‘Mendel’s dead. In bed, he always said he’d die in bed. He was right. Now my dogs.’ He drew his lips up in a smile. ‘They want to take me to a clinic, boy. There’s a clinic in Riga. Very fancy, no expense spared for heroes. I thought that’s why you came. I have cancer all through me, rotten with it. It’s all that’s holding me together, you know. And they have this clinic with radiation and heat cures and I’m invited. They won’t get me there because I know I’d never come back. I’ve seen doctors in the field. I won’t go. I didn’t tell the bitch. She’d want me to go because she thinks she’ll get my pension. Same as you, right? I can smell you coming like a monk with shit in your pants.’
‘I don’t care where you die,’ Arkady said.
‘That’s right. The main thing is, I’ll cheat you. See, I always knew why you joined the prosecutor’s office. All you ever wanted to do was tear me down, come sniffing up here with all your detectives, bring the whole thing up again. Did the wife of the general die in a boating accident or was she killed? That explains your whole life right there – getting me. And I’ll be dead before you do, and then you’ll never know.’
‘But I do know. I’ve known for years.’
‘Don’t try to fool me. You’re a bad liar, you always were.’
‘Still am. But I know. You didn’t do it and it wasn’t an accident. She killed herself. The wife of the hero committed suicide.’
‘Belov—’
‘Didn’t tell me. I figured it out for myself.’
‘Then if you knew I didn’t do it, why didn’t you visit me all these years?’
‘If you could see why she killed herself, you should be able to see why I never came. It’s not a mystery; it’s just the past.’
The general sank back into his chair, his expression set for a scornful protest, and then he seemed to continue sinking beyond himself and the chair and Arkady. His face went slack. He diminished. Not gave up the ghost; the ghost retreated in him. Shirt and pants might simply have been left on the chair, unruffled as they were by movement or breath, as unruffled as his head or hands.
In the silence Arkady thought – he didn’t know why – of the Asiatic folktale of life. Perhaps it was the abrupt peacefulness of the figure in the chair. The tale had it that all life was preparation for death, that death was a passage as natural as birth, and that the worst a man could do in his life was to struggle to avoid death. There was a mythical tribe where all births were without crying and all deaths were without agony. Where the hell these mythical people thought they were going after they were dead, he forgot. However, they had their advantages over the universal Russian, who went through life struggling like a man caught in a river rushing toward a falls. By the second, he could see his father growing more inert, the force in him fading to one last central stronghold. Then, just as visibly, he saw the force painfully rally. The breathing deepened, and blood, ordered like reinforcements, sent a tremor through the limbs. It was a picture of a man reconstituting himself out of sheer will, holding on within himself. At last, the waxiness of the face was gone and the milky eyes stared forward, corrupted but defiant.
‘Mendel was in my class at the Frunze Military Academy, and we both had armored commands on the front line when Stalin said, “Not one step back!” Me? I understood the Germans would be spread out, ripe for infiltration. The effect of my radio reports from behind their lines was electric. Stalin listened every night in his bomb shelter. The newspaper reports said, “General Renko, somewhere behind enemy lines.” The Germans asked, “Renko, who is this Renko?” Because I was only a colonel. Stalin had promoted me, and I didn’t even know it. The Germans had our entire officers’ list, and this new name confused them, shook their confidence. It was on everyone’s lips, the first name after Stalin. And the effect when I fought my way into Moscow and was welcomed by Stalin himself, and still in battle gear followed him to Mayakovsky Station and stood by his side to hear his greatest speech, words that turned the Fascist tide even as they shelled the city overhead . . . And four days later I was given my own armored division, the Red Guard Division that marched first into Berlin. In Stalin’s name . . .’ His hand shot out to restrain Arkady from rising and going. ‘I gave you a name like that, and you come here, a petty detective, to ask about a coward who spent his war hiding in packing cases? Some common snoop, is that all you are? Is that a life? Asking about Mendel?’
‘I know all about you.’
‘And I, you. Don’t forget. Another milk-fed reformer . . .’ The general’s hand dropped. He stopped and tilted his head. ‘Where was I?’
