like?”
“Actually, she was just like you.”
Marlene gave him a basilisk stare.
“Seriously,” he said. “My mother was tough as a fistful of nails. She knew how to
stand up to my father.”
Marlene seized on this opening. “Why did she have to do that? Was your father
abusive?”
Arkadin shrugged. “No more than any other father, I suppose. When he was frustrated
at work he took it out on her.”
“And you find that normal.”
“I don’t know what the word normal means.”
“But you’re used to abuse, aren’t you?”
“Isn’t that called leading the witness, Counselor?”
“What did your father do?”
“He was consiglieri-the counselor-to the Kazanskaya, the family of the Moscow
grupperovka that controls drug trafficking and the sale of foreign cars in the city and
surrounding areas.” He’d been nothing of the sort. Arkadin’s father had been an
ironworker, dirt-poor, desperate, and drunk as shit twenty hours a day, just like everyone
else in Nizhny Tagil.
“So abuse and violence came naturally to him.”
“He wasn’t on the streets,” Arkadin said, continuing his lie.
She gave him a thin smile. “All right, where do you think your bouts of violence come
from?”
“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
Marlene laughed. “Come on, Leonid Danilovich. Don’t you want to be of use to Mr.
Icoupov?”
“Of course I do. I want him to trust me.”
“Then tell me.”
Arkadin sat for a time. The sun felt good on his forearms. The heat seemed to draw his
skin tight over his muscles, making them bulge. He felt the beating of his heart as if it
were music. For just a moment, he felt free of his burden, as if it belonged to someone
else, a tormented character in a Russian novel, perhaps. Then his past came rushing back
like a fist in his gut and he almost vomited.
Very slowly, very deliberately he unlaced his sneakers, took them off. He peeled off
his white athletic socks, and there was his left foot with its two toes and three miniature stumps, knotty, as pink as the polka dots on Marlene’s bathing suit.
“Here’s what happened,” he said. “When I was fourteen years old, my mother took a
frying pan to the back of my father’s head. He’d just come home stone drunk, reeking of
another woman. He was sprawled facedown on their bed, snoring peacefully, when
whack!, she took a heavy cast-iron skillet from its peg on the kitchen wall and, without a
word, hit him ten times in the same spot. You can imagine what his skull looked like
when she was done.”
Marlene sat back. She seemed to have trouble breathing. At length, she said, “This
isn’t another one of your bullshit stories, is it?”
“No,” Arkadin said, “it’s not.”
“And where were you?”
“Where d’you think I was? Home. I saw the whole thing.”
Marlene put a hand to her mouth. “My God.”
Having expelled this ball of poison, Arkadin felt an exhilarating sense of freedom, but
he knew what had to come next.
“Then what happened?” she said when she had recovered her equilibrium.
Arkadin let out a long breath. “I gagged her, tied her hands behind her, and threw her
into the closet in my room.”
“And?”
“I walked out of the apartment and never went back.”
“How?” There was a look of genuine horror on her face. “How could you do such a
thing?”
“I disgust you now, don’t I?” He said this not with anger, but with a certain
resignation. Why wouldn’t she be disgusted by him? If only she knew the whole truth.
“Tell me in more detail about the accident in prison.”
Arkadin knew at once that she was trying to find inconsistencies in his story. This was
a classic interrogator’s technique. She would never know the truth.
“Let’s go swimming,” he said abruptly. He shed his shorts and T-shirt.
Marlene shook her head. “I’m not in the mood. You go if-”
“Oh, come on.”
He pushed her overboard, stood up, dived in after her. He found her under the water,
kicking her legs to bring herself to the surface. He wrapped his thighs around her neck,
locked his ankles, tightening his grip on her. He rose to the surface, held on to the boat, swung water out of his eyes as she struggled below him. Boats thrummed past. He waved
to two young girls, their long hair flying behind them like horses’ manes. He wanted to
hum a love song, but all he could think of was the theme to Bridge on the River Kwai.
After a time, Marlene stopped struggling. He felt her weight below him, swaying
gently in the swells. He didn’t want to, really he didn’t, but unbidden the image of his old apartment resurrected itself in his mind’s eye. It was a slum, the filthy crumbling Soviet-era piece of shit building teeming with vermin.
Their poverty didn’t stop the older man from banging other women. When one of them
became pregnant, she decided to have the baby. He was all for it, he told her. He’d help
her in any way he could. But what he really wanted was the child his barren wife could
never give him. When Leonid was born, he ripped the baby from the girl’s arms, brought
Leonid to his wife to raise.
“This is the child I always wanted, but you couldn’t give me,” he told her.
She raised Arkadin dutifully, without complaint, because where could a barren woman
go in Nizhny Tagil? But when her husband wasn’t home, she locked the boy in the closet
of his room for hours at a time. A blind rage gripped her and wouldn’t let her go. She
despised this result of her husband’s seed, and she felt compelled to punish Leonid
because she couldn’t punish his father.
It was during one of these long punishments that Arkadin woke to awful pain in his left
foot. He wasn’t alone in the closet. Half a dozen rats, large as his father’s shoe, scuttled back and forth, squealing, teeth gnashing. He managed to kill them, but not before they
finished what they’d started. They ate three of his toes.
Twenty-Seven
IT ALL STARTED with Pyotr Zilber,” Maslov said. “Or rather his younger brother,
Aleksei. Aleksei was a wise guy. He tried to muscle in on one of my sources for foreign
cars. A lot of people were killed, including some of my men and my source. For that, I
had him killed.”
Dimitri Maslov and Bourne were sitting in a glassed-in greenhouse built on the roof of
the warehouse where Maslov had his office. They were surrounded by a lush profusion of
tropical flowers: speckled orchids, brilliant carmine anthurium, birds-of-paradise, white
ginger, heliconia. The air was perfumed with the scents of the pink plumeria and white
jasmine. It was so warm and humid, Maslov looked right at home in his bright-hued
short-sleeved shirt. Bourne had rolled up his sleeves. There was a table with a bottle of
vodka and two glasses. They’d already had their first drink.
“Zilber pulled strings, had my man Borya Maks sent to High Security Prison Colony
13 in Nizhny Tagil. You’ve heard of it?”
Bourne nodded. Conklin had mentioned the prison several times.
“Then you know it’s no picnic in there.” Maslov leaned forward, refilled their glasses,
handed one to Bourne, took the other himself. “Despite that, Zilber wasn’t satisfied. He
hired someone very, very good to infiltrate the prison and kill Maks.” Drinking vodka,
surrounded by a riot of color, he appeared totally at his ease. “Only one person could
accomplish that and get out alive: Leonid Danilovich Arkadin.”
The vodka had done Bourne a world of good, returning both warmth and strength to