Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  Highway and city fell behind. Woods blurred the side of the road. The land became more hilly and rumpled, and the taillights of the car ahead would disappear, then reappear as the road straightened out. Crows blew past.

  ‘What’s this place called?’ Kirwill asked.

  ‘Silver Lake.’

  ‘And this guy is just a major?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I don’t think that’s who we’re going to see.’

  Water showed through a screen of ash and rowans. Side roads, muddy tributaries, led to summer dachas. As they crossed a wooden bridge, Silver Lake was on their left. The lake had melted except for a central island of ice populated by eiders. The road moved back into trees. The taillights of the Volga were fleeting markers at the end of each curve. Yards with upended parasol tables, broken arbors, and an archery range slipped by the car.

  Arkady turned his engine off and coasted onto a side road that ended in ruts beside a cabin that was nailed and shuttered up. Its lawn ran to an apple orchard unpruned and gone wild, then to a fringe of willows and on down to a beach.

  ‘Why did we stop here?’ Kirwill asked.

  Arkady put a finger to his lips and gently opened his door. Kirwill did likewise, and in the near distance they heard the shutting of another car door.

  ‘You know where they are?’ Kirwill asked.

  ‘Now I do.’

  The ground was waterlogged and heavy under Arkady’s feet. He could hear voices, though not words, through the trees as he crossed the lawn. He moved through the apple orchard, clutching branches, trying to pick his way through the wet leaves and detritus of winter.

  The voices were stronger, agreeing on some point as he moved from tree to tree. When the voices stopped, he halted in mid-step. They began again, closer, and he dropped to his stomach and crawled to a low screen of brush. About thirty meters away, he saw the corner of a neighboring dacha, the black Volga, a Chaika limousine, the pocked man and Andrei Iamskoy, the Moscow town prosecutor. The pocked man held a cardboard box. Iamskoy wore the same wolf-trimmed coat and boots as when Arkady had visited the dacha before, as well as a lamb’s wool cap on his bare skull and leather gloves that he pulled on while he talked. Arkady could snatch none of the words out of the air, for the prosecutor spoke in a low tone, but he caught the familiar power of that tone, the foresight in it and its total conviction. Iamskoy put his arm around the other man and led him to the path to the beach where Arkady had played a tin horn for the geese.

  Arkady kept pace with them through the brush and willows. On his first trip to Iamskoy’s dacha he had paid no attention to the woodpiles scattered among the trees on the property. The pocked man waited by one while Iamskoy went into the shed. Arkady remembered the horn, the bucket of fishmeal pellets and the ripening geese inside it. Iamskoy came out carrying an ax. The other man opened his box and pulled out the head of Valerya Davidova – or rather, Andreev’s perfect nearly alive re-creation of her head. They laid her on her cheek, staring, an already executed head waiting to be executed again on a chopping stump.

  Iamskoy brought the ax down and split the head in two parts. With the precision of a man who enjoys country skills, he set up the halves of the head and split them, and those smaller parts he split again. With the thoroughness of a man who likes a bracing sweat, he minced small parts into smaller, then turned the ax on its broad side and reduced the smaller parts into powder, which he brushed back into the box. The pocked man took the box down to the beach and poured the dust into the water. Iamskoy picked two marbles, Valerya’s glass eyes, from the ground and put them in his pocket. He picked up the wig as the pocked man returned, filled the empty box with wood, and together they walked up the path back to the dacha.

  Kirwill had followed Arkady silently. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  Kirwill knew. His smiled had a profound amusement.

  ‘I watched your office, remember,’ Kirwill said. ‘I’ve seen the prosecutor before. You better run for your life.’

  ‘Where should I run?’

  By the time they got back to the orchard, smoke was rising from the chimney of the Iamskoy dacha. Through the dacha window, Arkady saw the glow of the fire. If he could stand tall enough he might be able to smell the burning hair, he thought.

  ‘Tell me who shot Jimmy,’ Kirwill said. ‘You’re never going to get him. You’ve got no evidence, no identification and now you’re as good as dead. Let me get him.’

  Arkady sat down against a trunk and considered the suggestion. He lit a cigarette and cupped it against the rain. ‘If the person who killed your brother lived in New York and you killed him, do you think you’d get away with it?’

  ‘I’m a cop – I can get away with anything. Look, I tried to help you.’

