Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) (27 page)

“No. No way.”

Terror lent strength. The beachcomber wrested one hand free enough to throw sand in Arkady’s face. By the time Arkady cleared his eyes, the man had vanished in the pines.

When Arkady returned, Tatiana was examining the litter of soda cans and bottles, twists of driftwood, shells, scarf and sack. In the sack were a sandwich and a cell phone.

“He’s gone,” Arkady said.

“That’s okay, he won’t be communicating with anyone soon.” Tatiana handed him the cell phone.

He punched up the cell phone’s recent calls. The last was a call to a Kaliningrad number only minutes before. He pressed “Contacts.” The name that popped up was Alexi.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Sure, I’m just sorry he got away.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“Nothing.”

•  •  •

There were different ways to be on the run. One was to flee, the other was to blend in. In the tourist town of Zelenogradsk, they bought hooded ponchos and binoculars to join the birders who tracked migrating flocks as they streamed overhead. What was it like to be ordinary people? With a baby and grandmother waiting
at home, a pan of water on the radiator, a cat with a whimsical name, no fear that a neighbor might put a gun to your head. When a black car cruised by, Arkady and Tatiana played newlyweds and ducked into a souvenir shop to price amber jewelry. Amber was on sale everywhere as pendants, bracelets and necklaces that were honey colored or dark as molasses, with apple seeds or the wings of a primordial fly that had buzzed its last as resin started to encase it.

“You’re enjoying this,” Arkady said. “You like the hunt even if you’re the hunted.”

“When I was growing up, I never understood why, when games began, girls sat down while the boys had all the fun.”

“You haven’t changed.”

“I’m a woman who doesn’t like to be left behind, if that’s what you mean.”

She was the one who found an Internet café, a basement dive soaked in screen glow. Fluorescent decals blossomed on the walls. A counter served espresso and herbal tea. Globs rose and sank in lava lamps. There were only two other patrons. Tucked into their separate headphones and carrels, between the cigarette haze and fruity exhalation of hookahs, the denizens of the café were oblivious to each other.

Arkady called Victor on the café phone. It was Zhenya who answered.

“Is it you, Arkady? You’re alive?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Me too.”

A sign on the wall said,
NO BLOGGING, NO FLAMING, NO SKYPING
. However, the waitress, a girl with a shaved head and blue tattoos, said the warning was meant for tourists, not Koenigs, the native sons of Kaliningrad.

Once the visual connection was made, Zhenya, Victor and a pretty girl with red hair appeared on the screen.

Arkady said, “This, I take it, is Lotte. She must be a good friend.”

During introductions, Lotte regarded Arkady with undisguised curiosity. What a sight he must have made, Arkady thought. A knackered horse next to the beautiful Tatiana. Tatiana studied Zhenya much the same way. Victor maintained a straight face and kept his eyes on the café stairs.

There was no sign of Alexi’s men; it wasn’t their scene, Arkady thought. Alexi was not Grisha. He was calculating but he didn’t command the same loyalty or respect. He was perverse, and even in the underworld that wore thin. Men who should have relentlessly pounded the pavement, foul weather or no, would stop in a hotel lounge for a drink to drive the cold out of their bones.

Zhenya held the notebook up for Tatiana to read. She had seen it before. All the same, the speed at which she scanned the pages was impressive.

He said, “Lotte figured that the symbols with colons were people speaking at the meeting. They were partners.”

“First among partners would have been Grisha Grigorenko.”

“The man with a top hat with the line underneath.”

“Next,” she said, “the man without the line underneath would be Ape Beledon. Old and deadly. The crescent moon could be Abdul. Abdul makes a fortune out of videos and makes even more protecting gas lines that cross Chechnya.”

“I have no idea about the symbol of the blocks,” Zhenya confessed.

“Building blocks,” Tatiana said. “The Shagelmans, Isaac and
Valentina, have a construction company. They build highways, high-rises, shopping malls. In fact, they wanted to tear down my apartment house. As for the last two partners, I can’t be so definite. The star stands for official power, someone high up in the Defense Ministry or a strongman in the Kremlin. One of those perpetual thugs. And China. Joseph Bonnafos spoke Chinese, but he also spoke Russian, French, German, English and Thai.”

“Why the wasp?” Victor asked.

“Amber,” Lotte said.

Zhenya proudly said, “We think it’s an agreement between the Chinese government and a company close to the Kremlin.”

