‘Even if Osborne is an important informer, I don’t understand why the FBI would allow him to see me,’ Arkady said. ‘No matter what, he is still a criminal and they are an organ of justice.’
‘Other towns go by the book. There’s no book in New York. If a diplomat hits your car, shoots your dog, rapes your wife, he goes home quietly. There’s a small Israeli army, a small Palestinian army, Castro’s Cubans, the bureau’s Cubans – all we can do is play chambermaid and clean up the mess.’
Driving through a strange city at night, his imagination filled in what wasn’t seen. In the shadows Arkady placed the chimneys of the Likhachev works, the walls of the Manezh, the side streets of Novokuznetskaya.
‘The bureau is playing this one differently, though,’ Kirwill said. ‘They have safe apartments in the Waldorf, why put you in the Barcelona? That’s good because the security stinks, and I can get Billy and Rodney right on top of you. It’s fishy, though, because it suggests that Wesley doesn’t want any record even in the bureau that you were ever here. What did Osborne say to you? He mention any kind of deal?’
‘We just talked,’ Arkady said. The lie came without hesitation, as if from another set of nerves and another, glibber mouth.
‘He talked about himself and the girl, if I know him. He’s the kind that takes a lot of pleasure in applying the screws. Leave him to me.’
Lower Manhattan’s public buildings were a nighttime collection of Roman, colonial and modern architecture, with one floodlit exception, a single mammoth building that consumed an entire block and seemed familiar to Arkady. It was a building in Stalinist Gothic without Stalin’s Oriental frills, a sleeker necrolith without a ruby star which rose out of sight of its lights. Kirwill parked in front.
‘What is it?’ Arkady asked. ‘What can be open now?’
‘It’s the Tombs,’ Kirwill said. ‘Night Court’s open now.’
They pushed through brass doors into a lobby full of beggars with purple bruises, jackets with exploded pockets and lapels, the sideways suspicion of kicked dogs. There were beggars in Moscow, but they were seen only in railway stations or when they were flushed out by a militia campaign. The entire lobby was theirs. The information counter was filled waist-high with trash. One long side of the lobby was papered with trial times; the other side had a line of aluminium phones. Huge ceiling fixtures hung far out of reach. A pair of older men in shabby overcoats and carrying briefcases eyed Arkady.
‘Lawyers,’ Kirwill explained. ‘They think you might be a client.’
‘They should know their clients better.’
‘They don’t know their clients until they come through these doors.’
‘They should meet their clients in their offices.’
‘This is their office.’
Kirwill steered him through the crowd and a double set of brass doors into what Arkady recognized at once was a courtroom. It was close to midnight; how could any court be in session?
A single judge in a robe sat at a high desk before a wooden panel engraved with the words ‘In God We Trust’ and an American flag covered in plastic. A stenographer and a clerk were at lower desks, and one man sat at a table sorting through stacks of blue-covered charge sheets. Attorneys wandered from the table of papers to the judge or to the side bench where the offenders waited. These were of both sexes, all ages and mostly black; all the attorneys were young, white, male.
A velvet rope separated the proceedings from a front row of men in leather jackets and jeans. They wore police shields on their belts and expressions of infinite boredom, some with eyes rolled back, others with eyes closed. Families of the defendants sat in the back rows among beggars who had come to drowse. Here was the city’s sleep; it started and spread from this court, a fatigue overcoming any outrage, outlasting even the fixed pose of cynicism. Judge, offender, friend, every face was slack. A young coffee-colored woman with a baby in a snowsuit sat peacefully by Arkady. The baby’s eyes reflected the bright squares of the ceiling lights. The window blinds were drawn. Occasionally a guard would stir to evict a snorer; otherwise the court was virtually silent because when an offender and the arresting officer were called to stand at the table, the attorneys talked to the judge in voices too soft to carry. Then the judge would set a price. Sometimes the price was $1,000, sometimes $10,000. The judge listened, never looking up, his head turning from one attorney to the other. They’re bargaining, Arkady realized. A case could take five minutes or only one before a price was set. In Moscow, he saw cases of drunkenness settled as quickly, but these were accusations of robbery and assault. As the next offender was called, the previous one smirked through the velvet rope, placing a comb in his hair just so, leaving before the man who had arrested him.
