Red Square (26 page)

   
He dropped on to his bed, and at once fell into a black sleep. He dreamed he was in a locomotive. He was the engineer, stripped to the waist and sitting at a cockpit of gauges and controls. Blue sky sped by the window. A woman's hand rested lightly on his shoulder. He didn't look back for fear that she might not be there. They were running along the seashore. Somehow, without tracks, the engine ploughed through the beach. Faraway waves reflected rows of sunlight, nearer waves curled lazily over each other and collapsed on the sand; perfect gulls plunged into the water. Was it her hand or the memory of her hand? He was happy not to look and keep the train moving by sheer will if necessary. But the wheels ground to a stop. The sun was sinking. Waves mounted in towering black walls that carried along dachas, cars, militiamen, generals, Chinese lanterns and birthday cakes.

   
In panic, Arkady opened his eyes. He was in bed in the dark. He looked at his watch. Ten p.m. He had slept ten hours, right through the call to the booth from Peter Schiller - if he had ever called.

   
Someone was knocking at the door. Getting up, he brushed aside the drying shirts and trousers hanging in his way.

   
He didn't recognize the visitor, a heavy-set American with stringy hair and a tentative smile.

   
'I'm Tommy, remember? You came to a party at my place last night.'

   
'The man in the helmet, yes. How did you know where to find me?'

   
'Stas. I bugged him until he told me; then I just knocked on every door here until I found you. Can we talk?'

   
Arkady let him in and searched for a shirt and cigarettes.

   
Tommy wore a corduroy jacket stressed at the buttons. He bounced on his toes and his hands hung in soft fists. 'I told you last night that I was a student of World War II. "The Great Patriotic War" to you. Your father was one of the outstanding generals on the Soviet side. Naturally I'd like to talk some more about him with you.'

   
'I don't think we talked about him at all.' Arkady sat down to pull on socks.

   
'That's what I mean. The truth is, I'm writing a book about the war from the Soviet side. I don't have to tell you about the sacrifices the Soviet people made. Anyway, that's one reason I work at Radio Liberty - for the information. When someone interesting comes through I interview them. I heard you might be leaving Munich pretty soon, so I came over.'

   
Arkady searched for his shoes. He wasn't following Tommy closely. 'You interview them for the station?'

   
'No, just for me, for the book. I'm interested in more than military tactics; I'm also interested in the clash of personalities. I was hoping you could give me some insight into your father.'

   
Out of the window, the station yard was a field of signal lights. Arkady saw torch beams running around freight cars and heard the heavy grip of couplings engaging. 'Who told you I was leaving soon?' he asked.

   
'People said.'

   
'Who?'

   
Tommy rose on his toes. 'Max.'

   
'Max Albov. You know him well?'

   
'Max was head of the Russian section. I'm in the Red Archives. We worked together for years.'

   
'The Red Archives?'

   
'The greatest library of Soviet studies in the West. It's at Radio Liberty.'

   
'You were friends with Max.'

   
'I'd like to think we're still friends.' Tommy held up a tape recorder. 'Anyway, what I wanted to cover to begin with was your father's decision, despite being overrun, to stay behind the German lines and wage guerrilla warfare.'

   
Arkady asked, 'Do you know Boris Benz?'

   
Tommy leaned backwards and said, 'We met once.'

   
'How?'

   
'Right before Max went to Moscow. Of course no one knew he was going. He was with Benz.'

   
'You haven't seen Benz since?'

   
'No. It was purely by chance. Max and I were surprised to see each other.'

   
'You met Benz only once and yet you remember him?'

   
'Under the circumstances, yeah.'

   
'Who else was there?'

   
As Tommy squirmed, his shirt-tail showed under his jacket. 'Employees, customers. No one I've seen since. Maybe this isn't a good rime for an interview.'

   
'It's the perfect time. Where did your encounter with Benz and Max take place?'

   
'Red Square.'

   
'In Moscow?'

   
'No.'

   
'Munich?'

   
'It's a club.'

   
'Would it be open now?'

   
'Sure.'

   
'Show me.' Arkady picked up a jacket. 'I'll tell you all about the war and you tell me about Benz and Max.'

   
Tommy gulped down a brave breath. 'If Max was still with Liberty, you couldn't get a word - '

   
'Have you got a car?'

   
'Sort of a car,' Tommy said.

Arkady had never ridden in an East German Trabant before. It was a fibreglass tub with tail fins. The sound of its two cylinders was a syncopated popping. Fumes flowed not only from the exhaust but from a kerosene heater that sat on the car floor between his feet. They drove with the front windows rolled down; the rear windows were glued shut. Every time an Audi or Mercedes passed, the Trabant bobbed in its wake.

   
'What do you think?' Tommy asked.

   
'It's like getting on the road in a wheelchair,' Arkady said.

   
'It's more an investment than a car,' Tommy said. 'The Trabi is a piece of history. Except for being slow and dangerous and polluting, it's probably the most efficient piece of technology in the world today. It goes fifty miles an hour and it'll run on methane or coal tar -probably even on hair tonic.'

   
'Sounds more Russian.'

   
In truth, however, the Trabant made Arkady's Zhiguli look like luxury. It made a Polska Fiat look good.

   
'Ten years from now, this will be a collector's item,' Tommy promised.

   
They'd reached the outer city, a black plane where stakes of light led to different autobahns. When Arkady twisted to see whether anyone was following, the seat almost snapped beneath him.

