Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  ‘You—’ Chuchin blocked Arkady’s view of her, but Arkady was looking a second time at what he’d seen: the door swinging open, Chuchin’s initial amazement, the hand closing the buckle, the red-faced girl – young but plain – turning in her chair to spit. Chuchin, the smoothest-featured of men, a mustache of sweat on his upper lip, buttoned his jacket and pushed Arkady into the hall.

  ‘An interrogation?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘Not a political, just a whore.’ Even Chuchin’s voice was mild, as if he were identifying a type of dog.

  Arkady had come with a request. He didn’t have to request anymore. ‘Give me the keys to your files.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘The prosecutor would be very interested in how you carry out an interrogation.’ Arkady put out his hand for the key.

  ‘You don’t have the nerve.’

  Arkady’s hand closed on the crotch of Chuchin’s pants and on the softening prick, the prick of Special Cases inside the pants, and squeezed Chuchin to his tiptoes so that the two men could see eye to eye.

  ‘I’ll kill you for this, Renko, wait and see,’ Chuchin said huskily, but he gave up the key.

  Arkady spread the files over Chuchin’s desk.

  No investigator showed another his files. Each was a specialist, and where their activities did overlap, their separate files contained the identities of personally groomed informers. Especially in Special Cases. What were Special Cases? If the KGB were to arrest all political offenders, their sheer numbers would exaggerate their importance. Better that some be arrested by the prosecutor’s office for normal crimes that the average citizen could understand. For example: The historian B., a correspondent of exiled writers, was arrested for profiteering on ballet tickets. The poet F., a samizdat courier, was charged with stealing books from the Lenin Library. The technician M., a Social Democrat, was arrested in the act of selling religious ikons to the informant G. This grab bag was an insult to real investigators. Arkady’s attitude had always been to ignore Chuchin, as if to deny his existence. He’d hardly spoken to the man, let alone touched him.

  Arkady’s eye was caught by Chuchin’s references to ‘the informant G.,’ ‘the alert citizen G.,’ ‘the reliable source G.’ Fully half the arrests involving ikons were battened by that single letter. He went to Chuchin’s budget accounts. On a list of informants G. was at the top with 1,500 rubles. There was a telephone number.

  From his own office Arkady called the telephone exchange. The number belonged to a Feodor Golodkin. Pasha’s tape machine was by the desk. Arkady put a fresh tape on it and dialed the phone. After five rings it was picked up without an answer.

  ‘Hello, is Feodor there?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘Give me a number to call you back at.’

  ‘Let’s talk now.’

  Click.

  When the first cartons came from Pribluda, Arkady felt some of the exhilaration that even illusory progress brings. There were thirteen Intourist hotels in Moscow, with a total of over twenty thousand guest rooms, half equipped with listening devices, and while only 5 percent might be monitored at a time, even fewer taped and transcribed, the accumulation of material was impressive.

  ‘You may come across some innocent who talks openly about buying ikons or meeting someone in the park, but don’t expect it,’ Arkady told Pasha and Fet. ‘Don’t bother reading transcripts of anyone accompanied by an Intourist guide. Don’t bother with foreign newspapermen or priests or politicians; they’re watched too closely. Concentrate on tourists or foreign businessmen who know their way around, speak Russian, have contacts here. Who have short, cryptic conversations and immediately leave their rooms. A tape of the black marketeer Golodkin is on this machine so that you can match his voice on another tape, but don’t lose sight of the fact that he may not be involved.’

  ‘Ikons?’ Fet asked. ‘How did we decide on them?’

  ‘Marxist dialectic,’ Arkady answered.

  ‘Dialectic?’

  ‘We are now in an intermediate stage of communism where there are still criminal tendencies resulting from relics of capitalism in the minds of some individuals. What more obvious relic than an ikon?’ Arkady opened a pack of cigarettes and passed one to Pasha. ‘Besides, gesso and gold dust were found on the victims’ clothes. Gesso’s a primer for wood, and about the only legal use of gold is for restoring ikons.’

  ‘You mean this could be tied to an art theft?’ Fet asked. ‘Like the case at the Hermitage a couple of years ago. Remember, a gang of electricians were taking crystals from the museum chandeliers. It took years to catch them.’