  ‘No.’ Arkady leaned back. ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean? I told you about his leg.’

  ‘He had a bad leg and he’s dead; beyond that I know nothing. Well, tell me, was he smart or foolish, brave or a coward, humorous or serious? How could you say so little about your brother?’

  Standing over Arkady, Kirwill looked bigger than the trees – a trick of proportion: little trees around a big man. Rain rolled from his shoulders. ‘Give up, Renko, you’re not in charge anymore. The prosecutor’s taking over and so am I. What’s the name?’

  ‘You didn’t like your brother?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘What would you say?’

  Kirwill looked up at the rain, then down at Arkady. He took his hands from his pockets, made two huge fists and let them spread slowly, as if reassuring himself. He glanced at the house. What would he do if the dacha weren’t so close? Arkady wondered.

  ‘I hated Jimmy,’ Kirwill said. ‘Surprised?’

  ‘If I hated a brother I wouldn’t go halfway around the world on the chance that he was dead. But I am curious. When we dusted for fingerprints in the garage you had a card of his prints – a police card. Did you ever arrest your brother?’

  Kirwill smiled. With an effort he put his hands back in his coat. ‘I’ll be waiting for you in the car, Renko.’

  He disappeared, ducking between the trees, for all his size hardly making a sound. Arkady congratulated himself for eliminating his last, part-time ally.

  Iamskoy. Now it all comes together, the man said as he climbed the gallows steps, Arkady thought. Iamskoy who refused to let anyone but Arkady Renko investigate the bodies in Gorky Park. Iamskoy who led Arkady to Osborne. Pribluda didn’t have Pasha and Golodkin followed to Golodkin’s apartment; there never was time to shoot them, steal the chest and carry it off. Chuchin had told Iamskoy that Golodkin was being interrogated, and Iamskoy had hours to have the chest removed and the killers waiting. And who had told Iamskoy about Valerya’s head? Nobody but Arkady Renko. It was, after all, a discovery not of Iamskoy but of himself, of how stupid and groping an investigator he was, blind, deaf and stupid. An idiot, just as Irina had said.

  The door of the dacha opened and Iamskoy and the pocked man emerged. The prosecutor had changed into his usual brown uniform and coat. The other man brushed soot off himself while Iamskoy locked up. They had left the fire going.

  ‘So’ – Iamskoy took a deep, invigorating breath – ‘I will hear from you tonight.’

  The pocked man saluted, got into the Volga and reversed onto the road. Iamskoy followed in the Chaika. Rolling over the leaves and dipping down onto the road, the limousine seemed to give a heave of satisfaction, over work well done.

  As soon as the cars were gone, Arkady circled the dacha. It was a four-room cabin furnished in Finnish rustic. Front and back doors were double-locked and the windows were wired because, for the elite residents of Silver Lake, there was an alarm system tied directly to a local KGB station and regular car patrols.

  He walked down to the beach. There was a glove on the chopping stump, and pink plasteline dust and a hair or two embedded in the wood. More pink dust was on the ground among the goose droppings, and m
ore dust was being blown in the wind. He scratched the stump. There were also minute flecks of gold.

  This was where Golodkin’s chest had been brought. It was probably in the cabin on Arkady’s first trip, he realized; that was why he was hurried off to feed the eiders. Then the chest had been chopped up on the stump. Would a large chest have been burned all at once? he wondered.

  Looking through the woodpile, he couldn’t find any traces of the chest. He kicked the whole pile over; at the bottom were slivers that Iamskoy had missed – fine needles of wood and gold.

  ‘Look, Kirwill,’ Arkady said to the footfall behind him. ‘Golodkin’s chest, or what’s left of it.’

  ‘So it is,’ a different voice said.

  Arkady looked up at the pocked man who had left in the Volga. He aimed the same short-barreled TK at Arkady that he had in the metro. ‘I forgot my glove,’ he explained.

  A hand came from behind the pocked man and shook his gun loose. Another hand took him by the throat. Kirwill carried the pocked man by the arm and neck to the nearest tree, the single oak on the beach, held him against the tree by the throat and began hitting him. The pocked man tried to kick back. Kirwill’s fist had the sound of a cleaver.

  ‘We want to talk to him,’ Arkady said.

