Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  ‘It’s interesting that in all my other visits here this is my first encounter with an investigator.’

  ‘You never did anything wrong, Mr . . . forgive me, I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Osborne.’

  ‘American?’

  ‘Yes. Your last name again?’

  ‘Renko.’

  ‘You’re young to be an investigator, aren’t you?’

  ‘No. Your friend Yevgeny talked about champagne. Is that what you import?’

  ‘Furs,’ Osborne said.

  It would have been easy to say Osborne was more a collection of expensive items – ring, watch, profile, teeth – than a person; it had the correct socialist attitude and in part it was true, but it didn’t take into account what Arkady hadn’t expected, a sense of power under restraint. He himself was too stilted and inquisitorial. He had to change that.

  ‘I always wanted a fur hat,’ Arkady said. ‘And to meet Americans. I hear they’re just like us – big-hearted and open. And to visit New York and the Empire State Building and Harlem. What a life you must lead traveling around the world.’

  ‘Not to Harlem.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Arkady stood. ‘You know many important people here that you’d like to talk to, and you’re too polite to ask me to go.’

  Smoking his cigarette, Osborne gave him a prolonged, non-committal stare until Arkady started for the pool.

  ‘I insist you stay,’ Osborne said quickly. ‘I don’t usually meet investigators. I should take advantage of this chance occasion and ask you about your work.’

  ‘Anything I can tell you.’ Arkady sat. ‘Though from the accounts I read of New York anything I do will seem dull. Domestic troubles, hooligans. We have murders, but almost invariably they are committed in the heat of anger or under the influence of alcohol.’ He shrugged apologetically and sipped champagne. ‘Very sweet. You really should import it.’

  Osborne poured more for Arkady. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  ‘I could go on for hours,’ Arkady said with zeal, and downed the champagne in a swallow. ‘Wonderful parents, as well as wonderful grandparents. In school I had the most inspiring teachers and the most helpful classmates. Now the team of fellows with whom I work would each be worthy of a book to themselves.’

  ‘Do you’ – Osborne removed his cigarette holder from his smile – ‘ever talk about your failures?’

  ‘Speaking personally,’ Arkady said, ‘I’ve never had a failure.’

  He loosened the towel from around his neck and dropped it on the towel Osborne had cast aside. The American looked at the discolored swelling.

  ‘An accident,’ Arkady said. ‘I’ve tried hot-water bottles and heat lamps, but nothing is better than a sulfur bath for clearing up congestion. The doctors tell you a lot, but the old remedies are always the best. In fact, socialist criminology is the field where the greatest new advances are—’

  ‘Getting back to that,’ Osborne cut in, ‘what has been your most interesting case?’

  ‘You mean the Gorky Park bodies? May I?’ Arkady tapped out one of Osborne’s cigarettes and used his lighter, admiring its blue stone. The finest lapis lazuli came from Siberia; he’d never seen it before.

  ‘Not that there’s been any story in the press’ – Arkady puffed – ‘but I accept the fact that such a bizarre matter becomes grist for rumors. Particularly’ – he wagged his finger as a teacher might at a naughty student – ‘among the foreign community, yes?’

  He couldn’t tell whether he’d made any effect. Osborne sat back without expression.

  ‘I hadn’t heard about it,’ Osborne said when the silence grew too long.

  Yevgeny Mendel breezed in with the news that there were no phone calls. Arkady immediately rose and made profuse excuses for having overstayed his welcome, and thanked them for their hospitality and champagne. He picked up Osborne’s towel and knotted it around his neck.

  Osborne watched like a man far away and out of earshot until Arkady was at the screen. ‘Who is your superior? Who is the chief investigator?’

  ‘I am.’ Arkady issued a last, encouraging smile.

  After a few steps along the pool he felt exhausted. Suddenly Iamskoy was at his side.

  ‘I hope I was right about your father and Mendel’s being friends,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry about Vronskyism too much. You have my unqualified support to pursue your investigations as only you can.’

  Arkady dressed and retraced his steps from the bathhouse to the street. The rain had become a mist. He walked up Petrovka Street to Colonel Lyudin’s warm forensic lab and delivered Osborne’s damp towel.

