Red Square

by Martin Cruz Smith

  'Our witness is Gary Oberlyan,' Jaak reminded him.

  Arkady continued, 'Who identifies Kim as an assailant. We saw Kim with a Malysh. He could have emptied a hundred bullets into Rudy more easily than throwing a bomb. All he had to do was pull the trigger.'

  Polina asked, 'Why two bombs instead of one? The first was enough to kill Rudy.'

  'Maybe the point wasn't just to kill Rudy,' Arkady said. 'Maybe it was to burn the car. All his files, every piece of information – loans, deals, paper files, disks – were on the back seat.'

  Jaak said, 'When you kill someone, you want to leave the area. You don't want to have to start moving files.'

  'They're all smoke now,' Arkady said.

  Polina changed to a happier subject. 'If Kim was close to the car when the device ignited, maybe he was injured. Maybe it was his blood.'

  'I alerted hospitals and clinics to report anyone coming in with burns,' Jaak said. 'I'll add lacerations to that. I just find it hard to believe that Kim would have turned on Rudy. If nothing else, Kim was loyal.'

  'How are we on Rudy's place?' Arkady asked while he followed the at once tantalizing and repellent smell of stale tobacco to a bottom drawer.

  Polina said, 'The technicians lifted prints. So far they've only found Rudy's.'

  In the back of a drawer, Arkady found a forgotten pack of Belomors, a true gauge of desperation. He asked, 'You haven't finished the autopsy?'

  She said, 'There's a wait for morgue time, I told you.'

  'A wait for morgue time? That's the ultimate insult.' The Belomor lit with a puff of black fumes like diesel exhaust. Hard to smoke it and hold it away at the same time, but Arkady tried.

  'Watching you smoke is like watching a man commit suicide,' Polina said. 'No one has to attack this country, just drop cigarettes.'

  Arkady changed the subject. 'What about Kim's place?'

  Jaak reported that a more complete search of the storeroom had turned up more empty cartons for German car radios and Italian running shoes, the mattress, empty cognac bottles, birdseed and Tiger Balm.

  'All the fingerprints from the storeroom matched the militia file on Kim,' Polina said. 'The prints on the fire escape were smudged.'

  'The witness identified Kim throwing a bomb into Rudy's car. You find a land mine in his room. How much doubt can there be?' Minin asked.

  'We didn't actually see Kim,' Arkady said. 'We don't know who was there.'

  'The door opened and there was a fire inside,' Jaak said. 'Remember when you were a kid? Didn't you put dog shit in a bag and set the bag on fire to see people stamp it out?'

  No, Minin shook his head; he'd never done anything like that.

  Jaak said, 'We used to do it all the time. Anyway, instead of dog shit there was a land mine. I can't believe I fell for it. Almost.' A photo in front of Jaak showed the mine's oblong case, the two raised pins. It was a small army anti-personnel mine with a trinitrotoluol charge, the kind nicknamed 'Souvenir for...' The detective lifted his eyes and regained his poise. 'Maybe it's a gang war. If Kim went over to the Chechens, Borya will be looking for him. I bet the mine was left for Borya.'

  Polina had never removed her coat. She stood and buttoned the top with quick fingers that expressed both decisiveness and disgust. 'The mine in the box was left for you. The bomb in the car was probably meant for you, too,' she told Arkady.

  'No,' he said and was about to explain to Polina how backwards her reasoning was when she left, shutting the door as her last word. Arkady killed the Belomor and regarded his two detectives. 'It's late, children. That's enough for one day.'

  Minin rose reluctantly. 'I still don't see why we have to keep a militiaman at Rosen's flat.'

  Arkady said, 'We want to keep it the way it is for a while. We left valuable items there.'

  'The clothes, television, savings book?'

  'I was thinking of the food, Comrade Minin.' Minin was the only Party member on the team; Arkady fed him 'comrade' as occasional slops to a pig.

  • • •

  Sometimes Arkady had the feeling that while he had been away, God had lifted Moscow and turned it upside down. It was a nether-Moscow he had returned to, no longer under the grey hand of the Party. The wall map showed a different, far more colorful city drawn with crayons.

