Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘You’re in love already. Take your time, walk around it.’

  ‘Really nice.’ Arkady strolled to the back.

  ‘You’re a man who knows cars.’ The Georgian placed a finger to his eye. ‘Thirty-thousand kilometers. Some people would have turned the mileage back, but I’m not that way. Washed and polished every week. Did I show you the windshield wipers?’ He pulled them out of a paper bag.

  ‘Nice wipers.’

  ‘Practically new. Well, you can tell.’ He turned his back to everyone but Arkady and penciled on the bag: ‘15,000.’

  Arkady got into the car, sinking almost to the floor through the hollowed seat. The plastic wheel was as cracked as ivory from an elephant’s graveyard. He turned the ignition, and in the rear-view mirror watched a plume of black smoke rise.

  ‘Nice.’ He got out. After all, a seat could be padded and an engine repaired, but a car body was as precious as diamonds.

  ‘I knew you’d say that. Sold?’

  ‘Where’s Golodkin?’

  ‘Golodkin, Golodkin.’ The Georgian racked his brains. Was it a person, a car? He’d never heard the name before, until the investigator revealed an ID in one hand and the ignition keys still in the other. That Golodkin! That bastard! He’d just left the lot. Arkady asked where he was headed. ‘The Melodya. When you see him, tell him an honest man like me pays commissions to the state, not to punks like him. In fact, for officials of the state, dear, dear Comrade, there is a discount.’

  On Kalinin Prospekt the smaller buildings were five-story rectangles of cement and glass. The larger buildings were twenty-five-story chevrons of cement and glass. Copies of Kalinin Prospekt could be found in any new city being erected, but none were quite so on the march to the future as Moscow’s prototype. Eight lanes of traffic raced in each direction over a pedestrian underpass. Arkady and Pasha waited at an outdoor cafeteria across the street from the narrow building that was the Melodya record store.

  ‘It’s a little more fun in the summertime.’ Pasha shivered over a sundae of coffee ice cream and strawberry syrup.

  A bright-red Toyota came up the other side of Kalinin and turned onto a side street. A minute later Feodor Golodkin, wearing a sharply tailored coat, a lamb’s-wool cap and cowboy boots and jeans, sauntered into the store as the investigator and detective were coming out of the underpass.

  Through the Melodya’s glass front they saw that Golodkin was not climbing the open stairs to the classical-music floor. Pasha stayed by the door as Arkady passed the kids flipping through the rock ’n’ roll. In the rear, between divider racks, Arkady spotted a gloved hand searching the political albums. Moving closer, he glimpsed nicotine-blond hair fashionably shaggy and a puffy face scarred at the mouth. A sales clerk came out of the rear pocketing money.

  ‘ “The Speech of L. T. Brezhnev to the Twenty-fourth Party Congress.” ’ Arkady read the album cover aloud as he stepped by Golodkin.

  ‘Piss off.’ Golodkin elbowed Arkady, who took the elbow and bent it back so that Golodkin was forced to the toes of his boots. Three records slid out of the cover and rolled around Arkady’s feet. Kiss, The Rolling Stones, The Pointer Sisters.

  ‘One of the more interesting Congresses,’ Arkady said.

  Golodkin’s eyes were set within red and heavy lids. For all his long hair and tailored suit, he put Arkady in mind of an eel twisting a hook first one way and then another. Taking him to the office at Novokuznetskaya was a combination of hooks. First, it officially placed Golodkin entirely in Arkady’s hands. No lawyer could be summoned until an investigation was finished, and not even the prosecutor need be informed of an arrest for forty-eight hours. Also, by bringing Golodkin within earshot of Chuchin, the implication was made that the chief investigator for Special Cases had washed his hands of his prime informer, or that Chuchin himself was in some kind of danger.

  ‘I was as surprised as you to see those records,’ Golodkin protested as Arkady led him into the first-floor interrogation room. ‘This is all a mistake.’

  ‘Relax, Feodor.’ Arkady made himself comfortable on the other side of the table and put a stamped tin ashtray in front of the prisoner. ‘Have a smoke.’

  Golodkin opened a pack of Winstons and offered them around.

  ‘Myself, I prefer Russian cigarettes,’ Arkady said amiably.

  ‘You’ll have a laugh when you find out what a mistake this all is,’ Golodkin suggested.

