Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [72]
The smell of a café’s good coffee and chocolate almost dropped him to his knees, but he was so unused to restaurants or even to eating at all that he kept moving forward in hopes of seeing an approachable ice cream wagon. He focused not on shop windows, but on the reflections in their glass. Twice he entered stores and immediately came back out to see if anyone was waiting for him. A tourist sees the sights. Arkady, however, had a tunnel vision that excluded crowds, fountains and statues for the sake of spotting a telltale Soviet face, rolling walk or habit, like wearing the wedding band on the right hand. The sound of German around him was a babble of surf. It was like waking up to notice that he had arrived in a wide plaza surrounded by handsome buildings patterned in brick, with stepped gables that climbed to spires of red tile. On one side of the square was a town hall of gray Gothic stone. Hundreds of people strolled or rested at tables with steins of beer or stared up at the hall’s carillon of life-size clockwork dancers and musicians. Arkady turned around. Businessmen wore muted suits and silk ties. Women wore a stylish, not a grieving, black. Boys sported the T-shirts, shorts and backpacks of summer vacation. The volume of their voices swelled. There was a bookstore on a corner with three floors of books. Another shop had the sweet reek of tobacco. The yeasty bouquet of beer issued from this doorway and that. A golden Madonna looked down from a marble column.
He bought ice cream in a waffle cone, pantomiming his choice rather than testing his command of German. The ice cream was so rich that it tasted like frosting. He spent four marks on cigarettes. All the same, he had engaged with Munich now. He ran down into the plaza’s subway station, bought a ticket and jumped onto the first train returning the way he had come.
Hanging on to the bar on either side of Arkady were a pair of Turks, each with a faraway gaze. Filling the seat before him was a woman holding a ham that rocked back and forth on her knees like a baby.
What were the chances of anyone following him? Not great, considering the difficulty of trailing someone in an urban setting. According to Soviet technique, to carry out surveillance of a cautious mobile target demanded five to ten vehicles and thirty to a hundred people. Arkady didn’t know personally because he’d never had more than enough manpower and cars to follow someone around a room.
At the station stop, he returned to the same waiting hall where he had been an hour before. Some call boxes were in the open, but upstairs he found telephone cabinets and books for different cities on a stainless-steel counter. In Moscow, phone books were so rare they were kept in safes, but these weren’t even chained.
The books were confusing because of the sameness and strangeness of German names, full of consonants in death throes, and the variety of advertisements that filled more than half the pages. Under “Benz,” the only Boris had an address on Königinstrasse. There was no listing for any business called TransKom.
The phone cabinet had a rounded clear-plastic door. Arkady decided he knew just enough German to talk to an operator. He thought she said she had no number for TransKom. Then he called Boris Benz.
A woman answered, “Ja?”
Arkady said, “Herr Benz?”
“Nein.” She laughed.
“Herr Benz ist im Haus?”
“Nein. Herr Benz ist in Ferien.”
“Ferien?” On vacation?
“Er wird zwei Wochen lang nicht in München sein.”
Away for two weeks? Arkady asked, “Wo ist Herr Benz?”
“Spanien.”
“Spanien?” Two weeks in Spain? The news was just getting worse.
“Spanien, Portugal, Marokko.”
“Nein Russland?”
“Nein, er macht Ferien in der Sonne.”
“Kann ich sprechen mit TransKom?”
“TransKom?” The name seemed new to her. “Ich kenne TransKom nicht.”
“Sie ist Frau Benz?”
“Nein, die Reinmachefrau.” The housecleaner.
“Danke.”
“Wiedersehen.”
As Arkady hung up he thought that this was about as basic as a conversation could get without drawing pictures. So he had talked to a housemaid who said Boris Benz would be away on summer