‘All I know is that we don’t have a government anymore, just thieves.’ (p.269)
Joseph
Joseph cycles out to the beach. He’s a cool, well-paid freelance translator. The current job has gone well and he’s cycled here to Kaliningrad strand on his priceless bicycle to take the sea air and feel the sand between his toes. Onto the empty beach rolls an odd-looking van, a butcher’s van with a model pig on the top. A thug gets out, comes over and starts talking to Joseph, then hassling him. Finally, he bundles him into the back of his van and the gulls flying overhead hear a single shot.
Moscow
Senior Investigator Arkady Renko and Detective Sergeant Victor Orlov attend the funeral of a Moscow gangster, Grisha Grigorenko, bantering with his thuggish son Alexi, observing the other mafia bosses in attendance – ‘Ape’ Beledon, Abdul Khan the ‘rap artist’, Isaac and Valentina Shagelman – before the hoods go off for a wake aboard the old crook’s luxury yacht, the Natalya Gocharova, moored in the Moscow river.
Renko and Orlov are distracted by a noisy demonstration marching by. It’s the readers and fans of the ‘fearless’ investigative journalist, Tatiana Petrovna, who recently fell to her death from her 6th floor apartment in Moscow. They’re protesting at the lack of investigation of her death and at the suspicious way her body has gone missing from the morgue.
Arkady joins the protest marchers, noting the presence of Tatiana’s editor Sergei Obolensky, the fashionable poet Maxim Dal, and other intelligentsia, among the crowd. Arkady also spots his occasional bed partner, Anya Rudenko, also a journalist, who lives in the same apartment block as him. Barely have the rag-tag marchers arrived outside Tatiana’s apartment building than a gang of skinheads attack them with steel-capped boots and metal pipes.
When the police turn up they are – as so often in these Arkady novels – much more scary than the criminals and start attacking the protesters. Arkady had been knocked to the floor by some skinheads, and was taking a serious kicking when the militia arrived. He manages to fight his way back to his feet, and then make his identity known to the militia, and tries to protect Anya from arrest.
When Arkady makes it away from the scene he discovers he has a black eye and cracked ribs, in fact one of his ribs has punctured a lung. Several days of bed rest are prescribed, with a pipe inserted in his chest which will help reinflate the lung.
He is tended by Dr Korsakova, the sardonic doctor who nursed him through being shot in the head in the Stalin’s Ghost, with much entertaining banter on both sides. She points out that, according to X-rays, shell fragments seem to be moving round inside his brain. They could rupture at any moment. ‘Might as well smoke, then’, says Arkady, with typical bloody-mindedness.
Arkady ignores the medical advice and starts making enquiries about the ‘suicide’. He visits Tatiana’s flat in a soon-to-be-demolished block, and finds it has been ransacked. He visits Svetlana, the young woman Tatiana took off the streets and fixed up in the flat opposite her, along with her six cats. He visits Tatiana’s editor, Obolensky, who says they’d both seen a TV report about a body washed up on the shore off Kaliningrad, and Tatiana had set off to find out more. Nobody had identified the short skinny corpse (the corpse of Joseph who we met in the opening chapter), but Tatiana had tracked down the kids who found the body on the beach and discovered that they had found Joseph’s notebooks. She bought themoff the kids and found they were full of notes made in an eccentric and idiosyncratic style, using personalised hieroglyphs and symbols.
In the usual style of the Renko books, the plot ramifies out into a number of threads:
- The poet Maxim Dal is unusually interested in Tatiana because, he claims, they had an affair years earlier.
- Arkady is surprised to come across his own, admittedly occasional, girlfriend, Anya, hanging out with Alexi, the crime boss’s son (more or less what happened in Stalin’s Ghost, when Arkady’s girlfriend deserted him for the bad guy in that novel).
- Arkady visits Professor Kunin at Moscow University (p.89), an expert on language and ciphers, whose lungs are ruined and so who drags around an oxygen tank and breathing tube. Some interesting light is shed on translators’ codes in general, but Kunin can’t decipher these ones.
