Red Square (5 page)

   
Arkady got in through the passenger side and slid over to the wheel. The dogs shot the length of their chains and tried to claw through his door. He prayed and turned the key. Ah, at least a tenth of a tank of petrol. There was a God.

   
Two right turns put him in Gorky Street's gamut of shop windows, still lit. What wa's for sale? A scene of sand and palm trees surrounded a pedestal surmounted by a jar of guava jam. At the next shop, mannequins fought over a bolt of chintz. Food shops displayed smoked fish as iridescent as oil slicks.

   
At Pushkin Square, a crowd spilled into the street. A year before there had been exhilaration and tolerance between competing loud-hailers. A dozen different flags had waved: Lithuanian, Armenian, the tsarist red, white and blue of the Democratic Front. Now all were driven from the field except for two flags, the Front's and, on the opposite side of the steps, the red banner of the Committee for Russian Salvation. Each standard had its thousand adherents trying to outshout the other group. In between there were skirmishes, the occasional body down and being kicked or dragged away. The militia had discreetly withdrawn to the edges of the square and to the metro stairs. Tourists watched from the safety of McDonalds.

   
Cars were stopped, but Arkady manoeuvred up an alley into a courtyard of plane trees, a quiet backwater to the lights and horns on the avenue outside. A playground's chairs and a table were set into the ground, waiting for a bear's tea party. At the far end, he drove up a street narrowed by lorries straddling the pavement. They were heavy, with massive military wheels, the backs covered by canvas. Curious, Arkady honked. A hand drew aside a flap, revealing Special Troops in grey gear and black helmets, with shields and clubs. Armed insomniacs - the worst kind, Arkady thought.

The prosecutor's office had offered him a modern flat in a suburban high-rise of apparatchiks and young professionals, but he had wanted to feel he was in Moscow. That he was, in the angle formed by the Moscow and Yauza rivers, in a three-storey building behind a former church that produced liniment and vodka. The church spire had been gilded for the '80 Olympics, but the interior had been gutted to make way for galvanized tanks and bottling machinery. How did the distillers decide which part of their production was vodka and which was rubbing alcohol? Or did it matter?

   
While he was removing windscreen wipers and rear-view mirror for the night, Arkady remembered Jaak's short-wave radio, still in the boot of the car. Radio, wipers and mirror in hand, he considered the food shop on the corner. Closed, naturally. He could either do his job or eat; that seemed to be the option. If it was any consolation, the last time he had made it to the market he'd had a choice of cow head or hooves. Nothing in between, as if the bulk of the animal had disappeared into a black hole.

   
Since access to the building could be gained only by punching numbers into a security box, someone had helpfully written the code by the door. Inside, the letter boxes were blackened where vandals had shoved newspapers in the slots and torched them. On the second floor, he stopped by a neighbour's for his mail. Veronica Ivanovna, with the bright eyes of a child and the loose grey hair of a witch, was the closest thing to a guard the building had.

   
'Two personal letters and a phone bill.' She handed them over. 'I couldn't get you any food because you didn't remember to give me your ration card.'

   
Her flat was illuminated by the airless glow of a television set. All the old people in the building seemed to have gathered on chairs and stools around the screen to watch, or rather to listen, with their eyes closed, to the image of a grey, professorial face with a deep, reassuring voice that carried like a wave to the open door.

   
'You may be tired. Everyone is tired. You may be confused. Everyone is confused. These are difficult times, times of stress. But this is the hour of healing, of reconnecting with the natural positive forces all around you. Visualize. Let your fatigue flow out of your fingertips, let the positive force flow in.'

   
'A hypnotist?' Arkady asked.

   
'Come in. It's the most popular programme on television.'

   
'Well, I
am
tired and confused,' Arkady admitted.

   
Arkady's neighbours leaned back in their seats as if from the radiant heat of a fireplace. It was the fringe of beard from ear to ear and under the chin that gave the hypnotist a serious, academic cast. That and the thick glasses that enlarged his eyes, as intense and unblinking as an ikon's. 'Open yourself up and relax. Cleanse your mind of old dogmas and anxieties because they only exist in your mind. Remember, the universe wants to work through you.'

   
'I bought a crystal on the street,' Veronica said. 'His people are selling them everywhere. You place a crystal on the television set and it focuses his emanations directly on you, like a beacon. It amplifies him.'

