Red Square

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Did you lose count?' he asked.

  'It's automatic,' the attendant said.

  Arkady read the numbers off the counter's tiny dials. Already 7,950. Fifteen canvas bags were full and tied shut, five empty bags to go.

  'How much are they?' he asked.

  'Four tokens for a dollar.'

  'Four into... well, I'm not good at mathematics, but it seems enough to share.' When the attendant started around looking for help, Arkady said, 'Just joking. Relax.'

  Jaak was sitting at the far end of the bar, sucking sugar cubes and talking to Julya, an elegant blonde dressed in cashmere and silk. A pack of Rothmans and a copy of Elle were open beside her espresso.

  Jaak pushed a cube across the table as Arkady joined them. 'Hard-currency bar, they don't take rubles.'

  'Let me buy you lunch,' Julya offered.

  'We're staying pure,' Jaak said.

  She gave him a rich smoker's laugh. 'I remember saying that myself.'

  Jaak and Julya had once been man and wife. They had met on the job, so to speak, and fallen in love -not a unique situation in their callings. She had gone on to bigger and better things. Or he had. Hard to say.

  The buffet had pastries and open sandwiches under banners for Spanish brandy. Was the sugar the product of imported Cuban sugar cane or the plain but honest Soviet sugar beet, Arkady wondered. He could become a connoisseur. Australians and Americans traded monotones along the bar. At nearby tables, Germans wooed prostitutes with sweet champagne.

  'What are they like, the tourists?' Arkady asked Julya.

  'You mean, special kinks?'

  'Types.'

  She allowed him to light her cigarette and took a thoughtful drag. She crossed her long legs in slow motion, drawing eyes from around the bar. 'Well, I specialize in Swedes. They're cold but they're clean and they're regular visitors. Other girls specialize in Africans. There's been a murder or two, but generally Africans are sweet and grateful.'

  'Americans?'

  'Americans are scared, Arabs are hairy, Germans are loud.'

  'What about Russians?' Arkady asked.

  'Russians? I feel sorry for Russian men. They're lazy, useless, drunk.'

  'But in bed?' Jaak asked.

  'That's what I was talking about,' Julya said. She looked around. 'This place is so low-class. Did you know that there are fifteen-year-old girls working the street?' she asked Arkady. 'At night girls work the rooms, knocking on doors. I can't believe Jaak asked me here.'

  'Julya works at the Savoy,' Jaak explained. The Savoy was a Finnish venture around the corner from the KGB. It was the most expensive hotel in Moscow.

  'The Savoy says they don't have any prostitutes,' Arkady said.

  'Exactly. It's very high-class. Anyway, I don't like the word prostitute.'

  Putana was the word most often used for high-class hard-currency prostitutes. Arkady had the feeling, that Julya wouldn't like that word either.

  'Julya's a multilingual secretary,' Jaak said. 'A good one, too.'

  A man in a tracksuit set his sports bag on a chair, sat down, and ordered a cognac. A few sprints, a little cognac; it sounded like a good Russian regimen. He had the knotty hair of a Chechen, but worn long at the back, short at the sides, with a curly fringe dyed an off-orange. The bag looked heavy.

  Arkady watched the attendant. 'He doesn't seem happy. Rudy was always here when he counted. If Kim killed Rudy, who's going to protect him?'

  Jaak read from a notebook. 'According to the hotel, 'Ten entertainment machines leased by TransKom Services Cooperative from Recreativos Franco, SA, show total average reported receipts of about a thousand dollars a day.' Not bad. 'The tokens are counted daily and checked daily against meters in the backs of the machines. The meters in the slot are locked in; only the Spanish can get into them and reset them.' You saw...'

  'Twenty bags,' Arkady said.

  Jaak calculated. 'Each bag holds five hundred tokens and twenty bags is two and a half thousand dollars. So that's a thousand dollars for the state and fifteen hundred a day for Rudy. I don't know how he did it, but by the bags he beat the meters.'

  Arkady wondered who TransKom was. It couldn't be just Rudy. That kind of import-and-lease needed Party sponsorship, some official institution willing to be a partner.

  Jaak turned his eyes to Julya. 'Marry me again.'

