Red Square (30 page)

   
Stas's eyes looked fuelled by vodka. Arkady wondered if he had ever actually seen the man eat. He swirled the vodka in his own glass so that it rolled around like mercury. 'What was Max before he ever came to the West?'

   
'He was a film director. He defected at a film festival. Hollywood, however, was not interested in his work.'

   
'What kind of films had he done?'

   
'War epics, killing Germans, Japanese, Israeli terrorists - the usual. Max did have the tastes of a famous director: custom-made suits, fine wine, beautiful women.'

   
'Where is he staying in Munich?' Arkady asked again.

   
'I don't know. What I'm trying to say is that my last hope is you.'

   
'Max has outmanoeuvred me, too.'

   
'No, I know Max. He only attacks when he has to. If you weren't a threat he'd be your best friend.'

   
'Not much of a threat. As far as Irina is concerned, I'm dead.' That was the word she'd used in Tommy's kitchen, like a knife she'd found on the table.

   
'But did she tell you to go?'

   
'No.'

   
'So she hasn't really made up her mind.'

   
'Irina doesn't care whether I come or go. I don't think she even sees me.'

   
'Irina hasn't smoked for years. The first time she saw you she asked for a cigarette. She sees you.'

   
Laika's head turned towards the balcony and she rose to her forepaws, then stood, ears sharp. Stas motioned for Arkady to be quiet, then reached for the light fixture and turned it off.

   
The room was black. Outside were the percussive noises of Volkswagens and a bell chasing someone from a bike lane. Closer, Arkady heard the toeholds of rubber soles, the easing of a rail, the soft landing of a big man on to the balcony. Laika was invisible but Arkady located her by an anticipatory growl in the darkness. As a step crossed the balcony he felt the dog coil to attack.

   
There was an audible intake of breath and a voice in pain. 'Stas, please! Stas!'

   
Stas turned the lights on. 'Sit, Laika. Good girl, sit, sit.'

   
Rikki staggered through the door. Arkady had met the Georgian actor-turned-broadcaster in the station cafeteria and at Tommy's party. Each time Rikki had appeared distraught, or at the least histrionic. Now he was again. The back of one hand was covered in spines. 'The cactus,' he moaned.

   
'I rearranged them,' Stas said.

   
Arkady turned on the outdoor light. Under a hanging lamp were a metal table, two chairs, a bucket of empty beer bottles and a semicircle of various potted cacti, some of them pincushions with short spines and some that resembled serrated bayonets.

   
'It's an alarm system,' Stas said.

   
A shock wave went through Rikki with each needle that Stas pulled out. 'Everyone else has geraniums on their balcony. I have geraniums. The geranium is a lovely flower,' he said.

   
'Rikki lives upstairs.' Stas plucked the final spine.

   
Red puncture marks dotted Rikki's hand. He looked at them mournfully.

   
'Do you always visit this way?' Arkady asked.

   
'I was trapped.' Remembering, he pulled Stas and Arkady away from the balcony. 'They're at my door.'

   
'Who?' Stas asked.

   
'My mother and my daughter. All these years waiting to see them and now they're here. My mother wants to take the television. My daughter wants to drive back in the car.'

   
'Your car?' Stas asked.

   
'
Her
car, once she gets to Georgia.' Rikki explained to Arkady, 'In a moment of weakness, I said she could. But I have a new BMW. What is a girl going to do with that in Georgia?'

   
'Have fun,' Arkady said.

   
'I knew this would happen. These people have no control. They're so greedy it makes me ashamed.' Rikki's face fell tragically.

   
Stas said, 'Don't answer your door and they'll go away.'

   
'Not them.' Rikki's eyes lifted to the ceiling. 'They'll wait me out.'

   
'You can go down the stairs from here,' Arkady said.

   
Rikki said, 'I told them to wait a minute. I can't simply disappear. I have to open the door sometime.'

   
Stas asked, 'Then why come here?'

   
'Do you have any brandy?' Rikki examined his hand, which was already starting to swell.

   
'No. Vodka,' Stas offered.

   
'It will have to do.' He allowed himself to be helped to a chair and given a glass. 'This is my plan: let her take a different car.'

   
Stas said, 'You picked her up at the airport. She knows your car. She loves your car.'

   
'I'll say it's yours - that I borrowed it from you to impress her.'

   
'Ah. And what car are you going to let her take?' Stas asked.

   
'Stas.' Rikki batted his eyes. 'Stas, we're close friends. Your Mercedes is ten years old, bought used - a dog bed, if I may speak frankly. My daughter is a woman of some taste. She'll take one look at your car and will refuse to touch it. I was hoping we could trade keys.'