   
In fact, Arkady saw a row of crystals on her set.

   
'Do you think it's a bad sign when it's easier to buy stones than food?' he asked.

   
'You will only find bad signs if you're looking for them.'

   
'That's the problem. In my work I look for them all the time.'

From his refrigerator Arkady took a cucumber, yoghurt and stale bread that he ate standing at an open window, looking south over the church towards the river. The neighbourhood had ancient lanes on real hills and an actual wood-burner's alley hidden behind the church. Behind the houses were yards that used to hold dairy cows and goats, which sounded good now. It was the newer parts of the city that looked abandoned. The neon signs above the factories were half dark, half lit, delivering illegible messages. The river itself was as black and still as asphalt.

   
Arkady's living room had an enamel-topped table with a coffee can filled with daisies, armchair, good brass lamp and so many bookshelves that the room seemed to have been built against a dam of books, a paperback bulwark from the poet Akhmatova to the humorist Zoschenko, and including Makarov - the .9mm pistol he kept behind the Pasternak translation of
Macbeth
.

 
  
The hall had a shower and WC and led to a bedroom with more books. His bed was made, he gave himself credit for that. On the floor were a cassette player, headphones and ashtray. Under the bed he found cigarettes. He knew he should lie down and close his eyes, yet he discovered himself wandering back through the hall. He still wasn't sleepy or hungry. Merely as an occupation he looked into the refrigerator again. The last items were a carton of something called 'Berry of the Forest' and a bottle of vodka. The carton demanded a mauling to permit a stream of brown, gritty juice to plop into a glass. To judge by taste, it was either apple, prune or pear. Vodka barely cut it.

   
'To Rudy.' He drank and filled the glass again.

   
Since he had Jaak's radio he placed it on the table and turned on a garble of short-wave transmissions. From distant points of the earth came spasms of excitable Arabic and the round vowels of the BBC. Between signals the planet itself seemed to be mindlessly humming, perhaps sending those positive forces the hypnotist had talked about. On a medium band he heard a discussion in Russian about the Asian cheetah. 'The most magnificent of desert cats, the cheetah claims a range that extends across southern Turkmenistan to the tableland of Ustyurt. Distribution of these splendid animals is uncertain since none has been seen in the wild for thirty years.' Which made the cheetah's claims about as valid as tsarist banknotes, Arkady thought. But he liked the concept of cheetahs still lurking in the Soviet desert, loping after the wild ass or the goitered gazelle, gathering speed, darting around tamarisk trees, leaping skyward.

   
He found he had gravitated to the bedroom window again. Veronica, who lived below, said he walked a kilometre from room to room every night. Just claiming his open range, that's all.

   
A different voice on the radio, a woman's, read the news about the latest Baltic crisis. He half listened while he considered the land mine at Kim's address. Arms were stolen from military depots every day. Were army lorries going to set up shop at every street corner? Was Moscow the next Beirut? Filmy smoke hung over the city. Below, the same smoke swirled around empty vodka cases.

   
He drifted back to the living room. There was a strange slant to the broadcast, yet the voice itself sounded vaguely familiar. 'The right-wing organization "Red Banner" stated that it planned a rally tonight in Moscow's Pushkin Square. Although Special Forces are on the alert, observers believe the government will once again sit on its hands until chaos escalates and it has the excuse of public order to sweep away political opponents on both the right and the left.'

   
The indicator needle was between 14 and 16 on the medium wave and Arkady realized he was listening to Radio Liberty. The Americans ran two propaganda stations, the Voice of America and Radio Liberty. VOA, staffed by Americans, was a buttery voice of reason. Liberty was staffed by Russian émigrés and defectors, hence offered vitriol more in character with its audience. An arc of jamming arrays had been built south of Moscow simply to block Radio Liberty, sometimes chasing the signal up and down the dial. Although full-time jamming had stopped, this was the first time since then that Arkady had heard the station;

   
The broadcaster talked calmly about riots in Tashkent and Baku. She reported new findings on the poison gas used in Georgia, more thyroid cancer from Chernobyl, battles along the border with Iran, ambushes in Nagornyy Karabakh, Islamic rallies in Turkestan, miners' strikes in the Donbas, rail strikes in Siberia, drought in the Ukraine. In the rest of the world, Eastern Europe still seemed to be rowing its lifeboats away from the sinking Soviet Union. If it was any consolation, the Indians, Pakistanis, Irish, English, Zulus and Boers were making hells of their parts of the globe. She finished by saying that the next news would be in twenty minutes.

