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 thousands 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 Moscow River, 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 Moscow University, 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 Gorky Park. 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. Gorky Park 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 Pavel 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.
Arkady had tried to find Zhenya's father, even though the boy refused to supply the first name or help a sketch artist from the militia. Nevertheless, Arkady had gone through Moscow residence, birth and draft records in search of Lysenkos. In case the father was alcoholic, Arkady asked at drying-out tanks. Since Zhenya played so well, Arkady visited chess clubs. And, because Zhenya was so shy of authority, Arkady went through arrest records. Six possibles turned up, but they all proved to be serving long terms in seminaries, Chechnya or prison.
When Zhenya and Arkady were at the very top of the wheel, it stopped. The attendant on the ground gave a thin shout and waved. Nothing to worry about. Zhenya was happy with more time to scan the city, while Arkady contemplated the virtues of early retirement: the chance to learn new languages, new dances, travel to exotic places. His stock with the prosecutor was definitely falling. Once you'd been to the top of the Ferris wheel of life, so to speak, anything else was lower. So here he was, literally suspended. Poplar fluff sailed by like the scum of a river.
The wheel started to turn again, and Arkady smiled, to prove his attention hadn't wandered. "Any luck? You know, in Iceland there's a kind of imp, a sprite that's just a head on a foot. It's a playful imp, very mischievous, likes to hide things like your keys and socks, and you can only see it from the corner of your eye. If you look straight at it, it disappears. Maybe that's the best way to see some people."
Zhenya acknowledged not a word, which was a statement in itself, that Arkady was merely transportation, a means to an end. When the gondola reached the ground, the boy stepped out, ready to return to the shelter, and Arkady let him march ahead.
The trick, Arkady thought, was not to expect more. Obviously Zhenya had come to the park with his father, and by this point, Arkady knew exactly how they had spent the day. A child's logic was that if his father had come here before, he would come again, and he might even be magically evoked through a re-creation of that day. Zhenya was a grim little soldier defending a last outpost of memory, and any word he passed with Arkady would mute and dim his father that much more. A smile would be as bad as traffic with the enemy.
On the way out of the park, Arkady's mobile phone rang. It was Prosecutor Zurin.
"Renko, what did you tell Hoffman last night?"
"About what?"
"You know what. Where are you?"
"The Park of Culture and Rest. I'm resting." Arkady watched Zhenya steal the opportunity to take another turn of the fountain.
"Relaxing?"
"I'd like to think so."
"Because you were so wound up last night, so full of… speculation, weren't you? Hoffman wants to see you."
"Why?"
"You said something to him last night. Something out of my earshot, because nothing I heard from you made any sense at all. I have never seen a clearer case of suicide."
"Then you have officially determined that Ivanov killed himself."
"Why not?"
Arkady didn't answer directly. "If you're satisfied, then I don't see what there is for me to do."
"Don't be coy, Renko. You're the one who opened this can of worms. You'll be the one who shuts it. Hoffman wants you to clean up the loose ends. I don't see why he doesn't just go home."
"As I remember, he's a fugitive from America."
"Well, as a courtesy to him, and just to settle things, he wants a few more questions answered. Ivanov was Jewish, wasn't he? I mean his mother was." So?
"I'm just saying, he and Hoffman were a pair."
Arkady waited for more, but Zurin seemed to think he had made his point. "I take my orders from you, Prosecutor Zurin. What are your orders?" Arkady wanted this to be clear.
"What time is it?"
"It's four in the afternoon."
"First get Hoffman out of the apartment. Then get to work tomorrow morning."
"Why not tonight?"
"In the morning."
"If I get Hoffman out of the apartment, how will I get back in?"
"The elevator operator knows the code now. He's old guard. Trustworthy."
"And just what do you expect me to do?"
"Whatever Hoffman asks. Just get this matter settled. Not complicated, not drawn out, but settled."
"Does that mean over or resolved?"
"You know very well what I mean."
"I don't know, I'm fairly involved here." Zhenya was just finishing his circuit of the fountain.
"Get over there now."
"I'll need a detective. I should have a pair, but I'll settle for Victor Fedorov."
"Why him? He hates businessmen."
"Perhaps he'll be harder to buy." "Just go."
"Do I get my files back?"
"No."
Zurin hung up. The prosecutor might have shown a little more edge than usual, but, everything considered, the conversation had been as pleasant as Arkady could have wished.
