Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [1]
The Don Swaim interview of Martin Cruz Smith is courtesy of the WOUB Center for Public Media and the Donald L. Swaim Collection in the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections at Ohio University. The interview can be heard in its entirety at Wired for Books, Wiredforbooks.org/martincruzsmith/.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80977-3
www.mortalis-books.com
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
I
MOSCOW
II
MUNICH
III
BERLIN
IV
MOSCOW
DOSSIER
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
I
MOSCOW
August 6–August 12, 1991
In Moscow, the summer night looks like fire and smoke. Stars and moon fade. Couples rise and dress and walk the street. Cars wander with their headlights off.
“There.” Jaak saw an Audi passing in the opposite direction.
Arkady slipped on headphones, tapped the receiver. “His radio’s out.”
Jaak U-turned to the other side of the boulevard and picked up speed. The detective had askew eyes set in a muscular face and he hunched over the wheel as if he were bending it.
Arkady tapped out a cigarette. First of the day. Well, it was one A.M., so it wasn’t much to brag about.
“Closer,” he said, and pulled the phones off. “Let’s be sure it’s Rudy.”
Ahead were the lights of the peripheral highway that circled the city. The Audi swung onto the ramp to merge with highway traffic. Jaak edged between two flatbed trucks carrying steel plates that clapped with every undulation of the road. He passed the lead truck, the Audi and a tanker. On the way, Arkady had caught the driver’s profile, but there were two people in the car, not one. “He picked someone up. We need another look,” he said.
Jaak slowed. The tanker didn’t pass, but a second later, the Audi slid by. Rudy Rosen, the driver—a round man with soft hands fixed to the wheel—was a private banker to the mafias, a would-be Rothschild who catered to Moscow’s most primitive capitalists. His passenger was female, with the wild look achieved by Russian features on a diet, somewhere between sensual and ravenous, with short, stylishly cut blond hair brushed back to the collar of her black leather jacket. As the Audi passed, she turned and sized up the investigators’ car, a two-door Zhiguli 8, as a piece of trash. In her thirties, Arkady thought. She had dark eyes, and a wide mouth and puffy lips, parted slightly as if starving. As the Audi swung in front, it was followed by the sound of an outboard engine and the appearance of a Suzuki that inserted itself between the two cars. The motorcycle rider wore a black dome helmet, black leather jacket and black high-tops that sparkled with reflectors. Jaak eased off. The biker was Kim, Rudy’s protection.
Arkady ducked and listened to the headset again. “Still dead.”
“He’s leading us to the market. There are some people there, if they recognize you, you’re dead.” Jaak laughed. “Of course then we’ll know we’re in the right place.”
“Good point.” God forbid anyone should exercise sanity, Arkady thought. Anyway, if anyone recognizes me it means I’m still alive.
All the traffic squeezed off the same exit ramp. Jaak tried to follow the Audi, but a line of “rockers”—bikers—swarmed in between. Swastikas and czarist eagles decorated their backs, all wreathed in the rising smoke of exhaust pipes stripped of mufflers.
At the end of the ramp, construction barriers had been pushed to one side. The car bounced as if they were crossing a potato field, and yet Arkady saw silhouettes that loomed high against the faint northern sky. A Moskvitch went by, its windows crammed with swaying rugs. The roof of an ancient Renault wore a living-room suite. Ahead, brake lights spread into a pool of red.
The rockers drew their bikes into a circle, announcing their stop with a chorus of roars. Cars and trucks spaced themselves roughly on a knoll