   
Any reasonable man would have been depressed, yet Arkady checked his watch. He got up, assembled cigarettes and took the next vodka straight. The programme between newscasts was about the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Irrigation for Uzbek cotton fields had drained the Aral's rivers, leaving thousands of fishing boats and millions of fish foundered in slime. How many nations could say that they had wiped out an entire sea? He got up to change the water for the daisies.

   
The news came on at the half-hour for only one minute. He listened to the blissful chirping of Byelorussian folk songs until the news returned again at the hour for ten minutes. The stories didn't change; it was her voice he sat forward to attend to. He laid his watch on the table. He noticed he had lace curtains. Of course he knew his windows had curtains, but a man can forget these niceties until he sits still. Machine-made, of course, but quite nice, with a floral tracery fading into the pale light outside.

   
'This is Irina Asanova with the news,' she said.

   
So she hadn't married, or else she hadn't changed her name. And her voice was both fuller and sharper, not a girl's any more. The last time he had seen her she was stepping across a snowy field, wanting to go and wanting to stay at the same time. The bargain was that if she went, he stayed behind. He had listened for her voice so many times since, first in interrogation when he was afraid she had been caught, later in psycho wards where his memory of her was grounds for treatment. Working in Siberia, he sometimes wondered whether she still existed, had ever existed, was a delusion. Rationally he knew he would never see or hear her again. Irrationally he always expected to see her face turning the next corner or hear her voice across a room. Like a man with a condition, he had waited every second for his heart to stop. She sounded good, she sounded well.

   
At midnight, when programming started to repeat, he finally turned the radio off. He had a last cigarette by the window. The church spire blazed like a golden flame against the grey, under the arch of the night.

Chapter Four

The museum had a catacomb's low ceiling and compressed atmosphere. Unlit dioramas were spaced down the walls like abandoned chapels. At the far end, instead of an altar, open crates held unpolished plaques and dusty flags.

   
Arkady remembered the first time he had been granted admittance twenty years before, and the ghoulish eyes and sepulchral tone of his elderly guide, a captain whose only duty was to instill in visitors the glorious heritage and sacred mission of the militia. He tried the light switch on a display. Nothing.

   
The next switch did work and illuminated a foreshortened Moscow street circa 1930 with the hearselike cars of that period, model figures of men striding importantly, women shuffling with bags, boys hiding behind lampposts, all apparently normal except for, lurking on the corner, a doll with his coat collar turned up to his hat brim, a miniature paranoid. 'Can you find the undercover officer?' the captain had proudly asked.

   
The younger Arkady had arrived with other high-school boys, a group picture of sniggering hypocrisy. 'No,' they chorused with a straight face while they traded smirks.

   
Two more dead switches, then a scene of a man skulking into a house to reach for an overcoat hanging in the hall. In an adjoining parlour a plaster family listened contentedly to the radio. A caption revealed that when this 'master criminal' was captured he had a thousand coats in his possession. Wealth beyond compare!

   
'Can you tell me,' the captain had asked, 'how this criminal, without drawing suspicion, carried these coats home? Think before you answer.' Ten blank faces stared back. 'He wore them.' The captain looked each boy in the eye so that everyone understood the sheer brilliance and inventive deceit of the criminal mind. 'He wore them.'

   
Other models continued the historical survey of Soviet crime. Not a tradition of subtlety, Arkady thought. See photos of slaughtered children, see the axe, see the hair on the axe. Another display of disinterred bodies, another murderer with a face half erased by a lifetime of vodka consumption, another carefully preserved axe.

   
Two scenes in particular were designed to draw gasps of horror. One was of a bank robber who made his getaway in Lenin's car, equal to stealing an ass from Christ. The other featured a terrorist with a home-made rocket that had narrowly missed Stalin. Find the crime, Arkady thought: trying to kill Stalin or missing him.

   
'Don't dwell in the past,' Rodionov said from the door. The city prosecutor delivered his warning with a smile. 'We're the men of the future, Renko, all of us, from now on.'

