Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [53]
“Well, that’s about as much as I can take,” Arkady told Belov and started back down the path.
“There’s more.” Belov caught up.
“That’s why I’m going.” Gul was still ranting on.
“We were hoping you would say a few words now that he’s dead.”
“Boris Sergeyevich, if I had been the investigator of my mother’s death, I would have arrested my father. I gladly would have killed him.”
“Arkasha—”
“Just the idea that this monster died quietly in his bed will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
Belov’s voice dropped. “He didn’t.”
Arkady stopped. He forced himself to be calm. “You said it was a closed coffin. Why?”
Belov had trouble drawing breath. “At the end the pain was so great. He said the only thing holding him together was cancer. He didn’t want to die that way. He said he preferred the officer’s way out.”
“He shot himself?”
“Forgive me. I was in the next room. I …”
As Belov’s knees gave way, Arkady eased him onto a bench. He felt incredibly stupid; he should have seen what was in the old man’s face before this. Belov dug into his jacket, twisted around and gave Arkady a gun. It was a black Nagant revolver and four squat bullets as polished as old silver. “He wanted you to have this.”
“The general always had a good sense of humor,” Arkady said.
There was brisk business at a kiosk beside Vysotsky’s grave when Arkady got back to the gate. Now that the sun was out, fans were buying pins, posters, postcards and cassettes of the singer, dead ten years and more popular than ever. The number 23 tram stopped right across the street; it was the handiest souvenir run in Moscow. Around the gate were beggars, peasant women with white kerchiefs and sun-browned faces, legless men with crutches and carts. They congregated around worshipers leaving the cemetery’s little yellow church. Coffin lids dressed in crepe and wreaths of sharp-smelling evergreens and carnations rested against the church front. Seminarians sold Bibles from a card table, asking forty rubles for the New Testament.
Carrying his father’s gun in his pocket, Arkady felt a little dizzy and had some difficulty in discriminating. As much as he saw the ceremonies of human grief—a widow polishing the photo on a headstone—he saw just as clearly a robin wrestling a worm from a grave. He had no sense of focus. A funeral bus pulled inside the gate and the family clambered down its front steps. A coffin was slid out the rear, slipped and hit the ground with a bang. A girl in the family made a comic grimace. That was the way Arkady felt. Outside the gate, the Rodionov-Penyagin party was still milling around the sidewalk. Arkady didn’t feel in decent enough shape to talk to either the prosecutor or the general, so he slipped into the church.
There was a crowd inside. All standing, no pews. The atmosphere was like a crowded, colorful train station, with incense for cigarette smoke, and instead of a loudspeaker, an unseen choir whose voices hovered in the vaulted ceiling singing about the lamb of God. Icons—Byzantine, age-darkened faces in cutouts of bright silver—tipped down from the walls. Icon candles were wicks suspended in glass cups of oil. Strategically placed on the floor were cans of oil to keep the flames alight. Votive candles came in thirty-kopeck, fifty-kopeck and one-ruble sizes. Candles burned and sputtered in pools of pearly wax; candle stands glowed like softly burning trees. Lenin had described religion as a hypnotic flame for a reason. Women in black gathered contributions on brass plates covered with red felt. To the left, a store sold postcards of miraculous relics. To the right, three women, also in black dresses and scarves, hands crossed on their breasts, lay in open coffins surrounded by candles on arms of wrought iron and wax.
In a chapel next to the coffins, a priest taught a boy how to bow by pushing down his head. Arkady found himself forced by the sheer press of bodies into the “devil’s corner,” where confessions were heard. A priest in a wheelchair looked up expectantly, his long beard as white as rays of the moon. Arkady felt an interloper