Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  ‘I have just returned from seeing a reconstruction by Andreev of one of the victims,’ Arkady answered.

  ‘You see, this is the first I’ve heard about such a reconstruction. That is an example of a lack of organization.’

  ‘I am not losing control.’

  ‘Your refusal to say so could be a symptom. Now, there are more than seven million people in this city, among them a lunatic who has killed three victims. I don’t expect you to pull the killer out of a hat. I do expect an investigator to conduct a right-thinking, coordinated effort. You dislike coordination, I know. You see yourself as a specialist, an individualist. An individual, however, even the most brilliant, is vulnerable to subjectivity, illness or personal problems. And you’ve been working very hard.’

  Iamskoy pulled his hands apart and brought them back together. ‘I understand you’ve been having some difficulty with your wife,’ he said.

  Arkady didn’t reply; it hadn’t been a question.

  ‘My investigators are a reflection of me, all of you in your different ways. You, being the brightest, must know that,’ Iamskoy said.

  He changed his tone to one of decision. ‘You’ve been working under a strain. The holiday is coming up; nothing can be accomplished now. What I want you to do, as soon as you leave this office, is to prepare a detailed summary of all aspects of the investigation so far.’

  ‘Such a summary would take days, even if I did nothing else.’

  ‘Then do nothing else. Take your time and be complete. Naturally, I do not want to see any references to foreign nationals or officers of State Security. Your speculations in those areas have led you nowhere. References to them would be an embarrassment not only to you but to this office. Thank you.’

  Arkady ignored the dismissal. ‘Prosecutor, I would like to know, is this summary to be for another investigator who will take my place?’

  ‘What we want from you,’ Iamskoy said firmly, ‘is cooperation. Where there is heartfelt cooperation does it really matter who does what?’

  Arkady sat in front of a typewriter with no paper in it.

  On the wall, in a picture, Lenin relaxed in a garden chair, wearing a white hat and holding a cup on his lap. His eyes looked slyly up from under the brim of his hat.

  The summary. There would hardly be any summary after deleting Osborne and the identification of the Kirwill boy. To a succeeding investigator it would seem that there had been no investigation at all. He could start fresh with new detectives. The only problem would be the former investigator.

  Nikitin, with a bottle and two glasses, opened the door. The chief investigator for Governmental Directives wore an appropriate grimace of commiseration.

  ‘I just heard. Bad luck. You should have come to me.’ Vodka spilled into the glasses. ‘You keep things in, though. I always told you that. Don’t worry, we’ll find something. I know some people; we’ll get you something. Drink up. Not at the same level, of course, but you’ll work your way up again. I’ll think of something for you. I never felt you were a natural investigator.’

  It was clear to Arkady that he’d missed all the important clues: those messages that would have told a more astute investigator which avenues to follow, which to turn away from. Levin, Iamskoy, even Irina had tried to warn him. It was as if by staring into the sun, one sees the benefits of following the correct channels, those avenues so brightly lit that all seeming contradictions meet and are explained.

  ‘. . . can’t remember a chief investigator being dismissed before,’ Nikitin was saying. ‘The whole glory of this system is that no one can lose his job. Trust you to fuck that up.’

  When Nikitin winked, Arkady closed his eyes, and the chief investigator leaned forward. ‘How do you think Zoya’s going to take this?’ he asked.

  Arkady opened his eyes to see Nikitin balanced expectantly on the edge of a chair. He didn’t know why Nikitin was present and hadn’t really been listening to what he was saying, but it did strike him that his former mentor, this opportunist with his round face and mobile, guppy expression, would always be present. Some men die, some were dismissed. Nikitin attended them all like a grave robber.

  The phone rang and Arkady answered. It was a return call from the Foreign Ministry saying that while no individuals had exported ikons or items of a religious or superstitious nature during the previous January or February, a special license had been granted for a ‘religious chest’ sent as a gift to the Helsinki Party Arts Council from the Leatherball Clubs of the German Young Communist League. The chest was sent by air from Moscow to Leningrad, where it was transferred to the train going from Leningrad to Finland via Vyborg. The entire trip from Moscow to Finland had transpired on February 3, and the name on the invoice was ‘H. Unmann.’ There was a chest, and Unmann had sent it.

