Wesley’s forehead, smooth as a pebble, lolled to one side. ‘It is a wonderful view. I especially love views on days like today when you can hardly see anything at all. It gives the view some point,’ he said. ‘But I’m a fatalist. Some people were not meant to have sunny days. Also I’m a pessimist. Did you know that the deck of this ferry is one of the favorite suicide spots in all New York? True. Or you might accidentally slip under that gate. See how wet the deck is? And get sucked under into the propeller or freeze in the water. Well, it’s going to be safety first while I’m in charge.’
‘Then I will smoke,’ Arkady said.
It was a Russian snow, thick as cotton. One moment the storm was a single entity, a ring around the boat; the next, it broke into separate squalls spinning like tops on the black water. The cable at the bow had a skin of frozen spray.
Valerya, Kostia the Bandit and James Kirwill didn’t know what was waiting for them in Gorky Park. At least they skated to their deaths in innocence. If he told Irina, what could the two of them do? Overpower three armed agents? Make a commotion? Who would notice two passengers out of five in a car in a snowstorm in the middle of New York harbor? Would Irina believe him if he told her? Would Valerya, Kostia and James Kirwill have believed him as they skated by?
The storm parted toward the east. Gliding past them was a verdigris colossus on a stone pedestal, a torch uplifted, a crown of rays on her head, astonishingly familiar even to Arkady. Then the storm closed and she was gone.
‘Did you see it?’ Irina asked.
‘For an instant,’ Arkady said.
‘Don’t go away.’ Wesley got out of the car and vanished up the stairs.
The surface of the bay had the deep motion of heavy breathing. Railroad cars crossed on a barge pushed by a tugboat; gulls rose from floating garbage.
Arkady noticed Ray concentrating anxiously on a side-view mirror. He was looking at someone. Someone had followed, after all. Arkady kissed Irina’s cheek and glanced down the line of cars behind. At the far end of the ferry were two figures. A gust obscured them, and when Arkady looked again they were gone. One had been Wesley, though, and the other the red-haired KGB agent called Rurik.
The snow rushed down, the black water flowed by, and a red buoy danced in between, tolling its bell. A small town on the hills of an island emerged from the storms as Wesley returned.
‘This is it,’ he told Irina as he got into the car.
‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘The name of this town is St George,’ Wesley said.
‘It’s Staten Island,’ Arkady said.
‘Well, yes, it is,’ Wesley said. ‘And it’s part of New York City, no matter what people say.’
Arkady saw that for Irina the shabby docks and snow-covered roofs could have been a tropical island of palm trees and orchids. Or whipped cream set on the sea. She was near the destination of a wonderful journey.
Water surged ahead of them into the slip and crewmen hooked the ramps to the bow. When the cable dropped, the gates swung up and the cars rolled off.
St George was practically a Russian village. The streets were deeply rutted in snow and the traffic was almost stationary. The cars were old and rusted, the people drably dressed in hoods and boots. The houses were small, with real chimneys and real smoke. There was a statue with snowy epaulets. But the shops had fresh meat and poultry and seafood.
A plowed boulevard led away from the town to newer suburbs – prefabricated houses separated from each other by chain link fences. A church looked like a rising spaceship; a bank looked like a gas station.
They reached the highway that Arkady had been on the night before. There was very little traffic. Three cars behind them, Arkady made out Nicky and Rurik. He couldn’t see Kirwill’s detectives.
Slightly asynchronously the windshield wipers batted at the flakes. Was the snow falling or was the car rising? Arkady felt the cool skin of the car and every revolution of its wheels, the residue of whiskey in his stomach, the sweat under his arms, the sweat on George’s palms, the dark blood rushing through each man in the car, and their breath moving the turgid smoke.
Ray turned off before the bridge over the Arthur Kill. A single car followed. They plowed their own way on a narrow road that ran along the Kill, by gas domes and power lines and through a marsh of silvered rushes.
Arkady felt his life simplifying, its halves closing. Extraneous elements like Billy and Rodney no longer existed. The signs along the way were in a strange language, but the road was inevitable.