Zhenya
Arkady examines the notebook carefully and notes the recurrence of bicycle pictures and cats. When he rings them, the authorities in Kaliningrad, namely one Lieutenant Stasov, are monumentally unhelpful (hiding something? or just standard Russian obstructiveness?).
Zhenya, the street kid we first met aged 8 in Wolves Eat Dogs, is now a shabby-looking 17-year-old and appals Arkady by announcing he wants to join the army. (This gives Cruz Smith the opportunity to refer to the terrible ‘hazing’ ie systematic cruelty, to which new recruits are routinely subjected, and so he refuses to sign the paper allowing him to enlist.) But Zhenya complicates the plot by breaking into Arkady’s apartment and stealing the notebook. He’ll only give it back if Arkady signs the form.
Panther bicycles
Arkady has a beer at a genuine ‘Irish’ bar where the bartender, unexpectedly, turns out to be an expert on bicycles. He makes the connection between the bike frames doodled in the notebook and the images of cats. The latter must, in fact, be panthers. And Panther is a range of hand-built and extremely expensive bicycles made in Italy by a firm named Bicicletta Ercolo (p.109). So Arkady tracks down the firm’s phone number and makes some long distance phone calls to the owner of the firm in Italy.
These calls, with their confusions and misunderstandings, are partly played for laughs, but the owner eventually comes up with the name of a purchaser from Russia who more or less fits the corpse’s description – one Joseph Bonnafos (p.154).
Bad memories
Interleaved through the novel are Arkady’s memories of his brutal Red Army general father – especially the time the General nearly shot Arkady when the boy sneaked into his study and hid behind the thick curtains. Eventually his father killed himself (as his mother had, in the events traumatically described in Wolves Eat Dogs).
Arkady also remembers the events surrounding the tragic and futile death of his wife, Irina, mistakenly given an injection of penicillin to which she was allergic.
In this melancholy vein Arkady finds himself drawn to listening, in the haunted early hours, to the trove of tapes he found scattered over Tatiana’s floor. They are records of her investigations and amount to a summary of recent Russian scandals, which Tatiana either attended or investigated:
You can see why the authorities wanted her shut up. But what was her involvement with organised crime? To find out, Arkady goes the rounds of some of the gang leaders or godfathers he and Victor noted at Grisha’s funeral, notable Abdul Khan, ‘Ape’ Beledon, Valentina Shagelman.
In the middle of the night Arkady’s car alarm goes off and when he trudges down to the garage, he is knocked unconscious. Coming to, he finds himself on a barge on the river, being tortured by Alexi Grigorenko who, to his surprise, wants to find out what Arkady knows about Kaliningrad and to get him to hand over the notebook.
Alexi’s eyes were slightly hooded. Hands quick and delicate as a croupier’s. Under his jacket the hitch of a gun. (p.119)
Just as Arkady’s wondering whether he’ll die, Alexi makes a slip which allows Arkady to grab his arm, pull him down, dislocate his shoulder and punch him quite a few times in the face before walking free, in the casual insouciant manner we’ve become accustomed to.
Arkady learns from his friend, Willy the pathologist, that Tatiana’s body has gone from ‘missing’ to ‘found and cremated’ in one fell swoop. Nothing to see but ashes. Apparently, her sister, Ludmila, identified the body over the phone using photographs faxed to her. The sister lives in Kaliningrad. Aha.
Kaliningrad
As in Stalin’s Ghost a lot of the plot strands point towards a specific location outside Moscow, thus giving the author an opportunity to send the ostensibly Moscow-based investigator to a new and interesting location. In Stalin’s Ghost it was the town of Tver, scene of major battles in the Second World War. Here it is Kaliningrad, where Arkady flies to be met by the poet Dal, in his swanky ZIL, the Russian version of a limousine.
Dal claims he had to be in Kaliningrad anyway to promote some Moscow-to-Kaliningrad rally. He tells Arkady he wants to know more about Tatiana’s fate because he’s up for a sizeable poetry prize from the United States ($50,000) and, if her death turns out to be murder, the fact of his old relationship with her might jeopardise the award. They sound like excuses to Renko.
