Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [109]
“Sir, I don’t think you’d actually want people drinking lemonade under a microwave receiver.”
“No,” Gilmartin said. He scratched his chin with the pliers. “Maybe just the neighbors.”
Stas lived alone … and not alone. Moving through the hall meant elbowing Gogol and Gorky. Poets Pushkin through Voloshin resided in a closet. The elevated thoughts of Tolstoy filled shelves above a Swedish sound system, CDs and television set. Newspapers and magazines were stacked by year. The least slip, Arkady thought, and a man could die under an avalanche of stale news, music, fantasy, romance.
Stas said, “I don’t like to think of it as messy. I prefer to think of it as life lived at full tide.”
“It looks like full tide,” Arkady said.
“Hotels are lacking in soul,” Stas said.
Laika sat by the door. Arkady could barely see her eyes through her fur, though he felt them following his every move.
“Thanks, I have someplace to go,” he said.
After the visit to the station president, Arkady had spent the rest of the day watching Benz’s house. It was dusk now and light was seeping from the room. He had decided to ride the subway until it shut down, or to buy a cheap ticket for an early-morning train so he could wait at the station. That way he would at least be more migrant than vagrant. He had come to Stas’s place only for his bag.
One question kept forcing itself to the front of Arkady’s mind. It was so obvious that it was hard work not asking. “Where is Max staying?”
“I don’t know. One drink before you go,” Stas said. “I suspect you’re in for a long night.”
Before Arkady could protest or get around the dog and out the door, his host was in the kitchen and back with two water glasses and a bottle of vodka. The vodka was iced. “Fancy,” Arkady said.
Stas filled the glasses halfway. “To Tommy.”
The cold vodka gave Arkady’s heart a brief squeeze on the way down. Alcohol didn’t seem to affect Stas; he was a frail reed that stood up to the flood. He refilled the glasses. “To Michael,” he offered. “And the snake that bites him.”
Arkady drank to that and set the glass on a stack of papers out of Stas’s reach. “I’m just curious. You go out of your way to annoy the Americans. Why don’t they fire you?”
“German labor law. The Germans don’t want any foreigners on their welfare rolls, so once one has a job it’s almost impossible to dismiss him. There are meetings between the American management and the Russian staff at the station. By law, the reports are written in German. It drives the Americans crazy. Michael tries to fire me once a year. It’s wonderful, like starving a shark. Anyway, I put good programs on the air.”
“You like to embarrass him?”
“I’ll tell you what real embarrassment is—when the Jews on the staff accused the station of anti-Semitism, took it to a German court and won. That’s embarrassment. I don’t want Michael to forget episodes like that.”
“When Max defected back to Moscow, wasn’t that embarrassing?”
Stas took a deep breath. “It was embarrassing to me and to Irina. Actually, it was embarrassing to everyone. We’d had security problems before.”
“Michael said so. An explosion?”
“That’s why we have the gates and big walls now. But to have the head of the Russian section defect back to Moscow is a security problem on a different level.”
“I’d think that Michael would hate Max even more than he hates you.”
“You’d think so.” Stas looked at his empty glass. “I’ve known Max for ten years. I was always struck by how he could get along with the Americans and us. He changed, depending where he was and who he was with. You and I are Russians. Max is liquid. He changes shape. He fills the container whatever the container is. In a fluid situation, he’s king. He came back from Moscow more of a businessman than he was before. The Americans can’t help believing Max because he’s like a mirror. To them he looks like another American.”
“What kind of business is he involved in?”
“I don’t