Arkady asked, “Would it be Curonian Renaissance? Curonian Bank? Curonian Investments?”

“No.”

“Curonian Amber,” Tatiana said.

There was a long pause at the other end. Lotte said, “That’s it.”

Tatiana said, “I’ve been studying this strange entity for years. On the face of it, Curonian Amber is a virtually dead amber mine on the spit. Dig a little deeper and it’s also the holding company for the Curonian Bank, Curonian Investments, Curonian Renaissance and all the rest. It’s Grisha’s brainchild, a way to move money in any direction. Who would stop him? He was a billionaire with allies everywhere. So far, remarkable but not unique. Moscow has a dozen more Grishas. What Joseph Bonnafos was hinting at would have been a coup that set Grisha apart. It was also potentially another
Kursk
disaster.”

“I think that Curonian Amber plans to repair a Chinese nuclear submarine here,” Zhenya said. “There’s a price tag of two billion dollars mentioned. Wouldn’t that put Grisha in a league of his own?”

That wasn’t the only possible interpretation, Arkady thought. Tatiana thought so too; he saw it in her face. But a sum that magnificent inspired respect. Even Arkady felt it momentarily.

“It doesn’t change the fact that Grisha was nothing but a thief. They’re all thieves,” Victor said. “Somehow the repair was a scheme to steal money. A lot of money.”

Arkady asked, “Was there any mention of Alexi in the notebook? Doesn’t he feel that he is the heir apparent and that whatever was Grisha’s is now his? Alexi has been trying to cut in from the start. Zhenya, when he had you and Lotte translate the notebook, was there anything in particular that he was after?”

“Everything.”

“What was the last thing he asked?”

“Where the meeting was going to be. I told him on Grisha’s yacht, the
Natalya Goncharova
.”

“Abdul is in Kaliningrad,” Victor said. “His concert is over. He’s sticking around for something.”

“I’ll keep working on it,” Zhenya promised. “Nuclear submarines, that’s pretty wild. Maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe it’s about rubber duckies in a tub.”

“Come home,” Victor said to Arkady.

“Good night,” said Tatiana.

The screen returned to a home page of the Milky Way. Arkady noticed that Tatiana had not mentioned the submarine
Kaliningrad
and its failure in sea trials, rather than feed Zhenya’s assumption. She saw the big picture; anything less was a distraction. Tatiana thought in terms of nations and history, just as Arkady focused on the small picture of three children and a man in a butcher’s van.

All the cars in Zelenogradsk had gone to bed, except for black sedans that continued to cruise the streets. Arkady and Tatiana had not slept for days and took their chances on a motel that featured plastic swans and called itself the Bird Haus. The front desk was stocked with wildlife guides and offered wake-up calls for early birders.

They set out their shoes and her gun beside the bed, she laid her head on his shoulder and almost instantly, before he even turned off the nightstand light, she was asleep.

It occurred to Arkady that he and Tatiana were too cynical. As mature Russians, their dials, so to speak, were set by experience at “the Worst,” at disaster, not success. For example, Zhenya had it backward. That Curonian Amber would repair a nuclear submarine for China was bad enough. The worst, however, was the possibility that Curonian Amber would outsource a Russian
nuclear submarine to be repaired in China. Arkady remembered the name of the faulty submarine. The
Kaliningrad
. That didn’t sound Chinese at all.

He drifted off listening to the hull of a submarine being crushed and bent, the sound of the ice maker in the hall.

•  •  •

Morning traffic backed up on the road to Kaliningrad as police in yellow vests sorted out cars, trucks and bikes.

Arkady said, “We have to separate now. They’ll be looking for couples on bikes. I’ll go first. If there’s no problem, wait ten minutes and see if you can hitch a ride.”

“I know how to do that.”

“Be careful.” Although he saw that he was preaching to the joyously deaf.

•  •  •

For the driver of the delivery van it was another day of miserable weather, slippery cobblestones, “Bony Moronie” on the radio and a breakfast of glutinous peach pie. He had picked up the woman because she looked good from the back and not so bad from the front either, trying to hitch a ride on the highway. Police were waving all the traffic to the side of the road, like maneuvering a herd of elephants. She threw her bike in the back of the rig, hopped in the cab and said, “If anyone asks, I’m your sister.” Pretty nervy. They were checking papers but it was the driver’s regular route and he got through with a wink. Sailed along.