   
Stas poured two more vodkas and said to Arkady, 'You wouldn't know it now, but Rikki once swam the Black Sea. He had a wet suit and a compass. He dived through ndts and mines and swam under patrol boats. It was a heroic escape. Now here he is, hiding from his daughter.'

   
'You won't trade?' Rikki asked.

   
'Life has caught up with you. I think your daughter's going to make you pay for years,' Stas said. 'The car is only a beginning.'

   
The vodka seemed to stick in Rikki's throat. He drew himself up with dignity, walked out to the balcony and spat over the rail. 'Damn her! And you!' he told Stas. He set the glass on the balcony table and hoisted himself up on the waterpipe that ran down the front of the building. For a man his size he was still agile. Arkady saw his legs swing to the upper balcony. As he thrashed, geranium petals rained.

Arkady awoke on the sofa. It was two a.m. by his watch. There is no hole deeper than two in the morning, the hour when fear rules the world. Stas had avoided the question twice. Where was Max staying?

   
By nature, Russians did not like hotels. Visitors stayed with friends. Other friends knew where. The idea that Max was lying alongside Irina made Arkady stare into the bluish dark of the room. He could almost see them in bed, as if it were just on the other side of the living-room table. See Max's arm locked around her; hear Max breathe the perfume of her hair.

   
He lit a match. Chairs, desk and bookshelves crept out of the dark and towards the flame. He threw off his blanket. On the desk he had seen the telephone. Feeling around the top, he found a small address book. He lit another match clumsily with one hand, opened the front of the book and found 'Irina Asanova' and her number. The flame was at his fingers. He pinched it out and picked up the phone. Would he say he was sorry to wake her but they had to talk? She had already made it clear she had nothing to say to him, especially if Max was lying next to her. Arkady could warn her. How jealous and inept that would sound, with Max right there.

   
Or when she answered he could ask for Max. That would let her know he was aware of how things stood. Or if she asked who was calling, he could say, 'Boris', then see how she reacted to that.

   
Arkady punched her number, but when he started to lift the phone to his ear, his wrist was clamped. Damp teeth held the hand and phone down. When he made the slightest effort to raise the phone, the jaws tightened. He moved his other hand to the phone and a growl resonated through his arm.

   
On the other end of the line he heard the characteristic two rings of a German phone. 'Hello?' Irina said.

   
Arkady tried to wrench his arm free and the jaws closed.

   
'Who is this?' Irina asked.

   
The whole weight of the dog hung from his arm.

   
A click was followed by a dial tone.

   
As Arkady let his arm fall, the jaws relaxed. When he replaced the phone on the cradle, the teeth let go. He felt the dog waiting to make sure he left the phone alone.

   
Save me, Arkady thought. Save me from myself.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The secret was that Stas did all his eating at breakfast: liver, smoked salmon, potato salad and pots of coffee. He also had the VCR and enormous television of an unmarried man.

   
With a remote control, Arkady played the videotape. On fast forward, the television screen raced through monks, Marienplatz, beer garden, modern traffic, beer hall, swans, opera, Oktoberfest, Alps, beer garden. Stopped. He rewound to the start of the last scene. It was a sun-dappled garden in a wall of honeysuckle tended by bees. Diners sat exhausted by the effort of a heavy lunch, all but the woman at one table. He froze the frame where she raised her glass.

   
'Never seen her before,' Stas said. 'What amazes me is that I've never been in this beer garden. I thought I'd been in them all.'

   
The screen came back to life. The woman raised her glass higher. Blonde hair swept back almost ferociously, gold necklace bedded on black cashmere, cat-eyed sunglasses that expressed amusement, red nails and lips that promised in Russian, 'I love you.'

   
Stas shook his head. 'I'd remember her.'

   
'Not at Radio Liberty?' Arkady asked.

   
'Hardly.'

   
'Around Tommy?'

   
'Possibly, but I've never met her.'

   
Arkady tried a different tack. 'I'd like to see where Tommy worked.'

   
'The Red Archive? The next time I try to sign you in, the guards will call Michael. I don't mind annoying him, but he'll just tell the guards not to give you a pass.'

   
'Is Michael always at the station?'

   
'No. Between eleven and twelve he plays tennis at the club across the street. But he takes his phone everywhere.'

   
'You'll be at the station?'

   
'I'll be at my desk until noon. I'm a writer. I turn the decline and fall of the Soviet Union into bite-sized words.'

