Red Square (13 page)

   
'Munich is a city with the stamp of royal builders,' the narrator intoned. 'Max-Joseph-Platz and the National Theatre were built by King Max-Joseph, Ludwigstrasse by his son, King Ludwig I, the "Golden Mile" of Maximilianstrasse by Ludwig's son, King Max II, and Prinzregentenstrasse by his brother, Prince Regent Luitpold.'

   
Ah, but do we get to see the beer hall where Hitler and his Brown Shirts started their first premature march to power? Will we see the square where Goering took the bullet meant for Hitler and in so doing captured der F
ü
hrer's heart forever? Will we tour Dachau? Well, Munich's history is so packed with people and events that we can't see everything on one tape. Arkady admitted his attitude was unfair, jaundiced and corroded with envy.

   
'At last year's Oktoberfest, celebrants drank over five million litres of beer and consumed seven hundred thousand chickens, seventy thousand pork knuckles and seventy roasted oxen . . . '

   
Well, they could come to Moscow to diet. The nearly pornographic display of food glazed Arkady's eyes. After opera in the National Theatre - 'built by a tax on beer' - refreshment in a romantic beer cellar. After a spin on the autobahn, a pit stop in the beer garden. After an Alpine hike up the Zugspitze, well-earned beer at a rustic inn.

   
Arkady stopped the tape and rewound to the hike. Vista of Alps leading to stone-and-snow escarpment of the Zugspitze. Hikers in lederhosen. Tight shot of edelweiss. Silhouettes of mountaineers high above. Drifting clouds.

   
Beer garden of the inn. Honeysuckle climbing yellow plaster. The enervated stillness of Bavarians after lunch, except for one woman in short sleeves and sunglasses. Cut to a vapour trail leading from clouds to a Lufthansa jet.

   
Arkady rewound and ran the scene in the garden again. The tape quality seemed the same, but both the narrator's voice and the music were absent. In their place was the scraping of chairs and the off-screen sounds of traffic. The sunglasses were a mistake; in a professional tape they would have been off. He went back and forth from Alps to airliner. The clouds were the same. The beer garden scene had been inserted.

   
The woman raised her glass. Blonde hair was brushed back like a mane from her broad eyebrows and broader cheeks. Short chin, medium height, mid-thirties. Dark sunglasses, gold necklace, black short-sleeved sweater, probably cashmere - contrasts that were more sensual than pretty in any ordinary sense. Red nails. Fair skin. Red lips half open in the same slack, reckless study she had once given Arkady through a car window-lifting a corner of a half-smile. She mouthed, 'I love you.'

   
Her lips were easy to read because her promise was in Russian.

Chapter Eleven

'I don't know,' Jaak said. 'You saw her better than I did. I was driving.'

   
Arkady drew the curtains so that his office was lit only by the glow of the beer garden. On the monitor a glass was lifted and held by the 'Pause' button of the VCR.

   
'The woman who was in Rosen's car looked at us.'

   
'She looked at you,' Jaak said. 'My eyes were on the road. If you think she's the same woman, that's good enough for me.'

   
'We need stills. What's the matter?'

   
'We need Kim or the Chechens;
they
killed Rudy. Rudy as good as told you they would. If she's German, if we drag foreigners in, we have to spread the circle and share with the KGB. You know how that goes: we feed them and they shit on us. You told them?'

   
'Not yet. When we have more.' Arkady turned off the monitor.

   
'Like what?'

   
'A name. Maybe an address in Germany.'

   
'You're going to run this one around them?'

   
Arkady handed Jaak the tape. 'We just don't want to bother them until we have something definite. Maybe the woman is still here.'

   
Jaak said, 'You've got brass balls. You must ring when you walk.'

   
'Like a belled cat,' Arkady said.

   
'The bastards would just take all the credit anyway.' Jaak reluctantly accepted the tape, then brightened and waved a pair of car keys. 'I borrowed Julya's. The Volvo, naturally. After I run your errand, I'm headed for the, Lenin's Path Collective. Remember the lorry that sold me the radio? It's possible they saw something when Rudy was killed.'

   
'I'll bring the radio,' Arkady promised.

   
'Bring it to Kazan Station. I'm meeting Julya's mother at the "Dream Bar" at four.'

   
'Julya won't be there?'

   
'She wouldn't be caught dead at Kazan Station, but her mother's coming in on the train. That's how I got the car. Unless you want to keep the radio.'

