Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [63]
On the middle shelf was a gray criminal code book stuffed with the sloppy addenda of daily changing laws: protocol forms for investigation, search, interrogation; red directory of detectives in the Moscow region; loose Makarov slugs in copper casings. There were a surveillance photo of Rudy, a mug shot of a younger Kim, Polina’s pictures of the black market and of the burned shell of Rudy’s car. Also an interoffice envelope. Arkady opened it and found the German videotape he had given Jaak, along with two developed stills. So Jaak had got the pictures done.
They were individual photographs of the woman in the beer garden. On the reverse side of one, Jaak had written: “Identified by reliable source as ‘Rita,’ emigrated to Israel 1985.”
A romantic name, Rita, short for the flower, marguerite. He guessed Julya was the source. If Rita had married a Jew and got out, Julya would remember her.
Israeli? The combination of blond hair, black sweater and gold chain struck Arkady as a classic German style, added to a full red mouth and line of the cheek that were pure Slav. Why wasn’t she in the Jerusalem tape instead of the Munich one? Why had Arkady seen her in Rudy’s car and intercepted a glance from her that had read him and his Zhiguli as a man and machine all too familiar? Why had he seen her mouth on the tape, “I love you”?
The second picture was identical. On its back, Jaak had written: “Identified by Soyuz clerk as Mrs. Boris Benz. German. Arrived 5-8, departed 8-8.” Two days ago.
The Soyuz Hotel was not one of Moscow’s best, but it was the closest to where he and Jaak had sighted her with Rudy.
The outside line rang. He picked it up.
“Who’s there?” Minin demanded.
Arkady laid the receiver on the desk and softly left.
By now they would be watching his apartment. Arkady drove to the south bank of the river, parked and walked to stay awake.
Moscow was beautiful at night. The other day when he was in the café with Polina, he had recited a poem by Akhmatova. “ ‘I drink to our ruined house, to the dolor of my life, to our loneliness together; and to you I raise my glass, to lying lips that have betrayed us, to dead-cold, pitiless eyes, and to the hard realities: that the world is brutal and coarse, that God in fact has not saved us.’ ” Polina, the romantic, had insisted that he recite it again.
Moscow was the ruined house, a cityscape that looked half-burned at night. Yet a street lamp showed an iron gate open to a court of graceful linden trees around a marble lion on a pedestal. Another light, askew, shone on a church cupola, azure, studded with gold stars. As if in Moscow anything that wasn’t ugly dared display itself only at night.
His own bitterness surprised Arkady. He had been willing to tolerate a background of meanness and corruption if he could carry out his own work at a certain level of efficiency, the way a surgeon might be content with setting bones in the middle of an endless catastrophe. His own honesty had become a shell for him, a way to both deny and accept the general misrule. See the contradiction, Arkady told himself—a lie, to be precise. Still, if he had lost Rudy and Jaak, never even caught sight of Kim and probably been an evil influence on Polina, just how good was he?
What did he want? What he wanted was far away. For years he had been patient, yet for the last week he had felt that every second was like another grain of sand rolling through his fingers, ever since he had heard Irina’s voice on the radio.
If he felt this way, maybe he was in the wrong city. Was it possible to escape from the ruins of his own life?
The Central Telegraph on Gorky