Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  In all, a clumsy one-shot firearm inaccurate beyond five meters. Closer than that, adequate. Arkady was threading the silencer onto the barrel when the door opened. He aimed the barrel at William Kirwill.

  Kirwill shut the door gently with his back. He looked at the broken suitcase, the muffled phone, the gun. The quick blue eyes were the giveaway – otherwise he looked like any brute: a florid face of small, clean features, a body of beef still hard at close to fifty, heavy arms and legs. At first impression a soldier, at second impression an officer. Arkady knew this was the man with the fists from Gorky Park. Kirwill looked back, weary but alert, his raincoat open to a pink sport shirt.

  ‘Came back early.’ Kirwill spoke in English. ‘It’s raining again, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  He removed a short-brimmed hat to shake the water off.

  ‘No,’ Arkady spoke in Russian. ‘Throw the hat here.’

  Kirwill shrugged. The hat landed at Arkady’s feet. With one hand Arkady searched the sweatband.

  ‘Take off your coat and drop it on the floor,’ Arkady said. ‘Pull your pockets all the way out.’

  Kirwill did as he was told, letting his raincoat fall to the floor, then emptying his pants pockets front and back, dropping his room key, loose change and wallet onto the coat.

  ‘Push it to me with your foot,’ Arkady said. ‘Don’t kick it.’

  ‘All alone, aren’t you?’ Kirwill said. He said it in Russian, very easily, while he nudged the raincoat over the floor. Five meters was the effective range of the gun; a meter, Arkady felt, was the effective range of Kirwill. He waved Kirwill back to a point in between, and pulled the coat the rest of the way. The cuffs of Kirwill’s shirt were rolled back from heavy wrists, which showed freckles and red hair going white.

  ‘Don’t move,’ Arkady ordered.

  ‘It’s my room, why should I move?’

  Kirwill’s passport and visa were in the raincoat. In the wallet Arkady found three plastic credit cards, a New York driver’s license and car registration, a paper with the phone numbers of the American embassy and two American news services. Also eight hundred rubles in cash, a lot of money.

  ‘Where’s your business card?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘I’m traveling for pleasure. I’m having a wonderful time.’

  ‘Face the wall. Put your hands up and spread your legs,’ Arkady said.

  Kirwill very slowly did so, and Arkady shoved him from the back at an angle against the wall, then felt his shirt and pants. The man was built like a bear.

  Arkady backed up. ‘Turn around and remove your shoes.’

  Kirwill took his shoes off, watching Arkady and the gun.

  ‘Shall I hand them to you or mail them?’ Kirwill asked.

  Incredible, Arkady thought. The man was actually ready to attack a Soviet investigator again in a room at the Metropole.

  ‘Sit down.’ Arkady pointed to a chair beside the closet.

  He could see Kirwill gauging the chances of a rush. Investigators were issued guns and were expected to take target practice; Arkady never carried his and hadn’t fired a gun since the Army. Shoot for the head or the heart? A .22 anywhere else wouldn’t even slow a man like Kirwill.

  Finally Kirwill sat in the chair. Arkady knelt and examined the shoes, finding nothing. Kirwill shifted, his heavyweight’s shoulders leaning forward.

  ‘Just curious,’ he said when the gun barrel jerked toward him. ‘I’m a tourist, and tourists are supposed to be curious.’

  Arkady threw the shoes to Kirwill.

  ‘Put them back on, and tie the laces of the shoes together.’

  When Kirwill was done, Arkady approached and kicked the chair, tilting it and the man against the wall. For the first time since Kirwill had entered the room, Arkady felt reasonably safe.

  ‘Now what?’ Kirwill asked. ‘You pile the furniture on me to hold me down?’

  ‘If need be.’

  ‘Well, you might need to.’ Kirwill assumed an air of mock ease, a recklessness Arkady had seen in other powerful men, a vanity as if their strength had no limits. The hate in the blue gaze, though, Arkady didn’t understand.