  ‘Ikon fakers, not thieves.’ Pasha bummed a match. ‘That’s where the sawdust on their clothes came from, from woodworking.’ He stopped and blinked. ‘Did I just do some dialectic?’

  After a day of listening to tapes, without enough energy left to confront his apartment, Arkady wandered until he found himself under the Imperial Roman main entrance to Gorky Park, where he bought himself a supper of meat pies and lemonade. On the skating rink, muscular girls in short flared skirts skated backward from a boy with an accordion. The boy pumped gasps of music. The loudspeakers were silent; the deaf woman had put away her records.

  The sun set into steamy clouds. Arkady walked on to the amusement section. On a good weekend there might be a thousand kids riding the rocket ride and pedal cars, plinking wooden ducks with an air rifle or watching a magic show at the amphitheater. He’d come often enough himself as a kid with the then sergeant Belov, as a wise guy with wise-guy Misha and all the other wise guys in their group. He remembered when the Czechs opened the first foreign exhibition in the park, the Pilsen beer pavilion in ’56. Suddenly, of all things, beer was popular. Everyone was pouring it into his vodka. Everyone was happy and drunk. He remembered when The Magnificent Seven came to Moscow, and every male between the ages of twelve and twenty started walking like Yul Brynner; Gorky Park seemed to be full of stiff-legged cowboys looking for their mounts. A time when everyone was a cowboy. Amazing! What were they now? City planners, factory managers, Party members, car owners, ikon buyers, Krokodil readers, television critics, opera goers, fathers and mothers.

  There weren’t many kids today. Two old men slapped dominoes in the dusk. Pushcart vendors huddled together in their white caps and aprons. A toddler sought the limits of an elastic band held by a grandmother.

  On the Ferris wheel at the end of the amusements a couple in their eighties sat suspended halfway up while the operator, a boy with skin problems, leafed through a motorcycle magazine, damned if he was going to release the brake just for two pensioners. As the wind picked up, the cars rocked and the old woman edged closer to her husband.

  ‘Take it up.’ Arkady presented a ticket to the operator and sat in a car. ‘Now.’

  The wheel shrugged and revolved, and Arkady rose above tree level. Although sunlight lingered in the west, past Lenin Hills, lamps were coming on across the city and he could make out traffic lights like concentric halos; the tree-lined boulevards around the inner city, the Sadovaya Ring reaching the park, the Outer Ring as vague as the Milky Way.

  That was one of the things about Gorky Park; it was the only place in the city where you could fantasize. You had to have a special pass to join the fantasies of Mosfilm, but everyone was welcome in the park. At one time Arkady had planned to be an astronomer. All he had left of that period was a wrinkle of useless information on the cortex. He’d watched Sputnik pass over Gorky Park twenty years ago. Well, no regrets. Everyone left such ghosts in the park; it was a great and pleasant grave. He and Misha, Pasha, Pribluda and Fet, Zoya and Natasha. It offended him that someone had left bodies in it.

  Round again. The ancient couple a few cars ahead rode without a word, the way pre-Revolutionaries often did when they came to the capital. It was the Great Patriotic War crowd who were larded with enough self-confidence to push and shout. While their grandchildren sat outside the cathe
drals of the Kremlin and picked their noses, the salute of heirs.

  He shifted to get comfortable against the metal seat. Below, the park rose into hills, ran by the militia station and divided into romantic walks, off one of which ‘40 meters north of the footpath on a line with Donskoy Street and the river’ three people had been killed. Despite the growing dark he found the clearing because a figure stood in the middle of it with a flashlight.

  On the next pass by the ground Arkady jumped off. It was half a kilometer to the clearing, and he began running in long strides, alternately skidding on ice and regaining his balance. The path twisted uphill.

  Zoya was right; he should have exercised. Stupid cigarettes. He reached the militia station, just as cozy as Pasha had described but empty, not even a car around, so he kept on moving as the path became steeper. Consciously he pulled his knees up and his elbows back in some sort of rhythm, out of beat with the slap of his shoes and the rasp of his windpipe. After three hundred meters of sprinting his stride was as short as a baby’s. He felt as if he’d run for hours. The path leveled just as side stitches started tugging, and it would probably only be Detective Fet doing some housework, he told himself.

