Martin Cruz Smith - Tatiana torrent

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.”