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For Nell and Nelson, Luisa and Don, and Sam Marisa, Benicio, Rafael, Scarlett, and Daisy And always Em

MOSCOW

1

On a normal day, Pushkinskaya Square was a place where young mothers pushed their strollers, couples sat on park benches, and teenagers fishtailed on Rollerblades. Today was not a normal day.

Russia had just invaded Ukraine and the protesters were coming to make their voices heard: “Nyet voy-ne! No to war!” A few had arrived at dawn, then hundreds, then thousands until the square was packed. Half of them wore the blue and white medical masks that had been helpful in preventing Covid and now were useful for those who didn’t want to be recognized. Many of the women had painted blue and yellow hearts on their cheeks. WE STAND WITH UKRAINE! a banner proclaimed.

The crowd was overwhelmingly young, as protesters tended to be, but Arkady saw many his own age and older, men who still wore ties beneath winter coats and women who wore colorful scarves over their heads. These were the kind of men and women who became the collective conscience at times of national emergency. They were the ones who more than three decades earlier had stood in front of tanks at this very spot and shamed the soldiers in their turrets and gunports for threatening Gorbachev, their rightfully elected leader.

For all Arkady knew, some of them were the very same people, marooned halfway between pension and death. Unless addicted to the bottle, men could retain their vigor as they grew old. Russian women, on the other hand, often appeared old before their time—a legacy, perhaps, of a nation where men were so domestically incompetent that women ended up doing pretty much everything themselves, even shoveling snow on cold winter days like today.

The riot police watched and waited. One, caught for a moment in a shaft of sunlight, looked like a gargantuan insect, an exoskeleton of helmet and pads, a baton and assault rifle sprouting extra limbs. He and his colleagues began moving into phalanxes, plastic shields interlocking in front of them. Demonstrators linked arms and faced them while others clapped and chanted “Nyet voy-ne!” the syllables spaced and rhythmic as though part of an ancient incantation. “Nyet voy-ne! Nyet voy-ne! Nyet voy-ne!” Pushkin himself watched on impassively atop his pedestal with an arm tucked into his jacket and his overcoat falling in great green cascades of oxidized bronze.

Arkady knew how quickly the mood of the crowd could turn violent. All it took was one heavy-handed attempt at an arrest and the chants would become battle cries; the batons would start thumping and the boots flying. Every peaceful protest was a riot in waiting, and the anticipation was sometimes worse than the battle that followed.

A voice crackled over a megaphone. “Dear citizens, disperse. Otherwise, special measures will be used.”

There it was, Arkady thought. “Special measures.” It could mean several things, none of them good.

For some months now, the citizens of Kyiv had been talking about “Day X,” a portentous way of referring to the moment Russian troops would march across the border and claim all Ukraine as their own. Tatiana, the woman Arkady was in love with but seldom saw, wrote about it for the Moscow New York Times from Kyiv. Television political analysts discussed it in the same way serious men and women analyzed good novels or popular movies. Everyone talked about it, but few had really believed it would happen. Intellectually, perhaps, but not emotionally, not viscerally.

“Putin’s too rational,” people said. “The arch-pragmatist knows realpolitik better than anyone. He’ll never take the risk.” Perhaps they had allowed themselves a self-satisfied nod. No longer.

The writer Mikhail Bulgakov had called Kyiv simply “the City,” with a capital C, as though there could be no other. A millennium and a half since its founding, it had outlasted Khazars, Varangians, Mongols, and Tatars, but for how much longer? What would it look like, what would be left of it, once Putin had finished? Arkady remembered pictures of Grozny, the capitol of Chechnya, twenty-five years ago. After months of bombardment, it had been destroyed and pulverized. Russian planes had bombed even the rubble of buildings as though they could make the city disappear altogether.

It was only last summer that Arkady had been in Kyiv, a brief stop en route from Moscow to Crimea, and he had fond memories of the city: the pastel-colored houses, the bronze boat containing statues of the city founders, the goddess and the archangel standing guard over mortals in Independence Square. Would any of them still be standing? There had been a mural of ravens near where he had stayed, the black ravens for wisdom and the solitary white one for good news. No sign of either right now.

Arkady could imagine what it was like when the invasion began: mobile phones spluttering with the news, cars packed to the brim and heading out of the city in a downpour, anxious families laden with bedding and food hurrying down to basements and underground parking garages. Children were probably told this was all a game, but they knew it wasn’t true.

Zhenya was easy to spot in the crowd. His mask was pulled down around his chin and he was wearing at least one layer too few for the weather. Arkady didn’t know whether this was machismo, forgetfulness, genuine imperviousness to the cold, or a mix of all three. He made his way through the crowd.

“Look at this,” Zhenya said as Arkady approached. He handed him his phone. News footage of protests in various cities helpfully captioned: MOSCOW, ST. PETERSBURG, YEKATERINBURG, CHELYABINSK, NIZHNY NOVGOROD, NOVOSIBIRSK, and PERM. Arkady was cheered that so many people would risk coming out onto the streets, but he also knew that many more had swallowed the big lie that Putin was invading Ukraine to free its people from Nazi domination.

“Why are you here?” Zhenya asked.

“I was worried.”

“I’m not a child. How did you know I’d be here?”

“Where else would you be?” Arkady’s adopted son had been glued to the news every day for weeks—not the news in newspapers or on television but on the internet, where he could follow what was really going on. He had told Arkady again and again that Putin would invade, and every New York Times op-ed that said otherwise drove him crazy. Zhenya was a chess player and was trained to see several moves ahead to figure out what his opponent would do. Given enough information, he could logically predict the next move.

“You should go,” Zhenya said.

“Why?”

“You have Parkinson’s. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“I’m not an invalid.”

“That’s debatable.”

Arkady laughed. “Okay, let’s go and get a cup of coffee and something to eat, and if this is still going on when we’re finished, I’ll go home.”

“Deal.”

They started toward a café, a place where Arkady had taken Zhenya several times over the years.

A TV crew loomed into view. The cameraman aimed his lens and the reporter held a large microphone toward Zhenya.

“Why are you protesting?”

“This is real fascism,” Zhenya said before Arkady could stop him. “Everybody has a duty to protest about what’s going on and speak out against it.”

A quartet of riot police were hard on the reporter’s heels. The cameraman swiveled to film them as they grabbed Zhenya, one on each limb.

“Hey!” Zhenya shouted.

“He’s with me,” Arkady said. “I’m a senior investigator in the prosecutor’s office.”

The policemen had tinted visors pulled down so low Arkady couldn’t see their eyes. They quickstepped through the crowd with Zhenya jerking and wriggling in their grasp.

Arkady raised his voice. “Did you hear me?”

“Hey!” Zhenya shouted again. “Hey!”

Smartphones swiveled to follow their progress. Another protester tried to intervene on Zhenya’s behalf and received a club to the neck, hard enough to send him sprawling.

“Fuck you!” Zhenya yelled. “Fuck you and your filthy war!”

They threw him into the back of a police van and Arkady rushed in after him before the doors closed.

It was several hours before Zhenya was processed, and had it not been for Arkady pulling rank, it would have been even longer. The holding cells were full of protesters who had been rounded up at Pushkinskaya. Arkady bet that nine in every ten had never been in trouble with the law before. Decades as an investigator had given him a pretty good sense of who knew their way round the justice system and who didn’t. There was something about the way those new to the experience were nervous and afraid and those with years of experience waited in grim resignation.

Denis Kim took charge of Zhenya’s case. Arkady knew him from other crime scenes over the years. The surname was originally Korean. His family came from Sakhalin, a long, thin strip of land next to Russia with the Sea of Okhotsk to the north and the sweep of Japan beginning to the south. While only four miles from Russia, it was another world.

Denis looked Zhenya up and down.

“You are charged with the use of illegal language.”

“ ‘Illegal language’?”

He made a show of reading the arresting officer report.

“Which bit of this is illegal?”

“The final word.”

“I’m not allowed to use the word ‘war’?”

“Exactly.”

“What about the chants?”

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t hear them.”

“Nyet voy-ne. Nyet voy-ne.” Zhenya began to tap out the rhythm with a fingertip on the counter.

“If you don’t shut up, I can make it much worse for you.”

“If he can’t say ‘war,’ Arkady asked, “what can he say?”

“Special military operation.”

“ ‘Special military operation’?” Zhenya paused between each of the three words.

“ ‘Special military operation.’ Or ‘the tense foreign political situation.’ Either is acceptable.”

“But not ‘war’?”

“You have been warned.” Denis glanced at the paperwork again. “Born 2001, which makes you twenty-two. Adopted son of Arkady Renko.” He nodded to Arkady, then back to Zhenya. “Have you done your military service yet?”

Every male citizen between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven had to serve for a year before becoming an official reservist. Army service was a living hell, so every male citizen with any brains or contacts did their best to get out of it. Large cities had the worst recruitment rates because the residents were sophisticated at working the system to their advantage. It was the kids out in the country with little schooling and fewer prospects who ended up filling the quotas.

“No,” Zhenya said. “Not yet.” He didn’t add that he’d already been called up twice and that each time Arkady had used his influence to keep him out. It was just a matter of who you knew and how much you were prepared to bribe them to come up with some reason, medical or educational, for exemption.

“It would do you some good, teach you some discipline.” Arkady remembered that Denis had been in the army—a real soldier, a professional volunteer rather than a conscript before he’d become a policeman. “First offense, so no jail time, just a caution. But consider your card marked. Next time you’re pulled in, you’ll be looking at five years, mandatory.”

“Five?”

“Five years in jail.”

Zhenya was visibly shocked.

“I don’t make the rules.” He paused, then: “If I did, you would be looking at ten. Right. Go on. Go home.”

2

Moscow winters made everyone in Moscow look pale and sallow. Everyone but Prosecutor General Zurin, that is. His tan was so deep that the walls of police headquarters glowed as he passed by. Arkady tried to imagine the level of commitment needed not just to establish that color, more orange than brown, but to maintain it too. He thought of Zurin roasting like a chicken on a tanning bed, tiny goggles over his tiny eyes.

“Chernobyl is so nice at this time of year,” Victor said. He shared Arkady’s office and was Arkady’s most loyal friend.

Zurin either didn’t get the joke or chose to ignore it.

“I hear your boy thinks he’s the new Alexei Navalny,” Zurin said to Arkady. His smirk was not just that of a man who had never considered rebelling against authority; it was that of someone for whom the opposite had always been true: for whom power was a source of endless proximity. A man could put up with a lot if he thought the prize was within reach.

Arkady would have admired him more, or would have disliked him marginally less, if Zurin had shown the guts to seek out actual power for himself. But no, he had always let others do the running and had been adept mainly at knowing which coattails to grab onto as they whisked past. It was a skill of sorts, Arkady conceded, certainly one he’d never mastered himself.

“He feels strongly about the issue at hand,” Arkady said.

“He’ll grow out of it.”

“I hope not.”

“I have to say, Investigator Renko, it’s not an especially good look.”

“What’s not?”

“For you to be attending that demonstration.”

“It’s a free country.”

Victor snorted a laugh into his can of Fanta.

Zurin again seemed impervious to the humor. “Officers of law enforcement must remain politically neutral at all times.”

“And if it had been a demonstration in favor of the war?”

“ ‘Special military operation,’ please.”

“But would you have approved of my attendance there?”

“Of course.”

“That wouldn’t be politically neutral.”

“It would.”

“How is it neutral?”

“The special military operation is the correct course of action, politically, militarily, morally. Support for it is therefore a given for all right-thinking people and as such is neutral. It’s like breathing. You shouldn’t have to think about it, merely accept it. Anyway, we’re not here to debate semantics. I have a case for you.”

Zurin tended to push three kinds of cases Arkady’s way these days. There were minor ones that a trainee traffic cop could have solved, there were ones that involved Arkady traveling to far-flung parts of the Russian Federation and therefore absolving Zurin from having to deal with him, and there were politically sensitive ones that required at least the appearance of Arkady’s experience and dogged investigative skills. These were respectively designed to humiliate, remove, or neutralize Arkady, and even if they never worked, Zurin continued trying.

“You know Alexei Kazasky?” Zurin asked.

“Yes, he’s the deputy minister of defense.”

Not a minor case, then, even though the title sounded more impressive than it was. There were a dozen or so deputy ministers of defense, each responsible for one particular part of the vast defense edifice. Deputy ministers might be retired generals, civil servants, or businessmen, and their fiefdoms included material and technical support, financial support, information technology, housing and medical support, international cooperation, and so on. Above them were two first deputy ministers, and above them was the actual minister. Opportunities for bribery and corruption began high and rose to interstellar, depending on the rank. Because his father was a decorated general, Arkady could have been a deputy minister himself by now if only he had played the game. He told himself that it was for the best that he hadn’t. He would neither have enjoyed it nor been any good at it. Most of the time, he was convinced that this was true, but sometimes he wondered.

“Almost,” Zurin said.

“Almost?”

“You said he is deputy minister of defense. Right title, wrong tense. He was deputy minister of defense. His body has just been found.”

3

Moscow skyscrapers had sprouted like mushrooms after a rain these past couple of decades. They rose to the heavens in towers of steel and glass, bouncing sunlight across the streets in the summer and reflecting impassive gray skies in the winter. Their names could have come from a science fiction comic: Eurasia, Evolution Tower, City of Capitals.

Arkady was old enough to remember the city before any of these existed. Back then, the tallest buildings were the Seven Sisters, Stalin’s Gothic wedding cakes girded with crenelations and topped off with ruby stars. The sisters comprised a university building, two ministries, two apartment blocks, and two hotels, the Leningrad Kaya and the Ukraine. Arkady and Victor arrived at the Ukraine.

The hotel manager met them at the entrance.

“Yuri Spivak,” he said. He was a handsome man in his forties. His pocket square was arranged just so and perfectly matched his tie, and by the cut of his suit Arkady knew that it cost more than Arkady earned in a month. He wondered whether it came out of Spivak’s salary or whether the hotel chain, a Western one, gave him a clothing allowance.

Arkady recognized him as the kind of man who knew instantly where everyone he met fit into his own personal ecosystem: those who needed to be flattered and those who didn’t, those to whom he needed to pay heed and those to whom he didn’t, those who could make his life difficult and those whose lives he could make difficult. Just about the only people who didn’t fit neatly in any category were investigators who had come to find out why an important guest had been murdered in one of the hotel’s suites.

“Terrible business,” Spivak said, leading them across the lobby. Arkady saw a couple of hotel security guards following close behind. Businessmen clustered at tables. Departing guests peered at the printouts of their bills. Arkady detected a certain kinetic energy in the place, though that was almost certainly more to do with the war than anything else. The news had unsettled even those who approved. It wasn’t every day that your army marched into someone else’s country.

Victor was looking around with barely concealed contempt, and when Arkady followed his gaze, he could see why. The foyer looked modern enough—light and bright and polished, generic and inoffensive—but, looking up, one saw the socialist realist painting on the ceiling entitled “Labor and Harvest Day in Hospitable Ukraine” and the bronze statues called “Queen of the Fields” and “Mother.” They weren’t in homage to the Soviet Union, Arkady knew. They weren’t even an affectionate pastiche. It was all parody, an emptiness masquerading as retro chic to give foreigners a false sense of history and locals a false sense of comfort and nostalgia. Arkady had never been a true believer and had not for a moment mourned the loss of the USSR, but even he thought it deserved better than this, served up in chunks of knowingly insulting irony—repackaged, rebranded, sanitized.

The elevator journey passed in silence. A disembodied voice announced, “Floor 22,” and the doors slid open. Spivak led the way along the corridor, left and right and left again over carpets as thick and springy as a forest floor. Two police officers stood outside a door at the end. Through the window of the fire escape beyond, the sky was slate.

“I have to warn you,” Spivak said. “It’s not pretty in there.”

“It rarely is,” Arkady replied.

One of the police officers opened the door. Arkady knew from his first inhalation that Spivak was at least not lying. Most public buildings in Moscow were overheated, and neither this hotel nor this particular suite was an exception. Dead bodies have a smell all their own: part decomposing restaurant leftovers, part human waste, and layers of sulfur if the connoisseur was prepared to really lean into the bouquet. Arkady had long since grown accustomed to it, but there would never be a time when he didn’t fight the urge to gag upon his first breath. It was like diving into cold water: Ride out the initial shock, and you’d be fine.

Kazasky was lying on the floor between two sofas. Blood had pooled deep into the threads of the rug beneath his body and looked as though it had been hurled around the room in streaks and sprays, in splashes and smears. Arkady saw it on the sofas, on walls, on the legs of a desk, even on the TV screen in the corner. The typical adult holds more than a gallon of blood, an astonishingly large amount when found at the scene of a homicide. As with the death stench, Arkady was used to it by now, but it never failed to astound him.

Arkady and Victor moved through the room like deep-sea divers on a seabed, careful where they placed their feet and keeping their balance with arms held out wide. Victor had once rendered a crime scene unexaminable by crashing full length over the corpse—he had at the time been almost as drunk as the toxicology report later proved the dead man to have been—and the story had become the stuff of legend at Petrovka 38, police headquarters. They laughed about it now, Victor as much as the rest of them, but at the time Zurin had been apoplectic, and for once Arkady had understood why. The ability to stay upright at crime scenes was pretty much a minimum expectation for any detective.

Most of the murders Arkady investigated were brutal, but there were levels of brutality, and it was rare to find an efficient killer who struck a single, fatal blow and left it at that. Moscow murders were overkill, paroxysms of rage and frustration—at life, at fate, at other people—played out with whatever was at hand—vodka and knives, hammers and guns—until the killer’s fury was spent and the victim was dead.

Even by these standards, Kazasky’s death had been something else. His face was unrecognizable, not just as himself but as human. Arkady wondered momentarily whether the body was even Kazasky, yet the clothes were expensive and a wedding ring would prove easy identification. The angle at which his left arm lay suggested multiple fractures.

Arkady shivered, an involuntary reflex despite the heat. There was something about this level of savagery that unnerved him. No, there was something about this level of savagery in this place that unnerved him. Drunken slaughters in rancid tenement buildings, he was used to. But not here, in one of the city’s premier hotels, where refinement and luxury should have acted as deterrents to violence.

“Explain that to me,” Victor said.

“Explain what?”

Victor pointed to the far wall splattered with blood. Arkady hadn’t noticed at first and as his gaze followed Victor’s finger, he saw what he meant. This particular pattern of blood wasn’t a random one. It was the number 2, and it had been drawn very deliberately.

In the old Soviet days, an American guest had dubbed the hotel elevators “Jaws” for their shuddering and juddering of the metal cage, not to mention the time they took to arrive. Now they were rapid and smooth, and the doors opened almost as soon as Arkady pressed the call button.

“Arkady!” Marina Makarova stepped out from the elevator. “Have we been paired together again? I’m surprised.”

The word “surprised” covered many things, Arkady thought—most of all, the unpleasantness of that surprise. Was it possible she knew he had Parkinson’s and was there to make sure he could do the job?

“Oh, don’t look so shocked,” she said, “you must have known the FSB would be involved in this investigation.”

“Of course.” He was relieved; she didn’t seem to know. A senior politician in the defense ministry had been found murdered when a war was only a few hours old. The only surprise was that the FSB deigned to breathe the same air as the prosecutor’s office on this one rather than take the whole thing over from the start. “I just hadn’t expected it to be you.”

They had been lovers once, first when working a case concerning Chechen organized crime and terrorism in the early years of Putin’s reign, and then on and off for several years afterward until he met an investigative reporter named Tatiana. It had been Tatiana who had shown Arkady perhaps the single most fundamental truth about love: that it meant wanting what was best for the other person rather than yourself, and sometimes that meant letting go, trusting that the pieces would land in the right place.

Marina was a woman of steel in a trouser suit, a true believer in the old KGB concept of sword and shield, warrior for and defender of national law, and if she’d yet to meet a means not justified by an end, then Arkady didn’t know about it. She had never married, never had children, and never expressed a scintilla of interest in either. In her youth she had been a champion middle-distance runner, good enough to go to the Olympics, and even though she was now middle-aged, she retained a lean athlete’s body. Arkady had found her hard to figure out until he’d realized a simple truth about her. She would always put the FSB first, herself second, and everything and everyone else a distant third. Strangely, it had made him like her more rather than less. There was a certain comfort in always knowing exactly where he stood with her.

“All the better that it is me, then,” she replied. “We can use our personal connection to ensure an optimum working relationship, conclude the investigation swiftly, and provide an example of what interagency cooperation should look like.”

“Very impressive.”

“My aims?”

“No. The fact you kept a straight face while saying all that.”

4

Marina came along with Arkady and Victor to the autopsy. Arkady was amused to see that she dabbed perfume underneath her nostrils when she thought they weren’t looking. He considered voicing the thought that someone who worked in Lubyanka, Moscow’s secret police headquarters, should be used to corpses by now, but for once he considered discretion the better part of valor. There would be plenty of opportunity to antagonize her if he wanted.

“You know how many bodies I’ve got stacked up in there?” The coroner, Arveladze, jerked his great bearded head in the direction of the metal drawers that covered an entire wall. “Go on,” he said, when no one answered. “Guess.”

“I assumed it was a rhetorical question,” Arkady said.

“I ask a question, I want an answer.”

There were four rows of seven drawers each. “Twenty-eight,” Arkady said.

“Thirty-two!” Arveladze’s voice was triumphant. “Some poor bastards can’t get privacy even in death.”

Arveladze—or Niko, as his friends called him—had moved from Tbilisi after leaving school and had barely let a day pass since then without wondering loudly and repeatedly what had possessed him to forsake the greatest city in the world for a hellhole like Moscow. Georgians were the greatest people in the world, he said, and if you disagreed, he was happy to settle it with a drinking contest. He stood barely five feet, six inches but weighed over two hundred pounds, and very little of it was fat. Even Victor had been known to pale at the prospect of going head-to-head with Niko.

“So your man here”—Arveladze indicated Kazasky’s battered corpse—“has jumped the line, and then some. Not that he is in a position to care much one way or the other.” He laughed heartily at his own joke, flexed his fingers to ensure that the latex gloves were on properly, and began to examine the body in detail.

“Assuming the constant room temperature, degrees of decomposition and rigor mortis suggest he died between midnight and two a.m. this morning. Full-thickness scalp laceration with ragged non-bleeding edges, four inches long, stretching from the right frontal glabellar region across to the left medial superior orbital rim. One-inch left frontal laceration…”

Arkady tuned out. Arveladze dealt with bodies as a mechanic would treat cars: objects were examined, diagnostics run, problems solved. Every man had a place where he felt most at home, and for Arveladze it was here, his own small subterranean palace full of formaldehyde, scalpels, disembodied organs, and a clientele who couldn’t answer back. There were often rumors of dark goings-on in the city mortuaries, but Arveladze was never named among the suspects: he cared nothing for the money that a little black-market trading would provide, and his interest in the dead was in no way prurient or warped. Arkady would, ironically, have trusted him with his life.

He forced himself to pay attention again.

“… making a combination of multiple deep lacerations and multiple blunt-force trauma.”

“Two weapons?” Arkady said.

“Impossible to be absolutely sure, but it seems likely. Hard to think of a single object which could have caused both. Look: the lacerations have been made by something very sharp, possibly even a knife. But the blunt-force trauma is from a heavy item impacting at great velocity.”

“In plain language, please,” Marina said.

“He was cut to shreds and had the shit beaten out of him.”

Didn’t get much plainer than that, Arkady thought.

“By two weapons, are we presuming two killers?” Victor asked.

“You’re the detectives,” Arveladze replied. “You tell me.”

“Were the two types of wounds inflicted concurrently or consecutively?” Arkady asked.

“The first, by the look of it. Here.” Arveladze pointed to a particularly bloodied area of Kazasky’s head. “There’s a lot of overlay between the two, and at other points on the skull too. Overlay suggests things were happening all at once.”

“Frenzied rather than methodical?”

“I’d say.”

Arkady looked at Victor and Marina in turn. “We’re agreed that we’ll start from the premise of two killers?” They both nodded. Arkady turned to Arveladze. “Then we won’t take up any more of your time. Thank you, Niko. Better get started on the others while it’s still winter.”

Arveladze made a face. Spring always brought the highest body count, not because more people were killed then, but because the warm weather uncovered any number of corpses that had been hidden under snow.

“There’s a bottle of chacha with your name on it anytime you feel like putting the world to rights, Arkady.” Chacha was Georgian pomace brandy, and Arveladze’s homebrewed version could strip paint off the walls.

“Too strong for me,” Arkady said. “But I know a man who would like it.”

Victor looked embarrassed but pleased. Arkady’s mobile buzzed the moment they were aboveground. You have a new voicemail message. It took him a moment to remember how to access the voicemail, and another moment to get his fingers and thumbs connected to his brain. It was these little Parkinson’s symptoms that bothered him almost as much as the more obvious ones.

The voicemail was from Spivak, asking Arkady to return to Hotel Ukraine as soon as possible. Raised female voices could be heard in the background, and the note of weary harassment in Spivak’s voice was one that Arkady recognized all too well: the tone of a man trying and failing to deal with angry women.

“Maybe you should take the lead on this particular interview,” Arkady suggested to Marina as they drove back across Moscow.

She smirked. “And miss out on the fun of watching you take these women on? The FSB is happy to act in a purely observational capacity in this instance.”

Victor, who had been sitting quietly in the backseat, let out a short “Ha!”

Once again Spivak was waiting by the main entrance for them. “Thank God, you’ve come,” he said. “They’re in my office, and I’ve had to put two security staff in there to stop them from killing each other.”

“They” turned out to be Serafima Kazaskya and Dasha Lapina, separated by twenty-five years and brought together by their attachments to Kazasky. Serafima was the mother of Kazasky’s two children, both adults now, and until a few months ago she had been his wife. Dasha was his girlfriend. That there would have been overlap between the two went without saying. Arkady knew men like Kazasky all too well, and that was without any judgment, for when it came to his own romantic history, Arkady had hardly been a paragon of virtue.

Spivak’s office was as overheated as the rest of the building, but there was a definite chill in the air due to the two women. Two men from security stood as though ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice.

“I’m Investigator Renko,” Arkady said. “This is my colleague Detective Orlov and Agent Makarova from the FSB.” Those last three initials knocked Serafima and Dasha back into their chairs, as Arkady had known they would. FSB, KGB, NKVD, Cheka. The fear was ancestral and it never went away, no matter what they were called.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Arkady said.

“Her loss?” Serafima and Dasha spluttered in perfect synchronicity.

“We’re going to interview you one at a time.”

“Don’t let her go first,” Dasha said. “Everything she’ll tell you is bullshit.”

Arkady pulled a ten-ruble coin from his pocket and held it up so they could both see. “Serafima, the number 10; Dasha, the eagle. Understood?” He balanced it on the bridge of his thumb and middle finger, flicked it up, and it fell to the floor before he could catch it. Victor quickly retrieved the coin, tossed it up again, caught it and placed it on the back of his other hand, showing them the coin. The overhead light glinted off Russia’s double-headed eagle.

Dasha got to her feet. “At least this way you’ll get the truth first.”

Arkady turned to the security staff. “Please wait outside with Mrs. Kazasky until we call you in.”

Serafima shot a glance at Dasha that would have upset a lesser woman, but she resigned herself to leaving the room with her escorts. Arkady studied Dasha as they waited for the door to close. She was one of those women whom foreign men would find beautiful but who were so commonplace on the streets of Moscow as to be totally unremarkable: highlighted blond hair, flawless skin, and a sensual mouth.

“So,” Arkady said, “perhaps you could tell us the nature of your relationship with the deceased.”

“I was the love of his life.”

“His words or yours?”

“Both.” If she’d taken offense at the question, she didn’t show it. “He told me so every day. He’d been with a lot of women, both before his marriage and during it. I’m not stupid, Investigator: I know I wasn’t the first, but he said he’d never felt like that before. Not for a moment, not with anyone. Especially not with her.” Dasha’s eyes slid theatrically toward the door.

“How long were you together?”

“Five months, two weeks, and four days.”

Spoken like a lovestruck teenager. Endearing at sixteen, but less so a decade later.

“How did you meet?”

“He came to a fashion event where I was influencing.”

“ ‘Influencing’?”

“Yes. Influencing.”

“Influencing what?”

“The fashion brand Turbo Tigran.”

“I don’t understand. How can you influence a brand? You influence people, surely. Not objects.”

“You don’t know what influencing is?”

“In this context, no.”

The eye roll she gave was very similar to the one Zhenya pulled off whenever Arkady disappointed him.

“You’ve heard of Instagram?”

“Vaguely.”

“Okay. I have three million followers there: three million people who see my posts whenever they’re on the site.”

“And a post is?”

“A photograph. Sometimes with a caption.”

“A photograph of what?”

“Me, mainly.” Arkady shook his head, not understanding. Dasha plowed on, undaunted. “Three million followers are a lot of advertising exposure. So companies pay me to promote their stuff—but quite subtly, you know? I don’t just say ‘Go buy Turbo Tigran’; I put up pictures of myself at launch events and so on, wearing their clothes and making sure to highlight the party glamour: ‘Having a blast with my good friends at Turbo Tigran,’ so it looks organic and unforced, not too obvious. And then they pay me.”

Arkady found it all difficult to comprehend. Dasha may as well have been a cosmonaut for all he knew. He asked the first thing that came into his head: “This influencing… it pays well?”

“About thirty thousand.”

“Dollars?”

“Of course.”

“Per year?”

“Per post.”

“Per post?”

“Sure.”

“And how many posts do you make each year?”

“You have to ration them, of course. Too many just puts people off. But one a week seems to work well.”

Arkady did the math. A million and a half dollars—not rubles—a year for a handful of photos on a cell phone. He didn’t want to be that guy, the ‘world gone mad’ guy, but, really, the world had gone mad.

“That was before the war, of course,” Dasha continued.

“ ‘Special military operation,’ please.” Marina was on message.

“They’re saying that the government will shut Instagram down because so many people are using it to criticize the w—the special military operation. Here.”

Technicolor icons bloomed on her phone screen, pictures appeared and vanished as she scrolled with practiced fingers. Arkady caught glimpses of private jets and sunset cocktails. She stopped the scroll.

“Here’s where an oligarch’s daughter wrote: ‘The biggest and most successful lie of the Kremlin’s propaganda is that most Russians stand with Putin.’ There are loads like that. And it’s going to destroy what I’ve worked so hard for. This is my life; this is my soul. This is what I’ve been waking up to and falling asleep with for the last five years. I’ll have to go to Telegram and VKontakte, but they haven’t got a fraction of the reach.”

Bad time for Kazasky to have died on her, Arkady thought.

“When did you last see Alexei?” he asked.

“Last night. We had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant. Alexei wanted room service, but I insisted on going to a restaurant where there were other people. He had been living in that room for months. He must have been tired of it. I would have been.”

“He’d been living there for months?”

“Ever since that bitch divorced him. She took all the houses, left him nowhere to live.”

“Nowhere to live” was, Arkady thought, a relative term if you could afford a suite in the Hotel Ukraine for months on end. There were many countries where questions would be asked about how a government official on a government official’s salary could afford even a night or two at a five-star hotel, let alone an extended and, until now, an apparently endless stay. Russia was not one of those countries. An official salary was a sign of respectability, no more. A man needed money just to get to the position of deputy minister, and that man would make even more money while in that position, taking a percentage off the top of every deal as easily as opening a bottle of wine.

“How many houses did they have?”

“A few. And she took them all.”

“She must have had a very good lawyer.”

“Or he had a very bad one,” Victor said.

Arkady kept going. “How was Kazasky’s mood last night?”

“Preoccupied.”

“Was that unusual?”

“No. He always had a lot on his mind.”

“Did he give you any hint that the situation in Ukraine was imminent?”

“No.”

“Do you think he knew?”

“He must have.”

“What time did you leave him?”

“Around ten. He said he had work to do, and I wanted to stop by a friend’s party.”

“Your friend will confirm that you showed up?”

“Sure.” Victor offered her pen and paper and she wrote down a name and a number.

“Thank you,” Arkady said. “I’ll be in touch if we need anything further.”

Dasha swallowed, dabbed her eyes, gave them all a watery smile, and left the room. She wasn’t above a touch of theatrics, Arkady thought. Broken marriages, animosity, people out for themselves—he had seen it all a thousand times before, only usually with less money and less notoriety.

“Ask Mrs. Kazaskya to come in, please,” Arkady called out while the door was still open.

Serafima had been the kind of beauty Dasha was now, and perhaps in a couple of decades Dasha would look like Serafima did today.

“I don’t know what Dasha told you,” Serafima said, taking a seat, “but I wouldn’t believe a word she said. Not that she’s lying; she hasn’t got the imagination to lie, and she doesn’t have the faintest idea about what’s going on.” She sipped from a glass of water. “She told you that I’d taken all the houses, right?”

“Right.”

“You think a multi-millionaire deputy minister would let his wife take all the houses? Even in the most amicable divorce?”

“It did seem unusual,” Arkady said.

“You did it to avoid Western sanctions,” Marina said.

“Exactly. Alexei knew this was coming; he didn’t know exactly when, of course, not until recently, but they all knew months ago that it would happen one day. We were told that if he just transferred assets to my name, then they would be sanctioned anyway, but if we divorced, then that was far less likely to happen. So we chose to split.”

“And when it was all over, a few years from now, you would remarry?”

“Exactly.”

“This was your idea?” Marina asked.

“Of course.”

Marina looked as though she approved of Serafima’s cunning.

