Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [40]
Arkady said, “A bomb inside the car, Kim outside. It seems a little redundant.”
Polina said, “At the assassination of Duke Ferdinand, which started World War I, there were twenty-seven terrorists with bombs and guns at different points along the procession route.”
“You’ve made a study of assassinations? Rudy was only a banker, not an heir to the throne.”
“In contemporary attacks by terrorists, especially against Western bankers, the car bomb is the weapon of choice.”
“You have made a study of this.” It made his heart sink.
“I’m still confused about the blood in Rudy’s car,” Polina admitted.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out. You know, there’s more to life than … death.”
Polina had the dark curls of a girl painted by Manet, Arkady thought. She ought to be in a lace collar and long skirt, sitting at a wrought-iron table on sun-dappled grass, not in a wreck on a dock talking about the dead. He noticed her eyes observing him. “You really do lead an empty life, don’t you?” she said.
“Wait a second,” Arkady said. Somehow the conversation seemed to have been, without any warning or logic, reversed.
“You said so yourself,” she pointed out.
“Well, you don’t have to agree.”
“Exactly,” Polina said. “You can lead your empty life, but you criticize how I lead mine, even though I’m working day and night for you.”
The first car blew with a muffled sound like a damp drum. A white flash mixed with the explosion of windshield and windows. After a blink, and while crystallized glass was still raining down, the car interior filled with flames. Polina entered the time in her notepad.
Arkady asked, “That didn’t have a blasting cap or a fuse? Just chemicals?”
“Just what you saw, although with solutions at different concentrations. I have others with phosphorus and aluminum powder. Those need a blasting cap or some sort of blow to detonate.”
“That one seemed pretty effective,” Arkady said.
He had expected some sort of spontaneous combustion, but not an explosion of such strength. Already the fire had taken root, the front seat and dash covered with lapping flames that produced dark, noxious smoke. How did anyone ever escape car fires? “Thanks for not letting me take a closer look,” Arkady said.
“Entirely my pleasure.”
“And I apologize for criticizing even by suggestion your professional dedication, since you’re the only member of the team who has shown any competence. I’m in awe, really.”
While Polina scrutinized him for sarcasm, he lit a cigarette. “I’d roll down the window if there were a window,” he said.
The second car burst into flame without the explosive force of the first, and the bomb in the third car was even weaker—hardly a blast at all, though it was followed by a steady, hardworking flame. The fourth met the initial standard. By now Arkady was a veteran observer and could appreciate the sequence: the initial eruption of crystallized safety glass, the blinding flare of ignition, the whump of compacted air, and then the two-step flowering of roseate flames and brown, toxic smoke. Polina jotted down notes. She had delicate hands made even smaller by the rolled cuffs of her coat. Her rapid writing was as neat as type.
Belov had said there would be a funeral for his father. Were they going to bury the body or a pot of ashes? They could skip the crematorium and bring the old man out here for a glorious postmortem ride in one of Polina’s flaming chariots. Irina could report it on the news as one more Russian atrocity.
It occurred to Arkady that cars were not meant for Russians. First of all, Russia didn’t have enough roads free of frost heaves and mud wallows. More important, vehicles capable of any speed should not be placed in the hands of people given to vodka and melancholy.
“Did you have something else planned tonight?” Polina asked.
“No.”
The fifth and sixth cars exploded almost simultaneously, then burned very differently, one developing into a bowl of fire and the other, already a burned-out shell, subsiding into guttering flames. No fire engines had arrived yet. The era of