  Arkady placed a call to the headquarters of the Finnish Communist Party in Helsinki – no problem because international phone calls were far more reliable than local ones. From Helsinki he heard that the Arts Council had been disbanded more than a year before, and that nothing resembling a ‘religious chest’ had ever been expected or arrived.

  ‘Anything I can do?’ Nikitin offered.

  Arkady pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and took out the Makarov semiautomatic he’d been issued when he became an investigator and had never used, and a box of 9-mm. rounds. He slid the magazine from the grip, scooped eight rounds from the box, loaded the gun and slapped the magazine home.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Nikitin watched.

  Arkady lifted the gun, pushed off the safety and filled the square-notched sight with Nikitin’s face, which opened its mouth and gaped. ‘I’m afraid,’ Arkady said. ‘I thought you’d like to be afraid with me.’

  Nikitin vanished through the door. Arkady put on his overcoat, slipped the gun into his coat pocket and walked out.

  When he entered the apartment, Irina looked behind him as if he’d brought other men. ‘I thought you’d arrest me now,’ she said.

  ‘Why do you think I want to arrest you?’ He went to the window so he could look back at the street.

  ‘You will sooner or later.’

  ‘I stopped them from killing you.’

  ‘That was easy. You still think killing and arrest are two different things. You’re still a chief investigator.’

  Her dress was molded to her body from wear. She walked softly in bare feet. He himself wondered whether Pribluda had taken the apartment below, and whether he and Irina stood on a tracery of microphones.

  She’d swept the floor, obsessively; cleaned and empty, the apartment had a colorless and airless quality. In it she was like a fire in a vacuum.

  ‘You may hide me today. It’s only a day from your life,’ she said. ‘When the knock comes on the door, you’ll hand me over.’

  Arkady didn’t ask her why she didn’t leave because he was afraid she might.

  Her accent was rounded, bursting with contempt.

  ‘Investigator, Investigator, how can you investigate our deaths when you know nothing about our lives? Oh, you read magazine articles about Siberia, and the militia in Irkutsk told you about Kostia Borodin. How, you ask me, could a Jewish girl like Valerya become involved with a criminal like Kostia? How could such a clever guy like Kostia ever fall for Osborne’s promises? You think I wouldn’t fall for them too if they were offered to me?’

  As she talked she rubbed her hands on her arms and paced the floor. ‘My grandfather was the first Siberian in my family. To begin with, he was chief engineer of waterworks in Leningrad. He committed no crime, but you remember the order of the day was “All engineers are wreckers,” and so he was put on a train east to serve fifteen years’ hard labor in five different Siberian camps before he was freed in perpetual exile – which is to say he had to stay in Siberia. His son, my father, a teacher, was not even allowed to volunteer against the Germans because he was the son of an exile. They took away his internal passport so that he could never leave Siberia. My mother was a musicia
n and was offered a position with the Kirov Theater, but she couldn’t accept because she was the wife of a son of an exile.’

  ‘What about Valerya?’

  ‘The Davidovs were from Minsk. Their block committees had a quota of “Jew sophisticates” to arrest. So off the rabbi and his family went to be Siberians.’

  ‘And Kostia?’

  ‘He was more Siberian than any of us. His greatgrandfather was exiled by a czar for murder. From then on, the Borodins worked for the camps, capturing escapees. They lived with the Yukagir, the reindeer herders, because the herders knew first when a prisoner was trying to cross the tundra. When the Borodins caught a man they’d be friendly, as if they were going to help him escape. They’d let him talk a whole night about what he planned to do when he was free, and then they’d kill him when he was asleep, so that at least he’d tasted the illusion of freedom for an hour or so. You don’t even do that.’

  ‘It sounds cruel to me,’ Arkady said.

  ‘You’re not Siberian. Osborne knows us better than you do.’

  Even from the depth of her scorn, though, she watched him carefully, as if he might assume a different shape.

  ‘The Borodins couldn’t live off just catching prisoners,’ Arkady said.

  ‘They traded with the herders, worked their own illegal gold claims, guided geologists. Kostia trapped.’

