Red Square

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Depends.' She screwed her lips around the cigarette. 'Whether you're on a fruit diet or a vegetable diet.'

  'Fruit diet? Do you hear that, Polina? Like what?' he asked.

  'Pineapples, papayas, mangoes, bananas.' The waitress raided them off casually as if she were intimately acquainted with them.

  'Papayas,' Arkady repeated. 'Polina, you and I would be willing to queue for seven or eight years for a papaya. I'm not sure I know what a papaya looks like. They could give me a potato and I'd probably be happy. Then I wouldn't lose weight. Luxury is wasted on people like you and me.' He asked the waitress, 'Could you show us a papaya?'

  She studied them. 'No.'

  'She probably doesn't even have a papaya,' Arkady said. 'She just says it to impress her friends. Feel better?'

  'I'm laughing, so I must feel a little better.'

  'I've never heard you laugh before. It's a nice sound.'

  'Yes.' Polina slowly rocked back and forth. Her smile sank. 'At medical school we used to ask each other, "What is the worst way to die?" After Rudy, I think I know. Do you believe in hell?'

  'There's a question out of the blue.'

  'Well, you're like the devil. You take a secret glee in your work, like you've come to grab the damned. That's why Jaak likes to work with you.'

  'Why do you work with me?' He didn't think she was going to quit now.

  Polina took a moment. 'You let me do things right. You let me get involved.'

  Arkady knew this was the problem. The morgue was a simple theatre of black and white, dead or alive. Polina had been full of analytical detachment, a blind determinism perfect for labelling the dead as so many cold and inert specimens. But a pathologist who became involved in the investigation outside the morgue started seeing bodies as living people, and then the cadaver on the table became the picture of someone's worst and ultimate breath on earth. He had robbed her of professional distance. In a way he had corrupted her.

  'Because you're smart.' Arkady left it at that.

  She said, 'I've been thinking about what you said last night. Kim had a gun. Why use two different kinds of bombs on Rudy? It is such a complicated way to kill him.'

  'The point wasn't just to kill him; the point was to burn him. Or burn all the records and computer disks and every piece of information that would connect him to someone else. I'm more sure of that all the time.'

  'So I am a help.'

  'A Hero of Red Labour.' He toasted her.

  Polina drank her cognac and levelled her gaze.

  'I heard that you left once,' she said. 'There was a woman, I heard.'

  'Where do you hear all these things?'

  'You're avoiding the question.'

  'I don't know what people say. I was out of the country for a short time and then I came back.'

  'The woman?'

  'Did not come back.'

  'Who was right?' Polina asked.

  Now that, Arkady thought, was a question only asked by the very young.

  Chapter Ten

  * * *

  Irina said, 'The Soviet Defence Minister conceded that Soviet troops attacked civilians in Baku to prevent the overthrow of the Azerbaijan Communist regime. The Army had stood aside when Azeri activists rioted against Armenians in the capital, but went into action when an Azeri crowd threatened to burn down Party headquarters. Tanks and troops broke through blockades set up by anti-Communist militants and stormed into the city, firing dumdum bullets and spraying apartment buildings without provocation. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians are estimated to have died in the assault. Although the KGB had spread rumours that Azeri militants would be armed with heavy machine guns, only hunting rifles, knives and pistols were found among the dead.'

  Arkady had left Polina and hurried home in time to catch Irina's first broadcast. Drinks with one woman, then rushing to the voice of another. What a sophisticated life, he thought.

  'Official justification for the military operation was the mob violence against Armenians by militants who showed documents identifying themselves as leaders of the Azeri Popular Front. Since the Front does not issue such documents, a KGB provocation is once again suspected.'

  While Arkady listened, he changed into a dry shirt and jacket.

  Who was right? She was. He was. There was no choice, no right or wrong, no black or white. He wished for one blinding ray of certainty; even to be wrong would be relief. He had stepped back in his memory so many times his tracks would have worn through stone, and he still didn't know what else he could have done. He had told Polina, 'We'll never know.'

