Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [7]
Search the home of someone you don’t know and you’re an investigator, Arkady thought. Search the home of someone you do know and you’re a voyeur. Odd. He had watched Rudy Rosen for a month but never been inside his apartment before.
Upholstered front door with peephole. Living/dining room, kitchen, bedroom with TV and VCR, another bedroom turned into an office, bathroom with whirlpool. Bookcases with hardbound collections of culture (Gogol, Dostoyevsky), bios of Brezhnev and Moshe Dayan, stamp albums and back issues of Israel Trade, Soviet Trade, Business Week and Playboy. At once the forensic technicians began a survey, Minin one step behind them to make sure nothing disappeared.
“Don’t touch a thing, please,” Arkady told the street sweepers, who stood reverentially in the middle of the room as if they had stepped into the Winter Palace.
A kitchen cabinet held American scotch and Japanese brandy, Danish coffee in aluminum-foil sacks; no vodka. In the refrigerator, smoked fish, ham, pâté, butter with a Finnish label, a cool jar of sour cream and, in the freezer, a chocolate bar and an ice cream cake with pink and green frosting in the shape of flowers and leaves. It was the sort of cake that used to be sold in common milk shops, and was now a fantasy found only in the most special buffets—a little less rare, say, than a Fabergé egg.
Kilims on the living-room floor. On the wall, matched portrait photographs of a violinist in formal clothes and his wife at a piano. Their faces had the same roundness and seriousness as Rudy’s. The front window looked down on Donskaya Street and, over rooftops, north toward the giant Ferris wheel slowly rolling nowhere in Gorky Park.
Arkady moved on to an office with a Finnish maple desk, StairMaster, telephone and fax. A power-surge protector at the outlet, so Rudy had used his laptop computer in the apartment. The drawers held paper clips, pencils, stationery from Rudy’s hotel shop, savings book and receipts.
Minin opened a closet and slapped aside American warm-up outfits and Italian suits. “Check the pockets,” Arkady said. “Check the shoes.”
In the bedroom bureau even the underwear had foreign labels. Bristle brush on the television set. On the night table, travelogue videotapes, satin sleep mask and alarm clock.
A sleep mask was what Rudy needed now, Arkady thought. Safe but not foolproof, was that what he had told Rudy? Why did anyone ever believe him?
One of the street sweepers had followed him as silently as if she moved in felt slippers. She said, “Olga Semyonovna and I share a flat. We have Armenians and Turkmen in the other rooms. They don’t speak to each other.”
“Armenians and Turks? You’re lucky they don’t kill each other,” Arkady said. He unlocked the bedroom window for a view of a courtyard garage. Nothing hanging outside the sill. “The communal apartment is death to democracy.” He thought about it. “Of course democracy is death to the communal apartment.”
Minin entered. “I agree with the chief investigator. What we need is a firm hand.”
The sweeper said, “Say what you want, in the old days there was order.”
“It was rough order but it was effective,” Minin said and they both turned to Arkady with such expectation that he felt like a mad dog on a pedestal.
“Agreed, there was no shortage of order,” he said.
At the desk, Arkady filled in the Protocol of Search: date, his name, in the presence of—here he entered the names and addresses of the two women—according to search warrant number, entered Citizen Rudik Davidovich Rosen’s residence, apartment 4A at 25 Donskaya Street.
Arkady’s eye was caught by the fax again. The machine had buttons in English—for example, Redial. Gingerly he lifted the phone and pushed the button. The receiver produced tones, a ring, a voice.
“Feldman.”
“I’m calling for Rudy Rosen,” Arkady