Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [149]
“That’s all you want?”
“That’s all I want.”
They drove through the now-familiar hordes of the Ku’damm, under neon grails of AEG, SIEMENS, NIKE and CINZANO below a sky of pale lavender. The ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church looked out of place because it was the only building in sight that wasn’t new. Hard behind it stood the glass wall of the Europa Center, starting to blaze with office lights. Borya parked in the Center’s garage.
In its shopping area, the Europa Center had more than a hundred shops, restaurants, cinemas and cabarets. Borya led Arkady past the entreaties of sushi bars, first-run westerns, cultured pearls, Swiss watches and nail salons. His eye had a speculative glint, as if he were considering expanding on his golf range.
“Makhmud trusts you. With you along, he might listen.”
“He’s here?” Arkady asked.
“It’s one thing for Max to say that you’re as good as on the team. If you do this for me, this little thing, then I’ll know you’re okay. He’s right upstairs. You know how he is about his health.”
They climbed three flights. Arkady had expected that any meeting with Makhmud Khasbulatov would take place in the back of a car or in the corner of a dimly lit restaurant, but at the top of the stairs was a brightly illuminated carpeted foyer and a counter lined with a selection of organic shampoos, sunglasses and chelated vitamins. For sixty Deutsche marks the clerk issued them towels, rubber slippers and metal-bead chains with locker keys.
“A bathhouse?” Arkady asked.
“A sauna,” Borya said.
The changing room had lockers, showers, hair dryers, complimentary mousse. Arkady hung his miserable few clothes on hangers, locked up and slipped the chain over his hand like a bracelet. Borya had to stuff his wardrobe in. Most men when they stripped looked misshapen or diminished. An athlete like Borya Gubenko had undressed before other people all his life. He wore physical ease. Arkady looked starved alongside him.
“Makhmud comes here?” Arkady asked.
“Makhmud is a health nut. Wherever he is, here or Moscow, he spends an hour a day in a sauna.”
“How many other Chechens are here?” At the South Port car market, Makhmud never had less than half a dozen.
“A few. Relax,” Borya said. “I just want you to talk to Makhmud face-to-face. For whatever reason, he likes you. Also I want you to see that everything I do here is legitimate.”
“This is a public place?”
Borya pushed open the sauna door. “It couldn’t be more public.”
Arkady was used to utilitarian bathhouses, to pale Russian torsos and the smell of alcohol working its way out as sweat. This was different. A veranda with a tropical forest of plastic plants opened onto a circular indoor swimming pool surrounded by marble steps. Swimming, floating, stretched across chaise longues were naked bodies so pink they looked as if they had just rolled in snow. Male, female, boys and girls. The scene would have been hedonistic if it hadn’t been so serious. They looked as fit as Olympians and as stiff as mummies, some with the embellishment of a towel, some not. A man with a goatee and a belly of gray hair walked up the steps as gravely as a senator. Chechens were easy to find. Two of them leaned on the balustrade watching a woman swim slowly back and forth in bathing cap and goggles, nothing else. Although Chechens would never allow their wives to go naked in public, they had no objection if Germans wanted to.
Toddlers with hair as fair as goose down ran out of a dining area, their shrieks