Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [177]
MCS: Yeah, I like her. It’s, uh, a funny thing—
DS: Well, she almost takes over the investigation—
MCS: Yes. It’s extraordinary to me. I had a, uh, back in Polar Star, remember the character named Natasha. She started taking over that part of the book. These books are in danger of being hijacked by the women who appear in them. And so Polina does make a bid for power there in the beginning of the book. Anyway, he’s investigating the death of a black market speculator and banker named Rudy Rosen, whose demise we see in the first few pages of the book. And once again he runs into the power lines of Moscow, but these are, these are new power lines.
DS: Well, things, uh, everything has changed, hasn’t it, since the last time? The demise of the Communist government.
MCS: Well, the, you know, it’s—I went there expecting to see a collapse, but it’s different. It’s very—you know, it’s a little bit like going, I went up to the Oakland Hills after the fire there. And you think you’re prepared for it, but you’re not, because you walk around Oakland and you see nothing but chimneys, and where there were cars there are puddles of aluminum. Hardened aluminum. And now, to walk around Moscow, you are walking around the remains—the ruins—of Communist rule. Of Soviet rule. And of course it was a sham, of course it was a façade, but when it came down it really made a mess. And this mess, it wasn’t quite a mess at the point right before the coup when I’m writing, but it was all falling. It was mid-descent, mid-collapse, at the time Red Square is set. So I went expecting that, and I went expecting a more prominent role, a more visible role for the gangs, but I really didn’t anticipate, uh, the … not even brazen. It goes beyond brazen. The simple fact of the gangs on the street, of the taxicabs that won’t pick up anyone without cigarettes, vodka, or foreign currency, of the women who knock on your door in the middle of the night. At the, at the—you go to a tourist bar and it’s full of racketeers. Russian racketeers. You go to the casinos and find the mafia there. You go into the streets and you find the black markets. Some of them, of course, a lot of the black markets are simply providing goods that are unavailable. That should be available for stores and are not. But a lot of—a number of the black markets are clearly selling stolen goods. And you’ll find—you go to the right street and the entire block lined with men selling stolen goods—and protected by the police.
DS: This is essentially the setting for Rudy’s demise. The explosion, enormous. The huge black market area where you can find almost anything.
MCS: Yeah.
DS: Meanwhile, you have a wonderful description on page 71 of, uh, Red Square and the almost empty GUM department store—
MCS: Yes.
DS: These are really interesting touches because here, where you can get almost any kind of good in a black market, you go into a department store and you can’t get anything.
MCS: Yeah. But, you know, all this stuff that the black market has has been diverted from where it was, and there are different ways to divert it. One way is, of course, to steal it. But a simpler way, and one that is more the norm, is simply to pay somebody—to pay somebody in the government who will ship it your way. So there’s this new hand-in-hand relationship between brazen, organized crime and the caretakers of the old system. Because they’re operating, they’re operating like, as if they’re officers of a bankrupt company. The company doesn’t function anymore, it doesn’t make anything, it doesn’t produce anything anymore, but it has a great deal of physical assets. It owned much of the country. And what it didn’t own directly, what the Party did not own directly, it controlled. It controlled everything. So now it was selling off those assets to the highest bidder. And some of the highest bidders are foreign companies. And many of those bidders are also mafias—mafias which have the hard currency.
DS: And it should be noted that we’re not talking about the Sicilian mafia.
MCS: No.
DS: This is a mafia—
MCS: It’s