“And Dasha?” Arkady asked.

“What about her?”

“Was she part of the ruse too?”

“As far as Alexei and I were concerned, yes. Investigator, you don’t need me to spell this out to you. A man like Alexei, we all know how he treats his marriage vows. I’m not naïve. I know there were other women right from the start. You can be idealistic at fifteen but not at fifty. For him to have a public relationship immediately after our divorce helped legitimize the split. It threw doubters off the scent.”

“I have one more question,” Arkady said.

“Yes?”

“Why are you telling us all this?”

“Because Alexei is dead and I don’t want anyone trying to usurp his memory and make it into something it wasn’t. The sanctions people aren’t going to come after me now. Even if they did, most of the money is offshore in places they’ll never find. If the divorce had been for real, then fine. And maybe this will never come out in public, but I want you to know the truth, because you’re the people investigating his murder. You understand?”

“Yes,” Arkady said.

As Serafima was leaving, Arkady heard Spivak breach the delicate matter of the bill. The unctuous voice dripped like molasses: “Five months’ accommodation plus meals comes to a hefty total. Alexei Kazasky has paid a small consideration already, but only a small one, and…”

Arkady did not hear her reply.

When Serafima had gone, Spivak asked if he, Victor, and Marina would come to the hotel security center.

“We’ve got all the CCTV from last night,” he announced.

The security center consisted of a series of windowless rooms tucked away in the heart of the hotel, a place that viewed the world through banks of screens. Spivak shifted uncomfortably. He may have been manager, but this was not his turf. He murmured something to the nearest technician and on the wall nine screens suddenly showed a single picture of an empty corridor. Marina eased Victor a step to the side so she could get a better view.

“This is the corridor which runs down to the suite Kazasky was staying in,” Spivak said.

Arkady saw the timestamp in the corner of the picture: 22:10:37 WED 23 FEB 2022. Last night. It felt like several weeks ago. “Run the tape, please.”

Only the scrolling of the seconds in the timestamp showed that the tape had started to run. The corridor remained empty.

“Did Tarkovsky direct this?” Victor whispered.

Eventually, some action. Kazasky himself walked past the camera, opened the door of his suite, and went in. That fit with the time Dasha said she had left him.

“Forward to the next, please,” Spivak told the technician.

The timestamp minutes tumbled over themselves until the clock showed 23:32:44 WED 23 FEB 2022. A button was pressed, and they slowed back to normal speed.

A man walked past the camera. Dark clothing, coat collar up, fur hat with the earflaps down, head bowed. It hadn’t been that cold last night, so the choice of clothing was deliberate to prevent his face from being seen. Arkady studied the man’s gait. It was purposeful, the gait of a man who felt no compunction about what he was about to do.

They watched as the man stopped outside Kazasky’s door and knocked on it.

More waiting. The man held himself perfectly still. That, too, caught Arkady’s attention. Most people are not still when waiting for a door to be opened—at least, not when that door remains unopened for any length of time. They knock again and fidget, they look around, they press an ear to the wood to try and hear movement inside. Remaining still showed a degree of self-possession. He obviously knew where the cameras were and made sure that no one could catch a glimpse of his face.

Half a minute passed. Forty-five seconds. The man’s mouth moved. No one else was around, so he must have been talking to Kazasky through the closed door, though of course there was no sound on the footage. After another ten seconds Kazasky opened the door and the man slipped inside the room. No sudden movements, no explosive rush of force. Kazasky had invited him in, perhaps reluctantly, but invited him in all the same.

“Forward again, please,” Spivak told the technician.

Up to 00:17:21 THU 24 FEB 2022 this time. The door opened, and the man came out, dressed just as before. Dark clothing would have made blood much less obvious, Arkady thought. The man shut the door behind him and walked unhurriedly back along the corridor, again with earflaps down and head bowed so they couldn’t get a look at his face.

“That’s it?” Arkady asked.

“Yes. Nothing else on that camera until six o’clock this morning.”

“And no way into Kazasky’s suite apart from that?”

“No.”

“No fire escape, no ladders, no way someone could have come, I don’t know, up the wall and through the window?”

“Suspect is wearing skintight red and blue suit and can shoot webs from his fingers,” whispered Victor. Only Arkady smiled.

“No.” Spivak was adamant. “No one could have climbed up that wall, and the windows don’t open. Part of the insurance stipulations.”

That made sense. People throwing themselves from the upper floors and spoiling the main concourse would be bad for business.

“Okay,” Arkady said. “We’d like a copy of the footage, please.” He would ask the technical department if there was any way of enhancing the picture. Whether they could and whether they would. Depending on how much Zurin actually wanted this crime solved, the technical boys might be entirely at Arkady’s disposal—or they might be unavailable for months.

Spivak’s technician nodded.

Even now, after so many years, the intrigue of a case energized Arkady. Arveladze had put the time of death at between midnight and two a.m., which coincided perfectly with the visit of the anonymous man. Perhaps that man and Kazasky had had an argument first, and the murder had taken place only just before the man left the room. Had there been guests in the adjacent rooms, and, if so, had they heard anything? They wouldn’t have intervened, of course. No one in their right mind involved themselves in someone else’s argument—not in Moscow—but perhaps they’d picked up some other clue, a regional accent, a name shouted in fear or distress.

Most of all, Arkady wanted to know whether Kazasky had been killed by one or two men. Only one man had gone to his suite before the murder. So where was the other?

5

They were on their way across the lobby when Marina’s cell phone rang. She answered without breaking stride, said yes twice, asked “Is he there?” and hung up.

“Change of plan,” she said.

“I wasn’t aware there was a plan,” Arkady replied.

“FSB agents have a suspect under surveillance.”

“Suspect? What kind of suspect?”

“He’s in his apartment. They have the exits covered.”

“And they are just telling us about it now?”

“We have the chance to bring him in and question him.”

“Who is it?”

“You’ll see when we interview him. Until then, trust me.”

Victor made a small noise at the back of his throat.

The suspect—Marina still wouldn’t tell them his name—was in an apartment block just off Three Stations Square. Arkady had worked a case there once involving a mother whose baby had been stolen on a train and a prostitute found dead of an overdose. It was an area in which he would happily never set foot again. Taxis crawled, sprung forth, crawled again. Traffic cops leaned against candy-striped sawhorses. The titular stations squatted on their respective sides of the square like medieval castles belonging to rival kingdoms. Leningrad Station served the northwest and St. Petersburg; trains from Kazan Station headed east to Yekaterinburg and southeast to Ryazan. Yaroslavl was where you started if you wanted 10,000 kilometers of the Trans-Siberian all the way to Vladivostok. The stations swallowed and regurgitated travelers: Uzbeks with mountains of Technicolor laundry bags, bright-eyed backpackers, wary-eyed businessmen in leather jackets. It was a zone of transience: people passing through, caught for a moment in this space and time before vanishing again.

An FSB agent met them at street level. “Nothing since we last spoke. Five of us out here, plus the maintenance guy looking like he’s doing some repainting on the floor in question and the courier waiting in the hall.”

“And you’re all armed?” Marina asked.

“Of course.”

“Okay. Let’s go get him.” She turned to Arkady and Victor. “We’ll let them go in first, secure the suspect and the premises; then we can go in.”

The FSB were nothing if not professional. They went up the stairs quickly, each taking the lead in turn as they peered round corners and up stairwells. Five men in suits plus the guy dressed as a courier and eventually the man with paint all over his overalls. Arkady glanced at the wall where the man had placed his ladder and hoped that his shooting was better than his brushstrokes.

A small battering ram was produced as if by magic. The door splintered at the first impact, and the agents went barreling through, shouting. Marina waited for the sounds of resistance, and when none came, she marched through the smashed door. Arkady and Victor followed her.

“There’s no need to put the cuffs on,” Marina said. “Is there, Yuri?”

Yuri was about forty, with a round Slavic face. If he thought a midafternoon home invasion was in any way unwelcome or unusual, he was doing a fairly good job of hiding it. Arkady had seen men look more concerned when they were putting the cat out for the night.

“Since I have no idea what I’m supposed to have done, no, there’s no need to put the cuffs on. I’ll come with you and you can play out whatever tedious game you’ve concocted this time.”

Yuri’s accent was Ukrainian.

“Let me introduce you to Investigator Renko and Detective Orlov,” Marina said. “They’ll be assisting me in this interrogation.”

Assisting, Arkady thought. So much for mutual cooperation.

“And this is Yuri Blokhin.”

“Second-class advisor at the Ukrainian embassy on Leontyevsky Lane,” Blokhin said.

“Don’t look like that, Arkady,” Marina said.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re contemplating the end of your career because I’ve embroiled you in some diplomatic scandal.”

Arkady did her the courtesy of not denying this. Had his thoughts always been so obvious?

“There will be no scandal,” Marina said. “For a start, Ukraine broke off diplomatic relations with Russia a few hours ago, so considerations of diplomatic immunity are no longer relevant. Which also means we can treat Yuri as an undeclared agent of the SBU.”

The SBU was Ukraine’s security service, which meant the interview would take place at the Lubyanka, FSB headquarters, instead of Petrovka 38, where Moscow city police were stationed. Marina could have tried to exclude Arkady and Victor from the interview on the grounds that national security was involved, but Arkady knew that she would rather have him on the inside, pissing out, as the phrase went, than vice versa.

They all rode in the same car, Marina in the passenger seat, Blokhin between Arkady and Victor in back, and the agent dressed as a painter behind the wheel. The FSB budget clearly did not extend to a chauffeur outfit and a quick costume change. Arkady tried to work out what he knew and what he could only guess at. There seemed little doubt that Blokhin was an SBU agent, if only because the FSB were pretty good at knowing who was and wasn’t operating on their turf and because Marina wouldn’t have sanctioned the arrest if she weren’t absolutely sure of Blokhin’s espionage credentials. Her professional pride would never have let her live down a mistake.

As for whether Blokhin had been the man on the hotel security footage, who knew? Even if he wasn’t, could the SBU have been involved anyway? It was possible. But if Kazasky had been such an obvious target for assassination, why didn’t he have security? And what would the SBU gain from killing him in the first place? Was it to prove that they were capable of striking in the heart of the Russian capital? Considering everything else that was going on, it would cause barely a ripple. Or perhaps it was a false flag, perpetrated by the FSB and blamed on the SBU in order to accentuate a mythical threat, keep the local populace riled up, portray Ukraine as an evil terrorist state that needed to be destroyed. It wasn’t as though the FSB were strangers to this particular tactic. Putin had first made his name as a young prime minister with the strength of his reaction to a series of apartment bombings that had been blamed on Chechens but had actually been the work of his own operatives.

Arkady knew that Russian politics were more vicious and toxic than most foreign intelligence services. Alliances were always shifting. The smart people, the survivors, were the ones who knew not just where the solid ground was but where it would be in the future too. Money gave access to power; power gave access to money. Who protected Kazasky, and who had he himself been protecting?

As a child, Arkady had had a poster of the solar system on the wall of his bedroom. It had fascinated him night after night for years on end: the sweeping mathematical beauty of spheres and orbits, the way the planets became larger and then smaller the farther out from the sun they were. The solar system was one of the central pillars behind man’s understanding of the universe and his place in it, but for a while now Arkady had thought of it as an all-too-accurate representation of the Russian political system. A man like Kazasky had been a moon—an Io, an Enceladus, or an Oberon—with a certain mass of his own but still fundamentally a satellite tied to a planet, dependent on someone of greater import and gravity. Some planets were larger than others: ministers jockeying with oligarchs, security bosses locking horns with bureaucrats. Many of them had wildly elliptical orbits, now flying close to the sun, now cast out into the vast darkness of cold space. But all of them, planets and satellites alike, had one thing in common: they lived and died by their proximity to the star at the center.

6

Lubyanka. Even the name, Arkady thought, sounded like a gunshot. It was impossible to sit in any of the interrogation rooms and not wonder who had passed through them over the years. Lubyanka was where the Cheka had carried out the Red Terror and the NKVD had implemented Stalin’s relentless purges. Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn had been held here; Bukharin and Wallenberg too. In Soviet times they had called it the tallest building in Moscow on the grounds that Siberia could be seen from its basement. If Arkady listened or looked carefully enough, perhaps he would hear the distant echoes of a scream or see a fingernail embedded in the brickwork. It was cursed, haunted, a vast repository of evil created in the name of a greater mission.

Blokhin affected an air of bored amusement.

“Let’s go through it again,” Marina said.

“As you wish.”

“My agents saw you leave your apartment at around 2230 last night.”

“No they didn’t.”

“There were three men conducting surveillance, and they have all confirmed this.”

“Then they’re all lying.”

“You have no alibi.”

“I don’t need one. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“You say you were alone all evening?”

“Yes.”

“But you went out at around 2230.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You returned from work just after 1900 yesterday evening?”

“Correct.”

“And how did you spend the time between then and 2230?”

“I cooked. I read. I ironed a few shirts. I went to bed around 2300.”

“You left the apartment building at 2230. My operatives followed you to Hotel Ukraine, where they saw you enter an elevator at 2330. They stayed downstairs, not wanting to be seen. The corridors are empty at that time of night. They picked up your trail again when you came back downstairs at 0020. You returned to your apartment building and left again at 0530 this morning.”

“I left at 0530 this morning; that is correct. The rest is fantasy.”

Unspoken was his implied scorn: Do you really think I wouldn’t have spotted a three-man tail? Do you really think I’d have unwittingly led your agents to a murder scene? Do you honestly take me for an idiot?

“Why did you leave so early this morning?”

“Please.”

“Tell me again, for the record.”

“Because your country had just invaded mine. Because every member of the embassy staff was called in as a matter of extreme urgency to discuss the situation and make plans for our own futures.”

“What were those plans?”

“I suggest you ask the ambassador.”

“You returned to your apartment just after midday.”

“That is correct.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I had some personal business to attend to.”

“You were packing in preparation for fleeing the country.”

“My suitcases are in the spare bedroom, empty, as they usually are.”

“Are you intending to remain in Moscow, then?”

Blokhin gestured around the room. “Is this the standard of accommodation I can expect if I do?”

This went on for hours. Marina made no progress and covered her frustration at the impasse by declaring Blokhin well-trained and herself relishing the challenge of breaking him down.

Arkady asked if he could talk to the FSB agents who had been watching Blokhin the night before.

“Why on earth do you want to do that?” Marina said.

“To corroborate their accounts and reinforce the case against Blokhin.”

She cocked her head and looked at him. “I have their statements here. There’s no point in just retracing the same old ground.”

“Zurin always likes to have as much direct evidence as possible. He would appreciate my account of their testimony rather than a purely internal FSB document handed to us.”

Arkady could practically see the cogs turning in Marina’s head. The confidence in her men’s abilities to maintain their story versus her fear that somehow he would find a crack in it. The desire to keep it all under her control versus the need to make it look like an open and thoroughly investigated case, with all agencies working in tandem.

“Yes,” she said at length, “of course.”

The three FSB men all looked alike, more or less, and they were all called Dimitri. Arkady wasn’t sure whether this was for real or a joke. To keep them straight in his head, he decided to name them after Moscow football teams: Dynamo, Lokomotive, and Torpedo.

Marina wanted Arkady and Victor to interview them all together, allowing one of them to take the lead and the others to agree with everything he said. Arkady insisted on questioning them one at a time. Thorough investigating, of course. He was sure she would understand.

That there would be discrepancies between the three accounts went without saying. Everybody, even highly trained operatives, saw the same events slightly differently. Witness accounts were like exam papers: if they were exactly the same, then chances were they had cheated. It wasn’t the discrepancies that interested Arkady; it was the extent of them.

Arkady began with Dynamo.

“Tell me what you saw on the night in question.”

“The suspect exited the apartment building at 2230. He was wearing the clothes you could see on the security camera f—”

Arkady interrupted, “What was the make of the car?”

“It was an old Chevrolet Cruze LT… blue, I think. We followed him in our car as he took the Garden Ring to the Arbat and across the river to Hotel Ukraine. There was a fair degree of traffic even at that time. That is how it is now; the city never sleeps. When he arrived, I was first into the lobby after him while my partners covered the exits. We stayed in the lobby the entire time he was with Kazasky. We didn’t know who he was seeing or what he was doing.”

“How long did you have to wait?”

“About half an hour.”

“And what did you do while you waited?”

“I had a Coke. Dimitri had a coffee. I can’t remember if the other Dimitri drank anything. None of us had any vodka. We don’t drink when we’re on the duty.”

“Okay, go on,” said Arkady. “How did the suspect look when he reappeared?”

“I thought I could see traces of blood on his face, but I was too far away to be sure and I didn’t want to risk being spotted by getting too close. The suspect retrieved his car from the hotel parking garage and returned to his apartment via the Garden Ring, the same way he’d come. He reentered the apartment building at just after 0100.”

“Thank you. You may go.”

Lokomotive was next.

“Tell me about Blokhin’s movements on the night of Kazasky’s murder.”

“The suspect exited the apartment building at 2230. His car was parked on Novaya Basmannaya near the corner.”

“And the make of the car?”

“A gray Chevrolet Niva. He was wearing the clothes you could see on the security camera footage. We followed him in our vehicle as he took the Garden Ring as far as Tverskaya, where roadwork forced him—and us—to take a detour toward the Arbat. He arrived at Hotel Ukraine and parked in the hotel parking garage. Dimitri and I followed him in, the other Dimitri remained outside to watch the main entrance. When he had gone upstairs, we called in the other Dimitri and together we waited in the lobby, all three of us. There were plenty of small groups there, so we didn’t stand out as unusual. I had a Baltika; the other two had Cokes. The suspect reappeared at around 0020.

“Did the suspect show signs of distress?”

“He looked a little disheveled, but since we didn’t know where he’d gone, we were joking that maybe he’d been with a woman. We followed him back around the Garden Ring—the traffic from the roadwork had eased by now—and he reentered the apartment building at just after 0100.

The last FSB agent, Torpedo, began exactly as the others had.

“The suspect exited the apartment building at 2230 pm. He was parked just off Novoryanskaya.”

“What kind of car was he driving?”

“His car was a black Lada Granta, I think. He was wearing the clothes you can see on the security camera footage. He took the Garden Ring all the way round.”

“Any problem with traffic?” Arkady asked.

“The traffic was okay. I don’t remember it being particularly clear or particularly bad. The suspect parked in the garage. We all went in after him but not as a group. We spread out so if he’d seen us we would have looked like three unconnected individuals. Once he was in the elevator and went up to Kazasky’s floor, we waited downstairs for him.”

“What did you do while he was upstairs?”

“I had a coffee; the others had Baltikas.”

“How did he look when he came back down?”

“I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. We followed him back home and he reentered the apartment building just after 0100.”

“FSB recruitment isn’t what it used to be,” Victor said when Torpedo left the room. He looked almost disappointed. Keeping tabs on a relatively low-ranking Ukrainian spy wasn’t a task a high-ranking agent would perform, but even so, one wouldn’t have found KGB agents making such amateur mistakes in Soviet days. They would have worked hard to get their stories straight, thought of any detail they might be asked, and even included a few minor but unimportant points of difference. These three, on the other hand, had just been given the bare bones of a story. The rest of it they’d had to improvise, and the results were unconvincing.

“Marina’s going to be livid,” Arkady said.

“Incandescent!” said Victor. “By the way, I never could see the two of you together. She’s a viper.”

“She wasn’t always. When she was younger and had less power, she was almost human.”

Victor laughed. “Almost, but not quite.”

7

It was evening before Arkady got home, and exhaustion blanketed him. He fumbled with his key, knowing that he had to guide it toward the lock with both his hands or he never would be able to open the door. Dr. Pavlova had said this would happen; a deterioration in fine motor skills was a classic Parkinson’s symptom, but the reality still bothered Arkady. It was like being drunk but without the pleasure of having gotten there in the first place.

The door opened onto voices. Arkady felt a flash of annoyance that Zhenya had friends there tonight of all nights when he craved peace and quiet.

“You look awful,” Zhenya said the moment Arkady walked into the living room. “Sit down. I’ll get you a drink.” Arkady wasn’t much of a drinker by Russian standards, but sometimes a vodka was just what he needed. “I’ll let these two introduce themselves,” said Zhenya as he disappeared into the kitchen.

Arkady sat down heavily in his armchair. “These two” were a man and a woman, both about the same age as Zhenya, mid-twenties. The man’s hair was a mop of tousled black curls, and his glasses seemed so ethereal, with their transparent stems and rimless lenses, that Arkady wondered how they stayed on his face. The woman had titian hair down to the small of her back, chewed fingernails, and wary eyes.

“I’m Misha,” the man said.

“Good to meet you.” Arkady rubbed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a long day, that’s all.”

“And I’m Margarita,” the woman said.

Arkady stopped rubbing his eyes and looked at them.

“From The Master and Margarita? Are you going to tell me your real names?”

“Best that they don’t,” Zhenya said as he came back in and handed Arkady a glass.

“Why?”

Misha, Margarita, and Zhenya exchanged glances. Arkady watched the silent currents pass between them.

“Listen,” he said. “I’m happy to have you in my apartment, but I work for the prosecutor’s office, and if you come here, I have to know what you’re doing and why.”

Zhenya nodded, first at Arkady and then at Misha. “You can tell him.”

“He works for the prosecutor’s office?” Misha said. “You didn’t mention that.”

He got up and gestured for Margarita to follow. Arkady was pleased to see that she didn’t move.

“Yes, but he won’t bust us. He might even help us,” Zhenya said. “He came to the demonstration with me this morning.”

“Fuck that.”

Arkady shrugged and drank his vodka. Zhenya continued to stand. Margarita continued to sit.

“Okay,” Misha said at last. “I guess you know your father.” He sat down again and looked at Arkady. “Zhenya said we could come here because this place wouldn’t be under surveillance.”

“That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Now it makes sense why,” Misha said.

“Misha and Margarita have enlisted me into the Black Army,” Zhenya said. Arkady had visions of a satanic cult or a heavy metal fan club, but he didn’t think that either was really Zhenya’s style. “It’s a group of hacker activists, or ‘hacktivists.’ The name comes from a Ukrainian anarchist force a century ago, but there are as many Russians as Ukrainians in this one. All you need is to be opposed to the war. It’s been going on for a while, ever since Crimea and the Donbas, but of course it’s really ramped up these past twenty-four hours.”

“And what is it that the Black Army does?” Arkady heard the skepticism in his voice and saw Misha’s face harden.

“We get the truth out,” Misha said. “We show videos from Ukrainian citizens on the ground, intercept phone calls from Russian soldiers, and disseminate that information on social media. And some hacking work, too, of course. DDOS attacks against Russian websites: ministries, banks, infrastructure businesses such as Gazprom. Belarus ones, as well, because they’re so completely in bed with Putin.”

“ ‘DDOS’?”

“Distributed denial of service. It’s when you shut down websites by—”

“Save your breath,” Zhenya said. “Arkady is strictly analogue.”

“Strictly,” Arkady agreed.

“We show what the state media won’t show, basically,” Zhenya said.

They didn’t call it state media—not anymore—but that didn’t make it any less accurate. At least the Soviets had been honest about it, which was to say that they had been so dishonest as to have been totally transparent. This was the way things were now; this was the way things had always been. Under communism there had been samizdat, literature that was forbidden and passed from dissenter to dissenter, to disprove the lies from the Kremlin.

“I heard Zelensky was offered a flight out of Ukraine and said he needed ammunition, not a ride.” Zhenya called up a video on his mobile phone.

He passed Arkady the phone. “You won’t see this on Channel One.”

Zelensky in a military green uniform stood outside a nondescript building with grim-faced men huddled around him.

“I am here,” he said. “We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will defend all of this.”

He was a comedian who had played a president on TV before becoming one for real, an accidental leader who could have given up and run but instead had decided to meet the challenge.

President Joe Biden in Washington, an old man, was energized by outrage: “Putin is the aggressor. Putin chose this war. And now he and his country will bear the consequences.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson in London, hunched and disheveled, declared that Putin “will never be able to cleanse the blood of Ukraine from his hands…. And to our Ukrainian friends in this moment of agony, I say we are with you and we are on your side.”

And Macron in Paris, compact and handsome, did not hold back. “The events of last night mark a turning point in the history of Europe. We will respond to this act of war without weakness, with cold blood, determination, and unity.”

“This is the kind of news Russians would never see unless we can reach them through the internet,” Misha said.

Well, Arkady thought, they were in the right city. Moscow was where the Black Army’s efforts would be most effective. People were better informed and showed more interest in the news here. They also believed they deserved their privileges as residents of what they thought was the largest and richest city in the country.

“Aren’t you worried that the authorities will trace you?” Arkady asked.

“How would they do that?”

“I’m not an expert, but even I know that this government has some of the best computer experts in the world. You must be leaving traces online.”

“We do, but we muddy those traces so that no one can follow. Multiple servers, remailers, encryption, all that. Hopefully, anyone looking for us will just find themselves going down lots of rabbit holes.”

Misha had the absolute confidence of youth. Arkady had seen it many times, and sooner or later it always came unstuck. People overestimated themselves and underestimated others. Arrogance led to complacency. The only thing more certain than this was the futility in telling Misha. He would find out the hard way, the way everyone did.

“I don’t care if they do find us,” Zhenya said suddenly.

“They won’t.” Misha’s tone was part reassurance, part warning.

“Even if they do, I don’t care.”

“Why not?” Arkady asked.

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

As worried as he was, Arkady couldn’t help but be proud of his son.

Misha and Margarita left not long after, and Zhenya made pelmeni for Arkady and himself. He took the meat dumplings from the freezer, simmered them in beef broth, and served them up with a little sour cream.

They ate in a companionble mix of silence and conversation before Arkady was too exhausted to sit up straight and decided to turn in.

8

Zhenya had charged Arkady’s laptop and left it beside his bed. It was an old model, one of Zhenya’s castoffs that he had reset before handing it over to Arkady. Arkady hadn’t really seen the point in having a computer, but Zhenya had convinced him—or, rather, Arkady had agreed to it just to stop Zhenya from pestering him. “Check your e-mails,” Zhenya had said. “Keep in touch with people.”

One of those people was Saran, whom Arkady had met out in Siberia a few years back. Arkady had been attacked by a bear, exorcised by a shaman, and convinced himself that Tatiana was cheating on him. An eventful trip, all told. Saran and her mother still ran the hotel where Arkady had stayed.

Arkady, hope you’re doing OK in all this craziness. You remember my brother Bazar? He’s joined the Russian army. I don’t know where, but the news is saying hundreds of thousands of troops have crossed the border, so I guess there’s a good chance he’s among them. There aren’t that many jobs round here, and the ones there are, don’t pay very well. Bazar was lucky if he made R20,000 a month.

How are things with you? Life here is same as ever. I wish I had something to report, some wild tales which would make you think I lived this amazing life. But you’ve been out here, you know that I don’t. I fear that one day I’ll wake up and I’ll be old and life will have just passed me by.

Anyway, enough of me. Write back sometime and tell me what you’re up to. I always love to hear from you.

Saran xx

Arkady sighed. He would write back, of course, but the effort of typing any more than a few sentences was huge. If he began now, he would have to save it and, despite Zhenya’s repeated instructions, he would lose it. “Drafts,” Zhenya had said. “Look in the drafts folder; they autosave there.” But whenever Arkady did look in the folder, it was empty. Whatever autosave was, it refused to work for Arkady. He alone could defy computer science and make things disappear without trying. There must be organizations out there that would pay handsomely for this kind of skill.

He knew Saran was in love with him. She had made that plain enough. He knew, too, that there were few if any men out in Siberia worthy of her. Arkady had met her ex-husband, a mediocre thug, and found it frankly incredible that a woman as beautiful and ethereal as Saran had ever breathed the same air as him, let alone shared the same bed. Arkady was enchanted by her and perhaps, given time, he might grow to feel the same way about her that she did about him, but maybe he wouldn’t, and it was a slow death, letting someone love you when you didn’t love them back.

He was just starting to get undressed when there was a knock on the front door of the apartment. He froze. It was past ten p.m. No one knocked on your door at this time without good reason, which meant a bad reason.

Arkady waited. The knock came again.

He left his room, putting his shirt back on.

A third knock.

If it was the authorities, they’d stop knocking and kick the door in. If it wasn’t them, then maybe it was someone he knew or someone who needed help. He unlatched the security chain and opened the door.

“Took your time,” Tatiana said.

All at once, he was wide-awake. He pulled her inside and wrapped his arms around her. By God, he could feel her, he could smell her, he could taste her.

“I’ve missed you,” she said once she got her breath. “I know I should have called you ahead of time. I don’t even know if you have room for me.”

“I do.”

It had been months since they had seen each other. They had been staying in an anonymous apartment in an anonymous suburb of Sevastopol, in Crimea, just before he had made a run for the border back into Ukraine. They had sat in silence an hour before dawn, knowing that if the escape went wrong, they would never see each other again.

This was the way they had been since they’d first met: orbiting around each other for years, sometimes close and sometimes distant but always somehow attached. Tatiana had gone, she had come back, she had gone again and come back again. It made no difference. In places Arkady could not see and ways he could not describe, she would always be with him.

“What have you been doing since I last saw you?”

“I’ve been traveling the world for the New York Times’ Moscow office, same as always. They sent me to Kabul for a terrifying evacuation as the Taliban came sweeping back in; they sent me to Sudan for a coup, Dubai for a chess match, Melbourne for a tennis player and a vaccination saga.”

“And why are you back in Moscow now?”

“Why do you think? This is where the news is—here and Kyiv. It’s the biggest story in years, and it will run for who knows how long.”

“Then stay with us.”

“ ‘Us’?”

Zhenya opened his bedroom door.

“Oh my God… Zhenya!” She walked over to give him a hug. “You’re a man now. I haven’t been away that long, have I?”

“At least a year. Probably more. Have you been covering the war?”

“Yes, but now I’ll cover it from here instead of Ukraine.”

“I’d like to talk to you about Ukraine, but I guess now’s not the time.”

“Later. Right now I’m just too tired.”

Arkady took her hand and led her back to his bedroom.

She fell onto the bed, exhausted. He lay beside her wide-awake.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Content now that you’re here.” He kissed her face, her lips, her neck.

“No, I mean the Parkinson’s.”

He lay back down. “Fine, I guess. I can still tie my shoelaces. Sometimes my right hand shakes.”

“Have they noticed at work?”

“Victor knows but nobody else. If my hand shakes, I just put it in my pocket. My handwriting has gotten smaller, which is a problem.”

“Oh, Arkady, I’m so sorry. What will they do if they find out?”

“Fire me, I’m sure.”

“I’ll always take care of you.”

“I’m not there yet.”

Tatiana regretted changing the mood. She pulled him to her and began to undress him.

9

Zurin was waiting when Arkady arrived at Petrovka 38 the next morning.

“A word with you, please.”

Zurin’s office wall was covered with pictures of him shaking hands with the great and good. Putin, of course, featured in the largest picture of all, but Zurin’s range was nothing if not catholic: oligarchs and film stars, ministers and footballers, pop singers and crime bosses. In every photo Zurin’s teeth flashed white. With anyone else, Arkady might have wondered if these pictures were all real, but he knew Zurin well enough to know his lust for recognition drove him to suss out any opportunity for glory, no matter how temporary or reflected. Arkady had seen a similar wall of pictures in a Sicilian restaurant where the owner showed off the celebrities who patronized his establishment and, in so doing, reminded those who were dining there just how lucky they were to be allowed to eat at the same tables.

Zurin shut the door behind him. He did not offer Arkady a seat.

“I’ve had a complaint about you,” Zurin said.

“So, what’s new?”

“Arkady, don’t play the fool with me.”

“I’m not.”

“Can you guess who the complaint was from?”

“Agent Makarova of the FSB?”

“Right. So you know what it’s about.”

“She took exception to my questioning three of her agents.”

“They reported you to her. They said you had been dismissive and aggressive.”

“That’s laughable.”

“I warned you…”

“Come on. These are FSB agents, not Boy Scouts. Being told that I’ve been—what was it? Dismissive and aggressive?—by them is like being told to sit up straight by the Hunchback of Notre Dame. If they can’t take a few questions, then they really are in the wrong job. And for what it’s worth, I wasn’t any of those things they’re accusing me of. I took a statement from each of them about following Blokhin, and they were all too amateur even to get their basic cover story straight. The only reason Agent Makarova is complaining is because I made a fool of her men. No, actually, I just gave them the opportunity to make fools of themselves. And now they know that I know they have an innocent man in custody.”

“I asked you to cooperate with the FSB, not undermine them.”

“A lot of people could have murdered Kazasky. I’m interested in finding the men or man who killed him, but whoever it was, it wasn’t the man they hauled in yesterday. Pointing that out isn’t undermining them.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I could say the same to you.”

Arkady had spent years getting around Zurin without confronting him head-on.

This time was different.

Zurin ran a hand through his hair.

“Just try not to piss too many people off,” he said at length.

They should put that on my gravestone, Arkady thought as he walked back to his office.

As he entered, Victor looked up from a printout he was studying. “The ministry sent over Kazasky’s itinerary for the past week.”

“Redacted?”

“Yes, but most of his hours seem to have been accounted for.”

Arkady took the printout and began to read. Financial Audit Committee meeting, State Order Placement Committee meeting, Sanatoria Resort Support Committee meeting, Nuclear and Radiation Safety Oversight Committee meeting, Hydrometeorological Service Committee meeting. Was there a committee in the entire ministry that Kazasky hadn’t sat on? Gogol would have had a field day with this. For him, committees were made up of idiots, eating up time and slicing up pies. Arkady imagined Kazasky’s shuttling between hotel suite and endless committee rooms, a man who, with a ministerial car to take him places, never needed to breathe what passed for fresh air in Moscow and never needed to set foot in snow and slush.