  ‘Mr Kirwill, you are guilty of violating Article 15, smuggling a weapon into the Soviet Union, and Article 218, manufacturing a dangerous weapon.’

  ‘You manufactured it, not me.’

  ‘You’ve been moving around Moscow dressed as a Russian. You talked to a man called Golodkin. Why?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Because James Kirwill is dead,’ Arkady said to shock Kirwill.

  ‘You ought to know, Renko,’ Kirwill answered. ‘You killed him.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Aren’t you the guy I punched around in the park the other night? You’re from the prosecutor’s office, right? Didn’t you send a man to follow me and Golodkin when I went back to the park? Little guy with glasses. I followed him from the park to a KGB office. What difference what office, huh?’ Kirwill’s head lolled to one side.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘I talked to the embassy. I talked to the correspondents. I read every back issue of Pravda. I talked to the people on the street. I watched your morgue. I watched the prosecutor’s office. When I found out your name I watched your apartment. I didn’t see you, but I saw your wife and her boyfriend clean the place out. I was outside your office when you let Golodkin go.’

  Arkady didn’t believe what he was hearing. This madman could not have watched him, followed Fet to Pribluda’s office, seen Zoya. When he and Pasha queued for a beer at the corner kiosk, was Kirwill in the line behind them?

  ‘Why did you choose this time to come to Moscow?’

  ‘I had to come sometime. Spring’s a good time, time for bodies to come up from the bottom of the river. Good time for bodies.’

  ‘And you think I killed James Kirwill?’

  ‘Maybe not you yourself, but you and your friends. Does it matter who pulled the trigger?’

  ‘How do you know he was shot?’

  ‘In the clearing in the park, the depth of the digging. For slugs, right? Anyway, you don’t stab three people to death. I wish I’d known it was you in the park, Renko. I’d have killed you.’

  Kirwill spoke with regret and some amusement for his missed opportunity. His Russian had no accent, yet retained a distinctly American voice. He folded his arms as if he were laying them aside. An outsized man of intelligence exerts a force of gravity, a threat of physical absorption, especially in a small room. Arkady sat down on a night table against the opposite wall. How could he have not noticed someone like Kirwill?

  ‘You came to Moscow to ask questions among the foreign community about a murder,’ Arkady said. ‘You have drawings of X-rays and dental charts. You must have meant to aid the investigation.’

  ‘If you were a real investigator.’

  ‘There is a record of James Kirwill leaving the Soviet Union last year; there is no record of his returning. Why did you think he was here, and why did you think he was dead?’

  ‘But you’re not a real investigator. Your detectives spend as much time with the KGB as they do with you.’

  There was no way of explaining Fet to an American, and Arkady didn’t try. ‘How are you and James Kirwill related?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Mr Kirwill, I operate under the directive of the Moscow town prosecutor, no one else. I am investigating the murder of three persons in Gorky Park. You came all the way from New York with information that might be of help. Give it to me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re not in a position to say no. You’ve been seen dressed as a Russian. You smuggled in a firearm you’ve already fired at me. You’re withholding information and that, too, is a crime.’

  ‘Renko, you find any Russian clothes here? Anyway, it’s a crime to dress like you? As for the gun, or whatever you’re aiming at me, I never saw it before. You broke into my suitcase; I don’t know what you planted in it. And what
information are you talking about?’

  Arkady was stopped for a moment by such massive contempt for the law.

  ‘Your statements about James Kirwill—’ he began again.

  ‘What statements? The microphone is in the telephone, and you’ve taken care of that. You should have brought some friends along, Renko. As an investigator you’re not too competent.’

  ‘There are your drawings of the murder scene in Gorky Park and the X-rays and dental chart you brought, which will connect you to James Kirwill if he was one of the victims.’

