Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel (Arkady Renko Novels) by Martin Cruz Smith

Joseph Bonnafos, Swiss, an interpreter. Who knows, the notebook may tell us everything we need to know.”
    “Where is it now?”
    “It’s locked in a drawer of my desk.”
    “You don’t know what the notes are for?”
    “Some sort of international event, I assume, since they needed the services of an interpreter.”
    “Can’t the local police take care of business there?”
    “The case is being torpedoed by a Lieutenant Stasov, who seems to regard the hotels in Kaliningrad as his slice of the pie. There hasn’t been any real investigation into Bonnafos’s death.”
    Victor said, “Wait, all we signed on for was to find Tatiana’s body. Just find her, not who killed her, if she was killed. Now you’re phoning people in Kaliningrad? She wasn’t killed in Kaliningrad and her body isn’t in Kaliningrad. I’m saying this as a sober man: we should stay with what we know.”
    “There’s also a missing Italian custom bicycle,” Arkady said.
    By then, Victor had hung up.
    •  •  •
    How does a man know when he becomes obsessive? Who can tell him except a friend? More specifically, how could two men cover one city, let alone two cities, hundreds of miles apart? He would need a dozen detectives and police dogs, none of which the prosecutor would authorize. All Zurin would support was a game of musical chairs in the morgue. At this point, if Tatiana had been moved from drawer to drawer, her body would be light blue with a film of crystals. Perhaps the person hiding her was waiting for the first mantle of snow to lay her down properly, when outrage was spent and she was just one saint out of many. The strange thing was Arkady looked forward to listening to the other tapes, not because Tatiana’s voice was especially mellifluous, but because it was clear, and not because the events she described were dramatic but because she underplayed her part. And because, listening to the tapes, he thought he knew her and that they had met before. Was that obsessive?

11
    “The moon will float up in the sky, / Dropping the oars into the water. / As ever, Russia will get by, / And dance and weep in every quarter.”
    “So nothing changes,” Tatiana said. “The poet Yesenin knew it a hundred years ago. Russia is a drunken bear, sometimes an entertainment, sometimes a threat, often a genius, but as night falls, always a drunken bear curled up in the corner. Sometimes, in another corner lies a journalist whose arms and hands have systematically been broken. The thugs who do such work are meticulous. We don’t have to go to Chechnya to find such men. We recruit them and train them and call them patriots. And when they find an honest journalist, they let the bear loose.
    “Is it worth it? The problem with martyrdom is the waiting. Sooner or later, I will be poisoned or nudged off a cliff or shot bya stranger, but first I will put a torpedo under their waterline, so to speak.
    “Also, why does heaven seem so dull? There’s love in heaven but is there passion? Do we really have to go barefoot and wear those robes? Are we allowed high heels? I have always envied women in high heels. I would like to spend my first thousand years in heaven learning to tango. In the meantime, I’ll stay ahead of the bear as long as I can.”
    It wasn’t so much that he was listening to her, it was more a sense of being alone with her, and if they were alone, he would have been so bold as to offer her a cigarette.
    When Arkady heard a key in the door, his first impulse was to gather the tapes and recorder and put them in a kitchen cabinet. He didn’t. Then wished he had.
    Anya came in and Alexi Grigorenko piled in after. They were flushed with pre-party hysteria and the first bottle of Champagne. If it was bad taste for him to celebrate so soon after a father’s death, there also was a message to men of his father’s generation that old manners, even between thieves, were out of date. He seemed to think he was a prince. In fact, he was a