Arkady and Maxim go to visit the sister, who doesn’t even let them into the house but wears dark glasses and yells out the window. She is more concerned about her vegetables than her dead sister. Yes, she identified her sister’s body from the photos she was sent, what does she care? ‘Now please leave.’
This isn’t the result Arkady spent the time and money flying here to find out to get. Back at Maxim’s flat the poet gets hopelessly drunk. Arkady carries him to his bed and sleeps on the couch.
Moscow Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Zhenya takes part in a ‘Blitz’ chess championship among university students and finds himself losing to an attractive red-head named Lotte, the first time he’s lost a game of chess in years. Intrigued, he lets her take him home to meet her grandfather, who made a career painting nothing but portraits of Stalin back in the day.
Then Zhenya takes Lotte to Arkady’s empty apartment, the only place he has to go. They’re sharing a beer and playing a game of chess when Alexi walks in with a gun and a big bruise under his eye (where Arkady hit him). Alexi threatens Lotte and Zhenya with the gun, demanding to know where the notebook is. Zhenya feigns ignorance and angrily says he’s got hundreds of notebooks of chess games, but not the notebook Alexi wants. Alexi leaves, pissed off. But Zhenya does have the notebook. It was lying on the coffee table throughout the whole confrontation.
Pig man and amber
Kaliningrad Arkady insists Maxim drives him out to the sandy spit where Joseph’s body was found. Apparently, this is where Tatiana bought the notebook from the children. They see a few children in the sea, playing with rakes except Maxim explains they’re actually raking for amber, which they can sell for a good price. The butcher’s van with a model pig atop it, which we met in the first chapter, turns up and the driver watches the kids for a while. Ominous.
On the drive back from the spit, Maxim takes a detour to an open pit mine and tells Arkady that Kaliningrad produces 90% of the world’s amber. Until recently the mafiosi Grisha Grigorenko owned the whole operation. Until someone shot him in the head, that is. Grisha’s front company was named Curonian Amber, the Curonian Spit being the long, thin, curved sand-dune spit that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea coast.
So it looks more than ever as if the murder of Joseph the interpreter, the suicide of Tatiana the journalist, and the clumsy threats by Grisha Grigorenko, the gangster’s son, are somehow linked – and have something to do with control of Kaliningrad’s amber.
Maxim then takes Arkady on a car tour of the city, taking in Kant’s tomb and also the mock old town. It is going to be heavily invested in, apparently. Money is flooding into the area. They’re going to open casinos. Whoever owns it will make a fortune. So that explains the gangland connection…
Just as they arrive at the quaint quayside, a 4×4 looms out of nowhere, rams the ZIL to a standstill and two heavies get out with Uzis, which they proceed to empty into the side of Maxim’s car. But Maxim’s car is an old Kremlin ZIL, completely armour plated and, when Maxim goes to ram the other car, it reverses and takes off. Angry, Arkady extracts from Maxim the fact that he promised to help Alexi, and promised to be parked down at the quay at this time. Why? Because he was scared. Because Alexi threatened to kill him.
Moscow Meanwhile, back in Moscow, Alexi returns to Arkady’s flat to catch Zhenya and Lotte red-handed, trying to decode the notebook. They have barely made any sort of start but Alexi threatens that he’ll be back in 10 hours and, if they haven’t decoded it, he will torture Lotte. He takes the kids’ mobile phones. He cuts the cable of the apartment’s phone. He stations one of his men on the door with a gun.
Kaliningrad Back in Kaliningrad, Arkady returns to the spit of land and finds one of the boys who was playing there. He is called Vovo. He and his sister saw the pig man murder Joseph, then search through his clothes looking for something, before throwing them away. When he’d gone, the kids found the notebook and a card with a phone number scribbled on it. When they rang it, Tatiana answered, and told them to keep the notebook till she arrived and could pay them $50. Which is what happened. And so she passed it on to her editor for safekeeping. And he gave it to Arakdy. And then Zhenya stole it. And now Alexi is threatening to torture Lotte unless she and Zhenya decipher it.