  'I'm going to marry a Swede, an executive. I have girlfriends in Stockholm who've already done it. It's not Paris, but the Swedes appreciate someone who's good with money and knows how to entertain. I've had proposals.'

  'And they talk about the Brain Drain,' Jaak said to Arkady.

  'One gave me a car,' Julya said.

  'A car?' Jaak was more respectful.

  'A Volvo.'

  'Naturally. Your bottom should touch nothing but foreign leather.' Jaak implored her, 'Help me. Not for cars or ruby rings, but because I didn't send you home the first time we took you off the street.' He explained to Arkady, 'The first time I saw her she was wearing gumboots and a mattress. She's complaining about Stockholm and she came from somewhere in Siberia where they take anti-freeze to shit.'

  'That reminds me,' Julya said, unfazed, 'for my exit visa I may need a statement from you saying you don't have any claims on me.'

  'We're divorced. We have a relationship of mutual respect. Can I borrow your car?'

  'Visit me in Sweden.' Julya found a page in her magazine that she was willing to deface. She wrote three addresses in curly script, folded the margin and tore it along the crease. 'I'm not doing you a favour. Personally, Kim is the last person I'd want to find. You're sure I can't buy you lunch?'

  Arkady said, 'I'll just treat myself to one more cube before we go.'

  'Be careful,' Julya told Jaak. 'Kim is crazy. 'I'd rather you didn't find him.'

  On the way out, Arkady caught another glimpse of himself in the bar mirror. Grimmer than he thought, not the kind of face that woke up expecting sunshine. What was that old poem by Mayakovsky? 'Regard me, world, and envy: I have a Soviet passport!' Now everyone just wanted a passport to get out, and the government, ignored by all, had collapsed into the sort of spiteful arguments that erupted in a whorehouse where no customers had come to call in twenty years.

  What could explain this shop, this country, this life? A fork with three out of four tines, two kopecks. A fishhook, twenty kopecks, used, but fish weren't choosy. A comb as small as a seedy moustache, reduced from four kopecks to two.

  True, this was a discount shop, but in another, more civilized world wasn't this trash? Wouldn't it all be thrown away?

  Some items had no discernible function. A wooden scooter with rough wooden wheels and no pole, no bars to hang on to. A plastic tag embossed with the number '97'. What were the odds someone had ninety-seven rooms, ninety-seven lockers or ninety-seven anything and was only missing the number '97'?

  Perhaps it was the idea of buying. The idea of a market. Because this was a cooperative shop and people wanted to buy... something.

  On the third table was a bar of soap, shaved and shaped out of a larger, used bar of soap, twenty kopecks. A rusty butter knife, five kopecks. A blackened light bulb with a broken filament, three rubles. Why, when a new bulb was forty kopecks? Since there were no new light bulbs for sale in the shops, you took this used bulb to your office, replaced the bulb in the lamp on your desk and took the good bulb home so that you wouldn't live in the dark.

  Arkady slipped out of the back door and walked across the dirt towards the second address, a milk shop, cigarette in his left hand, which meant that Kim had not been inside the cooperative. Up the street, Jaak seemed to be reading a newspaper in a car.

  There was no milk, cream or butter in the milk shop, though the chill rooms were stacked with boxes of sugar. The empty counters were staffed by women in white coats and caps who wore the boredom of a rearguard. Arkady lifted a sugar box. Empty.

  'Whipped cream?' Arkady asked an assistant.

  'No.' She seemed startled.


  'Sweet cheese?'

  'Of course not. Are you crazy?'

  'Yes, but what a memory,' Arkady said. He flashed his red ID and walked around the counter and through the swinging door into the rear. A lorry was in the bay and a delivery of milk was being unloaded, directly into another, unmarked lorry. The manager of the shop came out of a chill room; before the door snapped shut, Arkady saw wheels of cheese and tubs of butter.

  'Everything you see is reserved. We have nothing, nothing!' she announced.

  Arkady opened the chill room door. An elderly man huddled like a mouse in a corner. In one hand, he clutched a certificate naming him a volunteer citizen inspector to combat hoarding and speculation. In his other hand was a bottle of vodka.

  'Staying warm, uncle?' Arkady asked.

  'I'm a veteran.' The old man touched the bottle to the medal on his sweater.

  'I can see that.'