  Pasha came into the room bearing a stack of papers.

  ‘My file?’ Golodkin demanded. ‘Now you’ll see that I’m on your side. I have a long history of service.’

  ‘The phonograph records?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘Very well. Now I will be totally honest. That was part of my infiltration into a network of scheming intelligentsia.’

  Arkady tapped his fingertips. Pasha pulled out a charge sheet.

  ‘Ask anyone about me, they’ll tell you,’ Golodkin said.

  ‘ “Citizen Feodor Golodkin, of Serafimov Two, City and Region of Moscow,” ’ Pasha read, ‘ “you stand accused of hindering women from taking part in state and social activity, and of incitement of minors to crime.” ’

  A nice way to describe procuring whores; the sentence was four years. Golodkin brushed his hair back, the better to glare at the detective. ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘Wait.’ Arkady lifted his hand.

  ‘ “You stand accused” ’ – Pasha went on – ‘ “of receiving illegal commissions for the resale of private automobiles, of exploitation in the resale of living spaces, of selling for profit religious ikons.” ’

  ‘All of this is perfectly explainable,’ Golodkin told Arkady.

  ‘ “You stand accused of leading a parasitical life,” ’ Pasha read, and this time the eel twitched. The decree against parasitism was originally formulated for Gypsies, then broad-mindedly expanded to include dissidents and all sorts of profiteers, and the sentence was nothing less than banishment to a woodshed rather closer to Mongolia than Moscow.

  Golodkin’s grin was small and sharp. ‘I deny everything.’

  ‘Citizen Golodkin,’ Arkady reminded him, ‘you understand the penalties for failing to cooperate with an official inquiry. As you say, you are familiar with this office.’

  ‘I said—’ He stopped to light one of his Winstons and, through the smoke, measured the stack of papers. Only Chuchin could have given them so much documentation. Chuchin! ‘I was working for . . .’ He halted again despite Arkady’s inviting expression. Accusing another chief investigator was suicidal. ‘Whatever . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Whatever I did, and I’m not admitting I did anything, was on behalf of this office.’

  ‘Liar!’ Pasha flared up. ‘I should punch your lying face in.’

  ‘Only to ingratiate myself with real profiteers and anti-Soviet elements.’ Golodkin stood his ground.

  ‘By murder?’ Pasha cocked his arm.

  ‘Murder?’ Golodkin’s eyes shot open.

  Pasha lunged across the table, just missing Golodkin’s throat. Arkady shouldered the detective back. Pasha’s face was dark with fury; there were times when Arkady really enjoyed working with him.

  ‘I don’t know anything about murder,’ Golodkin blurted.

  ‘Why bother with an interrogation?’ Pasha asked Arkady. ‘All he does is lie.’

  ‘I have a right to talk,’ Golodkin said to Arkady.

  ‘He’s right,’ Arkady told Pasha. ‘As long as he can talk and tell the truth, you can’t say he isn’t cooperating. Now, Citizen Golodkin’ – he switched on the tape recorder – ‘let’s begin with an honest and detailed account of your violation of women’s rights.’

  Purely as an unofficial service, Golodkin began, he had provided females he’d believed of legal age to approved persons. Names, Pasha demanded. Who fucked who where, when, and for how much? Arkady listened with half an ear while he read the reports from Ust-Kut that Golodkin had thought was
his file. Compared with the petty crimes Golodkin was boasting about, the information supplied by Detective Yakutsky was an adventure by Dumas.

  As an orphan in Irkutsk, Konstantin Borodin, called ‘Kostia the Bandit,’ took apprentice courses in carpentry and engaged in restoration work at the Znamiensky Monastery. Shortly afterward, he ran away from his state school and traveled with Yakut nomads to the Arctic Circle to hunt polar foxes. The militia first took notice of Kostia when a gang of his was caught trespassing on the Aldan gold fields along the Lena River. Before he was twenty, he was wanted for the theft of Aeroflot tickets, vandalism, sale of radio parts to young people whose ‘pirate’ stations interfered with government transmissions, and old-fashioned highway robbery. Always he escaped into the Siberian taiga, where not even Detective Yakutsky’s helicopter patrols were able to find him. The only recent photo of Kostia was a chance picture taken eighteen months before by the Siberian newspaper Krasnoye Znamya.

