Stalin’s Ghost Read Free

would stab him in the back, although the prosecutor might show someone else where the knife drawer was. Anyway, the conversation had not gone as planned.
    Arkady heard a rustle, as if she were rising from a chair. He said, “Maybe he’s stuck somewhere until the Metro starts running. I’ll try the chess club and Three Stations.”
    “Maybe I’m stuck somewhere. Arkady, why did I come to Moscow?”
    “Because I asked you to.”
    “Oh. I’m losing my memory. Snow has wiped out so much. It’s like amnesia. Maybe Moscow will be buried completely.”
    “Like Atlantis?”
    “Exactly like Atlantis. And people will not be able to believe that such a place ever existed.”
    There was a long pause. The phone crackled.
    Arkady said, “Was Zhenya with homeless boys? Did he sound excited? Scared?”
    “Arkady, maybe you haven’t noticed. We’re all scared.”
    “Of what?”
    This might be a good time to bring up Isakov, he thought. With the distance of a telephone cord. He didn’t want to sound like an accuser, he just needed to know. He didn’t even need to know, as long as it was over.
    There was a silence. No, not silence. She had hung up.
     
    As the M-1 became Lenin Prospect it entered a realm of empty, half-lit shopping malls, auto showrooms and the sulfurous blaze of all-night casinos: Sportsman’s Paradise, Golden Khan, Sinbad’s. Arkady played with the name Cupid, which on the lips of Zoya had sounded more hard-core than cherubic. All the time he looked right and left, slowing to scan each shadowy figure walking by the road.
    The cell phone rang, but it wasn’t Eva. It was Zurin.
    “Renko, where the devil have you been?”
    “Out for a drive.”
    “What sort of idiot goes out on a night like this?”
    “It appears we are both out, Leonid Petrovich.”
    “Didn’t you get my message?”
    “Say that again.”
    “Did you get…Never mind. Where are you now?”
    “Going home. I’m not on duty.”
    Zurin said, “An investigator is always on duty. Where are you?”
    “On the M-1.” Actually, at this point, Arkady was well into town.
    “I’m at the Chistye Prudy Metro station. Get here as fast as you can.”
    “Stalin again?”
    “Just get here.”
     
    Even if Arkady had wanted to race to Zurin’s side his way was slowed when traffic was narrowed to a single lane in front of the Supreme Court. Trucks and portable generators were drawn up in disorder on the curb and street. Four white tents glowed on the sidewalk. Round-the-clock construction was not unusual in the ambitious new Moscow; however, this project looked especially haphazard. Traffic police vigorously waved cars through, but Arkady tucked his car between trucks. A uniformed militia colonel seemed belligerently in charge. He dispatched an officer to chase Arkady, but the man proved to be a veteran sergeant named Gleb whom Arkady knew.
    “What’s going on?”
    “We’re not to tell.”
    “That sounds interesting,” Arkady said. He liked Gleb because the sergeant could whistle like a nightingale and had the gap teeth of an honest man.
    “Well, seeing as how you’re an investigator…”
    “Seeing that…,” Arkady agreed.
    “Okay.” Gleb dropped his voice. “They were doing renovations to extend the basement cafeteria. A bunch of Turkish workers were digging. They got a little surprise.”
    Excavation work had torn up part of the sidewalk. Arkady joined the onlookers on the precarious edge, where klieg lamps aimed an incandescent light at a power shovel in a hole two stories deep and about twenty meters square. Besides militia, the crowd on the sidewalk included firemen and police, city officials and agents of state security who looked rousted from their beds.
    In the hole an organized crew of men in coveralls and hard hats worked on the ground and up on scaffolding with picks and trowels, plastic bags, surgical masks and latex gloves. One man dislodged what looked like a brown ball, which he placed in a canvas bucket that he