Three Stations ar-7 Read online

  A black DJ in a bulging Africa knit cap pulled on headphones, set records on two turntables and made mysterious adjustments on his control panel while he nodded to a beat only he heard. He grinned, just joking, and fed the speakers. Everyone had been so black tie and bloody noble for charity's sake but now the ties were loosened and champagne poured, and in a minute the floor was so crowded that all the dancers could do was writhe in place.

  Anya explained that the highest tiers were the most expensive. They were the refuge of older men who, after a shuffle or two, left the floor with honor intact, assured that while the world might be shit, at least the Club Nijinsky was the top of the heap.

  Vaksberg said, "This is neutral ground. We have dogs to sniff out bombs and fifty security men to enforce a 'No Guns, No Cameras' policy. We don't want our guests from the Middle East to worry about photos of them with a drink in one hand and a dancer in the other."

  "What about Dopey?" Anya asked.

  Still in costume, the dwarf had curled up underneath a table and was snoring.

  Vaksberg said, "He's breathing and he looks comfortable. Let him be."

  Arkady sat back as waiters in white gloves laid a tablecloth and served a chilled bowl of Beluga caviar, warm toast and spoons of mother-of-pearl.

  "Young people call Ecstasy a huggy drug because it seems to reduce aggression. They're happy to dance their little heads off in two square centimeters all night long. I can't say enough for it. What do you do for pleasure, Renko?"

  "In the winter I ski at Chamonix. In the summertime I sail in Monte Carlo."

  "Seriously."

  "I read."

  "Well, the people at the fair entertain themselves by giving money to charity. In this case to homeless children who are cheated of their childhood and drawn into prostitution, boys and girls. You disapprove?"

  "A handout from a billionaire to a starving child? What can be wrong with that?"

  Anya said, "Please, the Nijinsky is not a charity. The Nijinsky is a social club for super-rich, middle-aged boys. They only come to table-hop. Their women are supposed to be beautiful, laugh at the men's crude remarks, drink to every toast, endure the clumsy attempts at seduction by their husband's best friends and at the end of the evening be sober enough to undress the old fart and put him to bed."

  "And they call me a cynic?" Vaksberg said. "We will continue this conversation but an intermission is coming and I have to go onstage and remind our friends to be generous." He poured champagne for Anya and Arkady. "Five minutes."

  Arkady did not understand why Alexander Vaksberg spent even a minute with such an ill-mannered guest. He watched Vaksberg's progress on the dance floor. A billionaire. How much was that? A thousand million dollars. No wonder mere millionaires stepped aside as if an elephant were coming through.

  Anya said, "So, you're here to find the person who invited you?"

  "Not me. Not exactly."

  "This is intriguing."

  "We'll see."

  He laid on the table a postcard-size photograph of Olga looking straight up from a filthy mattress.

  Anya recoiled. "Who is this?"

  "I don't know."

  "She's dead."

  Not all the beauty in the world could mask the fact that no light shone in her eyes, no breath stirred at her lips and she had no objection to the fly examining her ear.

  "Why are you showing this picture to me?"

  "Because she had a VIP pass to the fair."

  "It's possible she's a house dancer. I don't remember her name. They have new dancers here all the time. She's young. Dima, have you seen her?"

  The bodyguard peered over Anya's shoulder.

  "No. They pay me to watch for troublemakers, not girls."

  "And if you find troublemakers?" Arkady was curious.

  Dima opened his jacket enough to afford Arkady a glimpse of a matte-black pistol. "A Glock. German engineering never fails."

  "I thought no guns were allowed in the club."

  Anya said, "Only Sasha and the boys. It's his club. He can write the rules any way he wants."

  During an intermission Vaksberg gave a surprisingly heartfelt speech about homeless children. Five to forty thousand lived on the streets of Moscow; there was no accurate count, he said. Most of them were runaways, boys and girls as young as five who preferred life on the street to a household ruined by alcohol, brutality and abuse. Freezing to death in the wintertime. Squatting in abandoned buildings and surviving on petty theft and restaurant scraps. Vaksberg pointed out volunteers with collection baskets. "Remember, one hundred percent of your donations go to Moscow's invisible children."