Bobby Hoffman let Arkady and Victor into the Ivanov apartment, moved to the sofa and dropped into the deep impression already there. Despite air-conditioning, the room had the funk of an all-night vigil. Hoffman's hair was matted, his eyes a blur, and tear tracks ran into the reddish bristle on his jowls. His clothes looked twisted around him, although the jacket given to him by Pasha was folded on the coffee table beside a snifter and two empty bottles of brandy. He said, "I don't have the code to the keypad, so I stayed."
"Why?" Arkady asked.
"Just to get things straight."
"Straighten us out, please."
Hoffman tilted his head and smiled. "Renko, as far as your investigation goes, I want you to know that you wouldn't have touched Pasha or me in a thousand years. The American Securities and Exchange Commission never hung anything on me."
"You fled the country."
"You know what I always tell complainers? 'Read the fine print, asshole!' "
"The fine print is the important print?"
"That's why it's fine."
"As in 'You can be the wealthiest man in the world and live in a palace with a beautiful woman, but one day you will fall out a tenth-floor window'?" Arkady said. "As fine as that?"
"Yeah." The air went out of Hoffman, and it occurred to Arkady that for all the American's bravado, without the protection of Pasha Ivanov, Bobby Hoffman was a mollusk without its shell, a tender American morsel on the Russian ocean floor.
"Why don't you just leave Moscow?" Arkady asked Hoffman. "Take a million dollars from the company and go. Set up in Cyprus or Monaco."
"That's what Timofeyev suggested, except his number was ten million."
"That's a lot."
"Look, the bank accounts Pasha and I opened offshore add up to about a hundred million. Not all our money, of course, but that's a lot."
A hundred million? Arkady tried to add the zeroes. "I stand corrected."
Victor took a chair and set down his briefcase. He gave the apartment the cold glance of a Bolshevik in the Winter Palace. From his briefcase he fished a personal ashtray fashioned from an empty soda can, although his sweater had holes that suggested he put out his cigarettes another way. He also had put, in a light-fingered way, drinking glasses from the evening before in plastic bags labeled "Zurin," "Timofeyev" and "Rina Shevchenko," just in case.
Hoffman contemplated the empty bottles. "Staying here is like watching a movie, running every possible scenario. Pasha jumping out the window, being dragged and thrown out, over and over. Renko, you're the expert: was Pasha killed?"
"I have no idea."
"Thanks a lot, that's helpful. Last night you sounded like you had suspicions."
"I thought the scene deserved more investigation."
"Because as soon as you started to poke around, you found a closet full of fucking salt. What is that about?"
"I was hoping you could tell me. You never noticed that with Ivanov before, a fixation on salt?"
"No. All I know is, everything wasn't as simple as the prosecutor and Timofeyev said. You were right about Pasha changing. He locked us out of here. He'd wear clothes once and throw them away. It wasn't like giving the jacket to me. He threw out the clothes in garbage bags. Driving around, suddenly he'd change his route, like he was on the run."
"Like you," Victor said.
"Only he didn't run far," Arkady said. "He stayed in Moscow."
Hoffman said, "How could he go? Pasha always said, 'Business is personal. You show fear and you're dead.' Anyway, you wanted more time to investigate. Okay, I bought you some."
"How did you do that?"
"Call me Bobby."
"How did you do that, Bobby?"
"NoviRus has foreign partners. I told Timofeyev that unless you were on the case, I'd tell them that the cause of Pasha's death wasn't totally resolved. Foreign partners are nervous about Russian violence. I always tell them it's exaggerated."
"Of course."
"Nothing can stop a major project-the Last Judgment wouldn't stop an oil deal-but I can stall for a day or two until the company gets a clean bill of health."
"The detective and I will be the doctors who decide this billion-dollar state of health? I'm flattered."
"I'd start you off with a bonus of a thousand dollars."
"No, thanks."
"You don't like money? What are you, communists?" Hoffman's smile stalled halfway between insult and ingratiation.
"The problem is that I don't believe you. Americans won't take the word of either a criminal like you or an investigator like me. NoviRus has its own security force, including former detectives. Have them investigate. They're already paid."
"Paid to protect the company," Hoffman said. "Yesterday that meant protecting Pasha, today it's protecting Timofeyev. Anyway, Colonel Ozhogin is in charge, and he hates me."
"If Ozhogin dislikes you, then I advise you to get on the next plane. I'm sure Russian violence is exaggerated, but it serves no one's purpose for you to be in Moscow." Ozhogins displeasure was a cue for any man to travel to foreign climes, Arkady thought.
