‘Fair enough. She’s at the university, in the garden near the pool.’
‘Repeat it.’ Arkady leaned forward, increasing his pressure on the trigger.
‘The university, in the garden near the pool.’
This time Osborne had steadied himself reflexively to take the bullet, his head tilted slightly back but his eyes locked on Arkady’s. For the first time he allowed the investigator to see him. A beast looked out through Osborne’s eyes, something leashed by its own hand, a creature that inhabited his coat and skin. Osborne’s eyes had no fear at all.
‘I’ll take your car.’ Arkady slipped the gun into his coat. ‘You can probably buy the next one in line.’
‘I love Russia.’ Osborne whispered it.
‘Go home, Mr Osborne.’ Arkady got into the limousine.
The university glowed. Beneath a golden star within a golden wreath descended a floodlit spire and ruby stars and thirty-two floors empty of students gone for the May Day vacation. Around the wings of the university enormous gardens five hundred meters wide spread over the Lenin Hills. For May Day Eve the gardens were lit a soft dark green. In this deminight, clay paths spoked away from outsized fountains to wander through hedges, to vanish into stands of fir and spruce, or to stumble haphazardly into statues.
The front garden facing the river had a long reflecting pool foaming with water jets and tinted by colored lights. The city night was lit by mile-high beams that waved from antiaircraft installations along the embankments.
Osborne had escaped effortlessly. He had produced Arkady’s heart with Irina’s scarf. Yet Arkady was sure that Irina was here. It was a trap, not a lie.
The light show from the embankments lasted for half an hour. At last the colored lights of the pool died and the water jets subsided, and on the stilling surface of the pool emerged a mirror of the university spire.
He waited among the firs. Osborne’s plane would be in the air now. The trees rustled, giving off a scent of resin as a breeze came up. From the far end of the pool two shadows walked toward him.
Midway to Arkady, the shadows fell and the image on the water broke. Arkady ran, drawing his gun. He made out Unmann straddling a body over the edge of the pool, then Irina as she pulled her head free of the water. Unmann pushed her under again, and she reached backward, scratching. Unmann twisted her long hair into a bun, the better to hold her still. He looked up at Arkady’s shout. The German had eyes set in hollows and protruding teeth. He let Irina go. She pulled herself out of the water and gagged against the side of the pool. Damp hair swept over her face.
‘Get up,’ Arkady ordered Unmann.
Unmann stayed on his knees, grinning. Arkady felt warm metal softly brush the short hairs at the base of his skull.
‘Instead’ – Iamskoy closed the last step behind Arkady – ‘why don’t you throw your gun down?’
Arkady did as he was told, and Iamskoy laid a consoling hand on his shoulder. Arkady could see the pink ends of the fingers. The gun, the same issue as Arkady’s, nestled at the back of his neck. ‘Don’t do it,’ he said to the prosecutor.
‘Arkady Vasilevich, how can I avoid it? If you had done as you were directed, neither of us would be here now. This sad occasion wouldn’t be. But you’re out of control. You’re my responsibility, and I have to clean up this affair not only for my own sake but also because of the office we both represent. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. Which is not to denigrate your talents. There’s not another investigator with your powers of intuition, your resourcefulness or your integrity. I counted on them heavily.’ Unmann rose and slowly sidled forward. ‘I thought I was a student of you, and you—’
While Iamskoy braced him, Unmann punched Arkady in the stomach, pulling his fist away with a curious flourish. Arkady looked down and saw a slim knife handle protruding from his stomach. He felt a sensation of ice inside himself and couldn’t breathe.
‘And you surprised me,’ Iamskoy went on. ‘Most of all, you surprise me by coming here to save a tramp. Which is interesting, because Osborne wasn’t surprised at all.’
Arkady’s eyes filled helplessly with Irina.
‘Be honest with yourself,’ Iamskoy suggested, ‘and admit I’m doing you a favor. Besides your father’s name, you’re losing nothing – no wife, no children, no political consciousness and no future. You remember the upcoming campaign against Vronskyism? You would have been the first to go. That’s the sort of thing that happens to individualists. I warned you about it for years. You see what comes of ignoring advice. Believe me, this way is better. Why don’t you sit down?’