  Then the records began spinning again and the relentless beat resumed.

  "They didn't hear a word," Vaksberg said on his return. "They only know when to clap. I could have been talking to trained seals."

  Anya bestowed a kiss on Vaksberg's cheek. "That's why I love you, because you're honest."

  "Only around you, Anya. Otherwise, I lie and fabricate as badly as Investigator Renko thinks. I'd be dead if I didn't."

  Arkady asked, "What is the problem?"

  "Sasha has been receiving threats. I mean more than usual."

  "Perhaps he should keep his head down instead of hosting a party with a thousand guests."

  Arkady was not about to feel sorry for a billionaire, even one who looked as exhausted as Vaksberg did. He seemed more and more in shadow, his shoulders weary, his smile forced. He was head of the Vaksberg Group, an international chain of casinos and resorts. It seemed to Arkady that Sasha Vaksberg should have been backed by an army of lawyers, accountants, croupiers and chefs rather than a female journalist, an investigator half out the door, a single bodyguard and a drunken dwarf. This was an historical fall. Vaksberg was one of the last of the first oligarchs. He still had a fortune and connections but every day that his operations were shut down his situation deteriorated. It was written on his face.

  The houselights dimmed, and when they returned, the Club Nijinsky dancers were on the runway in braids, denim skirts, bare midriffs, short skirts and long socks. Their eyes were outlined with mascara, freckles and rouge applied almost clownishly to their cheeks. In other words, as child prostitutes.

  "Ready?" The tennis star had been asked to do the honors with a simpler script in hand.

  The dancers straightened up. They might not have been from the Bolshoi but they knew the basic positions of ballet.

  "First position!" the tennis player said.

  The first girl stood with her feet set heel to heel and her hands on her waist.

  Anya said, "I remember this. Every little girl goes through a ballet phase. Then ice skating and then sex."

  "Second position!"

  The next girl widened her legs and held her arms out at shoulder level.

  "Third position!"

  The third girl brought her legs together, her right heel ahead of her left. Left arm as before. Right arm lifted in gentle curve overhead.

  "Fifth position!"

  Legs crossed, left foot touching right instep. Both arms lifted.

  Anya asked Vaksberg, "What happened to the fourth position?"

  Some in the crowd assumed the tennis player had made a mistake and yelled, "We want the fourth position!"

  The call was picked up by the crowd; playfully, but also as a taunt, they stomped their feet and shouted in unison, "We want the fourth! We want the fourth!"

  The tennis player burst into tears.

  Vaksberg sighed. "It's Wimbledon all over again. I have to deal with this."

  A spotlight followed Vaksberg to the stage. On the way Arkady watched the transformation from a defeated man to an energized, take-charge Sasha Vaksberg who bounded up the stairs to the stage and took the microphone. The man had stage presence, Arkady thought. The crowd chanted and he faced them down. He smiled them down.

  "Do you want to see the fourth?"

  "Yes!"

  He shook off his jacket and handed it to the tennis playe
r.

  "I can't hear you. Do you really want to see the fourth?"

  "Yes!"

  "What a feeble choir. You are a disgrace to the city of Moscow. For the last time, do you want to see the fourth position?"

  "Yes!"

  Vaksberg did it deadpan. Right foot pointed out, left foot tucked behind, left hand on the waist and the right arm raised in triumph or grace.

  The reaction was shock and delight. Sasha Vaksberg clowning? Hijacking the joke and turning it around until applause started first from the old lions in the upper tiers and then the young crowd on the floor. "Bravo" s and "Encore" s broke out.

  Arkady said, "He's a comedian too?"

  "He still has a few surprises. When the guests leave the fair tonight, they might talk about a Bugatti for him and a Bulgari for her, but you can be sure that they'll talk about an unworried Sasha Vaksberg."

  "He was lucky he knew what to do."

