A bridge took them over a river called the Kill Van Kull. Below, a tanker slipped toward the sea, its passage betrayed by a single unblinking red eye.
‘Staten Island,’ Kirwill announced. ‘We’re back in New York.’
‘It’s not Manhattan?’
‘No, it’s definitely not Manhattan. So near and yet so far.’
They drove by row houses. A plaster saint blessed a lawn.
‘Could Jimmy have gotten those people out, Arkady? Tell me the truth.’
Arkady remembered the bodies under the snow in the park, all in a row, not even a step of escape, and the log cabin, the sheets over the sleeping compartments where Jimmy Kirwill read the Bible while Kostia rode Valerya. ‘Sure,’ he lied. ‘He was brave enough. Why not?’
‘You’re all right,’ Kirwill said after a while.
A bridge carried them back to New Jersey over a narrow strip of water the road signs called the Arthur Kill. Along it were docks, tracks and the flares of more refineries. Arkady had lost his sense of direction, but as the moon was to his left he guessed they were headed south. Was there a bulletin out for him in New York? Were they searching for Kirwill, too? What was Irina thinking?
‘How far are we going?’
‘We’re almost there,’ Kirwill said.
‘Your friend Rats lives here? I don’t see any houses.’
‘It’s all marshland,’ Kirwill said. ‘Used to be herons here, ospreys, barred owls. A lot of clamming, years back. And frogs. At night the peepers would drive you just about deaf.’
‘You used to come here?’
‘Used to bring a boat in. I came with one of our anarchists. He was in love with outboard motors. He was also in love with weeds. Naturally, we spent most of our time marooned. To me it was a typical Russian outing.’
Now they were on an industrial access road that ran by the factories. In the headlights the swamp showed all the viscous hues of a palette, greens, yellows, reds.
‘You’re worried, I can tell,’ Kirwill said. ‘Don’t be. I’ll take care of Osborne.’
Then what will happen to Irina and me? was Arkady’s first thought. See how grotesque it is to be saved by Osborne; you hope he lives.
‘Turn here.’ Rats popped up, awake in the back seat.
Kirwill swung onto a strip of blacktop that ran down to the Kill.
‘There’s more involved than you and Osborne,’ Arkady said.
‘You mean the bureau? They can protect Osborne anywhere else, not in New York.’
‘No, I don’t mean the bureau.’
‘The KGB? They want his head, too.’
‘Stop!’ Rats said.
They got out of the car. In one direction, marshland extended to the faint and moving lights of a turnpike; in the other it slipped down to boatyards. They followed Rats on a path that sank spongily under their shoes.
‘I’ll show you.’ Rats looked back. ‘I’m no thief.’
In the boatyards, harbor craft stood on timber stilts. Guard dogs barked under a lamp, joined by dogs from another yard where timbers rose in creosote-soaked pyramids. On the Kill a garbage scow was on a night run. Across on Staten Island were a few lights, a window, a blue storage tank couched in trees and, along the water, what appeared to be houses, boats, trucks and cranes piled one on top of another.
Arkady reached the relative security of planks set in mud before Kirwill. Snowflakes glittered on sedges and rushes. Rats bounded energetically ahead to a tarpaper shack with a stovepipe. As Arkady approached it he stepped on small bones that oozed like teeth out of the mud. Rats opened the shack door, lit a kerosene lamp and invited him in.
Arkady hesitated. For the first time since he’d been in America he was not surrounded by lights. There was only the glow of the highway, another distant haze blocked by Staten Island, and overhead the familiar half-dome of darkness and the dizzy glitter of snow. The emptiness poured into him.
‘Why did we come here?’ he asked Kirwill. ‘What do you want from me?’
‘I want to save you,’ Kirwill said. ‘Listen, the Barcelona’s full of prostitutes; the bureau can’t keep track of who goes in and out. By tomorrow night I’ll have Billy and Rodney in the room above you. They’ll wait until it’s good and dark and then drop a ladder outside your window. You and the girl wear something that won’t show and hit your ceiling when you’re ready. They’ll take you down the service elevator and out the basement. Simple operation – up and out, the Red Squad’s done it before.’
‘The Red what?’
‘The Red Squad. They told you about us.’
‘How do you know they told me about the Red Squad?’ Arkady waited for the answer, then gave it. ‘You have a microphone in our room. That’s what your detectives Billy and Rodney are doing across the street; the radio in their window is the receiver.’
