Gorky Park

by Martin Cruz Smith

  They each still had a forgotten upraised glass. Arkady touched his to the other. ‘To Siberia,’ he offered. Viskov continued to glare at Irina. ‘Drink up,’ Arkady said more strongly, and pulled free of his visitor’s grip. Viskov shrugged, and they downed the vodka in a swallow.

  The alcohol burned the cut in Arkady’s mouth. ‘Why in the world are you going there?’ he asked.

  ‘They need line engineers on the new Baikal track.’ Viskov moved reluctantly at first to a new subject. ‘The pay has double bonuses, triple vacation time, an apartment, refrigerator stocked with food – everything. There’ll be Party creeps out there, but not as many as here. I’ll start a new life, build a cabin in the woods, hunt and fish. Can you see it, a former convicted murderer with his own shotgun? That’s where the future is, out there. You’ll see, when I have kids they’re going to grow up different. Maybe in a hundred years we’ll tell Moscow to fuck off and have our own country. What do you think of that?’

  ‘Good luck.’

  There was nothing left to say. After another minute Arkady was looking down into the courtyard as Viskov trudged, shoulder against the wind, out toward the lights of Taganskaya. The night was low enough to press rain clouds against the roofs. The window glass hummed.

  ‘I told you not to use the phone.’ He watched Viskov disappear around the gate. ‘You shouldn’t have called him.’

  Though he stilled the pane with his hand he could feel the vibration on his skin. Irina was a white reflection in the window. If it had been anyone besides Viskov, she could be dead. Arkady realized it was his arm that was shaking, not the window.

  He stared at himself in the pane. Who was this man? He saw that he didn’t give a damn for Viskov, whose life he’d saved only months before. He wanted only one thing: Irina Asanova. The obsession was so plain that even Viskov, drunk, saw it. Arkady had never wanted anything before; there’d never been anything worth wanting. Lust was too pale a word. It was unfair. Life was so drab and listless, such a routine of shadows. She burned so bright against this dark that she lit even him.

  ‘He saw it,’ Arkady said. ‘He was right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘About me. I’m not interested in your friend Valerya. I don’t care whether Osborne is up to his waist in blood. There’s no investigation. All I’m doing is keeping you with me.’ Every word was a surprise to him; he didn’t even sound like himself. ‘I wouldn’t doubt that everything I’ve done since the first time I met you was to get you here. I’m not the investigator you thought I was, and I’m not the investigator I thought I was. I can’t protect you. If they didn’t know you were here before, they must have been listening to my phone and so they know now. Where do you want to go?’

  He turned to Irina. It took him a moment to see the dull glint of the gun in her hands. Without explanation, she put it back on the drainboard. ‘What if I don’t want to go?’ she asked.

  She came to the middle of the room and pulled off her dress. She was naked underneath. ‘I want to stay,’ she said.

  Her body had a porcelain glow. Her arms hung by her sides, with no attempt to cover herself. She opened her lips slightly as Arkady came toward her, and her eyes opened, not the lids but the very centers of the eyes themselves, when he touched her.

  He entered her standing up, lifting her and setting her down on him before they kissed. At his first touch she was wet, an unfolded secret, and when they finally kissed, her fingers pulled on his head and his back. He felt drunk on her taste through the vodka and blood in his mouth. They swayed and lowered themselves to the floor, where she locked her legs around him.

  ‘Then you love me, too,’ she said.

  Afterward, in bed, he watched her breast tremble with her heartbeat.

  ‘It’s a physical thing.’ She spread her hand on his chest. ‘I felt it the very first time I saw you at the studio. I still hate you.’

  The rain beat on the windows. He ran his hand over her white flank.

  ‘I still hate what you do; I don’t take anything back,’ she said. ‘When you’re in me, though, nothing else matters. In a way, I think you’ve been in me for a long time.’

  There might be listeners above and below; the fear only made sensation more sensitive. The tips of her breasts remained hard.