“There.” Victor was pointing to an entry from Monday, four days ago.

11:30 a.m. Meeting, Lev Volkov, 1812 Judo Club, Lavrushinsky Ln.

“Let’s pay a visit to the judo club,” said Arkady.

He knew only the bare bones of who Volkov was and what the 1812 Group did but he figured Tatiana would be able to fill in the gaps, and he was right.

“How long until you meet him?” she asked.

“His assistant says he’ll be free in an hour.”

“Good. That should give me just about enough time. There’s a lot to tell.”

Victor drove so Arkady could keep Tatiana on the phone. Technically, Arkady could have just put Tatiana on speakerphone as he drove, but these days he was finding that though he could still drive and he could still talk on the phone, he could no longer do both at once. A few months back, Zurin had rung while Arkady had been driving home. They had discussed a couple of the cases Arkady had been working at the time, and when after half an hour Arkady had hung up and arrived home, he realized that he remembered almost nothing about their conversation.

Where to start with Volkov and the 1812? The name of Volkov’s private army was an obvious reference to Tchaikovsky’s overture, which in turn commemorated Russia’s defeat of Napoleon in that year. Every Russian knew the cannon fire, ringing chimes, and brass fanfare, and every Russian knew the heroism at Borodino, the genius of Kutuzov, the burning of Moscow and the bedraggled retreat of La Grande Armée. As a nation’s finest hour, it was up there with 1945, perhaps even more so, if only by virtue of not having lost twenty million people on the way to victory.

No one was quite sure when Volkov had founded the 1812 Group. It hadn’t been around during the 2008 conflict with Georgia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia, but it had taken a leading role in the 2014 annexation of Crimea. It must have been approved by Putin—it was inconceivable that a private military force several thousand strong wouldn’t have had the President’s blessing—and in many ways it suited him to allow military intervention abroad while maintaining plausible official deniability. “Nothing to do with us,” the government could say, even when 1812 was doing exactly what the Kremlin wanted it to do. Putin ensured that 1812 received funds and weapons that would and should otherwise have gone to the regular army. Pay for Volkov’s soldiers was much better than for normal army soldiers, and medals for Orders of Courage and Services to the Motherland were often awarded them by the presidential administration.

The 1812 didn’t confine its operations to former Soviet countries. There were 1812 mercenaries in half a dozen African countries, playing on local sentiment against former colonial powers such as France. They trained soldiers, took sides in conflicts, and got paid in gold, diamonds, and timber. They represented a strange but very modern hybrid of business and warfare. The Ndassima mine complex north of Bambari in the Central African Republic was rumored to be worth billions if they could get all the gold out of there. Whereas the locals would say that the French had treated them like dogs, the 1812 soldiers ate with their hosts, drank at local bars, and went to football matches and movies with them.

They killed people as easily as breathing, but that was the way things were down there. Two dozen dead was a quiet Tuesday in Mali or the Central African Republic. Dreadful things happened in the thick jungles and in the empty, distant savanna, and no one ever knew. Few people wanted to admit that the 1812 were valued because they were brutally effective. They got things done. When it came to fighting, the UN was useless and the African Union no better, but the 1812 were ready, willing, and very, very able. Who in Africa could afford to care about the relative merits of authoritarianism versus democracy when the average wage was a dollar a day?

As for Lev Volkov himself, he was in his late sixties by now, born not long after the death of Stalin and the end of the Korean War, and one way or another he had been around soldiers all his adult life. He’d fought in the Spetsnaz, the Soviet special forces, in both Afghanistan and the First Chechen War. There were a lot of blowhards in and around army circles, but Volkov was the real deal. He had been part of Operation Storm-333 right at the start of the Afghan War, assassinating the then president Hafizullah Amin and installing a Kremlin puppet. He had battled the mujahideen high in the mountains near the Pakistani border and he had spent weeks behind enemy lines in Grozny during Yeltsin’s first attempt to quell the Chechens.

After retiring from active service, he had taken various roles in the Ministry of Defense, always fighting and usually winning turf wars on behalf of Spetsnaz.

In carving out his niche, he had also eased his way into Putin’s inner circle, and with that access had come influence and riches. In a land deal so corrupt that even Tatiana had not gotten to the bottom of it, Volkov had established a training camp in the Great Vasyugan Mire, a network of vast swamplands and peat bogs in Western Siberia. Men, even experienced spetsnaz operatives, sometimes went to the mire and never came back. Peat bogs were where ancient mammoths and Neanderthals were found. You could hide a body there and be sure it wouldn’t surface for 40,000 years.

This was the man Arkady was going to see: an oligarch, a political operator, and a warlord.

10

The 1812 Judo Club was a few doors down from the Tretyakov Gallery. This was not a club shunted away down a side alley of a backwater suburb. This was high-end, and it wanted that fact recognized.

As Arkady waited to be seen by Volkov, he watched the judo students grappling with each other on interlocking mats of blue rubber. It was the ritual that interested him as much as the violence: the way men bowed before combat, the swift motions of hands and feet as they sized each other up even before contact had been made, the handshakes at the end.

Finally, a young man appeared to lead Arkady to Volkov’s office, where large windows opened out over the hall. From Tatiana’s briefing, Arkady had expected a large man, but Volkov was no bigger than the average man on the street. What he did have was a compactness at an age when many men had retired and let themselves go. His face was lean, his movements economical, his strength apparent even when sheathed in Italian tailoring.

“Always happy to help officers of the state,” Volkov said. He moved forward to shake Arkady’s hand. “May I offer you anything? Coffee? Tea? Vodka?” Arkady politely refused.

“You don’t mind if Ivan sits in on this?” It was a question only in name. “My son,” Volkov added, though it was hardly necessary. Ivan looked exactly as Arkady imagined Volkov would have looked twenty-five years before if he had ever let himself wear crumpled clothes and appear unshaven. Ivan had been sitting in the corner when Arkady walked in and had made no attempt to introduce himself.

“Not at all,” Arkady said. He nodded at Ivan and in return received nothing.

Volkov sat behind his desk and Arkady across from him.

The noise from the training hall filtered in through the open windows.

“You’ll have heard about the death of Alexei Kazasky,” Arkady said.

“Of course.” Volkov didn’t appear shocked or even dismayed.

“You met him here earlier this week. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yes.”

“What did you talk about?”

“The forthcoming conflict.”

“More specifically?”

A trainer barked commands as the students were thrown down with loud thumps onto the mats.

“The respective allocation of resources,” Volkov said.

“Again, I would ask you to be more specific.”

Ivan was staring at Arkady and he did not blink. Arkady broke the gaze and looked away to a banner on the wall outside: ANY COMMITMENT OF MUSCLE AND MIND MUST BE TOTAL.

“Kazasky was unhappy that my men were receiving preferential treatment.”

“In what way?”

Arkady wondered whether Volkov was being deliberately obtuse or whether a lifetime in the military had conditioned him to offer up as little as possible.

“Equipment. Transport. Weapons.”

Tatiana had said as much, Arkady remembered.

“And were they?”

“Receiving preferential treatment?”

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“Because my men are the cream of the crop, and the regular army is useless.”

Arkady remembered something he had read, perhaps in one of the foreign articles Zhenya had shown him.

“I understand there are four hundred men in Kyiv right now specifically tasked with hunting down and assassinating Zelensky.”

“If you say so.”

“And they are your men.”

“Again, if you say so.”

“Not just because your men are better but because if you don’t get Zelensky, then the regular troops can’t be blamed.”

Ivan spoke up. “The regular troops couldn’t find Red Square with a damn map.”

“You could have been imprisoned in Soviet times for saying that,” Arkady said.

“I wouldn’t have said it in Soviet times, because back then the Red Army was something to be proud of. And it’s certainly nothing I haven’t said to my father.”

The older Volkov indicated a picture of himself and Putin in judo gear with their arms round each other’s shoulders, a picture even bigger than the one Zurin had of himself and the president.

“Of course, there are plenty of good soldiers in the ranks, but not all of them. The elite get first call. Always have, always should. I did when I was in Spetsnaz, and so, too, Ivan after me.”

Two new men took their positions on the mats, one in blue pajamas and the other in white. They twitched, feinted, tried to fasten their grip on the other’s clothes. A sudden flash of movement, Blue on one knee, White in a quick parabola over the top. Blue up and raising a fist in triumph even as White rolled to break his own fall.

“How did the conversation go?” Arkady said.

“Kazasky wanted me to agree that my men would get less and his would get more. I refused. He persisted. I refused again. He told me he would take it higher up the chain. I told him he was welcome to.”

“I assume you are getting more power, money, and arms than the regular army. Is that because 1812 has approval from the very top?”

“Kazasky was a businessman, not a military man. He had never picked up a weapon, never taken his turn on watch, never stood a post. He had no discipline, not in any way. He was flabby, you understand. Men like him should be sent to the front with machine guns, but he would never have lasted a minute there, or even here.” He nodded toward the training hall. “You know which ones become champions, Investigator? Those who go into each training session as if they are going into battle. Those for whom victory is more important than life.”

“Interesting that Kazasky came here,” Arkady said.

“Why?”

“A deputy minister, three days before a major military operation: he must have been exceptionally busy. And as a government minister, he could have demanded that the meeting take place in the ministry. Instead, he took time out of his day to come here.”

Volkov shrugged. “He asked for the meeting. I told him I’d be here and if he wanted to come, then I’d see him. Otherwise, I wasn’t interested.”

“What did he think of you?”

“He hated me, obviously. Everyone in the regular army fiercely hates me—until we defend them in battle. Then they fiercely love me. They don’t understand us and they’re afraid of us. They say we act on our own initiative and against their orders. Let me ask you: Whose hands would you put your life in? Ours, or theirs?”

Neither seemed to be a desirable option, so Arkady said nothing. He was aware of Ivan still watching him. It was classic Putin, he thought. Set the underlings against each other, give each of them enough power to make them loyal to him, but not so much that they might become a threat. By the same token, there were gradations of power, and Volkov obviously had more than Kazasky.

Grunts, gasps of exertion. A hand tap on a mat. Surrender.

This was the judocracy, martial arts as a way of demonstrating both fealty and moral fiber to the boss. Those who sparred together stayed together. Putin had often spoken of what judo had taught him: self-control, purposefulness, patience, respect for elders and comrades, and seeing an opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. In times past, czars and their courtiers had gone hunting, drinking, and whoring. Now it was all pins and throws, trips and grapples, choke holds and break falls.

As Arkady got up to leave, Volkov pressed a pamphlet into his hands. “This may help you understand.”

Once outside, it took Arkady a couple of attempts to open the pamphlet, another area where his small motor skills were failing. He read it aloud to Victor on their way back to the Lubyanka. It was an introduction to the 1812 Group for new recruits, written by Volkov himself. It described what the group expected of its members and what the members could expect of the group.

1812 follows the ethos of Spetsnaz, which is to say the instinct of a wolf. A lone wolf is one of the most awe-inspiring and feared animals in the wild. It combines strength and endurance to a degree rarely seen. The wolf’s strength is not so much in its jaws as in its legs. All physical strength depends on leg strength.

But a lone wolf is as nothing compared to a pack. The pack is without equal, taking the talents and qualities of each individual wolf and putting them together to create a collective which is even greater than the considerable sum of its parts. Daring and dangerous operations can be successfully carried out against overwhelming numbers of the enemy. Communication, trust, flexibility, and courage are all key. Brute strength combined with profound cunning is unbeatable.

“What utter bullshit,” said Victor.

11

Marina made it sound as though letting Blokhin go had been both her decision and an act of mercy, but Arkady was not fooled and neither, he suspected, was Blokhin. Having made such a show of her agents’ accounts yesterday, she could not admit to Blokhin that his story had checked out after all and that they had no reason to keep him. Instead, she intimated that politics lay beneath it all. Ukrainian embassy staff were being pulled out of Russia, in the first instance via Riga, since there were obviously no direct flights between Moscow and Kyiv anymore, and she had therefore offered Blokhin his freedom in return for his leaving Moscow with the rest of his colleagues and not returning at least until the war was over. As if he wanted to come back anyway, Arkady thought.

Arkady walked out of Lubyanka onto the sidewalk with Blokhin.

“I think you must have persuaded them to release me,” Blokhin said.

“Partly.”

“Then I thank you.” He glanced down at Arkady’s hands. “They took what I had on me, of course, but I have some back in the apartment if you’d like.”

“Excuse me?”

“That. What you’re doing.” Arkady followed Blokhin’s gaze, saw his own thumb and forefinger rubbing together in a circular motion.

“Oh!” Arkady was so flustered that for a moment the words wouldn’t form themselves properly. “No. That’s not—I mean, I’m not asking you for money.”

Blokhin looked skeptical. “No?”

“No. It’s just a tic I have sometimes. Pill rolling, they call it. I would never ask for a bribe. Never.”

“Okay.”

“I swear.”

“I believe you.”

“Good.” Arkady hurried to fill the awkward silence. “They will make sure you leave, you know.”

“They won’t need to. I wouldn’t stay even if I could. My country needs every man it has.”

“I was in Kyiv last year. It’s a beautiful city.”

“It is.”

“Are you from there?”

“Not far away. A place called Bucha. They call it ‘Little Switzerland.’ It’s clean, it’s relatively affluent, it has woods and ponds and parks, there are pine forests all around. People come from Kyiv to get away from the bustle for a while. They drop their kids off at the summer camp for a week or two, take them to the Crazy Squirrel ropes course. It still feels like part of the countryside.”

“It sounds idyllic.”

“In Soviet times, when I was a young child, it was pretty grim, with dirt track roads, run-down houses. Its only claim to fame was that Bulgakov had once had a summer cottage there. Then independence came, and the place started to grow and flourish. Lenin’s statue was torn down and for a while his metal head lay in our garden. I can’t remember how it came to be there or when it disappeared, but there was a time when my mother would plant her vegetables around his stern face. He looked like he disapproved of her choice in vegetables.” He took half a step forward and flung out his right arm as though addressing a crowd, the typical pose of Lenin statues across the country. “ ‘What is to be done with these zucchinis? Give us the cabbage and it will be a Bolshevik forever.’ ”

Arkady laughed. Blokhin went on: “People shared what they had grown or sold it at the open-air market. There were fruit trees all around, and in the summer you’d have thought the branches would snap with the weight of their fruit. The pavement was a splashed canvas of purple, crimson, and blue where it fell. Villagers believed it was the best place to live in all Ukraine, and they were right. Academics, journalists, and musicians came to make their home there. My mother used to walk at night and never once felt unsafe, but now she doesn’t take walks and she doesn’t feel safe.”

He left the rest hanging. Arkady felt a sudden sense of shame—not so much for himself as for his country.

Blokhin touched him gently on the shoulder. “You’re not like other Russians.”

In some ways, Arkady thought, that might be true, but in other ways he was exactly like them: Russian to his core.

“I mean that as a compliment,” Blokhin added.

“Then I’ll take it as one.”

When Arkady got home, he found Tatiana watching TV, with a notebook on her lap and all her attention focused on the screen.

Putin’s face was pale and puffy. He looked disconnected, his eyes zoning out slightly, then coming back. Arkady knew the feeling.

He was giving a speech. “The model of total domination of the so-called golden billion is unfair. Why should this ‘golden billion’ of all the population on the globe dominate over everyone and impose its own rules of behavior? Based on the illusion of exceptionalism, it divides the peoples into those of first or second-rate, and therefore it is racist and neocolonial in its essence, while the globalist, allegedly liberal, ideology underlying it is more and more acquiring the features of totalitarianism, restraining the creative search and free historical creativeness. It wants to place Russia, with our natural resources, under its own control by any means necessary.”

“I wonder if he’s on steroids,” Tatiana said. “Cancer, perhaps. It would make a good piece, I think. I’ll ring round some medical experts and ask them for a diagnosis.”

“No Russian doctor’s going to go on the record.”

“Of course not. But I can anonymize them. And Western ones might be happy to be named.”

12

Kazasky was buried in Novodevichy Cemetery, which he, at least, would presumably have regarded as his due. After all, even belowground, all men were not equal. Here Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin were buried, as well as Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Chekhov.

Arkady stood with Tatiana and scanned the crowd. Dasha sat in the first row, audibly crying in grief under a long black veil. Behind her, Serafima wore dark glasses that covered half her face and accepted murmured condolences with a nod. Arkady did not volunteer information about progress on the case, and they did not ask. A couple of goons hovered on the side, presumably ready to prevent Kazasky’s distraught ex-wife from causing a scene with his young new girlfriend.

Volkov came over as the coffin was being lowered into the ground. “Do you always come to the funerals of people you are investigating?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.” Perhaps it was foolish to presume that a killer would show up at their victim’s funeral, but it was always a possibility. Maybe he just liked funerals. Unlike weddings, one didn’t have to hope for a happy ending.

“Does it prove useful?”

“Yes. It gives me a sense of my own mortality, if nothing else.”

Like many men, Arkady had spent decades presuming that his own demise was largely theoretical, but Parkinson’s had knocked that belief out from under him. He and Tatiana had wandered through the cemetery earlier and seen portrayals of the dead; couples who had spent their lives together, then died within months of each other; the children whose birth and death dates were in the same year; the inscriptions of Dream Conductor, International Man of Mystery, Loved Beyond Measure. He remembered a photograph of Karl Marx’s tomb in London and his words: THE PHILOSOPHERS HAVE ONLY INTERPRETED THE WORLD IN VARIOUS WAYS. THE POINT HOWEVER IS TO CHANGE IT. Changing the world did not necessarily represent progress, Arkady thought.

“You know Tatiana Petrovna?” Arkady asked.

“Of course.” Volkov gave a slight nod but he did not extend a hand. Tatiana did not seem bothered by this, and Arkady wondered, not for the first time, whether her fearlessness was genetic or learned.

“Did you read the pamphlet?” Volkov said.

“Yes,” Arkady said.

“And?”

“I found it fascinating.”

Volkov searched Arkady’s face for signs of sarcasm.

“Genuinely.”

“Good.”

“You said your son was also Spetsnaz?” Arkady asked.

“Yes. He would still be serving now if I hadn’t asked him to take up a senior role with me.”

“Is he here today?”

“No. He’s away.”

Volkov cleared his throat. “You don’t agree with the ‘special operation,’ do you?”

“Why do you say that?”

Volkov indicated Tatiana. “You keep the company of a woman whose sole aim in life seems to be to undermine the Russian state and its institutions.”

“My aim is to expose corruption and injustice,” Tatiana said.

Volkov turned back toward Renko as though he hadn’t heard her. “You haven’t answered my question, Investigator.”

“What I think of the conflict is not important.” He could not bring himself to call it a “special operation.”

“A man’s morality is always important.” Volkov shook his head. “Your father, the General, would have been ashamed, hearing you say that.” Arkady knew the jibe was calculated to wound.

“Believe me,” he said, “my father had many more reasons to be ashamed of me than that.”

13

Misha, Margarita, and Zhenya were hunched over their screens when Arkady and Tatiana returned to the apartment. If Arkady hadn’t seen them leave last night, he’d have thought they hadn’t moved for twenty-four hours.

Zhenya was wearing a pair of headphones the size of small saucepans as he concentrated on his computer. Colored lines on the screen rose and fell at his command.

“Sound enhancement,” Misha explained. “He takes a jumble of background noises and filters them, separates them, makes them clear.” He tapped Zhenya on the shoulder. Zhenya looked up, waved at Arkady and Tatiana, and removed the left saucepan from his ear. He and Misha tossed jargon back and forth as though this were a volleyball court. Arkady understood about one word in ten.

“Here.” Misha beckoned Arkady and Tatiana closer. He indicated an open window on the screen. “ ‘Osint’ means open-source intelligence. Russian recruits, because they’re dumbasses, put up social media posts and don’t have the first clue about metadata. Everyone in the Black Army, not just us in this room, extracts temporal and spatial information from them. Time, date, location. Those are fed into the map of Ukraine, and gradually the picture of where Russian forces are located and where they are headed becomes clear.”

Arkady watched as icons of military helmets and tanks popped up, together with flexed-arm emojis.

“We have to fight for every inch,” Margarita said, “online just as in the physical world. Here, look at this.” She scrolled and tapped her phone screen, and a video came up of Russian teenage kids dressed identically in red berets, red T-shirts emblazoned with the double-headed eagle, khaki trousers, and military boots. Youth Army, read the caption. Child soldiers, Arkady thought. Girls sat in their bedrooms and flicked their berets at an angle; boys side-eyed the camera and tried without success not to look self-conscious. Here was Maria, fifteen, from Novosibirsk, taking apart an AK-74 before reassembling it; Dydydy, seventeen, from Omsk, was throwing grenades. Volunteer, read another caption. “More than a million Russian kids have signed up,” Misha said.

“If that’s their idea of teenage rebellion,” Arkady said, “I don’t think much of it.”

Arkady remembered the forced jollity of the Young Pioneers back in Soviet days. He had attended their meetings because it had been compulsory. The idea that any self-respecting youth would seek out such organizations was an anathema to him then and still was.

Computer graphics made the White House in Washington, DC, look as though it were burning and portrayed Orthodox priests blessing troops at the front.

“There is no greater good than to cleanse ourselves, our communities, and the world from fascism,” said two members of the group. Posing in front of a giant black Z on a white wall, they were each wearing a black T-shirt with a white Z on the front. Even Arkady had to admit that the effect was startling.

“This is the symbol of our movement,” Gennady explained, pointing to the Z. “Z stands for ‘Victory’ and ‘Strength in Truth.’ ”

Some more captions: Antiterror Z; Z for Victory; Strength in Truth.

“We are Generation Z,” Maria added, “and we are proud of it.”

Arkady took out his mobile and dialed Victor. Victor answered immediately.

“Are you drunk?” Arkady said.

“Is that how you begin all your telephone calls? No, I’m not drunk.”

“I’ve had a thought.”

“What is it?”

“The number 2 on the wall in Kazasky’s room.”

“Yes?”

“What if it wasn’t a 2? What if it was a Z instead?”

That night Arkady slept fitfully, as he seemed to be doing more and more often these days. He woke at midnight not knowing if he had even dozed off. Tatiana had her back to him, and her sides rose and fell in the easy rhythm of sleep. At three he woke again, to the sounds of Zhenya trying not to make too much noise. He got out of bed and padded into the living room. Zhenya was grinning.

“Why so happy?” Arkady asked.

“Just done my first urbex.”

“Urbex? I haven’t heard that term in a while.”

When it came to the geography of Moscow’s hidden subterranean world, the urban explorer crowd—the “urbex,” or “diggers,” as they called themselves—knew everything. When in 2002 Chechen terrorists took almost a thousand people hostage at the Dubravka Theater in southeast Moscow, one of the old-school diggers shared his map of the city’s tunnels and sewers with the Russian special forces. This allowed them to sneak into the theater undetected and end the siege. The diggers received medals and awards, but they had also made it clear that sharing the map with the authorities was not to be repeated.

“So where are the diggers exploring these days?”

“Subway tunnels, sewers, drainage systems, abandoned bomb shelters and bunkers, places like that.”

“Anywhere you’re not supposed to go, basically.”

“Yeah. That’s the point.”

“So where did you go tonight?”

Zhenya called up a video on his phone and handed it to Arkady. There were Misha and Margarita by the perimeter fence of a building site. Zhenya followed them with his phone’s camera through a gap and toward a crane, its dark hulk silhouetted against the building lights behind. The footage was extraordinarily stable even as Zhenya began to climb the crane’s ladder. Misha and Margarita waited above him.

“GoPro camera,” said Zhenya. Arkady nodded as though he understood.

More climbing. A look down to see how far they had come. Zhenya was out on the boom. Moscow was spread out beneath, lights twinkling, the river a dark snake winding through neon canyons.

Misha put on a face mask so that only his eyes could be seen. He looked straight into the camera and began to speak, addressing not just Zhenya and Margarita but an online audience on all the electronic hydras, which replicated faster than the authorities could shut them down.

“You follow the rules, right?” he began. “Every day you see buildings you can’t enter, fences you can’t climb, and thoroughfares you can’t cross. But the only reason you can’t do these things is that you’re told you can’t. Moscow is for all of us, not just for those who have the power or the money. Join us. There are no limitations to what we can explore.”

14

Western coffee shops were everywhere in Moscow these days, but how long they would last was another question. Arkady imagined that at least some of the Western companies would be pulling out sooner or later in response to the war, and once a few closed their doors, the rest would be under increasing pressure to follow suit. That kind of pressure was an entirely alien concept to the Russians. If Arkady had been a different man—younger, richer, and more business-minded—he’d be offering all those companies knockdown prices for their premises and open up identical Western-style coffee shops.

“A coffee, please,” Arkady said.

“What kind of coffee?”

“A coffee kind of coffee.”

They circled through endless descriptions of macchiatos, Americanos, and mochas before Arkady conceded defeat and ordered a flat white, whatever that was. Victor peered at the board behind the baristas as though it existed purely to antagonize him and eventually went with a triple espresso—“Yes, of course you can make one: Just make a double and put another shot in.” Marina had a cappuccino, which some of her FSB colleagues would still have regarded as unpalatably bourgeois.

They took a table at the back, making sure they couldn’t be overheard. Arkady took a couple of sips of his “flat white” and outlined his theory about it being a Z rather than a 2 on the wall of Kazasky’s suite. Victor nodded, “I think you’ve got something.”

“I agree,” Marina said.

“Can I have that in writing?” Arkady asked.

“We are allowed to agree on something every now and then, you know.”

Arkady always felt uneasy when an agreeable Marina showed up. An agreeable Marina was a creature he didn’t understand and didn’t trust. He felt on much firmer ground with a contrary Marina.

“The question is, what does the Z stand for?” Arkady asked.

“It’s the symbol of the invasion”—Marina had stopped insisting on “special military operation,” at least with him—“but is it used here as a sign of protest or support? Is this someone who objects to the war and killed Kazasky because of it, or someone who supports the war and somehow saw Kazasky as an obstacle?”

“Kazasky was just a deputy minister. There are more important men than Kazasky to kill if you’re a protester or a supporter.”

Arkady thought of Volkov’s account of his disagreement with Kazasky, but that had been about allocation of resources rather than the principle of the invasion itself.

“Strange way to show your objection to something,” Victor said.

“What is?”

“By drawing the symbol most associated with it. If I wanted to show my opposition to Nazism, I wouldn’t draw a swastika.”

Arkady and Marina conceded that this was a fair point.

“Maybe I’m wrong about the Z, then,” Arkady offered.

“I don’t know either way,” Marina said. “Let’s keep it in mind and keep digging into Kazasky’s life, see if we can find evidence one way or the other. What else have we got in the meantime?”

Victor pulled a sheaf of printouts from his bag.

“Interviews with other hotel guests staying at the time of the murder, everyone on Kazasky’s floor, and the ones above and below. No one saw anything; no one heard anything.”

Of course they didn’t, Arkady thought. It was as though Soviet thinking was so ingrained in the Russian mind that, like the three monkeys, if you heard or saw something you shouldn’t have, you didn’t tell anyone about it. You pretended it hadn’t happened and went on your way.

“Alibis for both Serafima and Dasha have been checked and confirmed. Everyone Kazasky met in the course of his work over the past week has also been interviewed. Nothing there. Crime scene reports reveal no matches with any known suspects yet.”

There was such a huge backlog of cases and shortage of staff at the city’s police headquarters on Petrovka Street that even this one couldn’t be fully processed quickly. They might get bumped up the chain, but that merely increased their progress from nonexistent to glacial. Besides, the various databases against which cases could be checked were so incomplete as to be hardly worth the name. Not being on a database was not in itself a sign of innocence, merely that one had yet to be reduced to a series of data points. The number of wrongful arrests over the years must have been off the charts, and Arkady had never been able to bring himself to believe in the rationale that underpinned the city’s police policy: this specific suspect may not have committed this specific crime, but he’s bound to have committed others we haven’t pinned on him, and even if he hasn’t, he’s bound to commit some in the future, so let’s lock him up because it will all even itself out in the long run anyway.

“Okay,” Arkady said. “We’ll just have to keep at it.” He gripped the back of his chair as he stood. “If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.”

15

“So,” Dr. Pavlova said, “how have you been?”

It was such a commonplace question, and so often asked without any real interest in the answer, but Arkady knew that Dr. Pavlova wasn’t one for social platitudes, and there was no point lying to her; she would simply keep asking till he was honest with her.

“The old Boris Yeltsin line comes to mind,” he replied.

“Which one was that?”

“Someone—another world leader, whose name I can’t remember—asked him what the Russian economy was like. ‘Good,’ Yeltsin replied. The other leader asked if he could expand on that a bit. ‘Of course,’ Yeltsin said. ‘Not good.’ ”

Dr. Pavlova chuckled. Her smile lingered for a second, no more, before she wiped it away with an expression of concern. “The national economy is not the kind of comparison I like to hear when discussing my patient’s health.”

The phone on her desk rang. She answered it, listened for a few moments, and said, “I’ll be there right away.” She opened a drawer, brought out a thin sheaf of stapled papers, and handed them to Arkady. “Here. Rather than have me ask you lots of questions, I’ll give you this standard questionnaire. It’ll take you a few minutes to fill in and then we can discuss it. Don’t think too hard about each question; just answer with what first comes to mind.” She gave Arkady a pen and left the room. Gone to see another patient, he guessed. Double-booking was common, she had once told him. It paid more, and it also minimized the empty sessions when patients simply failed to turn up on the grounds of being forgetful, drunk, or dead.

He began to read.

PARKINSON’S DISEASE QUALITY OF LIFE QUESTIONNAIRE (PDQ-39). Each question had four boxes next to it: NEVER, SOMETIMES, OFTEN, and ALWAYS, with the instructions, PLEASE TICK OFF ONLY ONE BOX FOR EACH QUESTION.

Arkady could still keep the pen steady enough to do what he needed to do—a literal box-ticking exercise, he thought.

The first section was on his range of difficulty in doing things.

Should he ask for an extra box to explain that, even before Parkinson’s, he had rarely indulged in leisure activities or hobbies and had certainly never voluntarily run for pleasure?

Doing up buttons and shoelaces, cutting up food, spilling drinks, writing clearly, falls—no point lying about those. Yes, SOMETIMES to each of them.

Others he answered NEVER to, and every NEVER felt like a small triumph.

Section two was about feelings and left space for comments next to the boxes: Are you depressed? “Who wouldn’t be these days?” Are you angry or bitter, anxious, worried about the future? “See above.” Do you feel you have to conceal your Parkinson’s from people? He hovered over SOMETIMES, and realized OFTEN was the more honest answer. Are you worried by other people’s reaction to you? Have you had problems with your close personal relationships? Do you feel unable to communicate with people properly? “Definitely no more than usual, in all three cases.”

Part three asked questions on physical symptoms. Changes in vocal pitch or volume? SOMETIMES. Painful muscle cramps or spasms, aches and pains, feeling unpleasantly hot or cold? He wanted a stage between SOMETIMES and OFTEN for these. Tremor on the right-hand side? SOMETIMES. Tremor on the left-hand side? NEVER. Tremor on the midline? NEVER. Stiffness and rigidity? SOMETIMES. Losing sense of smell? NEVER. Constipation? SOMETIMES. Erectile problems? NEVER. Sleeping problems? SOMETIMES. Problems with concentration? He hovered over the answers to this question, started ticking OFTEN, but landed on SOMETIMES. Distressing dreams or hallucinations? SOMETIMES—even beyond the mass communal psychosis that was Russia these days.

Dr. Pavlova came back in. Arkady thought she looked a little flushed.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes. Thank you. Always problems to deal with, that’s all.” She nodded at the questionnaire. “Finished?”

“Yes.”

Her hands were trembling slightly as she picked up the papers and began to read.

“Well,” she said when she’d finished, “it looks like you’re moving into the next stage of the disease. So far, you’ve been at the early diagnosis stage: you’ve been experiencing symptoms and coming to terms with it all. Now I think we’re entering the stage when new symptoms are beginning to show up and old symptoms are becoming more advanced.”

“What does that mean?”

“We need to control those symptoms.”

“How?”

“With drugs.”

“I can tell there’s a ‘but’ coming.”

“How can you tell that?”

“Because when it comes to supplies of anything controlled or valuable in this country, there always is.”

Dr. Pavlova sighed. “You’re not wrong.”

“In other words, you can get what I need, but it’s not going to be cheap.”

“If only I could. There just aren’t any around. The drugs we use are all based on levodopa, which boosts the levels of dopamine in the brain. Over the years I’ve prescribed tremonorm from Israel, Madopar from Switzerland, and our own domestic generic benziel, but imports of the first two have been canceled and production of the third’s been reduced and reduced again until the supply’s just a dribble, almost literally. There’s an Indian one called Tidomet Forte, but getting it is difficult. And Western sanctions are going to make it all even worse, because we won’t be able to access European or American brands. I haven’t had any supplies here since the New Year, and this is one of the best clinics in Moscow.”

“So, what happens next? What’s beyond the maintenance stage?”