  "Luck had nothing to do with it."

  That took Arkady a second to decipher.

  "You mean it was staged? The entire routine? The tennis player crying? How could he even come up with the idea like that?"

  "Because he's Sasha Vaksberg. Let me see the photo again."

  Vaksberg took bows. Anya studied the head shot. Smeared mascara and rouge couldn't hide how beautiful the dead girl was and how unblinking, as if she were watching clouds.

  "It's Vera," Anya said in a rush. "It's the missing dancer."

  "Vera what?"

  "I don't know."

  "You're a reporter. Maybe it's in your notepad."

  "Of course." Anya flipped through the pad. "Here it is, a list of Nijinsky dancers, starting with Vera Antonova." She gave Arkady a second assessment. "Suddenly you sound like an investigator."

  12

  Zhenya and Maya shared a bag of chips at the all-night cafe in Yaroslavl Station while he taught her how to use her new cell phone. She tended to shout because there was no wire.

  "I can't believe you never used a mobile phone before. Never texted? Videoed?"

  "No."

  "Where are you from, anyway?"

  "You wouldn't know it."

  "Try me."

  "There's no point."

  "Why not?"

  "There's no point. So now that I have a telephone, what do I do? I don't know anyone to call."

  "You can call me. I put my name at the top of your speed dial."

  "Can you take it off?"

  "You don't want my number?"

  "I don't want anyone's name or number. Can you take it off?"

  "Of course. I'll delete it. No problem."

  Still it was an awkward moment. He had overstepped again. It was a relief to see a chessboard at the next table. Actually an electronic chess game. The man hunched over it was about fifty years old, with a red nose peeking out of a gray beard. In a virtually unintelligible British accent he ordered another gin. Zhenya noticed that the game's level of difficulty was set at Intermediate. It was painful to see a grown man bested by a motherboard.

  Zhenya dropped his voice and told Maya, "We're running a little low on pocket money. Give me five minutes alone."

  "I'll be in the main hall. Don't call your friend the investigator."

  "Five minutes."

  He waited until she left before he paid any attention to his neighbor. He seemed eccentric, vaguely professorial, pretty much what Zhenya expected in an Englishman.

  "Hard game?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Chess."

  "Well, it certainly is when you're playing against open space, a vacuum, so to speak. Very disorienting."

  "I know what you mean. I have the same machine. It beats me all the time."

  "You do play, then. This is very lucky. Look, if your train is not departing soon, perhaps we could squeeze in a game. Do you know speed chess?"

  "Blitz? I've played it once or twice."

  "Five minutes' sudden death. The chessboard has a game clock. Are you up for it?"

  "If you'd like."

  "Your girlfriend wouldn't mind?"

  "She's fine."

  "Henry." They shook hands as Zhenya switched tables.

  "Ivan."

  There was an art to barely winning. Henry brought out his queen too soon, didn't protect his rooks, let his knights stagnate on the side of the board. Zhenya made some judicious blunders of his own and didn't corner the Englishman's king until there had been satisfactory bloodletting on both sides.

  Henry was good-natured and full of winks. "Youth will be served. However, it's a different game when there's money on the line. Yes, it is. Then there are consequences. Have you ever done that? Faced the consequences?"

  "Sure. I won ten dollars once."

  "Then you're practically professional. How about it, then? Another game?"

  Zhenya won with the stakes at ten dollars, again at twenty.

  Henry set up the pieces. "How about a hundred?" Yegor slid into the seat next to Maya and whispered, "I hear you're looking for a baby."

  Maya stiffened as if there were a snake at her feet. Suddenly it was reassuring to be surrounded by the waiting hall's army of travelers, sleeping or not.

  "Where did you hear that?"

  "You've asked half the people in this station. Word gets around. A baby? That's a real shame. That's really sick. I'd kill someone who did that. I really would. If I can help, just say the word. Seriously."

  If Yegor had seemed large in the fluorescent glare of the tunnel, he seemed to expand in the dusk of the waiting hall.

