Red Square (10 page)

   
Gul picked up the theme. 'Now we crawl to Germany to kiss their arse. That's what we get for letting them get off their knees.'

   
'And what do we get for saving Hungarians and Czechs and Poles except the spit on our face?' The passion of his question was too much for Ivanov; the ancient bearer of the field case slumped against the fender of the car. They were all so thoroughly soaked with vodka, Arkady realized, that a match would set them off like rags.

   
'We saved the world, remember?' Shuksin demanded. 'We saved the world!'

   
Belov pleaded. 'Why?'

   
'He was a killer,' Arkady said.

   
'That was war.'

   
Gul asked, 'Do you think
we
would have lost Afghanistan? Or Europe? Or a single republic?'

   
'I'm not talking about the war,' Arkady said.

   
'Read the letter,' Belov begged.

   
'I'm talking about murder,' Arkady said.

   
'Arkasha, please!' Belov's eyes were as pleading as a dog's. 'For me. He's going to read the letter!'

   
The generals rallied, regrouped and crowded round. One push and they would probably collapse and turn to piles of dust, Arkady thought. Who did they see, he wondered? Him, his father, who? This could be his moment of vindictive triumph, a child's long-awaited fantasy. But it was too pathetic, and the generals, grotesque as they seemed, were also at their most human in this last stage of fangless dotage. He took the letter. It had a luminous quality and his name printed in spidery letters. It felt light, as if empty, to the hand.

   
'I'll read it later,' Arkady said and walked away.

   
'The Vagankovskoye Cemetery,' Belov called after him. 'Ten a.m.'

   
Or I'll throw it away, Arkady thought. Or burn it.

Chapter Eight

The following day was the final one of so-called 'hot investigation', the last day of official alerts at travel points, a peak time for frustration and argument. Arkady and Jaak chased false sightings of Kim north, west and south at all three Moscow airports. On the fourth tip, they headed east towards the dead end known as Lyubertsy.

   
'A new informant?' Arkady asked. He was driving, which was always a sign of bad humour.

   
'Totally new,' Jaak insisted.

   
'Not Julya,' Arkady said.

   
'Not Julya,' Jaak maintained.

   
'Borrow her Volvo yet?'

   
'I will. Anyway, it isn't Julya, it's a Gypsy.'

   
'A Gypsy!' With an effort, Arkady stayed on the road.

   
'You always say
I'm
prejudiced,' Jaak said.

   
'When I think of Gypsies, I think of poets and musicians, I don't think of reliable informants.'

   
Jaak said, 'Well, this guy would sell out his brother and that's what I call a reliable informant!'

Kim's motorcycle was there. An exotic, midnight-blue Suzuki, sculpture that linked two cylinders to two wheels, propped on a chrome kickstand at the back of a five-storey block of flats. Arkady and Jaak walked around the machine and admired it from every angle, taking an occasional glance at the building. The upper floors had balconies that were illegally enclosed. The ground was littered with refuse that seemed to have rained down from the windows: paper cartons, mattress springs, broken bottles. The next block was a hundred metres away. It was an incomplete landscape of buildings set far apart, sewer pipes lying in open trenches, concrete walkways that intersected among weeds. No one was walking. The sky was soiled with that particular kind of smog which expressed both industrial poison and despair.

   
Lyubertsy was all that Russians feared, which was to be outside the centre, not to be in Moscow or Leningrad, to be forgotten and invisible, as if the steppes started here, only twenty kilometres from the Moscow city limit. This was the vast population that moved on a straight track from day care to vocational school to assembly line to the long vodka queue to the grave.

   
Lyubertsy was also what Muscovites feared because its young factory workers took the train into Moscow to beat up privileged urban kids. It was only natural that Lyubers developed into a mafia with a special talent for tearing up rock shows and restaurants.

   
Jaak cleared his throat. 'In the cellar,' he said.

   
'The cellar?' That was the last thing Arkady wanted to hear. 'If we're going into the cellar, we should have bulletproof vests and lamps. You didn't order those?'

   
'I didn't know Kim was going to be here.'