  Irina said, 'Increasingly, Moscow has cited nationalist tensions to justify the continued presence of Soviet Army troops in different republics, including the Baltic states, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and the Ukraine. Tanks and missile launchers that were supposed to be scrapped in the arms-control agreement with NATO have instead been moved to bases in the dissident republics. At the same time, nuclear missiles have been removed from those republics to the Russian republic.'

  He hardly heard her words. Every rumour he heard was worse than her reports; reality was worse than her reports. So, like a beekeeper separating honey from a comb, he was able to hear only her voice and not the words. She had a darker sound tonight. Had it rained in Munich? Were there traffic jams on the autobahn? Was she with anyone?

  She could have said anything and he would have gone on listening. Sometimes he felt as if he were going to fly out of the window, and wheel in the sky above Moscow. He would home in on that voice like a beacon, which would lead him, lead him, lead him away.

  When the news switched to a tape, Arkady left his flat not with wings but wipers, attached them to his car and plunged into the midnight traffic. Night and rain combined to make disoriented streets and paint smears of light across the windscreen. At the embankment road he had to stop for a convoy of Army lorries and personnel carriers as long and slow as a freight train. While he waited he felt his jacket for cigarettes, found an envelope and winced when he recognized the letter Belov had given him in Red Square. His name was written across the face of the envelope with a fine nib in letters that started as slashes and ended in sprawls, as if the hand had been too weak to wield a pen or a knife.

  Polina had asked what the worst way to die was. Holding the letter, letting it rest lightly across his palm with the shadow of water running over his name, Arkady knew the answer. It was to realize that when you died no one would care. It was to realize that you were already dead. He didn't feel that way now; he would never feel that way. Just hearing Irina made him come so alive his heart shook with every beat. What had his father written? The wise course, he thought, would be to leave the letter on the street. The rain would wash it down a storm drain, the river would carry it to the sea, where the paper would unfold and fall apart and the ink would run and fade like poison. Instead, he slipped it back into his pocket.

  Minin let him into Rudy's flat.

  The detective was agitated because of the rumour that speculation would become legal. 'This undermines the basis of our investigation,' he said. 'If we can't go after money-changers, who can we arrest?'

  'There are still murderers, rapists and violent thieves. You'll always be busy,' Arkady reassured him and gave him his hat and coat. Getting Minin out of the place was like unearthing a mole. 'Catch some sleep. I'll take over here.'

  'The mafia's going to open banks.'

  'Very likely. I understand that's how they start.'

  'I searched everything,' Minin said and stepped reluctantly on to the threshold. 'Nothing hidden in books, cupboards, under the bed. I left a list on the desk.'

  'It's suspiciously clean, isn't it?'

  'Well...'

  'That's what I thought, too,' Arkady said as he started to shut the door. 'And don't worry about a lack of crime. In the future we'll have a better class of criminal -bankers, brokers, businessmen. You'll need lots of sleep for that.'

  Alone, the first place Arkady went to was
the office desk to see whether anything new had come on the fax. The paper was clean and bore the same faint pencil dot on the reverse side that he had left after tearing off the messages about Red Square. He picked up Minin's list. The detective had cut open Rudy's mattress and springs, inspected cupboard and drawers, unscrewed switches, tapped skirting boards, disassembled and assembled the flat again, and found nothing.

  Arkady ignored Minin's list. What could be found, he thought, would be more obvious. Sooner or later a flat fitted a man like a shell. He might be gone, but his outline stayed in a worn chair, a photo, a crust of food, a forgotten letter, in the smell of hope or despair. In part, Arkady took this approach because technological support for investigations was so weak. The militia had invested in German and Swedish gear, spectrographs and haemotypers, which lay unused for lack of parts for dearth of funds. There was no computer matching of blood or number-plates, let alone of something so laughably out of reach as 'genetic fingerprints'. What Soviet forensic labs possessed were archaic chemistry sets of blackened test tubes, gas burners and curlicues of glass piping that the West hadn't seen in fifty years. Polina had extracted answers from the body of Rudy Rosen in spite of her equipment, not because of it.

  Since the chain of hard evidence tended to be thin, a Soviet investigator was more dependent on softer clues, on social nuance and logic. Arkady knew investigators who believed that with a sufficiently clear understanding of the scene of a homicide they could deduce a murderer's sex, age, occupation and hobbies. The only place in the Soviet Union where psychological analysis was allowed to thrive was criminal investigation.