‘What is “bail”?’ Arkady asked.
‘It’s what you pay to get out of jail,’ Kirwill said. ‘You can look at it as a bond, or a loan, or a tax.’
‘That’s justice?’
‘No, but it’s the law. They didn’t bring Rats out yet – that’s good.’
Some of the detectives walked to the back of the courtroom to say hello respectfully to Kirwill. They were big, unshaven men, muscle and fat tucked into plaid shirts and belts with detective shields – nothing like the slim agents of the FBI. One pointed to the next defendant slouching before the judge and said, ‘Fucker mugged a lady in Battery Park, so the Robbery Squad caught it. Then they thought she was raped, so they gave it to the girls on the Rape Squad; then they thought she was going to die so they passed her over to us on Homicide. But she didn’t die and she wasn’t raped, so they gave her back to Robbery – only, their shift is over and the paperwork’s all over the fucking place and if it doesn’t get here in one minute he walks.’ ‘A psycho,’ the second detective said. ‘Already did murder as a juvenile for torching his mother. We have to protect everyone who reminds him of his mom?’ ‘What’s the point?’ the first detective asked. ‘What’s the sharp and nasty, smooth and greasy, barbed and two-pronged fucking point?’ Arkady shrugged, he didn’t know. Kirwill shrugged. Accepting the homage of the other detectives, he was their intelligence, their broad shoulders, their alcohol-washed blue eyes. ‘No point,’ he said, ‘that’s the point.’
Kirwill led Arkady out of the court and back through the lobbies. ‘Where are we going now?’ Arkady asked.
‘Going to get Rats out of the pens. You’ve got something better to do?’
Kirwill buzzed at a steel door. Two eyes peered through a slot and the door opened to the Manhattan Pens. The pens were the court detention cells. Seen from an angle, the green bars were solid walls with protruding hands. Head on, they opened into cells of yellow tile where a dozen or more men waited their turn in court as docilely as machinery, the only movement their eyes as Arkady and Kirwill passed. Kirwill stopped at a cell occupied by a white man bizarrely dressed in woolen gloves cut off at the fingers, muddy boots, an overcoat of many pockets and a woolen cap pulled over matted hair. His face had the raw flush and dirt of liquor and exposure, and he was trying to control the trembling in his left leg. Outside the cell were a mustached detective and a pinch-faced young man in a suit and tie.
‘Ready to go home, Rats?’ Kirwill asked the man in the cell.
‘You aren’t taking Mr Ratke anywhere, Lieutenant,’ the man with the tie said.
‘This is an assistant district attorney, he’s going to grow up and be a high-paid defense lawyer,’ Kirwill explained to Arkady. ‘And this is a very sheepish detective.’
In fact, the detective did look as if he wanted to crawl behind his mustache and hide.
‘Mr Ratke is being arraigned in a few minutes,’ the attorney said.
‘On a drunk-and-disorderly?’ Kirwill laughed. ‘He’s drunk, what do you expect?’
‘We would like some information from Mr Ratke.’ The attorney had the nervous courage of a small dog. ‘I would like to draw the lieutenant’s attention to the fact that recently there was a major theft at the Hudson Bay Company, the perpetr
ators of which are still unknown. We have reason to believe Mr Ratke was attempting to sell goods from that robbery.’
‘Where’s the evidence?’ Kirwill asked. ‘You can’t hold him.’
‘I dint steal it!’ Rats shouted.
‘Anyway, he’s being held for drunk-and-disorderly,’ the attorney said. ‘Lieutenant Kirwill, I’ve heard about you and I don’t mind going head to head with you.’
‘You pulled him in on a D-and-D?’ Kirwill read the name on the detective’s badge. ‘Casey, is it? Didn’t I know your father? There was a detective.’
‘Rats was already in, and they needed someone to stand up with him—’ Casey wouldn’t meet Kirwill’s eyes.
‘I could understand a uniformed man doing it, but you?’ Kirwill asked. ‘Money problem? You need overtime? What is it, alimony?’