   
'No.'

   
When he was alone, Arkady opened his closet and locked the original Munich tape in his safe. He had come to the office early to make a duplicate. Who was paranoid?

   
He opened the windows. The rain had stopped, leaving weepy stains around the windows of the courtyard. The skyline was a ring of damp chimneypots upraised like spades. Perfect weather for a funeral.

The man at the Ministry of Foreign Trade said, 'A joint business venture requires a partnership between a Soviet entity - a cooperative or a factory - and a foreign company. It helps if there is sponsorship from a Soviet political organization - '

   
'Meaning from the Party?'

   
'Yes, to be plain, but it's not necessary.'

   
'This is capitalism?'

   
'No, this is not pure capitalism; this is an intermediate stage of capitalism.'

   
'Can the joint venture take rubles out?'

   
'No.'

   
'Can it take dollars out?'

   
'No.'

   
'This is a very intermediate stage.'

   
'It can take oil. Or vodka.'

   
'We have that much vodka?'

   
'For sale abroad.'

   
Arkady asked, 'All joint ventures must be approved by you?'

   
'They should be, but sometimes they aren't. In Georgia or Armenia they tend to make their own arrangements, which is why Georgia and Armenia don't ship anything to Moscow anymore.' He giggled. 'Fuck them.'

   
His office was on the tenth floor with a view of squalls moving east to west. No factory smoke, though, because parts hadn't arrived from Sverdlovsk, Riga, Minsk.

   
'What did TransKom register as its purpose?'

   
'Importation of recreational equipment. It is sponsored by the Leningrad Borough Komsomol. Boxing gloves, things of that nature, I suppose.'

   
'Like slot machines?'

   
'Apparently.'

   
'In trade for what?'

   
'Personnel.'

   
'People?'

   
'I guess so.'

   
'What kind of people? Olympic boxers, nuclear physicists?'

   
'Tour guides.'

   
'Touring where?'

   
'Germany.'

   
'Germany needs Soviet guides?'

   
'Apparently.'

   
Arkady wondered what else the man would believe. That the baby Lenin left coins under pillows in exchange for teeth?

   
'TransKom has officers?'

   
'Two.' The man read from the file in front of him.

   
'Many positions, but all filled by two people, Rudik Abramovich Rosen, Soviet citizen, and Boris Benz, a resident of Munich, Germany. TransKom's address is Rosen's. There may be any number of investors, but they're not listed. Excuse me.' He covered the file with
Pravda
.

   
'The Ministry has no names for the tour guides?'

   
The man folded the newspaper in halves and quarters. 'No. You know, people come here to register a venture to import penicillin, and the next thing you know they're bringing in basketball shoes or building hotels. Once conditions exist here for a free market, it will be like watering the ground.'

   
'What will you do when capitalism is in full swing?'

   
'I'll find something.'

   
'You're inventive?'

   
'Oh, yes.' From a drawer he took a ball of string, bit off an arm's length and put it and
Pravda
in his jacket. 'I'll walk you out. I was on my way to lunch.' Bureaucrats survived on the butter, bread and sausage they took home from cafeterias. The jacket was loose and its pockets were jowls dappled with grease.

Vagankovskoye Cemetery was lovingly but casually tended. A coverlet of wet leaves lay unswept around limes, birches, oaks; dandelions were allowed to line the walk, and overall spread the soft embrace of natural decay. Many of the gravestones were busts of Party stalwarts hewn from granite and black marble: composers, scientists, writers of Socialist Realism with broad brows and commanding gazes. More timid souls were represented by photographs set like cameos on their stones. Since the graves were surrounded by iron fences, the faces on the tombstones seemed to peer from black birdcages. Not all, though. The first grave inside the gate belonged to the roughneck singer-actor Vysotsky, and was heaped so high with daisies and roses freshly watered by the rain that it stirred with the hum of bumblebees.

   
Arkady found his father's funeral procession halfway down the central path. Cadets bearing a star of red roses and a cushion covered with medals were followed by a porter pushing a handcart and coffin, then a dozen shuffling generals in dark-green dress uniforms and white gloves, two musicians with trumpets and two with dented tubas playing a funeral march from a sonata by Chopin.

