Red Square (7 page)

   
'With this medication I have and oxygen tubes, I look like a cosmonaut and I sleep like a baby.'

   
'What happened to Rudy?'

   
'My opinion? Rudy was a Jew, and a Jew thinks he can eat with the devil and keep his nose from being bitten off. Maybe Rudy knew too many devils.'

   
Six days a week, Rudy and Makhmud had taken Turkish coffee together while they bargained over exchange rates. Arkady remembered seeing the fleshy Rudy across the table from the bone-thin Makhmud, and wondering who would eat whom.

   
'You were the only one he was afraid of.'

   
Makhmud rejected the compliment. 'We had no problem with Rudy. Other people in Moscow think the Chechens should go back to Grozny, back to Kazan, back to Baku.'

   
'Rudy said you were out to get him.'

   
'He was lying.' Makhmud dismissed the idea like a man used to demanding belief.

   
'It's hard to argue with the dead,' Arkady noted as tactfully as he could.

   
'Do you have Kim?'

   
'Rudy's bodyguard? No. He's probably looking for you.'

   
Makhmud said to the front of the car, 'Beno, could we have some coffee?'

   
Beno passed back a thermos, small cups and saucers, spoons and a paper bag of sugar cubes. The coffee came out of the thermos like black sludge. Makhmud's hands were large, fingers and nails curved; the rest of him might have shrunk with age, but not the hands.

   
'Delicious,' Arkady said. He felt his heart fibrillate with joy.

   
'The mafias used to have real leaders. Antibiotic was a theatrical promoter, and if he liked a show he'd hire the whole hall for himself. He was like family to the Brezhnevs. A character, a racketeer, but his word was good. Remember Otarik?'

   
'I remember he was a member of the Writers' Union even though his application had twenty-two grammatical errors,' Arkady said.

  
 
'Well, writing was not his main occupation. Anyway, now they're replaced by these new businessmen like Borya Gubenko. It used to be that a gang war was a gang war. Now I have to watch my back two ways, from hit men
and
militia.'

   
'What happened to Rudy? Was he part of a gang war?'

   
'You mean a war between Moscow businessmen and bloodthirsty Chechens? We're always the mad dogs; Russians are always the victims. I'm not addressing you personally, but as a nation you see everything backwards. Could I give you a small example from my life?'

   
'Please.'

   
'Did you know that there was a Chechen Republic? Our own. If I bore you, stop me. The worst crime of old people is to bore young people.' Even as he said this, Makhmud clutched Arkady's collar again.

 
  
'Go on.'

   
'Some Chechens had collaborated with the Germans, so in February 1944 mass meetings were called in every 'village. There were soldiers and brass bands; people thought it was a military celebration and everyone came. You know what those village squares are like - a loudspeaker in each corner playing music and announcements. Well, this announcement was that they had one hour to gather their families and possessions. No reason given. One hour. Imagine the scene. First the pleading, which was useless. The panic of looking for small children, for grandparents, forcing them to dress and dragging them put of the door to save their lives. Deciding what you should take, what you can carry. A bed, a chest of drawers, a goat? The soldiers loaded everyone into lorries. Studebakers. People thought the Americans were behind it and Stalin would save them!'

   
In Makhmud's stare, Arkady saw black irises locked like the lens of a camera. 'In twenty-four hours there wasn't a Chechen left in the Chechen Republic. Half a million people gone. The lorries put them on trains, in unheated freight carriages which travelled for week after week after week in the middle of winter. Thousands died. My first wife, my first three boys. Who knows at what siding the guards threw their bodies out? When the survivors were finally allowed to climb down from the carriages they found themselves in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. Back home, the Chechen Republic was liquidated. Russian names were given to our towns. We were removed from maps, histories, encyclopedias. We disappeared.

