Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [23]
“Meat or cabbage?”
It took him a moment to return.
“Meat? Cabbage?” the vendor repeated and held up identical pies. Her own face was as round and coarse, her eyes sunk in a crease. “Come on, everyone else knows what they want.”
“Meat,” Arkady said. “And cabbage.”
She grunted, sensing indecision rather than appetite. Maybe this was his problem, Arkady thought, lack of appetite. She made his change and handed over two pies embellished by paper napkins dripping grease. He checked the ground. No dead flies, though the ones buzzing around looked depressed.
“You don’t want it?” the vendor asked.
Arkady was still seeing Irina, feeling the warm pressure of her and smelling not the rancid fumes of grease but the clean crispness of sheets. He seemed to be moving quickly through progressive stages of insanity, or else Irina was moving from oblivion to the unconscious, then to the conscious areas of his mind.
As the vendor leaned over her cart, a transformation took place. In the middle of her face appeared what was left of a girl’s embarrassment, of sad eyes lost between jowls, and she shrugged apologetically with round shoulders. “Eat it, don’t think about it.”
When Jaak brought the sodas Arkady awarded him both pies.
“No, thanks.” Jaak recoiled. “I used to like them before I started working with you. You ruined them for me.”
On Butyrski Street, past a long storefront of lingerie and lace, was a building of barred windows with a driveway that dipped by a guardhouse down to entrance stairs. Inside, an officer issued numbered aluminum tags to Arkady and Jaak. A grille with a heart-shaped pattern slid open and they followed a guard across a parquet floor, down a stairwell with rubber treads and into a corridor of calcified stucco lit by bulbs in wire cages.
Only one person had ever escaped from Butyrski Prison and that was Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. He had bribed the guard. In those days a ruble meant something.
“Name?” the guard asked.
A voice behind the cell door said, “Orbelyan.”
“Article?”
“Speculation, resisting arrest, refusal to cooperate with proper organs—what the fuck, I don’t know.”
The door opened. Gary stood stripped to the waist, his shirt tied turban-style around his head. With his rakishly broken nose and torso of tattoos, he looked more like a pirate marooned on a desert island than a man who had spent one night in jail.
“Speculation, resisting and refusal. Great witness,” Jaak said.
The interrogation room had a monastic simplicity: wooden chairs, metal desk, icon of Lenin. Arkady filled out the protocol form: date, city, his own name under the grand title “Investigator of Very Important Cases under the General Prosecutor of the USSR,” interrogated Orbelyan, Gary Semyonovich, born 3/11/60, Moscow, passport number, Armenian nationality …
“Naturally,” Jaak said.
Arkady went on. “Education and specialization?”
“Vocational. Medical industry,” Gary said.
“Brain surgeon,” Jaak said.
Unmarried, hospital orderly, not a Party member, criminal record of assault and possession of drugs for sale.
“Government honors?” Arkady asked.
Both Jaak and Gary laughed.
“It’s the next question on the protocol,” Arkady said. “Probably just looking to the future.”
After he wrote out the exact time, the questioning began, going over the same ground Jaak had covered at the crime site. Gary had been walking away from Rudy’s car when he saw it blow up, and then Kim throw in a second bomb.
“You were walking backwards from Rudy’s car?” Jaak asked. “How did you see all this?”
“I stopped to think.”
“You stopped to think?” Jaak asked. “What about?”
When Gary fell silent, Arkady asked, “Did Rudy change your forints and zlotys?”
“No.” Gary’s face went dark as a cloud.
“You were pretty mad.”
“I would have twisted his fat neck.”
“Except for Kim?”
“Yeah, but then Kim did it for me.” Gary brightened.
Arkady drew an X in the middle of a page and handed Gary the pen. “This is Rudy’s car. Mark where you were, then mark what else you saw.”
With