  ‘Your boys have been trying to get hold of you all afternoon,’ Lyudin said before he took the towel off for examination.

  Arkady put a call in to the Ukraina. Pasha answered, and proudly told him that he and Fet were monitoring the black marketeer Golodkin’s phone, and had heard a man tell Golodkin to meet him in Gorky Park. Pasha believed the caller was American or Estonian.

  ‘American or Estonian?’

  ‘I mean he spoke very good Russian, but slightly different.’

  ‘Anyway, that’s a violation of privacy, Pasha, Articles 12 and 134.’

  ‘After all the tapes we’ve been—’

  ‘Those were the KGB tapes!’ There was a hurt silence on the other end until Arkady said, ‘All right.’

  ‘I’m no theoretician like you,’ Pasha answered. ‘It takes a genius to know what’s against the law.’

  ‘All right. So you stayed at that end and Fet covered the meeting. He took a camera?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘That’s what took him so long, finding a camera. Because he missed them. He walked all around the park and never found them.’

  ‘All right, at least we can use your tape and try to match—’

  ‘A tape?’

  ‘Pasha, you broke the law to listen in on Golodkin’s phone and you weren’t bothering to tape him?’

  ‘Actually . . . no.’

  Arkady hung up.

  Colonel Lyudin clicked his tongue from across the lab. ‘See here, Investigator. I found ten hairs on the towel. I took one and cut it and put it under this microscope to compare it with a hair from the cap you found before, which is under this other microscope. The one from the cap is gray to white and has an ovoid cross section, which is indicative of curly hair. The new one from the towel has a color more like chrome, quite attractive, and has a perfectly round cross section, which indicates straight hair. I’ll go on with a protein analysis, but I can tell you right now these hairs are not from the same man. Look.’

  Arkady looked. Osborne was not the man who had said ‘Son of a bitch.’

  ‘Nice goods.’ Lyudin fingered the towel. ‘You want it?’

  The vodka and codeine were getting to Arkady and he went over to the militia commissary on Petrovka for a cup of coffee. Alone at a table, he fought the urge to guffaw. Some detectives, trying to find a camera while a mysterious character (Estonian or American!) strolls around Gorky Park unobserved. Some investigator, stealing a towel that exonerates his only suspect. He’d go home if he had a home.

  ‘Chief Investigator Renko?’ asked an officer. ‘There’s a call for you in the teletype room, from Siberia.’

  ‘Already?’

  The call was from a militia detective named Yakutsky in Ust-Kut, four thousand kilometers east of Moscow. In answer to the all-republic bulletin, Yakutsky reported that a Valerya Semionovna Davidova, age nineteen, resident of Ust-Kut, was wanted for the theft of state materials. Comrade Davidova was in the company of Konstantin Ilyich Borodin, age twenty-four, also wanted for the same crime.

  Arkady looked around for a map; where in the world was Ust-Kut?

  Borodin, Detective Yakutsky said, was a hooligan of the worst cloth. A fur trapper. A black marketeer in radio parts, which were in great demand. Suspected of working illegal gold deposits. With the Baikal-Amur-Mainline railroad construction, Borodin had a regular windfall of truck parts
left in the open. When the militia had gone after him and the Davidova girl, the fugitives had simply disappeared. Yakutsky figured they either were holed up in some hut way off in the taiga or were dead.

  Ust-Kut. Arkady shook his head. No one ever got to Moscow from Ust-Kut, wherever it was. He wanted to let the Siberian detective down gently. We are all one republic, he thought. ‘Yakutsky’ was one of the names slapped on every other Yakut native. Arkady pictured some canny Oriental face at a far-off phone. ‘Just where and when were they seen last?’ he asked.

  ‘Irkutsk in October.’

  ‘Did either the girl or the man have any training in restoring ikons?’

  ‘If you grow up here you know how to carve.’

  The connection started to fade. ‘Well,’ Arkady said quickly, ‘send me whatever pictures and information you have.’

  ‘I hope it’s them.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Konstantin Borodin is Kostia the Bandit . . .’ The voice was faint.

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘He’s famous in Siberia . . .’

  Tsypin the killer greeted Arkady in a cell at Lefortovo. He wore no shirt, but his urka’s tattoos covered his body to his neck and to his wrists. He held up his beltless pants.