   
'The whole German-Russian thing is so incredible,' Tommy said. 'Historically, with the Germans always moving east and the Russians always moving west, and then you add Nazi racial laws, making all Slavs into
Untermenschen
only good for slaves. Hitler on one side, Stalin on the other. Now that was a war.'

   
His face was creased with a new grin of pride and camaraderie. He was a lonely man, Arkady realized. Who else would ride around late at night with a Russian investigator? When a tanker approached in the passing lane, engulfed the air and roared by, the Trabi vibrated violently in the shock wave and Tommy glowed with pleasure.

   
'I got to know Max best before I came to the Red Archives, when I ran the Programme Review section. I didn't create programmes; I had a separate staff that reviewed them for content. Radio Liberty has guidelines. Our strongest anti-Communists, for example, are monarchists. Of course we're supposed to be pushing democracy, but sometimes a little anti-Semitism creeps in, sometimes a little Zionism. It's a balancing act. We also translate programmes so that the station president knows what we're putting on the air. Anyway, my life was easier because Max was head of the Russian desk. He understood Americans.'

   
'Why do you think he went back to Moscow?'

   
'I don't know. We were all amazed. Obviously he had to be in contact with the Sovs before he went back, and they played it as a feather in their cap when he showed up in Moscow. But nobody here suffered. He wouldn't have been welcome at the party if anyone had.'

   
'How do the Americans at the station feel about him.?'

   
'To begin with, President Gilmartin was upset. Max was always the favourite. It was a shock to think that the KGB had penetrated Liberty. You met Michael Healey at my party. He's deputy director. He tore the station apart looking for moles. Now it looks like Max went back just to make money. Like a capitalist. You can't blame him for that.'

   
'Did Michael talk to Benz about Max?'

   
'I don't think Michael knew about Benz. You don't want Michael messing with your life. Anyway, it all turned out okay. Max came back smelling like a rose.' Tommy made his point stronger: 'He's been on CNN.'

   
Arkady turned in his seat to look behind them again. If something was impinging on his consciousness, there was nothing in sight but the haze of the city.

   
Ahead, the road forked north towards Nuremberg, south to Salzburg. Tommy turned right, and as soon as they came off the curve and through an underpass Arkady saw what appeared to be a pink island in the dark. He didn't know what he had expected - Kremlin walls or St Basil's domes rising like phantoms by the autobahn? Whatever, something more than a one-storey building of white stucco framed in red neon, with a square red light bleeding into the air beside a sign that said
red square
and, in more demure cursive,
sex club.
As he got out of the Trabi he thought nothing you dream is as strange as what you see.

The inside of the club was so washed in red lights that it was difficult to focus, but Arkady did notice women in suspender belts, black stockings, push-up bras and corsets. The theme was established by brass samovars on the tables and fluorescent stars on the walls.

   
'What do you think?' Tommy scooped his shirt back into his belt.

   
'Like the last days of Catherine the Great,' Arkady said.

   
It was interesting how intimidated men were at a house of prostitution. They had the money, the choice, the chance to leave. Women were servitors, slaves, mattresses. Yet the power, at least before sex, was inverted. The women, ogled in their lingerie, sprawled on love seats as comfortably as cats; the men betrayed the tics of the undressed. American soldiers stood at a horseshoe bar. Approached by a prostitute, they nervously played out a charade of charm and seduction while she maintained a face so slack and bored that she could have been asleep. What amazed Arkady was that the women actually were Russian. He heard it in their accents and whispers to each other, saw it in the pallor of their skin, the tilt of their eyes. He saw a woman in pink silk as broad-shouldered as a farm girl from the steppe who might have wandered west in her underwear. She whispered to a more delicate friend with huge Armenian eyes and a body stocking of black lace. When he looked at them he couldn't help wondering why. How did imported Russian prostitutes differ from the local German? In wingspread, submissiveness, the ability to heal? They pointed to him. They could spot it; he was Russian, too. He asked himself how desperate was he for love, or at least for a facsimile of it. Did the need shine from him or did he look dead as a charred match?

   
He reminded Tommy, 'You said that Max Albov came back to Munich smelling like a rose.'

   
Tommy said, 'If anything, I think we respect Max more. I bet he'll make a million.'

   
'Doing what? Did he say?'

   
'Television journalism.'

   
'He mentioned a joint venture.'

   
'Properties, assets. He says a man who can't make money in Moscow couldn't find flies on shit.'

   
'Sounds inviting. Maybe everyone should go back to Moscow.'

   
'That was the idea.'

   
Tommy couldn't take his eyes off the women. He looked red-faced and overheated just by proximity, pressing his shirt against his belly, raking his hair with thick fingers, signs of an excitement Arkady did not share. Love was the mountain breeze, sunrise and nirvana; sex was a roll in the leaves; paid sex was the taste of worms. But it had been so long since he knew either sex or love, who was he to judge? One man imagines paid sex to be coarse and deadening, the next man finds it simple and direct. Does the next man have less imagination or more money?

   
Every race has its catalogue of features. A Tartar heritage of narrowed, upward-slanting eyes. Slavic oval outline and rounded brow. Small lips, skin pale as snow. None of the women looked like Irina, though. Her eyes were broader and deeper, more Byzantine than Mongol, both more open and more hidden in their look. Her face was less oval, lighter in the jaw, her mouth fuller, more articulate. It was curious; in Moscow he heard Irina five times a day. Here, silence.