  ‘If you want to know the truth,’ Golodkin was telling Pasha, ‘the girls liked screwing foreigners. Nice hotels, good food, clean sheets – it’s a little like traveling themselves.’

  The newspaper photo was grainy and showed about thirty unidentified men walking out of an undistinguished building. In the background, circled, surprised by the camera, a face recovered with a stare. It was heavy-boned and rakishly good-looking. There were still bandits in the world.

  Most of Russia was Siberia. The Russian language admitted only two Mongol words, taiga and tundra, and those two words expressed a world of endless forest or treeless horizons. Not even copters could find Kostia? Could such a man die in Gorky Park?

  ‘Have you heard of anyone selling gold in town?’ Arkady asked Golodkin. ‘Maybe Siberian gold?’

  ‘I don’t trade in gold; it’s too dangerous. There’s a bonus, you and I know; two percent of all the gold you can catch on a trader you boys can keep for yourselves. No, I’d be insane to. Gold wouldn’t come from Siberia, anyway. It comes in with sailors, from India, Hong Kong. Moscow’s not a big market for gold. When you say gold or diamonds, you mean dealing with the Jews in Odessa or Georgians or Armenians. People with no class. I hope you don’t think I’d ever be involved with them.’

  Golodkin’s skin, hair and coat reeked of American tobacco, Western cologne and Russian sweat. ‘Basically, I just do people a service. My particular expertise is in ikons. I go a hundred, two hundred kilometers out of Moscow, out into the sticks, into a little village, find out where the old men hang around and take a bottle. Look, these men are trying to stay alive on their pensions. Excuse me, but the pensions are a joke. I’m doing them a favor to give them twenty rubles for some ikon that’s been gathering dust for fifty years. Maybe the old women would rather starve and keep their ikons, but the men you can deal with. Then, I come back to Moscow and sell.’

  ‘How?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘Some taxi drivers and Intourist guides recommend me. But I can go right out on the street, I can spot the real buyers. Especially Swedes, or Americans from California. I speak English, that’s my strong point. Americans will pay anything. Fifty for an ikon you wouldn’t pick up from the gutter, an ikon you wouldn’t know whether you were looking at the front or back. A thousand for something big and fine. That’s dollars, not rubles. Dollars or tourist coupons, which can be just as good. How much does a bottle of really good vodka cost you? Thirteen rubles? With tourist coupons I can get that bottle for three rubles. I get four bottles to your one. I want a guy to fix my television, my car, do me a favor, I’m seriously going to offer him rubles? Rubles are for suckers. If I offer a repairman a few bottles, I have a friend for life. Rubles are paper, see, and vodka is cash.’

  ‘Are you trying to bribe us?’ Pasha demanded indignantly.

  ‘No, no, my only point was that the foreigners I sell ikons to are smugglers, and I was assisting an official investigation.’

  ‘You sell to Russian citizens, too,’ Arkady commented.

  ‘Only dissidents,’ Golodkin protested.

  Detective Yakutsky’s report went on to say that during the 1949 campaign against Jewish ‘cosmopolites,’ a Minsk rabbi named Solomon Davidov, a widower, was resettled in Irkutsk. Davidov’s only child, Valerya Davidova, quit her art studies after her father’s death a year ago to work as a sorter at the Fur Center in Irkutsk. Two photos were included. One was of a girl on an outing, eyes sparkling, dressed in a fur hat, heavy woolen jacket and the kind of felt boots called valenki. Very young, very gay. The other photo was from Krasnoye Znamya, captioned: ‘Pretty sorter V. Davidova holds up the pelt of a Barguzhinsky sable worth 1,000 R. on the international market for the admiration of visiting businessmen.’ She was extraordinarily pretty, even in a dowdy uniform, and in the forefront of the admiring businessmen, his fingers brushing the sable, was Mr John Osborne.

  Arkady turned back to the Kostia Borodin photo. With fresh eyes he saw that the group walking away from the circled bandit consisted of some twenty-odd Russians and Yakuts surrounding a small group of Westerners and Japanese, and this time he saw Osborne.

  By now, Golodkin was urgently explaining how certain Georgians had monopolized the used-automobile market.

  ‘Thirsty?’ Arkady asked Pasha.

  ‘From listening to lies,’ Pasha said.

  The windows had fogged over with perspiration. Golodkin watched one man and then the other.