  ‘They took my shoelaces, too. Whoever heard of anyone hanging himself with his shoelaces? Well, they fucked me again. Yesterday I saw you and I was all set up. Today two guys come by on the highway and try to rob me.’

  ‘Where you were peddling gas?’

  ‘Right. So what was I to do? I hit one with a spanner and he drops dead. The other guy drives away just as a militia wagon pulls up, and I’m standing there with the spanner in my hand and a dead guy at my feet. My God! This is the last of Tsypin.’

  ‘Fifteen years.’

  ‘If I’m lucky.’ Tsypin sat down again on his stool. The cell also had a cot bolted to the wall and a pitcher for washing. His door had two panels, a small one for the guard to look through and a large one for food.

  ‘I can’t do anything for you,’ Arkady said.

  ‘I know, I ran out of luck this time. Sooner or later everyone does, right?’ Tsypin put on a better face. ‘But look, Investigator, I’ve been a lot of help to you. When you really needed information I was the guy who helped you out. I never failed you because we had a mutual respect.’

  ‘I paid you.’ Arkady softened what he said by giving Tsypin a cigarette and lighting it for him.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I can’t help you, you know that. It’s aggravated homicide.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about me. You remember Swan?’

  Not well. Arkady recalled an odd figure that had stayed in the background at a couple of meetings he’d had with Tsypin.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘We’ve always been together, even in the camps. I’ve always been the moneymaker, understand. Swan’s going to be hard up. I mean, I have enough on my mind, I don’t want to worry about him too. You need an informant. Swan has a telephone, even a car, he’d be perfect for you. What do you say? Give him a try.’

  When Arkady left the prison, Swan was waiting at a street-lamp. His leather jacket emphasized his narrow shoulders, long neck and close-cropped hair. In camp a professional thief was likely to pick out an amateur convict, bugger him and then kick him out of bed. It made the thief, the one on top, more masculine. The ‘goat’, the one on the bottom, was detested as the queer. Yet Swan and Tsypin were a real couple, a rarity, and no one calls Swan a goat around Tsypin.

  ‘Your friend suggested you might do some work for me,’ Arkady said without enthusiasm.

  ‘Then I’ll do it.’ Swan had the strange delicacy of a chipped and shopworn figurine, all the more striking because he wasn’t handsome, let alone pretty. It was hard to guess his age, and his voice was too soft to be a clue.

  ‘There’s not much money in it – say, fifty rubles – if you come up with good information.’

  ‘Maybe you can do something for him instead of paying me.’ Swan looked at the prison gate.

  ‘Where he’s going all he can get is one package a year.’

  ‘Fifteen packages,’ Swan murmured, as if he were already wondering what to put in them.

  Unless Tsypin was shot right off, Arkady thought. Well, love was no fading violet; love was a weed that flourished in the dark. Has anyone ever explained it?

  Chapter Eight

  Although it led the way to the twenty-first century, Moscow maintained the Victorian habit of traveling on iron wheels. Kievsky Station, which was near the foreign ghetto and Brezhnev’s own apartment, pointed to the Ukraine. Belorussia Station, a short walk from the Kremlin, was where Stalin boarded the Czar’s train from Potsdam and, afterward, where Krushchev and then Brezhnev boarded their special trains for Eastern Europe to inspect their satellites or to launch détente. Rizhsky Station took you to the Baltic states. Kursky Station suggested suntanned vacations on the Black Sea. From the small Savelovsky and Paveletsky stations no one worthwhile traveled – only commuters or hordes of farmers as dusty as potatoes. Most impressive by far were Leningrad, Yaroslavl and Kazan stations, the three giants of Komsomol Square, and the strangest of these was Kazan Station, whose Tartar tower capped a gateway that might take you thousands of kilometers to the deserts of Afghanistan, to the siding of a Ural prison camp, or all the way across two continents to the shore of the Pacific.

  At 6 a.m. inside Kazan Station, entire Turkman families lay head to feet on benches. Babies with felt skullcaps nestled on soft bundles. Soldiers leaned slackly against the wall in a sleep so tangibly deep that the heroic mosaics of the ceiling overhead could have been their communal dream. Bronze fixtures glowed fully. At the one refreshment stand open, a girl in a rabbit-skin coat confided in Pasha Pavlovich.

