Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [132]
The void left by the destruction of the Wall and all this attendant apparatus was more immense than its presence had been. An image returned that was more connection than memory. He had been at this same point one summer night long ago. Nothing special had happened except that he had noticed a handler with a brace of dogs that were trotting excitedly along the base of the inner wall. The handler was East German, not Soviet, and the way he kept the dogs encouraged but in check was exactly the same way the charioteer up on her pedestal lightly reined her horses. The dogs had sniffed the ground, then turned, straining on their leads, in Arkady’s direction. He had had the irrational fear—he was a young officer who had done nothing wrong—that they were tracking him, that they could smell his treasonous lack of fervor. He had stood his ground and the dogs had turned aside before they came near. From then on, though, he had never looked at the Gate without seeing in the chariot’s silhouette a handler and dogs.
Arkady moved into the lights and crossed in long, cautious steps. On the other side was the Tiergarten, a park of well-behaved flowerbeds and well-illuminated avenues. It took him twenty minutes to walk the length of the Tiergarten and around its zoological garden to Zoo Station. There the subway emerged to ride above the street. It was the only train stop that West Berliners had been allowed to use to go east. It was also the station where Soviets had been delivered when they went west.
At street level, much of what Arkady remembered was covered with spray paint. Currency-exchange windows were shuttered, though a late-night drug trade flourished in the doorways. Overhead, though, less had changed. The same narrow-gauge tracks ran by the same elevated platforms under the same glass roof. Lockers were still available twenty-four hours a day. He stowed the videotape he had brought from Munich.
Phones were lined up on the street under the station. Arkady unfolded a wad of paper and called the number Peter Schiller had given him.
Peter answered on the eighth ring, sounding irritable. “Where are you?”
“Berlin. And you?” Arkady asked.
“You know I’m in Berlin. You called this afternoon to say I had to drive in the damn rain all day to be here. You know this is a Berlin number. Who are you with?”
A train came into the station. The sound traveled down through the girder that supported the phone. “Good,” Arkady said. “Then, I’ll try you tomorrow at noon at this same number. Maybe I’ll know more then.”
“Renko, if you think you can lead—”
Arkady hung up. It was a comfort to know that Peter was raging somewhere close by, nearer than Munich but farther than arm’s reach.
He took the same route back through the park. Again he anticipated the sight of a cement barrier so intensely lit that it rose like a wall of ice. Again he crossed nothing but rubble covered by springy grass and nodding heads of flowers.
He told himself he should have more faith.
The morning was bright, dry, not a cloud in the sky. Arkady and Max strolled the same route he had taken the night before. Irina was at the gallery, helping with the installation of the show.
Max was the sort of animal that basked in the sun. He wore a suit the color of butter. In the windows they passed he looked as if he were being importuned by his companion for loose change, a meal, a business opportunity. Then he would put his hand on Arkady’s arm as if to say, “Look at this raffish friend I have in tow.” Their eyes would meet, and in the small black center of his irises Arkady could read that Max had not slept with Irina during the night, and that his bed had been no more comfortable than Arkady’s bare floor.
“It’s a developer’s dream,” Max said. “This side of Berlin always had the grandeur. University, opera, cathedral, the great museums