‘Everyone has a transmitter in your room.’
‘But they don’t know me as a friend. As a friend, tell me, does everyone gloat over every word? Is it possible to listen antiseptically? Excuse me for being so stupid, I must ask you now what you were doing at the apartment Osborne took me to. Why was the electricity off there? Tell me if I’m wrong, but you were running more microphones through that apartment – one in every room right with the wiring? Ah, Lieutenant, you’ve been busy. You didn’t miss the bedroom, did you?’
‘They’re setting you up, Arkady. The bureau and the KGB together. There’s no record of you being in this country – I checked. Not in this country, not in the Barcelona, nowhere. Whatever I’m doing is for your protection.’
‘Liar! You broke your own brother’s leg for his protection. You know all about Osborne and Irina and me.’
‘But I can save you. I can get you both out, and Wesley won’t even know you’re gone until the morning. There’ll be a car waiting for you a few blocks from the hotel with money, new identification, maps. You can be in Maine in nine hours. I still have that cabin. I stocked it for you, and I replaced the Packard with a jeep. There are skis and rifles. If things get tight, you can head for Canada – it’s not far away.’
‘This is an insane joke of yours, because you can’t help us.’
‘I can. See, this way Jimmy still wins. He stills gets two Russians out. Otherwise, his whole life and death was a waste. This way there’s some point to Jimmy’s having lived.’
‘There’s no point. He’s dead.’
‘What are we arguing for? Then let me do it for you. We’re friends.’
‘No, we’re not. Take me back to the hotel.’
‘Wait.’ Kirwill held on to Arkady’s arm.
‘I’m going.’ Arkady pulled loose and started for the car.
‘You’ll do what I tell you.’ Kirwill grabbed him again.
Arkady hit him. The corner of Kirwill’s mouth split and bled, as if with surprise as much as the force of the blow. Kirwill still held Arkady’s other arm.
‘Let go, now,’ Arkady warned.
‘No, you’ve got to—’
Arkady hit him again and the blood smeared over Kirwill’s lip. Arkady expected a display of the lieutenant’s professional expertise: the powerful hands that crushed ribs and struck at the heart, the kick that disabled a knee, the legendary fury. But he had learned something since Gorky Park, and he thought it might be a little more even this time. A fight to the death had a growing attraction, and that’s where Kirwill – Killwell, as his own brother called him – could help; that’s what he was best at.
‘Fight back,’ Arkady demanded. ‘This is how we started, remember.’
‘No,’ Kirwill said, but he hung on.
‘Fight.’ He knocked Kirwill to his knees.
‘Please,’ Kirwill asked.
This was a new and grotesque figure, Kirwill in the mud, begging.
‘Let go!’ Arkady shouted. His arms dropped. ‘Just let me go. There’s not going to be any escape to any fairytale cabin. You know that. You know we could hide for ten years, and the KGB would find us and kill us if
they don’t get the sables. They’ll never let us go without the sables. They’ll give us to Osborne to get the sables. So don’t tell me your stories – you can’t save anyone.’
‘Just look,’ Kirwill said.
Arkady looked at the shack. Rats still waited at the door, too frightened to run.
‘Look inside,’ Kirwill said.
Arkady felt sweat pouring over his chest. His face was freezing. With each step the ground sucked at his feet.
Rats held the lamp up. Arkady stooped through the low door and pushed aside a dangling roll of flypaper. The walls and roof of the shack were boards and plastic sheets, insulated with newspaper and rags. Loose planks were the floor. A rug and blankets lay on one side. In the middle, a potbellied stove displayed a pan of congealed beans. In the windowless structure the smell of decaying meat was overpowering.
‘I dint steal it.’ Rats backed away, terrified of Arkady. ‘Unnerstan’ English? I trap. Thass what I am, thass what I do.’
Cans of grease and tallow lined an orange-box shelf. There was a shelf of medicine: digitalis, nitroglycerin, ampules of amyl nitrite, Contact, Scope.
‘Muskrats is good food, nashural foood. It’s just the name what puts people off. The fur’s firs’-rate. People is so dumb; most of the coats they wear is muskrat. I take ten, twenny hides a week to town. I’m set up, I don’t need to steal nothin’ an’ I dint.’
