Red Square

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Get out.' He slowed to fifteen kilometres, enough to knock Minin off his feet when he landed. 'Jump.'

  Arkady leaned, opened the passenger door and pushed Minin. But as the door swung wide, Minin swung with it and hung on to the outside of the door, pressed against the glass. He broke the window with the Stechkin, got his elbows in and aimed. Arkady tapped the brake. As Minin fired, the side window behind Arkady exploded. The door swung out and Minin's hat flew off. The motorcycle burned far behind. The lights of the ring road flyover appeared ahead. Arkady kicked the door open again with his right foot and with his left pushed the accelerator all the way down. Minin's weight and the air resistance forced the door back in. Minin began firing as soon as the door swung inward, spraying the rear and side windows as Arkady steered across the shoulder of the road and hit the corner of the flyover.

  The dark under the ramp was enormously quiet. When the Zhiguli came out of the other side, the passenger door hung like a broken wing and Minin was gone.

  Arkady had no guide left, but he was fairly certain by now that he was returning to a place he knew. He brushed glass off the bag. Air tunnelled sideways through the hanging door and out of the shattered windows.

  Arkady remembered that Soviet cars always evolved, doing with fewer and fewer luxuries.

  This was the new model.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  * * *

  The first time Arkady had come through the village, women were selling flowers on the side of the road. Not tonight. The place seemed abandoned, its windows dark, as if the houses themselves were trying to hide. Sunflowers bobbed in the rain. A cow, startled by his headlights, bolted from a garden.

  On the road, water was pooling in tread tracks. Tanks had kneaded mud to a soft consistency, and where they had moved two abreast they had rolled over fences and fruit trees. The Zhiguli had front-wheel drive, and Arkady ploughed ahead in low gear as if he were steering a boat.

  The fields on the other side of the village were flatter and the way was straighter, though more chewed up. Half a kilometre on, the right shoulder of the road was crushed by tracks emerging from a field. Mud stood stacked like bricks, showing how the tanks manoeuvred on to the road, advancing one tread to pivot on the other. It would have looked like a military parade, Arkady thought, except that it had started from a potato field, with as few witnesses as possible.

  The rest of the way was smooth enough for him to use only running lights. Fields stretched in rows from grey to black and, with the rain, the road looked like a causeway between bodies of water.

  There were no bonfires this time to guide him. Coasting between animal pens into the yard of the Lenin's Path Collective, he saw the rusting tractors and reapers waiting like so many theatrical props, the garage where he had discovered General Penyagin's car, the slaughterhouse, the shed full of consumer goods. In the middle of the yard the lime pit in which he had found Jaak and Penyagin was swollen by the rain.

  Arkady got out, pushed the revolver under his jacket into the back of his belt and held the bag chest-high. With every step, milk that was a combination of rainwater and septic lime filled his shoes.

  On the far side of the yard, past the barn and shed, were headlights. Closer, he saw that the car was a Mercedes and that the lights were aimed at a figure climbing out of one of the command bunkers, the one that had been locked during his first visit. Borya Gubenko struggled under the weight of a flat, rectangular wooden case. His shoes were encased in mud, his camelhair coat was hemmed with mud. He lifted the case up to the back end of a Lenin's Path lorry, the same one that had sold Jaak a short-wave radio.

  On the floor of the lorry, Max arranged the case against others standing on end. 'You almost missed us,' he called to Arkady. 'We were packing to go.'

  Borya seemed less pleased. He was drenched, his hair stuck to his brow, as if he'd played a full day of goal in foul weather. He looked past Arkady. 'Where's Kim?'

  'Kim and Minin had road problems,' Arkady said.

  Max said, 'I'm sure. I would have been disappointed if they had made it. Anyway, I knew you'd come.'

  'I have to get more.' Borya gave both Max and Arkady a hard look and trudged back to the bunker. The case that had just been loaded bore fading stamps: FOR REFERENCE ONLY and CONFIDENTIAL MATERIALS OF THE ARCHIVES OF THE USSR MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR.

  'How is Irina?' Max asked.

  'She's happy.'

