|
He pulls up beside me
at the next light, and he's still multi-tasking, no hands on the wheel. He
hangs his hand with book out the driver window, like he's shaking some ash from
it. Holy Christ, it's Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith -- I just
finished reading that!
What he's doing is
what we call "distracted driving" hereabouts, you know, one hand on the wheel,
the other holding a cellphone or a beer or whatever. Only this guy has no hands
on the wheel, he's busy with the dope pipe and Stalin's Ghost.
Imagine him being
pulled over by a cop. If I was the cop I'd say, "Is that a hash pipe you got
there, son? I hope so because hash isn't a criminal offense if it's
medical."
And he'd say, "Oh it's
medical, officer... I can't function without it."
And I'd say, "Well be
that as it may... but the book... you can't be driving and reading at the same
time, that's Distracted Driving, son. $280."
He looks really
choked. Maybe it's those thin-rim glasses. "I just picked the book up," he
says. "While I was waiting fer the light, honest."
And I'd say, "Sure,
kid. The book any good?"
And he'd say, "Don't
give me a ticket, man. I'm kinda freaked out... going for a job
interview."
"What do you think of
the ending?"
"Haven't got that far.
See? I'm shakin'...."
"So is it really
Stalin's ghost they see at the railway station?"
"You've read it? I
didn't like that... they explain it and I don't like that."
"It's a
scam?"
"Yeah. These kind of
books are always like that, eh... built around a scam. Ghosts are for real,
man."
Ghosts are for real...
must be the hash, I'm thinking. Superstitious, like half the characters in that
book.
I say, "How do you do
it... smoke and read and drive at the same time?"
He demonstrates by
bringing his knees up on either side of the steering wheel, locks on. Peer
inside, see he has no feet.
Amazed, I say, "You're
handicapped!"
"Yeah," he says. "Like
I say, I need my medicine."
"Don't you have blades
or springs or something?"
"Blades? I don't need
blades, officer. I can walk on my hands."
I don't ask what
happened, how he got to be here in a shabby gold Kia SUV with no feet, driving
through town reading Martin Cruz Smith. It's obvious, he's a victim, like all
the ghosts Stalin left behind. I send him on his way, tell him to go home and
finish the book, even though he's a hard-core distracted driver. He's not
smoking hash -- it's crack cocaine.
"Some cop that
Renko."
"Yeah, I like him.
He's fair."
"You think I'm
fair?"
He doesn't seem
surprised that I show mercy. He's cynical, steeped in tragedy and death; anyone
who reads Martin Cruz Smith has to be. Sure, MCS's protagonist Renko is a
utilitarian moralist, son of a predator killer (one of Stalin's generals) who
doggedly survives from novel to novel like a Lada passed down through the
generations. If you start at the beginning with Gorky Park and keep going
through a few of them you get a lazy reader's guide to the collapse of the
Soviet Union and its chaotic survival as a gangster state. Not only are they
well-written, they are extremely well-researched with an impressive
authenticity considering MCS is an American writing as an outsider. Gorky Park,
Polar Star, Red Square... Havana Bay... Wolves Eat Dogs... Stalin's Ghost and
one or two others. All of them have great setups, drop you into the action, no
sweat. But the measure of a truly great writer is how he/she ends the story and
MCS often falls back on bullshit to tie it all up. For all his realism, and
excellent writing, he has a prime time affliction.
Polar Star is
perhaps the most successful narrative in terms of symmetry (considering the
asymmetric world Renko operates in). It's set on a Russian factory ship fishing
off Alaska, where Renko has been banished following the inconvenient truth of
Gorky Park. It's almost a dystopian science fiction setting, brilliantly
conceived and executed, even if at heart it's a basic reinvention of an Agatha
Christie country murder house. Red Square... well this one is a clever play on
the painting by the Russian godfather of abstract impressionism, Kazimir
Malvelich. The scam here concerns a substitute version of the Red Square
painting which has a natural analogue to the confused state of affairs in the
new Russia. Here, perhaps, Renko's tortured romance is more important than the
mystery of the 'red square' (this might be true of all the Renko novels, with
their reverse Byronic romanticism) (yes, you can connect Renko to Pushkin and
Lermontov). Renko has more than a mild case of masochism, although his detached
persistence is the classic 'silence, exile and cunning' approach to life as a
Russian moralist, er, investigator.