  Bright blood started coming out of the pocked man’s mouth. His eyes swelled. Kirwill’s fist accelerated.

  ‘Let him go!’ Arkady tried to pull Kirwill off.

  Kirwill knocked Arkady to the ground with a backhand.

  ‘No!’ He reached for Kirwill’s leg.

  Kirwill kicked him in the still-unhealed bruise over the heart, and Arkady doubled up, gagging. Kirwill went on hitting the man against the tree. The blood from the man’s mouth became effusive and foamy and his feet jerked clear of the ground. The nearest thing Arkady had ever seen to it was watching a hunting dog savage a bird. The pocked man’s face thrashed from side to side, blood flying like spittle. His heels beat on the tree. Each blow was harder than the one before, and the impact of Kirwill’s fist was into something increasingly soft and inert. Kirwill must have broken the man’s ribs at the very start, Arkady thought. Kirwill went on hitting as the pocked face got grayer and grayer.

  ‘He’s dead.’ Arkady got to his feet and pulled Kirwill back. ‘He’s dead now.’

  Kirwill staggered away. The pocked man dropped to his knees and discolored face, then rolled on his side. Kirwill fell and crawled, his hands speckled red.

  ‘We needed him,’ Arkady said. ‘We had to ask him questions.’

  Kirwill started trying to wash his hands with pebbles. Arkady grabbed him by the back of the collar and led him like an animal down the beach to the water, then returned to the oak tree and went through the dead man’s clothes. He found a cheap wallet with little money, a change purse, a push-button knife and the red identification book of a KGB officer. The name inside was Ivanov. He kept the book and the gun.

  Arkady dragged the dead man to the shed. When he pulled the door open, warmth and buzzing poured out. The eiders hung in rows all the way to the ceiling, feet bound, heads resting on dirty plumage. A murmur of flies crawled in and out of feathers and there was a smell of liquid decay. He threw the dead man in and slammed the door.

  The wind pushed them back to Moscow.

  ‘First he was going to be a priest,’ Kirwill said. ‘One of those pale boys who bleed over cut flowers, gets to Rome and hates Italians and sucks up to French Jesuits. That would have been disgusting but all right. He could have been a workers’ priest, an ordinary pain in the ass. Then he raised his sights; he wanted to be a messiah. He wasn’t smart and he wasn’t strong, but he wanted to be a messiah.’

  ‘How could he do that?’

  ‘A Catholic can’t. If you call yourself an Oriental yogi or a guru and drool and eat chicken heads and never change your pants, you can attract all the disciples you want. But a Catholic, no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘If you’re Catholic, the best you can hope for is excommunication. There are too many messiahs in America, anyway. It’s a supermarket of messiahs. You don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  At the Outer Highway they reached the Exhibition Park. Dusk curved around an obelisk.

  ‘Russia is the Virgin Land for messiahs,’ Kirwill said. ‘Jimmy could have stood out here; he had a chance. He’d already fucked up at home. He had to do something big here. He wrote me from Paris saying he was coming here. He said the next time I saw him would be at Kennedy Airport. He said he was going to perform an act in the spirit of Saint Christopher. Do you know what that means?’

  Arkady shook his head.

  ‘That means he was going to smuggle someone out of Russia and hold a news conference at Kennedy. He was going to be a savior, Renko – at the least, a religious celebrity. I know how he got in here. He told me when he came back from here the first time how easy it would be to find a Polish or Czech student who looked like him. They’d exchange passports and Jimmy would return here under the other guy’s name. That’s how the Church runs a lot of Bibles in through Poland, he said. Jimmy spoke Polish, Czech and German besides Russian; it wouldn’t have been hard. What would have been hard was not being caught here. And getting out.’

  ‘You said he’d fucked up in the United States. How?’

  ‘He got involved with those Jewish kids who harass Russians in New York City. At first it was just paint on the cars and protests. Then letter bombs. Then pipe bombs at Aeroflot and shooting rifles through the windows at the Soviet Mission. There’s a bureau in the Police Department called the Red Squad that watches radicals; it stepped in and watched the Jews. In fact, we sold them their next bunch of blasting caps. In the meantime Jimmy went down to Georgia and bought some more rifles and ammo for them. He made two trips – one load he brought up in an altar.’

