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Summary
Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Arkady Renko, one of the iconic investigators of contemporary fiction, has survived the cultural journey from the Soviet Union to the New Russia, only to find the nation as obsessed with secrecy and brutality as was the old Communist dictatorship. In Tatiana , the melancholy hero--cynical, analytical, and quietly subversive--unravels a mystery as complex and dangerous as modern Russia itself.
The fearless reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-floor window in Moscow the same week that a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigo-renko, is shot and buried with the trappings due a lord. No one else makes the connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes he discovers of Tatiana's voice describing horrific crimes in words that are at odds with the Kremlin's official versions.
The trail leads to Kaliningrad, a Cold War "secret city" that is separated by hundreds of miles from the rest of Russia. The more Arkady delves into Tatiana's past, the more she leads him into a surreal world of wandering sand dunes, abandoned children, and a notebook written in the personal code of a dead translator. Finally, in a lethal race to uncover what the translator knew, Arkady makes a startling discovery that draws him still deeper into Tatiana's past--and, paradoxically, into Russia's future, where bulletproof cars, poets, corruption of the Baltic Fleet, and a butcher for hire combine to give Kaliningrad the "distinction" of having the highest crime rate in Russia.
More than a mystery, Tatiana is Martin Cruz Smith's most ambitious and politically daring novel since Gorky Park . It is a story rich in character, black humor, and romance, with an insight that is the hallmark of a writer the New York Times has called "endlessly entertaining and deeply serious . . . [not merely] our best writer of suspense, but one of our best writers, period."
Author Notes
Martin Cruz Smith is a writer of suspense novels. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on November 3, 1942 but grew up in New Mexico and the Philadelphia area. Smith earned a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Smith worked for local television stations, newspapers, and the Associated Press. His early work was published under the names Simon Quinn, Jake Logan, and Martin Smith. Smith is best known for a series of suspense/thrillers featuring Investigator Arkady Renko. The first of these books, Gorky Park, was published in 1981 and adapted as a film starring William Hurt and Lee Marvin two years later. An earlier film of his work, Nightwing, directed by Arthur Hiller, was released in 1979. Smith is a member of the Authors League of America and the Authors Guild.
In 2013 his title Tatiana made The New York Times Best Seller List. The Girl from Venice also became a bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Smith's riveting seventh Arkady Renko novel (after 2010's Three Stations), Renko, now a "Senior Investigator for Very Important Cases," looks into the apparent suicide of crusading investigative journalist Tatiana Petrovna, who fell from a window to her death in Moscow. Renko's bosses have no problem accepting the suicide theory, but Renko and his loyal partner and friend, Det. Sgt. Victor Orlov, continue to search for answers. Smith spins a complex plot involving the Russian mafia, a teenage genius struggling to crack the code of Petrovna's notebook, and an excursion to Kaliningrad, the isolated Russian enclave on the Baltic. While Petrovna may be a candidate for sainthood (she's evidently modeled on real-life reporter Anna Politkovskaya), the most intriguing "character" after Renko is contemporary Russia-freer than it was at the height of the cold war, but at least as corrupt and vastly more unequal-into which Smith offers many insights. Agent: Andrew Nurnberg, Andrew Nurnberg Associates (U.K.). