Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [115]
In Moscow, he was a senior investigator of the city prosecutor’s office; here, after less than a week in the West, he was a thief. He knew he should feel guilty; instead, he felt alive. Even smart enough to turn off the phone.
It was after eleven by the time he got to Radio Liberty. Across the street, and hidden by parked cars and wire fences, were a clubhouse, patio tables and steps leading down to clay tennis courts where players in whites and pastels patrolled the baselines and traded top spin. What a delightful world, Arkady thought. Imagine having the leisure in the middle of the day to pull on shorts, chase a fuzzy ball, work up an athletic sweat. He looked into Michael’s Porsche. Its red cellular phone, the plastic scepter, was gone.
Michael was on a court near the clubhouse. He wore shorts and a V-necked sweater and played with the indolent ease of someone who had been given his first tennis ball in the crib. His opponent, whose back was to Arkady, swung wildly and moved as unsteadily as a man on a trampoline. Behind him and directly in Michael’s line of sight was a table with the phone, its antenna fully extended. The other tables were empty.
While Arkady considered an approach, he noticed that life offered its own distractions. Michael’s opponent hit balls left and right and over Michael’s head to the screen. Other times he missed the ball completely. Sometimes he got tangled up in his shorts. The game seemed not just foreign to him, but from a planet with a different gravity.
During a conference at the net, Arkady was surprised to overhear his own name. As the opponent returned to the baseline, he got a good look. Federov. The consular aide’s next serve flew over the screen and bounced into a far court where two women were playing. They wore short skirts that displayed scissory, tanned legs, and they regarded the ball as a breach of form. Michael strolled to the fence and apologized with a tone that suggested his empathy. Waving his racquet and making too much noise for a tennis court, Federov ran to join him. By then Arkady had walked by the table and switched phones.
On the far side of the clubhouse were two recycling bins, orange for plastic, green for glass. Arkady tossed the phone into the orange one, then walked back past the tennis courts, through the station gates, under the cameras, by the guard booth in the parking lot and up the steps to the reception area.
Summoned, Stas came to the desk, a little astonished to see him, while the guards tried to call Michael. “It’s ringing.”
Stas said, “We haven’t got all day.”
The guard hung up, welcomed Arkady with a glare and a visitor’s pass. After a buzz at the door he was back in the cream-carpeted hallway of Radio Liberty. The bulletin boards were changed, a sign of a well-run organization. Glossy photographs showed President Gilmartin leading a tour of Hungarian broadcasters and applauding the folkloric dancers from Minsk. Technicians with audiotape trafficked up and down the corridor. Ludmilla’s gray bangs bobbed in and out of a doorway.
“Did you come to bomb the director’s office or Michael’s? How much trouble am I in?” Stas asked.
“Which way is the Red Archive?”
“The stairs are between the soda and the snack machine. Bomb away.”
When Tommy boasted about the Red Archive being the greatest library of Soviet life outside Moscow, Arkady had pictured the lamps and musty stacks of the Lenin Library. As usual, he was unprepared for reality. There were no lamps in the Red Archive, only the aquarium glow of room-length fixtures. No books either, only microfiche files, motorized steel cabinets that glided on tracks. Instead of a reading room there was a machine that enlarged microfiche to legible size. Arkady ran a hand over a file in awe. It was as if Ancient Rus, Peter and Catherine the Great and the storming of the Winter Palace had been reduced to the