  ‘You’re wrong about Valerya,’ she said. ‘Valerya had no place to run. Osborne knew that.’ She smoothed his hair. ‘Do you believe me?’

  ‘The part about Valerya, not all the rest.’

  ‘What don’t you believe?’

  ‘You know what Valerya and Kostia were doing for Osborne.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’re still enemies,’ she said.

  A look of hers went through him, leaving him like the surface of water broken by a rock.

  ‘I got you this.’ He let the scarf fall on her.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To replace the one you lost at the metro.’

  ‘I need a new dress and coat and boots, not a scarf.’ She laughed.

  ‘I could only afford a scarf.’

  She looked at it, trying to see its colors in the dark. ‘It will have to be a wonderful scarf,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how ridiculous a lie is if the lie is your only chance of escape,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter how obvious the truth is if the truth is that you’ll never escape.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Misha sounded panicky on the phone. Arkady dragged on his clothes. Irina was still asleep, her arm across the bed where he had lain.

  ‘I have to meet a friend. We’ll stop someplace else on the way,’ Arkady said as William Kirwill got in the car.

  ‘I have four days left here, and I wasted yesterday waiting for you to show up,’ Kirwill said. ‘Today you tell me who killed Jimmy or I’ll kill you.’

  As Arkady pulled away from the Metropole Hotel and around Sverdlov Square he was laughing. ‘In Russia you have to stand in line.’

  At Serafimov 2 they walked up to the second floor. The door they found had none of the locks and pasted notices that Arkady had expected. When he knocked it was opened by an old woman holding a baby with a hairless skull delicate with veins. The woman squinted at Arkady’s identification.

  ‘I thought this apartment would be sealed,’ he said. ‘Two people died here a week ago, the occupant and a militia detective.’

  ‘I’m just a grandmother. I don’t know anything about that.’ She looked from Arkady to Kirwill. ‘Anyway, why should a good apartment be empty? People need apartments.’

  There was nothing left of Boris Golodkin to be seen from the door. The black marketeer’s rugs, record players and stacks of foreign clothes were gone, and in their place were a sofa still made up as a bed, a splitting carton of dishes, an ancient samovar. Pasha and Golodkin might have died in another apartment altogether.

  ‘Did you find a chest here?’ Arkady asked. ‘Maybe it was in a storage area in the basement? Like a church chest?’

  ‘Why would we want a church chest? What would we do with one?’ She stepped out of the way. ‘Look for yourselves. Honest people live here, we have nothing to hide.’

  Frightened, the baby burrowed like a pupa into the old woman’s arms. Its eyes threatened to explode. Arkady smiled, and the baby was so startled that it smiled back with gums and drool.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ Arkady said. ‘Why should a good apartment go to waste?’

  Arkady met Misha at a small church off the end of Serafimov. It was Saint Something-or-Other, one of the great majority of churches long ago renamed ‘museums’, desanctified and euthenized by cultural restoration. A barrier of scaffolding rotted around crumbling walls. Arkady pushed the door open and stepped into the dark, catching a glimpse of puddles and bird droppings on the stone floor before the door closed. A match flared and lit a candle, illuminating Misha. Arkady could make out the four central pillars of the church, the broken bars of an ikonostasis and faint light from the ceiling dome. Rainwater d
ripped and ran down the pillars. The interior was once covered in ikons of Christs, angels and archangels, but the plaster had cracked and the paint had faded and all that was left were forms hovering in the candle’s light. Pigeons rustled in the shuttered windows of the dome.

  ‘You’re early,’ Misha said.

  ‘Is there something wrong with Natasha? Why couldn’t we talk at your apartment?’

  ‘You’re half an hour early.’

  ‘Then we both are. Let’s talk.’

  Misha was strange, his mop of hair uncombed, his clothes looked slept in. Arkady was glad he’d persuaded Kirwill to stay outside in the car. ‘It’s Natasha?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s Zoya. Her lawyer’s a friend of mine and I’ve heard the statements she’s giving to the court. You know your divorce hearing is set for tomorrow, don’t you?’