  Arkady walked around the storeroom. Why did a milk shop need bins?

  'Everything here is special order for invalids and children,' the manager said.

  Arkady opened a bin to see sacks of flour stacked like sandbags. When he opened another, pomegranates rolled around his feet and over the storeroom floor. A third bin, and lemons poured over pomegranates.

  'Invalids and children!' the manager shouted.

  The last bin was stacked with cigarettes.

  Arkady stepped carefully around the fruit and exited through the bay. The men loading the milk tucked their faces away.

  From the back of the shop, his cigarette still in his left hand, Arkady walked across a yard seeded with broken glass to the main street. On it, apartment buildings rusted in seams along drainpipes and window casings. Cars had the creased and rusted look of wrecks. Kids hung on to a rust-orange roundabout without seats. The school seemed to be built of bricks of rust. At the end of the street, the local Party headquarters was sheathed like a sepulchre in white marble.

  At Julya's last address for Kim, Arkady dropped the cigarette as he approached a pet shop whose plaster had fallen from its facade in large, geographic sections. He heard Jaak and the car rolling close behind.

  The only animals for sale seemed to be chicks and cats peeping and mewing in wire cages. The shop assistant was a Chinese girl carving what looked like liver for a customer. When the liver stirred Arkady saw that it was actually a spreading mound of bloodworms. He stepped behind the counter and into a back room as the girl followed with her cleaver and warned, 'This is no entry.'

  In the back were sacks of wood shavings and chicken pellets, a refrigerator with a calendar for the Year of the Sheep, shelves with tall glass jars of teas, mushrooms and fungi, man-shaped ginseng and items labelled only in Chinese characters, but which he recognized from the herbal shops he had seen in Siberia. What looked like tar in a jar was black-bear bile; a larger bottle held a lumpish mass of coagulated pig's blood, good for soup. There were dried seahorses and deer penises that resembled peppers. Bear paws, another illegal delicacy, were stacked on a rope. An armadillo stirred, half-alive, on a string.

  'No entry,' the girl insisted. She couldn't have been more than twelve and the cleaver looked as long as her arm.

  Arkady apologized and left. A second door led up stairs littered with birdseed to a metal door. He knocked and pressed himself against the wall. 'Kim, we want to help you. Come out so we can talk. We're friends.'

  Someone was inside. Arkady heard the careful easing of a floorboard and a sound like rustling sheets. When he pounded the door, it popped open. He walked into a storeroom that was dark except for a shoebox that was burning from the top down in the middle of the floor; he smelled the lighter fluid that had been poured on to it. Around the walls were television cartons, on the floor a bare mattress, tool kit, hot plate. He pulled the curtains aside and looked out of the open window at a fire escape leading down to a yard knee-deep in pet-shop junk: birdseed bags, steel netting, dead chicks. Whoever had been here was gone. He tried the switch. The light bulb was gone, too. Well, that showed forethought.

  Arkady made a complete circuit of the room, looking behind the cartons, before he returned to the burning box. The sound of the flames was soft and furious at the same time, a miniature firestorm. It wasn't a shoebox. The side of it said 'Sindy' and showed a doll with a blonde ponytail sitting at a table, pouring tea. He recognized it because Sindy dolls were the most popular import in Moscow, displayed in every toy-shop window, non-existent on the shelves. The box's illustration also showed a dog, perhaps a Pekingese, that sat at the doll's feet and wagged its tail.

  Jaak rushed in to stamp out the fire.

  'Don't.' Arkady pulled him back.

  The fire line edged down into the picture. As Sindy's hair burst into flame, her face darkened in alarm. She seemed to raise the teapot, then stand as her upper half was consumed. The dog waited faithfully as paper burned down around him. Then the entire box was black, twisted, spider-webbed with red, turning grey and gauzy, with a layer of ashes that Arkady blew away. Inside was a land mine, lightly charred, its two pressure pins up, triggered, still waiting for Jaak's foot to push them down.

  Chapter Three

  * * *

  Arkady drew a cartoon car on a piece of paper. Crayons, he thought, were about the only thing he lacked. Amenities for rehabilitated Special Investigator Renko included desk and conference table, four chairs, files, and a closet that held a combination safe. Plus two 'Deluxe' portable typewriters, two red outside phones with dials and two yellow intercoms without. He had two windows dressed with curtains, a wall map of Moscow, a rollaway blackboard, an electric samovar and an ashtray.

