs in Disney's Snow White, which had been huge in Russia, except that here the gems were bottle glass and there was only one dwarf and he was drunk, still wearing a rubber mask and passed out on the floor. Dopey.

  Anya motioned Arkady to sit and they joined a man on a cell phone at a front table. A steely bodyguard sat behind and scanned the crowd. Since when did Russians mousse their hair? Arkady felt increasingly inept and unkempt.

  "Vaksberg," the man at the table identified himself, and immediately turned his attention back to an argument on the phone. He seemed patient and soft-spoken. He had an expensive tan and a black goatee and was known to the public more fully as Alexander "Sasha" Vaksberg, the Prince of Darkness.

  He snapped his phone shut.

  "A year ago we had over a hundred billionaires in Moscow. Today there are less than thirty. So it's the best of times, the worst of times and sometimes it's just the shits. It turns out we don't know how to run capitalism. That's to be expected. As it happens, nobody knows how to run capitalism. That was a bad surprise. Cigarette?"

  Vaksberg pushed across the table a slim pack that said Dunhill Personal Blend for Alexander Vaksberg.

  "Vanity cigarettes. I never saw that before." Arkady lit one. "Excellent."

  Anya said, "Don't be rude. Sasha arranged this event for homeless children out of his own pocket. Have something to eat. I hear the charlotte russe is delicious."

  "After you."

  "She wishes," Sasha Vaksberg said. "Our Anyushka is allergic to dairy. Milk is the killer. Show him."

  Anya allowed Arkady a glimpse of an emergency wristband on her left arm. What struck Arkady was that Sasha Vaksberg, one of the country's wealthiest men and the evening's host, was being virtually ignored by his peers. Instead he was with a journalist and a policeman, which was a
bit of a comedown.

  She said, "The scraps will go, of course, to homeless millionaires."

  Vaksberg said, "Perhaps so. Someone has to point out to the blockheads in the Kremlin that we have an angry mob; only this mob is made up of the rich. Peasants are hard to rouse, but the rich have expectations."

  "Are you talking about violence in the streets?"

  "No, no. Violence in the boardroom."

  "You two should get along. Investigator Renko always expects the worst," Anya said. "He sleeps with a gun."

  "Do you really?" asked Vaksberg.

  "No, I'd probably shoot myself."

  "But you carry one when you're on duty?"

  "On special occasions. There's almost always another way out."

  "So you're a negotiator, not a shooter. That's kind of Russian roulette, isn't it? Have you ever guessed wrong?"

  "Once or twice."

  "You and Anya are a pair. She writes for a fashion journal of mine. Last week the editor asked for a diet piece and she did an article called 'How to Cook Supermodels.'"

  "How did the models like it?"

  "They loved it. It was about them."

  The tennis player returned to the stage and hit a gong. The fair was over. The party was about to begin.

  First the floor had to be cleared, which could have been awkward without a curtain to hide the pushing and pulling of display cases. Few guests noticed, however, because a spotlight directed their attention to a dancer in a loose harlequin costume and pointed cap sitting high on a ceiling catwalk, arms and legs dangling, like a puppet placed on a shelf. He moved jerkily, pantomimed a mad passion and, after sobbing from a broken heart, jumped to his fate. Instead of plunging, however, he soared on a single, nearly invisible wire. He seemed to be a creature of the air. It was part illusion. His every move was choreographed with an eye to angles, acceleration and centrifugal force. Shadowy figures on the floor were counterweights, operating in concert to keep the ropes taut so that the flier could freely swing like a pendulum or turn a somersault or fly straight up into a grand jete.

  Mainly it was the flier's daring as he was drawn like a moth from light to light, ending in a series of prodigious leaps a la Nijinsky. The spotlight died on him, and when the houselights went up, the fair had been replaced by a dance floor and tier after tier of tables and booths in rococo white and gold.