   
The city prosecutor was Arkady's superior, the all-seeing eye of Moscow courts, the guiding hand of Moscow investigators. More than that, Rodionov was also an elected deputy to the People's Congress, a barrel-chested totem of the democratization of Soviet society at all levels. He had the frame of a foreman, the silvery locks of an actor, and the soft palm of an apparatchik. Perhaps a few years ago he'd been just one more clumsy bureaucrat; now he had the particular grace that comes from performing for cameras, a voice modulated for civil debate. As if he were bringing together two dear friends, he introduced Arkady to General Penyagin, a larger, older man with deep-set, phlegmatic eyes, whose blue summer uniform was marked by a black armband. The chief of criminal investigation had died only days before. Penyagin was now head of CID and though he had two stars on his shoulder boards he was distinctly the new bear in the circus, taking his cue from Rodionov. The city prosecutor's other companion was a different type altogether, a jaunty visitor named Albov who looked less Russian than American.

   
Rodionov dismissed the displays and cartons with a wave and told Arkady, 'Penyagin and I are in charge of cleaning out the Ministry archives. These will all be junked, replaced by computers. We joined Interpol because, as crime becomes more international, we have to react imaginatively, cooperatively, without outdated ideological blinkers. Imagine when our computers here are hooked up to New York, Bonn, Tokyo. Already Soviet representatives are actively assisting in investigations abroad.'

   
'No one could escape anywhere,' Arkady said.

   
'You don't look forward to that prospect?' Penyagin asked.

   
Arkady wanted to please. He had once shot a prosecutor, a fact that lent relations a certain delicacy. But was he thrilled by that prospect? The world as a single box?

   
'You've worked with Americans in the past,' Rodionov reminded Arkady. 'For which you suffered. We all suffered. That's the tragic nature of mistakes. The office suffered the loss of your services during crucial years. Your return to us is part of a vital healing process that we all take pride in. Since this is Penyagin's first day at CID, I wanted to introduce him to one of our more special investigators.'

   
'I understand you demanded certain conditions when you returned to Moscow,' Penyagin said. 'You were given two cars, I hear.'

   
Arkady nodded. 'With ten litres of petrol. That makes for short car chases.'

   
'Your own detectives, your own pathologist,' Rodionov reminded him.

   
'I thought a pathologist who wouldn't rob the dead was a good idea.' Arkady glanced at his watch. He had assumed they would leave the museum for the usual conference room with baize table and double sets of aides taking notes.

   
'The important point,' Rodionov said, 'is that Renko wanted to run independent investigations with a direct channel of information to me. I think of him as a scout in advance of our regular forces, and the more independently he operates, the more important the line of communication between him and us becomes.' He turned to Arkady and his tone became more serious. 'That's why we have to discuss the Rosen investigation.'

   
'I haven't had time to review the file,' Penyagin said.

   
When Arkady hesitated, Rodionov said, 'You can talk in front of Albov. This is an open, democratic conversation.'

   
'Rudik Abramovich Rosen.' Arkady recited from memory. 'Born 1952, Moscow, parents now dead. Diploma with distinction in mathematics from Moscow State University. Uncle in the Jewish mafia that runs the racetrack. During school holidays, young Rudy helped set the odds. Military duty in Germany. Accused of changing money for Americans in Berlin, not convicted. Came back to Moscow. Carpool dispatcher at the Commission on Cultural Work for the Masses, where he sold designer clothes retail out of cars. Freight-yard director at the Moscow Trust of the Flour and Groats Industry, where he stole wholesale by the container load. Up to yesterday, managed a hotel souvenir shop from which he ran the lobby slot machines and bar, which were sources of hard currency for his money-changing operation. With the slot machines and the exchange, Rudy made money at both ends.'

   
'He lent money to the mafias, that's it?' Penyagin asked.

   
'They have too many rubles,' Arkady said. 'Rudy showed them how to invest their money and turn it into dollars. He was the bank.'

   
'What I don't understand,' Penyagin said, 'is what you and your special team are going to do now that Rosen is dead. What was it, a Molotov cocktail? Why don't we leave Rosen's killer to a more ordinary investigator?'