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The more Russia changes, the more it supports Arkady Renko's unremittingly bleak worldview: I'm a cynic. I believe in car wrecks, airline disasters, missing children, self-immolation, suffocation with pillows. And, yet, he soldiers on, a cop perpetually on the outs with his superiors, trying to solve cases that no one wants solved. I have no authority anywhere, Arkady explains, but I like to understand things. But things, in the New Russia, are getting harder and harder to understand. Arkady knows corruption, of course, but the new corruption, from officialdom through the Mob now as powerful as the party ever was leaves even a lifetime cynic shaking his head in wonder and dismay. The apparent suicide of investigative reporter Tatiana Petrovna Was she really murdered? Is she even dead? sends Arkady on another of his ill-advised searches for answers, this time taking him to Kaliningrad, an isolated, Mob-dominated city with the highest crime rate in Russia. What Arkady finds there is a grayed-out surreal landscape, postapocalyptic but without an apocalypse, in which the answers he seeks are as elusive as they are lethal. That Smith has kept this series going for more than 30 years, finding through decades of change more and more reasons for Arkady to justify his cynicism, says much about the modern world and much about Arkady's bedrock humanity in the face of snowballing absurdity. If a man believes in self-immolation, Tatiana asks Arkady, what doesn't he believe in? I don't believe in saints, Arkady replies. They get people killed. --Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S A SPOOKY FEELING, if you're a translator who loves bicycling and word games and likes traveling to Russia, to open a book and encounter, in the very first chapter, a translating, cycling crossword fanatic who is plucked from a Kaliningrad beach by a homburg-hatted butcher, hurled into a carcass-strewn meat van and never heard from again. (Note to self: Avoid Kaliningrad.) At the time he was nabbed, the translator was carrying a notebook he'd used at a session of multilingual, high-stakes business negotiations. His abductor, flipping through the pages, was infuriated to find them filled with illegible doodles - stars, bugs, cats and spirals - the translator's own private code. "Let the birds read it," the butcher declared, flinging the notebook into the wind. Local children later found it in the sea grass. Could this collection of rebuses hold the key to the deaths of a muckraking journalist, Tatiana Petrovna, and a slimy oligarch, Grisha Grigorenko, in Moscow, 700 miles away? What else might it conceal? The reporter bought the notebook from the kids in Kaliningrad just before she died. Might it, therefore, be dangerous to attempt to decode it? In "Tatiana," his eighth crime novel dominated by the lawless landmass once known as the Soviet Union, Martin Cruz Smith sets his Slavic sleuth, Arkady Renko, on the case. Like his fellow thriller writer, the late Tom Clancy, Smith hasn't let the end of the Cold War deter him from raking the Formerly Evil Empire for bloodcurdling tales of suspense and intrigue. Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, both authors kept a cool war nicely chilled, piling ice on the corpus delicti to keep the frisson intact. While both men have written of submarines, suicides, murders and mayhem, soldiers and statesmen, and the machinations of the K.G.B., F.S.B. and C.I.A., Smith has always had a lighter, more emotional touch. The main event of a Tom Clancy novel is always its precise, technically detailed plotting, but it's the human factor that takes center stage for Martin Cruz Smith. His protagonist, Arkady Renko, Senior Investigator for Very Important Cases in the Moscow prosecutor's office, is a hangdog, underdog hero - romantic in a diffident, chain-smoking way, like Rick Blaine in "Casablanca." Unlucky in love, mistrusted by the higher-ups, Renko has a soft spot for outcasts (he's the guardian of a surly teenage chess hustler named Zhenya) and a conscience that goads him to put himself at risk to serve truth, justice and the Arkady Renko way of life. Early in "Tatiana," Renko gate-crashes Grisha Grigorenko's funeral to spy on various mourners from the Moscow underworld. In life, Grisha had been the crime boss of Kaliningrad; his death made room for a successor. When the capo's son spots Renko, he indignantly accosts him. "You're going to hound him to his grave?" he snaps. "This is harassment." More muscular harassment comes a little later, when Renko bumps into another group of mourners who have gathered to protest the untimely end of Tatiana Petrovna. As skinheads hurl bricks at demonstrators and a police bus pulls up, releasing baton-wielding cops, the riot police mistake Renko for a demonstrator and puncture his lung by "dancing on his ribs." When he flashes his investigator's ID, a cop drops his fist: "He's with us?" Well, yes and no. Renko's allegiances are personal, not professional. He knows he should have quit the detective business long ago, "but there was always a reason to stay and a semblance of control, as if a man falling with an