  Where the militia van had turned off the path four days before, he slowed woodenly, following the tracks to the clearing. Ice popped underfoot. The light was gone; the searcher was gone or smart enough to block the light from the path. There was no definition to help because the clearing, stripped of snow, was totally black. No sounds. He moved from tree to tree around the clearing, stopping in a crouch, staring. He was about to move again when a beam of light shone on the shallow trench from which the bodies had been removed.

  Arkady was about ten meters into the clearing when the light disappeared.

  ‘Who’s there?’ he called.

  Someone ran the other way.

  Arkady followed. The clearing sloped down to a copse of trees, he knew. Beyond that would be a steep bank, some bowers for chess tables, another path, trees, then a jump down to the Pushkinskaya quay road and the river.

  ‘Stop! Militia!’ he shouted.

  He couldn’t shout more and run, too. He was gaining. The footsteps ahead were heavy, a man’s. Though Arkady was once issued a gun, he never carried it. The copse neared, leaping forward like the crest of a wave. The fugitive reached the trees first, breaking through branches. There’d be lights on the lower path, Arkady thought, and many lights on the quay road. He put his arms out as he reached the trees.

  He ducked when he heard an arm drawing back, but it wasn’t a punch, it was a kick at his groin. As his breath rushed out he grabbed for the foot and got a fist in the neck. He swung and missed. Another kick knocked him back. His second swing hit a stomach that was round and hard. A shoulder pinned him against a tree while fingers stabbed his kidneys. Arkady’s mouth found an ear, and bit.

  ‘Son of a bitch.’ In English. The shoulder jumped back.

  ‘Militia . . .’ Arkady tried to shout, but it came out a whisper.

  A kick dropped him face first into the snow. Fool, Arkady told himself. The first time an investigator hits anyone in years he loses his wife. The second time he bawls for help.

  He pulled himself up, listened for the sound of branches shaking, and followed. The slope pitched toward the river. He half fell. The lower path was empty, but he saw feet dissolving in the trees beyond.

  Arkady took the path in one stride and leaped, coming down on a broad back. The two men rolled through the dark until they hit a bench. Arkady tried to lock the man’s wrist back, but their coats were too tangled for either to do anything until the man twisted free. Arkady tripped him and, swinging as wildly as ever, knocked him off his feet again. But as soon as they were separated, Arkady hadn’t a chance. A palm slapped his face, and before he began to react the same hand as a fist shot into the ribs under his heart. He stood in feeble admiration long enough for the fist to find his heart again. Falling, he felt his heart stop.

  This is a vast improvement over primitive methods, the collective’s director told Arkady and his father, and pulled the cow’s head into a pillory over which was a large metal cylinder that at the flick of a switch drove an oil-slicked piston square into the cow’s cranium, the animal’s legs flying into a comic spread. Cowhide for tankers’ helmets, he remembered. Let me try it, General Renko said, and pulled another cow to the pillory. Whomp! Imagine being able to use one’s hands like that.

  Arkady pulled himself out of a drift and staggered, holding his chest. Trees and snow sucked him downhill to a stone wall. He eased over and collapsed onto the sidewalk of the Pushkinskaya quay.

  Truck lights sailed along the sweep of the quay road. He could see no one walking. No militiamen. Street-lamps were furry balls, like the bubbles of air he gagged down. The trucks moved on and he was left alone, unsteadily crossing the road.

  The river was a three-hundred-meter-wide streak of ice backed by black trees stretching toward Lenin Stadium to the west, and by unlit ministry buildings to the east. The Krimsky suspension bridge was at least a kilometer away. Close at Arkady’s left was a subway bridge with no walkway. Over it rattled a train, wheels sparking.

  A figure was running on the river under the bridge.

  There were no stairs. Arkady slid three meters down the curving stone embankment, his ass taking the punishment of a violent landing on the ice. He picked himself up and started running.

  Moscow was a low city. From the river it almost disappeared into its own somnolent ether.

