Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [176]
“Let’s wait with them,” Irina said.
They walked down the steps, through the defense ring of the Afghan vets and past a row of candles freshly lit. Other vets in wheelchairs had arrived and had run chains through the spokes of their wheels. Women shielded them with umbrellas. Now, that must have made a parade on the way here, Arkady thought.
“Keep walking,” Irina said. “I didn’t get down here before. I want to see.”
People were sitting, standing, slowly circulating as if at a fair. They would all have different memories later, Arkady was sure. One would say that the atmosphere around the White House was quiet, grim, purposeful; another would remember a circus air. If they lived.
All his life Arkady had avoided marches and demonstrations. This was the first one he had ever willingly come to. The same could be said, he suspected, of the other Muscovites around him. Of the construction workers who formed the unshaven and unarmed inner troops. Of the mousy apparatchiks who set down their briefcases to hold each other’s hands and form a human ring, so many that there were fifty rings of them around the White House. Of the women doctors who somehow, out of empty hospital storerooms, had scavenged bandages.
He had an urge to see each of their faces. He wasn’t the only one. A priest moved along a row giving absolution. He noticed artists who were making white pencil portraits on black paper, passing them as gifts.
The mystery is not the way we die, it’s the way we live. The courage we have at birth becomes hoarded, shriveled, blown away. Year after year, we become more alone. Yet, holding Irina’s hand, for this moment, for this night, Arkady felt that he could swing the world.
A piece of paper was pushed into his other hand. Look at this face, it was familiar, it was the one he was born with. Sound grew as a vortex in the rain. Overhead a helicopter shook the air and shot a flare that dropped, a matchhead in a well.
IT WAS ALL FALLING
An excerpt from Don Swaim’s 1992 interview with Martin Cruz Smith …
… in which the author discusses his visit to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, his picnic with a Russian mafioso, and the perils of waiting in line for vodka.
Don Swaim: So, Arkady Renko is back … and he’s back in, uh, relatively good graces—
Martin Cruz Smith: Relatively, yeah.
DS: I say relatively because he runs into a new, uh, Commissioner of Police … no, a new Head Prosecutor.
MCS: Yes, a new City Prosecutor—
DS: A new City Prosecutor with whom he butts heads, of course, which is not unusual for Arkady. It’s been his pattern all along. The last time we saw Arkady he was on a fishing trawler, or a, uh—
MCS: A factory ship.
DS: A factory ship—
MCS: Yeah.
DS:—that processes fish, and was, uh, pulled out of his enforced retirement to solve a murder onboard that ship. Now he is back in Moscow as a special investigator with his own staff. This is kind of unusual, so tell me about that.
MCS: Well, I spent some time with a prosecutor’s investigator in Moscow for this book. And, uh, he described to me how in fact he gets his, uh, he has his own investigators and they take in detectives from the militia. It’s sort of a split system there. The prosecutor’s a little bit like our District Attorney, and they put a team together for, uh, to investigate different crimes. And they do it partly, the, the person in charge is the investigator and then he has these detectives and you can, um, you can pick or choose your detectives there—who you want to use and who you don’t want to use and quite often you take who you can get because you don’t think you’re going to get anyone better. Arkady, uh, has a typical Russian kind of hand, in that he plays what he’s dealt, to some degree, which is, uh—there’s one detective he would not necessarily want to use, a man named Minin, a Communist of the old school. And then he has Jaak, who’s an Estonian, and probably, uh, not, not a party man at all. And he has Polina, a very forthright pathologist.
DS: She’s great.