anvil in his hands could be said to be in control." Smith's metaphor could double for the strategy of the Putin administration, which has reasserted a tight grip on power with a certain disregard for the consequences. The Yeltsin '90s are over, Renko reflects: "Those heady days were gone, deflated, and all they had reaped was bruises." Those who track international headlines will note echoes of Putin-era events scattered throughout "Tatiana." Smith's title character was inspired by the intrepid Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered in 2006 - payback for her aggressive reporting on Chechnya and political corruption. On the ground in real-life Russia, Politkovskaya's death was not vigorously investigated; Moscow prosecutors eventually assigned blame to a former policeman who was sentenced in December 2012. But in Smith's fictional Moscow, Tatiana Petrovna's demise instantly raises Senior Investigator Renko's hackles. Did she really commit suicide, as the authorities claim? Or was she killed? When Renko learns that her body has gone missing from the Moscow morgue, his suspicions are aroused. "The case is closed," Renko's boozing sidekick grumbles; and his boss warns, "Your colleagues are fed up with the melodrama of your life." Even Tatiana's editor tells Renko to back off: "What are you doing? The war is over." But the war is never over for Smith's dogged hero, whose paranoia, time and again, turns out to be justified. Besides, the editor has shown Renko the cryptic notebook from Kaliningrad. Tatiana had known the interpreter personally, she'd told her boss; these scrawls held information about criminal networks in Moscow and Kaliningrad. She was determined to break the code and expose the malefactors in a "glorious, going-down-in flames sort of article." Her editor refuses to give the notebook to Renko: It's reserved for one of his reporters. But that reporter happens to be one of Renko's sometime girlfriends. In near possession of such a tantalizing piece of evidence, how could any detective resist the hunt? Gaining entry to Tatiana's abandoned apartment, Renko finds a stash of tapes that hold her accounts of multiple crises - the Beslan school massacre of 2004, the Moscow metro bombing of 2010 and, further back, the terrorist takeover of a Moscow theater in 2002. Renko listens to tape after tape, alert for hints of the woman behind the warrior. "I am supposed to be so grave but I am sick of gravity," Tatiana says on one tape. "I ache for a man I haven't met." On another tape, Renko hears murkier sounds: eerie metallic scrapes and taps that come from the belly of the Kursk nuclear submarine, in which 118 sailors drowned in 2000. For reasons Renko can't fathom, Tatiana had labeled that tape "Grisha." Was this the capo who was laid to rest at Vagankovo Cemetery? Listening to Tatiana's voice, Renko falls under the spell of a woman he's never seen: "He thought he knew her and that they had met before. Was that obsessive?" Ask him when he gets to Kaliningrad. It would be a treat to watch the evening news with Martin Cruz Smith's fabulist's eye and see current events colorized through Renko's dramatic filter. In "Tatiana," Smith continues the tradition he began at the end of the Brezhnev era with "Gorky Park," using Russia as his game board to make geopolitical conspiracy, well ... fun. "Tatiana" ought to come with a decoder ring so readers who share the author's fondness for brainteasers can try to crack the translator's code on their own. Then again, struggling slowly from benighted dread into the glimmering dawn of fictional resolution is the reward of reading an Arkady Renko thriller. Figuring everything out too quickly would only spoil the game. Time and again, the paranoia of Martin Cruz Smith's dogged hero turns out to be justified. LIESL SCHILLINGER is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
In Smith's latest Arkady Renko novel, the Russian investigator seeks the truth about a young reporter's apparent suicide. Tatiana Petrovna is one of the last occupants of a Kaliningrad apartment building that developers want to raze. When she falls six stories to her death, authorities are quick to rule the tragedy as a suicide. Renko suspects otherwise and gets his boss' permission to look into it. The young woman had been a troublemaker, with a nose for rooting out the corruption widely known to be rampant in Russia, so few people seem to miss her. Renko can't view the body, because police say they are unable to produce it. This certainly won't stop him, though. Fans of his earlier adventures (Gorky