Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [55]
Was he in an emotional state? He supposed so. Wasn’t everybody, all the time? Had anybody ever, awake or asleep, experienced a totally nonemotional state? To his right, a swale of trees sank into steam flowing from the pool. He climbed down and then up through them using branches as handrails until he came to a real handrail of metal, cold and sweaty to the touch, and pulled himself onto an apron of concrete.
He walked around a locked and shuttered changing house until he came to the edge of the water. Vapor rose not in wisps but as white and dense as smoke off the surface of the water. This was the largest swimming pool in Moscow, a perfect factory for the fog that wrapped around him and made his eyes smart from chlorine. He knelt. The water was heated, warmer than he had expected. Although he had assumed the pool was closed, the lamps were on, sodium halos hanging in the mist. He heard the slap of water against the sides, and then not words but perhaps someone humming. He wasn’t sure of the direction, but he thought he heard feet strolling around the pool’s perimeter. Whoever it was hummed not so much tunelessly as idly and in snatches, in the manner of someone who believes himself or herself totally alone. Arkady guessed from the lightness of the step and voice that it was a woman, probably an attendant or a lifeguard who felt herself at home.
Fog was a great confuser. On a trawler, Arkady remembered a veteran seaman who had listened to a distant foghorn for an hour before discovering that the sound came from an open bottle ten meters away. “Chattanooga Choo Choo”—that’s what she was humming. A classic. Unless no one was there, because suddenly she was silent. Waiting for her to start again, he tried to light a cigarette, but the match was dowsed instantly and the cigarette crumpled into wet paper and tobacco. How hard was it raining? He heard her from a new direction, straight ahead and higher, nearly level with the lamps. Her voice faded, paused, and he heard the flexing of a diving board. There was a flash of white dropping through the steam and the swallowed splash of a clean entry.
Arkady resisted the temptation to clap for what was, he thought, an unusual dive at every stage: finding the ladder, climbing the rungs by feel, walking out onto the high board and keeping her balance while locating the board’s end with her toes, finally pushing down against the strength of the board and flying off into … nothing. He expected to hear her surface; he imagined she would be an expert swimmer, the sort who did laps with languid, tireless strokes. But there was no sound besides the steady drumming of rain on the pool and the irregular, barely audible rush of traffic from the embankment road.
“Hello?” Arkady called. He stood and walked along the side. “Hello?”
The other customers in the Dream Bar of the Kazan Railway Station carried suitcases, duffels, cardboard boxes and plastic bags, so Arkady didn’t feel out of place with Jaak’s radio. Julya’s mother was a stocky peasant dressed in discards sent her over the years by a chic, long-legged daughter: rabbit-fur coat, denim skirt and lacy hose. She consumed sausages and beer while Arkady ordered tea. Jaak was half an hour late.
“Julya won’t meet her own mother’s train. She won’t even send Jaak, oh, no. She sends a stranger.” She studied Arkady. His jacket smelled like wet wash and sagged around the gun in his pocket. “You don’t look Swedish to me.”
“You’ve got a good eye.”
“She needs my permission to go, you know. That’s the only reason I’m here. But the princess is too good to come to the train herself. And now we have to wait?”
“Let me get you another sausage.”
“Big spender.”
They waited another thirty minutes before he took her outside to the taxi line. Clouds smothered the spire lights of the two other railway stations