  ‘She says Golodkin used to shake her down, but not anymore,’ Pasha reported when he returned to Arkady. ‘She says somebody saw him at the car market.’

  A young soldier took Pasha’s place with the girl. She smiled through a rouge of vaseline and lipstick while the boy read the price chalked on the toe of her shoe; then, hand in hand, they walked out the station’s main door as the investigator and detective trailed behind. Komsomol Square was blue before the dawn, the clicking candles of trams the only movement. Arkady watched the lovemakers slip into a taxi.

  ‘Five rubles.’ Pasha watched the taxi pull out.

  The driver would swing into the nearest side street and get out to watch for militia while the girl and boy went at it in the back seat. Of the five rubles the driver would get half and the chance to sell a congratulatory bottle of vodka to the soldier afterward; the vodka was a lot more expensive than the girl. The girl would get some sips, too. Then a return to the station, a tip to the washroom attendant for a fast douche, and overheated and giddy, she’d start all over. By definition prostitutes did not exist, because prostitution has been eliminated by the Revolution. Charges could be brought against them for spreading venereal disease, performing depraved acts or leading a nonproductive life, but by law there were no whores.

  ‘Not there, either.’ Pasha returned from talking to the girls in Yaroslavl Station.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Arkady threw his overcoat in the back of the car before getting behind the wheel. No frost, and the sun wasn’t even up. The sky was just lightening above the neon signs of the stations. A little more traffic. It would still be black in Leningrad. Some people preferred Leningrad, its canals and literary landmarks. To Arkady, it wore a perpetual sulk. He preferred Moscow, a big open machine.

  He headed south toward the river. ‘You can’t remember anything else about that mysterious caller who met Golodkin in the park?’

  ‘If I’d gone instead . . .’ Pasha muttered. ‘Fet couldn’t find the balls on a bull.’

  They watched for Golodkin’s car, a Toyota. Across the river, at the Rzhesky bathhouse, when they stopped for coffee and cakes, a fresh newspaper was being tacked to the public board. ‘ “Athletes
Inspired by Impending Celebrations for May Day,” ’ Pasha read aloud.

  ‘ “Vow to Score More Goals?” ’ Arkady suggested.

  Pasha nodded, then looked over. ‘You played soccer? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Goalie.’

  ‘Aha! See, now that explains you.’

  A crowd was already gathering a block away from the bathhouse. At least half the people wore signs pinned to their coat. ‘Three-Room Apartment, Bed, Bath’ was a woman with a widow’s stricken eyes. ‘Trade Four Rooms for 2 Two Rooms’ was a newly-wed determined to escape her parents. ‘Bed’ was a shrewd junk dealer. Arkady and Pasha worked their way from each end of the block and met in the middle.

  ‘Sixty rubles for two rooms with indoor plumbing,’ Pasha said. ‘That’s not bad.’

  ‘Any word of our boy?’

  ‘Of course, it doesn’t have heat. No, Golodkin’s here some days, some days not. He makes himself a sort of go-between, you know, and takes thirty percent.’

  The used-car market was near the city limit, a long trip made longer because Pasha saw a truck selling pineapples. For four rubles he bought one the size of a generous egg.

  ‘Cuban aphrodisiac,’ he confided. ‘Some friends of mine, weight lifters, went down there. Fuck your mother! Black girls, beaches and unprocessed foods. A worker’s paradise!’

  The car market was a lot filled with Pobedas, Zhigulis, Moskviches and Zaporozhets, some excruciatingly old but others with the aroma of the showroom. Once he had after years finally received the miniature Zaporozhets he’d paid 3,000 rubles for, a sharp owner could drive it at once to the used-car lot, sell his toy for 10,000, record a mere 5,000-ruble transaction at the government shed and pay a 7 percent commission, then turn around and spend his extra 6,650 rubles for a used but roomier Zhiguli sedan. The market was a beehive – the proviso being that each bee bring some honey of his own. Perhaps a thousand bees were on hand. A foursome of Army majors gathered around a Mercedes. Arkady ran his hand over a white Moskvich.

  ‘Like a thigh, eh?’ A Georgian in a leather coat stopped next to him.