  ‘The drawings and chart are done by a Russian pencil on Russian graph paper,’ Kirwill answered. ‘There are no X-rays, only tracings. What you should be thinking about right now, Renko, is what the American embassy is going to say about a Russian cop who assaults innocent American tourists when he’s caught’ – Kirwill glanced at the open suitcase – ‘apparently in the act of burglary. You didn’t plan to take anything, did you?’

  ‘Mr Kirwill, if you report anything to your embassy they will put you on the next plane home. You didn’t come here to go right home, did you? You also don’t want to spend fifteen years in a Soviet rehabilitation center.’

  ‘I can handle it.’

  ‘Mr Kirwill, how is it that you speak Russian so well? Where have I heard your name before, before you and this James Kirwill? It seems to me now it’s a familiar name.’

  ‘Good-bye, Renko. Go back to your friends in the secret police now.’

  ‘Tell me about James Kirwill.’

  ‘Get out.’

  Arkady gave up. On his way he put Kirwill’s passport, wallet and credit cards on the night table.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Kirwill said. ‘I’ll clean up after you.’

  The wallet was heavy in the palm, and stiff even without credit cards. There was handstitching along one lip of the wallet. Kirwill rocked forward. Arkady waved the gun. A spy? Arkady thought. Something as ridiculous as a secret message sewn into a wallet and a heroic roundup of traitors and foreign agents with a chief investigator bumbling around in the middle? He ripped the stitching open, keeping one eye on Kirwill. From the wallet he drew a gold metal shield embossed in blue with the figures of an Indian and a pilgrim. ‘City of New York’ was above the scale and ‘Lieutenant’ below it.

  ‘A policeman?’

  ‘Detective,’ Kirwill corrected.

  ‘Then you must help,’ Arkady said as if it were clear, because it was to him. ‘You saw Golodkin leave my office with a detective, a friend of mine, Pasha Pavlovich.’ A name like that would mean nothing to an American, Arkady decided. ‘Anyway, a detective I worked with many times, a very good man. An hour later, in Golodkin’s apartment, both Golodkin and the detective were killed by someone else. I don’t care about Golodkin. All I want to do is find the man who killed the detective. Things can’t be so different in America. Being a detective, you understand how it is when a friend—’

  ‘Renko, go fuck yourself.’

  Arkady wasn’t aware of raising the makeshift gun. He found himself aiming the barrel at a point between Kirwill’s eyes and pulling the trigger so that the doubled rubber band and plunger started to move smoothly. At the last moment he aimed away. The closet jumped and a hole two centimeters across appeared in the closet door beside Kirwill’s ear. Arkady was astonished. He’d never come close to murdering anyone in his life, and when the accuracy of the weapon was considered he could as easily have killed as missed. A white mask of surprise showed where the blood had drained around Kirwill’s eyes.

  ‘Get out while you can,’ Kirwill said.

  Arkady dropped the gun. Unhurriedly, he collected the X-ray tracing and dental chart from the open suitcase. He kept the badge and threw the wallet aside.

  ‘I need my shield.’ Kirwill came out of his chair.

  ‘Not in this city.’ Arkady walked out the door. ‘This is my city,’ he murmured to himself.

  No one was on night duty at the lab. Arkady matched the tracings and dental chart with Levin’s records himself, aware that at the same time William Kirwill was probably disposing of his gun – a hand grip here, a barrel there – around the city. By the time he got to his office at Novokuznetskaya and wrote a report for Iamskoy, he knew that Kirwill was probably seeking asylum at the American embassy. Fine; all the more proof for the prosecutor because now it was certain that James Kirwill was the third body from Gorky Park. Arkady left the report on the desk of Iamskoy’s deputy, to be found in the morning.

  A bright searchlight stood in the middle of the Moskva. No, it moved. There was a sound as of stones shifting. Arkady stopped his car and watched from the embankment as an icebreaker plowed by, pushing a crest of broken ice ahead, trailing floes that rose and fell in the thrust of the wake. Water, freed, twisted in braids of black.

