CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two days after Ilya called Maria Mikhailovna, the news of Dmitri’s suicide broke in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki. He had driven his car off the Bolshoi Bridge and straight into the Pechora, the same river into which Vladimir had claimed to have thrown the knife. It was a mild day for October, the paper said, so a number of people were out picnicking at the tables that lined the river’s banks and had witnessed the crash. One man, who’d narrowly avoided being hit by Dmitri’s car, said he’d never seen a vehicle move so fast. Another man said it had been flying. And the car must have been, at least for a moment, because it sailed almost entirely over the river before crashing in the muddy shallows and bursting into flames.
Suicides were not so uncommon in Berlozhniki, nor were violent deaths. After suggesting that the refinery pay city taxes, the former mayor had been stabbed in broad daylight in front of the statue of Iron Felix. His wife shot herself the next day. But Dmitri’s death had been spectacular.
“It was like a meteor strike,” one woman said, to describe the impact. There had been enough petrol in the tank that for a full minute it seemed as though the river itself were in flames. And perhaps because of the fire, it took a while for the reports to shift from one casualty to two.
For a sickening hour, Ilya feared that the second casualty was Maria Mikhailovna. He imagined Dmitri taking her down in the elevator, down into that cavernous garage, where her footsteps would sound so small, but another article soon took over the paper’s home page announcing that the passenger had been Fyodor Fetisov, one of Russia’s richest men, the majority owner of Gazneft.
Dmitri had been driving Fetisov from the airstrip on Berlozhniki’s south side to the refinery—the newspaper explained that Fetisov made occasional visits to Berlozhniki and that Malikov was his driver—when Malikov lost control of the car, or, as bystanders claimed, drove it intentionally off the Bolshoi Bridge.
Ilya had noticed that Russia did not feature in the American news nearly as much as America featured in the Russian news, but evidently it was a drama-free day in America, because Fetisov’s death made the American news almost instantly.
“You know this guy?” Papa Cam hollered down the basement stairs, and when Ilya came into the den and saw Fetisov’s face, his eyes so big that they seemed to greedily take in the room, he knew. He could picture Fetisov hitting Vladimir on the elevator, the ring slicing Vladimir’s cheek. He could feel the way it had snagged his skin when they’d shaken hands on the stage.
Then the picture shrank and was dispatched to a corner of the screen. A Moscow correspondent, a woman of unclear nationality with bright red curls and a face made fuzzy by makeup, said, “To give you a little background on Fetisov. He’s an oligarch, on the Forbes 500. He’s famous, even in his own set, for his decadence… .”
She went on, describing a maelstrom of champagne and caviar and fine art and prostitutes and private jets, all the decadence that Ilya and Vladimir and Sergey had imagined as boys, sitting damp-assed in the snow by the refinery fence. Then she paused and touched the mic in her ear, and Ilya saw that she knew now too.
“We’ve just gotten confirmation that Fetisov’s death was likely a murder-suicide,” she said, and she described a note left by Dmitri accusing Fetisov of three murders in Berlozhniki, the “Gulag Murders,” as they were called by the American press for the hour they made the news, though the murders had had nothing at all to do with the gulag.
Online, Ilya found clips from Russia 1 on the story. The network summarized Dmitri’s suicide note in depth. Apparently he had begun to suspect Fetisov because the first two murders coincided with Fetisov’s visits to Berlozhniki, which were rare and brief. When Lana’s body was discovered, the date of her murder coincided with a visit from Fetisov as well, but it wasn’t until Fetisov asked Dmitri to get rid of a witness—Gabe, trudging along the lumber road at just the moment when Fetisov had returned to the grove—that Dmitri was sure of Fetisov’s guilt. And Fetisov had not seemed to care if Dmitri knew. He didn’t need to care, Dmitri explained, because he’d threatened to kill Dmitri’s wife if Dmitri didn’t take care of the witness and find someone else on whom to pin the murders. So the witness had been taken care of.
“Malikov doesn’t explain how he took care of the witness except to say that he didn’t kill anyone,” the newscaster said. “And apparently a local teen was put in prison for the murders.”
The newscaster paused. She was practically panting with excitement or horror. The wrong emotion, whatever it was, and Ilya wanted to throttle her weedy neck, to make her feel, for a moment, as trapped as Vladimir had been, as Dmitri had been. Then she gathered herself and said, “Unfortunately the final lines of the note are redacted. They were a last good-bye addressed to his wife, and she’s chosen to keep them private.”
As the news cycle wore on, Fetisov was linked to a handful of other murders in other refinery towns, to women stabbed in Ukhta and Krasnodar and Orsk. Other women who’d survived him came forward too—a waitress, an escort, a stewardess—to detail the abuses they’d suffered at his hands. The newscaster interviewed one girl with long brown hair and blue eyes, and for a moment Ilya thought it was Aksinya, or maybe her sister, but the newscaster identified her as Irina from Ukhta. Irina said that Fetisov had hired her for a week, and that all he’d wanted to do was to cut her cheeks.
“Why did you let him?” the newscaster asked. A stupid question made insulting by the way she tilted her head as if in commiseration.
The girl did not seem to mind. “He paid me so much,” she said. “It was a bad week, then a good year.”
Vladimir, the “local teen,” was never named, and Ilya worried it wouldn’t be enough, that somehow Vladimir would be allowed to languish in prison, innocent, but a victim of bureaucratic neglect nonetheless. Then his mother called, and for a full minute she cried so hard that she couldn’t get a word out.
“Mama,” he said. “Mama, what is it?”
“They’re letting him go,” she managed. “A lawyer called. After the arraignment, they’re letting him free. We’re going tomorrow—to Syktyvkar—and we’ll stay until he’s out.” She paused, and then she said, “How did you do it?”
Ilya told her about the tape, about calling Maria Mikhailovna. His mother paused, and he could feel her debating whether to tell him something.
“What is it?” he said.
“I saw her,” his mother said. “She was standing on the square, right by the bench where that American used to stand, and for a second I thought that she’d lost her mind, that she was handing out the same pamphlets that he used to. The ones I sent you. I was too afraid to go over to her, but it didn’t matter, because the letter was everywhere. In all the newspaper boxes. At every kiosk. In our mailbox. She taped them to the door of the House of Culture, the police station, every tree on the square.”
“His letter?” Ilya said.
“Yes,” his mother said, and Ilya imagined Maria Mikhailovna finding the letter on her pillow or on the kitchen table or on the chair by the window that had been his. She’d read it once, twice. With a thick marker she’d inked out the lines beginning with Masha, which only he had called her, and then she’d walked across the square to the school. She’d copied the letter on the ancient machine in the teachers’ lounge, the one that was half the size of a car and smelled of burnt oil and that sometimes expelled papers with such force that they took flight in that tiny room. She’d watched each copy slip out of the machine, each one a promise, a hope that what had happened could not be ignored or denied. Each one proof of Vladimir’s innocence.