Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [122]
Peter said, “I was here earlier. In and out. Normally we don’t search the apartments of traffic victims.”
On the table where the birthday cake for the Berlin Wall had melted, a typewriter was set up with notes, paper and file cards. Peter wandered about, focusing field glasses, trying on an armband and an SS cap, like an actor let loose in a prop room. He lifted a helmet, the one Tommy had worn at the party.
“Alas, poor Jürgen, I knew him well.”
He laid down the helmet and picked up a dental mold. “Hitler’s teeth,” Arkady said.
Peter opened the mold. “Sieg heil!”
The short hairs on Arkady’s neck rose.
“Do you know why we lost the war?” Peter asked.
“Why did you lose the war?”
“It was explained to me by an old man. We were hiking in the Alps. We were on a high meadow surrounded by wildflowers when we stopped to eat. The subject of the war came up. He said the Nazis had committed ‘excesses,’ but the real reason Germany lost the war was because of sabotage. There were workers in the munitions factory who deliberately degraded the gunpowder in the shells to make our weapons ineffective. Otherwise we would have been able to hold out for an honorable peace. He described the grandfathers and boys fighting in the ruins of Berlin, stabbed in the back by those saboteurs. It was years later when I learned that those saboteurs were Russians and Jews, slave labor being starved to death while they worked. I remembered the flowers, the wonderful view, the tears in his eyes.”
He put the mold down, joined Arkady at the table and flipped through the file cards, notes and pages. “What are you looking for?” Arkady asked.
“Answers.”
They searched the drawers of the desk and night table, folders that were stuffed into cabinets, address books discovered under the bed. Finally, next to the phone in the kitchen, numbers without names were penciled on the wall. Peter gave a laugh of dark amusement, nailed one number with his finger and dialed the phone.
Considering the hour, the other end answered quickly. Peter said, “Grandfather, I’m coming over with my friend Renko.”
The elder Schiller padded around in a silk robe and velvet slippers. His living room was covered in Oriental carpets. His lamps had shades of stained glass.
“I was awake anyway. The middle of the night is the best time to read.”
The banker seemed to make a firm distinction between work and personal life. Bookshelves accommodated not tomes on banking regulations but art books that ran from Turkish rugs to Japanese ceramics. Objets d’art—a Greek bronze of a dolphin, Mexican skulls of sugar and jade, a Chinese alabaster dog—sat under spotlights arranged by someone who had taken great care to display eclectic pieces of modest size but unusual quality. A dark icon of a Madonna was in the traditional place, high in a corner that would have been the “beautiful corner” of a pre-Revolutionary peasant house. Its thick wood was split and the Madonna’s face was shrouded by smoke, which made her eyes seem all the more luminous.
Schiller poured tea into a gilded cup. He wore a brace under his bathrobe, Arkady realized, and leaned stiffly, marble from the waist up.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have any jam. I remember that Russians love their tea with jam.”
Peter paced back and forth.
“Walk,” his grandfather told him. “It’s good for the rug.” He turned to Arkady. “When he was a boy, Peter would march a kilometer on that carpet, back and forth. He always had too much energy. He can’t help it.”
“Why did the American have your number?” Peter asked.
“His book, his moronic book. He’s the sort who lurks in graveyards and thinks he has a career. He kept pestering me, but I refused to be interviewed by him. I suspect he gave my name to Benz.”
“The bank was not involved?” Arkady asked.
Schiller allowed himself the thinnest suggestion of a smile. “Bayern-Franconia would no more invest in the Soviet Union than in the far side of the moon. Benz approached me personally.”
Peter said, “Benz is a pimp. He runs a string