He expected some reciprocation and a kilometer down the road they pulled into an empty fruit stand. She said she wanted privacy. She said she’d do it in the back of the truck. But there was no room because of her bike. He courteously climbed up and
handed the bike down. She jumped up, pulled down the gate and locked him in. It turned out she could drive a rig. And she picked up her boyfriend on the way.

They didn’t stop until they reached a zone of eerie quiet and when people finally heard him pound on the side of the truck he found himself in a lot of windblown trash beside the empty colossus of Party headquarters.

•  •  •

“Where are you now?” Victor asked.

Arkady said, “We’re having coffee in Victory Square in Kaliningrad. Tatiana is with me.”

“Have you made contact with Maxim?”

“Not yet.” Why not? Arkady asked himself. He and Tatiana had been in Kaliningrad for two hours and hadn’t tried to connect with anyone. She kept her backpack. Otherwise, they ditched their bikes and traveled light. It was intoxicating to be a tourist, to climb the stairway of a pastry shop and take in a view of the city’s central square with its bubbling fountain, a requisite victory column, skateboarders clicking over tiles and a new church that looked snapped together from plastic parts.

In the pastry shop, vitrines of glass and chrome offered strawberry tarts, Sacher tortes, cream puffs, and figures of Grover and Elmo sculpted in marzipan. The shop was also a display case for trophy wives dressed in Prada and Dior. Upstairs, Arkady and Tatiana were on a level with a street banner that announced in stark black and white letters a hip-hop concert by Abdul, larger than life-size, scowling, with the pallor of a healthy vampire. The concert had taken place the night before. Arkady imagined Abdul sleeping in a closet upside down.

An Audi rolled into the shadow of the church. The driver
emerged to tuck in his shirtfront and comb his fingers through his hair. Detective Lieutenant Stasov, surveying his domain.

“I’m coming out there,” Victor said.

“No,” Arkady said. “You’re needed in Moscow. If you come here, Zhenya will follow and then Lotte.”

Victor asked, “What about Maxim?”

“We’ll get in touch with him.”

Lieutenant Stasov started across the square. Whether he had spotted Arkady and Tatiana or had a fondness for pastries didn’t matter. In a minute he would be walking through the door, strutting with the lopsided swing of a man wearing a gun, and if he climbed the stairs, Arkady and Tatiana would be in full view.

The lieutenant changed his mind and retreated to his car, to release a pug with a monkey face. The little dog dragged Stasov by the leash, eyes rolling like marbles, tongue flapping from side to side.

The shop’s glass door was directly below the table that Tatiana and Arkady shared. For the dog the shop was a blend of irresistible aromas and he balanced on his hind legs to view each display case in turn.

Stasov played the indulgent pet owner. “There’s no stopping him any time we’re near sweets.”

A woman asked, “What’s his name?”

“Polo. That’s what it said on his dog tag. I rescued him from a criminal. Can you imagine?”

Did the lieutenant carry the dog as a social icebreaker wherever lonely women congregated? Arkady wondered.

“How old is he?” another woman asked.

People always asked certain questions, Arkady thought. How
old is your dog? Your baby? Your grandmother? Another constant was, is your gun loaded? Tatiana’s pistol rested on her lap.

“I swear, he’s as curious as a cat. Come on, Polo. Don’t bother the nice people, Polo. Good boy. Oh, now he’s going up the stairs.”

Arkady heard the dog scamper up. He was halfway to the balcony before Stasov snagged the leash. Arkady got a glimpse of the lieutenant’s bald spot when he scooped up the dog.

“Excuse me,” he told the ladies. “Excuse me, please. Such a rascal. Ah, well, here comes his treat.”

“A bonbon!”

“He’ll gobble this down in two bites. See?”

“What a character.”

“Well, ladies, duty calls. My friend and I must go fight crime.”

Polo made a final bolt for the stairs but Stasov stepped on the leash and reeled him in like a fish.

“Au revoir.”

“Au revoir.”

Stasov retreated to his car and held high an extra bonbon. Polo was enraptured.

“I told you that dog had no loyalty,” Arkady said.

Maxim knew. He knew as soon as Arkady and Tatiana walked into his apartment that the situation had changed. He had gone from suitor to also-ran. All the risks he had taken were worthless chips. He was a poet without words.