  ‘No.’ Arkady was not surprised; he felt nothing about the news.

  ‘Everyone talks about the Party the way you do, but not to have it repeated in court. You, a chief investigator. And what about me?’ Misha asked. ‘You were saying those things about me, a lawyer! That’s in her statements, too. I’ll lose my Party card. I’ll be finished in court, I won’t be able to go back.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, you never were a good Party member. I tried every way I could to help your career, and you threw it in my face. It’s your turn to help me. Zoya’s lawyer is meeting us here. You’re going to deny ever making anti-Party statements in my presence. In Zoya’s presence, maybe, but not in mine. It’s her or me. You have to help someone.’

  ‘You or Zoya?’

  ‘Please, for old friends’ sake.’

  ‘I would have said “best friends”. Anyway, all sorts of things are said in divorce hearings and no one takes them seriously. It’s too late.’

  ‘Will you do it for me?’

  ‘All right, give me his name and I’ll call him.’

  ‘No, he’s on his way, he’s meeting us here.’

  ‘He doesn’t have an office or a telephone?’

  ‘We can’t reach him now, and he’s on his way.’

  ‘We’re going to talk here, in a church?’

  ‘A museum. Well, he wanted privacy, talking to his client’s husband and all. He’s doing it as a favor to me.’

  ‘I’m not going to wait half an hour.’ Arkady thought of Kirwill in the car.

  ‘He’ll be early, I swear. I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t have to.’ Misha clutched Arkady’s sleeve. ‘You’ll stay?’

  ‘All right, I’ll wait awhile.’

  ‘He won’t be long.’

  Arkady leaned against a pillar until he found his neck getting wet from the water dripping down. He lit a cigarette from Misha’s candle and walked around the pillars. The longer he was in the church, the more he could see. Perhaps old paintings were best seen in bad light, he thought. Many of the figures on the wall were winged, though he couldn’t tell angels from archangels. Their wings were slim and airy. The angels themselves were birdlike; they glistened, their eyes and swords. The altar was gone. Tombs were ripped out, leaving holes like graves. Both eyes and ears became accustomed. He heard the frightened passage of a mouse. He thought he could hear not only a drop of water hit the floor but the moment when it was released from the dome. In the candle’s light he could see Misha sweating, though the church was cold. He saw Misha watching the faint blue outline of the shut door.

  ‘Remember,’ Arkady said abruptly and watched Misha start, ‘when we were kids – we couldn’t have been more than ten – we went into a church?’

  ‘No, I don’t remember.’

  ‘We went because you were going to prove to me that there was no God. It was a working church, it was in the middle of a service. All these old people were standing around, and priests with big beards. You went right up behind them and shouted, “There is no God.” Everyone was angry, and I think a little scared. I know I was. Then you shouted, “If there is a God, let him strike me dead and let him strike Arkasha dead, too.” I was very scared. But we weren’t struck down dead, and I thought you were the bravest person in the world. We marched out of there, didn’t we?’

  ‘I still don’t remember.’ Misha shook his head, but Arkady knew he did.

  ‘It may have been this same church.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’

  On one wall Arkady could barely discern a seated figure with a raised hand. Angels seemed to bubble up from it. Below it were two naked figures, perhaps a man and a woman, on what looked like a two-headed dog. Or a pig. Or a stain. Martyrs trooped over here, a man led a donkey over there, there was a secret bustling about everywhere.

  ‘There’s no lawyer coming,’ Arkady said.

  ‘He’s on his—’

  ‘There’s no lawyer.’

  He lit another cigarette from the first one. Misha blew out his candle, but Arkady could still see him. They both watched the door.

  ‘I never thought it would be you,’ Arkady said. ‘Anyone but you.’

  A minute went by. Misha said nothing.

  ‘Misha,’ Arkady sighed, ‘Misha.’