‘Detective Casey is doing me a favor,’ the attorney said.
‘For your father’s sake, I’ll send you the money,’ Kirwill said. ‘Anything to keep a good Irish boy from kissing ass. I’d hate for this kind of story to get around.’
‘Lieutenant Kirwill, there’s no point belaboring the issue,’ the attorney said. ‘The detective has agreed to be the arresting officer for the arraignment. I don’t know what your interest in the matter is, but we are definitely holding Mr Ratke. As a matter of fact, we should be going into court—’
‘Fuck this.’ Casey waved his hand and walked off.
‘Where are you going?’ the attorney demanded.
‘I’m gone.’ The detective didn’t look back.
‘Wait!’ The attorney ran after him and tried to get between Casey and the door, but the detective wouldn’t stop to argue.
‘You don’t have to work with these fucking Hibernian ball-busters,’ he said and slammed the door as he left.
The attorney returned.
‘You still lose, Lieutenant. Even if we can’t arraign him, Mr Ratke is in no condition to go home by himself, and no one has come forward to claim him.’
‘I’m claiming him.’
‘Why? Lieutenant, what are you doing all this for? You interrupt the caseload, you intimidate a fellow detective, you antagonize the district attorney’s office – all for a drunk. If an officer can do this, what’s the point in having a court?’
‘No point, that’s the point.’
Kirwill and Arkady got Rats all the way to the main lobby before he started screaming with d.t.’s. The beggars in the lobby were startled, wakened somnambulists. Kirwill put a hand over Rats’s mouth and Arkady carried him. Rats was the first American he’d met who really stank.
They got him into the car, and at Mulberry Street Kirwill went into a delicatessen and came out with a pint each of whiskey and port and more bags of nuts. ‘It’s against the law to buy booze from a deli,’ Kirwill said. ‘That’s why it tastes so good.’ Rats drained the port and promptly went to sleep on the back seat.
‘Why?’ Arkady asked. ‘Why did we go to all that trouble to get a drunk? Wesley and the FBI must be looking for me – maybe the KGB as well. You’ll be in a great deal of trouble. So why?’
‘Why not?’
The nuts salted the tongue and the whiskey spread through Arkady’s limbs. He saw that Kirwill was enormously pleased with himself. For the first time he began to see some humor in the situation. ‘You mean there actually is no point?’ he asked.
‘Not at this place at this time. Let me show you around.’
‘What if they find us before you take me back?’
‘Renko, you have nothing to lose, and God knows, I don’t. We’ll take Rats home.’
Arkady looked at the filth-encrusted figure asleep on the back seat. He’d dined with Osborne, had a taste of American justice and didn’t want to face Irina yet. ‘Why not?’
‘That’s my boy.’
Snow and gilt Chinese characters swayed above Canal Street.
‘What I couldn’t figure out right from the start,’ Kirwill said, ‘was how you became a cop.’
‘You mean an investigator.’
‘A cop.’
‘Whatever.’ Arkady was aware that some odd compliment, perhaps even an apology, had been paid. ‘I saw a case once when I was a boy – one of those cases that could have been murder or suicide.’ He paused in surprise at himself, because he hadn’t meant to say that. An investigator is trained by rote to answer this particular question by referring to fatherly investigators he has known, to stopping shirkers and wreckers, and to protecting the Revolution. Tonight there were demons in his head. ‘It was right after the war and there were large reputations at stake,’ Arkady went on. ‘I’d never heard so many people blurting out the truth. Because the victim herself was such an inescapable truth, there was no way they could set her back on her feet, and because the investigators had special permission to deal with the truth.’
They passed mysterious storefronts with names like Joyeria, Knights of Columbus, Head Shop.
‘I’m not making myself clear,’ Arkady said.
‘Try.’
‘Let’s say a meritorious artist one night asks his wife to get out of the car to push some glass off the road and then runs her down. A girl, a Young Communist, soon to be married, tucks her old grandparents into bed, seals the windows and turns on the gas before going out for the evening. A hard-working peasant, an honored agronomist, kills a flirt from Moscow. These are worse than crimes; these are things-that-aren’t-supposed-to-happen. They’re the truth. They’re the truth about a new kind of Russian: a man who can afford a mistress and a car; a young girl who has to bring her husband home to live in one room with two old people; a peasant and nothing but a peasant who knows he’ll never leave a village a thousand miles from the rest of the world. We don’t put this in our reports, but we’re supposed to know it. That’s why we have to have special permission to deal with the truth. We play with the statistics, of course.’