  "The problem is that people don't believe you. They don't think you had a baby. I know you did because you kind of fucked up my beautiful white silk scarf with your mother's milk and all. It was an accident, I know. Don't worry about it."

  She stayed mute although she couldn't say that she was totally surprised to see Yegor. She had half expected him ever since he placed his hands on her in the tunnel.

  Yegor said, "I suppose Genius is on the case. Genius is the smartest guy I know. What's the capital of Madagascar? Card tricks? That sort of thing. The problem with Genius is that he lives in a world of his own. I don't think he knows ten people. You couldn't have picked anyone more useless if you tried. You'll never find your baby. But I can."

  She had to ask.

  "How?"

  "You buy her. That's what we do, the boys and me. Protect things or bring them back. Last night with the Canadian, that was more of a romp, like. Unusual. We hear all the rumors, all the news, and we assess and react. For example, you were asking the conductor about Auntie Lena. We'd track her down. We're a network like the police but less expensive. You don't want to end up in the courts, do you? They'd send your baby to America and you'd never see it again."

  "What about Zhenya's friend, the investigator?"

  "He's a wreck. I wouldn't let him near a baby."

  "How much? What would it cost?" She didn't believe a word he said, but it wouldn't hurt to know.

  "Well, in this situation every second counts. We'd commit all our resources full-time right away. To start, five hundred dollars. After negotiations and satisfactory delivery, more like five thousand. But I guarantee you'll get your baby."

  "I don't have that much money. I don't have any money."

  "No friends or family to borrow from?"

  "No."

  "Last night you said you had a brother."

  "I don't."

  "That's too bad. Maybe…"

  "Maybe what?"

  "Maybe we could work out an arrangement."

  "What sort of arrangement?"

  Yegor's voice went hoarse and he leaned close enough for his beard to tickle her ear.

  "You work it off."

  "Doing what?"

  "Whatever the customer wants. It's not like you're a virgin."

  "It's not like I'm a prostitute either."

  "Don't be angry. I was trying to do you a favor. It must drive you crazy imagining what they're doing to your baby. Are they feeding her? Chang
ing her nappies? Is she still alive?" He got to his feet. "I'll be back at this spot in two hours in case you change your mind."

  "Rot in hell."

  Yegor sighed like a man who had done his best. "It's your baby." In the middle of the game Zhenya wondered about Maya. Sooner or later her wandering would catch the attention of the militia, perhaps of the lieutenant she had outraced when Zhenya first saw her, when she was a flash of red hair in the crowd. If she were stopped without some form of identification, she would be put in a juvenile holding cell where she could be held for a year before seeing a judge or placed in a children's shelter where she might be held even longer. It occurred to him that she might not be wandering at all. She could be headed for the Metro with her razor.

  Meanwhile Henry's game turned sly and accrued small advantages, saddling Zhenya with doubled pawns and forcing the unequal swap of a bishop for a knight.

  "Check!"

  Zhenya was lost in anxious reverie. He imagined Maya on a Metro platform. It was rush hour and the pressure of the crowd had forced her over the "Stand Clear" warning. Being a country girl, what would she know about pickpockets or perverts? Women were groped, especially at rush hour. Accidents happened. It was easy to imagine. The clock over the tunnel counting the seconds until the next train. A breeze and a halo of head beams approaching. The crowd surging forward; no one made it easy for passengers getting off the train. An indistinct flurry of motion. Shouts and screams.

  Henry repeated, "Check!"

  As Zhenya emerged from daydreams the flesh-and-blood Maya appeared at the buffet, her mood hidden in the shadow of her hood. He was relieved; at the same time he couldn't help but wonder where she had been. Also, with his first good look at the board, he was unhappy to find that with less than two minutes on his game clock, he was on the brink of losing to Henry, who grinned in his beard, performed his tics and winks and said in perfectly native Russian, "Never hustle a hustler."

  Maya said, "I thought you were looking for the baby. You're still playing chess."

  "You knew I was." Zhenya concentrated on the board.