Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  There were different ways not to get drunk. Some people relied on the bite of a pickle right after a swallow; some trusted in mushrooms. Pasha had always said the trick was to get the alcohol straight to the stomach without breathing in. Arkady supposed that was what he was doing, doubled up and coughing.

  In some fashion Pasha and Zoya were linked. They were twin emblems of the chief investigator, his admiring colleague and his faithful wife. If there’d been any temporary sense to her desertion, Pasha’s death made it final. Marxist history was a scientifically arranged series of muffled clappers, one swinging against the next and so on, out of Arkady’s reach now and beyond retrieval, but all set in motion by a fatal instability, a flaw. It wasn’t the system that was at fault. The system excused, even assumed, stupidity and drunkenness, sloth and deceit. Any system that didn’t wouldn’t be human, and this system was more human than any other. The instability was in a man who put himself above the system; the flaw was in the chief investigator.

  Pasha’s notes were written in block print. Arkady saw, however, an effort to make them more scribbled, like his own. He knew he should get another detective to go through the rest of the German and Polish tapes and transcripts. Of course, there was Detective Fet to continue with the Scandinavian tapes, in between reports to Pribluda. There was a great deal of work left to be done, even if the investigator did nothing at all.

  Who had demanded the tapes and transcripts in the first place? Who bravely threatened to arrest a foreign informant of the Committee for State Security? Who really killed Pasha?

  Arkady threw a carton of tapes against a wall. He threw a second, splitting it open. A third, and then he scooped reels by the handful, releasing their long black tails in the air. ‘Down with Vronskyism!’ he shouted.

  The only undamaged carton was the one that had been delivered that day. There were all new tapes inside. Arkady found one for Osborne’s suite at the Rossiya that was only two days old.

  He would do his work. He would carry on.

  The first conversation on the reel was very short.

  Arkady listened to a knock, the sound of a door opening and Osborne’s greeting.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Where is Valerya?’

  ‘Wait. I was about to take a walk.’

  The door closed.

  Arkady listened to it over and over because again he recognized the voice of the girl from Mosfilm.

  Chapter Ten

  The sign was a city block long, of red letters standing as tall as a man: THE SOVIET UNION IS THE HOPE OF ALL MANKIND! GLORY TO THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION!

  Beyond the sign were the Liklachev works, where workers were ‘storming’ to fill the special May Day quota of cars, tractors and refrigerators by slamming in screws with hammers, setting coolant coils with hammers, hand-making whole vehicles with hammers as the welder followed one step behind with his blessing torch, though all that could be seen from the sign outside was the impressively leaden smoke of the chimneys, each puff big as a boxcar and regularly patched to the morning sky.

  Arkady led Swan to a cafeteria and gave him pictures of James Kirwill, Kostia the Bandit and Valerya Davidova. The morning drunks raised their heads from their tables. Swan’s black sweater made his neck and wrists seem all the more emaciated, and Arkady wondered how he would survive as an informant. Where workers drank, militiamen traveled in pairs.

  ‘It must be difficult for you,’ Swan said.

  ‘Me?’ Arkady was surprised.

  ‘Being a man of feelings like you, I mean.’

  Arkady wondered if this was some sort of homosexual pass. ‘Just ask about those faces.’ He threw some ruble notes on the table and left.

  Irina Asanova lived in the basement of an unfinished apartment house near the Hippodrome. As she came up the steps Arkady had the benefit of her full gaze and a look at the faint blue discoloration on her right cheek. The mark was small enough to cover with powder if she wished; uncovered, it added a lazuline edge to her dark eyes. Her patched coat flapped in the wind.

  ‘Where is Valerya?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘Valerya . . . who?’ She faltered.

  ‘You’re not the kind of citizen who reports her skates stolen to the militia,’ he said. ‘You’re the kind who avoids the militia. You wouldn’t report your skates stolen unless you were afraid they might be traced to you.’

  ‘What am I accused of?’

  ‘Lying. Who did you give your skates to?’

  ‘I’ll miss my bus.’ She tried to pass him.

  Arkady grabbed her hand, which was warm and soft. ‘Who is Valerya, then?’

  ‘Where? Who? I know nothing, and neither do you.’ She pulled free.

  On the way back, Arkady passed a rank of girls waiting for a bus. Compared with Irina Asanova they were as drab as cabbages.

