'We both have business there.'
'My business can wait,' Irina said.
Max was absolutely still for a moment, re-evaluating Irina and Arkady together, then dropped the brusque manner as easily as his hat, which he shook free of rain. Arkady remembered Stas's description of him as liquid, the master of a changing situation.
Max smiled, pulled up a third chair, settled and gave Arkady a nod of acknowledgement. 'Renko, I'm amazed you're still here.'
Irina said, 'Arkady has been telling me what he was doing the last few years. It's different from what I'd heard.'
Max said, 'He was probably modest. People claim he was the darling of the Party. A well-earned status, I'm sure. Who knows what to believe?'
'I know,' Irina said. She blew smoke Max's way.
He brushed it aside, considered his hand as if he had caught a cobweb and raised his eyes to Arkady. 'So how is your investigation going?'
'Not well.'
'No arrests imminent?'
'Far from it.'
'And you must be running out of time.'
'I was thinking of abandoning the entire case.'
'And?'
'Staying.'
'Really?' Irina said.
'You're joking,' Max said. 'You came all the way to Munich to give up? Where's your patriotic duty, your sense of pride?'
'I have very little country left and I certainly have no pride.'
'Arkady doesn't have to be the last man in Russia,' Irina said.
'You know, some people are going back, some people see opportunities,' Max pointed out. 'This is a time to contribute, not run away.'
Irina said, 'That's interesting, coming from someone who has run twice.'
'It's hilarious,' Stas said. He closed the café door and fell back against it, a rain-soaked mime of collapse. 'Irina, the next time you vanish, leave a forwarding address. This is the most exercise I've had since Laika learned to fetch.'
His clothes looked wrung, body and all, but he stayed on his feet and concentrated his attention on Max.
'Are you all right?' Irina asked.
'I may throw up. Or maybe I'll have a beer. Max, you were lecturing on political morality? I'm sorry I missed that. Was it a short lecture?'
Max said, 'Stas doesn't forgive me for going home. He hasn't accepted that the world has changed. It's sad. Sometimes intelligent men cling to simple answers. Even the fact that you're in Munich proves how things have changed. You don't claim to be a political refugee, do you?' He tilted towards Irina. 'Let Renko come or go, I don't see what it has to do with us.'
Irina said nothing. Like a man who senses a growing gulf, Max edged his chair closer and lowered his voice. 'I want to know what kind of wild stories Renko has been entertaining you with. All of a sudden he seems to have assembled an audience here.'
'They were probably happier without us,' Stas said.
'I only want to remind you that Renko is no unsullied hero. He stays when he should go; he goes when he should stay. He's the master of bad timing.'
'Unlike yours,' Irina said.
'I also want to point out,' Max said, 'that your hero probably just came to you because he was frightened.'
'Why would he be frightened?' Irina asked.
'Ask him,' Max said. 'Renko, weren't you with Tommy when he suffered his fatal accident the other night? Weren't you with him right before it?'
'Is this true?' Irina asked Arkady.
'Yes.'
Max said, 'Stas and Irina and I have no idea what kind of disagreeable business you're involved in. But isn't it possible that Tommy is dead because you dragged him into it? Do you really think you should drag Irina into it, too?'
'No,' Arkady admitted.
'I'm only suggesting,' Max said to Arkady, holding up his hand to stifle Stas's protests, 'I'm only suggesting that you came to Irina simply because you want to hide.'
Stas said, 'Max, you really are a shit.'
Max said, 'I want to hear the answer.'
Water dripped from Stas's chin. Max looked unmeltable. For a moment the only sound was the ring of china on the counter and the slow release of steam.
Arkady said, 'I heard Irina on the radio in Moscow. That's why I came.'
Max said, 'You're a devoted fan. Get an autograph. Go home to Moscow and you can hear her five times a day.'
Irina said, 'We can take him to Berlin.'
Max's voice went flat. 'What?'
She said, 'If you're right, Arkady should get out of Munich. No one connects us to him. He'll be safe with us.'