   
'You didn't really believe your reliable informant, did you?'

   
'I didn't want to cause a lot of fuss,' Jaak said.

   
The trouble was that Lyubertsy cellars were not ordinary cellars, because until recently the private practice of unarmed oriental self-defence was against the law. In response, Lyuber muscle men had gone underground, refitting coal bins and boiler rooms as secret gymnasiums. Wandering alone around a Lyubertsy basement was not a prospect Arkady looked forward to, but he knew it would take a day to get special gear out of Moscow.

   
Three babushkas sat on the steps of the apartment building and watched over a playground where toddlers climbed into a sandbox that was made from rotting boards. The women had grey heads and black coats that made them look like crows.

   
Jaak asked, 'Remember the Komsomol club that called about a trophy for Rudy?'

   
'Vaguely.'

   
'Did I mention they keep calling?'

   
'Is this a good time to mention it?' Arkady asked.

   
'What about my radio?' Jaak asked.

   
'Your radio?'

   
'I bought it, I'd like to listen to it. You keep forgetting to bring it in.'

   
'Come by my place tonight and pick it up.'

   
They couldn't stand around the bike all day, Arkady thought. They had already been seen.

   
Jaak said, 'I have the gun, so I'll go in.'

   
'As soon as someone goes in, he's going to run. Since you have the gun, you wait here and stop him.'

   
Arkady walked up to the steps. The women regarded him as if he had arrived from a different solar system. He tried a smile. No, they didn't accept smiles here. He looked at the playground. It was empty; the kids were chasing cottonwood fluffs across the ground. He glanced back at Jaak, who was sitting on the bike and watching the building.

   
He moved along the base of the house until he found stairs leading down to a steel door. The door was unlocked and the other side of it was as black as an abyss. He called, 'Kim! Mikhail Kim! I want to talk to you!'

   
The answer was a profound hush. This was the sound of mushrooms growing, Arkady thought. He didn't want to enter the cellar. 'Kim?'

   
He felt around until he found a chain. When he pulled it a dozen dim light bulbs appeared, hanging from an too electrical line tacked directly to bare support beams, not so much illumination as markers in the dark. As he stooped down it was like slipping into shallow water.

   
Clearance from floor to ceiling was a metre and a half, sometimes less. It was a crawl space excavated into a tunnel that worked its way over and around exposed pipes and valves. The underside of the house creaked overhead like a ship. He peeled cobwebs from his face and held his breath.

   
Claustrophobia was an old friend come along for the trip. The main thing was to keep moving from one tiny, shivering light bulb to the next. To breathe more evenly. Not to think about the weight of the building pressing down on his back. Not to consider the low quality of Soviet construction. Not to imagine for a moment that the tunnel resembled a mouldering grave.

   
At the last light bulb, Arkady squeezed through a second hatch and found himself on his hands and knees inside a low, windowless room that was smoothly plastered and painted and lit by a fluorescent tube. On the floor were mattresses, barbells and pulleys. The barbells were home-made from steel wheels crudely slotted to fit over bars. The pulleys were boiler plates cut up and strung with wire. On the walls were a full-length mirror and a picture of Schwarzenegger in total flex. A heavy bag hung by a chain from the ceiling. The air was pungent with sweat and talc.

   
Arkady got to his feet. Behind was a second room with benches and weights on blocks. Books on bodybuilding and nutrition lay on a mattress. One bench was slick and showed the imprint of a sneaker. Set in the ceiling above the bench was a metal plate. There was a switch on the wall. Arkady turned the light off so that he wouldn't be a silhouette. He stood on the bench, lifted the plate and slid it back. He was beginning to hoist himself up when a gun pressed against his head.

   
It was dark. Arkady's head was halfway through the floor behind the stairs of the building foyer. The bench was a million miles below his swaying feet. The odour of stale urine wafted from the foyer floor. He could see a tricycle with no wheels, the corner detritus of cigarette packs and condoms and, on the other end of the automatic, Jaak.

   
'You scared me,' Jaak said. He pointed the gun up.

