Red Square (40 page)

Chapter Thirty-Five

Irina said, 'I always imagined who you were with. I saw someone very young, for some reason. Small and dark, bright, passionate. I thought of places you would walk, what you'd talk about. When I wanted to torture myself, I imagined an entire day at the beach - blankets, sand, sunglasses, the sound of waves. She tunes a short-wave radio looking for romantic music when she happens to hear me. She stops, because the station is Russian after all. Then she moves the dial and you let her; you don't say a word. So I imagined my revenge. She gets a trip to Germany. By coincidence we share the same compartment of a train, and as it's a long trip we talk, and naturally I discover who she is. We usually end up on an icy platform in the Alps. She's a nice woman. I push her off the platform anyway for taking my place.'

   
'You kill her, not me?'

   
'I'm mad, I'm not crazy.'

From the floor of the flat, the street had a sound like surf. A wash of headlights moved across the ceiling.

   
Arkady saw a car park one block north on Friedrichstrasse. He couldn't tell the make, though he could see that no one got out. A second car parked a block south.

As the hours passed, he told her about Rudy and Jaak, about Max and Rodionov, about Borya and Rita. To him it was an interesting tale. He remembered his walk with Feldman, the art professor describing the revolutionary Moscow that had been. 'The squares will be our palettes!' We ourselves are palettes, Arkady thought. Possibilities. Inside Borya Gubenko was a Boris Benz. Inside an Intourist prostitute known as Rita was the Berlin gallery owner Margarita Benz.

   
Irina said, 'The question is who can we be? If we get out alive. Russian? German? American?'

   
'Whatever you want. I'll be putty.'

   
'Putty is not what comes to mind when I think of you.'

   
'I can be American. I can whistle and chew gum.'

   
'Once you wanted to live like the Indians.'

   
'Too late for that now, but I can live like a cowboy.'

   
'Rope and ride?'

   
'Drive cattle. Or stay here. Drive on the autobahn, climb the Alps.'

   
'Be a German? That's easier.'

   
'Easier?'

   
'You can't be American unless you stop smoking.'

   
'I can do that,' Arkady said, although he lit another cigarette. He exhaled and watched the smoke.

   
He screwed the cigarette out on the floor, put his finger to her lips and motioned her to move away. It had taken him a moment to realize that the shift in the smoke was air stirring under the door. Stairwells produced suction, though he wouldn't have felt the draught if he hadn't been lying down.

   
He put his ear to the floor. See, he
could
live like an Indian. He heard the easing of shoes in the hallway.

   
Irina stood against a wall, not trying to hide or get small.

   
Around his holdall, Arkady saw the light at the bottom of the door, a white bar fading at one end.

   
He pressed his stomach into the floorboards. If he were any flatter he could slide under the door himself. He glanced at Irina. Her eyes watched him like hands keeping a man from falling off a cliff.

   
The door swung open. Light fanned in and a familiar bulk stepped across the threshold.

   
'You could get killed that way, Peter,' Arkady said.

   
Peter Schiller kicked the bag aside. He snorted at the sight of Arkady. 'Is this a shooting range?'

   
'We were expecting other people.'

   
'I'm sure you were.' Peter saw Irina, who returned his stare undiminished. 'Renko, we have Russians running all over Berlin. We have two dead mafiosos at the Europa Centre, cut up by someone who looked like you. What happened to your back?'

   
'I slipped.' Arkady got to his feet and shut the door.

   
'Arkady was with me,' Irina said.

   
'How long?' Peter asked.

   
'All day.'

   
'Lies,' Peter said. 'This is a gang war, isn't it. Benz is connected to one of them. The more I know about the Soviet Union, the more it sounds like one endless gang war.'

   
'In a way,' Arkady conceded.

   
'This afternoon you said you didn't even know this woman. Tonight she's your witness.' Peter walked around the room. He had the size and vigour of a Borya, but he was more Wagnerian, Arkady thought. A Lohengrin who had stumbled into the wrong opera.

   
'Where is Benz?' Arkady asked.

   
'Gone,' Peter said. 'He boarded a plane to Moscow an hour ago.'

   
It wasn't a bad time to leave Berlin. Maybe Borya was abandoning the entire Benz identity, Arkady thought. After this Boris Benz might never be seen again. Eliminating Makhmud was certainly a more important accomplishment than hanging on to the German asset of Fantasy Tours. All the same, he was surprised; Borya wasn't the type who settled for less than everything.

   
Peter said, 'Benz boarded the plane with Max Albov. They're both gone.'

   
'Max was coming here,' Irina said.

   
Arkady remembered how the lift had paused on his floor before continuing to the sixth. Max must have been packing. 'Why would he go to Moscow?'

   
'They got on a charter flight,' Peter said.

   
'How could they get on a late-night charter flight at the last minute?'

   
'There were lots of seats available at the last minute,' Peter said.

   
'Why?'

   
Peter looked at both Arkady and Irina. 'You haven't heard? You don't have a radio or a television here? You must be the only ones in the world who don't know. There's been a coup in Moscow.'

   
Irina softly laughed. 'It finally happened.'

   
'Who took over?' Arkady asked.

   
'A so-called Emergency Committee. The army rolled in. That's all anyone knows.'