  ‘Come on, it’s lunchtime anyway.’ Arkady put the file and tape under his arm and led Pasha to the door.

  ‘What about me?’ Golodkin asked.

  ‘You know better than to go, don’t you?’ Arkady said. ‘Besides, where would you go?’

  They left him. A moment later Arkady opened the door to toss in a bottle of vodka. Golodkin caught it against his chest.

  ‘Concentrate on the murder, Feodor,’ Arkady urged, and shut the door on Golodkin’s bewildered expression.

  Rain had washed away all the snow. Across the street at the metro station, a line of men formed at a kiosk selling beer – ‘a true sign of spring,’ according to Pasha – so he and Arkady bought pork sandwiches from a wagon as they queued up. They could see Golodkin watching them through a smear on the window dew.

  ‘He’ll tell himself he’s too smart to take a drink, but he’ll think it over, say he’s doing all right and deserves a reward. Besides, if your throat’s dry, think of his.’

  ‘You’re a subtle bastard.’ Pasha licked his lips.

  ‘About as subtle as a shove off a high place,’ Arkady said.

  All the same, he was excited. Imagine, the American Osborne could have encountered the Siberian bandit and his lover. The bandit could have come to Moscow on stolen plane tickets. Remarkable.

  Pasha bought the beers, two full glass mugs for forty-four kopeks, golden liquid warm and yeasty. The street corner filled up, more men in overcoats using the beer kiosk as an excuse to stand around. Without any grand squares or a building high enough to hang a banner from, Novokuznetskaya had the air of a small town. The mayor and his planners had plowed Kalinin Prospekt through the old Arbat neighborhood to the west. The Kirov section to the east of the Kremlin would be the next to go, laid to rest under a new boulevard three times longer than Kalinin. But Novokuznetskaya, with its narrow streets and small shops, was the kind of place to which spring came first. Men with beer mugs greeted each other as if during the winter everyone had been invisible. At times like these, Arkady felt that a figure like Golodkin really was an aberration.

  The break over, Pasha went off to the Foreign Ministry for travel histories of Osborne and the German, Unmann, and to the Ministry of Trade for exterior photos of the Fur Center in Irkutsk. Arkady returned alone to finish off Golodkin.

  ‘It’s no secret to you, I’m sure, that I myself have participated in interrogations on the other side of the table, so to speak. I think we can speak honestly, you and I. I can promise you I will be as cooperative a witness for you as I was for others. Now, these things we discussed this morning—’ />
  ‘Minor matters, Feodor,’ Arkady said.

  Golodkin’s face flushed with hope. The vodka bottle stood half empty on the floor.

  ‘Sometimes sentences seem all out of proportion to the crime,’ Arkady added, ‘especially for such citizens as yourself with, let’s say, special status.’

  ‘I think we’re going to work this out now that detective is gone.’ Golodkin nodded.

  Arkady put a fresh tape on the recorder, offered a cigarette to Golodkin, who took it, and lit one for himself. The tape started spinning.

  ‘Feodor, I’m going to tell you some things and show you some pictures; then I want you to answer some questions. It may all sound perfectly ridiculous to you, but I want you to be patient and think carefully. Okay?’

  ‘Go right ahead!’

  ‘Thanks,’ Arkady said; inside he felt as if he were at the top of a long dive, the way he always did when he had to go by guesswork. ‘Feodor, it is established that you sell religious ikons to tourists, often Americans. This office has evidence that you tried to sell ikons to a foreign guest now in Moscow named John Osborne. You contacted him last year and again a few days ago by phone. Your “deal” fell through when Osborne decided to buy from another source. You’re a businessman of a sort yourself, and sales must have fallen through for you before. So what I want you to tell me is why you got so angry this time.’ Golodkin looked blank. ‘The bodies in Gorky Park, Feodor. Don’t tell me you haven’t even heard about them.’

  ‘Bodies?’ Golodkin couldn’t have been less fazed.

  ‘To be more precise, a man called Kostia Borodin and a young woman called Valerya Davidova, both Siberian.’

  ‘Never heard of them,’ Golodkin answered helpfully.

  ‘Not by those names, of course. The point is that you were done out of a sale by them, that you were seen arguing with them, and that a few days later they were killed.’

  ‘What can I say?’ Golodkin shrugged. ‘It’s just as ridiculous as you said it would be. You said you had pictures?’