A twist
Leaving a forlorn and broken Maxim, Arkady hires his own car and drives back to Ludmila’s cottage. Now she is not wearing dark glasses and her little pug dog bounces out the front door. Ludmila says, ‘So you’re back.’ Arkady says, ‘And you are Tatiana.’ And she admits it, yes. Her sister, almost identical to look at, was visiting her in Moscow. Someone lay in wait and bundled her over the balcony rail. Max rang her at the magazine to tell her someone had murdered her sister thinking it was her, came to pick her up, and they drove through the night to Kaliningrad where they agreed Tatiana’s best hope of surviving was to impersonate the sister.
Arkady understand. ‘Will she be safe here?’ she asks Arkady. ‘No’, he replies. Especially when he points out that there’s an unmarked police car parked opposite her cottage, keeping an eye on her.
So they devise a scam. Arkady takes her dog for a walk past the car and rolls its toy ball under the car. The cop in it turns out to be the obstructive Lieutenant Stasov, who yells at him to piss off, while Arkady makes a big song and dance about getting the ball back for his dog. By the time this noisy charade has been played out, Tatiana has slipped out of the side door and mingled with the passing pedestrians.
Moscow Back in Moscow, the ten hours Alexi gave Lotte and Zheny to decipher toe notebooks are up, and the man guarding the door of Arkady’s apartment goes to push it open to shoot Zhenya and Lotte, to the latters’ horror. But there are the sounds of a scuffle, and the door eventually opens to reveal stalwart old Victor banging the hood’s head against the wall, before throwing him down the stairs. Hooray! Lotte and Zhenya are saved!
Victor handcuffs the hood – named Fedorov – and allows Zhenya to menace him with Arkady’s pistol, till he admits that Alexi is in Kaliningrad, along with the heads of the mafia families we met at his dad’s funeral. But why?
Kaliningrad Back in Kaliningrad, Arkady meets up with Tatiana at a bicycle shop and they sign up to one of the all-day, all-night bicycle outings he’d seen advertised. Soon they are anonymous among a pack of cyclists leaving the city. That night they camp in the countryside, sing songs round a campfire, and are surprised to watch a small orgy get underway among the cyclists. Takes all sorts. They sleep chastely in a tent till dawn, then cycle off along the coast to Tatiana’s childhood seaside house, full of family memories.
Here Tatiana explains that the government of crooks, dedicated to embezzling vast amounts for the state, has made a massive cock-up with its latest nuclear submarine, which cost hundreds of billions of rubles but is still not seaworthy.
The meeting of gangsters seems to be about a plan to get the submarine refurbished and cream off vast profits from the project. Joseph had been a translator at an initial meeting of those involved in the conspiracy, Tatiana had heard of him through her multiple contacts, and was going to ask Joseph to explain the details, but he was killed before he could meet her.
Tatiana explains that all the cases of corruption she’s dealt with over the past decades build to a climax with this one. It’s the lynch pin to the entire Russian system of official corruption – which is why everyone wants it.
Suddenly a searchlight cuts through the window of the cottage. It’s Alexi in a sleek, designer speedboat. He shouts threats through a loudhailer. He asks Tatiana if she wants to know what happened to her sister, Arkady if he wants to know what happened to Zhenya (implying he’s killed him). Tatiana, bravely or foolishly, walks into the open doorway and Alexi fires wildly at her, missing, but sending splinters pinging, then swings the boat around and roars away. Arkady was winged by some of the splinters. Tatiana cleans and dresses the wound, their hands touch, they kiss, they make love.
‘Afterward was an overused word, Arkady thought. It meant so much. A shifting of planets. A million years. A new sea. (p.276)
Now lovers, the couple go on the run, cycling up the coast in the dark. They encounter armed security guards who turn a searchlight on them and fire with automatics; but in the fog, they escape amid a herd of elk and cycle back to the resort town of Zeleogradsk and try to blend in as tourists.
From an internet cafe, they skype with Zhenya, Lotte and Victor in Arkady’s flat and both groups share the information they’ve discovered – Zhenya confirming the interpretation that the notebook was the record of conference, various parties spoke, it’s something to do with the sea, maybe a submarine, that the final meeting will be aboard the luxury yacht, the Natalya Gocharova, which has moored at Kaliningrad.