When Stas left, Arkady neatened the couch, washed the dishes and ironed the clothes that Federov had squashed into his bag the day before. Arkady's wrist was ringed with bruises, but the skin wasn't broken; Stas had seen the marks and said nothing. Every step Arkady took, from sofa to sink to ironing board, he was followed by Laika. So far, she found his behaviour acceptable.

   
While he ironed, Arkady ran the tape again. As the camera panned, he realized he might be looking at a restaurant patio rather than a beer garden. There was indoor dining, though the light outside was too intense to see through the windows.

 
  
What did he know about her? She might at one time have been a Moscow
putana
called Rita. She could be the globe-trotting Frau Benz. The only hard evidence of her existence was this tape. This time he noticed that her table was set for two. She had an almost theatrical presence. The gold necklace was Teutonic, but the angles of her face were distinctly Russian. Thick make-up - that was more Russian, too. He wished that just once she would take off her glasses. Slowly her lips formed a smile and said to Rudy Rosen, 'I love you.'

   
Laika whined, walked towards the television set and sat again.

   
Arkady rewound and froze every other frame. Backwards from her glasses. Retreat from her table. Turn from the diners. Embroidery of vines and bees. Trolley of linen, utensils, water carafes. Stucco. Honeysuckle. Window with one pane that reflected the person with the camera standing before a solid wall of green. That was another question: who took the film? A man with distinctively broad shoulders in a sweater that was red-white-and-black. Marlboro colours.

   
He played it again. Motes floated in the sunlight. Bees stirred and diners came back to semi-life. The woman in the glasses repeated, 'I love you.'

At the Luitpold garage, an elongated Mercedes with a red car phone was parked by the attendant's booth. Remembering the Arabs at the Hilton, Arkady climbed the ramp to the next level, chose a BMW that looked light on its feet and gave it a firm shove. The car woke at once with blinking lights and a sounding horn. He heaved into Mercedes, Audis, Daimlers and Maseratis until the entire level reverberated with an orchestra of alarms. When he saw the attendant come racing up the ramp, he ran down the stairs.

   
In the booth were ticket punch, register, car tools and a long knife for opening locked car doors. The knife demanded patience that Arkady didn't have time for. He took a lug wrench. As he broke the window of the Mercedes, the limousine's alarm joined the woodwinds, but in five seconds he was walking out of the garage exit with the phone.

   
In Moscow, he was a senior investigator of the city prosecutor's office; here, after less than a week in the West, he was a thief. He knew he should feel guilty; instead, he felt alive. Even smart enough to turn off the phone.

   
It was after eleven by the rime he got to Radio Liberty. Across the street, and hidden by parked cars and wire fences, were a clubhouse, patio tables and steps leading down to clay tennis courts where players in whites and pastels patrolled the baseline and traded top spin. What a delightful world, Arkady thought. Imagine having the leisure in the middle of the day to pull on shorts, chase a fuzzy ball, work up an athletic sweat. He looked into Michael's Porsche. Its red cellular phone, the plastic sceptre, was gone.

   
Michael was on a court near the clubhouse. He wore shorts and a V-necked sweater and played with the indolent ease of someone who had been given his first tennis ball in the crib. His opponent, whose back was to Arkady, swung wildly and moved as unsteadily as a man on a trampoline. Behind him and directly in Michael's line of sight was a table with the phone, its antenna fully extended. The other tables were empty.

   
While Arkady considered an approach, he noticed that life offered its own distractions. Michael's opponent hit balls left and right and over Michael's head to the screen. Other times he missed the ball completely. Sometimes he got tangled up in his shorts. The game seemed not just foreign to him but from a planet with a different gravity.

   
During a conference at the net, Arkady was surprised to overhear his own name. As the opponent returned to the baseline, he got a good look. Federov. The consular aide's next serve flew over the screen and bounced into a far court where two women were playing. They wore short skirts that displayed scissory, tanned legs, and they regarded the ball as a breach of form. Michael strolled to the fence and apologized with a tone that suggested his empathy. Waving his racquet and making too much noise for a tennis court, Federov ran to join him. By then Arkady had walked by the table and switched phones.

   
On the far side of the clubhouse were two recycling bins, orange for plastic, green for glass. Arkady tossed the phone into the orange one, then walked back past the tennis courts, through the station gates, under the cameras, by the guard booth in the parking lot and up the steps to the reception area.

   
Summoned, Stas came to the desk, a little astonished to see him, while the guards tried calling Michael. 'It's ringing.'

   
Stas said, 'We haven't got all day.'

   
The guard hung up, welcomed Arkady with a glare and a pass. After a buzz at the door he was back in the cream-carpeted hallway of Radio Liberty. The bulletin boards were changed, a sign of a well-run organization. Glossy photographs showed President Gilmartin leading a tour of Hungarian broadcasters and applauding folk dancers from Minsk. Technicians with audio tape trafficked up and down the corridor. Ludmilla's grey hair bobbed in and out of a doorway.