‘You mean fewer murders?’ Kirwill asked.
‘Of course.’
Kirwill passed the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked. ‘We love it. The number one cause of death for young men in America is murder. That body’s hardly hit the ground before it’s a star on television, everybody has a chance to be a star. We’ve got wars and better than wars – psychos, rapists, queers, cops, chainsaw massacres. Step outside and get shot, stay inside and watch television. We’re talking art form. Bigger than Detroit, better than sex, native art and industry rolled into one, what the Renaissance was to Italy, chopsticks to the Chinks, Hamlet without the slow parts – we’re talking car chases here, Arkady, me boy. The guys getting killed for real are lost in the shuffle, life’s losing stuntmen. How can you care when you can see a better murder in slow motion, plus special effects, with a beer in one hand and a tit in the other? Better than real cops. All the real cops are in Hollywood; the rest of us are fakers.’
The Holland Tunnel took them under the Hudson. Arkady knew that he should be anxious because by now Wesley really must be thinking he was defecting; yet he felt strangely elated, as if he found himself speaking a language he had never been taught.
‘Our Soviet murders are secret,’ he said. ‘We’re backward in terms of publicity. Even our accidents are secret, officially and unofficially. Our killers generally only boast when they’re caught. Our witnesses lie. Sometimes I think our witnesses are more afraid of the investigator than the killers are.’ From the New Jersey side of the river he looked back at Manhattan. At the end of a million lights, two white towers reached into the night. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see two moons above them. ‘For a time, I thought I wanted to be an astronomer, but then I decided astronomy was a bore. The stars only interest us because they’re so far away. Do you know what would really interest us? A murder on another planet.’
Signs pointed to the New Jersey Turnpike, J. F. Kennedy Boulevard, Bayonne.
Arkady’s throat was dry and he took a long drink. ‘There are not many road signs
in Russia, you know.’ He laughed. ‘If you don’t know where a road goes, you shouldn’t be on it.’
‘Here we live on road signs. We consume maps. We never know where we are.’
The whiskey was gone. Arkady laid the empty bottle gently on the car floor. ‘You had a babushka!’ he said abruptly, as if Kirwill had just mentioned it.
‘Her name was Nina,’ Kirwill said. ‘Never became American, not to her dying day. There was only one thing American she liked.’
‘What was that?’
‘John Garfield.’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Nothing like you, much more proletarian.’
‘This is a compliment?’
‘He was a great lover. To his dying day.’
‘What was your brother like?’
Kirwill drove for a while before answering. Arkady liked the way the white dashes of the road seemed to leap into the headlights.
‘Sweet. A virgin. It was tough having the parents he had, even tougher having them dead. The priests feasted on him, put the Holy Grail in his hand and a passport to heaven up his ass. I used to bust up his altar every time I came home. Stuffed Mark Twain and Voltaire down his throat. It was like throwing rocks at Saint Sebastian. But chasing him to Russia, how do you forgive yourself that?’
Bayonne was a terrain of oil tanks and fractioning columns silvered and brightly illuminated, a lunar encampment.
‘We used to go fishing up on the Allagash in Maine, Jimmy and me. It’s all timber-company country up there, just one road in and out. Great fishing – pike, bass, trout. Ever fish from a canoe? We even went up there in winter. I took Big Jim’s old Packard and put on some oversized tires. We floated over the snow in that car. Ever hear of ice-fishing? You punch a hole in the ice and put some lines down?’
‘It’s been done in Siberia.’
‘Just drink enough to stay warm. Snowed in? No problem. The cabin had canned goods, fireplace, wood-burning stove, and all the goddamned wood you could chop. There was deer, moose, one game warden every thousand square miles. No one else but loggers and French Canadians, and you speak better English than they do.’
Gorky Park Page 40