  Red, for example, was for the mafia from Lyubertsy, a workers' suburb east of Moscow. Kim was unusual in that he was Korean, but otherwise he was typical of the boys who grew up there. The Lyubers were the dispossessed, the lads without elite schools, academic diplomas and Party connections, who had in the last five years emerged from the city's metro stations first to attack punks and then to offer protection to prostitutes, black markets, government offices. Red circles showed Lyubertsy spheres of influence: the tourist complex at IzmailovoPark, Domodedovo airport, video hawkers on

  Shabalovka Street

  . The racetrack was run by a Jewish clan, but they bought muscle from Lyubertsy.

  Blue was for the mafia from Long Pond, a northern dead-end suburb of barrack housing. Blue circles marked their interest in stolen cargo at Sheremetyevo airport and prostitutes at the Minsk Hotel, but their main business was car parts. The Moskvitch car factory, for example, sat in a blue circle. Borya Gubenko had not only risen to the top of Long Pond but had also brought Lyubertsy under his influence.

  Islamic green was for the Chechens, Moslems from the Caucasus Mountains. A thousand lived in Moscow, with reinforcements that arrived in motorcades, all answering to the orders of a tribal leader called Makhmud. The Chechens were the Sicilians of the Soviet mafias.

  Royal purple was reserved for Moscow's own Baumanskaya mafia, from the neighbourhood between Lefortovo Prison and the Church of the Epiphany. Their business base was the Rizhsky Market.

  Finally, there was brown for the boys from Kazan, more a swarm of ambitious hit-and-run artists than an organized mafia. They raided restaurants on the Arbat, moved drugs and ran teenage prostitutes on the streets.

  Rudy Rosen had been banker for them all. Just following Rudy in his Audi had helped Arkady draw this brighter, darker Moscow. Six mornings a week – Monday to Saturday – Rudy had followed a set routine. A morning drive to a bathhouse run by Borya on the north side of town, then a trip with Borya to pick up pastries at Izmailovo Park and meet the Lyubers. Late-morning coffee at the National Hotel with Rudy's Baumanskaya contact. Even lunch at the Uzbekistan with his enemy, Makhmud. The circuit of a modern Moscow businessman, always trailed by Kim on the motorcycle like a cat's tail.

  The night outside was still white. Arkady wasn't sleepy or hungry. He felt like the perfect new Soviet man, designed for a land with no food or rest. He got up and left the office. Enough.

  There was grillwork at each landing of the stairwell to catch 'divers', prisoners trying to escape. Maybe not only prisoners, Arkady thought on the way down.

  In the courtyard, the Zhiguli was parked next to a blue dog van. Two dogs with bristling backs were chained to the van's front bumper. Ostensibly Arkady had two official cars, but petrol coupons enough for only one because the oil wells of Siberia were being drained by Germany, Japan, even fraternal Cuba, leaving a thin trickle for domestic consumption. From his second car he'd also had to cannibalize the distributor and battery to keep the first one running, because to send the Zhiguli to the shop was equivalent to sending it on a trip around the world, where it would be stripped on the docks of Calcutta and Port Said. Petrol was bad enough. Petrol was the reason defenders of the state slipped from car to car with siphon tube and can. Also the reason dogs were leashed to bumpers.

  Arkady got in through the passenger side and slid over to the wheel. The dogs shot the length of their chains and tried to claw through his door. He prayed and turned the key. Ah, at least a tenth of a tank of petrol. There was a God.

  Two right turns put him in

  Gorky Street

  's gamut of shop windows, still lit. What was for sale? A scene of sand and palm trees surrounded a pedestal surmounted by a
jar of guava jam. At the next shop, mannequins fought over a bolt of chintz. Food shops displayed smoked fish as iridescent as oil slicks.

  At

  Pushkin Square

  , a crowd spilled into the street. A year before there had been exhilaration and tolerance between competing loud-hailers. A dozen different flags had waved: Lithuanian, Armenian, the tsarist red, white and blue of the Democratic Front. Now all were driven from the field except for two flags, the Front's and, on the opposite side of the steps, the red banner of the Committee for Russian Salvation. Each standard had its thousand adherents trying to outshout the other group. In between there were skirmishes, the occasional body down and being kicked or dragged away. The militia had discreetly withdrawn to the edges of the square and to the metro stairs. Tourists watched from the safety of McDonalds.