  'What I'd forgotten about Irina was her impulse for martyrdom. How could she resist you?' Max seemed bemused, a little distracted. 'I didn't get a chance to say a proper goodbye in Berlin because Borya was in a rush. He's unromantic. Once a pimp, always a pimp. He's still hanging on to his prostitutes and slot machines. He wants to change, but the criminal mind is so limited. Russians don't change.'

  'Where is Rodionov?' Arkady asked.

  'He's keeping the prosecutor's office in line for the Emergency Committee. The Committee is such a collection of Party hacks and all-out drunks that Rodionov shines by comparison. Of course the Committee will win because people always recognize the crack of a whip. The trouble is that the coup is so unnecessary. Everyone could have been rich. Now we're going to go back to a system of counting crumbs.'

  Arkady nodded at the crates. 'Those aren't crumbs. Why are you moving them if the Committee's going to win?'

  'In the wildly remote unlikelihood that the attack fails, people are going to trace the route of the tanks very quickly. Once they re here, they'll go right to the bunkers and we'd lose everything.'

  Arkady looked in the direction Borya had taken. 'I'd like to see.'

  'Why not?' Max jumped off the lorry, happy to oblige.

  The space inside the bunker was narrow, designed for a dozen men to sweat out a nuclear holocaust and live like apes around a vented generator so that they could radio troops that had been crisped in the field. The generator, throbbing like a Trabi, powered red emergency lights. Borya was covering a painting with an oilcloth.

  'It's tight,' Max said. 'We had to get rid of the radiation counters. They didn't work anyway.'

  He played a torch across it. The eye imagines a mine with veins of malachite, lapis or gold twisting into the ground. This was even brighter. Some of the paintings were crated, but most were not, and the beam lit a canvas covered with the primal stripes of Matiushin, in colours as fresh and vivid as the day they were painted. Max moved the beam across a palm tree by Sarian, Vrubel's swans, radiant suns of Iuon, an angelic cow by Chagall. An ogre by Lissitzky overlapped erotic sketches by Annenkov. Above a kaleidoscope by Popova was a fighting cock, all whirling feathers, by Kandinsky. Arkady felt he had stepped into a mine of images, as if a culture had been buried.

  Max shared his pride. 'This is the greatest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world, outside of the Tretykov Gallery. Of course the Ministry didn't know what they were confiscating because the militia doesn't have any taste. The people they stole from did, however, and that's what matters, right? First the Revolution confiscated all the private collections. The revolutionaries themselves wanted the most revolutionary paintings. Then Stalin purged his old friends and the militia got its second harvest of great art. And it kept on harvesting, right through Khrushchev and Brezhnev, hiding it all away beneath the Ministry. That's how great collections are built. Let's give Rodionov credit because when he was given the task of cleaning up the Ministry archives he recognized Red Square and it led him to all these, which are great art but not in the class of Red Square. He also had the sense to know that while he could smuggle the painting out himself, he needed someone more sophisticated both to get it out and legally put it on the market. You have the painting?'

  Arkady said, 'Yes. Do you have the money and the ticket?'

  Borya looked around with the experienced eye of a man who knew how complicated transactions could be. 'It's crowded here. We need more room.'

  Max led the way into the slaughterhouse. The torch picked out butchering blocks, meat grinders and waist-high
tallow pots out of the dark. The pig still hung on the wall hook, exuding an odour of swamp gas.

  Max shared cigarettes. 'I'm not surprised to see you. What I do find hard to believe is that you're willing to make an arrangement. That simply isn't like you.'

  'Yet here I am and here's the painting,' Arkady said.

  'So you say. I think that fifty thousand dollars is high, considering there's no one else you can sell it to. You don't have the provenance or the Knauer crate.'

  'You agreed.'

  'Tonight of all nights, it's difficult to get money together,' Max said.

  Borya stared out at the rain. 'Take the painting.'

  Max said, 'You're always in a hurry. We can work this out between intelligent men.'

  'What is it with the two of you?' Borya asked. 'I don't get it.'

  'Renko and I have a uniquely intimate relationship. We're practically partners already.'