Iamskoy and Unmann stepped back for him to fall, and Arkady’s knees trembled and started to give way. He pulled out the knife. It seemed to come out forever, double-edged and sharp and red. German workmanship, Arkady thought. A hot rush poured down the inside of his uniform. Without warning he swung the knife into Unmann’s stomach at the same spot that Unmann had driven it into him. The force of his thrust carried them both into the pool.
They rose together from the water. Unmann tried to push away, but Arkady single-mindedly lodged the knife deeper and jerked it upward. Along the edge of the pool, Iamskoy ran back and forth for a clear shot. Unmann began boxing his ears, and Arkady clung all the tighter, lifting the other man in an embrace. Unable to break free, Unmann tried to bite, and Arkady fell back, carrying the man down into the water with him. There the German sat on top, squeezing Arkady’s throat. He looked up from the bottom of the pool. Unmann’s face grimaced, fluttered, divided, ran back together and split apart again like quicksilver, each time less coherently. It broke into moons, and the moons broke into petals. Then a dark cloud of red obscured Unmann, his hands went slack and he slid out of view.
Arkady came up gasping. Unmann’s body bobbed alongside.
‘Stay there!’
Arkady heard Iamskoy’s shout; he couldn’t move anyway.
Iamskoy stood at the side of the pool, aiming at him. There was the boom of a large automatic, deafening in the open garden, though Arkady hadn’t seen the gun flash he’d expected. He noticed that Iamskoy’s hat was gone, replaced by a jagged crown that sat on Iamskoy’s shaved skull. The prosecutor wiped blood away from his brow in a distracted fashion, but his head produced a profusion of more blood, a fountain. Irina was behind Iamskoy, holding a gun. She fired again, whipping Iamskoy’s head around, and Arkady saw that an ear was gone. She fired a third time, through Iamskoy’s chest. The prosecutor tried to keep his balance. On the fourth shot he pitched into the water and sank.
Irina came into the pool to drag Arkady out. She was lifting him over the side when Iamskoy rose to his waist out of the water beside them. He fell backward without seeing them, his eyes straight up to the night, and bellowed, ‘Osborne!’
He sank again as if he were walking down a staircase, yet Arkady heard the shout long after he had disappeared.
Part Two
SHATURA
Chapter One
He was a conduit. Tubes flowed into him carrying blood and dextrose; tubes flowed out of him taking blood and wastes. Every few hours when he was afraid of consciousness, a nurse would inject him with morphine, and at once he would float above the bed and look down at the gray-faced sewage operation below.
He had no clear idea why he was there. It was vaguely in his mind that he’d killed someone, and it struck him as typical that it should have been a piece of butchery. He was uncertain whether he was criminal or victim; he worried some about this, but not much. Mostly he sat up in the far, high corner of the room and observed. Nurses and doctors constantly hovered and whispered at the bed, and then the doctors would walk over and whisper to two more men in street clothes and sterile masks who sat by the door, and they in their turn would open the door to whisper to more men waiting in the hall. Once a group of visitors arrived; among them he recognized the prosecutor general. The entire delegation stood at the foot of the bed and studied the face on the pillow in the somber manner of vacationers at
a foreign landmark trying to decipher an inscription they could not understand. Finally they shook their heads, ordered the doctors to keep the patient alive and left. Another time a captain in the Border patrol was ushered in to identify him. He didn’t care because at that moment he was busy hemorrhaging, a secret revealed by all the tubes running from his body, every plastic byway a sudden, generous red.
Later he was belted into bed, and surrounded by a translucent plastic tent. The belts didn’t constrict him – he hadn’t planned to use his arms – but somehow the tent kept him from floating away anymore. He sensed that the doctors were cutting back on the morphine. By day he was dully aware of colors moving around him, and by night of a burst of fear when the room door opened to the lights outside. The fear was important; he sensed this as well. Of all the hallucinations of his opiated state, only the fear was real.