‘Mendel.’
Arkady expected more rambling, but the general came to the point.
‘An amusing story. They captured some German officers in Leningrad and handed them to Mendel for interrogation. Mendel’s German was—’ He spat cleanly into the bowl. ‘So this American volunteered to do it – I don’t recall his name. He was good, for an American. Sympathetic, charming. The Germans told him everything. At the end the American took the Germans for a picnic in the woods with champagne and chocolates and shot them. For fun. What was amusing was that they weren’t supposed to be shot, so Mendel had to make a false report about raiders. The American paid off the military investigators, and for that Mendel got an Order of Lenin. He swore me to silence, but you being my son . . .’
‘Thank you.’
Arkady rose, more exhausted than he could have imagined, and stumbled on the way to the library door.
‘You’ll come again?’ the general asked. ‘It’s good to talk.’
The cardboard box contained milk, eggs, bread, sugar, tea, plates and cups, a frying pan, soap, shampoo, toothpaste and toothbrush – all bought on the return trip outside Moscow – and he rushed to the refrigerator before the bottom of the box broke. He was kneeling, putting the food away, when he heard Irina behind him.
‘Don’t look,’ she said, picked up the soap and shampoo and was gone. He heard water running into the tub.
Arkady stayed in the living room, sitting on the windowsill and feeling foolish for hesitating to enter the bedroom when there was no real place to sit here. The rain had stopped, yet no characters in overcoats had emerged on the street. He was surprised because Pribluda was not subtle. Which brought Arkady’s mind back to his conversation with his father. Osborne had killed the three Germans (I’ve been to Leningrad before,’ Osborne had said on the tapes; ‘I’ve been there with Germans before’) in almost exactly the same manner he’d killed the three victims in Gorky Park. Arkady was interested in the military investigators paid off by Mendel and Osborne; who were they and what glorious postwar careers had they carved out?
He felt Irina at the bedroom doorway before he saw her. She was in a sheet with holes cut for her arms, a belt of his around the waist, her wet hair in a towel, her feet bare. She couldn’t have been there for more than a second, but he had the sensation that her eyes had been on him for longer, the same as the first time he’d seen her, as if she were studying some oddity in her field of vision. Again she made the strangest apparel seem stylish, as if sheets were the natural thing to wear this year. Now, too, he noticed how her face was turned slightly to one side; he remembered what Levin had said about the blind eye, and glanced at the telltale mark on her cheek.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Cleaner.’
Her voice was harsh from throwing up; sulfazin had that effect. Still, there was color in her face, more than most Muscovites ever boasted. She looked around the room.
‘I apologize for the state of the apartment.’ He followed her gaze. ‘My wife did a little spring-cleaning. She took a few things out.’
‘It looks like she took herself out.’
‘She did.’
Arms folded, Irina walked to the stove with its single frying pan, cups and plates.
‘Why did you save my life last night?’ she asked.
‘You’re important to my investigation.’
‘That’s all?’
She looked into an empty closet. ‘I don’t want to upset you,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t look as if your wife’s coming back.’
‘An objective opinion is always appreciated.’
She rested against the stove, across the room from him. ‘Now what?’
‘When your clothes are dry, you go,’ Arkady said.
‘Where?’
‘That’s up to you. Home—’
‘They’ll be waiting for me. Thanks to you, I can’t even go to the studio.’
‘Friends, then. Most of them will be watched, but there must be someone you can stay with,’ Arkady said.
‘With the chance of getting them in trouble as well? That’s not what I do to friends.’
‘Well, you can’t stay here.’
‘Why not?’ She shrugged. ‘No one else is. The apartment of the chief investigator seems perfect to me. It would be a crime to let it go to waste.’
‘Comrade Asanova—’
‘Irina. You’ve undressed me enough; I think you can call me by my first name.’
‘Irina, this may be hard to grasp, but this is the worst place for you to be. They saw me last night, and this is one of the first places they’ll come. You wouldn’t be able to go out for food or clothes. You’d be trapped here.’
