Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [26]
“Ali is very fond of me, so he doesn’t like to hear this sort of accusation.”
“That’s not an accusation,” Arkady said. “I was there, too. Maybe we’re both innocent.”
“I was at home asleep. Doctor’s orders.”
“What do you think might have happened to Rudy?”
“With this medication I have and oxygen tubes, I look like a cosmonaut and I sleep like a baby.”
“What happened to Rudy?”
“My opinion? Rudy was a Jew, and a Jew thinks he can eat with the devil and keep his nose from being bitten off. Maybe Rudy knew too many devils.”
Six days a week, Rudy and Makhmud had taken Turkish coffee together while they bargained over exchange rates. Arkady remembered seeing the fleshy Rudy across the table from the bone-thin Makhmud, and wondering who would eat whom.
“You were the only one he was afraid of.”
Makhmud rejected the compliment. “We had no problem with Rudy. Other people in Moscow think the Chechens should go back to Grozny, back to Kazan, back to Baku.”
“Rudy said you were out to get him.”
“He was lying.” Makhmud dismissed the idea like a man used to demanding belief.
“It’s hard to argue with the dead,” Arkady noted as tactfully as he could.
“Do you have Kim?”
“Rudy’s bodyguard? No. He’s probably looking for you.”
Makhmud said to the front of the car, “Beno, could we have some coffee?”
Beno passed back a thermos, small cups and saucers, spoons and a paper bag of sugar cubes. The coffee came out of the thermos like black sludge. Makhmud’s hands were large, fingers and nails curved; the rest of him might have shrunk with age, but not the hands.
“Delicious,” Arkady said. He felt his heart fibrillate with joy.
“The mafias used to have real leaders. Antibiotic was a theatrical promoter, and if he liked a show he’d hire the whole hall for himself. He was like family to the Brezhnevs. A character, a racketeer, but his word was good. Remember Otarik?”
“I remember he was a member of the Writer’s Union even though his application had twenty-two grammatical errors,” Arkady said.
“Well, writing was not his main occupation. Anyway, now they’re replaced by these new businessmen like Borya Gubenko. It used to be that a gang war was a gang war. Now I have to watch my back two ways, from hit men and militia.”
“What happened to Rudy? Was he part of a gang war?”
“You mean a war between Moscow businessmen and bloodthirsty Chechens? We’re always the mad dogs; Russians are always the victims. I’m not addressing you personally, but as a nation you see everything backwards. Could I give you a small example from my life?”
“Please.”
“Did you know that there was a Chechen Republic? Our own. If I bore you, stop me. The worst crime of old people is to bore young people.” Even as he said this, Makhmud clutched Arkady’s collar again.
“Go on.”
“Some Chechens had collaborated with the Germans, so in February 1944, mass meetings were called in every village. There were soldiers and brass bands; people thought it was a military celebration and everyone came. You know what those village squares are like—a loudspeaker in each corner playing music and announcements. Well, this announcement was that they had one hour to gather their families and possessions. No reason given. One hour. Imagine the scene. First the pleading, which was useless. The panic of looking for small children, for grandparents, forcing them to dress and dragging them out the door to save their lives. Deciding what you should take, what you can carry. A bed, a bureau, a goat? The soldiers loaded everyone into trucks. Studebakers. People thought the Americans were behind it and Stalin would save them!”
In Makhmud’s stare, Arkady saw black irises locked like the lens of a camera. “In twenty-four hours there wasn’t a Chechen left in the Chechen Republic. Half a million people gone. The trucks put them on trains, in unheated freight cars which traveled for week after week after week in the middle of winter. Thousands died. My first wife, my first three boys. Who knows at what siding the guards threw their bodies out? When the survivors were finally allowed to climb down from