Park, 1981; Red Square, 1992) know he's not a flashy fellow, perhaps in part because he walks around with a bullet lodged in his skull. But he is an honorable man, persistent in asking questions, raising doubts and following leads. At the center of the plot is a notebook that appears to be filled with symbols looking like gibberish. Can Renko find someone to decipher it? Sitting on the Baltic seacoast, Kaliningrad is portrayed as a bleak industrial city that's probably on no one's vacation itinerary. The novel suggests a deep cynicism pervading Russian society, where officials and businessmen are expected to bribe and steal. For example, submarines costing hundreds of millions of dollars may sink into the ocean and never resurface since half the money goes to graft instead of craft. Smith is a master storyteller, delivering sharp dialogue, a tight plot, memorable descriptions and an understated hero in Arkady Renko. Anyone who enjoys crime novels but hasn't read Smith is in for a treat. Read this book, then look for other Arkady Renko adventures.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Cryptography, chess, amber wars, and missing corpses combine in this serviceable series entry (after Three Stations) set in modern Russia, with locales alternating between Moscow and the bleak coastal city of Kaliningrad. The suspicious death of a female journalist seems to police investigator Arkady Renko to be related to the murder of a gangster, as well as to some international intrigue. Corruption in post-Soviet Russia apparently still abounds, and listeners do get a sense of a country in which freedom of the press is not a given. Narrator Henry Strozier's gravelly voice and world-weary delivery suits the character of Renko very well, although sometimes in dialog it is difficult for a moment to distinguish among speakers. VERDICT Recommended for libraries where the author is popular, although the stakes in earlier series entries have seemed higher. ["Burnished to a fine sheen, this tale has it all: a high-velocity plot...endearing chess-playing teenagers, patricide, and death-defying Renko, still indomitable despite a scarred and weary hide," read the starred review of the S. & S. hc, LJ 9/1/13.]--Victoria A. Caplinger, NoveList, Durham, NC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Tatiana PROLOGUE It was the sort of day that didn't give a damn. Summer was over, the sky was low and drained of color, and dead leaves hung like crepe along the road. Into this stillness dashed a cyclist in red spandex, pumping furiously, taking advantage of the flat terrain. Joseph spoke six languages. In restaurants he spoke French, with tradesmen he preferred Chinese and he dreamed in Thai. He was a one-man crowd. It meant that he could travel and find work anywhere in the world. The United Nations sent him one place and the European Union sent him somewhere else. Always, he took his black custom-made bike, his designer jersey and shorts, his molded saddle and tear-shaped helmet. He had started biking too late in life to be a competitive racer, but he could astonish the locals at most rallies. Anyway, winning didn't matter. It was the tension, the feeling of a drawn bow, that he found most satisfying. At this point he calculated he had ridden twice around the world. He'd never married. His schedule wouldn't allow it. He felt sorry for saps stuck on tandem bikes. He loved word games. He had a photographic memory--an eidetic memory, to be exact. He could look at a crossword puzzle and play it out in his mind while he biked, teasing out those words that existed only in crossword puzzles: ecru, ogee, amo, amas, amat. A clue that was not in English was all the easier. A tort was a civil action; a torte was a piece of cake. A full-grown anagram could occupy his mind from Toulon to Aix-en-Provence. He had the afternoon off, and he needed it after interfacing in Russian and Chinese. When the two sides broke early, the interpreter seized the opportunity to ride. He prided himself on finding routes out of the ordinary. His idea of hell was being in Tuscany or Provence stuck behind tourists wobbling on and off the road in rented bikes as they worked off a lunch of cheese and wine. Elastic pockets in the back of his jersey held water bottles, energy bars, a map and repair kit. He was willing to patch a tire or two if he could have a new vista to himself. Kaliningrad had a reputation of being ugly and crime ridden, a city that was an orphan or bastard or both. Escape the city, however, and, voilà, a pastoral delight. He was born to translate; his