   
A coup was the predicted catastrophe, the long-due sum of Russian fears, the Moscow night that followed day, yet Arkady was stunned. Stunned to find himself stunned. Max and Borya must have been surprised, too.

   
'With all that confusion, why would Max go back?' Arkady asked.

   
Irina said, 'It doesn't matter as long as they aren't coming here.'

   
'So you don't need this anymore.' Peter took the machine pistol away from Arkady, scooped the clips off the floor and stuffed them in his belt.

   
'We're safe,' Irina said.

   
'Not quite.' Peter motioned with the pistol for them to move to a corner. Arkady had put the safety on; now Peter pushed it off.

   
The room was still dark. Peter could see them against the glow of the glass better than they could see him, but Arkady caught the gesture for them not to move. In the hall the lift door opened. Irina took Arkady's hand. Peter motioned for them to lie down, then turned around and fired through the wall.

   
The Skorpion wasn't a particularly loud weapon, though its 7.62mm heads went through plasterboard as if it were paper. Peter walked along the wall, sawing waist-high, reloading as he went. A couple of rounds sparked off studs and nails. Shouts of outrage and confusion answered from the halt. Peter sprayed the second clip at knee level. Someone in the hall finally understood what was happening and fired back. A saucer-sized chunk of the wall exploded into the room. Peter used the shining hole as a target. He turned his back to the wall, disengaged the empty clip and inserted the last. An arc of holes answered through the walls. Peter walked to the high point of the arc, aimed low and fired, standing as close as a carpenter to the wall, surrounded by shafts of light. He moved to the side when a single shot responded, took his stance again, put the barrel in the hole and widened it with four more shots. He set the rate to manual and listened for moans, then placed a shot straight through the wall at his feet. Reset to automatic and finished the clip in a spray. In ten seconds Peter had put eighty rounds through the wall. On his way to the door, he let the Skorpion fall and reached around to the holster at the back of his belt for his own gun in case he needed it.

   
He didn't. Four Chechens lined the hall. Covered in blood and lime, they seemed to have suffered an industrial accident. Peter sorted through them, holding a cautionary gun to each head with one hand while he checked the carotid pulse with the other. A couple of the dead men held Skorpions of their own, for all the good it had done them. Arkady recognized Ali's friend from the Wall café staring up through a layer of dust. He didn't see Beno.

   
'They were parked outside when I got here,' Peter said. 'Two in each car.'

   
'Thank you,' Arkady said.

   
'
Bitte
.' Peter relished the word, like a mouthful of satisfaction.

People are confused when they wake to the sound of automatic fire. In an area of the city with so much construction, the first reaction is bourgeois outrage that anyone would break the law and drive a nail before dawn.

   
On the street, Arkady saw blue police lights floating far off down Friedrichstrasse, approaching without sirens since it was the middle of the night. He and Irina followed Peter around a corner to his car. As he started to drive, Peter monitored the police radio.

   
The responding officers had to locate the right address, then search four floors to find the bodies. There were no witnesses in the building. Arkady knew that possibly someone in a flat across the street had noticed them leave the building, but what was there to describe except two men and a woman seen from hundreds of metres away at an angle in the dark?

   
Peter said, 'There's nothing we can do about your finger- and footprints; they're all over the flat, but they won't be easy to match. Your friend says she has no criminal record in Germany and there are no prints on you at all.'

   
'What about you?'

   
'I wiped the pistol and the clips, and I didn't use my own gun.'

   
'That's not what I meant. What about
you
?'

   
Peter drove for a while before he said, 'There's an official review every time you use a firearm. I don't want to explain why I shot four men that I didn't formally identify and warn. Through a wall? They could have been four visitors asking directions, collecting for Greenpeace or Mother Teresa.'

   
There was dust on Peter's fingers. He wiped them on his shirt.

   
'I don't necessarily want to explain how I was helping my grandfather. This is a Russian gang war. I'm not going to let it turn into a public scandal about him.'

   
'If they do trace this to me, Federov knows your name,' Arkady said.

   
'With the coup, I think the consulate in Munich has more on its mind than me or you.'

   
On the police band, a dispatcher ordered ambulances to Friedrichstrasse. The urgency of the voice contrasted to the calm of the Tiergarten, the park's rounded massing of shadow under morning stars.

   
Peter said, 'You've lied to me from the start, but I have to admit that I've found out more from your lies than the lies I've heard before. What is it about you, I wonder? I still expect the truth.'

   
Arkady said, 'If we go to Savigny Platz, I might be able to show it to you.'

While Arkady sat on an arbour bench, his back tightened. He needed aspirin or nicotine, but he had no pills and didn't indulge the telltale glow of a cigarette because the hedges around him stayed dark as the sky slowly lightened to grey. From the bench he couldn't see Peter and Irina, parked a block away. He could see the lights of the gallery, which looked as if they had burned through the night.

   
In Moscow, under the same roof of clouds, tanks were rolling through the streets. Was it a military putsch? Was the Party reclaiming its role as the vanguard of the people? Had the work of national salvation begun in earnest, with both hands? Just as the Party had protected Prague, Budapest and East Berlin before? There should at least be a rumble of distant thunder.