Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [65]
The man said, “I was only looking for a bottle. I didn’t know I was going to run into a fucking general. I apologize.”
The pistol was the Nagant. Carefully he handed it to Arkady butt first. Arkady took the ID, too.
The man hesitated. “Spare some coins? No?” He picked up the blocks to push himself away.
Arkady checked the clock; it was five A.M. He said, “Wait.”
Something had occurred to him. While the idea was fresh, he laid his gun and ID down and pulled out the sketch of the farm. On a fresh blank he drew the interior of the shed as best he could remember: door, table, stacks of VCRs and computers, racks of clothes, copier, dominoes, telltale Grozny newspaper on the table, prayer rug on the floor. Referring to the farm sketch, he added an arrow north. Now that he thought about it, the rug had been new, with no wear from knees or forehead, and it had been aligned east-west. But from Moscow, Mecca was directly south.
“Do you have a two-kopeck piece?” Arkady asked. “For a ruble?”
The beggar dug a change purse from his shirt and produced a coin. “You’re going to make a businessman out of me.”
“A banker.”
He used the same phone he had called Polina on. For once he felt he had the advantage. Rodionov wasn’t used to being confused and in the dark, but Arkady was.
At Veshki, on the verge of the city, the Moscow River seemed to hesitate among sedges and reeds, reluctant to leave a village where the drumming was the sound of frogs, the water reflected the morning hunt of swallows and the steam of dawn wreathed beds of lilies.
Arkady had sailed here as a boy. He and Belov would tack back and forth, disturbing the ducks, reverently trailing the swans that summered in Veshki. The sergeant would draw the boat up on the beach and he and Arkady would walk up to the village through a maze of lanes and cherry orchards to buy fresh cream and sour candies. The sun always seemed to be uphill, beyond the crows that roosted in silhouette on the belfry of the church.
Better, the village was surrounded by the lush tangle and wonderful disrepair of old forest. Tier upon tier of birches, ash, broad-leafed beeches, larches, spruces and oaks that the sun penetrated only in providential single rays that searched for mushrooms. Everything was still and moving at once: ground litter alive with the tunneling of shrews and moles, an explosion of needles and leaves when a hare left its cover, warblers and tits cleaning branches of caterpillars, woodpeckers ministering to the trunks, the cello drone of insects. Veshki was the fantasy of all Russians, the village of perfect dachas.
Nothing had changed. When he slipped into the woods he followed paths that were familiar even in the mist. The same solitary oaks, not quite so dark and grandiose. A stand of birches with pale, trembling leaves. Someone had once tried to set out a lane of pines, but vines and smaller trees had sprung up around them and hauled them down. Everywhere ferns, ivy, the boughs of secondary growth tried to hide the way.
Fifteen meters to the left, a squirrel with tufted ears swayed on a lower branch, hanging upside down to scold an overcoat lying in the leaves. Minin lifted his face, which only annoyed the squirrel more. Arkady counted a windbreaker huddled in the bushes and a pants leg farther to Minin’s left. He moved right, behind a screen of pines.
He stopped when he caught sight of the road. It was smaller and the macadam more frayed than he remembered. A jogger went by in a warm-up suit, a Gypsy with caved-in cheeks and black eyes on the woods. A woman rode by on a bicycle, chased by a terrier. When