father was Russian, his mother French, and both were Berlitz instructors. In boarding school he spread a rumor that they were dead, tragically killed in a car crash in Monte Carlo, and became the boy most invited for the holidays by wealthy classmates. He was ingratiating and sometimes he imagined ending his days as a guest in a villa not far from the sea. He still sent his parents a card at Christmastime, although he hadn't seen them for years. He interpreted for film stars and heads of state, but the most lucrative work was corporate negotiations. They were usually carried out by small teams operating in strict confidentiality and an interpreter had to be omnipresent yet nearly invisible. Most of all, he had to be discreet, trusted to forget what he heard, to wipe the slate clean when the job was done. As the road became a country lane he flew past occasional ruins of brick smothered by lilacs. Fortunately, there was almost no traffic. He navigated pothole after pothole and, at one point, rode through asphalt as humped as waves. A butcher's van with a plastic pig on the roof came the opposite way and seemed to aim straight at the bike until they passed like ships at sea. In fact, the interpreter had not erased everything. There were his notes. Even if the notes were stolen, they would be safe, because nobody could read them but himself. The road ended at a desolate parking area with a shuttered kiosk and a billboard of events past. An ice-cream cart lay on its side. Everything described postseason ennui. Nevertheless, when he heard the screech of gulls he got off his bike and carried it over the brow of a dune to a view of a beach that stretched in either direction as far as he could see and wavelets that advanced in regular order. Mist turned the sea and sky into luminous bands of blue. Sand skipped in the wind and nestled into beach grass that grew among the dunes. Rough wooden beach umbrellas, stripped of canvas, stood guard, but no one else was in view, which made it perfect. He set the bicycle down on the sand and removed his helmet. This was a find. This was the sort of mini-adventure that would make for a good story around the fireplace with a glass of red wine and a captivated audience. A little derring-do to cap his career. To give it significance; that was the word. Although the air was cool, Joseph was warm from cycling, and he removed his biking shoes and socks. The sand was fine, not like the loose stones of most resorts, and unspoiled, probably because Kaliningrad had been a closed city during the Cold War. Water rushed up, hissed around his feet, and drew back. His reverie was interrupted by the approach of a vehicle rolling like a drunken sailor across the beach. It was the butcher van. The plastic piggy, pink and smiley, rocked from side to side until the van came to a stop and a man about thirty years old with a homburg and stringy hair climbed out. A dirty apron fluttered around him. "Looking for amber?" Joseph asked, "Why would I be looking for amber?" "This is the place. But you have to wait for a storm. You have to wait for a storm to rile up all the amber." Roil, not rile, Joseph thought, but let it pass. Joseph detected nothing in common with the man, no intellect to engage with. Sooner or later the character would demand money for vodka and they'd be done. "I'm waiting for friends," Joseph said. The tilt of the homburg lent the butcher an antic air. He seemed dizzy or drunk--in any case, so amused at a private joke that he stumbled into the bike. "Idiot! Watch where you're going!" Joseph said. "Sorry, real sorry. Say, is this Italian?" The butcher picked up the bicycle by its top rail. "S'fucking beautiful. You don't see many of these in Kaliningrad." "I wouldn't know." "You can take my word for it." Joseph noticed that the butcher's hands were nicked and raw from handling frozen beef, and his apron was suitably daubed with liverish stains, although his sandals were hardly appropriate footwear for slippery ice lockers. "Can you give me the bike, please? The last thing I want is sand in the gears." "No problem." The butcher let the bike drop and brightly asked, "Holidays?" "What?" "It's a question. Are you here on holidays or business?" "Holidays." The butcher's face split into a grin. "Really? You came to Kaliningrad for a vacation? You deserve a medal." He pretended to pin a decoration to Joseph's chest. "Give me the highlights of Kaliningrad. Like, what did you see this morning?" Joseph had worked all morning, not that it was anyone else's concern, but the butcher produced a nickel-plated