So getting out to the yacht and intervening in the meeting now becomes the plan.
The Natalya Gocharovas
In an odd scene Maxim, Arkady and Tatiana argue over which of them will be wired for sound and go out to the yacht, and who will stay in the flat recording whatever happens, onto a tape recorder.
In the event, Maxim insists that he goes instead of Tatiana, insisting on steering a dinghy out to the yacht moored in the harbour, on the basis that he’s a local and knows the seaways. It’s a very spooky and atmospheric trip…
But when they get there, the Natalya Gocharova is dark and unpopulated. What’s going on? Maxim turns nasty and claims the whole thing is a set-up so that Arkady could get him alone and kill him. Ridiculous, but the old drunk pulls out a pistol and is about to shoot Arkady when the latter’s mobile phone rings. It is Zhenya – he has somehow found out that there are two Natalya Gocharovas – the other one is an oil tanker, also moored in the harbour.
So Maxim grugingly puts his gun away and they putter on into the industrial section of the port, and discover that the other Natalya Gocharova is a ‘stubby coastal tanker’. Maxim and Arkady chunter up to it and ascend the rusty ladder to find a champagne party taking place. Overseeing it is old ‘Ape’ Beledon, along with Abdul the ‘rap artist’, Isaac and Valentina Shagelman, Alexi, along with a number of naval officers and two Chinese representatives from the Red Dawn shipyard.
There is a tense stand-off in which Arkady gets ‘Ape’ to confess details of the scam – the Russian government will sub-contract the refurbishment of the nuclear submarine to a Chinese shipyard, at a cost of billions of rubles (hence the presence of the Chinese delegates). But Russian crooks will work with corrupt government officials, going as high as the Kremlin, to cream half the sum into private pockets. It is a vast corruption conspiracy and explains the murders and assassinations which have surrounded it.
Arkady, initially outnumbered, does the classic thing of sowing disunity among his foes by pointing out:
a) that it was ‘Ape’s own sons who shot up the ZIL he and Maxim were in – not at Ape’s bidding, so someone else must have ordered them, probably Alexi – ‘aren’t you even in control of your own sons?’
b) that whoever killed someone as savvy as Grisha, must have been very close to him to get away with it – who else but his nearest and dearest son, Alexi?
At this very tense moment, Tatiana appears on deck, having rowed out to the tanker, and cries out to Alexi that he killed her sister.
She pulls a gun and fires on him but it jams and Alexi fires back at her. Maxim steps into the path of the bullet and is shot in the shoulder. ‘Ape’ – now convinced that Alexi shot his own father and suborned his, ‘Ape’s, sons, – shoots Alexi in the face, then twice in the back as he lies on deck. The naval officers have disappeared. The Chinese are long gone. ‘Ape’ suavely places the pistol in Maxim’s hands.
‘Congratulations. By the evidence you have just shot your first man.’ (p.312)
Being a reasonably civilised mafiosi – and realising there’s nothing to be gained by harming them – ‘Ape’ lets Arkady and Tatiana and Maxim go back to their boat and leave.
Death of the pig man
Now Arkady and Tatiana are free to share idyllic days in her family cabin by the sea. The shifting dunes, the sound of the waves breaking, the salt in the air – are all painted by Cruz Smith with characteristic prose poetry.
But Arkady wakes one night to hear footsteps prowling. It is the pig man, the psycho who killed Joseph in the opening scene. So Arkady is relieved when Tatiana announces that her editor, Obolensky, has commissioned her to write a long piece about Kremlin corruption, with the Natalya Gocharova story as its centrepiece. She has to go to Moscow to research and write it.
Off she goes and Arkady prepares for a shootout with the pig man. He rummages around in Tatiana’s father’s old tool shed and finds lots of cabling. He wraps this round himself and slips a poncho over. That night the pig van with the glowing model of a pig on top comes rumbling over the dunes. It parks and the pig man throws the three children Arkady met weeks ago, onto the sand, trussed and tied up. He threatens to shoot them unless Arkady shows himself. Arkady stands and walks towards piggy who, after some insults, shoots him. Arkady is knocked backwards but rises and walks forward. Pig man shoots again, and again Arkady staggers but carries on walking (as in a thousand movies), finally raising Tatiana’s little peashooter of a pistol and killing pig man at almost point blank range.