'No,' Max said in disbelief. Arkady saw that he had come to a totally different conclusion; he had carefully and confidently built a seamless, logical argument with only one way out, a perspective of Arkady disappearing over the horizon. Irina had ignored all of it. 'No, I am not taking Renko to Berlin.'
'Then go without me,' Irina said. 'Arkady and I will do fine here.'
Max said, 'We're not staying at a hotel. We'll be in the new flat.'
'It's a big flat,' she said. 'You can have it all to yourself if you want.'
Max reassembled his composure, but for a moment Arkady recognized one reason why the man had returned from Moscow. The worst of reasons.
Love curls around like a snake and crushes two men at the same time.
Part Three
BERLIN
18 August – 20 August 1991
Chapter Twenty-Eight
* * *
Max drove a Daimler, a saloon with the woodwork of an antique cabinet and the sound of a muted trumpet. His attitude was friendly, as if they were off on a lark, as if becoming a threesome had been his idea.
The German landscape lay under folds of rain. Sitting in front, Irina was the tangible warmth in the car. She propped her back against the door to include Arkady when she talked, almost as if to exclude Max.
'You'll like the show. It's a Russian show, but some of the pieces have never been seen in Moscow, not publicly.'
'Irina wrote the catalogue,' Max said. 'She really should be there.'
'It's just about the provenance of the painting, Arkady, but the painting itself is beautiful.'
'Are critics allowed to use the word beautiful ' he asked.
'In this case,' she promised him, 'it's perfect.'
Arkady enjoyed hearing about this other life of hers, this new and independent mix of knowledge and opinions. He was now, as a benefit of experience, a skilled hauler of nets and gutter of fish. Why shouldn't she be an expert on the arts? Max seemed just as proud.
From the back seat, he couldn't tell at what point they crossed what had been the old East German border. As the road narrowed they slowed for farm equipment that lunged in and out of the mist. When the road cleared, they raced ahead again, as if the three of them were in a bubble caught in a river fed by the rain.
There was a sense of suspended time in the situation. Part of it was Max's self-control. Arkady thought Max had wanted to kill him in Moscow; instead he let him escape to Munich. He was sure Max had wanted him dead in Munich, yet here he was driving him to Berlin. On the other hand, Arkady couldn't touch Max. With what authority? As a refugee? He couldn't even ask questions without Irina accusing him of using her again, without losing her a second time.
Max said, 'Since Irina is going to be busy tomorrow, let me take you around the city. You've been to Berlin before?'
'In the Army. He was stationed there,' Irina answered for Arkady. He was surprised she remembered.
'Doing what?' Max asked.
Arkady said, 'Listening to the American command, translating for the Soviet command.'
Irina said, 'Like you at Radio Liberty, Max.'
More and more she was given to sarcastic attacks on Max, and the walls of the bubble would tremble. Yet it was Max's luxurious car they rode in, his destination they drove to. 'I'll show you the new Berlin,' he told Arkady.
When they reached the city late at night, the rain had stopped. They entered on the Avus, the old racetrack
through the Berliner Woods, then drove directly on to the Kurfürstendamm. Instead of the homogeneous affluence of Munich's Marienplatz, the Ku'damm was a chaotic collision of West German shops and East German shoppers. For block after block, crowds in Socialist off-colours milled around display cases of silky Italian scarves and Japanese cameras. Their faces had the tight, poutish look of poor relations. A phalanx of skinheads marched in leather jackets and boots. Streetlamps hung on ornate, Nazi-era poles. Tables sold pieces of the Wall, with graffiti and without.
'It's terrible, it's a mess, but it's alive,' Irina said. 'That's why the art market has always been here. Berlin is the only international city in Germany.'
Max said, 'The city between Paris, Moscow and Istanbul.'
He pointed to a sidestreet vendor with a rack of uniforms. Arkady recognized the grey chest and blue shoulders of a Soviet Air Force colonel's greatcoat. The vendor himself was covered with Soviet military medals and ribbons from his collar to his belt. 'You should have kept your uniform,' Max said.