   
'Twenty, thirty years went by before we managed to return to Grozny, even to Moscow. Like ghosts, we make our way back home to see Russians in our houses, Russian children in our yards. And they look at us and they say, "Animals!" Now you tell me, who has been the animal? They point fingers at us and shout, "Thief!" Tell me, who's the thief? When anyone dies, they find a Chechen and say, "Murderer!" Believe me, I would like to meet the murderer. Do you think I should feel sorry for them now? They deserve everything that's happening to them. They deserve us.' Makhmud's eyes became their most intense, dead coals come alive, and then dimmed. His fingers unclenched and released Arkady's lapel. Fatigue folded into a smile across his face. 'I apologize, I wrinkled your jacket.'

   
'It came wrinkled.'

   
'Nevertheless, I got carried away.' Makhmud smoothed the jacket. He said, 'I'd like nothing more than to find Kim. Grapes?'

   
Beno handed back a wooden bowl overflowing with green grapes. By now, Arkady could see not so much a family resemblance among him, Ali and Makhmud as a likeness of species, like the bill of a hawk. Arkady took a handful. Makhmud opened a short knife with a hooked blade to slice off a bunch carefully. When he ate, he rolled down the window to spit the seeds on the ground.

   
'Diverticulitis. I'm not supposed to swallow them. It's a terrible thing to grow old.'

Chapter Six

Polina was dusting Rudy's bedroom for prints when Arkady arrived from the car market. He had ever seen her out of her raincoat before. Because of the heat, she wore shorts, had knotted her shirt into a halter and tied her hair up in a kerchief, and with her rubber gloves and little camel's-hair brush she looked like a child playing house.

   
'We dusted before.' Arkady dropped his jacket on the bed. 'Aside from Rudy's prints, the technicians got nothing.'

   
'Then you have nothing to lose,' Polina said cheerfully. 'The human mole is in the garage tapping for trapdoors.'

   
Arkady opened the window over the courtyard and saw Minin in his hat and coat in the open door of the garage. 'You shouldn't call him that.'

   
'He hates you.'

   
'Why?'

   
Polina rolled her eyes, then climbed a chair to dust the mirror on the chest of drawers. 'Where's Jaak?'

   
'We've been promised another car. If he gets it, he'll go to the Lenin's Path Collective Farm.'

   
'Well, it's potato time. They can use Jaak.'

   
At a variety of odd locations - on hairbrush and headboard, inside the medicine-cabinet door and under the raised toilet lid - were the shadowy ovals of brushed prints. Others had already been lifted with tape and transferred to slides lying on the night table.

   
Arkady pulled on rubber gloves. 'This isn't your job,' he said.

   
'It isn't your job, either. Investigators are supposed to let detectives do the real work. I have the training for this and I'm better than the others, so why shouldn't I? Do you know why no one wants to deliver babies?'

   
'Why?' Immediately he was sorry he asked.

   
'Doctors don't want to deliver babies because they're afraid of AIDS, and because they don't trust Soviet rubber gloves. They wear three or four at a time. Imagine trying to deliver a baby wearing four pairs of gloves. They don't do abortions either, for the same reason. Soviet doctors would rather set women out about a hundred metres away and watch them explode. Of course, there wouldn't be so many babies if Soviet condoms didn't fit like rubber gloves.'

   
'True.' Arkady sat on the bed and looked around. Though he had followed Rudy for weeks, he still knew too little about the man.

   
'He didn't bring women here,' Polina said. 'There are no crackers, no wine, not even a condom. Women leave things - hairpins, make-up pads, face powder on a pillow. It's too neat.'

   
How long was she going to be up on the chair? Her legs were whiter and more muscular than he would have expected. Perhaps she had wanted to be a ballerina at one time. Black curls escaped from the discipline of her kerchief and coiled at the nape of her neck.

   
'You're working room by room?' Arkady asked.

   
'Yes.'

   
'Shouldn't you be out with your friends playing volleyball or something?'

   
'It's a little late for volleyball.'

   
'Did you lift prints from the videotapes?'

   
'Yes.' She bounced a glare off the mirror.

   
'I got you more morgue time,' Arkady said to mollify her. Isn't that the way to soothe a woman, he thought, by offering her more time in a morgue? 'Why do you want to go back inside Rudy?'