The longer they talked, the more the sheet attached itself to her still-damp body, the damp spots showing through.
‘I won’t be around that much,’ Arkady looked away.
‘I see two plates and two cups,’ Irina said. ‘It’s very simple. Either you are with “them,” in which case it doesn’t matter where I run because you’ll have me followed, or you’re not with “them”, in which case I can drag a friend down with me or I can drag you. I’ve thought it over. I want to take you.’
The phone rang. It was in a corner of the bedroom floor, black, insistent. On the tenth ring, Arkady picked up the receiver.
It was Swan saying that the Gypsy had found where Kostia Borodin did the ikons.
The place the Gypsy had found was a garage near the go-kart track on the south side of the river. A mechanic called ‘the Siberian’ had disappeared a few months ago. Two karts hung by hooks from the ceiling, apostrophes above a corroded Pobeda that was set on blocks. Sawdust and oil coated the floor. A worktable vise clutched a half-sawed board. Metal and car parts were piled in one corner and wood trash in another. There was a frame for stretching canvas hanging on a wall, and cans of whiting, linseed oil and turpentine. A locker with a broken door had coveralls too filthy to steal. There were no tool chests, nothing valuable and portable in sight. Accelerating and decelerating whines came from the track outside.
‘You know how to do this?’ Arkady asked.
‘I spent two years in Latent Prints. I’ll try to keep up,’ Kirwill said.
Swan and the Gypsy stood aside, the Gypsy using his pocket as an ashtray. Arkady set down a floodlight, spread his forensic case on the floor, and took out a flashlight, thin rubber gloves, black and white cards, tongs, powders (black, white and dragon’s blood), camel’s-hair brushes and atomizers. Kirwill put on a pair of gloves, unscrewed the garage’s suspended sixty-watt light bulb and replaced it with one of a hundred fifty watts. Arkady started at the windows, playing his flashlight over dirty panes as he brushed on white powder, then moved to the drinking glasses and bottles on the shelves, applying white powder and dropping black cards into the glasses to see the prints. Kirwill started on porous surfaces with an atomizer of ninhydrin, working clockwise from the garage door.
Dusting was the sort of work that could be done well in a day or badly in a week. After all the obvious places – points of entry, handles, glasses – were covered, an investigator had to consider all the unlikely places a human finger could reach: tires, picture backs, the bottom of paint cans. Generally Arkady avoided dusting if possible. This time he welcomed it; it was normal and occupied the mind. The American detective worked with a methodical energy and a certain grace, directing muscle and concentration on minute labor. Nothing was said to spoil the immersion in work. Arkady dusted the door handles, fenders and license of the car while Kirwill sprayed the workbench, upper and under. When the Gypsy pointed out a heap of rags, Arkady and Kirwill dismissed him with a mutual glance; there were no decent prints on cloth. Arkady dusted black powder onto the margin of a photo on the wall. The actress in it had a smile that spoke of romps over sea-girt cliffs, honesty and foreign underwear. He used as little powder as possible, brushing in the direction of the ridges, from the top of a fingerprint loop to the exit.
There was the personality of the garage to consider. The area around the car and go-karts bloomed with greasy prints; a man doesn’t get under an oil pan unless he’s looking forward to a little oil. Woodworkers, on the other hand, were a more fastidious, almost surgical lot. There were other factors. The perfect suspect would be a nervous man with an oily complexion and lotion in his hair. But a cool, dry man could just have shaken hands with the oily one or shared the same bottle. Also, winter was an item; cold closed human pores. Wood dust could absorb latent prints like a sponge.