  ‘What was wrong with the blasting caps?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘They were defective. I saved his life. He was supposed to help make the bombs. That morning I went to his apartment and told him not to go. He wouldn’t listen. I threw him on the bed and broke his leg over the bed-board. So he didn’t go. The Jews attached the bad caps and the bombs went off. Everyone was killed. The point is, I saved Jimmy’s life.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘What do you mean, “Then what”?’

  ‘The Jews who were left, didn’t they think your brother was an informant?’

  ‘Sure. I sent him out of town.’

  ‘He never got a chance to explain to his friends?’

  ‘I told him that if he came back I’d break his neck.’

  There was a downpour on the Avenue of Peace. Newspapers were scattered on the sidewalk.

  ‘There was a case in New York.’ Kirwill accepted a cigarette. ‘There was a slasher, a mugger, who pulled a knife on people, and after he got what he asked for he’d cut them up just for fun. We knew who he was, a black guy – into jewelry mainly. I wanted him off the street, so I pulled a drop on him. You know, I had one of the victims’ rings, dropped it behind this black individual and grabbed him. The stupid fucker pulled a gun and shot and missed. I didn’t miss. This was in Harlem. There was a crowd, and somebody took the bastard’s gun and ran. That made him a martyr, a citizen shot down on the way to church. There were marches up and down One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, every black minister that could shuffle his feet, plus the whole white antiwar crowd and Jimmy and his Christian Witnesses. All the Christian Witnesses had signs saying, “Sergeant Killwell: Wanted for Murder.” I found out who thought up “Killwell.” Jimmy never told me, but I found out.’

  The river was swollen. High black water drove the last floes.

  ‘You know what else he liked to call me?’ Kirwill asked. ‘He liked to call me Esau. His brother Esau.’

  At the Ethnological Institute Arkady went up alone to tell Andreev what had happened to the head. From Andreev’s studio he called Misha’s apartment and office and got no answer. Then
he called Swan, who said he had found the house used by Kostia Borodin, Valerya Davidova and James Kirwill. The woman who had led Swan to the house said she had sold them a fresh chicken and fish every day.

  Arkady took Kirwill with him to see the house, which proved to be a cabin between the factories of the Lyublinsky District and the southern arc of the Outer Ring Highway. Almost everything about the place was familiar to Arkady, as if he’d entered a creation of his own imagination. Kirwill moved through it silently, in a trance.

  The two men went to a workers’ cafeteria. Kirwill ordered a bottle of vodka and picked up where he’d left off about his brother, but in a different manner, almost about a different person. He told Arkady how he had taught Jimmy how to ice-skate, how to drive, how to lay gilt on a frame, how to deal with nuns, how they’d gone every summer up the Allagash River, how they’d seen Roger Maris hit his home run, how they’d buried the old Russian babushka who’d raised them both. The stories flowed; some Arkady understood and some he didn’t.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I knew you were for real,’ Kirwill said. ‘When you shot at me in my hotel room. You aimed away, but not by much. You could have hit me. You didn’t care and I didn’t care. We’re just the same.’

  ‘I care now,’ Arkady said.

  At midnight he dropped Kirwill close to the Metropole. The big man walked away fragilely on drunken legs.

  Irina had waited for him. She made love to him tenderly, as if saying, Yes, you can trust me, you can come in, you can trust your life in me.

  His last conscious thought before sleep was of what Kirwill had said at the cafeteria when Arkady asked whether he and his brother Jimmy had ever trapped sables.

  ‘No. There are pine martens in Maine and Canada, and the pelt of the pine marten is called sable, but they’re pretty rare. They were trapped out by auger holes. The auger’s a drill. If he’s a real bastard, a trapper uses the auger to bore a hole into a tree trunk about eight inches deep. This deep. He puts some fresh meat all the way into the hole. Then he drives two horseshoe nails at an angle into the trunk so that the tips of the nails almost meet about six inches inside the hole. The auger hole does the rest. The pine marten’s a good climber – slim, clever. He smells the meat, goes right up the trunk and into the trap. He can just squeeze his head past the nails pointing at the meat. He gets the meat – he always gets the meat – but by then the nails have got him. He’s trying to go against the angle of the nails, and the more he struggles to get his head out, the deeper the nails dig in. Finally he bleeds to death or else rips his head off. There aren’t many pine martens left. The auger holes got them.’