Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [121]
“What’s Tima short for?” Arkady asked.
“Fatima.” Immediately she added, “I never said my name was Tima.”
“Did he take the car two nights ago?”
She crossed her arms. “Have you been watching me?”
“Do you come from Samarkand or Tashkent?”
“Tashkent. How do you know so much? I’m not talking to you.”
“How long ago tonight did he take the car?”
She set her face and starting walking again, wobbling on her heels. Uzbeks had once been the Golden Horde of Tamerlane that had swept from Mongolia to Moscow. This was the end, stumbling on the autobahn.
They drove into the Red Square parking lot and cruised through. There was no red Bronco. A contingent of businessmen were trooping loudly from vans into the sex club.
“Slumming,” Peter said. “The Stuttgart set. They’ll only touch the beer here and then they’ll go home and fuck their wives silly.” He shot a little gravel at them as he swung by.
Back on the road, Peter was calmer, as if he had reached some internal decision. Arkady relaxed, too, more in tune with the speed.
The city spread as it approached, not like wildfire, more like a battlefield of moths.
A red Bronco sat in front of Benz’s flat. The apartment was dark. They drove by twice, parked on the next block and returned on foot.
Peter stayed in the shadow of a tree while Arkady walked up the steps and pushed the button to the flat. No voice came over the intercom. No window lit upstairs.
Peter joined him. “He’s gone.”
“The car is here.”
“Maybe he went for a walk.”
“A midnight walk?”
Peter said, “He’s an Ossie, how many cars can he have? Renko, let’s act like detectives and see what we can find.”
He gave Arkady a flashlight, led him to the Bronco and opened the tweezers of a combination knife. The chrome on the front bumper was untouched, but its rubber guard sparkled in the flashlight’s beam. Peter squatted and teased from the rubber what looked like threads of glass.
“One reason it’s almost impossible to reprocess a Trabi is that the fiberglass body breaks up into such sharp splinters.” He dropped pieces into a paper envelope. “Dead or alive, a Trabi is very difficult to handle.”
Peter radioed in the Bronco’s plate. While they waited for an answer he shook pieces from the envelope into the ashtray, then turned the flame of his lighter directly on the threads. They lit like yellow kindling; strings of black ash rose on brown smoke, and a familiar, noxious aroma filled the car.
“Pure Trabi.” Peter blew out the flame. “Proving nothing. There’s not enough left of Tommy’s Trabi to match to this, but even a lawyer would have to say the Bronco hit something.”
The radio spoke rapid German. Peter wrote on a pad “Fantasy Tours” and the address of Boris Benz.
Arkady said, “Ask how many cars are registered in Fantasy’s name.”
Peter asked, then wrote on the pad the number 18. Also, “Pathfinders, Navajos, Cherokees, Troopers, Rovers.”
He put the phone back in its sleeve. “You said you never met Benz.”
“I said that Tommy met Benz.”
“You said that you and Tommy were on the highway because you were looking for Benz. You went to the sex club first.”
“Tommy saw him there a year ago.”
“Who was the connection? How did they meet?”
Arkady had succeeded in keeping Max’s name from Peter because Max was only one step away from Irina. It would be a bitter outcome, he thought, if he had come all this way just to drag her into Peter’s investigation.
Peter said, “Why would they meet? Tommy wanted to talk to Benz about the war?”
“I’m sure Tommy told him about it. He was interviewing people for a book about the war. He was obsessed with it. His apartment is a museum of the war.”
“I was there.”
“What did you think?”
Peter’s eyes looked energized, as if they had picked up electricity from the radio. From his jacket he produced a key. “I think we should visit this museum again.”
Swastikas stretched across two walls. The Wehrmacht map covered a third. On the shelves were Tommy’s collection of gas masks, tin panzers, a hubcap from Hitler’s touring car, assorted ammunition,