“Two things. First, the advanced stage, where you’ll find your life increasingly curtailed as the symptoms get worse. Next, the palliative stage, which is what it sounds like: providing relief from the extreme systems and stress but knowing that this is very much the endgame. How long those will take, I have no idea. The tremors might become awful and the dementia nonexistent. It might just as easily be the other way round or both at once. It could take another ten or twenty years or it could get worse next week. I’m not being deliberately unhelpful. Each person’s case is different. Try not to worry about it—easy for me to say, I know, but it’s still true.”

“And in the meantime, with no drugs, what else should I be doing?”

“Avoiding stress, mainly.”

Arkady laughed. “Too late for that.” He stood, swayed slightly to one side, regained his balance. “When would you like to see me again?”

“I’ll get my secretary to make an appointment for six months from now. And, of course, I’ll be in touch if I get hold of any levodopa.”

Arkady walked out of Dr. Pavlova’s office and into the reception area. He was just opening his mouth to speak to the receptionist when he noticed two things: that she wasn’t meeting his eye and that the woman sitting in an armchair waiting for her turn to see Dr. Pavlova looked just like Marina.

Arkady knew that Marina wasn’t waiting for anyone but him. The receptionist’s shame, Dr. Pavlova’s sudden exit after the phone call and her flustered return, the power of those three simple initials, F, S, and B, to open doors, to threaten and coerce, to scare people, to secure supposedly confidential records, to get what they needed by any means necessary, to bend the rules to their advantage. The FSB was still full of sharks, and Marina was by no means the least of them.

“How did you know?” he asked Marina.

“I followed you to the clinic.”

“You can’t have known I was going there.”

“I didn’t know. But I wanted you off the case, and I was going to find a way to ensure that.”

“Well, you did a better job of tracking than the three Dimitris supposedly did.”

16

As expected, Zurin and Marina arrived at Arkady’s office the next morning. Arkady asked Victor to stay, for all the good it would do. They all knew it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Parkinson’s was demonstrably affecting Arkady’s ability to do his job and would only get worse. Arkady was in breach of his contract with the department for not having declared the condition when Dr. Pavlova had first diagnosed it last year. Marina wanted him off the case so she could run it her way.

Zurin finally had a reason to remove Arkady from the premises.

Best of all, from their point of view, they could do so secure in the knowledge that they would look like the good guys in all of this: Investigator Renko has given decades of superior service to law enforcement in Moscow, and all upstanding citizens appreciate his diligence and industry. However, ill health has made it impossible for him to continue his duties. Mindful not just of our gratitude but also our duty of care toward Investigator Renko, we will continue to ensure that he receives the very best treatment available.

“This is bullshit,” Victor said, “and you know it.”

“It’s for Arkady’s own good,” Zurin replied, and his tone was so sincere that anyone who didn’t know him well would believe that he meant it.

For your own good, Arkady thought. If there were four more hateful words in the language, he had yet to come across them.

“We’ll put you on indefinite sick leave for the moment,” Zurin said. “You’ll continue to be paid, but you won’t be able to participate in any of the department’s work, obviously.”

“Why not just sack me?” Arkady said.

“Arkady.” Zurin’s voice dripped with disappointment, as though he’d found Arkady’s suggestion unspeakably vulgar. “I understand why you didn’t come forward and tell us you were sick. It must have been a shock, a blow to your sense of self. But the fact that you didn’t do the right thing then doesn’t mean I can’t do the right thing now. Let’s just all be glad that it didn’t get to the stage where your subterfuge had begun to endanger the lives of your colleagues.”

Arkady wondered what level of pay would make Zurin’s relentless condescension worthwhile.

He conceded, silently and reluctantly, that Zurin’s tactics made sense. They would not only forestall any legal challenge from Arkady but would demonstrate to anyone interested that the prosecutor went the extra mile for his employees. In the fullness of time, sick leave would become permanent dismissal, by which time everyone would agree that Renko had been treated justly and fairly, and wasn’t it awful what had happened to him? Besides, what else could have been done? The prosecutor’s office wasn’t a charity.

“Well,” Zurin said, “I’ll get the personnel department to sort out the details. I’d love to share a farewell drink with you, but I’ve got such a packed schedule, I can’t even find a spare five minutes. You understand.”

“Of course.”

Zurin clapped Arkady awkwardly on the shoulder and left. If Arkady hadn’t known better, he’d have mistaken Zurin’s relief for affection.

Arkady glanced round the room. It had been such a constant in his life for so many years—the chipped paint on the walls, the folded cardboard under one leg of his desk, the old computers, the wall charts turning yellow with age—and he had so often wanted to leave it behind, but now that he had the opportunity to do so, he felt a sudden urge to clamp his shaking fingers around the nearest solid object and refuse to move until they dragged him out kicking and screaming. Of course, then he would be institutionalized.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Victor said to Marina.

“Agent Makarova doesn’t feel shame,” Arkady said. “It’s surgically removed from all FSB operatives as part of their entry process.”

“I wish my dog was as loyal as you,” Marina said, looking at Victor.

“You don’t have a dog,” Victor said.

“How do you know?”

“I can tell dog people. You’re not a dog person. That’s not a compliment.”

17

Arkady waited until Tatiana was home to tell both her and Zhenya about being put on sick leave.

“How can they do that?” Zhenya was outraged.

“Actually, they have every right. I didn’t let them know I was sick, and in fact I may become too physically handicapped for the job.”

“But you’re not anywhere near that point. Don’t they realize that even with Parkinson’s you’re the best they’ve got?”

It wasn’t the first time Arkady found himself reflecting on how the Zhenya he’d first met, the sullen, closed-off young chess obsessive, had changed into this young man who took any slights against Arkady as personal wounds against himself. Arkady had wondered many times why, how, and when the transformation had come and how much of it had been his own doing. He liked to think that he had effected some of the change, even if it was only a small amount. Then again, perhaps in the end it was nothing more complicated than Zhenya growing up.

Tatiana, in contrast, was brusquely practical.

“You can help Zhenya and me, then. We’re both fighting the same fight, and we could use your help.”

Between Zhenya’s outrage and Tatiana’s practicality, Arkady reflected, he had just the reactions he needed.

Arkady thought of the other times when he’d been most unmoored. There had been the initial diagnosis of Parkinson’s last year, of course, and when he lost his wife, Irina, and when he first met Tatiana. He knew life with them, and even life after them, would never be quite the same as life before them. A readjustment of his baseline, a realization that magnetic north and true north were no longer in the same place.

And now there was this. No time to plan, no time to wind down his cases, no time to say goodbyes to those whose company he valued. Men and women retired from their jobs every day. Usually they worked hard so that they could look forward to a life without the misery of working day in and day out, but not him. He liked what he did, and he wasn’t ready to become a private citizen.

He could stay at home, do nothing, and surrender as his symptoms got worse. He could watch as Zhenya and Tatiana went about their lives with energy and purpose and feel his love for them curdling into resentment. He was defined by who he was and what he could still do.

Put that way, it wasn’t even a choice.

18

If Spivak was surprised that Arkady had come back, he didn’t show it. Arkady supposed that a five-star-hotel manager received half a dozen outrageous requests before breakfast every day. In those terms, an investigator asking to revisit a crime scene didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow.

“Would you like me to come with you, or would you prefer to go alone?” Spivak asked.

“Alone, please.”

“As you wish.”

With the card key Spivak programmed for him, Arkady opened the door to Kazasky’s suite. It was still as Arkady had last seen it. They were waiting for professional cleaners to come in, but they had been delayed on an existing job by a couple of days. Arkady’s good luck, for once. This was Moscow, where the dirt always piled too high too quickly for the cleaners to get on top of it.

He rode up in an empty elevator, wondering what exactly had brought him here. A desire to do something, to keep himself busy, sure, but also some vague, nagging sense that there might be something here that he had missed the first time round. Crime scenes could be like movies: it was on the second pass, when you weren’t so busy concentrating on every detail in front of you, that you noticed things you missed before. A fresh crime scene was full of colors and noise—not just the police officers and technicians but the evidence of psychic violence that had been inflicted. In a few days, when the place was quieter and the atoms had somewhat settled back into their usual patterns, clues and theories had room to breathe. Arkady couldn’t do anything on the case directly, of course, but he could pass whatever he found on to Victor, who could in turn introduce the information into the investigation. Marina wasn’t going to be allowed to get away with a total FSB whitewash—not if he could help it.

The corridor was empty. Every luxury hotel pulled the same trick, Arkady thought, cocooning their guests in a world distant from the streets that teemed and pulsed just outside.

He pressed the key card Spivak had programmed for him against the reader. A green light glowed. Arkady pushed the door open, held it there a minute or so to let some of the fetid air out, and then stepped inside. The door swung shut behind him. He pressed the light switch, wondered for a moment why nothing happened, and then remembered to insert the key card in the slot by the door. Clearly, he was not in the habit of staying in luxurious hotels. He was used to hard metal keys and an attitude to customer service that could best be described as lackadaisical.

Kazasky’s suite was as he remembered it, though the blood on the floor and walls had dried and hardened, leaving a metallic smell in the air. Arkady looked at the large symbol on the far wall. Almost certainly a Z, he thought: the lines were too straight and sharp to be otherwise. A 2 would have been drawn with a curve and more fluidity.

He stood in the middle of the room, closed his eyes, exhaled, and tried to clear his mind. This was another reason to be alone at a crime scene: he wasn’t trying to tune in to the cosmos, or get vibes from beyond the grave, or anything like that. He was simply trying to re-create what might have happened.

There had been two killers, almost certainly: one with a sharp weapon, the other with a blunt one. Both had inflicted multiple wounds on Kazasky.

Why?

It was a simple enough question, but one with several possible answers. That level of violence was, as he’d thought before, overkill. If the aim had been simply to kill Kazasky, then they could have done it much more easily with a silenced handgun. Kazasky had been a middle-aged man, not in terrible physical condition but hardly an Olympic athlete either. Two men wouldn’t have been needed to subdue him. The violence had therefore been a deliberate choice—a premeditated one, too, as evidenced by the killers having brought the weapons to the scene in the first place.

So, again, the question: Why? Why the violence?

It wasn’t a vodka- or drug-fueled frenzy killing. The man on the CCTV footage had been walking perfectly normally. Kazasky hadn’t been killed by accident or happenstance. The killers had come here or been sent here because they could be relied upon to do the job, and for that they would have needed to be sober.

A warning to others? Possibly.

Perhaps the violence had been for another purpose, and that purpose had been to get Kazasky to cooperate—to agree to something, to give them information—and when he’d refused, that’s when they’d attacked him.

Information might have been a document, or at least an electronic version of one. Maybe a password or a flash drive.

Arkady opened his eyes.

It was a long shot, but he had nothing else, and he had all the time he wanted to search. Chances were there was nothing, either because there had never been anything or because Kazasky’s killers had gotten what they came for: he’d given it to them or they had found it and taken it with them.

The police and FSB had thoroughly searched the apartment already but he would methodically search again, beginning at one end of the suite and working his way slowly through it.

He started by the window. Felt up and along and around the window frame and curtains. Behind and under chairs and sofas. Took the cushions off, checked them all, felt around the sides. Opened every desk drawer, took them out one by one, checked in the spaces left empty. Around the back of the TV. Opened the back of the TV remote to check that the batteries and nothing else were in there. Took every pillow off the bed and checked each one. Ran his hand around the edge of the bed frame. Shifted the mattress first one way and then the other, enough to see that there was nothing underneath. Dropped to his knees and used the flashlight on his phone to look under the bed. Every drawer in the wardrobe, and the shelves at the top, and of course the safe itself. In and around and behind the minibar.

He was sweating and his muscles ached slightly. It should have made him feel worse, but actually it felt good. Activity, counterintuitively, was what he needed.

He went into the bathroom. The surround on the bath itself looked solid, but he checked up close just in case. No, nothing dislodged or removed recently. He jiggled the showerhead to see if anything rattled inside. Looked in the cupboard under the basin.

Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

He was heading toward the door, ready to give up, when he realized there was still one place left to look. The toilet flush button was set in a wall panel, but there had to be a cistern behind it. Arkady saw a screw at each corner of the panel.

He didn’t have a screwdriver, and he didn’t want to involve Spivak or the maintenance department by asking for one. He went back into the main room, found a knife and corkscrew in a drawer, and returned to the bathroom.

It was neither quick nor pretty, but he didn’t care. He hacked, jimmied, and prized the panel until it splintered enough for him to pull it away and open up the cistern.

Nothing inside. No plastic bag floating in the water to keep its contents dry.

He turned the lid over—and there it was, neatly taped to the underside.

A flash drive, no bigger than Arkady’s thumb.

Arkady took the flash drive home to Zhenya rather than to Victor. If Arkady let it go before knowing what was on it, then chances were that Marina would sit on the results, contrive to “lose” the drive, or both, and he would never know. The drive, and more specifically its contents, were Arkady’s only leverage. He would involve Victor once he knew what was there.

Zhenya put the flash drive into the side of his laptop and waited for the icon to show up on the screen. “Usually it’s just porn, but probably not this time, right?” He clicked to expand the icon into a folder and began to run through the results.

“Whatever’s on here,” he said, “it’s not going to give itself up easily.”

“Oh?”

“It’s password protected.”

“Is there any way round that?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On how good the password is. I’ve got a few crack password programs I can run.”

“How long will that take?”

“I have no idea. A lot depends simply on the number of characters used. A six-number password, such as ‘123456,’ I could crack almost immediately. An eight-character password—you know how often the English word ‘password’ is used as a password? As many times as there are imbeciles in the world—can be cracked in two minutes, maybe five. But with each character you add on, it gets exponentially longer, and even more so if there are special characters to go with letters and numbers.”

“Special characters?”

“Math signs: add, subtract, divide, multiply. Ampersand. Asterisk. Parenthesis. Dollar sign, percent symbol, exclamation point, and question mark. So it might be minutes; it might be months.”

“Months?”

“Worst case, yes. Actually, the worst case is that I can’t open it at all. It’s like the endgame in chess. Computers have solved every possible eventuality with seven pieces, but eight will be harder than two through seven put together, and nine the same when they get to it. Chess really tells you everything about life.”

19

Arkady didn’t recognize the number that flashed up on the screen of his mobile.

“Arkady.”

“It’s Saran.”

He could tell instantly from her voice that she was upset.

“What’s wrong?”

“My brother, Bazar.” Arkady knew what was coming even before she said it. “He’s been killed. In Ukraine.”

It all came out in a rush after that. Bazar had been in a tank en route to Zaporizhzhia, one of the many cities unheard-of before but which in one way or another would soon be seared on a nation’s conscience. His Siberian unit had come under attack from Ukrainian soldiers. Bazar’s body was being repatriated to Buryatia for burial, but the army had insisted on a closed casket, so she could only imagine the kind of injuries he’d sustained. Why couldn’t the Ukrainians have killed her ex-husband instead?

Arkady let her talk without interruption. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Who?” whispered Tatiana.

“Saran,” Arkady whispered back. “Her brother’s dead.”

“Let me talk to her when you’ve finished.”

Arkady wasn’t sure this was a good idea. Saran had liked Tatiana, he remembered, but she had also been jealous of Tatiana’s place in his life. He shook his head at Tatiana.

“Yes, let me. I can write about him.”

“How have you been?” Saran asked.

“Oh, you know.” Classic Arkady deflection. “Just here with Zhenya and Tatiana.”

“How are they?” He heard the catch in Saran’s voice.

“They’re fine. Tatiana would like to talk, if you’re up to it.”

“Sure.”

Arkady passed the phone to Tatiana and within a few seconds heard her find the perfect words and the perfect tone, managing to simultaneously convey deep sympathy for Bazar’s death and making light of any awkwardness caused by Saran’s feelings for Arkady.

By the time she hung up, she had gotten Saran to agree to send the link for the live streaming of Bazar’s funeral the next day and had promised to write a story about it: the human cost of the war as seen through the eyes of the Buryat community in Siberia. It would be emotional, it would be searing, and it would court trouble.

The next day, after Arkady watched the live stream of Bazar’s funeral with Tatiana, he felt the need for a long walk. Tatiana set to work. When he returned several hours later, she showed him a first draft.

ULAN-UDE, SIBERIA

By Tatiana Petrovna for The New York Times

It was the silence which spoke loudest. The only sounds which could be heard after the prayers faded away were the footsteps of the burgundy-robed lamas and the mourning relatives as they walked round the coffins. This was a Buddhist funeral, and Buddhists are not supposed to mourn loudly. Tears and wailing are thought to block the journey of the deceased person’s soul on its way to heaven before returning to earth in a new body after exactly seven weeks.

The footsteps echoed in the wide spaces of the Lukodrome sports hall. The hall was unheated, and all the mourners kept their coats on. There were so many people that some had to stand at the sides and even in the corridor outside: the bleachers were full, as were the chairs specially brought in for the occasion.

There were five coffins, one for each young man from Buryatia who had joined the army and been killed in the first days of the war. At the head of each coffin stood a soldier, ramrod straight, with his machine gun and bayonet held upright.

Photographs of each soldier had been placed at the foot of each coffin.

At 20, Vladislav Kokorin had been the youngest of the dead. He had grown up in an orphanage before going into foster care. He was the only one who had not been a Buddhist, and an Orthodox priest stood silently to one side of his coffin, watching over it but performing no rituals.

Paramedic Naidal Zyrenow, 24, had been “school student of the year” in 2016. He was dressed in his gray uniform and his hands, one of them bandaged, were crossed over his chest.

Bazar Itigelov, 27, was killed when his tank was attacked outside Zaporizhzhia.

His casket was closed, a sign that his injuries had been severe.

Thirty-five-year-old Bulat Odoev and Shargal Dashiev, 38, are both survived by pregnant wives and their children.

When the lamas came to sing their funeral prayers, they did so in Tibetan, and their heads nodded in unison with each other and with the cadence of the chant. An oil lamp, symbolizing the clear light of primordial wisdom illuminating the darkness of ignorance, burned steadily. The scent of incense mingled with that of the coffins.

Buryatia is a small republic in Siberia, and it clings fiercely and proudly to its religion and traditions. Officials spoke of the sacrifices the dead men had made. “They did not die for nothing,” said the republic’s deputy head, Bayir Tsyrenov, first in Russian and then in Buryat. “They died so that Russia could be great. So that the bloodshed in Ukraine would come to an end.” Ulan-Ude mayor Igor Shutenkov concurred. “They died protecting the freedom and future of our country.”

Among the relatives themselves, however, there seemed little anger; instead there was a profound and aching sadness at the loss of five young men with their lives still ahead of them, a regret as deep as the region’s famed Lake Baikal. Saran Itigelova, Bazar’s sister, said: “We don’t want to blame the government, even at the moment of our greatest grief. But it’s no surprise, and no coincidence, either, that we Buryats have lost our relatives first. We are poor, we are humble, we do not complain. And we are not Slavs. They don’t take people from Moscow or St. Petersburg, do they? Have you ever seen anyone with slanted eyes in Ceremonial Guard No.1 on Red Square? No, of course not. They’re all tall, blue-eyed, Slavic men. Our kind—bowlegged, short, high-cheekboned—aren’t wanted around there. But when the time comes for someone to die, we’re the ones they send.”

Bazar had joined the army, she said, because he had been a patriot and had sought the camaraderie which would come from defending the motherland. “He often said that he was as Russian as anyone else. I don’t know if in his heart of hearts he agreed with what he was being asked to do, but I do know that he would have followed orders and done whatever he could as best he could. He would never have abandoned his brothers.”

The men will be buried in the Defense Ministry’s section of Ulan-Ude’s Southern Cemetery. “I won’t go back to Bazar’s grave after the cemetery,” Saran said. “That’s not what we Buryats do. We don’t put tombstones or gates up. We pack the dirt tightly over our loved ones’ graves, and at their feet we put a soyombo, a tall stake with a white or blue cloth tied to the top. The sooner the grave becomes level with the earth and overgrown with grass and trees, the sooner the soyombo rots and falls over, and the better it is for the souls of the dead.”

It is more than 6,000 kilometers from Ulan-Ude to Kyiv. In the Lukodrome, that distance felt both vast and nonexistent at the same time: a remote war brought home in the starkest way possible. Next to the hall where the funerals took place is an archery range. Archery is the premier sport in Buryatia, and competitions attract participants from all over Siberia and beyond. The children who practice here are already used to having to share their space with coffins brought back from the front, and there is no sign that this will abate anytime soon. “Everything smells like the dead now,” Saran said.

“What do you think?” Tatiana asked when Arkady had finished reading.

Saran had been brave, Arkady thought, saying as much as she had, but Tatiana had ensured that the quotes would fall just the right side of being inflammatory.

“Don’t change a word,” he said.

20

Zhenya had put several programs to work, trying to crack the password of Kazasky’s flash drive. He listed them as his fingers ran across keyboards.

“I’ve got Air Crack, which has a command line for an instant grind; Rainbow Crack, which uses some sort of large-scale time-memory technique; Medusa—that’s brute force parallel testing; Oph Crack, which is good but can’t do any passwords of fourteen characters or longer; and Hashcat, which has an in-kernel rule engine.”

Sometimes, Arkady thought, Zhenya existed not so much in this world as a parallel one, flying through an ether full of binary coding and processing chips. He was never happier than when caught up in a subculture teeming with its own rules and language, and his absorption there was one of the things Arkady found most endearing about him—that, and the way Zhenya assumed everybody else both shared his interest and knew what he was talking about.

“I’ll let you know the moment I find something,” Zhenya said. “In the meantime, I want to show you this. Have you ever heard of a city called Bucha?”

“Yes,” Arkady said, recalling the connection. “Blokhin.”

“What?”

“Blokhin. The guy Marina had arrested and I got released. He’s from Bucha. ‘Beautiful city,’ he said.”

“Not anymore, it’s not.”

Even at several removes, a time-lapse sequence of graphics laid over a street map, it was terrifying.

“The Black Army have put this together over the past few days,” Zhenya explained. “It begins on February twenty-fifth with Russian forces arriving in the city on their way to Kyiv: paratroopers, tanks, sappers, and reserves from the 36th Command.” Arkady watched as the street map lit up with photographs and video clips piling on top of one another. “These were all taken by civilians on the ground, with location services allowing us to pinpoint exactly where they were when they took them.”

Russian troops fanned out as they prowled the streets. Photographs of tanks jerking and listing as they rumbled over potholes. Photographs with curtains visible at the edges of the frames and the horizons wonky, taken quickly, fearfully, by photographers trying not to be seen by men with guns.

Zhenya pointed to a clock running many times normal speed in the corner of the screen. “This shows how the situation progressed.” Flames flared red and diffuse on a video clip. The dull thunk of artillery bombardment, Arkady thought, the age-old Russian way of solving problems. Nothing succeeded like excess.

Young Ukrainian men with scarves wrapped round their faces hurled Molotov cocktails at the troops. The troops shot back. One of the young men fell, got up, fell again, lay still. Debris strewn across the road: twisted chunks of metal, blackened and scarred. A tank had tipped into a crater and its wheels sat lonesome and abandoned.

“The Ukrainian counteroffensive,” Zhenya said.

A bus drove slowly past the camera. People so exhausted, so spiritually tired that they no longer had the capacity even to be scared, pressed their faces against the windows. Men, women, and children had abandoned everything but the purest fatalism, for how else could they live when their world had been torn to shreds?

Another bus, and another: a convoy leaving hell, but for who knew where?

The blue-and-yellow flag fluttered on top of the city hall. Ukrainian soldiers wrapped their arms round each other and stared into the camera. No triumph in their eyes, merely grim-faced resolve that their country’s flag should remain on top of the municipal building.

“Well,” Arkady said, “at least they got their city back.”

Zhenya puffed air out through his cheeks. “You’ve just seen the nice part so far.”

“Really?”

“Compared to what’s coming next, yes.”

Two days later, the Russians came back. Troops looted houses and traded possessions between themselves. The Z symbol was everywhere: three slashes of hatred, of conquest, of man’s atavistic desire to dominate smeared on doors, painted on armored vehicles, fluttering from homemade flags. Civilians knelt in the street, their hands tied behind their backs. The same civilians a few frames later, face down and motionless. On a video clip taken in complete darkness, a woman screamed. It sounded like an animal caught in a trap. An old man was dragged from a car and taken behind a building. Silence, followed by a gunshot.

Arkady forced himself to watch. These were, he knew, only the ones that had been caught on camera.

“There’s one that is even worse than any of these,” Zhenya said.

“Show me.”

“Sure?”

Yes, Arkady was sure. He needed to bear witness if nothing else.

“Okay. This one didn’t come up on open-source media. It was uploaded to a closed VKontakte group. Extra layers of security there. Lots of bad shit. One of Black Army’s top hackers—better than me; better, even, than Misha—got hold of it.”

The footage began. Arkady saw a Shell gas station, as though this were an establishing shot in a movie. The camera moved down and across to find a man dressed in fatigues, army issue. He had a baseball cap on, turquoise with MIAMI DOLPHINS embroidered on it. His nose and mouth were covered by a red bandana. He was standing with his feet shoulder width apart, and he was holding something that Arkady could not instantly make out.

As though reading Arkady’s mind, the cameraman zoomed in on the man’s hands, and the object became clearer. It was a shovel, though the shaft was much shorter than would usually be found on a tool used for gardening or roadwork or clearing snow. The man held the handle in his right hand and the shovel blade in his left.

Arkady recognized it. His father had kept one as part of his collection of military memorabilia. How funny, he thought, that he could remember a conversation from decades ago so clearly and things from a few days ago not at all. The shovel was called a saperka, and General Renko had sworn by it. “With a saperka,” he’d told Arkady, in the days when he still thought that Arkady would follow him into the army, “you can do anything. All three of its edges are as sharp as a knife, so it’s a lethal weapon but you can dig a trench with it, chop up food, and can even use it as a paddle to get across a river. It’s only twenty-one inches long, small enough to carry with you.”

The camera moved a few feet to the side. A man in civilian clothes was kneeling on the side of the road, next to the man with the saperka. The kneeling man wore a mustard-yellow anorak, and his hands were bound in front of him. Arkady saw that he was trembling.

“This is for stealing from our Russian soldiers,” yelled the man in the baseball cap.

He twisted the saperka above his head and brought it down as hard as he could on the kneeling man. Arkady had sensed it was coming, of course, but that didn’t mitigate the shock of the blow. The saperka whirled, rose, fell, again and again. Arkady saw the blood, heard shouts, grunts, and cries. The camera wobbled, lost focus, then found it again.

The kneeling man was on the ground now, blood-soaked and motionless.

“This is what happens to our enemies,” said the cameraman.

Arkady only half heard. He was looking at the man who had been killed and realized that he had just been shown the weapon that killed Kazasky. Two weapons, two killers, he had thought. One to produce blunt-force trauma and the other for the sharp cuts. But the saperka could provide both at once; it cut like a knife and hit like a rock. A saperka could have caused every single injury on Kazasky’s body. And a single weapon only needed a single killer.

They showed Tatiana the graphics, the saperka video, everything.

“What I don’t know,” Arkady said, “is whether it’s the same killer or just the same method of killing. If battering someone to death with a saperka is something lots of people do, as a… I don’t know, a symbol, maybe a gang initiation, some form of army hazing. If it’s the same killer, that narrows it down quite a lot. The same man who killed this man in Bucha may be the same one who killed Kazasky in Moscow.”

“Only one way to find out,” Tatiana said.

“Which is?”

“We go to Bucha.”

It was an absurd proposition on several levels, and Arkady said so.

“Which levels?” Tatiana said.

“First, you can’t investigate a single death in a war zone.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are thousands of deaths there. There’s no infrastructure. There’s no recourse to law enforcement or anything like that.”

“So? You can still investigate. The Russians have left Bucha and I know that the people of that city want their story told.”

“I can investigate and tell you everything I find out. Why do you have to go?”

“Arkady, don’t be stupid. I’m going because it’s a huge story. Russian troops massacring civilians needs to be told; it needs to be broadcast loud and clear. You’re going there because you have a lead in your case.”

“It’s not my case anymore.”

“Of course it is. We go there; we do our jobs; we come back; you pass on the information to Victor and get him to find a way round the FSB.”

“I could just send him the video now.”

“It’s not enough—not as it is. You have to come back with so much proof that not even Marina can ignore it. What’s the next one?”

“The next what?”

“The next reason you don’t want us to go.”

“We can’t get to Bucha.”

“Why not?”

“There are no flights there or anywhere near. It’s a war zone.”

“There are flights. We’ll just have to go the long way round. We can fly from here to Istanbul, from Istanbul to Warsaw, and then go via land from there.”

“How will we get across the border and into Ukraine?”

“Ring your friend Blokhin and get him to help. He has government contacts and you did him a favor. Ukraine still controls its border with Poland. He can get us through there.”

Arkady felt like a tennis player sending up lobs for a champion to smash.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be with you at all times,” she said.

Arkady rang Victor and got him to read Blokhin’s phone number off the arrest form.

“Why do you want his phone number?” Victor asked.

“I just thought I’d get in touch with him to see how he’s doing.”

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, you know. Life could be worse.” Arkady hated lying to Victor about the trip, but the less Victor knew, the better. Victor was loyal, but he could blurt something out when he drank too much, or Marina would know how to extract the information from him. He couldn’t tell her what he didn’t know.

Arkady rang Blokhin and left a message on his voicemail. Tatiana spent two hours on the phone to various people and by the end had gotten everything they needed: plane tickets, a budget, and accreditation for Arkady, a qualified and experienced law enforcement professional as her protection officer. They’d meet up with a photographer in Warsaw and travel the rest of the way with him. The flight to Istanbul left in five hours’ time.

They packed fast and in almost total silence. Zhenya was waiting in the hall when they emerged with their suitcases.

“Be careful,” Arkady said.

“I’m not the one going to a war zone.”

“But you are the one uncovering a ton of stuff that the government doesn’t want made public.”

“We’ve discussed this before.”

“We have.”

“We agreed it was the right thing to do.”

“We did.”

“It still is the right thing to do.”

“That doesn’t stop me worrying about you.”

“Like I said, I’m not the one going to a war zone.”

Zhenya hugged Tatiana, towering over her. Then he hugged Arkady, and the ferocity of the embrace caught Arkady off-balance in more ways than one.

BUCHA

21

Blokhin was waiting for them on the steps of the Uniwersytet metro station. He looked a decade older than when Arkady had last seen him, his face sallow and gray, a triplex of bags hanging down from below each eye. That was what preparing for conflict round the clock did to you, Arkady thought.

Blokhin shook Arkady’s hand. “You made it. Welcome to our own little corner of hell. How was the journey?”

“An odyssey.”

The flight from Moscow to Istanbul had been the easy part. Getting from Istanbul to Warsaw had been harder. Every direct flight had been booked. Tatiana had gone from LOT Polish Airlines to Turkish Airlines to KLM and back again, using all the tricks she’d picked up from a lifetime of international reporting, but she had found nothing.

“It’s this,” she had told Arkady, holding up her Russian passport. “They see it and they don’t want to let you on.”

The airport lounge had been less picky, however, and her New York Times account had gotten them into a place where Arkady could stretch out, eat, drink, and not have to worry about making his way through large crowds.

Eventually they found a flight via Athens, but by the time they landed in Warsaw, it was almost midnight. When Arkady woke up the next morning after five hours of deep, dreamless, unsatisfying sleep, he couldn’t remember where he was. Disorientated by waking up in a generic corporate hotel room, and unmoored from a vague sense of reality, he wondered whether the afterlife came in several shades of beige and taupe. He pressed himself against Tatiana’s back and reached over to fold his hand over hers. He was aware that whenever he held her hand, the slight tremor in his right hand disappeared as though this was where it was always meant to be.

The photographer arrived after breakfast. He was tall, with gray sprinkled throughout his beard and along his temples. There was a restlessness to his walk and his eyes were never still, always scanning for the next image, a mixture of people, objects, and light not just as they were arranged at that moment but how they might look rearranged.

“Josh!” Tatiana rose to hug him. “So glad they sent you.”

Josh smiled at Arkady over Tatiana’s shoulder. His teeth alone, white and even, gave away his origins. The American accent confirmed it.

“You must be Arkady. Tatiana’s spoken about you so much.”

“Josh and I have worked together half a dozen times,” Tatiana said.

“Kabul, most recently,” Josh said. “The retreat from the Taliban. What a shitshow that was.”

“How’s your wife?” Tatiana asked.

“Still moaning that I’m never around and how one day I’ll come back to find her gone.”

“One day you probably will.”

Josh shrugged. “I know. But what’s the alternative?”

It was almost five hundred miles by road from Warsaw to Kyiv: a twelve-hour journey. The search engine on Tatiana’s phone was clearly delusional, as in the end it had taken three times that. The search engine had, after all, never tried to make the journey at a time when thousands of buses, vans, and cars were traveling from Warsaw to pick up refugees at the border and had never been obliged to wait for hours at the border while staff processed all those refugees. Arkady found it mildly surprising that they were still letting Russians in without a visa even if he and Tatiana weren’t bulldozing their way across the frontier in a tank. They had been forced to stop so many times for checkpoints on the way to Kyiv that he lost count. Most of the traffic had been going the other way, and once again he was swimming against the tide, a metaphor for his life writ large on the M06.

And now they were here, an exhausted and bedraggled trio in Kyiv.

Arkady introduced Tatiana and Josh to Blokhin.

“I’m amazed you made it,” Blokhin said.

“We barely did. Where should we go now?”

“Curfew in the city begins in an hour, so I’m afraid tonight you’re going to have to stay here.”

“Here as in right here, in the metro station?”