   
Belov was in the rearguard, wearing civilian clothes. His eyes lit when he saw Arkady. 'I knew you would come.' Solemnly he pumped Arkady's hand with both of his. 'Of course, you couldn't stay away, it would have been disgraceful. You saw
Pravda
this morning.'

   
'Being used as food wrap.'

   
'I knew you'd want this.' He gave Arkady an article that seemed to have been meticulously torn from the newspaper with a ruler.

   
Arkady stopped to read the obituary. 'General of the Army Kyrill Ilyich Renko, a prominent Soviet military commander . . . ' It was a long piece and he read it in small handfuls. ' . . . after completing the M. V. Frunze Military Academy. K. I. Renko's active involvement in the Great Patriotic War was a brilliant page in his biography. Commander of a tank brigade, he was cut off by the first rush of the Fascist invasion but joined partisan forces and mounted raids behind enemy lines . . . fought successfully in battles for Moscow, in the Battle of Stalingrad, the campaign in the steppes and operations around Berlin . . . After the war, he was responsible for stabilizing the situation in the Ukraine and then for command of the Urals Military District.' Or to put it another way, Arkady thought, the general, now numbed to slaughter, was responsible for a mass execution of Ukrainian nationalists so bloody that he had to be exiled to the Urals. ' . . . Twice awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union and awarded four Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, three Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of Suvorov (First Class), two Orders of Kutuzov (First Class) . . . '

   
Belov had pinned a plaque of fading ribbons on his jacket. His white crewcut was a sparse stubble and badly-shaved wattles covered his collar.

   
'Thanks.' Arkady put the obituary in his pocket.

   
'You read the letter?' Belov asked.

   
'Not yet.'

   
'Your father said it would explain everything.'

   
'That would be quite a letter.' It would take more than a letter, Arkady thought; it would take a heavy tome bound in black leather.

   
The generals marched ahead in creaky lock step. Arkady had no desire to catch up. 'Boris Sergeyevich, do you remember a Chechen named Makhmud Khasbulatov?'

   
'Khasbulatov?' Belov adjusted slowly to the change of subject.

   
'What's interesting is that Makhmud claims he's been in three armies: White, Red, and German. According to the records, he's eighty. In 1920, during the Civil War, he would have been ten years old.'

   
'It's possible. There were plenty of children on each side, White and Red. Those were terrible times.'

   
'Let's say that at the time of Hitler Makhmud was in the Red Army.'

   
'Everyone served, one way or another.'

   
'I was wondering: in February 1944, was my father in the Chechen military district?'

   
'No, no, we were pushing to Warsaw. The Chechen operation was completely rear echelon.'

   
'Hardly worth the time of a Hero of the Soviet Union?'

   
'Not worth a second of his time,' Belov said.

   
Wasn't it wonderful, Arkady thought, how completely some people retired? Belov had only recently left the prosecutor's office; now Arkady had asked him about the head of the Chechen mafia and the old sergeant had not made the connection at all, as if his mind had already retreated forty years.

   
They started walking again in silence. Arkady felt watched. In marble and bronze the dead stood over their graves. A dancer whirled dreamily in white stone. An explorer paused, compass in hand. Against a bas-relief of clouds, a pilot pulled aviator goggles from his eyes. They shared a sombre, communal gaze, restless and restful at the same time.

   
'It was a closed coffin, of course,' Belov muttered.

 
  
Arkady was distracted because moving in the opposite direction on a parallel path was another, longer procession with an empty cart, a larger battery of horns and tubas and, among the mourners, some familiar faces. Bolstering a widow on either side were General Penyagin and Rodionov, the city prosecutor, both of them with black bands on their sleeves. Arkady remembered that Penyagin's predecessor at CID had died only days ago; presumably the woman was the dead man's wife. The three were trailed by a slow-moving entourage of militia officers, Party officials and relatives parading fixed expressions of boredom and grief. None of them noticed Arkady.

   
His own cortege had turned down an alley of shaggy pines and stopped at a gate open to a fresh hole in the ground. Arkady looked around. Since Soviet tombstones were not anonymous slabs, he felt introduced to his father's new neighbours. Here was a statue of a singer listening to music inscribed in granite. There, a sportsman with bronze muscles shouldered an iron javelin. Behind the trees gravediggers hunkered over cigarettes, hands on their shovels. Beside the open grave was a small marker of white marble almost flush with the ground. Space was tight at Vagankovskoye, and sometimes husbands and wives were stacked on top of each other, but not this time, thank God.