While Arkady returned his instruments to his kit for a magnifying glass and a fingerprint card of Kostia Borodin, Kirwill plugged in the long extension cord of the flood lamp, turned it on and began retracing his steps, shining the intense heat of the lamp where he’d sprayed before. Arkady noted that Borodin’s card showed unusual double loops on each first finger and a scarred whorl on his right thumb. Gathering evidence for court he would have used a slower routine, photographing the prints and lifting them on tape, trying to gain as many points of reference between the card and the brushed prints as he could. Instead, he worked now for speed and Kirwill moved quickly as well. The light spray of ninhydrin, combined with residue amino acids of forgotten touches, dried purple under the lamp’s glow. Then Kirwill retraced his route a second time, without the lamp and without a magnifying glass, comparing the ninhydrin prints with his own card of the prints of James Kirwill. They didn’t exchange cards. When Arkady was done with the dusted prints, he switched to the sprayed ones, while Kirwill moved on to Arkady’s work.
Three hours after they’d arrived, Arkady repacked his case. Kirwill leaned on a car fender, lighting a cigarette and being bummed for one by the Gypsy, who’d showed signs of starving for a smoke for the last hour. Arkady lit one himself.
The garage looked as if madmen had pasted moth wings, thousands of them, black, white and purple, everywhere they could reach. Arkady and Kirwill were silent, sharing the perverse sense of contentment that comes from well-done and futile labor.
‘You found their prints, then,’ the Gypsy assumed.
‘No, they were never here,’ Arkady said.
‘Then why do you both look happy?’ Swan asked.
‘Because we did something,’ Kirwill answered.
‘This man was Siberian,’ the Gypsy said. ‘There was wood and paint, that’s all you told me.’
‘We didn’t give him enough to go on,’ Kirwill said.
What else was there to go on? Arkady asked himself. James Kirwill dyed his hair, but Arkady guessed that it was the girl who had been sent out to buy the dye.
‘What was in that forensic report again?’ Kirwill asked.
‘Gesso, sawdust, what we’re already looking for,’ Arkady said.
‘Nothing else at all?’
‘Blood. They were shot, after all.’
‘I remember something else on their clothes.’
‘Animal-blood stains,’ Arkady answered. ‘Fish and chicken blood. Fish and chicken,’ he repeated, and looked at Swan.
‘Now, I’ve been to your food stores, and I haven’t seen anything fresh enough to sweat out one drop of blood,’ Kirwill said. ‘Where do you get fresh meat around here?’
A poor grade of blood-drained and water-heavy chicken or frozen fish was commonly available. But freshly killed chicken or live fish were exorbitantly expensive and �
� outside of ‘closed shops’ for the elite or foreigners – available only from private entrepreneurs, fishermen or a local woman with a backyard coop. Arkady was disgusted with himself for not thinking of it before.
‘He’s good,’ Swan nodded toward Kirwill.
‘Find out where they got fresh meat and fish,’ Arkady ordered.
Swan and the Gypsy left. The other two men remained, Kirwill weighing down a fender, Arkady sitting on the table. Arkady took out the New York detective shield and tossed it over.
‘Maybe I ought to detect. I could be a fucking superman around here,’ Kirwill said.
‘That was a good idea, those other bloodstains,’ Arkady tried to concede graciously.
‘How did you get that cut over your eye? Where did you go last night after we left the bar?’
‘I went back for a piss and fell down the hole.’
‘I can kick the answer out of you.’
‘What if you broke a toe? You’d be kept in a Soviet hospital until it was healed – six weeks at least. At no cost, of course.’
‘So what? The killer’s here, that will give me more time.’
‘Come on.’ Arkady heaved himself from the table. ‘You’ve earned something.’
At the Central Universal Department Store music was a serious business. There was a contemplative atmosphere where a young soul could be influenced by the function of official pricing, by an approving twenty rubles for a violin and bow or a forbidding four hundred eighty rubles for a brassy saxophone. A man with a pockmarked face in a hat and overcoat picked up the saxophone, admired it, fingered the stops, and gave Arkady the vague sort of nod one passes to a colleague. Arkady recognized the face from the train tunnel. Looking around, he found another KGB plainclothesman pricing accordions. As he led Kirwill into the home-entertainment department, the two music lovers laid down their instruments and followed at a discreet distance, interested but not obtrusive.
Kirwill spun the turntable of a stereo. ‘Where is this guy, Renko? He works here?’
Gorky Park Page 24