Arkady understood. Osborne would kill him and Irina while the KGB was misled a thousand miles away from the sables. Yet here were Nicky and Rurik being led right to them. Better than understanding, Arkady saw. All mutual informers were mutually expendable. Worse was a man who did too many favors for both sides and demanded too much in return. What choice did Wesley have? Osborne refused to go into hiding; the bureau would have to protect not only him but a whole growing industry of sables. Seeing at last, Arkady noted the symmetry. As certainly as two eyes and two hands, there was a balance of two energetic armies with mirror hearts. Osborne would kill him and Irina, and then Wesley-George-Ray-Nicky-Rurik would kill Osborne.
They passed a corral, where a black horse stood in the snow and watched them go by.
Irina’s fingers threaded through his. Although she’d tied the knot tight around her wrist, his mother’s hand was open, as if she were reaching for more water.
Trucks rusted, dropping their own orange flakes in the snow outside a barn.
Even the maddest killer – Osborne – was only an individual, unpredictable, finally vulnerable. Policy, like snow, reduced the world to essentials. There, in a field, was a piece of farm machinery, a row of curved blades turned into a scribble.
Now the unctuous bowing of weighted trees.
The second car fell far behind. Arkady felt it, however, like a bead of sweat on his back.
Was there any comfort, he wondered, in seeing the outlines of life?
His sweat was as cold as snow.
Ray turned through a gate into a salvage yard. It appeared as though a sea of snow had lapped up from the Kill, bearing anything of iron with it. Entire ships, gutted hulls, locomotives rode on a white tide. Buses were piled on trucks, New York Central RR cars stood on end, anchors rested on mobile homes. Painted everywhere were signs: NO TRESPASSING THIS MEANS U AND BEWARE OF DOGS. There was an office shingled with license plates, but no one came out to stop them. Arkady noticed they were following tire tracks that looked three or four hours old; Ray drove as if he would be lost without them. The car swung uncertainly between atolls of boxcars, counterweights, cranes, around mountains where snow overlaid the erratic details of turbines and screws, past the loose slopes of chains and scrap. The tracks led away from the yard and through sycamore and linden trees, then into a field of mechanical cranes and vines. Throughout the trees, as if they had dropped there from the sky, were more abandoned cars and buses.
Because it stood before a background of snow, the chain-link fence seemed to spring at them. It was topped by triple strands of barbed wire, and all the tall trees within twenty meters inside it were cut to stumps. Arkady had no doubt that the fence had a concrete base. And there were insulators on the poles, so it was electrified. His eye was caught by a small brown bird that hopped from fence to insulator fence. The power was off. On a phone box was a sign, ATTACK DOG KENNELS, PHONE FOR DELIVERIES, BEWARE OF DOGS. The fence gate was wide open, inviting them in.
The road seemed to deliberately meander through the trees. At one curve the tracks they were following divided into two separate tracks. One earlier car had continued on the road; another had veered off, making its own path through brush.
Kirwill was waiting at the next curve. He faced them, one arm high, before a large tree, an elm. Ray stopped the car a meter in front of him. Kirwill didn’t move, his eyes boring into the car and through it. Snow had settled deep on his shoulders and hat and in the cuff of his upraised hand. Str
etched out dead in the snow at his feet were two large gray dogs. Arkady noticed that what protruded in a bundle from Kirwill’s open coat were his entrails, pulled out and covered with snow. Snow obscured the two pink holes over his breast. His face was totally white. Now Arkady saw the ropes around his waist and wrist that tied him to the tree. When they got out of the car, they saw the blood scattered everywhere. The dogs were similar to Siberian huskies but leaner, longer-legged, more wolflike. One dog’s head was crushed. Kirwill’s eyes were paler than ever, the irises collapsed. He had an expression of weariness, as if he had been condemned to carry a tree on his back all his life.
‘Jesus!’ Ray said. ‘This wasn’t planned.’
‘Don’t touch him,’ George warned.
Arkady forced Kirwill’s eyes shut, buttoned his overcoat together and kissed his cold cheek.
‘Get away from him, please,’ Wesley said.
Arkady stepped back. Irina looked almost as white as Kirwill, the mark on her cheek sharp and dark. Did she finally understand? Arkady asked himself. Did she see Kostia in Kirwill? Did she know who Valerya would be? Did she finally realize how short a distance they had come from Gorky Park?