  'Like last night in Berlin? When you came down from the flat, you said Renko and the woman weren't there. I'm starting to think I should have been the one to go up. Now that I think about it, I've done all the work.'

  'Don't forget Rita,' Arkady reminded him. 'She must have overwhelmed Rudy.'

  Borya's shrug became a smile. 'Rudy wanted to get into the art business with us, so we let him. He thought someone was coming from Munich with a fabulous picture for him to authenticate. He didn't know who Rita was because he didn't have a very active sex life.'

  'Unlike Borya,' Max said. 'Some people might call Borya indiscriminate. Bigamous, at the least.'

  'So Rita brought him one,' Borya said. 'Max painted it. He called it a "special effect", like in the movies.'

  Max said, 'Kim added his own incredibly crude bomb because Borya demanded that everything in the car burn up.'

  Borya said, 'Kim can do all kinds of things with blood.'

  'Such a rich life Borya has had,' Max said. 'Rita and Kim. In TransKom we had a venture that could have become a true multinational company if we'd just stayed away from gambling and whores. It's the same with this Emergency Committee. They could all have been real millionaires, but they couldn't tolerate even the least reform. It's like having a partner who's in the last stage of syphilis, when it attacks the brain. Now we're just salvaging what we can.'

  'I had a friend named Jaak, a detective. I found him here in a car. What happened?' Arkady asked.

  'Bad timing,' Borya said. 'He ran into Penyagin. The general was checking the communications in the other bunker, and your detective asked why there was a battalion of tanks and troops sitting in the field. He thought it was going to be like Estonia all over again, there was going to be a coup and he was going back to Moscow to sound the alarm. It was lucky I was around. I was checking a shipment of VCRs in the shed, and I stopped him before he got to the car. But Penyagin was in a dither.'

  Max said, 'Borya doesn't like grandstand critics.'

  'Penyagin was supposed to be head of CID. You'd think he'd have seen a body before,' Borya said.

  'He was a desk man,' Arkady said.

  'I guess so. Anyway, Minin was supposed to investigate, but you showed up first.' Borya stared at the lime pit. Like a man who can't trust his good fortune, he said, 'I can't believe you came back.'

  'Where is Irina?' Max said.

  'Munich,' Arkady lied.

  'Let me tell you where I'm afraid she is,' Max said.

  'I'm afraid she came back with you and went to the White House, where she'll probably be gassed and shot. The Committee may be a collection of Party nobodies, but the troops know their job.'

  'When is the attack?' Arkady asked.

  'At three a.m., the middle of the night. They'll use tanks, it will be fast but messy, and they won't be able to spare reporters even if they wanted to. Do you know what would really be ironic? If this time I saved Irina.' Max let a moment pass. 'Irina's here. Don't deny it. You still have a little glow. She wouldn't let you come back without her.'

  Strangely, Arkady couldn't deny it, though a lie would have served. As if a word could make her disappear.

  'Now do you know what you wanted to know?' Borya asked Max, who nodded. 'Let's see the painting.' He snatched the bag away and opened it while Max played the torch through the plastic wrapper. 'Just like Rita told us.'

  Max lifted the painting out. 'It's heavy.'

  Borya protested, 'It's the painting.'

  Max unwound the wrapper. 'It's wood, not canvas, and it's the wrong colour.'

  'It's red,' Borya pointed out.

  'Red is all it is,' Max said.

  Arkady thought it looked like one of Polina's better efforts – vibrant crimson instead of dark maroon, with more consistent brushstrokes.

  'I think it's a fake, but what's your opinion?' Max turned the torch directly into Arkady's eyes.

  Borya kicked Arkady's legs out from under him, then, with no loss of momentum, moved in and planted a second kick in his chest. Arkady rolled into the dark. On his side, he freed the Nagant from the back of his belt. Faster, Borya produced a pistol and fired into the floor, spraying Arkady with cement.

  Arkady shot. Max had been standing in the black behind the torch. Now he held a shield of phosphorescent white brilliant enough to light the entire slaughterhouse. Polina's canvas had ignited as the slug passed through and Borya squinted, stupefied by the blaze. When he understood what was happening, he turned back to Arkady and fired wildly four more times.