  Arkady drove along the river until he had finished a pack of cigarettes. He was shaken by the encounter at the Metropole. He hadn’t shot William Kirwill, but he’d wanted to and had come within a finger’s breadth of doing so. He was shaken because he hadn’t cared particularly one way or the other. Neither, he suspected, had Kirwill.

  Going by Gorky Park, he noticed the lights in Andreev’s studio on top of the Ethnological Institute. Although it was midnight, Arkady was welcomed by the anthropologist.

  ‘I do this work for you after hours, so it’s only fair you should keep me company. Come on, there’s supper enough for two.’ Andreev brought Arkady to a table where Cro-Magnon heads made way for plates. ‘Beets, onions, sausage, bread. No vodka, I’m sorry. It’s been my experience that dwarfs become drunk very quickly, and personally I can think of nothing more grotesque than a drunken dwarf.’

  Andreev was in such good humor that Arkady hesitated to say that so far as he was concerned the investigation was as good as over.

  ‘Ah, but you want to see her.’ Andreev misinterpreted Arkady’s indecision. ‘That’s why you came by.’

  ‘You’re finished?’

  ‘Hardly. You can look, though.’ He lifted a cloth from the potter’s wheel to display his progress.

  Reconstruction of the face of the girl from Gorky Park was at that midpoint which might have been a building of her features by a sculptor or a dissection of them by an anatomist. All the muscles of her neck were in place, forming a graceful pink column only wanting skin. A cat’s cradle of pink muscles spread from the nasal hollow around the gum lines of naked teeth. Flat temporal muscles fanned across her cheekbones and temples. Muscles smoothed the angles of her jaw. Overall, the interlace of pink plasteline strips and daubs both softened the starkness of her skull and made it as gruesome as a death mask. She stared with two brown glass eyes.

  ‘As you can see, I’ve already finished the large masseter muscles of the jaw and the muscles of the neck. The position of her neck vertebrae tells me how she held her head, a psychological clue as well. She held her head high. I saw at once by the larger muscle attachments on the right side of the vertebrae that she was right-handed. Some things are very simple. A female’s muscles are smaller than a man’s. Her skull is lighter, she has larger eye sockets and less bone relief. But every muscle must be individually sculpted. Look at her mouth. See how uniform the teeth are with a medium projection, typical Homo sapiens, except for some primitive aborigines or red Indians. The main thing is, in this kind of bite the upper lip is usually dominant. In fact, the mouth is one of the easier areas of reconstruction. Wait and see, she has a lovely mouth. The nose is more difficult, a triangulation from the horizontal profile of the face and the contours of the nasal opening and eye sockets.’

  The glass eyes, anchored in plasteline, bulged hysterically. ‘How do you know what size eyes to insert?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘Everyone’s eyes are about the same size. You’re disappointed. The “windows of the soul” and all that? Where would romance be without eyes? The fact is, when we talk about the shape of a woman’s eyes, we’re really describing the shape of her eyelids. “She deliberately shrouded the light in her
eyes but in spite of herself it gleamed in the faintly perceptible smile.” ’

  ‘Anna Karenina.’

  ‘A literate man! I suspected it all along. And it’s eyelids, nothing but eyelids and muscle attachments.’ Andreev climbed a stool and carved a piece of bread for himself. ‘You like the circus, Investigator?’

  ‘Not especially.’

  ‘Everybody likes the circus. Why don’t you?’

  ‘Some parts I like well enough. The Cossacks and the clowns.’

  ‘It’s the bears you’re sick of?’

  ‘A little. But the last time I was there they had an act of trained baboons. There was a girl in a sequined outfit – she was too fat for it or it was too tight for her – and she’d call the baboons out one by one and they would roll around or do flips. All the time the baboons were looking over their shoulders at this big brute, a guy in a sailor outfit, who was snapping a whip at them from behind. It was crazy. This brute, unshaven, in a sort of kid’s sailor costume, and he’s beating the baboons every time they miss a cue. Then the fat girl comes out, does a curtsy and everyone claps.’