Stas had forced a hundred Deutschmarks on Arkady before he left Munich; he had never been richer or felt poorer.
They passed the Kaiser Wilhelm Church's shattered, floodlit brow. Looming behind it was a glass tower topped by a Mercedes star. Max left the boulevard and followed a dark, arterial route along a canal. All the same, Arkady's internal compass began to function. Before they even reached Friedrichstrasse, he knew they were in what used to be East Berlin.
Max turned down the ramp of a garage. As they drove in, the garage lights automatically went on. A smell of wet cement hit their nostrils like the chlorine of a pool. Electrical junction boxes hung by wires from the walls.
'How new is this building?' Arkady asked.
Max said, 'It's still under construction.'
Irina said, 'Believe me, no one will know you're here.'
Max unlocked the lift with a key. Inside, it had crystal sconces and an unscratched parquet floor. He toted Irina's overnight bag. Carrying his own holdall, Arkady felt like a workman with a sackful of tools.
They stopped on the fourth floor, where Max opened a door to a two-storey living-room-cum-loft. 'Just a studio. I'm afraid it's not furnished, but the electricity and plumbing are in and it's rent-free.' Ceremoniously he handed the doorkey to Arkady. 'We'll be two storeys up.'
Irina said, 'The main thing is that you'll be safe.'
'Thanks,' Arkady said.
Max gathered Irina into the lift. He had her, which was thanks enough.
The key had freshly stamped, sharp serrations, perfect to unlock the heart, Arkady thought, if you worked diligently in between the ribs.
No bed, bedding, chairs or chest of drawers. Dry walls angled seamlessly into hardwood floors. The bathroom was all tiles gleaming like teeth. The kitchen had a stove but no utensils. If he'd had food, he could have held it in his hands above the flame.
Steps echoed out of proportion to every move he made. He listened for sounds from two storeys above. In Munich he had dreaded the possibility that Irina was sleeping with Max. Now, overhead, he had the certainty. What was Max's flat like? Extrapolating, Arkady pictured the finish on the walls, the polish on the floors. He could imagine the rest.
He asked himself if he should have stayed in Munich.
Choice was the luxury of casting a vote, trying on shoes, lingering over a menu and deciding between red caviar and black.
He'd had to come to Berlin. If he hadn't he would have lost Irina, not to mention Max. This way he had them both. Like a man who's proud he wears so much rope around his neck.
The lift was locked. Arkady took the emergency stairs down to the garage, where he wedged the door open and stepped out on to the street. Though Friedrichstrasse was a major thoroughfare, its streetlamps were as dim as curb lights. Except for himself, the pavement was empty. Anyone awake was in the West.
He spotted the point of a television tower and immediately knew that Alexanderplatz was to his right, West Berlin to his left. The mental map he had was out of date by a decade or so, but no major city in Europe was as unchanged as East Berlin in the last forty years. The advantage of the Soviet model was that construction and upkeep were kept to a minimum, so Soviet memories tended to be excellent.
Munich had been new territory to Arkady. Not Berlin. Day after day, his military assignment had been to monitor British and American radio patrols as they drove through the Tiergarten to Potsdamer Platz, along Stresemann and Koch to Checkpoint Charlie, then on to Prinzenstrasse and back. He followed them from the moment they left their motor pool. It was his own daily ride.
It didn't matter how fast Arkady walked. Jealousy stayed with him, a shadow that walked ahead in giant steps, shrank at the next lamp, then jumped out again.
On Unter den Linden, office buildings were massive and fragile in the same way Soviet architecture was. The hugest structure was, in fact, the Soviet embassy. Trabis were parked nose in. Figures shifted under the lime trees. A man stepped out and hoisted a hand and cigarette like a question mark. Arkady hurried by, surprised he looked good to anyone.
He was approaching the floodlights of the Brandenburg Gate and the familiar outline of Victory in her chariot when the city opened up into a sudden expanse of stars and grass. It wasn't a park but a wide ridge of green hillocks that stretched north and south. Over them a breeze lifted waves of insect calls. His first impulse was to step back. This is where the Wall had been, he realized, which was like saying, 'This is where the pyramids were.'