   
'Did you come to bomb the director's office or Michael's? How much trouble am I in?' Stas asked.

   
'Which way is the Red Archive?'

   
'The stairs are between the drinks and the snack machine. Bomb away.'

When Tommy boasted about the Red Archive being the greatest library of Soviet life outside Moscow, Arkady had pictured the lamps and musty stacks of the Lenin Library. As usual, he was unprepared for reality. There were no lamps in the Red Archive, only the aquarium glow of room-length fixtures. No books either, only microfiche files, motorized steel cabinets that glided on tracks. Instead of a reading room there was a machine that enlarged microfiche to legible size. Arkady ran a hand over a file in awe. It was as if Ancient Rus, Peter and Catherine the Great and the storming of the Winter Palace had been reduced to the head of a pin. He was relieved to see something as primitive as a wooden box with filing cards in Cyrillic.

   
All the researchers scribbling away at desks were Americans. A woman with a blouse full of bows was delighted to see a Russian.

   
'Where was Tommy's desk?' Arkady asked.

   
'The
Pravda
section.' She sighed and pointed to another door. 'We miss him.'

   
'Of course.'

   
'There's just so much information coming these days,' she said. 'There used to be none and now there's too much. I wish it would just slow down.'

   
'I know what you mean.'

   
The
Pravda
section was a narrow room made smaller by shelves of bound copies of
Pravda
on one side and
Izvestya
on the other. At the end of the room a VCR was taping from a colour television set. The station had to have a satellite dish because, though the sound was low, Arkady realized that he was watching Soviet news. On the screen, a crowd in shabby clothes was pushing over a lorry. When it landed on its side, they swarmed into the back of it. A close-up of the driver showed his bloody nose. A different angle on the lorry displayed the name of a cooperative for rendering tallow. People climbed out of it waving bones and black meat. Arkady realized how much he had been conditioned by a few days of ample German beer and food. Was it this bad, he asked himself. Was it really this bad?

   
Behind the set was Tommy's desk, covered by newspapers, coffee rings and machine-gun bullets used as paperweights. In the middle drawer were soft pencils, staplers, memo pads and paper clips. In the side drawers, Russian-English and German-English dictionaries, cowboy paperbacks, heavier books on military history, manuscripts and rejection letters. There was not even a phone jack for a fax.

   
Arkady returned to the file room and asked the woman at the filing cards, 'Did Tommy have a fax when he worked at "Programme Review"?'

   
'Possibly. The "Review" section is in a different part of town. He could have used one there.'

   
'How long was he here?'

   
'A year. I wish we had a fax here. That's one of the executive perks. Privileges,' she said brightly, as if describing awards. 'We do have information here. Anything about the Soviet Union. Any subject.'

   
'Max Albov.'

   
She took a deep breath and played with the bows on her collar. 'Well, that's close to home. Okay.' She started to move away, stopped. 'Your name is?'

   
'Renko.'

   
'You're visiting?'

   
'Michael.'

   
'Then . . . ' She lifted her hands. The sky was the limit.

   
Max was a vein of gold that seemed to work its way through cabinet after cabinet of microfiches. Arkady sat at the enlarger and scrolled through years of
Pravda
,
Red Star
and
Soviet Film
describing Max's career in cinema, his treacherous defection to the West, his service with Radio Liberty, the CIA's mouthpiece of disinformation, his pangs of conscience, his return to the motherland and recent incarnation on American television as a respected journalist and commentator.

   
An early item in
Soviet Film
caught Arkady's attention. 'For director Maxim Albov, the most important part of the story is the woman. "Get a beautiful actress, light her properly and your film is already halfway a success." '

   
His films, however, had all been of the action variety, extolling the daring and sacrifices of the Red Army and border guards against Maoists, Zionists and mujahedin.

   
Another item read, 'One effect of an Israeli tank on fire was particularly difficult because the film crew didn't have the blasting caps or plastic explosives they had requested. The successful shot was improvised by the director himself.

   
'Albov: "We were filming outside Baku, near a chemical complex. Film-goers don't know that my initial schooling was in chemistry. I was aware that by combining red sodium and copper sulphate we could create a spontaneous explosion without a fuse or a cap. Since the question was timing we tested forty or fifty samples before filming, which we did with a remote camera behind a Plexiglas screen. It was a night shot and the effect when the Israeli tank erupts into flame is spectacular. Hollywood couldn't do better." '