Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [127]
“Stas was always curious about you. I’m not surprised you’re friends. Max says you’re both artifacts of the cold war.”
“We are. I’m like a piece of marble you find in an ancient ruin. You pick it up, turn it around in your hand and ask, ‘What was this? Part of a horse trough or part of a noble statue?’ I want to show you something.” He took out an envelope, opened it and showed her the paper and the one word scribbled inside.
“My name,” she said.
“It’s my father’s writing. I hadn’t heard from him in years. This must have been almost the last thing he did before he died. You actually talked to him?”
“I wanted to reach you without causing trouble so I tried your father.”
Arkady tried to imagine this. It sounded like a dove flying into a furnace, though his father had been a fairly cold furnace in his last years.
“He told me what a hero you were, how they tried to break you but that you forced the prosecutor’s office to take you back, that they gave you the most difficult cases and that you never lost. He was proud. He went on and on. He said he saw you often and that you’d write me.”
“What else?”
“That you were too busy for women, but women were always chasing you.”
“None of this rang a false note?”
“He said the only problem with you was that you were a fanatic and that sometimes you put yourself in God’s place. That some things only God could judge.”
“If I were General Kiril Renko, I wouldn’t have been so eager to see the face of God.”
“He said he thought about you more and more. Did you have women?”
“No. I was in psychiatric cells for a while, then I was in Siberia on the move, and then I was fishing. There was limited opportunity.”
She stopped him. “Please, I remember Russia. There’s always opportunity. And when you got back to Moscow, you must have had a woman there.”
“I was in love. I wasn’t looking for women.”
“In love with me?”
“Yes.”
“You are a fanatic.”
They walked along a pond that bore snowy down and fine drops of rain like pearls. Was it the same lake as before?
“Arkasha, what are we going to do?”
They left the park for a university café that had stainless-steel machines hissing into pots of milk and posters of Italy—ski slopes of the Dolomites, colorful tenements in Naples—on the walls. The other patrons were students with open books and bowl-sized cups of coffee. They took a table by the window.
Arkady talked about working his way across Siberia, from Irkutsk to Norilsk to Kamchatka to the sea.
Irina talked about New York, London, Berlin. “Theater work in New York was good, but I couldn’t join the union. They’re like Soviet unions—worse. I waited on tables. In New York, waitresses are fantastic. So hard and so old you think they waited on Alexander the Great or the pharaohs. Hard workers. An art gallery. They wanted someone with a European accent. I was part of the gallery ambience, and I started getting involved in art again. What no one was interested in then was the Russian avant-garde. You know, you expected to see me in Russia and I expected to see you walk into an art gallery on Madison Avenue, dressed in a proper suit, good shoes, tie.”
“Next time we should coordinate dreams.”
“Anyway, Max was visiting the Liberty office in New York. He produced a show on Russian art and happened to interview me and said if I was ever in Munich and needed work to call him. A year later I did. I still do some work for Berlin galleries. They’re always looking for pieces of Revolutionary art because now the prices are phenomenally high.”
“You mean the art of our defunct and discredited Revolution?”
“Is auctioned at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Collectors can’t get enough. You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”
“I was in trouble. Not now.”
“I mean with your work.”
“Work has its difficult moments. The good people die and the wrong people walk away with the spoils. My career seems to be in a shadow, but I’m thinking of taking a holiday, a vacation from professional pursuits.”
“And do what?”
“I could become a German. Transitionally, of course. First I’d turn into a