  He felt the drops hit, the circles spread and overlap. It must be raining harder outside, he thought. The faintest rays of light crossed the dome, fading before they reached a wall. Misha looked pleadingly at Arkady. His black curls were bedraggled and ridiculous. Tears ran from his eyes and formed a lyre on his face. ‘Run,’ he whispered.

  ‘Who’s coming?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘Hurry, they’re taking the head.’

  ‘How did they find out about the head?’

  Arkady thought he heard a step. He killed his cigarette, backed to a wall and drew his gun. Misha stayed where he was, smiling weakly. A pigeon was bathing in a broken font. It shook the water off and rose, clapping its way between the pillars to the dome.

  ‘You’ll be all right?’ Arkady asked. ‘I’ll call you later.’

  Misha nodded.

  Arkady moved along the wall and pulled the door open. Another spring shower was in progress, pouring over the scaffolding, chasing people under their newspapers and umbrellas. Kirwill waited impatiently in the car.

  ‘Arkasha, I’ve often thought about that church,’ Misha said.

  Arkady ran.

  The embankment road was flooded, and he had to detour around Gorky Park. As he reached the Ethnological Institute, a black Volga was turning on its lights for the rain and pulling out. He recognized the driver. Thank you, Misha, Arkady said to himself. He went by the institute, made a complete circle at Andreyesk Prospekt and returned back along the park, a block behind the Volga.

  ‘Now what are we doing?’ Kirwill asked.

  ‘I am following a car and you are getting out at the next light.’

  ‘The hell I am.’

  ‘There is a KGB officer in that black car. He is stealing a head that was reconstructed for me.’

  ‘Then stop him and take it back.’

  ‘I want to see who he’s taking it to.’

  ‘Then what will you do?’

  ‘Then I will come in with a couple of militiamen and arrest them for theft of state property and obstruction of the prosecutor’s office.’

  ‘That’s the KGB, you said. You can’t arrest them.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a KGB operation. The KGB announces it is taking over a case; they don’t steal the evidence. The apartment we visited should have been sealed for a year; that’s the way the KGB operates. The bodies in the park should have been “discovered” within a day. That’s the way the KGB operates, they don’t let a lesson grow cold. I think it’s one major in the KGB and a few of his officers running their own private operation, protecting someone just for money. The KGB doesn’t like entrepreneurs in its ranks. Anyway, the Moscow town prosecutor is the law outside the KGB, and I am still his chief investigator. You can get out here.’

  They were stopped at a light at the Sadovaya Ring, three cars behind the Volga. The driver, the pockmarked man who ha
d followed Irina into the metro station, looked down at something beside him on the front seat. He didn’t check his rearview mirror. Such a man couldn’t conceive of being followed himself, Arkady thought.

  ‘I’m along for the ride.’ Kirwill stretched out.

  ‘Very well.’

  The light changed. At any moment Arkady expected the Volga to turn left toward the center of the city and Pribluda’s office. Instead it turned right, to the east, onto Enthusiasts Road. Some banners were already up. NO ONE WILL LAG BEHIND! said one. Arkady stayed three cars behind.

  ‘How can you be sure he has the head?’ Kirwill asked.

  ‘It’s probably the only thing I’m sure of. I would like to know how he found out about it.’

  The farther they went from the center of town, the less traffic and the more distance Arkady put between himself and the black car. The Hammer and Sickle Works were behind them; Izmailovo Park, too. They were leaving Moscow.

  The Volga turned north onto the Outer Ring, the division between city and country. The overcast broke into thunderheads and wells of light. Suddenly on the shoulder of the highway they saw personnel carriers, heavy trucks with gunslit windows, tanks as large as trucks, caissons, trailers of angular canvas-shrouded forms. Soldiers peered into the headlights.

  ‘For the May Day parade,’ Arkady explained.

  He slowed as the highway approached the Dmitrov Road. Of the cars ahead only the Volga entered the exit ramp. Arkady turned off his headlights before he hit the ramp. The motorcycle militiamen on duty there checked the Moskvich’s official plate and waved him through. The Volga was about two hundred meters ahead.