Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [13]
“From when the tank blew,” Jaak said.
Arkady drew a stick figure in the car and, with a red pen, a circle around the stick feet. “What about Rudy?”
“Flesh in that condition is as hard as wood, and at the same time bones break as soon as you cut. It’s hard enough to pick the clothes off. I brought you this.” From a plastic bag Polina produced a newly buffed garnet and a hard puddle of gold, what was left of Rudy’s ring. The cool pride on her face reminded Arkady of the sort of cat that brings mice to its owner.
“You checked his teeth?”
“Here’s a chart. The gold ran and I haven’t found it, but there are signs of a filling in the second lower molar. This is all preliminary to a complete autopsy, of course.”
“Thank you.”
“Just one thing,” she added. “There’s too much blood.”
“Rudy was probably pretty cut up,” Jaak said.
Polina said, “People who are burning to death don’t explode. They’re not sausages. I found blood everywhere.”
Arkady squirmed. “Maybe the assailant was cut.”
“I sent samples to the lab to check the blood type.”
“Good idea.”
“You’re welcome.” Chin up, contemptuous from then on of the proceedings, she even sat just like a cat.
Jaak diagrammed the market on the brownboard, showing the relative positions of Rudy’s car, Kim, the line of customers, then, at a distance of twenty meters, the truck with VCRs. A second grouping was arranged in a loose orbit of ambulance, computer salesman, caviar van; then more space and half an orbit that included Gypsy jewelers, rockers, rug merchants, the Zhiguli.
“It was a big night. With Chechens there we’re lucky the whole place didn’t erupt.” Jaak stared at the board. “Our only witness states that Kim killed Rudy. At first I found it hard to believe, but looking at who was actually close enough to throw a bomb, it makes sense.”
“This is from a memory of what you saw in the confusion in the dark?” Polina asked.
“Like much of life.” Arkady searched his desk for cigarettes. No sleep? A little nicotine would take care of that. “What we have here is a black market, not the usual daytime variety for ordinary citizens, but a black market at night for criminals. Neutral territory and a very neutral victim in Rudy Rosen.” He remembered Rudy’s description of himself as Switzerland.
“You know, this was like spontaneous combustion,” Jaak said. “You get together enough thugs, drugs, vodka, throw in some hand grenades and something’s going to happen.”
“A type like that probably cheated someone,” Minin suggested.
“I liked Rudy,” Arkady said. “I forced him into this operation and I got him killed.” The truth was always good for embarrassment. Jaak looked pained by Arkady’s lapse, like a good dog that sees his master trip. Minin, on the other hand, seemed grimly satisfied. “The question is, why two firebombs? There were so many guns around, why not shoot Rudy? Our witness—”
“Our witness is Gary Orbelyan,” Jaak reminded him.
Arkady continued, “Who identifies Kim as an assailant. We saw Kim with a Malysh. He could have emptied a hundred bullets into Rudy more easily than throwing a bomb. All he had to do was pull the trigger.”
Polina asked, “Why two bombs instead of one? The first was enough to kill Rudy.”
“Maybe the point wasn’t just to kill Rudy,” Arkady said. “Maybe it was to burn the car. All his files, every piece of information—loans, deals, paper files, disks—were on the backseat.”
Jaak said, “When you kill someone, you want to leave the area. You don’t want to have to start moving files.”
“They’re all smoke now,” Arkady said.
Polina changed to a happier subject. “If Kim was