  Arkady told a story to Yevgeny Mendel at the Ministry of Foreign Trade.

  ‘A few years ago, an American tourist was visiting the village he was born in about two hundred kilometers from Moscow when he dropped dead. It was summer and the local people didn’t want to be disrespectful, so they stuck him in the refrigerator. They called here, and the people in the Foreign Ministry told them to do nothing more until they received special forms for the death of tourists. A couple of days go by, no forms. A week, no forms. These forms take time to organize. Two weeks went by, and the villagers got fed up with the tourist in the refrigerator. It was summer, after all. Milk was spoiling, and there was only so much they could fit on the American’s lap. Well, you know villagers – one night they got drunk, threw the body in a truck, drove all the way to Moscow, dumped the body in your lobby, jumped back in their truck and drove off. This is a true story. The commotion here was unbelievable. There was a ring of KGB officers around the body. At three in the morning they called an American attaché from the embassy. The poor bastard thought he was going to have a private word with Gromyko, and instead here’s this body. He wouldn’t touch it – not without the right forms. Still no one could find the right forms. Someone suggested there were no such forms, and that set off a panic. Nobody wanted this American. Maybe they should just lose him, someone else suggested. Take him back to the village, bury him in Gorky Park, give him a job in the ministry. Finally, they called in me and the head pathologist. It turned out we had the right form, and we threw the American tourist in the trunk of the attaché’s car. That was the last time I was in this building.’

  Yevgeny Mendel, who had been with Osborne at the bathhouse and who appeared so often on the Osborne tapes, knew nothing about James Kirwill or the bodies in Gorky Park, Arkady was sure. No special anxiety or intelligence had stirred Mendel’s soft face during the story.

  ‘What was the correct form for an American tourist?’ Mendel asked.

  ‘In the end, they settled for a death certificate.’

  Yet Yevgeny Mendel was troubled. He knew now that Arkady was an investigator, and while he wouldn’t have been bothered by an investigator who had worked his way up from the general population, he knew that Arkady was from that magic circle of Moscow children of ‘the High Ranks,’ a creation of the same special schools and mutual acquaintances, and someone from that circle should be more than a chief investigator. Mendel, the fool of that circle, had an English suit, a silver pen beside the Party pin in his lapel, a large office high over Smolenskaya Square with three phones and a brass sable emblem of Soyuzpushnina, the agency for fur exports, on the wall. Somehow this chief investigator had fallen, and the social implications brought a sweat to Mendel’s chin like water beads on good butter.

  Arkady used this reaction. He mentioned the great friendship between their fathers, praised the valuable labor of Yevgeny Mendel’s father behind the lines during the war, and insinuated that the old brute was a coward.

  ‘He was decorated for bravery, though,’ Yevgeny protested. ‘I can show you the papers, I’ll send them to you. He was attacked in Leningrad! He was with the American you met the other day,
isn’t that a coincidence! The two of them were attacked by a whole squad of Germans. My father and Osborne killed three Fascists and drove the rest away.’

  ‘Osborne? An American furrier at the siege of Leningrad?’

  ‘He’s a furrier now. He buys Russian furs and imports them to America. He buys one here for four hundred dollars and sells it there for six hundred. That’s capitalism; you have to admire it. He’s a friend of the Soviet Union, that’s been proven. May I speak out of school?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Arkady said encouragingly.

  Yevgeny wasn’t vicious; he was nervous. He wanted the investigator to go away, but not until the investigator had a high opinion of him. ‘The American fur market is in the grip of international Zionist interests,’ he said softly.

  ‘Jews, you mean,’ Arkady said.

  ‘International Jews. I regret to say that for a long time there has been an element in Soyuzpushnina close to those interests. My father hoped to break this relationship by reserving for certain non-Zionists especially competitive prices. Somehow the Zionists got wind of it, flooded the Fur Palace with their money and took the entire sable harvest.’

  ‘Osborne was one of the non-Zionists?’

  ‘To be sure. That was about ten years ago.’

  From Mendel’s window the river ice showed dark fractures. Arkady lit a cigarette and dropped the match in a wastebasket.

  ‘How did Osborne prove himself a friend of the Soviet Union, besides fighting heroically with your father at Leningrad?’

  ‘I shouldn’t tell you this.’

  ‘You might as well.’