   
'There was too much blood. I did get laboratory results on the blood from the car. It was his type, at least.'

   
'Good.' If she was happy, he was happy. He turned on the television and VCR, inserted one of Rudy's tapes, pushed 'Play' and 'Fast Forward'. Accompanied by high-speed gibberish, images rushed across the screen: the golden city of Jerusalem, Wailing Wall, Mediterranean beach, synagogue, orange grove, high-rise hotels, casinos, El Al. He slowed the tape to catch the narration, which was more glottal than Russian.

   
'Do you speak Hebrew?' Arkady asked Polina.

   
'Why in the world would I speak Hebrew?'

   
The second tape showed in rapid succession the white city of Cairo, pyramids and camels, Mediterranean beach, sailing boats on the Nile, muezzin on a minaret, date grove, high-rise hotels, Egyptair.

   
'Arabic?' Arkady asked.

   
'No.'

   
The third travelogue opened in a beer garden and raced through etchings of medieval Munich, aerial views of rebuilt Munich, shoppers on the Marienplatz, beer cellar, polka bands in lederhosen, Olympic stadium, Oktoberfest, rococo theatre, gilded angel of peace, autobahn, another beer garden, nearby Alps, vapour trail of Lufthansa. He rewound to the Alps to listen to a narration that was both ponderous and exuberant.

   
'You speak German?' Polina asked. The dusted mirror was starting to look like a collection of moth wings, each one an oval of whorls.

   
'A little.' Arkady had spent his Army years in Berlin listening to Americans and had picked up some German in the truculent fashion that Russians approach the Language of Bismarck, Marx and Hitler. It wasn't only that Germans were a traditional foe; it was because the tsars for centuries had imported Germans as taskmasters, not to mention that the Nazis had regarded all Slavs as subhuman. There was a certain accretion of national ill will.

   
'Auf wiedersehen,' said the television.

   
'Auf wiedersehen.' Arkady turned the set off. 'Polina, auf wiedersehen. Go home, see your boyfriend, go to a film.'

   
'I'm almost done.'

   
So far, Polina seemed to have sensed more about the flat than Arkady had. He knew he was missing not so much clues as essence. Rudy's phobia about physical contact had created a flat that was solitary and sterile. No ashtrays, not even dog-ends. He craved a cigarette, but didn't dare upset the flat's hygienic balance.

   
Rudy's single weakness of the flesh appeared to be food. Arkady opened the refrigerator. Ham, fish and Dutch cheese were still cool, in place and overwhelming even to a man who had just eaten an appetizer of Makhmud's grapes. The food was probably from Stockmann's, the Helsinki department store that delivered complete., smorgasbords, office furniture and Japanese cars for hard currency to Moscow's foreign community; God forbid they should have to live like Russians. In its rind of wax, the cheese shone like a mushroom cap.

   
Polina stepped into the bedroom doorway, one arm already thrust into her raincoat. 'Are you examining the evidence or consuming it?'

   
'Admiring it, actually. Here is cheese from cows who graze on grass that grows on dykes a thousand miles away, and it's not as rare as Russian cheese. Wax is a good medium of prints, isn't it?'

   
'Humidity is not the best atmosphere.'

   
'It's too humid for you?'

   
'I didn't say I couldn't do it, I just didn't want to get your hopes up.'

   
'Do I look like a man with high hopes?'

   
'I don't know; you're different today.' It was not characteristic of Polina to be uncertain about anything. 'You - '

   
Arkady put a finger to his lips. He heard a barely audible noise, like the fan of a refrigerator, except that he was standing by the refrigerator.

   
'A toilet,' Polina said. 'Someone's relieving themselves on the hour.'

   
Arkady went to the water closet and touched the pipes. Usually pipes banged and rang like chains. This sound was fainter, more mechanical than liquid, and inside Rosen's flat, not out. It stopped.

   
'On the hour?' Arkady asked.

   
'On the dot. I looked, but I didn't find anything.'