  On the table Polina spread a black-and-white 360-degree panorama of the construction site and approaching shots of the Audi, then detailed colour shots of the gutted car and driver. Minin hovered zealously. Jaak, forty hours without sleep, stirred like a boxer trying to rise before the count of ten.

  'It was vodka that made the fire so bad,' Jaak said.

  'Everyone thinks of vodka,' Polina sneered. 'What really burns are seats because they're polyurethane. That's why cars burn so quickly, because they're mostly plastic. The seat adheres to the skin like napalm. A car is just an incendiary device on wheels.'

  Arkady suspected that not so long ago Polina had been the girl in pathology class with the best reports, illustrated and footnoted in punctilious detail.

  'In these photographs, I first show Rudy still in the car, then after we've peeled him off and removed him, then a shot through the springs to show what fell through from his pockets: intact steel keys, kopecks melted with floor rubbish, hardware from the seat, including what was left of our transmitter. The tapes burned, of course, if there ever was anything on them. In the first photographs you'll notice that I have circled in red a flash mark on the side wall by the clutch.' She had indeed, right by the charred shinbones and shoes of Rudy Rosen's legs. 'Around the flash mark were traces of red sodium and copper sulphate, consistent with an explosive incendiary device. Since there are no remains of a timer or fuse, I assume it was a bomb designed to ignite on contact. There was also petrol.'

  'From when the tank blew,' Jaak said. Arkady drew a stick figure in the car and, with a red pen, a circle around the stick feet. 'What about Rudy?'

  'Flesh in that condition is as hard as wood, and at the same time bones break as soon as you cut. It's hard enough to pick the clothes off. I brought you this.' From a plastic bag Polina produced a newly buffed garnet and a hard puddle of gold, what was left of Rudy's ring. The cool pride on her face reminded Arkady of the sort of cat who brings mice to its owner.

  'You checked his teeth?'

  'Here's a chart. The gold ran and I haven't found it, but there are signs of a filling in the second lower molar. This is all preliminary to a complete autopsy, of course.'

  'Thank you.'

  'Just one thing,' she added. 'There's too much blood.'

  'Rudy was probably pretty cut up,' Jaak said.

  Polina said, 'People who are burnin
g to death don't explode. They're not sausages. I found blood everywhere.'

  Arkady squirmed. 'Maybe the assailant was cut.'

  'I sent samples to the lab to check the blood type.'

  'Good idea.'

  'You're welcome.' Chin up, contemptuous from then on of the proceedings, she even sat just like a cat. Jaak diagrammed the market on the blackboard, showing the relative positions of Rudy's car, Kim, the queue of customers, then, at a distance of twenty meters, the lorry with VCRs. A second grouping was arranged in a loose orbit of ambulance, computer salesman, caviar van; then more space and half an orbit that included Gypsy jewellers, rockers, rug merchants, the Zhiguli.

  'It was a big night. With Chechens there we're lucky the whole place didn't erupt.' Jaak stared at the board. 'Our only witness states that Kim killed Rudy. At first I found it hard to believe, but looking at who was actually close enough to throw a bomb, it makes sense.'

  'This is from a memory of what you saw in the confusion in the dark?' Polina asked.

  'Like much of life.' Arkady searched his desk for cigarettes. No sleep? A little nicotine would take care of that. 'What we have here is a black market, not the usual daytime variety for ordinary citizens, but a black market at night for criminals. Neutral territory and a very neutral victim in Rudy Rosen.' He remembered Rudy's description of himself as Switzerland.

  'You know, this was like spontaneous combustion,' Jaak said. 'You get together enough thugs, drugs, vodka, throw in some hand grenades and something's going to happen.'

  'A type like that probably cheated someone,' Minin suggested.

  'I liked Rudy,' Arkady said. 'I forced him into this operation and I got him killed.' The truth was always good for embarrassment. Jaak looked pained by Arkady's lapse, like a good dog that sees his master trip. Minin, on the other hand, seemed grimly satisfied. 'The question is, why two fire bombs? There were so many guns around, why not shoot Rudy? Our witness –'