Time measured by hypodermic needles did not pass; it was only an edge between limbo and pain. What existed was the waiting, not his own but that of the men by the door and the men outside it. He knew they were waiting for him.
‘Irina!’ he said aloud.
At once he heard the scrape of chairs and saw shapes hurrying to his tent. As its walls were drawn back, he closed his eyes and jerked his arms against its belt as hard as he could. A tube jumped free and blood spewed from the hole in his arm. Steps ran in from the door.
‘I told you not to touch him,’ a nurse said. She pressed the vein shut and taped the tube back into his arm.
‘We didn’t.’
‘He didn’t do this himself.’ The nurse was angry. ‘He’s not even conscious. Look at this mess!’
His eyes closed, he imagined the sheets and floor. The nurse was only furious, but a bloody mess in a hospital terrified and intimidated anyone else, even dull souls from the KGB. He heard them on their knees wiping the floor. They said not another word about his being awake.
Where was Irina? What had she told them?
‘They’re going to shoot him anyway,’ one of the men wiping the floor muttered.
In his translucent tent he listened; he intended to listen to everything while he could.
In the minutes before the militia had arrived at the university garden, Arkady told Irina what her story should be. Irina had killed no one; Arkady had killed both Iamskoy and Unmann. Irina knew that Valerya, James Kirwill and Kostia were in Moscow – that was all in the tapes – but she knew nothing about any defections or smuggling. She was a dupe, a lure, a victim, not a criminal. If the story wasn’t plausible or neat, it had to be said in his defense that he had put it together while Irina was holding his stomach together. Besides, the story was her only chance.
They started off the first interrogation by reading off the crimes he was accused of: the crimes were familiar, generally the same he’d accused Osborne and Iamskoy of. One wall of the tent was pulled back so that the three men could sit close to the bed. In spite of sterile masks he recognized the squat face of Major Pribluda, and behind the mask a smile.
‘You’re dying,’ the nearest of them told Arkady. ‘The least you can do is clear the name of those who are innocent. You had an excellent record until this happened, and that’s the kind of record we want to remember you by. Clear the good name of Prosecutor Iamskoy, a man who befriended you and promoted you. Your father is an old man in poor health; at least let him die in peace. Wipe away this shame and meet your own death with a clear conscience. What do you say?’
‘I’m not dying,’ Arkady said.
‘You’re doing damned well, you know.’ The doctor opened the drapes. He smoothed the sunshine that poured onto his white coat. The tent had been removed and Arkady now had two pillows propped under his head.
‘How well?’
‘Very,’ the doctor said, gravely enough for Arkady to understand that the man had been waiting weeks to be asked. ‘The knife penetrated your colon, stomach and diaphragm, and also took a nick out of your liver. In fact, the one thing your friend missed was what he was probably aiming for, the abdominal aorta. Still, you had no blood pressure when you came in; then we had to contend with infection, peritonitis, filling you with antibiotics with one hand and draining you with the other. That pool you were in was filthy. The one fortunate thing was that apparently you hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours previous to being stabbed; otherwise the spread of infection would have been straight through your digestive tract, and not even we could have saved you. Amazing, isn’t it, how life can turn on a bite of food, something as insignificant as that? You’re a lucky man.’
‘Now I know.’
The next time five of them came, again wearing sterile masks, and sat around the bed asking questions in turn so that Arkady would become confused. He chose to answer Pribluda no matter who spoke.
‘The Asanova woman has told us everything,’ someone said. ‘You masterminded the conspiracy along with the American, Osborne, promising protection against the efforts of Prosecutor Iamskoy.’
‘You have the report I sent to the prosecutor general,’ Arkady answered Pribluda.
‘You were seen speaking with Osborne on numerous occasions, including May Day Eve. You didn’t arrest him. Instead you went directly to the university, where you lured the prosecutor into a trap and killed him with the aid of the woman.’
‘You have my report.’
‘What excuse do you have for your contacts with Osborne? The prosecutor always made notes after his meetings with his investigators. There is nothing in any of his notes about your so-called suspicions concerning the American. If you had mentioned it, he would immediately have conferred with the organ of security.’