Actually, around the Gate there had been two Walls, stranding it like a piece of Greece in the middle, so that it was not a gate but a terminus, with the view on either side brought to a halt. The Wall had been a white horizon four metres high. There had also been a flattened no-man's-land of watch towers both round and rectangular, trip wires, sapper chargers, tank traps, dog-tracks, brushed fields of anti-personnel mines and seasonal brambles of concertina wire. Everywhere, lights had crackled like an electric charge.
The void left by the destruction of the Wall and this attendant apparatus was more immense than its presence had been. An image returned that was more connection than memory. He had been at this same point one summer night long ago. Nothing special had happened except that he had noticed a handler with a brace of dogs that were trotting excitedly along the base of the inner wall. The handler was East German, not Soviet, and the way he kept the dogs encouraged but in check was exactly the same way the charioteer up on her pedestal lightly reined her horses. The dogs sniffed the ground, then turned, straining on their leads, in Arkady's direction. He had the irrational fear – he was a young officer who had done nothing wrong – that they were tracking him, that they could smell his treasonous lack of fervour. He'd stood his ground and the dogs turned aside before they came near. From then on, though, he never looked at the Gate without seeing in the chariot's silhouette a handler and dogs.
Arkady moved into the lights and crossed in long, cautious steps. On the other side was the Tiergarten, a park of well-behaved flowerbeds and well-illuminated avenues. It took him twenty minutes to walk the length of the Tiergarten and around the Zoological Garden to Zoo Station. There the underground emerged to ride above the street. It was the only train stop that West Berliners had been allowed to use to go east. It was also the station where Soviets had been delivered when they went west.
At street level, much of what Arkady remembered was covered with spray paint. Currency exchange windows were shuttered, though a late-night drug trade flourished in the doorways. Overhead, though, less had changed. The same narrow-gauge tracks ran by the same elevated platforms under the same glass roof. Lockers were still available twenty-four hours a day. He stowed the videotape he'd brought from Munich.
Phones were lined up on the street under the station. Arkady unfolded a wad of paper and called the number Peter Schiller had given him.
Peter answered on the eighth ring, sounding irritable. 'Where are you?'
'Berlin. And you?' Arkady aske
d.
'You know I'm in Berlin. You called this afternoon to say I had to drive in the damn rain all day to be here. You know this is a Berlin number. Who are you with?'
A train came into the station. The sound travelled down through the girder that supported the phone. 'Good,' Arkady said. 'Then I'll try you tomorrow at noon at this same number. Maybe I'll know more then.'
'Renko, if you think you can lead –'
Arkady hung up. It was a comfort to know that Peter was raging somewhere close by, nearer than Munich but farther than arm's reach.
He took the same route back through the park. Again he anticipated the sight of a cement barrier so intensely lit that it rose like a wall of ice. Again he crossed nothing but rubble covered by springy grass and nodding heads of flowers.
He told himself he should have more faith.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
* * *
The morning was bright, dry, with not a cloud in the sky. Arkady and Max strolled the same route he had taken the night before. Irina was at the gallery, helping with the installation of the show.
Max was the sort of animal that basked in the sun. He wore a suit the colour of butter. In the windows they passed he looked as if he were being importuned by his companion for loose change, a meal, a business opportunity. Then he would put his hand on Arkady's arm as if to say, 'Look at this raffish friend I have in tow.' Their eyes would meet, and in the small black centre of his irises Arkady could read that Max had not slept with Irina during the night, and that his bed had been no more comfortable than Arkady's bare floor.
'It's a developers' dream,' Max said. 'This side of Berlin always had the grandeur. University, opera, cathedral, the great museums were always in East Berlin. We Soviets built as many monstrosities as we could, but we never had the money or the energy of capitalist developers. West Berlin has shops with the highest real-estate value in the world. Imagine the value of East Berlin. See, without knowing, we Russians saved it. This is literally metamorphosis, this is East Berlin crawling out of its cocoon.'
Red Square Page 30