Free Stalin’s Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith Page B

mouth. Caught a deep breath draped with saliva. Retched again, wringing himself out. Sodden and freezing, he shivered not in any ordinary way but violently, as if he were in the grip of an invisible hand. He twisted his eyes up toward Arkady.
    “It’s a miracle,” Petya said.
    “Back from the dead,” said Platonov. He hovered, blocking half the light.
    Bora turned onto his back and laid a knife against Arkady’s throat. He had returned from the dead with a trump card. The blade scraped a hair Arkady had missed when shaving.
    “Thank you…and now…I fuck you,” Bora said.
    But the cold overwhelmed him. His shivering grew uncontrollable and hard enough to break bones. His teeth chattered like a runaway machine and his arms wrapped straitjacket-style tight around his body.
    “Find the knife,” Arkady told the boy with the flashlight.
    “What knife?”
    Arkady got to his feet and took the flashlight. “Bora’s.”
    “I didn’t see one,” Platonov said.
    “He had a knife.” Arkady nudged Bora over not with a kick, but firmly. No knife. Arkady played the beam in and around the water where Bora had fallen through, where he had freed Bora from the ice and finally, trying to reverse time, on Bora’s tracks across the snow.
     
    “A magnificent night,” Platonov declared. “A night like this you can only find in Moscow. This is the most fun I’ve had for years. And that you had your car parked here by the pond? Brilliant! Thinking two moves ahead!” He slapped the Zhiguli’s dashboard with satisfaction. The lamps of the Boulevard Ring rolled by; Platonov still hadn’t said where he wanted to go.
    Arkady said, “Make up your mind. My feet are wet and numb.”
    “Want me to drive?”
    “No, thanks.” He had seen Platonov walk.
    “You know who I saw tonight? I saw your father the General. I saw him in you. The apple does not fall far from the tree. Although I’m sorry you let that hooligan go.”
    “You didn’t see his knife.”
    “Neither did the boy with the flashlight. I take your word for it.”
    “That’s what I mean. All you could testify to is that Bora fell through the ice.”
    “Anyway, you taught him a lesson. He’ll be frozen solid for a day or two.”
    “He’ll be back.”
    “Then you’ll finish him off, I’m confident. It is a shame about the knife. You think it will turn up in the pond?”
    “Tomorrow, next week.”
    “Maybe when the ice melts. Can you hold a man in prison until the snow melts? I like the sound of it.”
    “I’m sure you do.”
    Platonov said, “You know, I met your father during the war on the Kalinin Front.”
    “Did you play chess?”
    Platonov smiled. “As a matter of fact, I was playing simultaneous games to entertain the troops when he sat down and took a board. He was very young for a general and so covered in mud I couldn’t see his rank. It was extraordinary. Most amateurs trip over their knights. Your father had an instinctive understanding of the special mayhem caused by that piece.”
    “Who won?”
    “Well, I won. The point is he played a serious game.”
    “I don’t think my father was ever on the Kalinin Front.”
    “That’s where I saw him. He was cheated.”
    “Out of what?”
    “You know what.”
    Snow had stifled the usual twenty-four-hour assault of construction crews across the city. The drive along the Boulevard Ring’s white-trimmed trees felt like passage through a more intimate town.
    “There were atrocities on either side,” Platonov went on. “The main thing is that your father was a successful commander. Especially in the beginning of the war, when all seemed lost, he was superhuman. If anyone deserved a field marshal’s baton it was him. In my opinion he was smeared by hypocrites.”
    “So, who is trying to kill you?” Arkady changed the subject. He was, after all, supposedly trying to find out.
    “New Russians, mafia, reactionaries in the Kremlin. Most of all, real estate developers.”
    “Half of Moscow. Have