  ‘Trapped what?’

  ‘Sables, fox.’

  ‘He was a bandit, so how could he bring in sables to sell?’

  ‘He came into Irkutsk and gave his pelts to someone else to sell. Each pelt was worth a hundred rubles, so he’d take ninety. No one was going to ask questions.’

  ‘There are farms for breeding sables now; why do they still need trappers?’

  ‘The farms are typical collectives – total disasters. Sables have to have fresh meat. The cost of distributing meat to farms in Siberia is high, and when the distribution breaks down, which it always does, the farms have to buy in the food stores. So it costs the state twice as much to breed a sable as it does to buy a wild one. But the quota is always increased because sables bring in foreign currency.’

  ‘There must be a lot of trappers, then.’

  ‘Do you know where you have to hit a sable with a rifle bullet at fifty meters? In the eye, or the pelt is ruined. Very few hunters could do that, and none like Kostia.’

  They ate fried sausages, bread and coffee.

  Arkady felt as if he were hunting, having to be very still and at the same time set out questions like bait to bring a wild animal within range.

  ‘Where else can we run to but Moscow?’ Irina asked him. ‘The North Pole? China? Leaving Siberia is the only real crime a Siberian can commit. That’s all your investigation is about. How did these wild Siberians get here? How did they get out of the country? Don’t tell me you’re going to all this trouble just because a couple of Siberians are dead. We’re born dead.’

  ‘Where did you hear this trash?’

  ‘You know what the “Siberian dilemma” is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a choice between two ways of freezing. We were out on a lake fishing through the ice when a teacher of ours fell through. He didn’t go far, just down to his neck, but we knew what was happening. If he stayed in the water he would freeze to death in thirty or forty seconds. If he got out he would freeze to death at once – he would be ice, actually. He taught gymnastics, I remember. He was an Evenki, the only native on the teaching staff, young, everyone liked him. We all stood about in a circle around the hole holding our poles and fish. It was about minus forty degrees, bright and sunny. He had a wife, a dentist; she wasn’t along. He looked up at us; I’ll never forget that look. He couldn’t have been in the water for more than five seconds when he pulled himself out.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was dead before he stood up. But he got out, that was the important thing. He didn’t just wait to die.’

  The sun broke in her eyes. Night made her paler, her eyes darker.

  ‘I’ll tell you about a “Siberian dilemma”,’ Arkady said. ‘Osborne could have bought religious chairs, chests and ikons from twenty different sources in Moscow. As you said, Golodkin already had one for him. So why would he take the risk of dealing with two desperate people running from the law? Why bother creating that fantastic lie of escape for them? What could Kostia and Valerya offer that no one else could?’

  ‘Why ask me?’ She shrugged. ‘You say there was an American student named Kirwill illegally brought into Russia. Why would Osborne take that risk? It’s crazy.’

  ‘It was necessary. Kostia wanted walking proof that Osborne could bring persons in and out. That’s what James Kirwill was. Kirwill was also perfect because he was American. Kostia and Valerya didn’t think Osborne would betray another American.’

  ‘Why would Kirwill come unless he thought he could get out?’

  ‘Americans think they can do anything,’ Arkady said. ‘Osborne thinks he can do anything. Was he screwing Valerya?’

  ‘She wasn’t that—’

  ‘She was pretty. Osborne says Russian women are ugly, but he was bound to notice Valerya. Even at the Fur Center in Irkutsk he noticed her. What did Kostia think of that? That he and Valerya were going to make a sucker out of this rich American?’

  ‘You make it sound—’

  ‘Is that what they had to offer Osborne? Sex? Did Kostia push her, say “Go ahead, a little screw doesn’t hurt me or you, let’s play the tourist for all he’s worth”? Was that it? Three people killed because Osborne figured out what a sucker he was?’

  ‘You don’t know anything.’

  ‘I know that when Kostia and James Kirwill were dying in the snow, your friend Valerya was alive and standing close enough to Osborne to touch him, and she didn’t run away or shout for help. That’s a real “Siberian dilemma”, and it suggests only one thing: that she knew Kostia and Kirwill were going to be killed, that she was in on it with Osborne. So much for her Siberian bandit. How could he compare with a businessman from New York? So much for romance! Maybe Osborne told her he could get only one person out. She had to make a choice, and she was a sharp girl. Call for help when she was plotting with Osborne to kill them? She planned to walk over their dead bodies arm in arm with her American!’