Osborne came out of the trees behind them carrying a rifle, a third gray dog at his side. The dog had black-outlined eyes and ruff and a muzzle of dried blood.
‘He killed my dogs,’ he explained to Arkady, pointing the rifle with one hand at Kirwill. ‘That’s why I gutted him, because he killed my dogs.’
He spoke to Arkady as if no one else were present. He was wearing hunting clothes, laced boots, a green jaeger hat and pigskin gloves. The rifle was a bolt-action sporting model with a sight and a handsome burled stock. A heavy knife was sheathed on his belt. Arkady noticed that no more snow was falling; not a flake drifted down, not even from the overheavy branches. There was a ceramic clarity to the scene.
‘Well, here are your friends,’ Wesley said.
Osborne, however, studied the dead man. ‘You were going to keep Kirwill away from me,’ he told Wesley. ‘You were going to protect me. If it weren’t for the dogs, he would have had me.’
‘But he didn’t,’ Wesley said, ‘and now he’s out of the way.’
‘No thanks to you,’ Osborne said.
‘The main thing,’ Wesley said, ‘is that we brought your friends. They’re all yours.’
‘They brought the KGB too,’ Arkady said.
Wesley, George and Ray, who had already started to back away from Arkady and Irina, stopped.
‘Good try,’ Wesley said to Arkady. He looked at Osborne. ‘You were right and I was wrong. The Russian is clever, but he’s desperate and he’s lying.’
‘Why do you say that, Arkasha?’ Irina asked. ‘You’ll ruin everything.’
No, Arkady thought, she still doesn’t understand.
‘Why do you say that?’ Osborne asked Arkady.
‘Wesley met with one of them on the ferry. He got out of the car to talk to him,’ Arkady said.
‘There was a blizzard on the ferry,’ Wesley said in a reasonable tone. ‘He could hardly see out the car, let alone any secret meetings.’
‘Did you recognize anyone?’ Osborne asked Arkady.
‘It was hard to see,’ Arkady admitted.
‘Why do you even ask him?’ Wesley said.
‘But I know a red-haired, anti-Semitic KGB officer when I see one,’ Arkady said, ‘even in a snowstorm.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Wesley told Arkady, ‘but no one will believe you.’
Arkady paid no attention to Wesley; neither did Osborne. They could have been alone. What two men better deserved to be alone than a killer and his investigator? Men who approach each other from the opposite sides of the dead – also from the opposite sides of a bed. That was a double intimacy that not even Irina could share. Who else could feel the profound weight of the snow still in the sky and almost hear Tchaikovsky in the air? Arkady let Osborne enter through his eyes. Test my words, Arkady thought; sniff them, chew them. I feel you inside me moving like a wolf’s pads on snow. Try the hate now; it’s lodged behind the heart. Inevitability is always in the stomach. That was all that Kirwill lacked. I have it. Now do you know?
Wesley stared at the two men and, at the last moment, motioned to Ray.
Without taking any apparent aim, Osborne fired his rifle. Wesley’s head snapped, half its smooth forehead missing; he landed on his knees and then his chest. While Ray tried to free a revolver from a shoulder holster inside his jacket and coat, Osborne ejected a shell, fed a new round into the rifle breech and fired again. Ray sat down, looking at his bloody hand. He lifted it away slowly and looked at the hole that went through the middle of his chest, then sagged to one side. Osborne’s dog attacked George. The dog was in midair when George shot it, and was dead before it fell. Osborne was bleeding from his shoulder. Arkady became aware that another shot had been fired from farther away. George rolled behind a tree. Arkady pulled Irina down into the snow, and Osborne vanished into the trees.
They remained face down in the snow until they heard George and then other footsteps run by. There was shouting back and forth in English, some of it with a Russian accent. He recognized Rurik’s voice and Nicky’s. Arkady crawled to Ray and shook the revolver out of his coat. Car keys fell out, too.
‘We can take the car,’ Irina said. ‘We can get away.’
He put the keys in her hand and kept the gun. ‘You get away,’ he said.
