Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [71]
“I’ve always been curious about Bavaria, the land of beer.”
“We’ll keep your passport. That means you can’t travel somewhere else or register at a hotel. We have accommodations for you at a pension. In the meantime I will be working hard to have you recalled to Moscow—tomorrow, if possible. My suggestion is that you forget about any investigation. See the museums, buy some gifts, have your beer. Enjoy yourself.”
The pension was above a Turkish travel agency half a block from the train station. The accommodations were two rooms with bed, bare mattress, bureau, chair, two tables and a cabinet that opened to reveal a miniature kitchen. The toilet and shower were down the hall.
“Turks on the third floor,” Federov said and pointed up. He pointed down. “Yugoslavians on the first. They all work at BMW. You could go join them.”
The lights worked. The refrigerator light went on when Arkady opened the door and there were no cockroach eggs in the corners. Even the closet had a light, and he had noticed when they came into the building that the halls smelled of disinfectant instead of piss.
“So this is paradise. It’s not all quite as great as you thought, is it?” Federov asked.
“It’s been a while since you were in Moscow,” Arkady said. He opened the rear window. The view was of the back of the train station and the tracks, steel ribbons shining in the sun. What was odd was that he felt as disoriented as if he were in a different time zone halfway around the world, when he had made only a four-hour flight.
Federov lingered at the door. “It occurs to me that you couldn’t have a more inappropriate name than ‘Renko’—for a visitor to Germany, I mean. I’ve heard about your father. He may have been a hero at home, he was a butcher here.”
“No, he was a butcher at home, too.”
“All I mean is that with a name like yours, maybe it would be wiser to stay right here and not go out at all.”
“Key?” Arkady put his hand out when Federov started to leave.
With a shrug, Federov gave it to him. “I wouldn’t worry, Investigator. One thing a Russian doesn’t have to worry about in Germany is being robbed.”
Alone, Arkady sat on the windowsill and had a solitary cigarette. It was a Russian custom to sit before embarking on a trip, so why not on arrival? To take formal possession of a bare, unlocked room. Especially with a filthy Russian cigarette. Down on the tracks he saw a sleek red-and-black train inching toward the station. In the locomotive an engineer wore the gray cap of a general. He remembered the train he had seen in Kazan Station, with the man in the locomotive stripped to his waist and the way the forearm of the woman with him rested on his shoulder. He wondered where they were now. Pulling cars around Moscow? Rolling across the steppe?
He returned to the bed and opened his carry-on. From the pockets of his rumpled pants he disinterred Penyagin’s handwritten list of three phone numbers, Rudy’s fax and the identified still of Rita Benz. From a rolled jacket he took the videotape. The clothes, which represented his complete traveling wardrobe, fit on two hangers and in one bureau drawer. He slipped the numbers, fax and photo into the videotape case with the cassette. They were his treasure and shield. Then he counted the money he had squeezed out of Rodionov. One hundred Deutsche marks. How far would that take the usual tourist in Germany? A day? A week? It would take thrift and paranoia to survive much longer.
The cassette inside his shirt, Arkady went out and ran across a boulevard to the train station, which had the mammoth scale of a modern museum on the outside. Light filtered through frosted glass and pigeon netting on the inside. No gangs of Kazans in black jackets, no somnolently flipping television screen, no Dream Bar. Instead, bookstores, restaurants, wine shops, a theater with erotic films. A kiosk sold maps with translations in French, English, Italian, none in Russian. With the English version, Arkady headed back for the street and followed a crowd out the main entrance.