  ‘Well’ – Mendel followed Arkady with an ashtray – ‘a couple of years ago there was a trade between Soyuzpushnina and the American fur ranchers. That’s what they call it – ranching. Like cowboys. It was a trade of the very best fur-bearing animals. Two American minks for two Russian sables. Beautiful minks – they’re still producing at one of our collectives. The sables were more beautiful; nothing can compare with Russian sable. However, they had one minor defect.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They were neutered. Well, it’s illegal to export fertile sables from the Soviet Union. They shouldn’t have expected us to break our own law. The American ranchers were upset. In fact, they even organized a plan to infiltrate a man into Russia, steal some sables from a collective and smuggle them out. It took a true friend to inform us about his own countrymen.’

  ‘Osborne.’

  ‘Osborne. We showed our gratitude by telling the Zionists that from then on an equitable share of the Russian sable market was going to Osborne. For services rendered.’

  ‘The plane’s delayed.’

  ‘It’s delayed?’

  ‘Everything is going fine. You worry too much.’

  ‘You never do?’

  ‘Relax, Hans.’

  ‘I don’t like it.’

  ‘It’s a little late to like or not like anything.’

  ‘Everyone knows about these new Tupolevs.’

  ‘A crash? You think only Germans can build anything.’

  ‘Even a delay. When you get to Leningrad—’

  ‘I’ve been to Leningrad before. I’ve been there with Germans before. Everything will be fine.’

  Arkady looked at the date on the reel again: February 2. Osborne was speaking to Unmann on the day of Osborne’s departure from Moscow to Helsinki. Arkady remembered Unmann’s itinerary; the German had gone to Leningrad on the same day, apparently not on the same plane.

  ‘I’ve been to Leningrad before. I’ve been there with Germans before. Everything will be fine.’

  How, Arkady wondered, had Osborne killed the three Germans in Leningrad?

  Listening to the new Osborne tapes, Arkady recognized the voice of Yevgeny Mendel.

  ‘John, you will be the ministry’s guest for Swan Lake on May Day Eve, yes? You know it’s very traditional, very special. It’s important to be there. We will have you driven immediately to the airport.’

  ‘I would be honored. Tell me all about what it will be like.’

  There was a change from winter to spring. The winter Osborne had been maliciously entertaining; the spring Osborne was an agreeable bore, a business dullard. Arkady heard monotonous toasts endlessly repeated, an endless conversation becoming longer and duller. Yet after hours of listening, he felt a watchfulness on the tapes. Osborne was hiding among the endless words like a man standing sideways among trees.

  Arkady thought of Pasha.

  ‘A peasant goes to Paris’ – Pasha had told a joke while they were riding around looking for Golodkin – ‘and when he comes back all his friends get together to welcome him home. “Boris,” they say, “tell us about your trip.” Boris shakes his head and says, “Oh, the Louvre, the paintings, fuck your mother.” “The Eiffel Tower?” somebody asks. Boris stretches his hand as high as it can go and says, “Fuck your mother.” “And Notre Dame?” somebody else asks. Boris bursts into tears remembering such beauty and says, “Fuck your mother!” “Ah, Boris,” everybody sighs, “what wonderful memories you have.” ’

  Arkady wondered how Pasha would describe heaven.

  Revolution Square used to be Resurrection Square. The Metropole Hotel used to be the Grand.

  Arkady turned on the lights. The bedspread and curtains were of the same threadbare red muslin. A Persian carpet had a pattern indecipherable from wear. Table, bureau and stand-up closet were mottled by dents and cigarette burns.

  ‘This is allowed?’ The floor lady was anxious.

  ‘It is allowed,’ Arkady said and shut the door on her to be alone in the room of the tourist William Kirwill. He looked down at the square, at the Intourist buses lined up from the Lenin Museum to the hotel entrance and the tourists boarding in linguistically divided herds for evenings of ballet and opera. According to Intourist, Kirwill was booked for regional-cuisine-and-theater. Arkady went into the bathroom. New, neat; hygiene was the one demand of the Western traveler. Arkady took the bath towels to the bedroom, where he wrapped them around the phone and covered them with pillows.

  William Kirwill’s bureau revealed American underwear, stockings, sweaters and shirts, but none of the Russian clothes Golodkin had described.

  There were no clothes hidden under the bed. In the closet was a locked aluminium-and-vinyl suitcase. Arkady carried it to the bed and tried to jimmy the lock open with his penknife. The latch didn’t move. He put the suitcase on the floor and stamped on the lock while he worked the knife. Half the latch sprung. He hammered the knife into the other side of the lock, sprung it open, put the suitcase back on the bed and went through the contents.

