Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [57]
Arkady got out and, before he was aware of it, stepped into water that overflowed the yard from an open pit. The sharp odor of lime overlaid ambient barnyard smells. In the pit, garbage, slops and animal bones stripped of skin floated in a stew that was pocked by rain. The fire was half again as tall as he was. It blazed in some sections and smoldered in others, individual flames blossoming around newspapers, gnawing on spoiled potatoes. A can rolled from the top of the pyre to the bottom, next to two neatly placed man’s shoes. Arkady picked one up and as quickly dropped it. The shoe was hot, literally steaming.
The whole yard glowed. The tractors were ancient models with rusty harrow disks, but both trucks were new, one the truck from which Jaak had bought his radio. Tractor attachments—reapers, balers, plows—were laid out along the shed; morning glories had grown around them, twined around tines, their petals folded for the night. Nothing stirred in the pens, no piggish grunts, no nervous clacking of a goat bell.
The garage was open. There were no working switches, but the light of the fire was sufficient for Arkady to see a white four-door Moskvitch with Moscow plates squeezed between oil cans and a tire vise. The car doors were locked.
The barn was cement, with empty stalls on one side. The other side was a butchering house. A white coat hung on a wall. It took a while for Arkady to see that it was a pig on a hook. The pig was headless, upside down and speckled with flies. Below it was a pail with cheesecloth black with crusted blood. Beside it was a long tallow paddle for stirring fat. The floor was cement, with blood grooves leading to a central drain. Against one end were butcher blocks, meat grinders and tallow pots as big as kettle drums on hooks standing before a hearth. On the blocks were perfume vials with labels that claimed both Sumatran origin and the rejuvenating powers of rhino horn. Why an endangered species would be famous for reproductive prowess, Arkady didn’t understand.
The shed’s double doors stood ajar, bent where a crowbar had forced the lock. Arkady swung them wide to the light of the fire. Unpacked VCRs, CD players, personal computers, hard disks and video games were stacked to the ceiling. Running suits and safari wear hung on racks, and a Japanese copier stood on slabs of Italian marble—all in all, a scene like a customs depot, except that it was in the middle of a potato field. The Lenin’s Path Collective hadn’t worked as a real farm for years, he realized. On the floor was a prayer rug; on a card table were dominoes and a newspaper. The paper’s headline was in Arabic script, but the masthead was half in Russian and said Grozny Pravda.
Arkady went outside to the fire. It was uneven, blazing through excelsior here, creeping through damp hay there. Paint rags burned in their own aura of colors. He pulled out a burning hoe shaft, poked in the flames and found nothing but charred brand names, Nike falling over Sony crashing onto Luvs, threatening to collapse over him.
As he stepped back, he noticed that the reflections of the fire betrayed a narrow track of footsteps leading between the butchering house and the shed to a meadow of tall wild grass that obscured two berms, low earthen walls serving no apparent purpose. At the end of one, cement steps went down to a steel hatch with a wheel lock that wore a bar and heavy padlock.
The second berm had a similar hatch without a bar. Arkady crouched as he entered because he felt how tight the space was. His lighter produced a weak glow, enough for him to see that he had stumbled into an army bunker. Command bunkers—capsules of buried reinforced concrete like this—had been built all around Moscow, then