Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [38]
Clearance from floor to ceiling was a meter and a half, sometimes less. It was crawl space excavated into a tunnel that worked its way over and around exposed pipes and valves. The underside of the house creaked overhead like a ship. He peeled cobwebs from his face and held his breath.
Claustrophobia was an old friend come along for the trip. The main thing was to keep moving from one tiny, shivering light bulb to the next. To breathe more evenly. To not think about the weight of the building pressing down on his back. To not consider the low quality of Soviet construction. To not imagine for a moment that the tunnel resembled a moldering grave.
At the last light bulb, Arkady squeezed through a second hatch and found himself on his hands and knees inside a low, windowless room that was smoothly plastered and painted and lit by a fluorescent tube. On the floor were mattresses, barbells and pulleys. The barbells were homemade from steel wheels crudely slotted to fit over bars. The pulleys were boiler plates cut up and strung with wire. On the walls were a full-length mirror and a picture of Schwarzenegger in total flex. A heavy bag hung by a chain from the ceiling. The air was pungent with sweat and talc.
Arkady got to his feet. Beyond was a second room with benches and weights on blocks. Books on bodybuilding and nutrition lay on a mattress. One bench was slick and showed the imprint of a sneaker. Set in the ceiling above the bench was a metal plate. There was a switch on the wall. Arkady turned the light off so that he wouldn’t be a silhouette. He stood on the bench, lifted the plate and slid it back. He was beginning to hoist himself up when a gun pressed against his head.
It was dark. Arkady’s head was halfway through the floor behind the stairs of the building foyer. The bench was a million miles below his swaying feet. The odor of stale urine wafted from the foyer floor. He could see a tricycle with no wheels, the corner detritus of cigarette packs and condoms and, on the other end of the automatic, Jaak.
“You scared me,” Jaak said. He pointed the gun up.
“Really?” Arkady felt as if more than his feet were dangling.
Jaak pulled him up. The foyer faced the opposite street from the way they had approached the building. Arkady leaned against the mailboxes, which were torched, as usual. The foyer light was broken, of course. No wonder people got killed.
Jaak was embarrassed. “You were taking forever, so I came around to see if there was another way in just as you popped up.”
“I won’t do it again.”
Jaak said, “You should have a gun.”
“If I had a gun, we’d be a suicide pact.”
Arkady still felt dizzy when they went outside.
“Let’s just watch the motorcycle,” Jaak suggested.
When they came around the building, Kim’s beautiful bike was gone.
The militia towed vehicular wrecks to a dock near the South Port, handy to the metal stamps and auto factories of the Proletariat Borough. Whatever was remotely reusable had been stripped from them. These were the bones of cars, and they had a kind of dignity, like dried flowers. The dock had a vista of the entire southern end of Moscow; it was not Paris, granted, but it possessed a certain sweep, the occasional gold cap of a church flashing in the shadow of industrial chimneys.
The evening sky was still lit. Arkady found Polina at the end of the dock working with a brush, cans of paint and squares of pressed wood. She had unbuttoned her raincoat, a concession to the balmy weather.
“Your message sounded urgent,” Arkady said.
“I thought you should see this.”
“What?” He looked around.
“You’ll see.”
He was losing patience. “There’s no emergency? You’re just working?”
“You’re working, too.”
“Well, I lead an obsessed but empty life. Don’t you want to go dancing or see a movie with a friend?” Irina’s newscasts had begun and he knew there was