Wolves Eat Dogs (4 page)

"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."

3

Inn the black-and-white videotape, the two Mercedeses rolled up to the street security camera, and bodyguards—large men further inflated by the armored vests they wore under their suits—deployed from the chase car to the building canopy. Only then did the lead car's driver trot around to open the curbside door.

A digital clock rolled in a corner of the tape. 2128. 2129. 2130. Finally Pasha Ivanov unfolded from the rear seat. He looked more disheveled than the dynamic Ivanov of the apartment photo gallery. Arkady had questioned the driver, who had told him that Ivanov hadn't said a word all the way from the office to the apartment, not even on a mobile phone.

Something amused Ivanov. Two dachshunds strained on their leashes to sniff his attaché case. Although the tape was silent, Arkady read Ivanov's lips:
Puppies?
he asked the owner. When the dogs had passed, Ivanov clutched the attaché to his chest and went into the building. Arkady switched to the lobby tape.

The marble lobby was so brightly lit that everyone wore halos. The doorman and receptionist wore jackets with braid over not too obvious holsters. Once the doorman activated the call button with a key, he stayed at Ivanov's side while Ivanov used a handkerchief, and when the elevator doors opened, Arkady went to the elevator tape. He had already interviewed the operator, a former Kremlin guard, white-haired but hard as a sandbag.

Arkady asked whether he and Ivanov had talked. The operator said, "I trained on the Kremlin staircase. Big men don't make small talk."

On the tape, Ivanov punched a code into the keypad and, as the doors opened, turned to the elevator camera. The camera's fish-bowl lens made his face disproportionately huge, eyes drowning in shadow above the handkerchief he held against his nose. Maybe he had Timofeyev's summer cold. Ivanov finally moved through the open doors, and Arkady was reminded of an actor rushing to the stage, now hesitating, now rushing again. The time on the tape was 2133.

Arkady switched tapes, back to the street camera, and forwarded to 2147. The pavement was clear, the two cars were still at the curb, the lights of traffic filtering by. At 2148 a blur from above slapped the pavement. The doors of the chase car flew open, and the guards poured out to form a defensive circle on the pavement around what could have been a heap of rags with legs. One man raced into the building, another knelt to feel Ivanov's neck, while the driver of the sedan ran around it to open a rear door. The man taking Ivanov's pulse, or lack of it, shook his head while the doorman moved into view, arms wide in disbelief. That was it, the Pasha Ivanov movie, a story with a beginning and an end but no middle.

Arkady rewound and watched frame by frame.

Ivanov's upper body dropped from the top of the screen, shoulder hitched to take the brunt of the fall.

His head folded from the force of the impact even as his legs entered the frame.

Upper and lower body collapsed into a ring of dust that exploded from the pavement.

Pasha Ivanov settled as the doors of the chase car swung open and, in slow motion, the guards swam around his body.

Arkady watched to see whether any of the security team, while they were in the car and before Ivanov came out of the sky, glanced up; then he watched for anything like the saltshaker dropping with Ivanov or shaken loose by the force of the fall. Nothing. And then he watched to see whether any of the guards picked up anything afterward. No one did. They stood on the pavement, as useful as potted plants.

The doorman on duty kept looking up. He said, "I was in Special Forces, so I've seen parachutes that didn't deploy and bodies you scraped off the ground, but someone coming out of the sky here? And Ivanov, of all people. A good guy, I have to say, a generous guy. But what if he'd hit the doorman, did he think about that? Now a pigeon goes overhead and I duck."

"Your name?" Arkady asked.

"Kuznetsov, Grisha." Grisha still had the army stamp on him. Wary around officers.

"You were on duty two days ago?"

"The day shift. I wasn't here at night, when it happened, so I don't know what I can tell you."

"Just walk me around, if you would."

"Around what?"

"The building, front to back."

"For a suicide? Why?"

"Details."

"Details," Grisha muttered as the traffic went by. He shrugged.

"Okay."

The building was short-staffed on weekends, Grisha said, only him, the receptionist and the passenger elevator man. Weekdays, there were two other men for repairs, working the service door and service elevator, picking up trash. Housecleaners on weekdays, too, if residents requested. Ivanov didn't. Everyone had been vetted, of course. Security cameras covered the street, lobby, passenger elevator and service alley. At the back of the lobby Grisha tapped in a code on a keypad by a door with a sign that said staff only. The door eased open, and Grisha led Arkady into an area that consisted of a changing room with lockers, sink, microwave; toilet; mechanical room with furnace and hot-water heater; repair shop where two older men Grisha identified as Fart A and Fart B were intently threading a pipe; residents' storage area for rugs, skis and such, ending in a truck bay. Every door had a keypad and a different code.