   
Arkady went into Rudy's office. The desk was undisturbed, phone and fax silent. He tapped the fax and a red 'alert' light blinked. Tapped harder and the button winked as regularly as a beacon. The volume had been turned all the way down. He pulled the desk forward and found facsimile paper that had scrolled between the desk and the wall. 'First rule of investigation: pick things up,' he said.

   
'I hadn't dusted here yet.'

   
The paper was still warm. On top was the transmission date and time, one minute ago. The message, typed in Russian, read: 'Where is Red Square?'

   
Anyone with a map could answer that. He read the previous message. The transmission time on it was sixty-one minutes ago: 'Where is Red Square?'

   
You didn't need a map. Ask anyone in the world - up the Nile, in the Andes or even in Gorky Park.

   
There were five messages in all, each sent on the hour, with the same insistent demand: 'Where is Red Square?'

   
The first also said, 'If you know where Red Square is, I can offer contacts with international society for ten per cent finder's fee.'

   
A finder's fee for Red Square sounded like easy money. The machine had automatically printed a long transmitting phone number across the top. Arkady called the international operator, who identified the country code as Germany and the city as Munich. 'Do you have one of these?' he asked Polina.

   
'I know a boy who does.'

   
Close enough. Arkady wrote on Rudy's stationery, 'Need more information.' Polina inserted the page, picked up the receiver and dialled the number, which answered with a ping. A light flashed over a button that said 'Transmit' and when she pushed the button the paper started to roll.

   
Polina said, 'If they're trying to reach Rudy, they don't know he's dead.'

   
'That's the idea.'

 
  
'So you'll get pointless information or find yourself in an embarrassing social situation. I can't wait.'

They waited an hour without an answer. Finally Arkady went downstairs and visited the garage, where Minin was tapping the floor with the butt end of a shovel. The hanging light bulb had been replaced by one with greater wattage. Tyres had been moved to the side and stacked according to size, rubber belts and oil cans enumerated and tagged. Minin's only concession to the heat had been to remove his coat and jacket; his hat stayed on his head, casting an umbra across the middle of his face. The man in the moon, Arkady thought. When he saw his superior, Minin came to sullen attention.

   
Arkady thought the problem was that Minin was the classic dwarf child. Not that he was small, but Minin was the unloved creature, the sort who always felt despised. Arkady could have him removed from the team - an investigator didn't have to accept everyone assigned to him - but he didn't want to justify Minin's attitude. Also, he hated to see an ugly man pout.

   
'Investigator Renko, when Chechens are on the loose, I think I would be of better use on the street than in this garage.'

   
'We don't know if we're after Chechens, and I need a good man doing this. Some people would slip the tyres under their coat.'

   
Humour seemed to give Minin a wide berth. He said, 'Do you want me to go upstairs and watch Polina?'

   
'No.' Arkady tried human interest. 'There's something new about you, Minin. What is it?'

   
'I don't know.'

   
'That's it.' On Minin's sweat-darkened shirt was the enamel pin of a red flag. Arkady would never have noticed it if he hadn't taken off his jacket. 'A membership pin?'

   
'Of a patriotic organization,' Minin said.

   
'Very stylish.'

   
'We stand for the defence of Russia, for the repeal of so-called laws that steal the people's wealth and give it to a narrow group of vultures and money-changers, for a cleansing of society and an end to chaos and anarchy. You don't mind?' It was a challenge as much as a question.

   
'Oh, no. On you it looks right.'

Driving to Borya Gubenko's, it seemed to Arkady that the summer evening had fallen like a silence. Streets vacant, taxis camped outside hotels, refusing to carry anyone but tourists. One shop was besieged with shoppers, while those on either side were so empty they seemed deserted. Moscow looked like a cannibalized city, without food, petrol or basic goods. Arkady felt like a cannibalized man, as if he might be missing a rib, a lung, some part of his heart.

   
It was oddly reassuring that someone in Germany had asked a Soviet speculator about Red Square in English. It was confirmation that Red Square still existed.