“I’ll be with you, for your safety as much as anything. I have to vouch for you. If people find out you’re Russian, hear you talking in Russian—hear even a Russian accent—who knows what they’ll do? Everyone’s terrified of pro-Russian agents set on provocation and sabotage. So stay quiet and keep to yourselves. Tomorrow morning we’ll move out and head toward Bucha. Military intelligence says the Russian troops withdrew earlier today, but even if we could get there during curfew, we’d need to give it a night just to be sure it’s not a trap.”

Blokhin led them down into the metro station. Up top, near the surface, it looked relatively normal if largely deserted except for small pockets of men with rifles.

Blokhin greeted a few of them with a friendly wave.

The escalators were running.

“We put them on for an hour or so every evening and every morning, when most people are coming in and out.”

Arkady was relieved that he didn’t have to worry about where to put his feet on the long journey down flights of stairs. He was used to the depth of Moscow Metro stations and how far underground they went, but now he felt himself traveling appreciably deeper than even those.

“Yes,” Blokhin said as though reading his mind, “it’s one of the deepest stations in the entire system. Two hundred and sixty-one feet below the surface, deeper than any station in Moscow or St. Petersburg. There are ones here which go even farther underground, to three hundred feet or more.”

They came out into a wide hall at the foot of the escalators. Plaster busts dotted alcoves on either side of them. Some had been covered with wooden boards. Tatiana gestured toward them. “Protection?” she asked. Surely no bombs could reach down here.

Blokhin laughed. “Only from outraged citizens.” He pointed along the lines. “Franko, Shevchenko, Bogomolets, and Skovoroda you can still see. Behind the boards: Pushkin, Gorky, Lomonosov, and Mendeleev. If you’re trying to eliminate our culture, prepare to see the favor returned.”

Josh unhooked a camera from around his neck and took a few quick pictures.

There were hundreds of people down here, settling in for the night. Foam mattresses had been laid out in neat ranks; plastic bags of food were balanced on top of suitcases. Overhead television screens showed the evening news. Some people couldn’t tear their gaze away from the footage and captions; others couldn’t bear to look. Small children pushed toy cars across the floor as their mothers’ thumbs stroked smartphone screens, faces bathed in the soft glow of doom scrolling. A dozen phones were charging off three power strips plugged into the wall, and a neat queue had formed for the restroom. A cot on the platform was full of books, and a sign enjoined people to take what they wanted and leave what they could. A babushka picked up a volume, opened it at random, and began to read aloud. Arkady could understand enough Ukrainian to know that the passage concerned Yemelyan Pugachev, an eighteenth-century Cossack soldier who had impersonated Catherine the Great’s late husband, Peter III, and led an unsuccessful rebellion against her.

Train lines had stopped running, and a train stood at each platform. People made their beds inside the train cars. Benches became bunks, and windowsills became shelves for toiletries and food. Arkady was put in mind of cramped communal Soviet apartments. He saw a small tent on the platform, a picnic on a rug: boiled potatoes, sour pickles, slick pork fat. The scent of borscht mixed with those of urine and body odor. A trumpeter played the national anthem with soft notes full of loss. Blokhin and Josh were about the only men of fighting age down here; anyone who could wield a weapon was up top, leaving the safety of the deep shelter to women, children, and the elderly.

Rumors spread even faster in war than they did normally. People told each other stories. There was the babushka who had killed a dozen Russian soldiers by poisoning a meal of dumplings they had been fool enough to accept. Then there was the secret password to root out Russian saboteurs. You would ask someone to say palyanitsa, a traditional Ukrainian bread roll. But Russians couldn’t pronounce it properly. When they said it, it sounded like polunytsya, the word for strawberry. “Strawberry” was a life-or-death giveaway.

Arkady, Tatiana, Blokhin, and Josh shared food and spoke little. Once the lights had gone out, the coughs and sniffles subsided, and the snoring began, Arkady felt a strange sense of peace. Here was humanity seeking refuge from war, packed in far below the earth’s surface, and he was a part of it.

They set out after breakfast the next morning. Kyiv felt primed, ready to block any Russian attack with tanks and thousands of gun-wielding soldiers. Blokhin took them on a haphazard route because so many roads were blocked. Concrete barriers squatted at intersections; signs in red and white shrieked ATTENTION! to anyone who dared pass and risk setting off an anti-tank mine. Teetering hills of tires were piled high, ready to be set ablaze and create impromptu smoke screens. Two men were decanting gasoline from a jerrican into milk bottles, with rags close by to turn them into Molotov cocktails. Arkady was reminded of school history lessons about the way Leningrad had prepared itself to block the Nazi advance with barrage balloons in the sky and machine-gun posts on street corners: another population determined to fight for every brick in every house in every street.

Checkpoints were punctuation marks. The car was halted, Blokhin talked to the men who peered in at the windows, gates were lifted, lowered. Men swaggered with the weight of their guns and the importance of their mission. An SUV was stopped on the curb, its doors pockmarked with bullet holes. “Suspected enemy car,” Blokhin said as they drove past.

“What happened to the occupants?” Tatiana asked.

Blokhin shrugged. Arkady couldn’t tell whether Blokhin didn’t know or simply didn’t care. In the distance came the dull thump of explosions, felt as much as heard.

A spiral of black smoke floated above the rooftops.

They were still within the city limits when Blokhin turned into an open space in front of a tsarist building.

“I want to show you Prosika House,” Blokhin said. “Not for the murder investigation, but for a journalistic story. I want you to write about this in the New York Times.”

He stopped the car and switched the engine off, and they all got out.

22

A woman was waiting for them in the doorway. She wore a tweed suit and a yellow band in her hair, a splash of vibrancy in the gray.

“This is Olena Bondarenka,” Blokhin said as they approached. “She’ll take you around.”

At first glance, the house looked like a rest home. The garden was large, and when spring came the trees would bud out and the grass would grow green and lush. The reception rooms were spacious and well-appointed; some even had the original wood paneling. There were enough chess boards for a tournament, and a Ping-Pong table for the more energetic residents.

When Arkady looked closer, he noticed that many of the doors had no handles, and nurses in white uniforms made their rounds in pairs whenever possible, in case of trouble. Their patients were often still dressed in military fatigues, having come straight from the front line. In peacetime, Dr. Bondarenka explained, Prosika had been a psychiatric hospital for people suffering from schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Now it was a sanatorium for those whose minds had been undone by battle.

They were young men, sometimes not much more than boys. Their packs and boots were lined up neatly next to their beds. Tatiana spoke to them softly while Josh took pictures as unobtrusively as possible, waiting to one side for a patient’s attention to be focused on Tatiana before raising his camera.

“I have the same dream over and over.” The young soldier was lanky and painfully thin, and the fuzz on his upper lip looked more like unwashed dirt than a mustache. “The Russians are shelling. I dive into a trench, only to find it’s a grave, an open coffin, and the lid closes over me. Those are my dreams, over and over again. Like a tangled fishing line. Whenever I find a knot in it and yank to pull the strands apart, they just get tighter and more entwined.”

Another soldier shook the whole time, even though the room was warm. “I remember the men with me, the one who stepped on a mine, the one who was shot when he stepped outside for a smoke, the one who was trapped beneath an armored vehicle. I know their names, their wives’ names, their children’s names, their hometowns, and which football teams they supported.”

Dr. Bondarenka didn’t go home anymore, she said. Instead, she slept on a camp bed in her office. She gave medication where she could, and she listened. “That’s what they want most of all, for someone to hear their stories.” They told her the same things over and again, of course, but she didn’t mind. “Once they start talking, you can’t shut them up. Even so, there’s only so much we can do. Some of these men need long-term hospitalization, but commanders want their men back. The commanders don’t understand—not really. If I were treating broken legs, injuries you could touch and see, then they’d get it, but lots of them think basically that soldiers should be strong and get on with it. The whole country’s suffering; why should any individual be exempt? But these boys aren’t prepared for what’s happened to them, and the savagery they’ve seen is so extreme that in many cases it’s precipitated instant psychological collapse. They beg me to let them stay; the commanders demand that I let them go.”

“Who wins that battle?” Tatiana asked.

Dr. Bondarenka’s smile was ineffably sad. “Who do you think?” She gestured toward another patient, this one a little older than the other two. “Here, Tymur, come and let me take your picture for my office.”

“I don’t want to go,” Tymur said. He was unshaven, and his eyes were red.

“I know you don’t. I wish I could keep you here, but your unit says they need you back.” She held up her phone, motioned for him to stand against a wall.

“I take pictures of all my boys,” she said to Arkady and Tatiana, “and I hang them on the wall so I won’t forget them.”

“May I ask,” Arkady said, “which unit you’re serving with?”

“It’s okay,” Blokhin said to Tymur. “He’s with me. You can answer.”

“The Territorial Defense Forces,” Tymur said.

“It’s a militia,” Blokhin said. “Civilian volunteers, formed not long before the invasion. Reservists.”

“I’m a construction worker,” Tymur said. “The only gun I’ve ever fired before all this was a nail gun.”

“Where were you fighting?” Arkady asked.

Tymur pointed out of the window. “In Bucha, not far from here.” He paused, swallowed, spoke again. “People will tell you it was hell, and they’ll mean it. But they won’t mean it literally. I do. I saw him there. I know it was hell because I saw him there.”

“You saw who there?

“Satana. The Devil.”

“It’s hallucinations,” Dr. Bondarenka said. “Very common.”

“I don’t think it’s hallucinations,” Arkady replied. She shot him a look.

“That’s right.” Tymur grasped Arkady’s arm. His grip was so hard that Arkady winced. “That’s right. He was there and I saw him, as clear as I’m seeing you.”

“What did he look like?”

Tymur thought a moment. “I only caught glimpses of his face. I was too frightened to look more. My brother Vadym, he might have seen more. He was there too. I don’t know what happened to him. He was still there when I left.”

“I’ll see if I can find him. Can you describe him?”

“Vadym?”

“No, Satana.”

“He wore a hat. A baseball cap.”

“A turquoise one?”

Tymur smiled, as though Arkady had passed some sort of test. “Then you know him too.”

23

Zhenya rang as they walked to the car.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“You should never ask that question of a pessimist.”

“Too late.”

“The good news, then.”

“I’ve cracked the password on the flash drive you gave me.”

“And?”

“There’s a video file on it. Five minutes long, give or take. It’s all shot at some kind of party, a huge drinking session by the look of it. Near the end, Volkov gets up and makes a speech.”

“Volkov?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s an 1812 gathering?”

“Yes, could be.”

“Do the people in it look like 1812 operatives?”

“As in, do they look like the biggest bunch of thugs you’ve ever seen? Yes.”

“What’s Volkov saying in his speech?”

“That’s the question.”

“How do you mean?”

“The audio quality is terrible. I mean, really terrible. It’s all shot on a cell phone, and a cell phone’s recording capabilities are very basic. Whoever took it was some ways away from Volkov when he was speaking, and there’s so much background noise in the way: voices, movement, some sort of industrial sounds too. Air-conditioning, maybe. That kind of thing. I need to remove all these unwanted sounds before I can even try and enhance Volkov’s voice, but it might not be that easy. I have to equalize it all first, then use gates and compression, then reduce any reverberations and echoes.”

“Whatever you can do will be great.”

“I just don’t want you to think…”

“Don’t want me to think what?”

“That if it takes time, it’s not because I’m slacking.”

“I would never think that.”

“On TV, they do it in an hour flat, including commercial breaks.”

“And on TV, cops solve cases in the time it takes the average detective at Petrovka 38 to make himself a cup of coffee. You don’t need to tell me the limitations of what you’re doing.”

“I guess. How’s it going out there?”

“Ask me in a day or two. You keeping safe?”

“Ask me in a day or two.”

Zhenya’s laugh echoed down the line.

The road into Bucha from the south snaked through pastureland. Just beyond the sign that announced the city limits, a white Ford station wagon sat on the verge. Its tires were flat, and the engine bay was almost completely severed from the passenger compartment. Clothes spilled out onto the ground. Arkady saw that black tape had been placed on its doors to spell out the word “children.” Josh raised his camera and took a few quick shots as they drove past.

A statue of a saint stood at an intersection, watching over a line of yellow newly built row houses awaiting their first occupants. No one in the car spoke. The air felt heavy, charged with the dreadful anticipation of what lay ahead.

The suburbs were empty. No cars on the road, no pedestrians walking briskly along the sidewalk, no babushkas out sweeping snow off their front steps. The streets looked empty but more or less normal and they continued to look normal right up to the point Russian tanks had rolled in. Violence and destruction could be almost total, but they could also be localized. He remembered Moscow’s White House siege in the early years of Boris Yeltsin’s presidency, when Yeltsin had bombed his own parliament. There were tanks, soldiers, roadblocks, and TV cameras, and yet less than a mile away you wouldn’t have known that anything was happening.

They turned a corner, and there it was as though a curtain had been drawn back. Trees were burned and broken like matches. The road was a slalom run of burned-out vehicles: tanks turned on their sides, armored cars mangled by mortar fire, metal twisted into rhomboids. Arkady recognized the street as the one Zhenya had shown him in the time-lapse presentation. This was where a Russian squadron had been ambushed on its way to Kyiv. Two days later, Russian troops returned to crush the city and burned, tortured, and slaughtered more than 1,400 people.

The car bounced and crashed over potholes as Blokhin carefully made his way through the wrecks.

“This is the city center,” Blokhin said, taking a corner wide to avoid another stranded car.

Shop fronts gaped open. Shattered windows were jagged mouths; a trail of women’s clothing was a lolling tongue. Lines of Z’s marched along a wall. There were clusters of V’s too. Z was an abbreviation of a Russian phrase meaning “For Victory,” and V stood for “Strength in Truth.” A young man was painting blue and yellow stripes on detour posts. Ration packs lay on the ground, long since emptied of their food. If the soldiers hadn’t eaten them, then the rats and foxes had.

Blokhin’s face was impassive, but Arkady could imagine his thoughts. A city was not just a collection of buildings and people: it was memories both communal and personal; it was civic pride; it was triumphs and setbacks; it was office work and factory shifts, football matches and concerts. It was home.

Blankets lay over and across most of the burned bodies. Other bodies lay frozen in the snow. Some of the corpses had their hands bound; others had dropped their shopping bags as they fell. There were bodies in playgrounds, in gardens, on street corners. Empty bullet shells were piled up at the side of the road. One cadaver had a wire leading away from it: a booby trap, Arkady guessed, connected to an explosive that would detonate the moment the corpse was moved. He saw all the tiny details: orange gloves on one man’s hands, medicine bottles and a screwdriver in another’s opened shoulder bag. It was unsettling to him that even the bodies on Arveladze’s slab were more recognizable as human beings than these frozen corpses who looked like mannequins taken from a shop display and laid on the snow.

Blackened smoke trails reached up the side of a municipal building. Blinds fluttered in the breeze through broken windows.

“City Hall,” Blokhin said. “They target three things: administration centers, communications infrastructure, and emergency services, making the city ungovernable, making sure people can’t talk to each other, and making sure people die because the ambulances and fire trucks can’t get to them.” He turned left, right, left again, and pulled over to the curb.

“This is the house I grew up in,” he said.

“Do your family still live here?” Tatiana asked.

“No. My parents are dead. I sold it when they died.”

“Who bought it?”

“A pair of sisters. Old, sweet; neither ever married or had children. Come.”

They got out of the car. Tatiana put her hand on Arkady’s arm. He squeezed her fingers. He wanted to find Tymur’s brother, Vadym, to ask whether he had seen the man with the saperka, but he also knew that Tatiana’s story should cover more than his investigation. In any case, one did not exist without the other.

Out in front of the house, colored plastic clothespins perched like exotic birds on an empty clothesline. The door was open. A babushka in a fur coat lay face down in the doorway. One of the sisters, presumably. Her corpse was ringed with empty bottles of vodka.

Josh took pictures. Blokhin led them inside. The other sister was curled up beneath a table, sightless eyes staring up at the table’s underside. Cigarette butts clustered around a dirty mattress that looked to have been dragged in from another room.

There were signs of normalcy: plates neatly stacked in the kitchen and in the living room, books lined up on every shelf and spilling over onto tables and chairs. Arkady imagined these two old women, reading their books every evening, sometimes in companionable silence, sometimes reading passages aloud to each other.

When Arkady looked up, he could see the sky through holes in the floor above. Blokhin gestured around them. The sweep of his arm trailed despair through the air.

“What can you tell people who ask how this happened? Some questions simply don’t have answers. All this, Arkady, and you’re so determined to pursue one killer?”

One killer who led his soldiers to torture and kill, Arkady thought, and who stood for so many. He would get this one because he couldn’t get all the others. To paraphrase Stalin, one killer was a criminal; a thousand killers was a statistic.

When Josh had gotten the pictures he needed, they returned to the car. Neon orange graffiti brightened one side of an armored vehicle down the road: RUSSIAN WARSHIP, GO FUCK YOURSELF! Arkady recognized the quote from something Zhenya had shown him in the early days after the invasion, about Ukrainian defenders on Snake Island refusing an order to surrender.

“Where now?” Tatiana asked.

Blokhin pointed to a riot of arches and golden domes visible over the rooftops.

“When you don’t know where to begin,” he said, “begin at a church.”

24

The priest was called Fedir, and he was driving a backhoe in the middle of an empty field. He stopped the machine and climbed down.

“You know how to operate heavy machinery?” Blokhin asked.

“I was trained for it thirty years ago before becoming a priest. I can still remember the basics.”

“What are you digging?”

“A mass grave, what else? We couldn’t take our dead to the cemetery while the Russians were here. It was too dangerous—too much shelling, too much shooting. Now the Russians have gone, but the city morgue has no power for refrigeration, so we have to bury these people before disease starts to spread. I have no choice but to dig in the shadow of God.”

If God was here in Bucha, Arkady thought, he was a God without compassion.

Blokhin made introductions and explained that Tatiana was trying to get the word out about Bucha for the New York Times.

“By all means, the world should know what is going on here. Please come on in.”

The church was cold and the air was musty. Regardless of denomination, a church always felt as though it needed its windows opened, Arkady thought. But it was clean, tidy, untouched. The Russian troops might have trashed an entire city, but they didn’t dare lay so much as a single finger on a single brick of an Orthodox church. Of course, the Russian Orthodox church was one of Putin’s reasons for the invasion in the first place. Kyiv had been the birthplace of the Orthodox church doctrine at a time when Ukraine was still part of the Greater Russia trinity: Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

“Forgive me for not offering you anything to drink,” Fedir said. “I’ve given what I had to survivors.”

To Fedir, the four of them must have seemed like intruders, trailing eddies of good health behind them as they moved. Three men and a woman who had not lived with fear for weeks on end and who had not needed to hide themselves away merely to make it to the next day.

“Please,” Tatiana said. “It’s on us, not you. We should have brought you something. May I ask what the Russians did when they first arrived?”

“That depends on which Russians you’re talking about. There was a shift. The first soldiers who came, the ones who were driven out by the Ukrainian counterattack, they were scared. You could tell they were. They didn’t want to be here. They asked me why I was still here when nine out of every ten residents had fled before they arrived. ‘Why didn’t you go with them?’ they’d say. Only the old, the infirm, and the stubborn hadn’t made it out. I told them that if they were so dense as to ask that of a priest, they were too dense to appreciate the answer. I had a bottle of horilka—you know, a traditional Ukrainian spirit. They finished it, drinking to dead comrades. One of them came up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry. It’s not us who are fighting. It’s our government that has waged this war.’

“ ‘And yet,’ I said, ‘it’s you who are here, not your government.’

“But the second wave, the ones who retook the city after our counteroffensive, they were different. They were drunk all the time. They’d start drinking first thing. For some of them, that might have been their way of coping, you know. But for others, it just provoked viciousness. They went door to door. They questioned people, smashed up their homes, stole their clothes, their shoes, alcohol, jewelry, money. They said they were examining people’s cell phones to see who was helping the Ukrainian military, but all they did was take the phones and call home to Russia. They shot TV screens for no reason. Sometimes armored vehicles would fire into buildings at random, just because they could. I saw a tank drive over two civilian cars in the middle of the road—for fun, no other reason. Zachistka, they called it. Cleansing. Like they were doing us a favor.”

“Or like it was a religious ritual.”

“Yes. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right. Cleansing. Baptizing. Rebirth.”

A cell phone on the table rang. Fedir glanced at the screen.

“Do you need to answer that?” Arkady asked.

“It’s not mine. And it’s voicemail calling.”

“Whose is it?”

“I don’t know. I found it on the street. The battery was dead, but I charged it up. Look at the last text sent.”

Arkady read. Where are you? Your good luck chain is with me, the amulet as well. We are praying for you. We are waiting for your call. Write us at least two words.

“Whoever that was for,” Fedir said, “they never saw it. You must have seen the bodies on your way here. One day we’ll hold a mass for them, the ones whose names we know and the ones we don’t. None of them deserved to die this way. God sees everything. God knows each person’s name. He doesn’t distinguish people by whether they are living or dead. For him, everyone is alive. As Christians, we believe in resurrection after death. For God, there is no difference.”

Arkady needed to ask, even though it felt too abrupt for comfort. “Do you know a man called Vadym? He has a brother called Tymur.”

“Vadym? I know a few by that name… Vadym… Tymur’s brother. Oh, yes. That Vadym. I think he was one of those defending the school.”

“Which school?”

“School No. 12. You can’t miss it. It’s on Yablunska Street.”

“Thank you.”

Fedir dug into his pocket, brought out a handful of candies, and gave them to Blokhin. “Give these to the children.”

Yablunska, a street named after apple trees. On the outside of the school, someone had sprayed: THIS IS OUR LAND!

A cat stalked through the ruins, head up and tail held high. Tatiana crouched down and held out her hand.

“Every war I’ve ever been to, there are cats,” she said. “Dogs are too nervous; they can’t stand the sound of shelling or any kind of fireworks. They run away. Cats don’t care.” The cat ignored her and marched on toward the body of a pigeon.

“What about pigeons?” Arkady asked.

“They just drop dead. Their hearts literally burst from the shock waves of the artillery. It’s why they had to stop using carrier pigeons in the First World War.”

They went in through the front door of the school. Arkady recognized Vadym immediately. He looked just like his brother. They introduced themselves, and Tatiana explained why they were there. Arkady looked around. The classroom was in ruins. Bright splashes of color on the walls were a mockery of a child’s innocent painting. At a battered desk, a small girl sat on a listing chair and drew dark rectangles that looked like tanks, the sharp lines of a rifle, orange and red scribbles of an explosion. Outside, on the playground, three boys raced around in volleys of shrieks. “Air raid! Air raid! Everybody run!!”

“Before we start,” Vadym said, “let me show you this.”

There was a table blocking the entrance to the basement. He bent down and moved it to one side. When he opened the cellar door, Arkady had a sense that something terrible had happened there, something way beyond the simple inescapable fact of death.

Arkady looked at Tatiana. This was her story, this was why she had come, and she could not turn away.

He went down with her and Josh; Vadym stayed at the top. Josh started by taking pictures of the steps and walls pockmarked with bullet holes. Then an empty water jug, a metal bed frame on its side, broken toys, and, finally, the bloodstains that spread out over the cellar’s cement floor.

They were down there for several minutes, and when they emerged, their faces were pale. Arkady put his arm around Tatiana’s shoulders.

Vadym nodded. “Write that. Tell the world about that.”

“I will,” Tatiana said.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Arkady asked.

“The principal’s office is free.”

They went in and sat amid the debris. Tatiana turned on her tape recorder.

“Your brother told us he saw a Russian soldier beat a man to death with a spade and that you were there too,” Tatiana said.

“I didn’t see him but I know who he is.”

“How do you know?”

“He was here too. We heard gunshots, so we all hid in the cellar. It made no sense to fight them. We had no weapons. The children were crying. They found us, of course, and after shooting blindly into the cellar, killing adults and children, they pulled six of us out and took us outside. ‘Take off your fucking shoes, Banderivtsi,’ they barked. Banderivtsi, like we were Nazis. Putin had told them that they would be welcomed by their Ukrainian brothers and sisters as liberators from the Nazis. So anyone who resisted was a fascist, the kind of person the invasion was meant to eliminate.

“They called the man you’re talking about ‘chief.’ He sat on top of a tank, wearing a baseball cap and passing a bottle of vodka around.

“ ‘We’re freeing you from Nazi oppression,’ he said. ‘We represent the citizens of Bucha. Why are you hiding from us?’

“Across the road, I heard three gunshots. A public execution. ‘Swift justice,’ they called it. Why wait for something to drag through the courts for years when it could be carried out right now?

“They put a grenade to my armpit and threatened to pull the pin. They took an AK-47 and fired it into the ground right at my feet. It was a miracle I wasn’t hit. They tied my hands behind my back, put a bucket over my head, and made me kneel. The chief then took up a shovel and beat the pail on my head until I blacked out. When I came round, I was put in a line with the other guys. They made us turn away from them, and then they shot. How they missed me, I don’t know. I fell forward with the shock of it, and when I realized I was still alive, I knew I had to play dead. There were bodies on top of me and all around. The blood, the smell, the feel of it… I can’t describe. I waited there until it was dark, then managed to free my wrists and crawl over the corpses. They moved beneath me, like they were revenants already. I kept expecting to see a flashlight or hear a shout, but I think they had moved on. I ran to the basement. The teachers who were still alive wouldn’t open the basement door at first. They thought it was a trap. Finally, someone recognized my voice and let me in. This is true, I swear. I’m not inventing this.

“The next night, we moved the dead children and teachers out of the basement and buried them in the woods behind the school. We hid in the basement for weeks. We could still hear the Russian tanks and dared move into the rest of the building only at night. We had no light, no electricity. Luckily, the school had served lunch, so there was enough food. We took candles back to the basement to heat water and cook. Parents came back for their children but many of them were dead and some had been taken away by the Russians.” He paused, overcome with emotion. “It’s all too much. You know what they’ll do with those kids, don’t you? They say they’re ‘evacuating’ them and taking them to ‘camps for health and rest,’ but it’s abduction, plain and simple. They take them back to Russia, parade them as abandoned waifs rescued by the Russians. Then they place them with Russian families and they’re brought up as little Russians.”

The logic was clear because the logic was that of the war itself. Ukraine is part of Russia; therefore Ukraine does not exist; therefore Ukraine has never existed; therefore all Ukrainians are Russian.

“Can you tell me about the man with the shovel?” Arkady asked again.

Vadym nodded. “He was the same man that was on the tank. He was the chief. His soldiers weren’t regular army. They wore the same uniforms, but you could tell they weren’t the same. They were a private army called the 1812. His men would defer to their chief. You know how when there are bad kids at a school and their influence spreads, other kids try to ape them? It was like that. Like the soldiers wanted to gain his approval. Regular Russian troops would rough people up a bit, but when it came to brutality, the 1812 men wanted it for themselves. Beating me around the head was nothing to the chief.” He shuddered with the memory. “And he loved blasting out music to intimidate us.”

“What kind of music?” Arkady asked.

Vadym began to hum. Arkady recognized it instantly, as every Russian would, and in his mind he automatically added cannon fire and church bells.

Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, of course.

25

Tatiana asked Vadym if there was someone else willing to talk to her about the attack on the school. He made a phone call, and soon she was sitting at a school desk with Ostap, one of the old-timers who had been there with Vadym.

“I don’t understand how the Russians could be acting like this,” he said. “It’s what they told us the Nazis did during the Great Patriotic War. I was born during that war. I served in the Red Army during the Cold War,” Ostap said. “We were all given the saperka, and I never really thought about it until one day, when a Spetsnaz guy arrived in our camp. We were never told why he was there or what he was doing, but that night we shared a bottle of whiskey and got to talking. He took my saperka and said it was the single greatest invention in the history of mankind. ‘Oh?’ I said. ‘It’s good, sure, but it’s just a short spade.’ He laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not just a spade.’ In expert hands like his, it was a weapon beyond compare, noiseless and terrible. Every Spetsnaz member was given much more training with the saperka than we ever were. They were taught to use the edge of the spade with precision to split little slivers of wood, cut off the neck of a vodka bottle with a cut so clean, the rest of the bottle stayed intact. They used it as an axe to chop down trees, and then as a combat weapon against knives, bayonets, and other saperkas. They used it as a throwing weapon, with the handle as a lever for the torque, ensuring it always flew true. ‘I have more faith in the reliability and accuracy of my saperka,’ he said, ‘than I do in my Kalashnikov automatic.’ ”

“How did the regular Russian army react to fighting beside this 1812 Group?” Tatiana asked.

“What Vadym told you about the regular soldiers is true. I heard them speak when we were covering the burned bodies and moving all the bodies. They were from the 64th Motor Rifle Brigade and had been ordered to direct and watch us. While we worked, I heard them talking about their leader. I remember not just what they said but their voices as they spoke. With us, they growled and bullied, throwing their weight around and barking orders. But when they talked about him, they were like children talking about a bogeyman. Their voices were hushed. They were scared. They were scared of all the 1812 men, but they were many times more scared of him. They said that even the other 1812 men were wary of him. He had been a Spetsnaz commander in the First Chechen War—you know, the one in the mid-’90s when Yeltsin sent them in and they didn’t know what to do. He’d single-handedly showed the conscripts that, to beat the Chechens, you needed to be even more ruthless and vicious than they were. He was the one who ordered the Samashki massacre, where they sealed off a village at both ends and killed everyone in it. He was there and everywhere else the Russian army went: Georgia, Syria, Donetsk, Luhansk. With his 1812 army alone, he was in Libya, Sudan, Mozambique, Mali, the Central African Republic. They said he trussed opposition fighters up with chains and dragged them behind personnel carriers. They said he threw screaming prisoners out of helicopters, boiled the skin off decapitated heads, and mounted the bleached white skulls on his vehicles. Right from the start, right from the First Chechen War, he had a nickname that never left him: “Ivan the Terrible.”

Ivan the Terrible, Arkady thought. Ivan Volkov, Spetsnaz, 1812. It all fit.

26

Arkady and Tatiana headed back to the Polish border on a bright winter’s day, the air crisp to the point of rawness. The driver was a man whom Blokhin had found for them, and someone he clearly trusted. There was a plastic partition between the driver and his customers, but even so, Arkady and Tatiana spoke quietly in the backseat.

“Why don’t you want me to come back to Moscow with you?” she said.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea. Stay in Warsaw for a while, or a big city like that—Paris or London; I don’t know. Write your article, use Josh’s photos. Everyone in Bucha wants the world to see what the Russians have done to them. Stay somewhere safe while you write their story.”

“I wouldn’t be in any more danger in Moscow than you.”

“Maybe not. But you would be in danger.”

“Why do you have to go back?”

“I have no choice.”

“Of course you have a choice.”

“No I don’t. To influence the Kazasky case, I have to be there, physically present. I have to talk to Victor, aggravate Zurin, tread on Marina’s toes. Make myself a nuisance.”

“You’re good at that.”

He laughed.

“It was meant as a compliment.”

“Then we’re agreed?”

“No.”

Her stubbornness was infuriating.

“Why not? What do you have to gain by coming back to Moscow? You’re putting yourself in needless danger. They’ll throw you in jail.”

“I’ve been in jail before.”

“I know you have. But what good will going to jail do if it means the story won’t be published?”

“Okay, let me ask you something. Say I publish the story and every news outlet picks it up. Other reporters go to Bucha; they’re probably already going. It will be huge for a few days. People will share it on social media. Op-ed writers will fulminate. Politicians and bigwigs will come and visit, put on their serious faces, condemn Russia and say how this must never happen again. But we know it will happen again, sooner or later. Sometime in the future it will be somewhere else. It repeats itself. The names change, but the melody remains the same. That doesn’t really describe it, though, does it? It’s not a melody; it’s a screech.”

“So how do you change the screech?”

“Not by going to the people.”

“But your whole career has been about getting news out to the people.”

“Yes. And look what good that’s done. I’ve spent two decades exposing corrupt leadership and it’s as if nobody cares enough to do anything about it. There’s more corruption now than there’s ever been. Is what happened in Bucha going to change minds? A few, maybe. Right now, everyone is following the war closely. But that will fade, and sooner than people want to admit. They’ll get used to it, and if they don’t know anyone fighting out there, they won’t feel involved. It will become the wallpaper of their lives, a distant war that drags on and on.”

“So,” Arkady said again, “how do you change it?”

“By holding those responsible for it accountable.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do with Ivan Volkov.”

“I know. But that’s not enough. Ivan Volkov didn’t go there in a vacuum and just start smashing people around the head. Who sent him there?”

“His father,” Arkady said, “and how will you prove it?”

“I’m still working on that. But however I do it, I’ll have to be in Moscow. It will have to be face-to-face somehow.”

“What else are you trying to prove?”

“Volkov didn’t just send Ivan to Ukraine on his own initiative. Just as there’s a chain of command up from son to father, there’s a chain of command up from father to his superior.”

Arkady grasped immediately what she meant. “You’re insane.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

She looked out the window at the bare fields and distant mountains, then stretched her arms forward and back as though trying to wake up.

“Did you ever take anthropology at school?” Tatiana asked.

“Nothing so esoteric.”

“I had an interesting anthropology professor who theorized that man is genetically predisposed to violence.”

“How?”

“Well, apparently we all have a small percent of caveman—otherwise known as Neanderthal—in our DNA, and the caveman got what he wanted with violence. It was only when society set rules and laws that punished them, that cavemen learned how to get what they wanted in other ways. He said that a despot feels he can get away with not following the rules because he is so powerful that society’s restraints and laws don’t apply to him. And the more powerful and alienated from society’s rules he is, the more brutal he can be.”