  Of course Soviet investigators had always relied on confession, too. Confession solved everything. But confession really worked only with amateurs and innocents. Makhmud or Kim would no more confess to a crime than suddenly burst into Latin.

  What had this flat said so far? One thing: 'Where is Red Square?'

  Was Rosen religious? There were no menorahs, Torahs, prayer shawls or Sabbath candles. The portraits of his parents were the bare minimum of family history; generally Russian homes were photo galleries of sepia ancestors in oval frames. Where were Rudy's pictures of himself or of friends? He was hygienic. The walls were smooth, scrubbed clean, not a nailhole to mar the blank space, as if he had effaced himself.

  Arkady pulled books and magazines from the shelves. Business Week and Israel Trade were in English and indicated an international breadth of ambition. Did the stamp album speak of a solitary youth? Inside was a regular aquarium of outsize stamps of tropical fish issued by miniature nations and islands around the world. In a paper sleeve were loose stamps of nondescript variety: tsarist two-kopecks, French 'Libertés', American 'Franklins'. No valuable red squares.

  He stacked the books and moved to the bedroom, where he balanced the pile on the night table. The sleep mask had a poignant quality, suggesting that a combination of rich food and diet pills made for uneasy nights.

  There was no chair in the bedroom. Arkady removed his shoes, sat on the bed and at once had the shock of hearing the complaint of springs that anticipated Rudy's weight. He packed the pillows behind his back, the way Rudy would have, and flipped through the books.

  Every home had a few classics just to prove literacy. Rudy read his. Arkady found underlined the humorous passage in the immortal Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter in which a Hussar offers to teach a young man the game of billiards: 'It's quite essential to us soldiers,' he said. 'One can't always be beating Jews, you know. So there is nothing to it but to go to the inn and play billiards; and to do that one must be able to play.'

  'Or beat Jews with cues' was scribbled below the line. Arkady recognized Rudy's handwriting from the bank book.

  Deep in Gogol's Dead Souls, Rudy had marked, 'For some time, Chichikov made it impossible for smugglers to earn a living. In particular, he reduced Polish Jewry almost to despair, so invincible, so almost unnatural, was the rectitude, the incorruptibility which led him to refrain from converting himself into a small capitalist.' In the margin, Rudy had added, 'Nothing changes.'

  There had to be more, Arkady thought. Thanks to Jewish emigration, the Moscow mafia had good connections with Israeli criminals. He put on the television set and replayed the Jerusalem videotape, skipping from place to place, from Wailing Wall to casino.

  His mind wandered to what Polina had said: 'Too much blood'.

  He agreed. If petrol could be thickened with blood, it could also be thickened with a dozen other agents easier to get hold of. He'd seen blood in some other strange form recently, but couldn't remember where.

  He looked at the Egyptian tape again. It was warming to see the tawny hues of the Sinai desert while rain tapped on the windows, and he crowded closer, like a man to a fireplace. He reached into his jacket for cigarettes, and before he remembered that he had given them away he had pulled the letter from his pocket. He could count the number of letters he had received from his father. One a month while Arkady was in Pioneer camp. One a month when the general was in China, at a time when relations with Mao were fraternal and deep. All those missives were brisk, military-like reports that ended with instructions for Arkady to be hard-working, responsible and worthy. About twelve letters altogether. He received one more after choosing the university over officers' school. He was impressed because his father cited the Bible, namely the episode in which God demanded from Abraham the sacrifice of his only son. This was where Stalin improved on God, the general said, because he not only would have allowed the execution but would have been glorified by Abraham all the more. Besides, there were some sons, like weak calves, that were fit only for sacrifice. Too much blood? For his father there was never enough.

  The father renounced his son, the son renounced his father, one cutting off the future, the other the past, and neither daring to mention, it occurred to Arkady now, the one point in time where they would always dwell together. At the dacha, boy and man had stared from the dock at feet caught in the drowsy, warm river that ran by the edge of the dacha's lawn. The feet were bare, and they neither floated up nor plunged down to deeper water; instead, they lazed beneath the surface like underwater flowers. Further down, Arkady could make out his mother's white dress billowing and swaying in the current, to his child's mind waving goodbye.