The same can be said
about Stalin's Ghost, where once again Renko grinds out his daily existence
like a fox in a fenced triangle. As usual, everyone is out to get him,
including the people he works with... and maybe the woman he sleeps with. All
is treachery in the red vodka dawn. Story starts with Renko and his partner
Victor pretending to be corrupt investigators from the Moscow Prosecutor's
Office who will not only kill an irksome husband of a business woman (Russian
brides) but also investigate the murder, make sure it is never traced back to
her. Renko receives a call on his cell from his boss, Prosecutor Zurin, telling
him to go immediately to the Chistye Prudy Metro Station. Yeah, it's late, it's
cold and it's snowing but... Joseph Stalin's ghost has been sighted on the
platform.
Is this a good opening
or what? As with any Renko story nothing is what it seems, and there are lots
of powerful reversals en route to the ending. You want chess? You get chess.
You want Chechens? You get Chechens. You want mass graves? Homicidal lunatics
and bikers? A little touch of Lara (Zhivago) in the main woman? Maybe Renko
even comes back from the dead... because, in truth, he's a sort of utilitarian
ghost figure himself. It's a nasty world MCS draws, a bit like the TV news, but
with the complete back story. Nastiness is like a good whiskey -- nice, but
it's gonna burn a little.
Nothing reveals the
Soviet nightmare better than Stalin's purges and mass executions. Katyn Forest:
the NKVD massacre in the Spring of 1940. Beria and the Soviet Politburo acting
on Stalin's orders directed the secret police to execute 22,000 Polish officers
and other citizens in order to make sure Poland would never again be a threat
to the Soviet Union; ironically the massacre was discovered by the Germans.
It's said that Churchill kept quiet about it for reasons of realpolitik. The
event was horrible by any stretch of the imagination, a human cull of holocaust
dimensions [and of course a subset of the Holocaust itself] and one which blurs
the moral distinction between communism and fascism. Knowledge of this
mega-atrocity has been a slow dawn in the west, more or less missed the entire
generation who fought the war, and gives some ugly credence to Hitler's view
that the Bolsheviks were the real enemy. If it wasn't for the fatal Polish
President Lech Kaczynski plane crash near Smolensk (Russia) in 2010 en route to
a commemoration ceremony at Katyn the western public would still be largely
ignorant of this genocide; novels such as MCS's Stalin's Ghost (2007) and
Philip Kerr's A Man Without Breath
(2013) use the Katyn Forest Massacre as a macabre setting, and secular moral
investigators to uncover the grim supernatural absurdity of it all. Smith's
investigator Arkady Renko does some muddy grave excavation aided by a squad of
bikers looking for body ID bounty and warrior (Nazi and Soviet) souvenirs,
although his involvement is incidental to his homicide case; Kerr's
Kripo/Gestapo detective Bernie Gunther is involved full-throttle under the
direction of Joseph Goebbels, the opportunistic Nazi Minister of Propaganda.
Kerr's novel is bleaker than Smith's, although his cop is every bit as
brilliant as Arkady Renko... and, unlike Renko, isn't afraid to pack a gun and
use it.
It's a nice way to get
your history if you find the textbooks too dry and presumptuous. Western
liberals would do well to study the modus operandi of Renko and Gunther; don't
look to your government for your survival, look to yourself. Sure it's fiction,
but is it anymore untrue than last week's news? The State is always a serial
killer. Watch out, baby -- the cop who pulls you over might not be your best
friend when you're in need of some literary compassion.
Well I'm driving
through the forest on the back road thinking... sort of distracted...
thinking... with these murder mysteries what you get is a life-style. Here it's
Russian, although the most popular is British with murder. Now the form is
global, a tourist itinerary for death and destruction some place you might like
to go if you had the time and the money. Of course it's the job of these crime
writers to draw the mysticism from an event, even if the truth can never be
fully explained in social terms. Government, society, the human herd insists
that the world be reduced to a binary reality. It's easier. The science of it
suggests control.
Where I live is
remote, the forest pretty thick and lonely; guess it has a few shallow graves.
Nothing like Katyn but the odd hooker has been dumped there, a dope dealer or
two... a suicide. Nuthin' industrial like Stalin or Hitler. European normal is
a lot different than normal around here... but then, who knows? In the mind
there is no Time and Space, just a dream waiting to be terminated.
Stalin's Ghost
at Amazon:
US
|
Canada
|
UK
|
Australia
*LR's new novel
RADIO
BRAZIL »» |
