Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [15]
Blue was for the mafia from Long Pond, a northern dead-end suburb of barrack housing. Blue circles marked their interest in stolen cargo at Sheremetyevo Airport and prostitutes at the Minsk Hotel, but their main business was car parts. The Moskvitch auto factory, for example, sat in a blue circle. Rudy’s friend Borya Gubenko had not only risen to the top of Long Pond but had also brought Lyubertsy under his influence.
Islamic green was for the Chechens, Moslems from the Caucasus Mountains. A thousand lived in Moscow, with reinforcements that arrived in motorcades, all answering to the orders of a tribal leader called Makhmud. The Chechens were the Sicilians of the Soviet mafias.
Royal purple was reserved for Moscow’s own Baumanskaya mafia, from the neighborhood between Lefortovo Prison and the Church of the Epiphany. Their business base was the Rizhsky Market.
Finally, there was brown for the boys from Kazan, more a swarm of ambitious hit-and-run artists than an organized mafia. They raided restaurants on the Arbat, moved drugs and ran teenage prostitutes on the streets.
Rudy Rosen had been banker for them all. Just following Rudy in his Audi had helped Arkady to draw this brighter, darker Moscow. Six mornings a week—Monday through Saturday—Rudy had followed a set routine. A morning drive to a bathhouse run by Borya on the north side of town, then a swing with Borya to pick up pastries at Izmailovo Park and meet the Lyubers. Late-morning coffee at the National Hotel with Rudy’s Baumanskaya contact. Even lunch at the Uzbekistan with his enemy, Makhmud. The circuit of a modern Moscow businessman, always trailed by Kim on the motorcycle like a cat’s tail.
The night outside was still white. Arkady wasn’t sleepy or hungry. He felt like the perfect new Soviet man, designed for a land with no food or rest. He got up and left the office. Enough.
There was grillwork at each landing of the stairwell to catch “divers,” prisoners trying to escape. Maybe not only prisoners, Arkady thought on the way down.
In the courtyard, the Zhiguli was parked next to a dog van. Two dogs with bristling backs were chained to the van’s rear bumper. Ostensibly Arkady had two official cars, but gas coupons enough for only one because the oil wells of Siberia were being drained by Germany, Japan, even fraternal Cuba, leaving a thin trickle for domestic consumption. From his second car he’d also had to cannibalize the distributor and battery to keep the first one running, because to send the Zhiguli to the shop was equivalent to sending it on a trip around the world, where it would be stripped on the docks of Calcutta and Port Said. Gas was bad enough. Gas was the reason that defenders of the state slipped from car to car with a siphon tube and can. Also the reason dogs were leashed to bumpers.
Arkady got in through the passenger side and slid over to the wheel. The dogs shot the length of their chains and tried to claw through his door. He prayed and turned the key. Ah, at least a tenth of a tank of gas. There was a God.
Two right turns put him in Gorky Street’s gamut of shop windows, still lit. What was for sale? A scene of sand and palm trees surrounded a pedestal surmounted by a jar of guava jam. At the next store, mannequins fought over a bolt of chintz. Food stores displayed smoked fish as iridescent as oil slicks.
At Pushkin Square, a crowd spilled into the street. A year before there had been exhilaration and tolerance between competing bullhorns. A dozen different flags had waved: Lithuanian, Armenian, the czarist red, white and blue of the Democratic Front. Now all were driven from the field except for two flags, the Front’s and, on the opposite side of the steps, the red banner of the Committee for Russian Salvation. Each standard had its thousand adherents trying to outshout the other group. In between were skirmishes, the occasional body down and being kicked or dragged away. The militia had discreetly withdrawn