Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [170]
Arkady looked in the direction Borya had gone. “I’d like to see.”
“Why not?” Max jumped off the truck, happy to oblige.
The space inside the bunker was narrow, designed for a dozen men to sweat out a nuclear holocaust and live like apes around a vented generator so that they could radio troops that had been crisped in the field. The generator, throbbing like a Trabi, powered red emergency lights. Borya was covering a painting with an oilcloth.
“It’s tight,” Max said. “We had to get rid of the radiation counters. They didn’t work anyway.”
He played a flashlight. The eye imagines a mine with veins of malachite, lapis or gold twisting into the ground. This was even brighter. Some of the paintings were crated, but most were not, and the beam lit a canvas covered with the primal stripes of Matiushin, in colors as fresh and vivid as the day they were painted. Max moved the beam across a palm tree by Sarian, Vrubel’s swans, radiant suns of Iuon, an angelic cow by Chagall. An ogre by Lissitzky overlapped erotic sketches by Annenkov. Above a kaleidoscope by Popova was a fighting cock, all whirling feathers, by Kandinsky. Arkady felt he had stepped into a mine of images, as if a culture had been buried.
Max shared his pride. “This is the greatest collection of Russian avant-garde art in the world, outside of the Tretyakov Gallery. Of course the Ministry didn’t know what they were confiscating because the militia doesn’t have any taste. The people they stole from did, however, and that’s what matters, right? First the Revolution confiscated all the private collections. The revolutionaries themselves wanted the most revolutionary paintings. Then Stalin purged his old friends and the militia got its second harvest of great art. And it kept on harvesting, right through Khrushchev and Brezhnev, hiding it all away beneath the Ministry. That’s how great collections are built. Let’s give Rodionov credit because when he was given the task of cleaning up the Ministry archives he recognized ‘Red Square’ and it led him to all these, which are great art but not in the class of ‘Red Square.’ He also had the sense to know that while he could smuggle the painting out himself, he needed someone more sophisticated to both get it out and legally put it on the market. You have the painting?”
Arkady said, “Yes. Do you have the money and the ticket?”
Borya looked around with the experience of a man who knew how complicated transactions could be. “It’s crowded here. We need more room.”
Max led the way into the butchering house. The flashlight picked butcher blocks, meat grinders and waist-high tallow pots out of the dark. The pig still hung on the wall hook, exuding an odor of swamp gas.
Max shared cigarettes. “I’m not surprised to see you. What I do find hard to believe is that you’re willing to make an arrangement. That simply isn’t like you.”
“Yet here I am and here’s the painting,” Arkady said.
“So you say. I think that fifty thousand dollars is high, considering there’s no one else you can sell it to. You don’t have the provenance or the Knauer crate.”
“You agreed.”
“Tonight of all nights, it’s difficult to get money together,” Max said.
Borya stared out at the rain. “Take the painting.”
Max said, “You’re always in a hurry. We can work this out between intelligent men.”
“What is it with the two of you?” Borya asked. “I don’t get it.”
“Renko and I have a uniquely intimate relationship. We’re practically partners already.”
“Like last night in Berlin? When you came down from the apartment, you said Renko and the woman weren’t there. I’m starting to think I should have been the one to go up. Now that I think about it, I’ve done all the work.”
“Don’t forget Rita,” Arkady reminded him. “She must have overwhelmed Rudy.”
Borya’s shrug became a smile. “Rudy wanted to get into the art business with us, so we let him. He thought someone was coming from Munich with a fabulous picture for