   
Penyagin's predecessor at CID had been that rare beast who had actually risen from the detective ranks, so he would have understood without having everything explained. The only thing Arkady knew about Penyagin was that he had been a political officer, not operational. He tried to educate him gently. 'As soon as Rudy agreed to put my transmitter and recorder in his cashbox, he became my responsibility. That's the way it is. I told him I could protect him, that he was part of my team. Instead I got him killed.'

   
'Why would he agree to carry a radio for you?' Albov spoke for the first time. His Russian was perfect.

   
'Rudy had a phobia. He was hazed in the Army. He was Jewish, he was overweight and the sergeants got together and put him in a coffin filled with human waste and nailed him in for a night. Since then he had a fear of close physical contact or dirt or germs. I only had enough to put him in camp for a few years, but he didn't think he could survive. I used the threat to make him carry the radio.'

   
'What happened?' Albov asked.

   
'The militia equipment failed, as usual. I entered Rudy's car and tinkered with the transmitter until it worked. Five minutes later he was on fire.'

   
'Did anyone see you with Rudy?' Rodionov asked.

   
'Everybody saw me with Rudy. I assumed no one would recognize me.'

   
'Kim didn't know that Rosen was cooperating with you?' Albov asked.

   
Arkady revised his opinion. Although Albov had the physical ease and blow-dried assurance of an American, he was Russian. About thirty-five, dark brown hair, soulful black eyes, charcoal suit, red tie, and the patience of a traveller camping with barbarians.

   
'No,' Arkady said. 'At least I didn't think he did.'

   
'What about Kim?' Rodionov asked.

   
Arkady said, 'Mikhail Senovich Kim. Korean, twenty-two. Reform school, minors colony, Army construction battalion. Lyubertsy mafia, car theft and assault. Rides a Suzuki, but we expect him to take any bike off the street and of course he wears a helmet, so who knows who he is? We can't stop every biker in Moscow. A witness identifies him as the assailant. We're looking for him, but we're also looking for other witnesses.'

   
'But they're all criminals,' Penyagin said. 'The best witnesses were probably the killers.'

   
'That's generally the case,' Arkady said.

   
Rodionov shuddered. 'The whole thing is a typical Chechen attack.'

   
'Actually,' Arkady said, 'Chechens are more partial to knives. Anyway, I don't think the point was only to kill Rudy. The bombs burned the car, which was a computerized mobile bank stuffed with disks and files. I think that's why they used two bombs, in order to make sure. They did a good job. It's all gone now, along with Rudy.'

   
'His enemies must be happy,' Rodionov said.

   
'There was probably more incriminating evidence about his friends on those disks than about his enemies,' Arkady said.

   
Albov said, 'It sounds as if you liked Rosen.'

   
'He burned to death. You could say I sympathized.'

   
'You would describe yourself as an unusually sympathetic investigator?'

   
'Everyone works in a different way.'

   
'How is your father?'

   
Arkady thought for a moment, more to adjust to this shift of ground than to search for an answer.

   
'Not well. Why do you ask?'

   
Albov said, 'He's a great man, a hero. More famous than you, if you don't mind my saying so. I was curious.'

   
'He's old.'

   
'Seen him lately?'

   
'If I do, I'll tell him you asked.'

   
Albov's conversation had the slow but purposeful motion of a python. Arkady tried to catch the rhythm.

   
'If he's old and sick, you should see him, don't you think?' Albov asked. 'You select your own detectives?'

   
'Yes.' Arkady was trying to answer the second question.

   
'Kuusnets is an odd name - for a detective, I mean.'

   
'Jaak Kuusnets is the best man I have.'

   
'But there aren't that many Estonians who are Moscow detectives. He must be especially grateful and loyal to you. Estonians, Koreans, Jews - it's hard to find any Russians in your case. Of course some people think that's the problem with the whole country.' Albov had the meditative gaze of a Buddha. Now he let it incline towards the prosecutor and the general. 'Gentlemen, your investigator seems to have both a team and a goal. The times demand that you let initiative have its head, not bring it to a halt. I hope we don't make the same mistake with Renko that we made before.'

   
Rodionov could tell the difference between a red light and a green. 'My office is totally committed to our investigator, of course.'

   
'I can only repeat that the militia wholeheartedly supports the investigator,' Penyagin said.

   
'You're from the prosecutor's office?' Arkady asked Albov.

   
'No.'

   
'I didn't think so.' Arkady added up the suit and the air of ease. 'State Security or Ministry of the Interior?'