Rats stumbled against the stove, and the pan of beans fell over a cardboard box of metal utensils. Ajax and Handiwipes. He back-shuffled around cases of Bisquick, Gravy Train, Roach Mottel, a postcard of John Glenn tacked to tarpaper. Jars of Vaseline, A&P Instant Coffee, a tannic acid solution made from Red Rose Tea. Wading boots and a net.
‘It was mine, in my trap. Never saw nothin’ like it. Wasn’t no mink, it was differ’nt. Thass why I took it to town, to fine out what it was.’
Backward past plastic bags of Kraft marshmallows, Wonder Bread and Alba Milk Powder. Stained clothes on a line. A fatigue jacket on a hook, a Citibank calendar and more encrusted curlicues of flypaper. Then a clothesline of muskrat hides, glossy pelts hanging from flat, naked tails, the heads and short, webbed feet still attached.
‘The man at the market said it ain’t even American. So maybe iss yours afterall. All I’m sayin’ is I caught it, I dint steal it. I’ll show you where, right across the water. I’m a happy man, I don’t need trouble.’
Rats took the fatigue jacket from the hook.
‘If iss yours, iss yours.’
On the hook was a pelt much longer and narrower than the muskrats, the fur a lustrous blue-black with a characteristic touch of ‘frost’ at the tips, its tail bushy and rounded, the hide stiff and meticulously tanned, but one paw had been almost gnawed through in desperation when the animal had tried to escape the trap. A sable.
‘I’ll take you right there,’ Rats told Kirwill, who stood inside the door. ‘We’ll go soon as there’s light. Dawn, juss you an’ me go.’ He giggled, and his eyes darted from Arkady to Kirwill, ready to take them into his confidence. ‘I gotta secret. Where I got that fur? There’s plenny more.’
Wesley pulled the emergency stop, and the elevator car hovered between the fourth and fifth floors of the Barcelona. In the car were Arkady, Wesley, George and Ray. It was 3 a.m.
‘We did have a bulletin out for an hour,’ Wesley said. ‘Lieutenant Kirwill is totally insane, attacking a civilian driver and taking his car. Who knew what danger you were in? Then I realized there was nothing to worry about; you’d never try anything as long as we have Miss Asanova. As long as we have her, we have you. So we waited, and here you are. Where have you been?’ He released the emergency stop. ‘I promise you, it doesn’t matter.’
George and Ray pushed Arkady along the fifth-floor hall until he shook them off and turned on them, and then they looked back at Wesley, who waited at the elevator. ‘Gently,’ Wesley said.
Arkady went the rest of the way down the hall alone. Al was waiting inside the room. Arkady threw him out and put a chair against the door.
Irina sat in bed watching, exhausted and afraid. He had never seen her more afraid. He noted the way the sheets lapped against the green silk nightgown she wore, the way her long hair fell over her shoulders. Her arms were erotically bare, her eyes large. The faint blue mark on her cheek was unmasked, the touch of guilelessness. She didn’t dare speak; she hardly dared breathe. An idiot shouldn’t be so frightening, Arkady thought. He sat on the bed beside her and tried to keep his hands from shaking.
‘You slept with Osborne in Moscow. You sleep with him here. He showed me the bed. I want you to tell me about it. You did intend to tell me about it sometime, didn’t you?’
‘Arkasha,’ she said so softly that he could hardly hear what she had said.
‘One man is not enough for you?’ Arkady asked. ‘Or Osborne does something for you that I don’t? Something special, a particular position? Backward, forward? Please inform me. Or he possesses a sexual magnetism you can’t resist? Are you attracted to a man whose hands are covered with blood? See, my hands are bloody now. Not the blood of your friends, I’m afraid – only the blood of my friend.’
He held his bloody hands up for her to see. ‘No’ – he read her reaction – ‘not satisfactory, not stimulating enough. But Osborne tried to kill you; maybe that’s the difference. That’s it! Why would a woman sleep with a killer unless she wanted to be hurt?’ He slipped his fingers into her hair, twisted it and raised her head. ‘Is that better?’
‘You’re hurting me,’ Irina whispered.
‘You don’t seem to like it.’ He let go of her hair. ‘Then that’s not it. Maybe it’s money that excites you; I understand it excites many people. Osborne showed me around our new apartment. What rich people we’re going to be in such an apartment, so full of gifts and clothes. But you’ve earned them, Irina. You paid with the lives of your own friends. No wonder you’re showered with gifts.’ He fingered the neck of her nightgown. ‘Is this a gift?’ He ripped the neck open, tore the gown down the middle and pulled it open from her breasts. Above her left breast he saw her pulse beat in terror, the same pulse he felt when they made love. He ran his hand lightly over her stomach: his pillow, Osborne’s pillow.