  Arkady shot and Borya dropped to his knees, into the soft folds of his coat. The breast of his coat showed a bright rosette. Arkady fired a second time in the same place. Borya swayed, rose and lined his eye on the sight. His eye wavered. As he started to topple, he put his hands on the floor, still clutching his gun, trying to keep the world from spinning. His head rolled and he relaxed and slumped across the floor at full length, as if he were diving for a penalty kick.

  On the floor, the canvas produced a white light that broke into noxious smoke against the ceiling. Max's sleeve was on fire. He was framed in the doorway for a moment, a man attached to a torch. Then the doorway went dark as he ran.

  The room filled with a chemical cloud that made Arkady's eyes smart. Flames ran down the blood grooves of the floor. His chest stung, though he didn't feel particularly hurt. Borya's kick had folded his knees in a new way and his legs were numb. He dragged himself over the floor to retrieve his jacket and Borya's gun, a little TK pistol that was empty. He crawled to the door, pulled himself up so he could exit erect, staggered out and leaned as stiff as a ladder against the wall until sensation returned.

  Except for the glow from the slaughterhouse and the headlights of the car, the yard was black. The surface of the lime pit seemed to seethe, but it could have been an effect of raindrops. There was no sign of Max, not even smoke.

  The Mercedes raised its headlights and Arkady's shadow jumped the pit. He stepped back and started to slide, so he stood his ground and fired the Nagant's last shot, though his eyes were so overloaded he could barely see his hand, much less the car. The lights swung to the side, raced across the yard and on to the road that led through the pens towards the village. Rear lights danced from rail to rail until they disappeared.

  More on one foot than two, Arkady made it to the step of the lorry. His knees still felt rearranged. When he opened his shirt, he could see that his stomach was pocked by cement, no worse than bird shot. He wished he had a cigarette.

  He buttoned his shirt and pulled on his jacket, then removed the ignition keys from the lorry and locked the back doors. Hobbling to the bunker, he closed it against the rain.

  In the last glimmer from the fire, Arkady staggered across the yard to the Zhiguli. The car had the gaping windows and crumpled fender of an abandoned wreck. Max had a head start. On the other hand, the Zhiguli was made for Russian roads.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  * * *

  The radio picked up nothing. He might have been travelling cross-country in Antarctica.

  He would have seen more
in Antarctica. Snow reflected light, potato fields absorbed it. Man didn't have to search for black holes in the universe when there were potato fields.

  By the time he was on the main road his leg had stiffened so much from Borya's kick that he no longer knew whether he had the clutch in or out.

  The ring road was a starry line of lights. Above the city, tracers dotted the sky. He tried the radio again. Tchaikovsky, of course. And a warning that a curfew was in effect. Arkady turned the radio off. The air rushing through the broken windows made him feel as if he were re-entering earth.

  On the Leningrad Road, armoured personnel carriers stopped pedestrians but let cars drive through, so that there were long spaces of sparse traffic and empty pavements, then crossing spotlights and military vehicles proceeding slowly on a circular road. The Zhiguli, bent door and all, drew no attention. At night a driver noticed that Moscow was a series of concentric rings, and how much the city resembled orbits of light in a void.

  The metro and buses were shut down, but people started to reappear out of the dark singly or in groups of ten or twenty, heading south. Troops were non-existent at one corner, massed at another. In the Red Presnya district, Belovaya Street was blocked by tanks; the idling of their engines sounded like deep thought. Regular militia was off the street.

  Arkady parked and joined the pavement traffic. A stream of men and women poured towards the river. Obviously some knew each other because there was quiet murmuring. Mostly they were silent, as if everyone was saving their breath for the walk, and as if that breath, visible in the rain, was sufficient communication. No one mentioned or looked askance at Arkady's bloody shirt. To his relief, his leg functioned, knee and all.

  Arkady let himself be swept forward. As the pace quickened, he found himself running with the crowd down a sidestreet that had been turned into a dead end by Army lorries parked bumper to bumper. But the canvas cover of one lorry was pulled back and people helped each other up, as if climbing a country stile.