All threats are over.
Cleaning the bike
With the kids’ help Arkady and Tatiana find the lost Pantera bicycle. They take it back to Arkady’s flat in Moscow, strip it down and rebuild it. Zhenya gets involved. Tatiana is off collecting international prizes for journalism. Lotte, Zhenya’s ‘friend’, is playing at an international chess tournament in Cairo. His ex, Anya, is happily covering fashion. Maxim has recovered and has published a new poem.
All loose ends are tidied up and everyone is happy. Thus ends the 8th and most recent Arkady Renko novel.
Having read all eight, my favourites are Polar Star and Wolves Eat Dogs because their settings give full rein to Cruz Smith’s spectacular abilities as a prose poet. But all of them are immensely enjoyable and rewarding reads.
Credit
Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. All quotes and references are to the 2013 Simon and Schuster paperback edition.
Related links
- Tatiana on Amazon
- Tatiana Wikipedia article
- Martin Cruz Smith website
- Martin Cruz Smith Wikipedia article
- The Curonian Split Wikipedia article
Arkady Renko novels
Smith is a prolific writer. Under his own name or pseudonyms, he has written some 28 novels to date. The eight novels featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko make up the longest series based on one character:
1981 Gorky Park – Introducing Arkady Renko and the case of the three faceless corpses found in Gorky Park, in the heart of Moscow, who turn out to be victims of John Osborne, the slick American smuggler of priceless live sables.
1989 Polar Star – In the first novel, Renko had clashed with his own superiors in Moscow. Now he is forced to flee across Russia, turning up some years later, working on a Soviet fish factory ship in the Bering Sea. Here, once his former profession becomes known, he is called on by the captain to solve the mystery of a female crew member whose body is caught in one of the ship’s own fishing nets. Who murdered her? And why?
1992 Red Square – After inadvertently helping the Russian security services in the previous book, Arkady is restored to his job as investigator in Moscow. It is 1991 and the Soviet Union is on the brink of dissolution so his bosses are happy to despatch the ever-troublesome Arkady to Munich, then on to Berlin, to pursue his investigations into an art-smuggling operation – to be reunited with Irina (who he fell in love with in Gorky Park) – before returning for a bloody climax in Moscow set against the backdrop of the August 1991 military coup.
1999 Havana Bay – Some years later, depressed by the accidental death of his wife, Irina, Arkady is ssent to Havana, Cuba, to investigate the apparent death of his old adversary, ex-KGB officer Colonel Pribluda. He finds himself at the centre of a murderous conspiracy, in an alien society full of colourful music by day and prostitution and voodoo ceremonies by night, and forced to work closely with a tough local black policewoman, Ofelia Orosio, to uncover the conspiracy at the heart of the novel.
2004 Wolves Eat Dogs The apparent suicide of a New Russian millionaire leads Arkady to Chernobyl, the village and countryside devastated by the world’s worst nuclear accident – and it is in this bleak, haunting landscape that Arkady finds a new love and the poisonous secret behind a sequence of grisly murders.
2007 Stalin’s Ghost The odd claim that Stalin has been sighted at a Moscow metro station leads Arkady to cross swords with fellow investigator Nikolai Isakov, whose murky past as a special forces soldier in Chechnya and current bid for political office come to dominate a novel which broadens out to become an wide-ranging exploration of the toxic legacy of Russia’s dark history.
2010 Three Stations In the shortest novel in the series, Arkady solves the mystery of a ballet-obsessed serial killer, while the orphan boy he’s found himself adopting, Zhenya, has various adventures in the rundown district around Moscow’s notorious Three Stations district.
2013 Tatiana – is Tatiana Petrovna, an investigative journalist who appears to have jumped to her death from the 6th floor of her apartment block. When Arkady investigates her death he discovers a trail leading to Kaliningrad on the Baltic Coast and a huge corruption scandal which will involve him in love and death amid the sand dunes of the atmospheric ‘Curonian Split’.
Books & Boots 