‘You’re a whore, Irina.’
‘I told you I’d do anything to get here.’
‘Now I’m here and now I’m a whore too,’ Arkady said.
The touch of her made him both furious and weak. He forced himself to stand and look away; as he did so, as if the very movement had upset a brimming cup, he found tears pouring from his eyes and over his face. I will kill her or cry, he said to himself. Hot salt poured into his mouth.
‘I told you I would do anything to get here,’ Irina said behind him. ‘You wouldn’t believe me, but I told you. I didn’t know about Valerya and the others. I was afraid, but I didn’t know. When could I have told you about Osborne? After I began to love you, after we were in your apartment? Forgive me, Arkasha, for not telling you I was a whore after I began to love you.’
‘You slept with him there.’
‘Once. So he would get me out. You had just appeared for the first time, and I was afraid you were going to arrest me.’
Arkady raised his hand. It dropped of its own dead weight.
‘You slept with him here.’
‘Once. So he would take you with me.’
‘Why? You were going to be free, have your apartment, your clothes – why ask for me?’
‘They were going to kill you in Russia.’
‘Maybe. They hadn’t killed me yet.’
‘Because I love you.’
‘You should have left me there! I was better off there.’
‘I wasn’t,’ Irina said.
He’d never even known he possessed such tears. He remembered Unmann’s knife standing from his stomach – the only other time anything had flowed from him so strongly. The pain was not so different.
‘I wasn’t better off with you there.’ As Irina s
at up the torn gown fell from her.
Were they listening? Arkady wondered – all those miniaturized ears within the bed, the sofa, the medicine cabinet. The window shade hung like a vulgar eyelid. He snapped it up and turned the lights off.
‘If you go back there, I’ll go with you,’ Irina said from the dark.
His tears were springs of rage as hot as blood. Blind, he saw in his mind the Viskovs in their cafeteria near Pavelettsky Station, the old man bearing a plate of caviar paste and smiling with steel teeth, his mute wife beaming. He saw them by the millions with their steel teeth. ‘They’d kill you for certain,’ he said.
‘Whatever you do, I’ll do.’
He sank on his knees by the bed. ‘You didn’t have to sell yourself for me.’
‘What else did I have to sell?’ Irina asked. ‘It’s not as though I’d sold myself for a pair of boots. I sold myself to escape, to become alive. I’m not ashamed, Arkasha. I would be ashamed of myself if I hadn’t. I’ll never say I’m sorry that I did it.’
‘With Osborne, though—’
‘I’ll tell you about it. I didn’t feel dirty afterward, the way young girls are supposed to feel. I felt burned, as if one layer of skin had been taken off.’
She pulled his head between her breasts. His arm went around her. His clothes were heavy and soaked through, and he sloughed them off, like memory.
At least this bed was theirs, he thought. Perhaps nothing else on earth was, but by rights this bed was, with its torn gown and torso of an overcoat, with its canopy of dark. Somehow they loved each other more. They were exhausted, dead, and now were alive again in this whore’s bed, in this alien night.
Arkady felt Irina’s deep sleep against his side.
In the morning Rats would take Kirwill to the sables.
‘They’re on the Arthur Kill,’ Kirwill had said on the way back, ‘and I’ll tell you, it makes a lot more sense stashing them here than a thousand miles away. First, everyone automatically assumes he has them up in mink country. Second, he keeps them right here under his own control; he doesn’t have to depend on someone answering a long-distance call. Third, maybe there’s a hundred thousand square miles around the Great Lakes, but there are a lot of mink ranchers up there, too. It’s one giant mink cooperative, did you know that? Sables need fresh meat. Big cooperatives find out about that kind of food being shipped into any part of their woods. But New York’s the fresh-meat capital of the universe; you can’t keep track of what goes where. And the west side of Staten Island is all woods and swamps, a couple of refineries, a few local people who mind their own business and no cops. The only thing that can possibly go wrong is a hole in a cage, a sable escapes, someone catches it and tries to sell it, a furrier in Manhattan calls the cops, and I, of all people, happen to hear about it. The only thing that can go wrong. The fates are good to you, Arkady. It’s going your way now.’
Gorky Park Page 41