  Dhows tipped and cruised the waters of the Nile. Arkady realized that he had stopped consciously watching the television. He replaced the letter in his jacket as delicately as if he were handling a razor, then punched the Egyptian tape out of the VCR and pushed in the one from Munich. He paid more attention now because in a rudimentary way he understood German, and because he needed to focus on something besides the letter. Of course he watched with Russian eyes.

  'Willkommen zu München...' the tape began. On the screen was an etching of medieval monks watering sunflowers, turning a spitted boar, pouring beer. It didn't look like such a bad life. The next image was of modern, rebuilt Munich. The narration managed to be boastful of this phoenix-like accomplishment without directly mentioning any world wars, suggesting that a 'sad and tragic' plague had reduced the city to rubble. Munich had been liberated by Americans, and there was the plastic feel of an American mall to the images on the screen. From the figure of the belled jester turning in the Marienplatz clock tower to the chequerboard walls of the

  Old Court

  , every historical site was sterilized to quaint-ness. Virtually every other image was of a beer garden or a beer hall, as if brew were an anointing oil of innocence – Hitler's beer hall putsch aside, of course. Yet Munich was undeniably attractive. People looked so wealthy and well dressed that they seemed to be shopping on a different planet. Cars looked inexplicably clean and sounded like the brass horns of a hunt. Swans and ducks flocked to the city's lakes and river; when was a swan last seen on the Moscow?

  'Munich is a city with the stamp of royal builders,' the narrator intoned. 'Max-Joseph-Platz and the National Theatre were built by King Max-Joseph, Ludwigstrasse by his son, King Ludwig
I, the "Golden Mile" of Maximilianstrasse by Ludwig's son, King Max II, and Prinzregentenstrasse by his brother, Prince Regent Luitpold.'

  Ah, but do we get to see the beer hall where Hitler and his Brown Shirts started their first premature march to power? Will we see the square where Goering took the bullet meant for Hitler and in so doing captured der Führer's heart forever? Will we tour Dachau? Well, Munich's history is so packed with people and events that we can't see everything on one tape. Arkady admitted his attitude was unfair, jaundiced and corroded with envy.

  'At last year's Oktoberfest, celebrants drank over five million litres of beer and consumed seven hundred thousand chickens, seventy thousand pork knuckles and seventy roasted oxen...'

  Well, they could come to Moscow to diet. The nearly pornographic display of food glazed Arkady's eyes. After opera in the National Theatre – 'built by a tax on beer' – refreshment in a romantic beer cellar. After a spin on the autobahn, a pit stop in the beer garden. After an Alpine hike up the Zugspitze, well-earned beer at a rustic inn.

  Arkady stopped the tape and rewound to the hike. Vista of Alps leading to the stone-and-snow escarpment of the Zugspitze. Hikers in lederhosen. Tight shot of edelweiss. Silhouettes of mountaineers high above. Drifting clouds.

  Beer garden of the inn. Honeysuckle climbing yellow plaster. The enervated stillness of Bavarians after lunch, except for one woman in short sleeves and sunglasses. Cut to a vapour trail leading from clouds to a Lufthansa jet.

  Arkady rewound and ran the scene in the garden again. The tape quality seemed the same, but both the narrator's voice and the music were absent. In their place was the scraping of chairs and the off-screen sounds of traffic. The sunglasses were a mistake; in a professional tape they would have been off. He went back and forth from Alps to airliner. The clouds were the same. The beer garden scene had been inserted.

  The woman raised her glass. Blonde hair was brushed back like a mane from her broad eyebrows and broader cheeks. Short chin, medium height, mid-thirties. Dark sunglasses, gold necklace, black short-sleeved sweater, probably cashmere – contrasts that were more sensual than pretty in any ordinary sense. Red nails. Fair skin. Red lips half open in the same slack, reckless study she had once given Arkady through a car window-lifting a corner of a half-smile. She mouthed, 'I love you.'