“So on one level we’re civilized but deep down we’re all cavemen?”

“Right.”

Tatiana rested her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes.

“Sometimes,” she said, “in my dreams, I get blown up. Maybe I’ve experienced too much shelling. It always starts with my fingers, weirdly enough. I watch them being torn from my hands; I feel the pain in my joints, one by one and then all at once.”

“That makes sense.”

“Why?”

“Because you write. Your fingers do the work and they get you in trouble.”

Zhenya rang when they were a few miles from the Polish border.

“Let me guess,” Arkady said. “You’re going to ask me if I want the good news or the bad news.”

“Not really.” Zhenya’s voice was shaky, and it wasn’t a fault on the line.

“How do you mean?”

“Actually,” Zhenya said, “I suppose I could break it down like that.”

“Go on.”

“The good news is that I’ve managed to get the sounds off the video on Kazasky’s flash drive. I know what they’re saying. I know what he recorded.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“The bad news is exactly that.”

“Exactly what?”

“What’s on the video. What they’re saying. That’s the bad news. That’s the very bad news.”

MOSCOW

27

It took them three days to get back from Bucha to Moscow, same as the outward journey, and Arkady had worried about Zhenya pretty much all the way. Zhenya had refused to tell Arkady over the phone what he had found. Too risky, he made it clear. Just the acknowledgment that Zhenya had found something seismic made Arkady worry, and that was even before considering Zhenya’s continued involvement with the Black Army. Arkady had only the vaguest idea what an electronic footprint was, but he still feared that Zhenya was leaving one that was too big, and that sooner or later someone would spot it.

It was therefore with some relief that Arkady opened the door onto a perfectly normal tableau: Zhenya, Misha, and Margarita sitting hunched over computers, take-out food cartons strewn across tables and floor.

Arkady and Tatiana washed their hands and splashed their faces. Margarita made tea for everyone. Arkady noticed that Zhenya had had a peephole installed in the front door while they were gone and wondered whether he should be worried that Zhenya was scared or pleased that he was taking precautions.

“Show me,” Arkady said when they were all settled.

Zhenya called up the video.

“It took me a while,” he said, “and I had to mix and match programs to get it. First thing, though: it wasn’t the speech I told you about.”

“The one Volkov makes at the end?”

“Yes. That’s just standard stuff: pride in the motherland, toasts to comrades. I had to play it three times after enhancement to make sure there was nothing more. Then I wondered whether somehow I’d got it all wrong and the entire tape was irrelevant.”

“But then, why would Kazasky have kept it?”

“Exactly. So I watched it all the way through again and I saw this.” Zhenya fast-forwarded the tape to the place he wanted. The camera—which had perhaps been held by Kazasky himself, perhaps by someone else; it was impossible to tell—was moving through a crowd of people. “Here.” Zhenya pointed to the screen. The camera stopped moving suddenly—so suddenly, in fact, that an approaching man had to sidestep smartly, his chest filling the screen for a moment as he brushed past.

“Why does he stop without warning?”

“An obstacle in front of him?”

“Not one that’s visible.”

“He’s talking to someone?”

“Then we’d hear it on the audio.”

Zhenya let the footage run on. After half a minute or so, the camera started moving again. Another minute beyond that, Volkov mounted the stage to applause and cheers.

“The camera stops for thirty-two seconds,” Zhenya continued. “And by ‘stop,’ I mean stop. It doesn’t even really move in place—up, down, left, or right.”

“Whoever’s holding it is remaining deliberately still.”

“Exactly.”

“Trying to listen to something.”

Zhenya nodded. “So I took just this section of the tape and began to work on the enhancement. I’ll spare you the details but I had to isolate and discard several different sound sources before I found what I was looking for.” He opened another file. “This is just this piece of footage, these thirty-two seconds, extracted from the main file and enhanced.”

He pressed PLAY. Arkady heard a voice, still slightly muffled and disembodied, but it was unmistakably Volkov’s voice.

For all his twenty-odd years, he’s played divide and rule, making sure no one person has enough power to mount a serious challenge. And so far it’s worked. But he’s fucked up. You know the intelligence he’s been getting is a crock of shit. The army is weak. It won’t be a quick win. People will soon start demanding a change in the war—not that it stops but that we pursue it more aggressively. And whose job will that be? Ours. I’ll be his savior, and he’ll look weak. Sometime in the future—and I’ll have to get the timing right—we move hard and fast, and he’s gone. Gone as in gone.

Arkady was conscious that his jaw was hanging open. Tatiana looked as though she felt the same way.

“You want to hear it again?” Zhenya said.

“Please.”

Zhenya played it once more. It was no less shocking the second time around. No prizes for guessing who “he” was, the man Volkov had referred to. Everyone who was even vaguely in Putin’s orbit must have been having similar thoughts: not necessarily about usurping him but about how to use their own positions, how to remain in his favor and at least on a par with their rivals. The Kremlin was an Ottoman court, not so much rife with intrigues as positively dependent on them. There was no succession plan because even the merest inkling of succession was a forbidden concept. The vozhd, the strongman, the despot, was all-powerful and immortal, and therefore by definition could not be succeeded or replaced. Opponents spoke wistfully of a palace coup, but who would dare be first above the parapet when they knew they’d almost certainly be denounced, betrayed, and killed?

Someone with a private army of their own, that was who.

Victor chose a bar out in the east of the city, near Kursk Station, in which neither a Petrovka 38 investigator nor an FSB operative would have been caught dead. Arkady maneuvered his way through a phalanx of barflies who hadn’t been sober since Brezhnev was in power. Moscow had thousands of such men, and the continued existence of each and every one was a small miracle. Science was not infallible, Arkady knew. For thousands of years, man had thought the sun revolved around the earth; maybe, in a few millennia’s time, scientists would discover that vodka was actually good for you.

They ordered Baltika beers, which at 4.8 percent alcohol by volume represented a nonalcoholic drink for Victor. “If it’s not 40 percent, then it doesn’t count.”

“Tell me about the case,” Arkady said.

“Case closed.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

Arkady had thought that, after he’d called Marina out on Blokhin, she wouldn’t dare be quite so brazen as to simply effect another blatant cover-up.

“What happened?”

“Remember the Lebedev case?”

“Of course.” Leonid Lebedev had been an opposition politician until last year, when he’d been assassinated on a footbridge within sight of the Kremlin. Arkady had been assigned to the case as representative for the prosecutor’s office and had quickly realized it was all a setup. The FSB had carried out the hit and the Chechens had been blamed, arrested, tried, and convicted. It was impossible that they’d done it. The footbridge in question was in proximity of the Kremlin, which meant that it was under constant surveillance. No one so much as sneezed on it, let alone carried weapons onto it, unless they were authorized to.

“Same as that, but this time with Ossetians.”

“Who are they?”

Victor shrugged. “Couple of brothers. Aslanbek and Akhsarbek Aguzarov. Some poor bastards on the FSB’s radar.” The capital was full of petty criminals from the Caucasus. The FSB kept tabs on some of them, usually on spurious anti-terrorism grounds, and if the number of one or more came up when the authorities were looking for someone to take a fall, then that was the toughest of luck. They could hardly have been more obvious scapegoats if they’d been tied to stakes in fields.

“Couldn’t you stop Marina?” Arkady heard the tone in his voice even as it came out.

Victor took a long swig of Baltika. “She interrogated them without me being there. She changed the time without telling me. I turned up at the original scheduled time to find it was all over. There was the confession: signed, sealed, and thanks for all your help on this case.”

“And Zurin?”

“Zurin was Zurin.”

Zurin was indeed Zurin. There was nothing he did, nothing he thought, that wasn’t aimed at keeping him in the favors of those whose power he craved, resented, feared. It was, oddly enough, one of the few things Arkady appreciated about Zurin: he never let you down. He would always behave as abominably as you had expected.

Two more Baltikas appeared. Arkady hadn’t seen Victor raise a hand, let alone speak to the barman. Perhaps the barman had some sort of alcohol-related ESP. Arkady shook his head. He was fine with the one he already had. Victor slid both new bottles over to his side of the table.

“So that’s it? The Kazasky case is over?”

“Till the trial, sure. Unless they meet with accidents in custody. And you? How have you been?”

Arkady had discussed this with Tatiana, Zhenya, Misha, and Margarita before coming out tonight. They had all agreed that he should tell Victor as little as possible, as much for Victor’s own protection as anything else. Arkady understood the logic behind this, but he still felt disloyal for not telling him. He and Victor had worked together for years, he counted Victor as a friend, and deliberate dishonesty didn’t sit well with him. He had argued with them. They had prevailed.

“Oh, you know. Trying to keep myself busy.”

“Arkady.”

“What?”

“Tell me.”

Arkady smiled. When Victor was sober, he saw things clearly.

“I can’t.”

“You won’t.”

“Same thing.”

“Don’t tell me it’s for my own protection.”

“It’s for your own protection.”

Victor rolled his eyes.

“If Marina’s closed the case and Zurin’s agreed with her, there’s nothing you can do,” said Arkady. “Not from inside Petrovka 38.”

“But you’re going to try and be a hero on your own time.”

“I want to arrest the man who killed Kazasky.”

“ ‘The man’? Just one?”

“Yes. Just one.”

“How’s that?”

“Victor, please.”

“You won’t tell me what’s going on, but a kopeck to a ruble says you’ll be calling me for help.”

“Of course I will. And also…”

“Yes?”

“There’s no way to say this without sounding melodramatic…”

“Is this where you tell me you love me?”

Arkady smiled. “It’s where I tell you that if anything happens to me, it won’t be an accident.”

28

Somehow, Volkov must have known Kazasky had taped his incriminating words. Maybe Kazasky had threatened Volkov with the tape when he went to meet him at the judo club, but even after Kazasky was killed, Volkov wasn’t able to find it.

Arkady knew two things: the first was that Volkov was desperate to find the flash drive before Putin was told what was on it; the second was that Tatiana was constitutionally incapable of seeing a bear without poking it.

“I’ve got a meeting with Volkov tomorrow,” Tatiana said.

She and Arkady were in bed, wrapped around each other. Tatiana had chosen her moment well.

“How did you manage that?”

“Rang his office, said I wanted to interview him.”

“Interview him about what?”

“The course of the war and 1812’s involvement.”

“And he said yes?”

“He did.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he wants to know exactly how much I know.”

Arkady sat up. “And that doesn’t worry you?”

“No.”

Arkady reminded himself that this was a woman without a fear reflex, the perfect subject for a case study in groundbreaking peer-reviewed papers.

“You know how dangerous this is?”

“Of course.”

“And that’s why you’re doing it?”

“No. I’m doing it because it’s important. The danger just happens to be a part of it.”

“Are you going to take any precautions?”

“Arkady, you sound like my mother did when I went out on my first date. And I really, really don’t want to think of you as my mother.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I’m going to meet him in a public place.”

“Where?”

“Hotel Ukraine.”

Arkady laughed. “His suggestion or yours?”

“Both of us suggested it at the same time, if you must know.”

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards? You think he’s going to ask to spend the night with me?”

“No, ‘afterwards’ as in you will be followed wherever you go, and you may get yourself killed.”

Arkady remembered the words of Maxim Dal, a poet who had been Tatiana’s lover before him. “It’s not safe to stand next to a martyr,” Dal had said, and he’d been right. But what else could Arkady do? What did safety matter when placed next to love?

“You remember where you first met me?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Where?”

“Is this some kind of test?”

“Just answer me.”

“In Kaliningrad.”

“And do you remember why I was in Kaliningrad?”

“You fled Moscow after your sister had been killed. She’d been mistaken for you. You lived as her for a while.”

“Right.”

“What’s that got to do with this?”

“Because that’s the only time I’ve ever run from threats, from the danger, from who I am. I was scared. I’m guilty because Ludmila lost her life in my stead. It should have been me. That risk was one I’d chosen to take. She hadn’t. I thought that if I went to live quietly as Ludmila, then perhaps in some way I could atone for it and live like her, live the life she would still have had.”

“It doesn’t work like that.”

Of course, Arkady knew he would go to the meeting with her. When he thought about it, he had as much reason to want some sort of admission out of Volkov as Tatiana did.

“Well,” Tatiana said, “you were officially listed as my protection officer in Bucha, and I’m still alive, so maybe it’s a good idea if you come with me.”

They walked down Ukrainian Boulevard. The poet Lesya Ukrainka loomed above them in bronze, a volume of her works clutched in her left hand. A sign left at the base said, We weep with you every day. At her feet were flowers, and outside a nearby florist a chalkboard read: NO MORE CARNATIONS TODAY. Carnations were symbols of grief.

The geography was revealing, he thought: a boulevard, a hotel, and a statue all with “Ukraine” in their names and right in the middle of Moscow. A sense of ownership. The hotel came closer, loomed above them. Arkady reached for Tatiana’s hand.

“You sure?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

As they walked into the hotel, he had a feeling of dread he couldn’t shake. On his own, he might have turned around and gone back, but he knew Tatiana would never contemplate such a move.

The first person they met was Yuri Spivak, the manager.

“Ah, Mr. Renko. I hope you are well?”

“As well as can be expected. This is my friend Tatiana Petrovna, a reporter from the New York Times.”

“Are you here in an official capacity? I had hoped that case was closed.”

“Not yet, but Tatiana is here to interview Lev Volkov. Maybe that will lead to some answers.”

Spivak gave Arkady a worried look. “He’s expecting you. I believe he told me he would be up on the hotel’s viewing platform. I’ll have someone take you.”

Volkov was waiting for them. Arkady had never liked heights at the best of times, and the way Parkinson’s played havoc with his balance and depth perception ensured that these were very far from the best of times. He didn’t want to let Tatiana down, and in some obscure way he didn’t want to let himself down, either, so he forced himself to walk onto the platform. There were railings all around, and he held on to one. He was perfectly safe. The fall was all in his mind. He could just as easily have been on the ground floor.

Moscow stretched out into the distance. Rooftops were still dotted with snow. Cars caught in traffic jams moved as one long metallic snake. Pedestrians hurried to and fro, hunched against the cold weather.

“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Volkov said. “You know that Stalin himself used to come up here?”

“He can’t have,” Tatiana said.

“Why not?”

“They didn’t even start building until after he’d died.”

Volkov smiled. Arkady guessed that the mistake had been deliberate, a way of seeing whether Tatiana would stand up to him.

“I proposed to my first wife up here,” Volkov said. “Arranged it all in advance.” He indicated a small room abutting the platform. “A restaurant for two people. Isn’t that something? The hotel made me a box for the ring and put a few butterflies in it. When she opened it, the butterflies flew out and around her head. It was beautiful. We stayed here that night. The next morning there was an ambulance out front. An American had been scouring his room for listening devices, noticed a panel under one of the carpets, and unscrewed it. It was holding up the chandelier in the room below. The ambulance was for the woman who’d been hit by the falling chandelier.” Arkady wondered how much of that was true. “Anyway,” Volkov said, “shall we go back inside? It’s getting cold out here.”

They took the elevator all the way back down to the lobby. Volkov’s unsmiling bodyguards led the way to the lobby bar. At this time of day, it was largely empty. Arkady watched the bodyguards as they worked, saw the smoothness with which they checked sight lines, secured space, and assessed threats. A lot of bodyguards in Russia were as much for show as anything else: hired muscle who had no idea how to prevent an attack and would only be marginally useful in reacting to one. Volkov’s protection detail was the real thing. Unsurprising, Arkady thought.

Tea was brought. One of the bodyguards poured, the cups amusingly small in his outsize hands.

Tatiana waited until all the cups were full and then very pointedly swapped hers with Volkov’s. Volkov laughed. “A healthy bit of paranoia never did anyone any harm.”

He didn’t seem offended in the slightest. He was enjoying himself. “So,” he said, “you want to talk about the special military operation?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask what the thrust of your piece is?”

“It’s a look at the role of private military contractors in the conflict. It’s for a Western audience who may not be as attuned to PMCs as we are here.”

“Western audiences have seen them used for many years during the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Private military contractors were usually there to protect civilian workers in those places. They weren’t actively fighting on the ground with the regular army, let alone taking over some of their roles.”

“Only someone very naïve would think that’s what Western contractors were doing. I’ve read your pieces, Miss Petrovna. Naïve you are not. So don’t play the ingenue with me.”

Tatiana ignored the jibe. “And your men?”

“What about my men?”

“They’re fighting in Ukraine alongside the regular army.”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“I’m asking you to confirm what’s already common knowledge.”

“If it’s common knowledge, then why do you need me to confirm it?”

“My editor likes me to.”

Volkov laughed. “Good for your editor.”

Arkady felt he was peripheral to the conversation.

“Your men are in Ukraine, though.”

“If you say so.”

Volkov would be well suited to Putin’s job. He certainly needed little training in a politician’s evasiveness.

“Were your men in Bucha?” Tatiana asked.

“That seems a very specific question for what you said was your piece.”

“It’s also an easy question to answer.”

“My men go where I send them. Where I send them is known to as few people as possible on the grounds of operational security. The need-to-know basis. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, and I’m equally sure you realize it doesn’t extend to the readers of the New York Times.”

“Do you know what happened in Bucha?”

“I’ve read reports.”

“What did the reports say?”

“That our troops entered the city, were forced to retreat, and then came back in greater numbers and conquered the resistance.”

“Would you like to know what really happened?”

“I know what really happened.”

“Those reports aren’t true.”

“I can assure you they are.”

“I’ll rephrase. The very minimum of what they say—first occupation, retreat, decisive second wave—is true. But those reports don’t say how they did it.”

“I’ve been a military man all my life. I know strategy; I know tactics. I know how they did it.”

“Then you won’t mind taking a look at these.” She handed him her phone. “Scroll through.”

They were photos that Josh had e-mailed her and that she’d then saved to her phone’s picture roll. The babushka in the doorway and her sister under the table, the school basement, civilian bodies in the street with their hands tied behind their backs, the mass grave being dug by the church, the cadaver booby-trapped with wire leading to a mine—they were all there.

Volkov scrolled through, taking his time, and handed the phone back to Tatiana.

“They’re all genuine,” Tatiana said.

“I’m sure they are.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what do you think?”

“I think the Ukrainian forces have done a very good job of pulling the wool over your eyes.”

Tatiana gave a snort laugh. “You’ve got to be joking.”

Volkov said nothing. His eyes were those of a basilisk. He let the silence stretch, and stretch, and stretch, knowing Tatiana would feel obliged to break it sooner or later.

“That’s crazy,” Tatiana said. “You think the Ukrainians did all this? To their own people?”

“Of course.”

“I guess I’ll just have to write the story the way I saw it.”

“Do you have any evidence it wasn’t them?”

“Apart from all the survivors I interviewed who told me that every atrocity had been carried out by Russian troops, you mean?”

“Of course the survivors would say that. Most of them are part of it all, this great lie propagated by Zelensky and his people to con the West into taking sides. A hoax, a staged production. A provocation.”

“And the ones who aren’t?”

“The ones who aren’t what?”

“The ones who aren’t part of it.”

“Too traumatized and ashamed to tell you—you, of all people, a Russian—to tell you the truth. To admit it was their own side which did this to them.”

Once more, Arkady thought, you needed only one book to really understand Russia. Not Tolstoy or Pushkin, not Dostoyevsky or Lermontov, but one his mother used to read to him as a child: Through the Looking-Glass, otherwise known as Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.

Tatiana flicked through her phone and found some more photos, screenshots this time, of advertisements for T-shirts she’d found. Some were adorned with a V or Z; others had the slogan Slaughter in Bucha. She held them up so Volkov could see. “What do you think of those?”

Volkov shrugged. “People wear what they want to wear.”

Arkady glanced across at Tatiana. Anger was Tatiana’s fuel. Whenever she became angry, the skin at the edges of her nostrils grew white. It was white now. He watched her hesitate—not through lack of decisiveness but simply to balance all the options one final time before she committed herself completely and took the plunge.

“Perhaps you would like to see this video,” she said.

For a moment Arkady wondered which video she meant: the one of Ivan with the saperka in Bucha, or the one Zhenya had managed to extract from Kazasky’s flash drive? Both were incendiary, but the latter exponentially more so than the former, if only for the fact that Ivan himself was not necessarily identifiable on the Bucha one.

It was the Bucha one she had chosen. Volkov’s face was a mask as he watched. Arkady’s right hand began to shake as it often did when he was nervous.

“The murder weapon is one used for exactly that purpose by Spetsnaz operatives,” Tatiana said. “Several witnesses say the killer was from your 1812 company.”

“1812 contains many former Spetsnaz operatives.”

Volkov checked his watch, opened his mouth to say something, seemed to think better of it, and then began to speak anyway. Whether he said what he had been going to say originally or something totally different, Arkady couldn’t tell.

“What is Spetsnaz? No, don’t say ‘special forces.’ Spetsnaz is way more than that. It’s a closed society, an elite society, and its members live permanently at the outer edges of society. You both believe that people can be encouraged to live according to the positive sides of their natures. You know what humans are capable of, but you prefer to believe that this is the fault of circumstance or corruption. A man who serves in Spetsnaz has no illusions about human nature. He has no optimism, no hope in a promised land or a shining city on a hill. He believes wholeheartedly in the depravity of human beings. He has seen it hundreds of times, in others and in himself. He accepts that there are examples of altruism and self-sacrifice but that these come from people untouched by poverty and suffering. He’s a man who trusts no one, relies on no one. That way he can never be caught out or disillusioned. Regular army soldiers will talk of placing their lives in their comrades’ hands. A Spetsnaz man never would. His credo is ‘Never trust, never beg, never fear.’ He is a dictatorship of one who believes in force, not law. His training, his mindset—his entire way of living—is geared to a single idea: Destroy the enemy. And this makes him completely free. He has no constraints, no ethics, no morality, and no guilt.”

Tatiana opened her mouth to reply, paused, held still. Arkady knew what she was doing: weighing the options, deciding whether to dig deeper.

“What are your ambitions?” she asked, and there it was. She was going for broke.

“My ambitions?”

“Beyond running 1812, I mean. High office, perhaps? A ministry?”

“I have all the responsibility I need right now.”

“Not really.”

No, Arkady thought. Back away. Step back.

“A man like you,” Tatiana said, and Arkady closed his eyes, “a man like you—I would be surprised if your ambitions stopped anywhere short of the summit.”

Volkov shimmered double in Arkady’s vision, stabilized, then shimmered again. A wave of dizziness broke over him and he grabbed the edge of the table. He forced himself to sit back and concentrate on what Volkov was saying. Tatiana’s eyes were beginning to glaze over. It felt very hot in there. Volkov’s voice was sounding increasingly distant, as though he were walking away or speaking from behind a thick pane of glass.

“You can imagine what effect this has on a Spetsnaz man, psychologically. He carries an enormous reservoir of malice, aggression, malevolence. Imagine a thunderhead just before the storm breaks. He can release some of that energy from time to time. He trains, he fights, he goes looking for women, but his arena is the battlefield; that’s where the thunderhead bursts. What did you see in Bucha? You saw atrocities, crimes against humanity, all the words you use to describe things beyond the limits of your comprehension. The Spetsnaz man sees none of that.”

Arkady took his teacup in both hands and took another sip. He couldn’t taste the tea; he could only barely register that he was drinking liquid at all. His mouth was numb and tingling, as if he had just received a shot of novocaine. Now his fingers were tingling—his hands too. Tatiana was looking at him with wide eyes, her mouth open, as though she were trying to say something to him. No, he realized, her mouth was open because she was trying to breathe.

Volkov was watching them with what appeared to be vague curiosity. Arkady saw a waiter pass by the edge of the room and begin to run to get help. Arkady thought, Please get help. The thirst roared in his throat, and his limbs felt as though they were being flayed. He felt his body jerk and convulse; he had no control and fell to the floor. He tried to keep his eyes on Tatiana even as his vision began to dull. There was fear in her eyes, and the sight frightened him, because if Tatiana was scared, there was no hope.

Volkov’s bodyguards approached. Arkady’s helplessness was its own kind of freedom. There was nothing he could do. The bodyguards could finish him off; they could try to help him; they could leave him alone. Being capable of nothing was as liberating as being capable of everything.

Tatiana was out of her chair, collapsing to the floor, reaching for him. Arkady saw her hand in his, but he could not feel it.

29

Arkady was on the ceiling, looking down at the emergency room. It was, he thought, the strangest thing he had ever experienced. He was up here, so how could he be down there at the same time? But there he was, lying on the operating table with his eyes closed and doctors buzzing around him. Definitely him.

His chest was bare. The doctors were pressing down on it with what looked like a pair of small irons, as though his skin needed its wrinkles removed. He saw his body jerk, but he felt nothing as it did so.

“Just give up,” one of the doctors was saying. “He’s gone.”

“No,” another replied. “He’s still there. I know it.”

Arkady wanted to swoop down and kiss the doctor who still had faith in him.

Flames were inside, consuming him from within, crisping and blackening his internal organs while leaving his skin untouched. There were people all around, but none of them had seemed to notice that there was anything wrong with him, and whenever he tried to tell them, the words came tumbling out in a language that neither he nor they understood.

The doctors were talking about something called the Glasgow Coma Scale. Arkady was scoring three on it. He had no idea whether that was bad or good. The doctors repeated the number in clipped tones, and their expressions bloomed with concern. Arkady figured that, on balance, three was unlikely to be good. As the number of people to share a bottle of vodka, it was perfect. Glasgow scale, not so much. The Glasgow scale was therefore unlikely to be about vodka. Did people even drink vodka in Glasgow? No. Glasgow was in Scotland, so they drank whiskey.

He felt weightless, untethered to life. No one was telling him what to do or where to be. He was hanging suspended deep in a sea of black. The darkness was not merely an absence of light; it was alive, seeking out light and sucking it in. A word swam into his mind, swam away, came back again. Vantablack. He turned it over, examined it, tested the sound. Vantablack. He’d read it somewhere. It was the darkest black ever invented. Some chemical company had come up with it.

The word twisted away from him. A line came in its place. I’ve got the light at the end, I’ve got the bones on the mast. It made no sense, but he repeated it to himself anyway, trying out different stresses and cadences. The line was from a song, the line was from a poem, the line was just some nonsense he’d come up with.

I’m not supposed to be here, he thought.

Arkady was a vagrant, shunning the safe harbor of a corporeal home and wandering the world. His world was a mosaic, a kaleidoscope, an endless sorting and reordering of memories. Life was but a dream; perhaps dreams were but a life. Maybe this was the real world and the world he had always assumed to be real was in fact nothing more than his own mental construct. And why was consciousness in any way superior to subconsciousness?

He was aware of trying to find his way back to the surface, and he was aware that there were others trying to bring him back, but sometimes he was tempted simply to stay where he was and wander the length and breadth of his mindscapes.

Time was irrelevant; it was a split second and an eternity all at once.

It was as though he were viewing the world through a lens set to an extra-wide aperture, with the light splashing in abundant orange rills but the focus a little soft. There was a lamp, the base bulbous and swooping beneath a partitioned shade, but it was wrong: the perspective was all off; it didn’t look like it should have. Arkady watched as the lamp grew wider and deeper, filling his entire field of vision before passing straight through him and vanishing when he turned round to see where it had gone.

He was racing through the desert, then coming to a halt at a house for a moment before setting off again. This was repeated several times, every one of them in a prefabricated suburban house with sand and scrub stretching far away. Each house had only three walls, and he would enter and leave through the open space where the fourth wall and the door should have been.

He had read about quantum physics and parallel worlds, the coexistence of different realities. He had listened to a radio program about epigenetics, the passing on of trauma at a cellular level. Could that be happening to him?

Alternate lives stretched out ahead of him like forks in a road. He was wearing blue latex gloves and giving vaccines to African children in a desert tent. His house was built on stilts in the middle of a lake. His father was still alive, the same age as he had been at the time of his death, and disavowing all the things of which he’d once been so proud. Arkady was a librarian, a firefighter, an advertising executive, the only man in an otherwise all-female road gang out on the Kazakh steppe.

He was in a hospital bed, an altogether less exotic location. He had experienced sleep paralysis before, the sensation of waking up only to find himself still asleep, of feeling himself conscious, walking around a room—even going to the bathroom and talking to other people—but he would gradually realize that it was all a trick of the brain. He had tried to jerk himself awake, force his body to snap out of the fog, but that never worked. Sometimes it had simply taken him to another level of sleep. It rarely happened at night, more often during daytime naps, but when it did happen, he learned just to relax and wait it out. He would wake in his own time in the real world.

He woke, and woke again, and woke again, a diver coming up from the deep depths to the surface. The hospital bed was still there.

The boundaries between reality and his imagination blurred. Arkady let himself slide under again. He woke, slept, woke, slept. Each time he came back to the hospital bed, the crisp white sheets, the smell of antiseptic all around, a tower block visible through a sliver of window away to his right. Sometimes Victor was there, sitting silently next to the bed. Sometimes there was a doctor or a nurse.

Now Zhenya was here, his face twisted in concern.

Arkady had dealt with psychotic people in the past, men and women who were obviously hallucinating, yet he had told them with complete sincerity that what they were seeing and hearing was not real. He’d told them he understood but he hadn’t—not really, not until now.

Images came back to him in flashes. Volkov at the hotel with cups of tea. The bodyguards. Tatiana reaching out to Arkady as she fell.

Now Victor was here again. The doctors and the nurses.

It took Arkady three attempts to get the words out.

“Where’s Tatiana?”

He saw the expressions on their faces, the surprise and concern.

“She’s here in the hospital, Arkady,” Victor said. “She’s alive, but she’s not in a good way.”

Toxicology reports showed that Arkady and Tatiana had been poisoned. The official Latin name of the poison was Gelsemium elegans: the more common name was heartbreak grass, due to its ability to trigger cardiac arrest. Both had found it hard to breathe and would have died had the waiter not found Spivak in time to call Emergency Services. They had been intubated immediately before their lungs shut down. Arkady came out of his coma after five days, Tatiana was still in hers. She was younger than Arkady, she wasn’t suffering from Parkinson’s, her state of health was in every way better, but, as the doctors liked to say, “The mind is unpredictable.” Besides, she had swallowed more of the poison than he had.

His subconscious might be playing all kinds of surreal tricks on him, but it would never tell him Tatiana was close to dying unless she really was. The magnitude of the revelation was in itself the proof. It was so enormous that he could see only a small part of it at any one time, as though he were watching an elephant pass by a tiny window.

There were men, especially in Russia, who not only accepted anger but embraced it, cultivated it, nurtured it, used it to ignite themselves. Arkady had never been one of them. He had felt anger to be counterproductive and wasteful, pointlessly rooted in machismo rather than something constructive. But now, for maybe the first time he could remember, he felt it. It was a pure blue point of icy fury, cold and vengeful.

Late at night, when Arkady felt strangely wakeful, Victor pulled his chair close to the bed and spoke low enough not to be overheard.

“There’s a cop in the corridor outside,” he said.

“One of ours?”

“Yes, twelve hours on, twelve hours off. There’s one outside Tatiana’s door too.”

Arkady didn’t need to ask why. The heartbreak grass had been meant to kill both him and Tatiana, and chances were that whoever had done it would want to come back and finish the job.

“Volkov?” he asked.

“He’s alive. Totally unaffected. It was in the tea you and Tatiana drank, but not in the cup he drank from.”

“Not surprising.”

Arkady remembered Tatiana swapping her own cup with his just to be sure. Had Volkov bet on her doing that, or had the attack really been aimed at him all along? If so, why poison Arkady and Tatiana too? To disguise the real target by poisoning all three? No, because, in that case, why not poison three cups instead of two? Had Volkov even drunk any of his tea? Arkady couldn’t remember.

“How often is heartbreak grass used?” Arkady asked.

“Not often. The Chinese have been known to use it now and then.”

“Hard to get hold of?”

“Easier than polonium-210. Harder than arsenic.”

“And more showy.”

“Yes.”

“Showy” suggested government involvement, which in this case meant FSB. If you simply wanted to get rid of someone, shooting was the quickest, easiest, and most reliable way to do it. Poison was trickier to access and execute, but poison sent a message.

“Are you involved in the investigation?”

“Yes.”

“They didn’t try to stop you?”

“They tried. But I said that since neither you nor Tatiana were senior government figures, there were no national security implications. Zurin backed me.”

“He did?”

“He did. He actually seemed quite upset at the prospect of your death.”

“I doubt that.”

“He did. I distinctly saw him grimace, at least once.”

“Probably trapped gas.”

Victor laughed.

“Have you found out anything?”

“We went over the hotel with a fine-tooth comb. Heartbreak grass isn’t radioactive, so it doesn’t show up or linger on surfaces the way polonium-210 would. We interviewed all the waiters, barmen, and other staff on shift that day. None of them saw a thing.”

“Genuinely didn’t see a thing, or lied about it because they had been paid off or intimidated?”

“Who knows?”

“What did Spivak say about it all?”

“He’s the one who called the ambulances, but I think he would quite happily never see our faces again. He’s not going to add us to the hotel loyalty list, that’s for sure.” Victor paused.

Arkady looked at him. Victor’s face swam out of focus. Arkady blinked and it was back.

“What are you not telling me?” Arkady asked.

“Nothing.”

“How long have we worked together?”

“Years. Decades.”

“Right, so I know when you’re not telling me something. What aren’t you telling me?”

Victor sighed. “I’ll tell you when you’re feeling stronger.”

“I’m feeling fine.”

“Liar.”

