Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [12]
“No entry,” the girl insisted. She couldn’t have been more than twelve and the cleaver looked as long as her arm.
Arkady apologized and left. A second door led up stairs littered with birdseed to a metal door. He knocked and pressed himself against the wall. “Kim, we want to help you. Come out so we can talk. We’re friends.”
Someone was inside. Arkady heard the careful easing of a floorboard and a sound like rustling sheets. When he pounded the door, it popped open. He walked into a storeroom that was dark except for a shoebox that was burning from the top down in the middle of the floor; he smelled the lighter fluid that had been poured onto it. Around the walls were television cartons, on the floor a bare mattress, tool kit, hot plate. He pulled the curtains aside and looked out the open window at a fire escape leading down to a yard knee-deep in pet-shop trash: birdseed bags, steel netting, dead chicks. Whoever had been here was gone. He tried the switch. The light bulb was gone, too. Well, that showed forethought.
Arkady made a complete circuit of the room, looking behind the cartons, before he returned to the burning box. The sound of the flames was soft and furious at the same time, a miniature firestorm. It wasn’t a shoebox. The side of it said “Sindy” and showed a doll with a blond ponytail sitting at a table, pouring tea. He recognized it because Sindy dolls were the most popular import in Moscow, displayed in every toy-store window, nonexistent on the shelves. The box’s illustration also showed a dog, perhaps a Pekingese, that sat at the doll’s feet and wagged its tail.
Jaak rushed in to stamp out the fire. “Don’t.” Arkady pulled him back.
The fire line edged down into the picture. As Sindy’s hair burst into flame, her face darkened in alarm. She seemed to raise the teapot, then stand, as her upper half was consumed. The dog waited faithfully as paper burned down around him. Then the entire box was black, twisted, spider-webbed with red, turning gray and gauzy, with a layer of ashes that Arkady blew away. Inside was a landmine, lightly charred, its two pressure pins up, triggered, still waiting for Jaak’s foot to push them down.
Arkady drew a cartoon car on a piece of paper. Crayons, he thought, were about all he lacked. Amenities for rehabilitated Special Investigator Renko included desk and conference table, four chairs, files and a closet that held a combination safe. Also, two “Deluxe” portable typewriters, two red outside phones with dials and two yellow intercoms without. He had two windows dressed with curtains, a wall map of Moscow, a rollaway brownboard, an electric samovar and an ashtray.
On the table Polina spread a black-and-white 360-degree panorama of the construction site and approaching shots of the Audi, then detailed color shots of the gutted car and driver. Minin hovered zealously. Jaak, forty hours without sleep, stirred like a boxer trying to rise before the count of ten.
“It was vodka that made the fire so bad,” Jaak said.
“Everyone thinks of vodka,” Polina sneered. “What really burns are seats because they’re polyurethane. That’s why cars burn so quickly, because they’re mostly plastic. The seat adheres to the skin like napalm. A car is just an incendiary device on wheels.”
Arkady suspected that not so long ago Polina had been the girl in pathology class with the best reports, illustrated and footnoted in punctilious detail.
“In these photographs, I first show Rudy still in the car, then after we’ve peeled him off and removed him, then a shot through the springs to show what fell through from his pockets: intact steel keys, kopecks melted with floor trash, hardware from the seat, including what was left of our transmitter.