He ran into the woods in the direction the other men had gone. He found the revolver safety on the left by the cylinder and pushed it off. The tracks in the snow were easy to follow: George’s, Osborne’s and two more joining from opposite directions. He heard them just ahead, yelling and swatting at branches. There was the crack of a rifle shot followed by rapid fire of handguns.
The fight moved away. When Arkady crept forward again, he found Nicky belly up in the snow, dead, his legs twisted as if he had spun when he fell. A little further on he found a U in Osborne’s tracks where he’d doubled back for the ambush.
The shooting stopped and there was quiet. Arkady moved from tree to tree. His breathing sounded terribly loud. Occasionally wind would brush snow from a branch and it would plop onto the ground and make him jump. He heard other sounds, which at first he thought were birds – sharp voices in agitation that came and went with the wind. The woods ended in a second, inner chain link fence with canvas baffles. Halfway through the fence, tangled in canvas and insulators, was Kirwill’s car. The driver had been trapped inside. The rear windows crystallized around a hole, and in the front seat Rats sat upright. He was dead; the blood that had poured from his torn woolen cap had dried in stripes.
Arkady came to another gate. It was open, and through it went tire tracks almost filled in by snow and the fresh tracks of running men. Inside were Osborne’s sables.
The layout of the compound was rectangular, about a hundred meters by sixty, and simply laid out. At the nearer end were a round corrugated steel unit for wastes and a lean-to for dogs; three chains hung from a ring. The tire tracks led to the far end, where Osborne’s limousine was parked outside a one-story cement bunker. The bunker seemed long enough to house refrigerators, an area for preparing food and an area for quarantine. The foot tracks ran to the sable sheds. The generals in the Fur Palace had underestimated; Arkady counted ten raised, open sheds, each of them twenty meters long, with a wooden roof that sheltered two rows of cages and a central aisle. There were four cages to a row, which meant about eighty sables altogether: eighty sables in New York City. He couldn’t see the animals clearly; they were excited and moving about too much. Nor could he see Osborne, George or Rurik, though there were few places to hide – only plastic cans at the end of each shed and concrete drainage troughs under each row of cages. The American revolver was odd and short-barreled, obviously not meant for marksmanship, and he was a terrible shot anyway; he’d never be able to hit anyone from the bunker or the lean-to. He ran for the nearest shed.
First he heard the shot and then he felt the bullet. It should be the other way round, he thought. He stumbled but regained his feet. It’s tough to put a pistol slug through the chest of a crouching man, he thought; now, a rifle slug would have done the job. When he dove under the shed, pain stretched on a line over his ribs.
Above him the sables shrieked in outrage. They climbed zinc-coated mesh walls, paced, leaped, were never still. They looked like cats, then weasels, furred ears turning in alarm, tails bristling with anger, moving so quickly that they were only black configurations within the cages. It was the life in them that was startling. They were wild, not tame, furiously alive, hissing and trying to reach him through the silver mesh. On his back, Arkady looked down the row of sheds and saw two different pairs of human legs. An upside-down face with dark, morose eyes joined one pair of legs; then a revolver joined the fact. It was George. He fired, and a spray of animal feces exploded over Arkady from the drainage trough. Arkady aimed back. Still too far. He rolled over the trough toward the next shed, closer to George, and was aiming again when there was a rifle shot. Arkady could see George’s legs walking backward, his head still hanging down, his revolver dangling from a finger. With his other hand George seemed to be trying to reach his back. His legs worked more and more stiffly, and his head hung lower as he backed into a plastic can at the end of the shed. The can tipped over, spilling a pink soup of fish heads and horsemeat over the snow. George lay down in it.
‘Arkady Vasilevich,’ Rurik said.
Rurik stepped out of Arkady’s shed and stood over him, a Makarov automatic hanging in his hand. Now we will hunt down Osborne together, Arkady thought, but Rurik was a better judge of enemies and trained not to hesitate. With the ironic sympathy of a final arbiter – we’re all human, especially we Ukrainians – the KGB officer raised his gun and aimed at Arkady with both hands. Before he could fire, his scalp rolled back from his skull, gray flecks stuck to his red hair, and Rurik dropped, knees and face forward, into the snow. This time the sound of the rifle shot came afterward.
Gorky Park Page 43