“Okay. But I’d still like to know.”

“You could give a mule lessons in stubbornness, you know.”

“So I’ve been told.”

Victor reached into his bag, brought out a manila envelope, and handed it to Arkady. The back was stiff cardboard, and on the front was written PLEASE DO NOT BEND.

There was a photograph inside, blown up to A4 size and losing a fair amount of resolution in the process, but it was clear enough. It was a still from surveillance footage with the time and date in the bottom right-hand corner, the exact time and date of Arkady and Tatiana’s appointment with Volkov. Arkady saw his own face and that of Tatiana’s. The back of Volkov’s head was between them and the camera, and they both were listening to whatever he was saying.

“There.” Victor pointed to a spot at the top of the picture, behind Arkady and Tatiana. A woman’s face in profile as she walked past the table where the tea had been served from, close enough for Arkady to have reached out and touched her if only he’d known she’d been there. A woman who surely had no business being in that particular place at that particular time, or at least a woman who had no legitimate reason to be there. He recognized her instantly. He’d worked with her, sparred with her, slept with her: Marina Makarova.

30

Tatiana was a road map. Lines snaked to and from and all around her, carrying fluids in and out, measuring her pulse and blood pressure, helping her breathe. Machines hummed, screens flickered. Her chest rose and fell in shallow measures, and behind those closed eyes there could have been everything or nothing.

Arkady sat in a wheelchair by her bed, holding her hand. It was warm, which was the first and most important thing. Warmth meant life.

Talk to her as you normally would, the nurses had said. Just chat about your day, keep the tone conversational, and be positive at all times.

“Positive at all times”? Arkady thought that if Tatiana heard him being “positive at all times,” she really would think she’d died and gone over to the other side.

He sat and spoke to her as naturally as he could, which was to say, not naturally at all. He felt absurdly self-conscious, as though just out of sight, the nurses were listening and giggling at his awkwardness. He started, stopped, started again.

“Remember when you asked me why Hamlet was the most popular Shakespeare play in Russia?” He paused. “I told you I thought it was because it was dramatic and romantic. ‘No,’ you said, ‘it was because Russians like to see everyone die.’ ”

Carrying on a one-sided conversation made him imagine what Tatiana might be thinking and what she might say. It didn’t take long before he felt he was actually talking with her. He told her he could stop being an investigator and she could stop being a journalist; they could live quietly instead of seeking out danger. He knew she would disagree and say they wouldn’t last a week together like that. He continued to argue his point until suddenly the spell was broken by a nurse who came in to change Tatiana’s drip.

He knew he had allowed his imagination to go too far. It was time to go back to his room. He was used to other people deceiving him, but he really should draw the line at kidding himself.

They let Arkady go home three days later. Victor went with him, announcing that he was going to stay at Arkady’s apartment for the unforeseeable future. Was there even room for him, with Zhenya and with Misha and Margarita, who often stayed late into the night? It didn’t matter. They would make room. Victor was not leaving Arkady’s side except to go to work.

The doctors had warned Arkady that he would be far from normal for a while.

“Parkinson’s will exacerbate your ability to walk in the beginning,” they said, “and you won’t be able to go up or down steps unless there’s a rail for you to hang on to. You will feel exhausted all the time and you’ll be moody and emotionally labile. Also, your short-term memory will be shot.”

“Is that all?”

They didn’t seem to get the joke.

Everything they told him had been true. His inability even to do the simplest thing without feeling as though he’d climbed a mountain was frustrating. He had to write things down to remember them but then found that he couldn’t read his own writing. He could have texted himself but couldn’t deal with the smartphone. He wanted to wreak vengeance on Volkov and Marina, but he knew he had to bide his time because right now he couldn’t have wrought vengeance on a chocolate cake.

Marina didn’t know that they knew she had been at the hotel that day. Victor had been alone with the technicians when going through the surveillance footage, and he had asked for two dozen separate still pictures in order not to make it obvious that there was only one that he really wanted. At the time, Victor had wondered why she hadn’t insisted on leading the investigation, knowing that he might uncover her presence, but he decided that maybe she thought she would give herself away by steering the inquiries one way or another, or maybe she just thought they weren’t clever enough to catch her. She was a professional: she must have known where the cameras were. She had been caught on camera for only a second. It had been sheer chance that he’d seen her on the footage at all. Either way, now Arkady and Victor had the element of surprise, and they needed to use it wisely.

There was one thing Arkady couldn’t yet work out, though, and that was whether Marina was working with Volkov or against him. Had the poisoning been aimed at him and Tatiana all along, and, if so, was this an official FSB operation or off the books? Or had Marina been aiming at Volkov all along? It was possible that the footage Zhenya had uncovered had found its way to the FSB and he and Tatiana had been unintended collateral damage.

Saran rang. Her voice was breathy, the words tumbling out in great rushes. She’d just heard that he and Tatiana had been poisoned, and she couldn’t believe it. He must know how devastated she was by the possibility of his death, how kind Tatiana had been to her, how much she and everyone in Buryatia had appreciated her article about the funerals, what an unfathomable tragedy it all was, and on and on and on.

Arkady let her talk. He dozed off, woke, dozed again. She was still talking. He was only vaguely conscious of what she was saying, but that didn’t matter. Her voice was a warm bath of comfort in his loneliness, a memory of the time he’d spent with both Tatiana and Saran out at Lake Baikal, where the ice was turquoise and sat atop long columns of cotton-white methane bubbles that stretched down into the darkness.

Zhenya and Victor took Arkady for walks around the block. He loved being outside on a sunny day and breathing fresh air, but walking was a slow painful progress. When they brought him back, he collapsed into bed and slept for hours.

Zhenya sought out different ways to engage Arkady. He brought his computer in to show Arkady footage of Ukrainian refugees being taken in by European countries. There was one clip that Arkady asked to watch again. It featured two Ukrainian children going to a school in Italy for the first time, and Arkady felt as though he could fly there as easily as he’d roamed the desert in his coma. After he watched it for a third time, he needed to rest again.

The next day Zhenya sat Arkady at the kitchen table and put a laptop and microphone in front of him.

“What are these for?” Arkady asked.

“For you to record.”

“Record what?”

“Things to say to Tatiana.”

“I’ve already been talking to her.”

“This isn’t talking to her.”

“Then what is it?”

“Think of it as making an audio scrapbook for her. A photo album in words.”

Arkady gestured at the equipment. “So, what am I supposed to do?”

“Exactly what I said. What does Tatiana like? What are her favorite books, quotes, movies, songs? Memories of things you’ve done together. Just talk about them into the microphone. Read passages. Don’t worry about stumbling over words or anything like that: I’ll clean it all up in the edit, and if you tell me about her favorite music, I can add that in.” He squeezed Arkady’s shoulder.

It took him the rest of the day, though it would have been quicker if he hadn’t had to keep resting. He spoke until he was hoarse and hoped that the hoarseness itself would register with Tatiana, make her realize how desperately he wanted to reach her. He quoted Tatiana’s favorite poet, Anna Akhmatova, a woman who had refused to leave the country after 1917 and who openly opposed Stalin all her life. Her lover, Nikolay Punin, was in and out of the Gulag for opposing Stalin and finally died there in 1953. “I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.”

He recalled their time together on the beach in Kaliningrad where they had first met, the wind whipping their faces as screeching gulls rode gusts of wind above them. Sky, sea, and sand became an abstract painting in soft bands of color. The dunes were alive, changing shape as the wind blew them this way and that. The sand hid roads and revealed them again, piled up in houses, got in where it wasn’t wanted, and acted as a persistent irritant.

“Remember?” Arkady asked.

The beach cabin she had taken him to, all weathered paint and old mattresses, the place where she and her sister Ludmila had come every summer as children. He had poured sand between her breasts and onto her stomach and wondered how someone like her even existed.

“Have you ever looked at sand through a magnifying glass?” she had asked him. “It’s so many different things. Quartz, seashells, miniature worm tubes, spines.”

He wanted to stay there with her forever. He talked about how she had surprised him in Sevastopol by total chance. They hadn’t seen each other for a long while, had even lost contact, but it was as though she had never left.

A man thinks he is over a lover, that he has wiped her from his memory, and when he sees her again, he knows that he has never been free of her. He’d taken her number out of his phone to resist the temptation to call, and when she had offered to give it to him again, he found he could still remember it.

“How annoying for you.” She had smiled.

“Very,” he had agreed.

31

Arkady began to feel stronger if not exactly better the following week.

What would Tatiana want him to do? Her entire life was about exposing injustice, and there was still plenty to do on that front. He had all her notes from Bucha, unsorted and unpublished. The New York Times had run some of Josh’s pictures as a photo essay, with Josh’s own captions beneath. Better than nothing, but not the kind of coruscating prose Tatiana would have made from them.

Tatiana wanted to prove a chain of command up to at least Volkov and, if everything went her way, Putin himself. Whether or not that was possible was another question. For all her drive and intelligence, she hadn’t really been sure how best to go about it, and if she hadn’t been sure, then Arkady wondered whether he could do any better.

He was still thinking about it when there was a knock at the door.

Victor was in the bathroom, and Zhenya had his headphones on as he searched for the locations of Russian soldiers. Arkady got up and walked to the door—slowly, but maybe a little less slowly than the day before. Marina’s face filled the fish-eye lens of the door peephole. There were two men on either side of her. The last time she’d been to this apartment had been more than a decade before, and that hadn’t exactly been in her capacity as a member of the FSB. This visit was, by the look of it, a long way from a social call.

He thought quickly. Marina didn’t know that Victor had discovered the picture of her at the hotel, so her visit couldn’t have anything to do with that. She might be there on behalf of Volkov, but the men with her looked more like FSB operatives than 1812 mercenaries, so why bring them along? Which left another possibility: that she was here for Zhenya. He could tell them to go away, but he got the impression that these weren’t the kind of people who would just happily come back another day.

“Hold on,” he said through the door.

He couldn’t let them in while Zhenya’s screen was visible, nor could he let them hear him alerting Zhenya. To go over from the door to Zhenya’s computer, tap him on the shoulder, get him to remove his headphones, and tell him the FSB were at the door would take long enough to arouse suspicion.

There was a small table by the door, and on it was a tray full of keys. Arkady picked up the nearest bunch and threw them at Zhenya. It was a throw that, before Parkinson’s, he would have made without even thinking, let alone without difficulty, but now his arms were weak and his aim unsteady, and the keys fell short of Zhenya and onto the floor. Zhenya didn’t notice.

The door had a chain lock on the inside. He moved the head of the chain within the track, loud enough for Marina to hear and assume he was being compliant. With his other hand he picked up the next bunch of keys, took a breath, tried to summon his strength, and threw them at Zhenya.

They made it, just about, glancing off Zhenya’s knee as they fell. Zhenya looked up and across at Arkady in puzzled irritation. Arkady gestured toward the door.

Zhenya understood immediately. His fingers blurred with the speed of his typing. “Arkady, open the door,” Marina said.

Arkady rattled the chain. “I’m doing it. Chain’s stiff.”

Zhenya nodded. Arkady unlatched the chain—it took him a couple of tries even when he wasn’t pretending—and opened the door.

“This is a surprise,” Arkady said.

“A pleasant one?”

“That depends on why you’re here.”

“To talk to your son.”

Arkady gestured to her companions. “You need five people for that?”

“No. I will talk to your son, and these men are here to remove any equipment I deem necessary.”

“You’ll have a warrant for all this, of course.”

“Warrantless searches are legal in urgent cases that could lead to serious crimes, including cases where the authorities have information about a possible national security threat.”

“Since when?”

“New law passed last week. Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, section 143, paragraph 2.b. We’re at war, Arkady, or haven’t you noticed?”

The four men swept past him and into the apartment. Marina followed them in. A few quick strides took them over to the table where Zhenya sat. Each of his screens was blank. The FSB men moved fast, unplugging hard drives, handing monitors to each other, packing equipment into plastic crates. Zhenya was still, watching the activity hum around him with an air of amused curiosity as though he were a naturalist observing an exotic caterpillar. For as long as Arkady had known him, Zhenya would have been on his feet, protesting loudly, and would have gotten hit in response.

Marina crooked her index finger at Zhenya. The casual condescension of the gesture was infuriating, but then Arkady looked at Zhenya and saw that instead of being outraged, he remained calm. Zhenya was so confident in the computer program he had concocted that he wasn’t afraid or even angry.

32

Arkady placed the headphones gently on Tatiana’s head, adjusting them so they sat flush on her ears. Zhenya had put together an audio file an hour long from everything Arkady had recorded.

“The headphones have got a wireless connection,” Zhenya had said. “All you have to do is press the PLAY icon on the file.”

“Even I can do that,” Arkady said.

It was an act of faith, believing that she was still in there somewhere. Hearing was the last sense to go, Zhenya had told him, so if anything was going to work, it was this. And if anybody was capable of coming through something like this, it was Tatiana. The Tatiana lying here, an inert body of flesh, organs, and bones, was not Tatiana. The Tatiana he knew would be kicking upward from the depths of her oblivion, striking for the surface, glowering with determination to come back. Then again, maybe it was peaceful in there. Maybe she was roaming through neural pathways of summer flowers, uncovering the meaning of life and connecting with spirits.

He matched his breathing to hers and held her hand, trying to sense any response from her skin. He knew that, because he wanted it too much, he could convince himself of anything, especially things that weren’t actually there. He tried to relax, to float with her. As an investigator, he had always tried to let reality follow the facts rather than the other way around. Now he tried to be as blank as he knew how, to be open to whatever came, and if there was no response, there was no way he could make something out of nothing, no matter how much he tried.

They held Zhenya for three days before releasing him: three days in which Arkady and Victor tried to pull in whatever favors they thought they could and found at every turn that their currency was not what it once had been—at least, not in the hallways of Lubyanka. Arkady even ventured down in person to the black hole, knowing that he might be arrested himself and not much caring if he was. He had been hiding out in his apartment and at the hospital, afraid that the FSB or the 1812 would try and finish off what they had started with the heartbreak grass, but sitting around waiting for assassins was not the key to his peace of mind. They might have got Tatiana, he thought, but he would not let them get Zhenya too.

He waited in the reception hall of the Lubyanka when Zhenya came out. Arkady had been there to see Marina, to try and persuade her to release Zhenya. At first he thought that his visit and Zhenya’s release were connected, but it didn’t take long for Zhenya to set him straight.

He was silent until they got some distance from the building, and even then he insisted on speaking only as they walked.

“They have nothing,” he said. “For the time being, that is.”

“If this involves computers, explain it to me as you would explain it to a five-year-old.”

“Okay. First things first: they knew what they were doing. Not a surprise, really, but still important. I shut everything down when you alerted me that they were on the other side of the door. For all they knew, I could have inserted some code into the boot-up procedure which could have destroyed data without them even being aware of it.”

“ ‘Code’ and ‘boot-up’?”

“Basically, I could have instructed the machine to self-destruct when they opened anything up on the computer.”

“Right.”

“They didn’t ask me for the password because I could have given them something which would have activated that. So they removed all the hard drives, copied over the data verbatim, and tried to break into it that way. All this time Marina was asking me about the Black Army, who was in it, where we held our meetings, things like that. She said if I gave up some names, she would make it easy for me. I kept telling her I didn’t know what she was talking about. I was in a cell with five other guys, and I figured at least one of them might be an informer, so I kept my mouth shut. But that made me think: I was in a two-man cell, and there were six of us in there. They’ve got so many people in custody for so many different things that they can’t cope. So when they came back and asked for the password after a couple of days, I knew I had encrypted it well enough for them not to have found anything, so I gave them the password, acting like I was surprised it had taken them so long to ask. And here’s the thing: all the Black Army info is kept on cloud servers, not individual hard drives, and since I’d been offline for more than twenty-four hours, the other members knew to change the access codes to those servers. We all have a protocol for exactly this kind of situation. If the FSB goes into my hard drive, they’ll find nothing other than my usual stuff, and if they do come across a password I used for a Black Army server, by the time they try to access it, the password doesn’t work and the information’s vanished into thin air.”

“How did they get to you in the first place?”

“Who knows? Maybe they picked up some internet traffic somewhere.”

“And Misha and Margarita?”

“Never mentioned them.”

“And they would have if they had known they existed.”

“Exactly.”

“You know they won’t stop here, though.”

“I know.”

“They never do. They have their suspicions and they’ll keep chiseling away at them.”

“It’s not all good news.”

“No?”

Zhenya reached into his pocket, brought out a piece of paper, opened it, and handed it to Arkady. “Marina gave this to me personally. Said that if she couldn’t get me for Black Army stuff, maybe the regular army would do the trick.”

Arkady read:

FINAL WARNING.

You are mandated for military service and have seven days from receipt of this letter to report to your nearest enlistment center at 44 Yablochkova Street. Opening hours: 0900–1800 Monday to Saturday, 0900–1600 Sunday. Nearest metro stations: Timiryazevskaya, Dmitrovskaya.

NO EXEMPTIONS WILL BE GRANTED.

By order of S. K. Shoigu, Minister of Defense.

“I’ve gotten you off it before,” Arkady said.

“This is different. She’s put my name on the priority list. And she also asked how long I thought I would last in an infantry unit if my comrades knew I had been tracking Russian soldiers online.”

The law said that conscripts couldn’t be deployed outside Russia, but Arkady knew that the law could be overturned in a moment if deemed necessary. Besides, by the logic of the “special military operation,” Ukraine was already inside Russia. Zhenya could flee the country—Istanbul and Belgrade were particularly popular destinations at the moment—but flights were overbooked to the point of fights breaking out in the airport concourse. And if Zhenya tried to claim conscientious objection to the war, he might be put in a psychiatric ward, which would be almost as bad as being on the front line in Donetsk or Luhansk.

“I’ll think of something,” Arkady said.

When they returned to the apartment, they found it had been searched.

Victor was out, so no one had been home. The search had been subtly carried out—no upended furniture or smashed ornaments—but not subtly enough to escape Arkady’s notice. He knew where certain things should have been, and they were just that little bit out of place: books lined up in a way he would never have arranged them himself, his old vinyl LPs a little askew in their rack. Small things but sufficient to alert and alarm. Arkady knew this had to be the work of the FSB and that FSB searchers had ample skills to comb the apartment without leaving any traces whatsoever, if only they chose to do so. And the fact that they hadn’t chosen to do so was a message in itself.

Victor said that they shouldn’t stay here any longer, and no one disagreed. He worked the phone for half an hour before announcing that they could use one of the safe houses owned and run by the prosecutor’s office. It wasn’t much—an apartment out in the south of the city, near the titanium statue of Yuri Gagarin—but it would do. He had filed false names for them all and said they were informants on a large organized crime case he was working. It would be weeks before anyone checked, and by that time this whole thing would be resolved one way or another.

Zhenya rigged up a hidden camera in Arkady’s apartment before they left. It was one he had taken from the Black Army’s supply of electronic hardware. He could log in at any time via an app on his phone. Arkady looked forward to seeing who might show up.

33

The next time Arkady went to the hospital, the doctors asked if they could have a word. There were three of them and he really should remember their names, but as they had warned, his short-term memory was shot. They took him into a small room and gestured toward the table in the middle of it. He sat on one side and they on the other, as though this were a tribunal hearing. The oldest and evidently most senior of the three sat in the middle and did all the talking.

“We need to discuss Tatiana Petrovna’s condition,” he said. “Before we do, may I just check: You are the next of kin, aren’t you?”

Arkady had a sudden image of himself, in a Siberian hospital after the bear attack, and the doctor there asking Tatiana the same question about him. “Yes,” Tatiana had said. “He’s my husband.” Arkady had been semi-delirious at the time, but he’d known that this particular moment had been real, and it had all been worth it just to hear her say that.

“Yes,” Arkady said. “I am.”

“Good. May I speak frankly?”

“Please.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry to say, we cannot keep your wife alive indefinitely. We might if we had infinite resources and we cared nothing for her quality of life, but neither is true.”

“You think she has no chance of recovery?”

“I think her chances of recovery are minimal, and they decrease with every day that passes.”

“I disagree.”

“May I ask why?”

“I’ve been in there with her day after day. I touch her, talk to her. She’s still in there; I’m sure of it.” In the stillness of the room, his words sounded like the pleading of a child who doesn’t understand the world. “You see her as she is now, broken and wounded. You didn’t know her before all this. You don’t know her strength, her resilience.”

“I know what our machines say about her vital signs.”

“But you don’t talk to her.”

“I’d love to have the time to talk to her, trust me. But I have a pile of clinical commitments the height of the Ostankino Tower. You say, ‘She’s still in there’ ”—he made air quotes around the phrase—“and I understand that, but you have no clinical evidence. You sit at her bedside day after day, as you say, clutching the faintest glimmer of hope, watching for the tiniest sign of awareness. If it is there, you will be the first to see it. But it’s such a thin line between reality and wishful thinking. Even if you did see something—a twitch, a movement, muscle tension, indistinct vocalization—that wouldn’t signify anything, not as an isolated incident. Science demands reproducibility. People in comas don’t just come around suddenly without any warning. And even if she does regain consciousness, which is a long shot, that won’t be the end to it. She’ll almost certainly have lasting brain damage. She’ll never have a normal life again. She may suffer intense and catastrophic complications, not just from the original incident, but from her stay here. We do our best to keep this hospital clean, but sick people bring an army of obnoxious viruses, bacteria, and fungi with them. It will at best, at the very best, be a long road of very small steps forward and very large steps backward, and you don’t need me to tell you where that ends up.”

According to Russian tradition, people could die in one of two ways. A good death involved old age and a natural end: a grandparent dying in their sleep, a gentle passing from this world to the next. A bad death was anything else, more or less: an accident, murder, suicide, unexpected illness, anything that involved violence or took someone before their natural lifespan. Supposedly, the soul of someone who died a good death would linger on earth for forty days. For a bad death, it could be much longer.

From a selfish point of view, he would want Tatiana’s soul to hang around for as long as possible. There were even folk superstitions about stopping clocks and covering mirrors—the first to help speed the soul onward, the second because mirrors are gateways to the underworld—but Tatiana would have no truck with those, and so Arkady felt he shouldn’t either.

Her friends all knew who Arkady was and what he had been to Tatiana. Sergei Obolensky, once her editor on Now magazine, was one; Max Dal, her erstwhile poet from Kaliningrad was another. Neither particularly liked Arkady, though that had been more to do with their feelings toward Tatiana than anything else.

He remembered something Dal had said to him back in Kaliningrad: that Tatiana preferred a short life, a dash across the sky.

“A dash or a waltz?” Arkady had asked.

“Somehow both, my dear Renko,” Dal had replied.

When he had first met Tatiana in Kaliningrad, she had been dead—or, rather, she had been faking her own death. He should have realized then that she blamed herself for her sister’s death and unconsciously wished to atone for it. He had known the risks she took and he was always aware that, sooner or later, her luck might run out, but knowing the possibility and accepting the reality were two different things.

He brought his mind back to the present in this hospital room with the three doctors.

“When do we need to decide by?” he asked.

“Soon.”

“How soon is soon?”

The doctor spread his hands. “As long as you need to accept the inevitability of this course of action. Within reason, naturally.”

34

Embassies may have been outposts of foreign lands on native soil, but they were still vulnerable to the relentless march of progress. In Soviet times, the British embassy had been a sizable and elegant merchant’s mansion right across the river from the Kremlin. It was built for a sugar magnate, designed in a mixture of Gothic and art deco styles, groaning with chandeliers and mahogany panels, and apparently capable of rousing Stalin’s anger every time he opened the curtains of his private apartment and saw the English flag fluttering on the other side of the water. These days, the mansion served merely as the ambassador’s residence, though “merely” was presumably not a word that sprung immediately to mind if you were the ambassador with the run of such a place. The embassy itself was a couple of miles away, all sharp angles and airy glass facade, a quartet of buildings that were indistinguishable from any number of other office buildings or apartment blocks.

Arkady walked in, showed his identification, passed through a security arch, and settled down to wait. He had phoned to make an appointment for 10:30 a.m. He was used to the slovenly timekeeping of even the most minor Russian bureaucrat and was expecting to be kept waiting at least until lunchtime and probably longer. When he heard his name called before 11:00 a.m., he was surprised and hopeful that at last something was falling his way.

“Arkady Renko?”

The man walked with the loose-limbed gait common to the very tall. His hair was neatly brushed but needed a trim, the frames of his tortoiseshell glasses almost exactly matched the shades of his beard, and his trousers tapered so narrowly at the ankles that Arkady wondered how he managed to get his feet in and out of them. He led them to the restricted area of embassy and consular offices, held a door open for Arkady, and introduced himself.

“Jeremy Harbottle. Third secretary.”

Third secretary was entry-level rank: a first overseas posting. Arkady found himself increasingly unable to assess people’s ages, so Harbottle could have been anything from his early twenties to late thirties, for all he knew.

Harbottle led them into a small meeting room. A table that could seat eight took up most of the space, and a sideboard on which two stainless steel urns were arranged accounted for much of the rest.

“Tea? Coffee?”

Arkady asked for coffee. Harbottle gestured that he should sit down, poured a coffee for Arkady and another for himself, and folded his frame into the chair at the head of the table.

“So,” he asked, “how can I help you?” His Russian was near perfect.

Arkady cleared his throat. “Forgive me if this seems blunt, but is this it?”

“Is what it?”

“This meeting. Are you the only representative of the embassy attending?”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

“I thought… Listen, this is a sensitive matter, and someone at a senior level will need to deal with it sooner or later. No offense.”

“None taken. But in answer to your original question: yes, this is it. Understand, Mr. Renko, we’re operating on minimal staffing levels as it is.”

“You lost some people?”

“Not so far during the war, no. But in 2018 my government expelled 153 of your diplomats after the Skripal poisonings, so your government retaliated by expelling two dozen of ours, and ever since then we’ve been stretched pretty thin. And secondly, it’s my job to take these kinds of initial meetings, to discuss and assess the situation, and then to decide how best to move forward. I appreciate that you would like someone more senior, and it may come to that further down the line, but for now I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.” He gave a small smile. “I’m sure you understand.”

What Arkady understood was that he needed to impress someone young and inexperienced, and that if he did manage that, then he would have to repeat the whole thing all over again with the next person up the ladder, and the next one after that, each of them carefully passing the parcel as though it were an unexploded bomb. Every bureaucracy Arkady had ever known worked this way.

He laid it all out for Harbottle, as quickly and efficiently as he could. Here was what Tatiana and he had seen in Bucha; here was what had happened when they had gone to see Volkov.

“Yes,” Harbottle said, “I’ve read a lot about what had happened in Bucha. Tatiana may have been the first journalist in there, but there have been plenty more since then, of course.”

“But you haven’t read about the saperka attack, have you?”

“Not that I recall. Forgive me, but I’m still not sure why you’re bringing this to me.”

“Tatiana wants to prove the links up the chain of command from Ivan Volkov to his father to Putin. That can’t be done, legally, without the cooperation of the International Criminal Court. Russia, Ukraine, the U.S.A.—none of these countries are signatories. Britain is.”

“I see.”

“Tatiana places great faith in the judicial process. She has often been disappointed, at least in this country, but those international tribunals for war criminals, she really believes in them. Court proceedings, full legal process even for some of the worst men in history. She loves the deliberate double meaning of the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’—crimes not just against humankind but against the very concept of being human.”

Harbottle shuffled the papers in front of him. “Well, I will certainly send a report of this meeting to the relevant parties.”

“But?”

“We’re an embassy, Mr. Renko, not a court service. There are proper channels to go through and protocol to be observed, and I would need guidance on how our role fits into that, if at all. And unofficially, as I understand it, private military contractors like the 1812 Group are deliberately removed from the legal system of the Russian Federation. They don’t exist, not officially. Armies exist, companies exist, but these contractors… As I said, I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is that if you go hunting for an actual entity called 1812, with legal rights and responsibilities, you won’t find one. Just a complex network of subsidiaries and a whole lot of stuff off the books.” He stood up. The meeting was over.

Dr. Pavlova’s schedule was full for the next three months, but since it was Arkady who was asking to see her, she extended her working day late into the evening.

“It’s not for me,” he explained as she showed him and Zhenya in. “It’s for my son.” Dr. Pavlova smiled at Zhenya.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“He’s going to be enlisted in a few days’ time, and I can’t think of any other way of stopping it.”

“Any other way than asking me to provide a certificate?”

Arkady made an expression of regret at his own unspeakable audacity in asking.

“Well,” Dr. Pavlova said, “I don’t approve of faking documentation. But I approve still less of young men being sent off to die, so, yes, I’ll do it. First time for everything.”

“You’ve never been asked to forge an exemption?” Arkady was genuinely astonished.

“Oh, I’ve often been asked. I’ve just never said yes.” She leaned forward and studied Zhenya. “You look remarkably healthy. I don’t usually complain when people come into my clinic looking healthy, but in this instance it is a problem.”

“What are my options?”

“Well, the simplest way is normally an HIV diagnosis, but they’re beginning to take men who have that. They do it in return for giving them retroviral drugs they might not otherwise be able to access. So we’ll steer clear of that. As far as I remember, the most common reasons for exemption have been musculoskeletal disorders, neuropsychological conditions, circulatory system diseases, and respiratory problems. Of those, the first category is easiest to pull off and most likely to withstand any basic tests the army would run to check you’re not shamming. They might take their chances with someone who has mild mental problems or asthma, but if you seem sufficiently impaired not to be able to walk freely or lift equipment, I can’t see how they’d think you would be much good to them.”

Arkady looked at Zhenya. Zhenya nodded.

“With all that in mind, I suggest I diagnose you with arthritis: easy to fake; in fact, lots of people think genuine sufferers are often doing just that. The symptoms come and go. Some days you might be okay; other days you get painful flares that come out of nowhere and make you feel like you’ve been run over by a truck. I’ll give you a list of the usual symptoms. Pick three or four and imagine how they would affect you if you really did have them.” She patted him on the knee. “If you try hard enough, you might start to actually believe it. Real psychosomatic symptoms. That will make it even more convincing.”

If only he could do the same in reverse for himself, Arkady thought: believe so fervently that his Parkinson’s symptoms weren’t real that they would disappear.

“May I ask you something else?” asked Arkady.

“Of course.”

“What do you know about comas?”

35

UNKNOWN NUMBER, said the screen on Arkady’s mobile. A marketing call, a wrong number, or a death threat? Arkady answered.

“Renko.”

“I have the information you’re looking for.” A man’s voice, no discernible accent.

“Which information would that be?”

“Legal proof. Chain of command. I don’t want to say any more on an open line.”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t want to say that either.”

It could be a trap, of course. The kind of person who would be able to offer that kind of information was probably also the kind of person who would stop at little to keep the information hidden. Ivan came to mind. Had he ever heard Ivan speak? He couldn’t remember. The voice didn’t sound like it was Ivan’s, or maybe Arkady was kidding himself. It could also be a genuine offer, and if he turned that down, Tatiana, spectral or real, would give him no peace.

“Can we meet?” Arkady asked.

“Of course. I suggest—”

“No. We do it at a location of my choice. I’m sure you understand.”

The voice was silent for a moment. Arkady imagined him silently checking with somebody else.

“Okay,” the man said. “Where shall we meet?”

Arkady ran through a checklist in his head. He wanted somewhere as public as possible, somewhere with lots of people around, somewhere with multiple exit points, and somewhere he could arrive early without making himself too obvious. Put like that, one place stood out.

“Gastronome number 1, ground floor, GUM. Vetoshny Lane entrance.”

“Six o’clock,” the man said, and he was gone.

There had been a GUM, for Gosudarstvennyy Universalnyy Magazin, a state department store, in pretty much every major Soviet city: vast, soulless buildings that sold whatever goods the state’s economy had produced at prices the same economy had set. In terms of quantity, quality, or variety, quantity had accounted for at least 90 percent of the merchandise. There had been years when almost every woman on the beaches of state-approved Black Sea bathing resorts had worn the same leopard-print swimsuit because that had been the sole design available that year. But there had always been one GUM to rule them all: the trapezoid with arched glass roofs and ornate facades that sat on the eastern side of Red Square across from the Kremlin. It was arguably Moscow’s most famous building except for the old fortress itself and St. Basil’s technicolor onion domes. It was still GUM even three decades after the end of communism, but the meaning was now subtly different—Glavnyy Universalnyy Magazin, a main universal store—and the range of shops was unrecognizable. It was Harrods, it was Galeries Lafayette, selling all the Western designer names Arkady had heard of, and many more that he hadn’t, clustered in racks. It was a mall to show that here was a city as rich and modern as any in the world.

Arkady arrived at 4:30, an hour and a half ahead of time. He had pondered whether to tell Victor and Zhenya but in the end had decided against it. If the meeting was on the level, then they had no need to be there. If it wasn’t, he didn’t want to put them in danger. The waiter stopped by and Arkady ordered another coffee just to keep the table. He felt alert enough as it was.

Six o’clock. Still no sign. Perhaps the man was being cautious. Perhaps he had arrived early also and was scoping Arkady out from an unseen position, checking that Arkady really was alone. Arkady looked left and right, straight ahead and behind, and up the nearest escalator to the walkways on the first floor.

There. A man moving quickly out of sight, the kind of reflex movement someone made when he didn’t want to be spotted. Arkady stared, waiting for the man to reappear, but he didn’t. It didn’t matter: Arkady had already seen his face.