"After you ask some questions. You hounded Pasha and me for months. Now you can hound someone else."
"It's not that simple, as you say."
"A few fucking questions is all I'm asking for."
Arkady gave way to Victor, who opened a ledger from his briefcase and said, "May I call you Bobby?" He rolled the name like hard candy. "Bobby, there would be more than one or two questions. We'd have to talk to everyone who saw Pasha Ivanov last night, his driver and bodyguards, the building staff. Also, we'd have to review the security tapes."
"Ozhogin won't like that."
Arkady shrugged. "If Ivanov didn't commit suicide, there was a breach in security."
Victor said, "To do a complete job, we should also talk to his friends."
"They weren't here."
"They knew Ivanov. His friends and the women he was involved with, like the one who was here last night."
"Rina is a great kid. Very artistic."
Victor gave Arkady a meaningful glance. The detective had once invented a theory called 'Fuck the Widow', for determining a probable killer on the basis of who lined up first to console a grieving spouse. "Also, enemies."
"Everyone has enemies. George Washington had enemies."
"Not as many as Pasha," said Arkady. "There were earlier attempts on Pasha's life. We'd have to check who was involved and where they are. It's not just a matter of one more day and a few more questions."
Victor dropped a butt in the soda can. "What the investigator wants to know is, if we make progress, are you going to run and leave us with our pants down and the moon out?"
"If so, the detective recommends you begin running now," Arkady said. "Before we start."
Bobby hung on to the sofa. "I'm staying right here."
"If we do start, this is a possible crime scene, and the very first thing is to get you out of here."
"We have to talk," Victor told Arkady.
The two men retreated to the white runway of the hall. Victor lit a cigarette and sucked on it like oxygen. "I'm dying. I have heart problems, lung problems, liver problems. The trouble is, I'm dying too slowly. Once my pension meant something. Now I have to work until they push me into the grave. I ran the other day. I thought I heard church bells. It was my chest. They're raising the price of vodka and tobacco. I don't bother eating anymore. Fifteen brands of Italian pasta, but who can afford it? So do I really want to spend my final days playing bodyguard to a dog turd like Bobby Hoffman? Because that's all he wants us for, bodyguards. And he'll disappear, he'll disappear as soon as he shakes more money out of Timofeyev. He'll run when we need him most."
"He could have run already."
"He's just driving up the price."
"You said there are good prints on the glasses. Maybe there are some more."
"Arkady, these people are different. It's every man for himself. Ivanov is dead? Good riddance."
"So you don't think it was suicide?" Arkady asked.
"Who knows? Who cares? Russians used to kill for women or power, real reasons. Now they kill for money."
"The ruble wasn't really money," Arkady said.
"But we're leaving, right?"
Bobby Hoffman sank into the sofa as they returned. He could read the verdict in their eyes. Arkady had intended to deliver the bad news and keep going, but he slowed as bands of sunlight vibrated the length of the room. A person could argue whether a white decor was timid or bold, Arkady thought, but there was no denying that Rina had done a professional job. The entire room glowed, and the chrome of the wet bar cast a shimmering reflection over the photographs of Pasha Ivanov and his constellation of famous and powerful friends. Ivanov's world was so far away from the average Russian's that the pictures could have been taken by a telescope pointed to the stars. This was the closest Arkady had gotten to NoviRus. He was, for the moment, inside the enemy camp.
When Arkady got to the sofa, Hoffman wrapped his pudgy hands around Arkady's. "Okay, I took a disk with confidential data from Pasha's computer: shell companies, bribes, payoffs, bank accounts. It was going to be my insurance, but I'm spending it on you. I agreed to give it back when you're done. That's the deal I made with Ozhogin and Zurin, the disk for a few days of your help. Don't ask me where it is, it's safe. So you were right, I'm a venal slob. Big news. Know why I'm doing this? I couldn't go back to my place. I didn't have the strength, and I couldn't sleep, either, so I just sat here. In the middle of the night, I heard this rubbing. I thought it was mice and got a flashlight and walked around the apartment. No mice. But I still heard them. Finally I went down to the lobby to ask the receptionist. He wasn't at his desk, though. He was outside with the doorman, on their hands and knees with brushes and bleach, scrubbing blood off the sidewalk. They did it, there's not a spot left. That's what I'd been hearing from ten stories up, the scrubbing. I know it's impossible, but that's what I heard. And I thought to myself, Renko: there's a son of a bitch who'd hear the scrubbing. That's who I want."