Independence Square: Arkady Renko in Ukraine

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For my dear friend Andrew Nurnberg MOSCOW 1“You know what the two most depressing words in the Russian language are?” Arkady asked.“How long have I got?”Victor’s voice sounded thick with gravel, which was always a sign that the previous night he hadn’t so much fallen off the wagon as plunged from it.“ ‘Desk job,’ ” Arkady said. “In a country which clasps tragedy to its breast, nothing is more tragic than a man with a ‘desk job.’ ”“As always, Investigator, you zero in on the truth.”“Investigator.” Arkady sighed. “The only inquiry I’ve made in the past three months has been into the quality of the coffee here in Petrovka.”Petrovka 38 was the police headquarters where Arkady worked as investigator for the Office of Prosecution, and Victor was his good friend and assistant detective.“What did you decide?”“That when the devil came to seduce Margarita in Patriarch Ponds, he stopped off on the way to install vending machines. Come on, Victor, what do you call an investigator who doesn’t investigate?”“A crime,” said Victor.It was, of course, Prosecutor Zurin who had confined Arkady to office duties. He had, over the years, sent Arkady to various extremities of the country on cases: to Kaliningrad, hard up against the Polish border in the west, and to Lake Baikal, halfway to the Far East, across endless rolls of Siberian tundra. Perhaps, Arkady thought, he could complete the compass by going to the far north or the far south. The Northern Fleet in Murmansk was always a hotbed of scandal, and any time spent there would play havoc with Arkady’s circadian rhythms to an extent which would please even Zurin. The sun didn’t rise for six weeks in the winter and didn’t set for six weeks in the summer. Men went mad with monotonous regularity up there, and sometimes Arkady felt he had less far to go than most. As for the south—well, Crimea was Russian again now, and it was very nice at this time of year. Arkady had been there once with his first wife, Zoya, back in the days when every woman on the beach wore the same leopard-print swimsuit because that was the only one on sale that year. As the saying went, the past was another country.Papers were stacked in ziggurats on Arkady’s desk. He picked up a sheet off the tallest one and waved it vaguely in Victor’s direction. “Departmental liaison officer. Do you know what that means?”“That 2It was June, warm enough for Arkady to take his jacket off and sling it over his shoulder. As he walked, he kicked up what looked like snow but wasn’t. It was pukh, fluff from poplar trees, which at this time of year could fall in blizzards. Moscow had hundreds of thousands of poplar trees, the planting of which was blamed on Stalin, or Khrushchev, or both. Piles of pukh burned like gunpowder, so street cleaners trained high-pressure hoses on the flakes wherever they gathered. In Arkady’s early days as an investigator, he heard the tale of the American ambassador who had such a bad allergic reaction to the stuff that he’d been evacuated to a hospital in Germany. Arkady regarded pukh in the same way he regarded Moscow’s traffic: as an annoyance so commonplace that acceptance was the path of least resistance.Zhenya was where Arkady knew he would be, because it was where he always was, at the chess tables in Gorky Park. Looking like a novitiate monk in his maroon hoodie, Zhenya crouched low over his table and stared at the board with such intensity that Arkady thought the king might give himself up through sheer fright.Zhenya’s opponent was an old man in a flat leather cap, a thick tweed jacket, and a pullover, a man in whose bones the long cold winters clearly lingered even once summer had come. He sat back in his chair, pondered, then slowly moved his piece. Zhenya was a dervish, hands dancing over the pieces, crashing a bishop down here, slapping the chess clock there. Each move was designed to set a trap. The old man’s queen was skittish and isolated.“Mate in five,” Zhenya said.“Let’s play it out.”“Why? I check here, your king goes there, check, check, pawn cuts off your flight.”“Let’s play it out.”Zhenya shrugged. “Suit yourself.”He made a show of impatience as the old man took his time over each move, until eventually it was done. Zhenya pocketed the two one-hundred-ruble notes tucked under one side of the board. He showed not the slightest trace of embarrassment. This was how he made his living.“I could have been halfway through my next game by now,” Zhenya said.The old man got to his feet as though uncoiling. “I know.”Arkady stopped his smile just short of a laugh.Only now did Zhenya even seem to notice that Arkady was there. He gave a sheepish