The man was Dynamo Dimitri, one of the three FSB men whom Marina had tasked with following Blokhin and who made such a mess of giving convincing testimony to Arkady that the case against Blokhin was dropped. There may have been a good reason for an FSB surveillance officer to be in GUM at exactly the same time as Arkady, but he couldn’t think of one. He could, however, think of several bad reasons.

Being able to see in almost every direction meant that he could also be seen from every direction, and multiple exit routes also meant multiple approach possibilities.

Arkady felt exposed.

The waiter came out with Arkady’s coffee. Arkady handed him the cash for both drinks, waited for him to talk to the women at the next table, and used that moment of cover and distraction to get up and leave.

He started toward the nearest exit, back onto Vetoshny Lane. A thickset man wearing a bomber jacket stood at the door. Not official mall security and not waiting for anyone either. Arkady changed course before the man saw him.

GUM had twelve exits, three on each side, close together on the side that opened onto Nikolskaya Street and Ilinka Street, further apart on the exits that opened onto Vetoshny Lane and Red Square. Arkady moved through the crowds toward the Ilinka exit with a slow, easy gait: no sudden movements, no unexpected changes of direction, only blending in with the motion of the crowd.

He turned right and kept walking. A fountain marked the centerpiece of the concourse, and nearby Arkady could see the escalators. He tucked in behind a Japanese family clutching Salvatore Ferragamo and Max Mara bags. The father turned, saw Arkady, and politely nodded. He and his family took the escalator first. Arkady tucked in a step behind them. He kept his eyes on the top of the escalator, wanting to see if Dynamo Dimitri or anyone else was waiting. No one was there.

At the top, Arkady stepped off and kept walking. He was in the footwear quarter: Barracuda, Pollini, Moreschi, all selling shoes he couldn’t afford and wouldn’t have wanted even if he could. But he forced himself to slow down and look at the shoes in casement windows, just to use the reflections in the glass…

Dynamo Dimitri and a colleague were thirty yards behind him and walking purposefully through the crowds.

Arkady kept moving, trying to maintain distance between himself and them. He was heading toward the Ilinka end of the building again. Burberry, Hermès. There were escalators at that end, and as Arkady approached, he saw a shaven head emerge from one of them, appearing smoothly and inexorably above the floor line as the escalator rose. Not really an FSB look, he thought. More an 1812 look.

He turned left, right, left again, using the blocks of shop racks to hide his movement.

The sky was beginning to darken through the glass vaulting above him. He could feel sweat beading on his forehead and his breath was coming in shallow pants, but he kept going. Another man appeared at the far end of the aisle he was on, too far away to reach him. Arkady used the window of the New Balance display to check on those still behind him. No sign, at least for the moment. He kept moving, conscious all the time that he needed a plan sooner rather than later or else he’d just be chasing his tail in ever-decreasing circles until they caught up with him.

Every instinct told him not to go upward, but upward he went. If it was what they would not expect him to do, that was exactly what he wanted to do. How long did an escalator ride take? Ten seconds, perhaps. Fifteen or twenty at most. But all that time was exposure, for once on the escalator there was effectively no way off. If one of them appeared at the top while he was on the way up or at the bottom while he was on the way down, he was finished. He could slide over the moving railing and try to go back against the direction of the escalator, but so could they, and they were younger and fitter than he was.

He made it up to the third floor and, looking down, caught a glimpse of Dynamo Dimitri walking fast but not running as he approached the bottom of the escalator.

There were fewer displays up here, which meant more open space. The most crowded place was the Cafe Festivalnoye. Most of the tables were taken, and waitresses were hurrying back and forth. Arkady headed in that direction.

Arkady saw a coat stand off to the side of the café and half a dozen coats hanging on it, together with a couple of hats. Arkady saw what he needed from five strides away; an old-fashioned overcoat of dark green wool and a mariner’s cap in navy blue. There was an old man sitting with his back to the stand and the coat and hat had to belong to him because everyone else there seemed much younger.

Arkady offered a silent apology to the old man. The coat and the hat were well made and good coats weren’t cheap. He walked up to the coats as naturally as he could, unhooked the coat and hat, and shrugged them on as he began to walk away. The coat was a size too small but that wouldn’t be noticeable to the casual observer. Arkady put his hands in the pockets to help adjust its fit, and his fingers closed round something. A piece of cloth, some string.

When he realized what it was, he almost smiled. It was an old Covid face mask, a standard blue-and-white one. Arkady didn’t know whether the old man had used it and he didn’t care. He looped the strings round his ears and placed the mask over as much of his nose and mouth as he could.

Dynamo Dimitri and his comrade had reached the top of the escalator. Arkady was about to head away from them when he remembered some old surveillance advice: that people looking for someone tended to scan at a distance of fifteen or twenty yards, which meant that being too near them could be as effective as being too far away. Against all instincts, he headed back toward Dynamo Dimitri. The gap was closing rapidly. Arkady reminded himself that only his eyes were visible and that he was wearing different clothes. He kept walking. Too tense, he realized, waiting for the shout from behind when the old man realized his coat and hat were missing. Relax, Arkady told himself. Calm down.

Another couple of strides and he would be passing Dynamo Dimitri. Arkady forced himself not to look straight at him. He felt a brush on his shoulder as they passed each other, nothing more than an accidental contact. Dynamo Dimitri was already several strides farther on, his head moving left and right as he looked for the man he’d just passed.

Arkady took the escalators back down all the way to the ground floor. He didn’t look for anyone following him because moving to avoid them risked being seen. He was an anonymous Muscovite who had no idea that the place was crawling with FSB operatives and 1812 soldiers, and he still wore a Covid mask indoors because even though the epidemic was long over, he felt vulnerable.

He headed for one of the crowded Red Square exits. Half a dozen teenagers were ahead of him, the kind of gilded Moscow youth who were only happy when wearing torn and bleached jeans. They were taking selfies and shrieking in mock horror at the results, which meant that Arkady had almost caught up with them by the time they reached the exit. The man at the door didn’t give him a second glance.

Once out in Red Square, he kept walking even though his legs ached with exhaustion. He was about to head for the metro station when it occurred to him that large surveillance operations like the one he had just eluded usually had officers on-site, which in practical terms meant a car nearby. Cars were warm, could accommodate sophisticated communications equipment, and moved fast when needed. Arkady didn’t want to take too long, but he decided that a search of the immediate area had a chance of paying off. He’d try eight separate streets, and if he found nothing, then he would give up and go home.

He found them on the third street he tried: Bogoyavlensky Lane, small and narrow and running a block away from the back of GUM. The car was parked half on the pavement with the engine running, and it sprouted the kind of heavy-duty aerials that announce the presence of law enforcement. Arkady came up from behind the car and walked past as close as he dared, trusting in the face mask and the fact that they wouldn’t be looking out for him. He made sure not to turn his head as he passed but he could see them clear as day: Marina in the driver’s seat and Ivan Volkov in the passenger’s.

36

Dr. Pavlova moved around Tatiana’s bed with the agility of a ballet dancer, attaching an electrode here, stepping over a wire there. The doctors who had told Arkady to prepare for the worst watched with an indifference that was too studied to be genuine. Their professional pride was put out by the fact that she, not they, had both the equipment and the skill to use it. Nevertheless, their professional curiosity was piqued by the prospect of what she might discover.

Dr. Pavlova turned on the machine—an electroencephalogram, EEG for short—peered at the screen, adjusted the settings, peered again, altered the position of a couple of electrodes on Tatiana’s head, and peered for a third time.

“There are three things you need to know about the human brain,” she had told Arkady when he first asked for her help. “One, we understand the brain roughly as well as people in the Middle Ages understood global geography. And if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we’d be so simple that we couldn’t.” All that, she had added, was her way of explaining why even trained doctors couldn’t begin to understand the brain unless they had devoted their studies to neurology.

“Okay,” she now said, “let’s give this a go. Arkady, she knows your voice best, so I want you to speak to her. This screen shows the electrical activity in Tatiana’s brain. If that activity changes when you ask a question or give an instruction, and if we can repeat that change several times, we will be able to conclude that she is, in fact, still ‘in there,’ an intact mind adrift inside a damaged body and brain. Covert consciousness, it’s called, a state in which the brain reacts to the outside world with some comprehension even though the body does not respond. Arkady, would you ask Tatiana to close her right hand?”

“Tatiana, please close your right hand.”

They all watched the screen. The lines flickered, jumped, resumed their previous tracking. Dr. Pavlova made a repeat gesture with her hand.

“Tatiana, please close your right hand,” Arkady said.

Again the lines flickered, and even Arkady could see they were a slightly different pattern from the first time. Dr. Pavlova made a rolling gesture with her index and middle fingers. What had the doctor told Arkady? Science demands reproducibility.

“Tatiana, please close your right hand.” He held the pause, saw the faint outline of a smile on Dr. Pavlova’s face as she watched the screen and waited for her nod. “Tatiana, please close your right hand.” And again, and again, and again, the same results each time. Arkady was caught between a violent desire to hug Dr. Pavlova and an equally violent desire to chide the hospital doctors for their lack of faith.

More than anything, he longed to slink off to a quiet room on his own and let the tears come.

37

The next morning Arkady was still half-asleep when Marina called.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Zhenya is not at the breakfast table this morning.”

Arkady knew there was no point in checking. “Where is he?”

“He was caught at Novodevichy Cemetery in the middle of the night with four other young men who claimed they were just seeing the sights.”

Another urbex expedition, Arkady thought.

“We’re about to release his three companions, but Zhenya will be visiting Lubyanka for the second time this month.”

“And when will you let him go?”

“When his father releases Kazasky’s flash drive.”

“How do you know I won’t copy what’s on it?”

“That’s beyond your capabilities, but if I find out that someone else has copied it, Zhenya will suffer the consequences.”

“Which means?”

“He will be found and killed.”

“When do you want to meet?”

“Tonight at nine, in the Hotel Ukraine’s underground garage. It’s on Level 2. Come alone.” Arkady hung up the phone and noticed his hand was shaking more than usual.

Victor was getting ready to go into work but dropped back into his chair when he saw Arkady’s expression. “Tatiana?”

“No, Zhenya. He was arrested last night and Marina claims she will keep him locked up until I give her the Kazasky flash drive.”

“Why was he arrested?”

“He was on one of those crazy urbex expeditions and was caught sneaking into Novodevichy Cemetery along with four others.”

“Was Misha with him?”

“No, but I have to call Misha to let him know.”

“Have him come over and we can make some sort of plan.”

Misha and Margarita arrived an hour later.

“Shall I set up my computer on the kitchen table?” Misha asked.

“Yes, good,” Arkady said.

Victor sat down, notepad in hand. “There’s a pot of coffee on the counter. Just grab a cup.”

“I think I’ve told you everything,” Arkady said once they were seated. “I’m meeting them in the hotel’s underground garage at nine and of course have to be alone.”

“She won’t be alone,” Victor said.

“No, I think you’re right. Ivan will be with her.”

“You’ll give them the flash drive?” Misha asked.

“Yes. Can you make copies of what’s on it?”

“Sure.”

“Even if you give it to them,” Victor said, “they’re not going to let Zhenya go. In fact, they aren’t going to stop until you’re both dead. They tried poison, they tried to ambush you at GUM, now this.”

“Do you have any ideas?” Arkady asked.

“I think the only way out is to get them before they get you.”

“I guess Zurin wouldn’t help.”

“Are you kidding?” Victor said. “Go up against the FSB? He would feed you to them if he could.”

Misha spoke up. “Listen, I have maps and diagrams of all the underground tunnels, places that don’t appear on regular maps, and there’s a sewer under the hotel. I’ve been down it. It’s one of our favorite venues for underground explorations.”

“How would we get into it?”

“There’s a manhole to the sewer tunnel right there in the second level of the garage.”

They worked into the afternoon putting together a plan. Coming up with one was the easy part. It was refining and revising it that took time, seeing what would work and what would not, changing one part of the plan and finding that four or five other moves would have to be changed. They studied the sewer diagram and memorized where lateral concrete pipes were connected to the main flow to change the flow’s direction. Misha pointed out places they could climb up and away from the flow and where they could exit.

It was decided that, since Misha had urbex experience, he would help Arkady navigate the sewer pipes and Victor would split off from them at a certain point.

They didn’t know if Marina would take the elevator down to parking level 2 or drive a car into the garage. Margarita planned to sit in the lobby with her eye on the front door. If she saw her, she would text Arkady. If instead Marina arrived by car, he would hopefully be able to see or hear her and text directions that would lead her to him.

This was a plan that could only work the first time or not at all, and so they had to get it right. By the end of the day, Arkady thought they had done just that—or gotten at least as close as they could get to it. Margarita had written it all out, each step following logically from the step before.

They agreed to meet at Arkady’s at six, go over the plan one more time, then take one car to the hotel’s garage. Victor always carried a standard-issue MP-443 Grach. Arkady had his service weapon, a Makarov that predated Brezhnev and might not have been fired since that time. Eight rounds in the magazine, maximum effective range fifty yards, but in a sewer with low light and thick tunnel walls offering the possibility of crazy ricochets, range was as much a matter of luck as anything else. Misha wouldn’t carry a gun because he wasn’t trained to use one and might be more of a danger to himself than anyone else.

Margarita would buy a basic Nokia burner for each of them with cash. They were untraceable and could make calls and send texts. Misha would bring a steel rod for lifting up the manhole cover, four small headlights that they could turn on and off, and three pairs of knee-high rubber boots. Arkady thought he would probably do better with his old Adidases.

He went back to the hospital and sat with Tatiana. He pressed his mouth close to her ear and talked softly for ten minutes without pause, outlining every detail of the plan, impressing on her the lengths that they would go to ensure that it worked. He made no attempt to hide his intent to seek vengeance and he did not need Dr. Pavlova’s machine to know that she heard every word.

38

Margarita sat in the lobby drinking coffee at a small table. An attractive young woman alone in the lobby of a five-star hotel could easily be mistaken for a high-class prostitute. She had to deflect half a dozen would-be suitors while she waited.

After what seemed an endless hour, Marina entered the lobby with a man Margarita presumed was Ivan.

It was hard not to look at them, but at the edge of her vision she could see Marina checking out the lobby. There were plenty of people there, and there was no reason for Marina to even think that someone was watching her, but, even so, Margarita pretended to be engrossed in a magazine.

Once they crossed the lobby to the elevator banks, she pulled the Nokia from her pocket and texted Arkady: Marina and Ivan are on their way down.

OK, Arkady replied from the steps of the manhole.

He waited until he heard the doors of the elevator close and texted Marina: Take the ramp to Bay 44.

Arkady could see that they had reached the end of the ramp. She had her phone in her left hand and in her right hand was a pistol, a PSS silent, standard FSB issue. Six 7.62mm rounds in the magazine. Ivan’s hands were free. If he was armed, Arkady couldn’t see it.

Again he texted: Proceed to Bay 44

Misha had figured it would take them twenty-five seconds to make it from the ramp down to Bay 44.

Arkady left the manhole cover open and quickly climbed down the steps to the concrete floor of the sewer. He slogged through the rancid water to join Victor and Misha deep in the tunnel but within sight of the ladder.

For a few moments nothing happened. Arkady wondered if Marina and Ivan suspected that this was a trap. Suddenly Marina’s head and shoulders appeared, upside down like a bat, swiveling this way and that with her pistol held in both hands. Arkady was out of her range of sight—there was no way she could see that far in the gloom—yet he fought back the urge to duck back farther into the darkness.

Marina’s head and shoulders disappeared up the ladder again. Another few moments passed, and then her feet and legs came into view as she climbed down the ladder. She stepped gingerly onto the floor of the tunnel. Ivan came down after her.

A shallow stream ran at their feet down the center of the tunnel. They dragged their feet slowly through the water toward Arkady, Misha, and Victor. Marina led the way, pistol held out in front of her. Ivan followed half a pace behind and to the side. Every few strides he half turned to check behind them.

“Arkady?” Marina called. Her voice bounced off the cylindrical walls, echoes fading on echoes. “Arkady?”

“Here!”

And then all three ran. Misha went with Arkady down one tunnel, Victor down another as planned.

Misha held Arkady’s hand, half helping him maintain his balance and half pulling him. Arkady lost his footing, slipped, somehow stayed upright. He didn’t have the strength or stamina for a chase but he persevered. Misha led him left, right, left again. Arkady heard splashing of only one person and was sure it was Marina gaining on them. Ivan must have followed Victor as they had hoped he would. If Ivan got hold of Victor… no, he couldn’t think about that.

“Arkady!” A shout from Marina, almost a scream. “Arkady, stop! Stop or I’ll shoot.”

Misha glanced at Arkady, eyes wide and questioning. Arkady shook his head: No, keep going. Another few paces and a deafening shot rang out. Arkady heard the rush of the bullet as it passed him and clattered against a wall.

There was a bend in the tunnel up ahead, and immediately after that was an alcove he remembered from the maps, offset and slightly elevated. He could hide there for a few moments to catch his breath. Arkady gestured to Misha—Keep going—as he stepped into the alcove and drew his pistol. Arkady tried to slow his breathing. Marina’s footsteps were coming closer. In a moment she’d be around the corner.

She began to run past him without realizing. Arkady gripped the Makarov tightly, tensed the muscles in his arm. She must have sensed he was there and in one fluid movement turned and shot. Arkady ducked and fell down into the water and onto her. The impact knocked both the Makarov from his grasp and the PSS from hers. She grabbed for her weapon. He kicked out at it, and his foot connected with her hand. She cried out in pain and swore at him.

“Arkady!” Misha’s voice rang out from farther down the tunnel.

“Keep going!” Arkady yelled.

No sound from Ivan in the adjacent tunnel, or at least not that Arkady could hear.

Marina lunged at Arkady, going for his eyes. He ducked and weaved. Marina swiped his legs away with one of hers, and he went face down into the water. She was on him in a flash, pushing his head into the brine. He twisted his face left and right, trying to keep nose and mouth above water. His hand scrabbled in the water, seeking some kind—any kind—of purchase so that he could push back against her. He felt his fingers close around a gun barrel, either his or hers; he couldn’t tell. He gripped it, swung his arm, and smacked the butt of the gun into Marina’s face. She fell back into the water.

Arkady tried to swivel the gun around in his hand so he was holding the butt and could fire, but it slipped from his grasp. Marina was rising. Arkady threw himself at her again, knocking her back, using his weight to pin her down. Again she went for his face, nails scratching, but he swayed back out of her reach and turned her face down in the water. He pressed down. She tried to bite him, but his fingers were out of reach and all it did was make her swallow more water.

He kept Marina underwater until she stopped struggling, until he felt the life drain out of her into the rivulets of wastewater surrounding them. He cautiously let go and felt for her pulse. There was none.

Arkady didn’t know exactly how long he lay motionless. He sat up and felt around in the water until he found both guns, his own and Marina’s. He stood and stuffed hers into the waistband of his trousers; his he carried as before. He began walking back in the direction he had first come from.

“Ivan!” His voice was weak, even with the echoes. He cleared his throat, tried again.

“IVAN!”

He didn’t know where Ivan was. It was possible that he had already caught up with Misha and Victor, and at any moment Arkady might trip over their bodies in the water.

He fired a shot down the tunnel to give Ivan a sense of where he was.

He reached another fork. One tunnel led down to the main drainage line, practically big enough to drive a car through; the other doglegged upward, dark and narrow.

“Ivan!” Arkady stood stock-still, listening.

He heard splashing coming from the larger tunnel.

“Renko.” Ivan’s voice was thick with menace.

“Come get me!” Arkady shouted, and set off up the doglegged tunnel. Footsteps quickened behind him. He kept moving, deeper into the bowels of the system. The rank air squatted heavily around him. One turn led to another, not enough straight sections for him to stop, turn and fire. He needed distance between them before he chose to stand his ground, because if he missed the first shot, Ivan would be on him.

“Can you hear me, Renko?” Ivan’s voice seemed to be coming from several directions at once. “Where do you think this tunnel’s going to end up?”

Arkady drove himself on, measuring the sections by the number of steps he was taking between turns. The tunnel seemed to be gradually curving around on itself, a giant snake of brick walls and filthy water. The flow ran hard against his feet. He was moving against it, and the effort was costing him.

“You know how many of my comrades I’ve killed, Arkady? Plenty. And in every case, if I hadn’t done it, then another of my comrades would have killed me, and rightly so.”

Ivan was silent for a few moments, his footsteps had stopped. Arkady couldn’t tell whether he was hundreds of feet away or right on top of him.

There was a clanging, the sound of metal on stone, deliberate and repetitive. A ringing. Arkady knew instantly what it was; Ivan’s saperka.

He wondered when the tunnel would end, knowing that the moment it did would be the moment he would have to turn and fight. He had firearms, but would they stop a man like Ivan?

Ivan’s voice rang out. “We swam three miles in freezing black water by way of training, dove off a high bridge, and made it to a distant island. Anyone got into trouble, there was no one to rescue him. No safety boats, no dry clothing and hot drinks.”

Ivan’s voice was getting closer. He must have quickened his pace and was attempting to distract Arkady with his talking. “You’ve seen what this little shovel can do. I can throw it like a tomahawk, chop with it like an axe, bring it down like a sledgehammer.”

Arkady half slipped, went down on one knee, pushed himself upright again. He forced himself to tune out what Ivan was saying. Above and beyond Ivan’s voice came another sound: a gathering rumble, a warning. It was the rushing of the water getting louder and louder. This was one of the first things Misha had warned him about. “Louder water flow means rising water, and the louder it gets, the faster it’s rising, and the more likely it turns into a flash flood. You can’t survive a flash flood in a small tunnel. You can’t ride it down or swim with it or hold your breath till it’s passed. It slams you against every hard surface it can find and beats the air from your lungs. The only way to survive a flash flood is not to be there when it hits. That’s the only way.”

Every tunnel had emergency exit doors in the walls. Arkady could see one up ahead. He hurried to it as quickly as he could, the noise mounting all around. The roar of the water was in front of him, Ivan’s footsteps and voice behind. Arkady reached for the handle and tried to turn it. No movement. He tried again, wondering if it was his poor grip or whether the door was locked. Not his grip; definitely locked. Typically Russian, he thought, to ensure an emergency exit couldn’t be opened.

Ivan was coming closer. There were ten yards between them now, perhaps less. “Renko!” Ivan yelled over the roar. Arkady was still holding his pistol. The water would be on them at any moment. He could shoot the door or he could shoot Ivan, but he wouldn’t have time to do both. He didn’t trust his aim against Ivan, not a moving target in the semidarkness. A stationary lock at point blank range, he could do.

He shot twice in quick succession, then kicked the door in. He plunged through it as the flash flood came barreling down over the place he had just been standing. He was in another tunnel, this one dry and reeking of engine oil and burnt cable. The ground beneath his feet was humming. Arkady saw the glint of metal stretching into the distance and realized he was in a metro system. For a moment he wondered whether it was Metro-2, the fabled secret system buried way deep beneath the city and full of escape routes for the nation’s leaders in times of war, but even Misha had never been inside Metro-2, so the chances of Arkady having accidentally stumbled across it from the sewers were remote. No, this was the regular metro, probably somewhere between Kievskaya and Park Kultury. The humming was the live third rail.

Touch that, and Arkady would have done Ivan’s dirty work for him. “Renko!”

Ivan was standing by the emergency door from the sewage tunnel. He was drenched from head to foot and his clothes were plastered to his body, but his eyes blazed and he was still holding his saperka. He must have leapt for the door just as the flood had hit.

Arkady ran. There wasn’t much space between the edge of the track and the wall, and he couldn’t risk slipping and falling onto the tracks. Ivan was closing in on him so fast that Arkady could hear his breathing.

“Tell me,” Ivan shouted. “Tell me what you saw in Bucha. Tell me what you found in Kazasky’s room. Tell me, and I swear I’ll make it quick.”

Yellow lights lit up on the walls ahead: a warning that a train was approaching. Insulated wires three fingers thick ran along the ceiling over Arkady’s head. There was a box set in an alcove up ahead—equipment storage, judging by its size—and if Arkady could get to that, then he could flatten himself up against the alcove wall as the train passed.

His back was suddenly aflame, the sharp impact of the saperka knocking him forward onto his face. He heard a clang as he fell: the saperka landing on metal.

Arkady tried to roll onto his back. He was still holding the Makarov, but he couldn’t bring it up to aim. He wondered if his arm was broken. Ivan bent down and picked up the saperka. He no longer seemed human. Like every investigator in Petrovka 38, Arkady had used the word “bloodlust,” but he had never seen anyone that defined the word as perfectly as Ivan did now.

The lights of the train grew brighter as the noise became louder.

Arkady froze. He couldn’t move. The metal of the blade glistened as Ivan raised the saperka high above his head. Arkady lifted his leg back and kicked Ivan’s legs, knocking him off-balance. Ivan took one step to the right as he stumbled with the saperka’s momentum, the weight bringing him forward and down onto the tracks. Metal hit electrified metal, sending 700 volts through him, and he was dead even before the train hit him.

Victor, Misha, and Margarita brought Arkady to the hospital, where he was kept for observation to see whether the shock and cold would give way to hypothermia. The doctors were amazed that a man of his age, with his condition, could do what he had done and apparently suffer no lasting ill effects. It didn’t quite defy medical science, but it was rare.

Arkady thought of what Dr. Pavlova had said about the limits of our understanding about the brain and wondered whether the same applied to the heart, the will, the spirit, whatever one wanted to call it.

He left the doctors and went and sat by Tatiana’s bed and told her what he had done. They were dead, he was safe, she was avenged.

He waited, and waited, and waited. He would wait for as long as it took.

39

Arkady sat on his living room couch watching Putin on the TV while Tatiana slept stretched out beside him. She had been out of the hospital and into a therapy program for three weeks now, and home for ten days. Sometimes, Arkady would wake in the middle of the night to find her clinging to him, as though his presence was the only thing that kept her from drifting back into her coma. She slept for long stretches during the day and sat awake reading into the small hours. It would be a while until she recovered her small motor skills enough to be able to write. This was something that she and Arkady could work on together. She was not yet back to her full self—not remotely—but Arkady believed she would be, and more quickly than others thought possible.

Putin was taking the salute at the Victory Day parade in Red Square. The parade was all sepia glory and imperial nostalgia. Tanks and missile launchers rumbled past. Troops with bayonets and pressed uniforms marched in lockstep. Some of the inner circle standing with Putin on the balcony looked just about as waxen as the mausoleum’s permanent resident. Volkov was there in the line but not as close to Putin as his old friends from his KGB days.

A Victory Day without an actual victor. There were the usual commemorations of the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany, forever and indelibly enshrined as Russia’s finest hour, within living memory at least. There was little mention of the “special military operation” in Ukraine and no hint of “mission accomplished.” There wasn’t even a pledge that it all soon would be over.

Putin harked back to triumphs of the past and Victory with a capital V. But that line of thinking could only exist in the future if every subsequent conflict ended successfully. If they were unable to win the battle in Ukraine, then Victory Day would soon become just another day in an endless cycle of wins and losses. “To victory!” Putin said, and that was pretty much it.

Once he was released from jail, Zhenya continued to work with Misha, uncovering Russia’s movements in Ukraine. With Dr. Pavlova’s certificate and without Marina there to push his enlistment through, the recruiting sergeant had given up on Zhenya’s case as more trouble than it was worth.

Arkady wondered where Volkov would go from there. Maybe he would be one of the many who ended up running afoul of Putin, but somehow Arkady doubted it. Oligarchs and ministers were easy to control, but someone like him was sui generis, an agent of chaos trained to high levels and utterly without remorse. Perhaps he was the one who would finally crack open the whole rotten edifice, show up the army’s shortcomings in a public way, lead a mutiny, and set himself up as the head of a coup.

It would be one hell of a risk, but wasn’t that exactly the image he’d been at pains to portray to Arkady and others? The flip side of having no official position meant that he was free to be whoever he wanted to be: the outsider, the man with a private army, the one untainted by the excesses and failures of the old regime. How many would join him? Russians could be very clever at working out who would stand with him and whom to appease—a nation of small-scale Zurins in that way. How many would rise up to defend Putin? The elites would vanish, ordinary people would flee, banks would find their reserves depleted in record time as everyone rushed to withdraw their savings. Volkov would be even more ruthless than Putin in prosecuting the war in Ukraine, and there were plenty out there who would cheer him on.

The 1812 army had learned how to win battles in the African jungles and on Arabian deserts, but those wars were small compared to what he thought he could achieve. He would bring it all home, right up to the fortress on the banks of the Moscow River.

Arkady still had the flash drive with Volkov’s intentions recorded. After Ivan’s and Marina’s subterranean deaths, Arkady had gone to him and made him a deal: not an offer, a deal, to be taken or rejected in its entirety. Arkady had made copies of the flash drive, and if anything happened to him, Tatiana, or Zhenya, those copies would end up in the hands of people who would use them to move fast and hard to destroy him. If nothing happened to Arkady, Tatiana, and Zhenya, the secrets would stay with him. Arkady would remain silent in return for being left in peace. Volkov had accepted.

As for the investigation into the deaths of Marina and Ivan, no one knew for sure. Victor had recused himself from being considered for the investigation on the grounds that he had worked with Marina on the Kazasky case and therefore would not be a neutral party. He and Arkady had been questioned by both Zurin’s people and the FSB, and they had given them nothing. No, they didn’t know why Agent Marina Makarova and Ivan Volkov had gone down into the sewers and the metro tunnel. No, they didn’t recognize the mobile number that had texted instructions to Agent Makarova’s phone shortly before she had died. Agent Makarova and Mr. Volkov had made plenty of enemies between them over the years; perhaps one or more of those enemies had lured them down into the city’s bowels?

There was a row of red granite blocks by the Kremlin Wall that commemorated the “Hero Cities,” the ones that had shown valor above and beyond the usual in their struggle against the Nazis. The first block was a monument to St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown. He laid flowers on it.

Under her blanket, Tatiana stirred, stretched, opened one eye. She sat up and watched as Putin stepped forward to Kyiv’s granite block and laid flowers on it.

“He really has no sense of shame,” she said. “Anna had it right.”

Arkady didn’t need to ask who she meant: “Anna” was Anna Akhmatova.

“ ‘Death is already chalking the doors with crosses…,’ ” Tatiana said.

“ ‘… and calling the ravens, and the ravens are in flight,’ ” Arkady said.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is surprising to think that I have had Parkinson’s for almost thirty years. For most of that time I have been remarkably well. But this disease takes no prisoners, and now I have finished my last book. There is only one Arkady, and I will miss him.

It wouldn’t have been possible to write Hotel Ukraine without the help and support of my brilliant friend and agent Andrew Nurnberg and his assistant Michael Dean. My editor, Sean Manning, has contributed good ideas and has shown great patience in seeing them carried out. Simon & Schuster has been a happy home for me, and its CEO, Jonathan Karp, has been my steady advocate. Ian Chapman from Simon & Schuster UK has been a loyal friend and publisher.

From the beginning, I received invaluable help from Knox Burger and Kitty Sprague, Joe Fox, Bob Loomis, and David Rosenthal. I will forever be indebted to Lyuba Vinogradova, Alex Levin, Yuri Hendler, Yegor Tolstyakov, and, more recently, Boris Starling for sharing their Russian experience and knowledge with me.

I’ve had huge support from my family: My wife, Em; my children, Nell and Nelson, Luisa and Don, and Sam; my grandchildren, Marisa, Benicio, Rafael, Scarlett, and Daisy; my brother, Jack, and his wife, Randy; my sister, Bea, and her husband, Harold; Robert and Jane Arnold, Chris Arnold, Heli Walker, Nell Arnold, Gary Louzon, Debbie Franzoni, and Kip and Joanne Arnold. And from my dear friends: Frank and Barbie Aguilera, John and Kathy Dick, Bill Hanson, Cynthia Van Hazinga, Robert Marshall, Tom and Judy Holland, Anne Lamott, Neal Allen, Mark and Liz Levy, Bob and Patty Mason, Andy and Linda Wolf, Richard Woodly, Susan Rainey, Jim and Martha Robinson, Ken and Suzanne Sack, and Phil and Marilyn Wellons.

These people are set like jewels in my memory.

More from this Series
Gorky Park Book 1 | Wolves Eat Dogs Book 5
Stalin's Ghost Book 6 | Three Stations Book 7
Tatiana Book 8 | The Siberian Dilemma Book 9

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Martin Cruz Smith’s novels include Gorky Park, Stallion Gate, Nightwing, Polar Star, Stalin’s Ghost, Rose, December 6, Tatiana, The Girl from Venice, The Siberian Dilemma, and Independence Square. He is a two-time winner of the Hammett Prize, a recipient of the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award and the UK Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award, and a winner of the Premio Giallo Internazionale at the Piemonte Noir festival. He lives in California.

SimonandSchuster.com

www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Martin-Cruz-Smith

@simonbooks

ALSO BY MARTIN CRUZ SMITH

THE ARKADY RENKO NOVELS

Gorky Park

Polar Star

Red Square

Havana Bay

Wolves Eat Dogs

Stalin’s Ghost

Three Stations

Tatiana

The Siberian Dilemma

Independence Square

OTHER FICTION

December 6

Rose

Stallion Gate

Night Wing

Gypsy in Amber

Canto for a Gypsy

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition July 2025

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Jacket design by Eric Fuentecilla

Jacket art: Sky by Nejron Photo/Adobe Stock, Buildings by Viacheslav Lopatin/Shutterstock, Figure by Mark Owen/Arcangel

Author photograph © Doug Menuez

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-8838-2

ISBN 978-1-9821-8840-5 (ebook)