Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [144]
At two, Arkady delivered her to the gallery, then went to Zoo Station and put more coins in his locker. He tried calling Peter, but there was no answer. Peter was fed up or had lost interest. Either way Arkady had lost contact.
As soon as he put the phone back on the hook it rang. Arkady stepped back. Along the sidewalk, Africans were selling Ossies what appeared to be French luggage. Backpackers with long hair queued sleepily at the currency exchanges. No one came forward to answer the phone. He picked it up.
Peter said, “Renko, you’d make a terrible spy. A good spy never calls from the same place twice.”
“Where are you?”
“Look across the street. See the man in the nice leather jacket talking on the phone? That’s me.”
In Good Weather, the drive out of the city was like a summer jaunt. They went south through the evergreens of the Grunewald, then by the waters of the Havel and hundreds of small boats, their sails catching as much sun as breeze, at a distance looking like gulls.
“There are some benefits to being German. In the middle of your first call I heard a train on your end of the line. Being efficient people, the transport organization was able to tell me at what subway and surface stations around the city trains were arriving at exactly that time. I narrowed the list to Zoo Station because, of course, you’re Russian. Zoo was the one station you were sure to know. You were bound to head to familiar places.”
“You’re brilliant. It’s undeniable.”
Peter didn’t argue the point. “When you called yesterday from Zoo Station I was there waiting for you. I followed you around Berlin. You noticed the city has changed?”
“Yes.”
“When the Wall came down there was such intensity of celebration. East and West Berlin back together. It was like a wild night of love-making. Afterwards was like waking in the morning and finding this woman you had yearned for so long was going through your pockets, your wallet, taking the keys to your car. The euphoria was gone. That’s not the only change. We were ready for the Red Army. We weren’t ready for the Russian mafia. I was behind you yesterday. You saw them.”
“It’s like Moscow.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Compared to your gangsters, German criminals are a Salzburg choir. German killers clean up after themselves. Russian mafias just shoot each other on the streets. Boutiques are keeping doors locked, hiring private guards, moving to Hamburg or Zurich. It’s bad business.”
“You don’t seem upset.”
“They haven’t reached Munich yet. Life was boring until you came along.”
Arkady felt that once again Peter had taken flight, and all that he could do was see where he would land. He didn’t know how long Peter had followed him, and waited to hear the names of Max Albov, Irina Asanova, Margarita Benz.
Somewhere in the woods, among the cottages and country lanes, the highway crossed the former East German border and Potsdam came into view. At least the part of Potsdam that was proletariat housing and might have appeared promising in an architectural rendering, but in reality was ten stories of anonymous balconies with fractured cement.
Old Potsdam was hidden in a canopy of beech trees. Peter parked on a leafy boulevard in front of a three-story town house. This was the kaiser’s kind of mansion, a wrought-iron gate and portico wide and high enough for a carriage, marble stairs to double doors, classical stone facing, carved scrollwork above the windows that were high enough to show coffered ceilings, an artist’s tower rising above a tiled roof. Except that so much of the facing had fallen off the bricks that a makeshift scaffolding covered the second floor. A wooden ramp ran down one side of the stairs; the other side was broken.