Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) (17 page)

Arkady gathered the tools left by the girls in their escape. Their lamp was ingenious: a biking shoe stuffed with a candle and sand. Arkady added a calling card with his cell phone number and a twenty-ruble note.

Maxim was steaming. As soon as they were in the car, he said, “A joke. A man is reading a book, and there’s a knock at the door. He answers it, and there’s a snail at his doorstep. The man just wants to read his book, so he kicks the snail out into the dark and goes back to reading. Two years pass. There’s a knock at the door. He opens it and it’s the snail, and the snail asks, ‘What the fuck was that about?’ So I’m asking you, what the fuck was that about?”

“I don’t know.”

“It seemed personal. We’re chased by a lunatic in a butcher’s van and you don’t seem particularly surprised. My shoes are wet, my socks are wet and you’re putting money in a shoe that’s going to go out to sea with the tide. Do you think anybody’s going to see it?”

“The kids will. They’re pretty bold. As soon as they think the coast is clear, they’ll come back.”

“What does this have to do with Tatiana?”

“Tatiana bought the notebook from kids on this beach, maybe from these kids. We wanted to make contact and I think we did.”

“So it was a great success?”

“Absolutely.”

“It felt like getting my feet wet.”

“I can understand that. Sorry about your shoes.”

Despite the apology Maxim was offended. “Now what?”

“You said there was a border station on the spit?”

“Of sorts.”

“I’d like to see that.”

•  •  •

“Of sorts” overstated the station. A typical Russian checkpoint was staffed by armed Frontier Guards trained to view every document with suspicion. On any pretext, travelers could be led into waiting rooms where the contents of their backpacks would be spilled and poked.

But the Russian-Lithuanian border on the Curonian Spit was no more than a metal shack beside a spindly communications tower perhaps ten meters high. The station and tower were guarded by whitewashed tires half-buried in the ground and an ancient floodlight that looked as if it hadn’t been activated since the siege of Leningrad. Telephone lines hung on the wire fence and disappeared into a spotty screen of birches. A Frontier Guard in ordinary camos roused himself enough to make a circling motion with his arm and shout, “Go back! You can’t go any further with a car!”

“This is it?” Arkady asked.

“This is the border,” Maxim said. “This time of year they get birders. Otherwise it’s pretty minimal. Do you want to report the maniac in the butcher’s van?”

“What would we report?”

“We saw a man menacing children.”

“Only he’s gone and so are the kids.”

“They could search.”

“Guards are not allowed to leave their posts.”

“They could call.”

“Let’s hope not,” Arkady said. “From here on, let’s be invisible.”

•  •  •

On the way back the fog was so thick that Maxim pressed his face against the windshield. He glanced at Arkady every few seconds. “You have a very high opinion of yourself, Renko. In two days, you
think you’re getting a grasp on Kaliningrad. You know everything there is to know.”

“Hardly.”

“But apparently enough to spontaneously wade into the sea. What else do you know?”

“Not much.”

“Inform me.”

“I know that Tatiana Petrovna thought it was worth risking her life to come to Kaliningrad for a notebook that no one can read. That she fell off a balcony the day she returned to Moscow. That honest journalists have enemies and Tatiana had more than most.”

“I suppose experts and computers have been brought in to decipher the code.”

“Maybe. That won’t help,” Arkady said.

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t think it’s a code. You can no more read it than read someone else’s mind.”

“Do you have enemies too?”

“Could you be more specific?”

“People who would push you off a balcony.”

“Well, I haven’t been in Kaliningrad very long,” Arkady said. “Give me time.”

Without warning, Maxim turned the ZIL onto a road riddled with potholes. A truck boomed by like a rhino, spilling sand and water.

“Where are we?” Arkady asked.

The words had barely left Arkady’s mouth when the horizon rose. The steering wheel of the ZIL twisted over ruts as hard as cement and the car came to a precipitous stop looking down at the spectacle of a strip mine and giant machinery at work.

“Gold? Coal?” Arkady asked.

“Amber,” said Maxim.

It didn’t take a large crew to operate a strip mine. One man to control a front-end loader, another in a bulldozer that pushed the earth this way and that. The maestro was a man on foot aiming a high-pressure hose with the aid of a tiller driven into the ground. Loose soil was hunchbacked; black slag rose in peaks. Meanwhile, an earthmover maintained a pattern of roads that descended six levels from top to bottom. Between the grinding of engines and jet of water, a meteor could have hit the mine and no one would have noticed.

Maxim said, “Ninety percent of the world’s amber comes from Kaliningrad. Control Kaliningrad and you control the world’s production of amber. That’s worth some degree of fuss.”

“Who controls it?”

“Grisha Grigorenko did, until somebody shot him. Who knows, maybe there’s a new war? Or maybe a man with your talents can start one.”

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