   
'Really?' Arkady felt as if more than his feet were dangling.

   
Jaak pulled him up. The foyer faced the opposite street from the way they had approached the building. Arkady leaned against the letter boxes. They were torched, as usual. The foyer light was broken, of course. No wonder people got killed.

   
Jaak was embarrassed. 'You were taking forever, so I came around to see if there was another way in just as you popped up.'

   
'I won't do it again.'

   
Jaak said, 'You should have a gun.'

   
'If I had a gun, we'd be a suicide pact.'

   
Arkady still felt dizzy when they went outside.

 
  
'Let's just watch the motorcycle,' Jaak suggested.

   
When they came around the building, Kim's beautiful bike was gone.

The militia towed vehicular wrecks to a dock near the South Port, handy for the metal stamps and car factories of the Proletariat Borough. Whatever was remotely reusable had been stripped from them. These were the bones of cars, and they had a kind of dignity, like dried flowers. The dock had a vista of the entire southern end of Moscow; it was not Paris, granted, but it possessed a certain sweep, the occasional gold cap of a church flashing in the shadow of industrial chimneys.

   
The evening sky was still lit. Arkady found Polina at the end of the dock working with a brush, cans of paint and squares of pressed wood. She had unbuttoned her raincoat, a concession to the balmy weather.

   
'Your message sounded urgent,' Arkady said.

   
'I thought you should see this.'

   
'What?' He looked around.

   
'You'll see.'

   
He was losing patience. 'There's no emergency? You're just working?'

   
'You're working, too.'

   
'Well, I lead an obsessed but empty life. Don't you want to go dancing or see a film with a friend?' Irina's newscasts had begun and he knew there was something he would rather be doing.

   
Polina daubed green paint on a square of wood balanced on the fender of a Zil from which doors and seats had been removed. She herself made rather a pretty picture, Arkady thought. If she had an easel and a little more technique . . . But she just slapped the paint on.

   
She seemed to sense his mind wandering. 'How did you do with Jaak?'

   
'It was not a day covered in glory.' He looked over her shoulder. 'Very green.'

   
'You're a critic?'

   
'Artists are so temperamental. I meant, as in "expansively, generously green".' He stood back to study the cityscape of black river, grey cranes and chimneys melting into a milky sky. 'What exactly are you painting?'

   
'The wood.'

   
'Ah.'

   
Polina had four different pots of green paint labelled CS1, CS2, CS3, CS4, separated from four pots of red labelled RS1, RS2, etc. Each pot had its own brush. The green paint had an infernal reek. He searched his pocket, but he had left Borya's Marlboros in his other jacket. When he did find Belomors, Polina blew the match out.

   
'Explosives,' she said.

   
'Where?'

   
'Remember, in Rudy's car we found traces of red sodium and copper sulphate? As you know, that's consistent with an incendiary device.'

   
'Chemistry wasn't my strong point.'

   
'What we couldn't understand,' Polina went on, 'was why we didn't find a timer or remote receiver. I did some research. You don't need a separate source of ignition if you combine red sodium and copper sulphate.'

   
Arkady looked at the pots at his feet again. RS: red sodium, marine-paint red, a deep carmine with an ochre tinge. CS: copper sulphate, a vile, stewpot green with a sniff of the devil. He put his matches away. 'You don't need a fuse?'

   
Polina set the wet board down on the Zil's front seat and brought out another on which the green paint was dry. Over the board she taped brown paper. 'Red sodium and copper sulphate are relatively harmless individually. Together, however, they react chemically and generate enough heat to ignite spontaneously.'

   
'Spontaneously?'

   
'But not immediately and not necessarily. That's the interesting part. It's a classic binary weapon: two halves of an explosive charge separated by a membrane. I'm testing different barriers such as cheesecloth, muslin and paper for time and effectiveness. I've already put painted boards in six cars.'

   
Polina took the brush from a can marked RS4 and started painting the paper in broad strokes of red sodium. Arkady noticed that she started with a 'W', like a house painter. 'If they did ignite immediately, you'd know by now,' he said.