pistol that he weighed in his hand like loose change. What had been to Joseph a cool breeze now gave him a chill, and grains of sand stuck to the sweat on his skin. Maybe this was an ordinary shakedown. No problem. He would pay whatever was asked and be reimbursed by the client. "Are you the police?" "Do I look like the fucking police?" "No." Joseph's heart sank. He had been trained to be calm and cooperative in hostage situations. The statistics were actually reassuring. People only got killed when someone tried to be a hero. "What do you want?" "I saw you at the hotel with those people. They're surrounded by bodyguards and have a whole floor to themselves." The butcher became confidential. "Who are they?" "Businessmen." "International business or they wouldn't need an interpreter, right? Without you, everything comes to a halt. The machinery stops, doesn't it? The big wheel is stopped by the little wheel, isn't that so?" Joseph was uneasy. This was Kaliningrad, after all. The pig glowed, happy to go to the abattoir. Joseph contemplated running from this madman. Even if he didn't get shot, he would have to abandon his bike; the sand was too deep and soft for the tires. The entire scene was demeaning. "I just interpret," Joseph said. "I'm not responsible for content." "And take notes of secret meetings." "Totally legal. The notes simply aid my memory." "Secret meetings or you wouldn't be in Kaliningrad; you'd be living it up in Paris." "It's sensitive," Joseph conceded. "I bet it is. You have a real skill. People run at the mouth and you translate it word for word. How do you remember it all?" "That's where the notes come in." "I'd like to see those." "You wouldn't understand them." "I can read." Joseph was quick to say, "I wasn't suggesting that you couldn't, only that the material is highly technical. And they're confidential. We'd be breaking the law." "Show me." "I honestly can't." Joseph looked around and saw nothing but gulls patrolling the beach in case food appeared. No one had told the gulls that the season was over. "You don't get it. I don't need to know the ins and outs. I'm a pirate like those Africans who hijack tankers. They don't know a dog's turd about oil. They're just a few black bastards with machine guns, but when they hijack a tanker they hold all the cards. Companies pay millions to get their ships back. The hijackers aren't going to war; they're just fucking up the system. Tankers are their targets of opportunity and that's what you are, my target of opportunity. All I'm asking is ten thousand dollars for a notebook. I'm not greedy." "If you're just an errand boy that changes everything." Immediately, Joseph understood that it was the wrong thing to say and the wrong way to have said it. It was like poking a cobra. "Let me . . . show . . ." Joseph reached around and wrestled with the pockets of his jersey, spilling a water bottle and energy bars until he found a notebook and pencils. "Is this it?" the butcher asked. "Yes, only it's not what you expect." The butcher opened the notebook to the first page. Flipped to the second page, the third and fourth. Finally, he raced to the end. "What the fuck is this? Pictures of cats? Doodles?" "That's how I take notes." Joseph couldn't help a hint of pride. "How do I know these are the notes?" "I'll read them to you." "You could say anything you fucking please. What am I supposed to show them?" "Who is them?" "Who do you think? These people, you fuck with them, they fuck with you." His employers? If he could just explain. "My notes--" "Are a joke? I'll show you a joke." The butcher dragged Joseph to the back of the van and opened the rear door. Out of the interpreter's many languages, the only word that came to mind was Jesu. Inside the van, two skinned lambs hung upside down, looking cold and blue. Joseph couldn't find more to say. He couldn't even find the air. "Let the birds read it." The butcher cast the notebook into the wind, then tossed Joseph into the back of the van and climbed in after. From everywhere gulls materialized. They descended as a succession of thieves, each robbing the other. Every scrap from Joseph's pockets was snatched and inspected. A tug-of-war developed over a half-eaten energy bar. The birds were momentarily startled by a shot and a winner flew off, trailed by other gulls and screams of outrage. The rest settled into a sullen peace facing the wind. As the haze retreated, a horizon appeared and waves rolled in with the sound of beads spilled on a marble floor. Excerpted from Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