  ‘Stop!’

  ‘Imagine her surprise when he shot her. Too late then to call for others to help. In hindsight it seems incredible. How obvious it is that the American was a cold-blooded killer, and how paper-thin his promises must have been. How cruel to bring this pretty, empty-headed girl all the way from Siberia so that he could kill her here. Yet you have to admit that if she wouldn’t run for help when her own boyfriend and an innocent foreigner were shot to death in front of her, then she really was stupid. She really deserved to be killed just the way she was.’

  Irina slapped him. He tasted blood in his mouth.

  ‘Now you know she’s dead,’ he said. ‘You hit me because you believe me. Yes!’

  There was a knock at the door. ‘Chief Investigator Renko,’ a man said from the hall.

  Irina shook her head. Arkady didn’t recognize the voice either.

  ‘Investigator, we know you’re there, and we know about the girl,’ the voice said.

  Arkady motioned Irina into the bedroom, moved to the overcoat folded on the drainboard and took out his gun. He saw her eyes were fixed on it. He didn’t enjoy handling the Makarov; he didn’t want to shoot anyone and he didn’t want to be shot in his own apartment, especially when there wasn’t even a chair to sit down on. He acted calmly while in his brain his thoughts tripped over themselves. Should he shoot through the door – was that what spies did? Should he rush into the hall, gun blazing? Instead, he crept to the wall beside the door and, with his free hand, gently unlocked the door and took hold of the knob. ‘Come in,’ he said.

  As soon as he felt a hand on the opposite knob Arkady swung the door open. A figure staggered in alone and off-balance. He caught t
he man with an arm around the neck and the gun at the side of the head, knocking off a woolen cap.

  Arkady kicked the door shut and turned the visitor around. He was about twenty-two, big and freckled and grinning drunkenly as if he’d pulled off a colossal trick. It was Yuri Viskov, the Viskov of the Viskov appeal that Prosecutor Iamskoy had argued before the Supreme Court, the son of the Viskovs in the cafeteria.

  ‘I’m leaving for Siberia tomorrow’ – he pulled a bottle of vodka out of his windbreaker – ‘and I wanted you to have a drink with me.’

  Arkady managed to put his gun away while Viskov hugged him. Irina came uneasily out of the bedroom. Viskov was enormously pleased with himself. With deliberate steadiness, he carried his bottle to the glasses in the sink.

  ‘I haven’t seen you since you were let out,’ Arkady said.

  ‘I should have come around and thanked you.’ Viskov brought back the glasses overfilled. ‘You know how things are – you’ve got so many things to do when you’re out of jail.’

  He had brought only two glasses. While there were two more in the kitchen, Arkady sensed that the exclusion of Irina was intentional and saw how she hung back by the bedroom doorway.

  ‘You know each other?’ he asked Viskov as they raised their glasses in a toast.

  ‘Not well,’ Viskov said. ‘She called someone today to ask about you, and that someone had me talk to her over the phone. Very simple. The first thing I told her was how you saved my neck. I gave you highest marks – I called you a hero of Soviet Justice, nothing less. What’s more, it’s true.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ Irina said.

  ‘I didn’t come to see you. I’m a railroad worker, not a dissident.’ Viskov turned his back on her, his joking mood gone, erased by a fumbling sincerity as he put his hand on Arkady’s elbow. ‘Get rid of her. People like her are poison. Who is she to ask about you? You were the only person to ever help me. I’ll tell you, if there weren’t any dissidents like her, a lot of good people would never suffer like my parents did. Just a few persons make trouble, and a lot of honest folks get arrested. It doesn’t happen only to people like me, either. Everyone’s out to get someone like you.’ As he looked again at Irina, Arkady saw perfectly the frame of Viskov’s vision: Irina, the doorway and the bed. ‘The best poison is the sweetest – right, Investigator? We’re all human, but when you’re done, get rid of her.’