  Cars were stopped, but Arkady manoeuvred up an alley into a courtyard of plane trees, a quiet backwater to the lights and horns on the avenue outside. A playground's chairs and a table were set into the ground, waiting for a bear's tea party. At the far end, he drove up a street narrowed by lorries straddling the pavement. They were heavy, with massive military wheels, the backs covered by canvas. Curious, Arkady honked. A hand drew aside a flap, revealing Special Troops in grey gear and black helmets, with shields and clubs. Armed insomniacs – the worst kind, Arkady thought.

  The prosecutor's office had offered him a modern flat in a suburban high-rise of apparatchiks and young professionals, but he had wanted to feel he was in Moscow. That he was, in the angle formed by the Moscow and Yauza rivers, in a three-storey building behind a former church that produced liniment and vodka. The church spire had been gilded for the '80 Olympics, but the interior had been gutted to make way for galvanized tanks and bottling machinery. How did the distillers decide which part of their production was vodka and which was rubbing alcohol? Or did it matter?

  While he was removing windscreen wipers and rear-view mirror for the night, Arkady remembered Jaak's short-wave radio, still in the boot of the car. Radio, wipers and mirror in hand, he considered the food shop on the corner. Closed, naturally. He could either do his job or eat; that seemed to be the option. If it was any consolation, the last time he had made it to the market he'd had a choice of cow head or hooves. Nothing in between, as if the bulk of the animal had disappeared into a black hole.

  Since access to the building could be gained only by punching numbers into a security box, someone had helpfully written the code by the door. Inside, the letter boxes were blackened where vandals had shoved newspapers in the slots and torched them. On the second floor, he stopped by a neighbour's for his mail. Veronica Ivanovna, with the bright eyes of a child and the loose grey hair of a witch, was the closest thing to a guard the building had.

  'Two personal letters and a phone bill.' She handed them over. 'I couldn't get you any food because you didn't remember to give me your ration card.'

  Her flat was illuminated by the airless glow of a television set. All the old people in the building seemed to have gathered on chairs and stools around the screen to watch, or rather to listen, with their eyes closed, to the image of a grey, professorial face with a deep, reassuring voice that carried like a wave to the open door.

  'You may be tired. Everyone is tired. You may be confused. Everyone is confused. These are difficult times, times of stress. But this is the hour of healing, of reconnecting with the natural positive forces all around you. Visualize. Let your fatigue flow out of your fingertips, let the positive force flow in.'

  'A hypnotist?' Arkady asked.

  'Come in. It's the most popular programme on television.'

  'Well, I am tired and confused,' Arkady admitted.

  Arkady's neighbours leaned back in their seats as if from the radiant heat of a fireplace. It was the fringe of beard from ear to ear and under the chin that gave the hypnotist a serious, academic cast. That and the thick glasses that enlarged his eyes, as intense and unblinking as an ikon's. 'Open yourself up and relax. Cleanse your mind of old dogmas and anxieties because they only exist in your mind. Remember, the universe wants to work through you.'

  'I bought a crystal on the street,' Veronica said. 'His people are selling them everywhere. You place a crystal on the television set and it focuses his emanations directly on you, like a beacon. It amplifies him.'

  In fact, Arkady saw a row of crystals on her set.

  'Do you think it's a bad sign when it's easier to buy stones than food?' he asked.

  'You will only find bad signs if you're looking for them.'

  'That's the problem. In my work I look for them all the time.'

  From his refrigerator Arkady took a cucumber, yoghurt and stale bread that he ate standing at an open window, looking south over the church towards the river. The neighbourhood had ancient lanes on real hills and an actual wood-burner's alley hidden behind the church. Behind the houses were yards that used to hold dairy cows and goats, which sounded good now. It was the newer parts of the city that looked abandoned. The neon signs above the factories were half dark, half lit, delivering illegible messages. The river itself was as black and still as asphalt.

  Arkady's living room had an enamel-topped table with a coffee can filled with daisies, armchair, good brass lamp and so many bookshelves that the room seemed to have been built against a dam of books, a paperback bulwark from the poet Akhmatova to the humorist Zoshchenko, and including a Makarov – the 9-mm pistol he kept behind the Pasternak translation of Macbeth.

