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

sitting duck. They made a handsome pair of boutique darlings, Arkady had to admit. In comparison, he looked as if he had dressed from a stranger’s clothesline.
    Anya said, “Alexi said he wanted to see my apartment, then I thought I heard Tatiana in yours.”
    “She’s an interesting woman,” Arkady said.
    “She’s seductive even dead, apparently.” Anya walked back and forth, almost sniffing the air.
    “I hope we’re not disturbing you,” Alexi said.
    Anya said, “Arkady is always up, like a monk at his prayers.”
    “Is that how you solve your cases?” Alexi asked. “Prayer?”
    “A good deal of the time.”
    Alexi’s eyes were slightly hooded. Hands quick and delicate as a croupier’s. Under his jacket the hitch of a gun.
    “Can I offer you a drink? Something to eat?” Arkady asked, as if there were any food in the refrigerator.
    “No thanks,” Anya said. “He’s going to show me his new apartment. It’s a penthouse.”
    “Penthouse?” That was a word Arkady never expected to hear on Russian lips. “You’re moving to Moscow?”
    “Why not?” Alexi said. “Grisha left a number of properties and investments here and in Kaliningrad.”
    “He left the makings of a war. Things were quiet until your father was killed. Quiet like a jungle, but quiet. Why don’t you cash out and live peacefully on some tropical island?”
    “Perhaps I have more faith and less negativity than you do.” Alexi’s gaze lit on Tatiana’s cassette tapes, still on the table. “For instance, how can you stand to listen to this garbage?”
    Alexi reached for the cassettes and Arkady seized his wrist.
    “Don’t.”
    “Okay, relax.” Alexi straightened up and rubbed his arm. “I had no idea they meant that much to you. My mistake.”
    Arkady knew it was a moment that distilled the day. Alexi’s ambition compared to his own isolation. He didn’t dare look at Anya.
    •  •  •
    One in the morning was a territory as much as a time, and Victor Orlov and Arkady were long-term residents. Victor dropped into a chair and contemplated the recorder and cassettes on the kitchen table.
    “Is this what you’ve been listening to?”
    “Tatiana.”
    “Huh. She’s the one who’s been fucking you over.”
    “Victor, she’s dead.”
    “Doesn’t matter. She has you ready to make a swan dive into a bucket of shit. Just because you got authority to go to Kaliningrad doesn’t mean you have to do it. This is not exactly hot pursuit. She’s been dead for ten days and my only hope is that whoever got her has her on ice.”
    “There’s a connection—”
    “There’s no connection. Tatiana Petrovna jumped off her apartment balcony in Moscow, was autopsied in Moscow, and if the fuck-ups in the morgue lost her, they did it in Moscow.”
    “I visited her apartment twice,” Arkady said. “The first time, it was turned upside down by someone searching for something, maybe the notebook. The second time, it was absolutely bare, to take no chances.”
    Victor said, “I asked around. The first time was skinheads trashing the place just for the fun of it. The second time the apartment was bare because the developer wants to build a shopping mall. Those are the facts. I have to ask, Arkady, are you feeling okay?”
    “I talked to the prosecutor. He agreed that I could search in Kaliningrad.”
    “Of course he did. Kaliningrad is like Siberia. He’d like it if you spent the rest of your life searching for bodies in Kaliningrad.”
    “Just a day trip.”
    “To Kaliningrad? No such thing, you’ll see. Chasing a body from town to town, calling a bicycle maker in Milan? That’s too crazy even for me.”
    Too crazy for Victor? That was worrisome, Arkady thought.
    He said, “The bicycle maker led us to Bonnafos, who, I believe, was a source for Tatiana. We can’t question him because, unfortunately, he was shot and killed on the same beach where the notebook was found. It was important enough for Tatiana to make a special