  There were four small books – A Concise History of Russian Art, A Tourist’s Guide to Russia, A Guide to the Tretyakov Gallery and Nagel’s Moscow and Environs – held together by a thick rubber band. By itself was an immense edition of Schulthess’s Soviet Union. Two cartons of Camel cigarettes. A Minolta 35-mm. camera fitted on a hand grip; also a 10-inch-long focus lens, filters and ten unopened boxes of film. Traveler’s checks to the amount of $1,800. Three rolls of toilet paper. A metal tube with a threaded cap on one end and a grooved plunger on the other that pushed up an artist’s razor-bladed knife. Used socks rolled into a ball. A small case shut tight with thick rubber bands; inside the case, a gold pen-and-pencil set. A pad of graph paper. A plastic bag containing a can opener, a bottle opener, a corkscrew and a thin, flat metal bar bent at one end and doglegged at the other with a screw through the bar above the dogleg. A book of Intourist dining coupons. No Russian clothes.

  Arkady went through the suits hanging in the closet; nothing but American goods. He looked behind and under all the furniture. Finally he returned to the broken suitcase. If the American was so crazy about Russian products, he could go buy some new luggage, something nice in cardboard. Arkady took the rubber band off the guidebooks and flipped through them. He picked up the Schulthess tome of color photographs, a bulky item for a light traveler. In the center, between a two
-page spread of a horse festival in Alma Ata, was a loose graph paper keyed five feet to one inch. Drawn precisely were trees, footpaths, the edge of the river, a clearing and, in the middle of the clearing, three graves. Except for the difference between meters and feet, it was almost an exact rendition of the militia base-line drawing of the clearing in Gorky Park. Between the following two pages of the book he found a drawing of the whole park scaled at twenty feet to one inch. He also found a tracing of an X-ray of a right leg; a shadow marked a compound fracture of the shin, the same fracture as on the third body from the park. A dental chart and a tracing of dental X-rays showed root-canal work on the upper-right incisor, but no steel molar.

  Arkady looked at the rest of the contents of the suitcase with a different eye. The metal tube that held the artist’s knife was curious; what did a businessman plan to cut in Moscow? He unscrewed the cap of the tube and, with the plunger at the other end of the tube, pushed up the knife, which appeared unused. There was a faint odor from the tube. The odor was gunpowder. Looking down the hole, he could just make out the sharp point of the inside of the plunger. The tube was a gun barrel.

  In Moscow, guns were hard to come by, and the most improbable weapons were concocted. One gang made shotguns out of exhaust pipes. Now that he knew what he was looking for, the investigator was in his element; he was angry that he hadn’t seen it all immediately.

  For apparently so devoted a photographer, this tourist took no pictures at all. Arkady removed the camera from the wooden hand grip. There was a groove along the top of the grip that the tube fit into snugly. Only an inch of the barrel protruded from the front, and the plunger at the rear. On the left side of the grip was a screw hole. For a moment Arkady was stumped. Then he broke open the plastic bag, dumped out the openers and corkscrew, and picked up the odd-shaped metal bar he’d noticed before. The main shaft was ten centimeters long, the right angle at one end about three centimeters, the dogleg at the other end about four centimeters. With his thumbnail he twisted its screw into the hole of the grip, leaving enough play for the bar to move. Now the dogleg was a trigger, and the right angle at the other end sat firmly on the barrel plunger, preventing it from sliding forward. He pulled the trigger; the right angle rose and the plunger was free. He set it again, and wrapped one of the heavy rubber bands twice from the front of the grip to the back of the plunger. Ammunition. American airports X-rayed luggage; how could bullets be hidden? Arkady opened the pen and pencil case. It was a matched set, fourteen-karat gold, impervious to X-rays. He pulled off their caps; there were two .22 bullets in the pencil cap and one in the pen cap. Using the long handle of the artist’s knife, he stuffed a round into the barrel until it set tight against where the plunger’s needle point would slap forward. Too loud; he’d heard hardly any report when he was fired at under the tram bridge. Somewhere was a silencer. Hidden in a box of film? Too short. He ripped open the American toilet paper. Inside the third roll, instead of a cardboard cylinder was one of black plastic, ringed by gas vents, with a threaded protrusion at one end.