  The hall had a shower and WC and led to a bedroom with more books. His bed was made, he gave himself credit for that. On the floor were a cassette player, headphones and ashtray. Under the bed he found cigarettes. He knew he should lie down and close his eyes, yet he discovered himself wandering back through the hall. He still wasn't sleepy or hungry. Merely as an occupation he looked into the refrigerator again. The last items were a carton of something called 'Berry of the Forest' and a bottle of vodka. The carton demanded a mauling to permit a stream of brown, gritty juice to plop into a glass. To judge by taste, it was either apple, prune or pear. Vodka barely cut it.

  'To Rudy.' He drank and filled the glass again.

  Since he had Jaak's radio he placed it on the table and turned on a garble of short-wave transmissions. From distant points of the earth came spasms of excitable Arabic and the round vowels of the BBC. Between signals the planet itself seemed to be mindlessly humming, perhaps sending those positive forces the hypnotist had talked about. On a medium band he heard a discussion in Russian about the Asian cheetah. 'The most magnificent of desert cats, the cheetah claims a range that extends across southern Turkmenistan to the tableland of Ustyurt. Distribution of these splendid animals is uncertain since none has been seen in the wild for thirty years.' Which made the cheetah's claims about as valid as tsarist banknotes, Arkady thought. But he liked the concept of cheetahs still lurking in the Soviet desert, loping after the wild ass or the goitered gazelle, gathering speed, darting around tamarisk trees, leaping skyward.

  He found he had gravitated to the bedroom window again. Veronica, who lived below, said he walked a kilometre from room to room every night. Just claiming his open range, that's all.

  A different voice on the radio, a woman's, read the news about the latest Baltic crisis. He half listened while he considered the land mine at Kim's address. Arms were stolen from military depots every day. Were army lorries going to set up shop at every street corner? Was Moscow the next Beirut? Filmy smoke hung over the city. Below, the same smoke swirled around empty vodka cases.

  He drifted back to the living room. There was a strange slant to the broadcast, yet the voice itself sounded vaguely familiar. 'The right-wing organization "Red Banner" stated that it planned a rally tonight in Moscow's

  Pushkin Square

  . Although Special Forces are on the alert, observers believe the government will once again sit on its hands until chaos escalates and it has the excuse of public order to sweep away political opponents on
both the right and the left.'

  The indicator needle was between 14 and 16 on the medium wave and Arkady realized he was listening to Radio Liberty. The Americans ran two propaganda stations, the Voice of America and Radio Liberty. VOA, staffed by Americans, was a buttery voice of reason. Liberty was staffed by Russian émigrés and defectors, hence offered vitriol more in character with its audience. An arc of jamming arrays had been built south of Moscow simply to block Radio Liberty, sometimes chasing the signal up and down the dial. Although full-time jamming had stopped, this was the first time since then that Arkady had heard the station;

  The broadcaster talked calmly about riots in Tashkent and Baku. She reported new findings on the poison gas used in Georgia, more thyroid cancer from Chernobyl, battles along the border with Iran, ambushes in Nagornyy Karabakh, Islamic rallies in Turkestan, miners' strikes in the Donbas, rail strikes in Siberia, drought in the Ukraine. In the rest of the world, Eastern Europe still seemed to be rowing its lifeboats away from the sinking Soviet Union. If it was any consolation, the Indians, Pakistanis, Irish, English, Zulus and Boers were making hells of their parts of the globe. She finished by saying that the next news would be in twenty minutes.

  Any reasonable man would have been depressed, yet Arkady checked his watch. He got up, assembled cigarettes and took the next vodka straight. The programme between newscasts was about the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Irrigation for Uzbek cotton fields had drained the Aral's rivers, leaving thousands of fishing boats and millions of fish foundered in slime. How many nations could say that they had wiped out an entire sea? He got up to change the water for the daisies.

  The news came on at the half-hour for only one minute. He listened to the blissful chirping of Byelorussian folk songs until the news returned again at the hour for ten minutes. The stories didn't change; it was her voice he sat forward to attend to. He laid his watch on the table. He noticed he had lace curtains. Of course he knew his windows had curtains, but a man can forget these niceties until he sits still. Machine-made, of course, but quite nice, with a floral tracery fading into the pale light outside.