  The footsteps were closer. The man was powerful, not fast; even limping, Arkady still gained. There were no stairs along the north embankment either, but he saw on the embankment toward the stadium the docks for summer excursion boats.

  The man stopped for breath, looked back at Arkady and moved on again. They were more than halfway across the ice, about forty meters apart. As Arkady closed in, the man stopped a second time and raised his hand with such authority that Arkady found himself halted. Ice created an illusion of luminescence. He could make out a stocky figure in an overcoat and cap. The face was hidden.

  ‘Away,’ it said in Russian.

  When Arkady stepped forward, the hand lowered. He saw a barrel. The man aimed with both hands the way detectives were trained to fire a gun, and Arkady dove. He heard no shot and saw no flash, but something smacked off the ice behind him and, an instant later, rang off stones.

  The figure lumbered again to the far side of the river. At the embankment Arkady caught up. Water had run down the stone wall and frozen to an uneven slickness on the ice, and there the two men struggled in the shadow of the bridge, slipping first on their feet and then on their knees. Arkady’s nose bled and the other man lost his cap. A blow on the chest no harder than a tap put Arkady on all fours. His opponent stood. Arkady took two kicks in the side and, as efficient as a hammer’s final measure, a shoe on the back of the head.

  When he turned over, the man was gone. Sitting up, he discovered in his hand the man’s cap.

  Above, more sizzling wheels crossed the sky. Small fireworks for small victories.

  Chapter Five

  Stalin gothic was not so much an architectural style as a form of worship. Elements of Greek, French, Chinese and Italian masterpieces had been thrown into the barbarian wagon and carted to Moscow and the Master Builder Himself, who had piled them one on the other into the cement towers and blazing torches of His rule, monstrous skyscrapers of ominous windows, mysterious crenellations and dizzying towers that led to the clouds, and yet still more rising spires surmounted by ruby stars that at night glowed like His eyes. After His death, His creations were more embarrassment than menace, too big for burial with Him, so they stood, one to each part of town, great brooding semi-Oriental temples, not exorcised but used. The one in the Kievskaya District, west of the river, was the Hotel Ukraina.

  ‘Isn’t this great?’ Pasha spread his arms.

  Arkady looked down from the fourteenth floor of the Ukraina at the broad boulevar
d of Kutuzovsky Prospekt, and across Kutuzovsky’s traffic at the obeisant buildings of the diplomatic and foreign correspondent complex with its center courtyard and militia kiosk.

  ‘Like Spy Smasher.’ Pasha surveyed a suite of tape machines, cartons, tables and cots. ‘You really swing some weight, Arkady.’

  Actually it was Iamskoy who had moved the base of the investigation, citing the lack of space in Arkady’s own office. There was no mention of who had occupied the suite before, though there was a poster of blond airline stewardesses of the Democratic German Airline taped to a wall. Even Detective Fet was impressed.

  ‘Detective Pavlovich is taking the German tourists and Golodkin, the man you suspect of dealing in ikons. I am familiar with the Scandinavian languages. When I was considering a naval career, I thought they would be useful,’ Fet confided.

  ‘Is that so?’ Arkady rubbed his neck. His whole body ached from the beating he’d taken the night before; he couldn’t honestly call it a fight. It ached to fish for a cigarette, and it gave him a headache to consider being attached to a headset. His Army career had consisted of sitting in a radio shed on the fraternal socialist side of Berlin and listening to Allied transmissions. A duller job couldn’t be imagined, yet his two detectives clearly shared a commonality of bliss. After all, here they were in a luxury hotel with their feet resting on a carpet instead of beating a sidewalk. ‘I’ll take English and French,’ he said.

  The phone rang. It was Lyudin reporting on the cap lost by the man who had beaten up the chief investigator.

  ‘The cap is new, Russian manufacture, of cheap serge, and it contained two gray hairs. A protein analysis of the hairs indicates the cap’s wearer to be Europoid, male, with blood type O. A pomade on the hair was lanolin-based, of foreign manufacture. Casts of the man’s heel prints from the park showed the unworn factory imprint of new shoes, also Russian. We also have your heel prints.’