‘You have my report.’
‘We aren’t interested in your report. The report only condemns you. No investigator could have ascertained a theft of sables in Siberia or how those sables were taken out of the country from the flimsy evidence you had.’
‘I did.’
It was the only time his answer varied. He was accused of conspiring with Osborne for money; his divorce was cited as proof of a mental collapse; it was known that he had bothered Osborne for the gift of a valuable hat; the Asanova woman had described his offensive sexual advances; he had encouraged Osborne’s scheme, hoping for the coup of a sensational arrest in the face of a campaign against careerists such as himself; proof of his violent nature was his assault on the secretary of the District Committee, a friend of his former wife; his link to the foreign agent James Kirwill was made manifest by his collaboration with the brother agent William Kirwill; he had clubbed to death an officer of the KGB at the prosecutor’s dacha; according to the Asanova woman, he’d had sexual relations with the dead female gangster Valerya Davidova; he was psychologically crippled by his father’s name – to sum up, all was known. To every attempt to anger, confuse and terrify, Arkady told Pribluda to read his report.
Pribluda was the one man who didn’t speak, the one who was content with silent menace, a warted brooding under wetted hair. Arkady remembered him best wrapped in a coat in the snow on that first morning in Gorky Park. He hadn’t appreciated how much space he’d taken in Pribluda’s mind until now. In their concentration, Pribluda’s eyes were startlingly candid. All was not known; nothing was known.
When the guards were dismissed, a telephone was brought into the room. As the phone never rang and no one ever used it to place a call, Arkady assumed that it was a transmitter to listen to him. The first time he was allowed soft food he could hear the cart bringing it all the way from the elevator to his door. Every other room on the floor was empty.
The five men returned for interrogation twice a day for two more days, and Arkady continued to repeat his single answer until a miraculously germinating seed of understanding burst within him.
‘Iamskoy was one of you,’ he interrupted. ‘He was KGB. You made one of your own into Moscow town prosecutor, and now he turns out the next thing to a traitor. You have to put a bullet in my head just because he made such enormous fools out of you.’
/> Four of the five men looked at each other sharply; only Pribluda maintained his attention on Arkady.
‘As Iamskoy said’ – Arkady laughed painfully – ‘ “We all breathe air and we all piss water.” ’
‘Shut your mouth!’
The five men adjourned to the hall. Arkady lay in bed and thought of the prosecutor’s lectures about the correct jurisdictions of the organs of justice, so much more amusing in retrospect. The five men didn’t return. After a while, guards showed up for the first time in a week and placed the five chairs against a wall.
As soon as he was allowed to walk alone with canes he went to the window. He found he was six stories up, near a highway and practically within reach of a candy factory. It was the Bolshevik Candy Factory, he realized, off the Leningrad Road, though he couldn’t recall any hospitals this far out. He tried to open the window but it was locked.
A nurse came in. ‘We don’t want you to hurt yourself,’ she said.
He didn’t want to hurt himself; he wanted to smell the chocolate from the factory. He could have cried for not smelling the chocolate.
He would feel an abundance of strength, and the next moment be ready to dissolve into tears. Part of this was the strain of the questioning. It was standard for interrogators to work as a team, massing their will against that of a single suspect, outflanking and confusing him with false charges, the wilder the better, bullying him this way and that until he was at their mercy. That was an honest man, a man on his knees. As a general rule it wasn’t bad, so he expected them to use the technique; it was normal.
Part of the problem was his isolation. He was allowed no visitors, no conversation with the guards or nurses, no books, no radio. He found himself reading the factory markings on utensils, and standing by the window watching the traffic on the highway. His sole intelligent occupation was sorting through the many contradictory questions to determine what was happening to Irina. She was alive. She hadn’t told everything and she knew he hadn’t either; otherwise the interrogation would be far more accurate and damaging. Why had he concealed her knowledge of smuggling? When had he brought her to his apartment? What happened there?
Gorky Park Page 32
