Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [74]
“We were about to leave,” Irina said.
“It’s been a long time,” Arkady said.
“Stas and I have a newscast to get ready.” She didn’t appear to be excited or nervous, just pressed by a heavy schedule.
“Not quite yet.” A man, all bones wrapped in a loose sweater and baggy pants, with bright, tubercular eyes, arrived with three foaming steins of beer. He was Russian, Arkady knew immediately. “I’m Stas. Do I call you Comrade Investigator?”
“Arkady is fine.”
The skeleton in the sweater sat by Irina and laid his hand over the back of her chair.
“May I?” Arkady took the chair facing them and said to Irina, “You look wonderful.”
“You look good, too,” she said.
“I don’t think anyone is thriving in Moscow,” Arkady said.
Stas raised his stein and said, “Drink up. The rats are leaving the ship now. Everyone’s coming for a visit. Most of them are trying to stay. In fact, most of them are trying to get work at Radio Liberty; we see them every day. Well, who can blame them?” He watched a buxom girl collecting empties. “Waited on by Valkyries. What a life.”
Arkady sipped for politeness’ sake. “I heard you—”
“So, Arkady, you’ve had rather a checkered career,” Stas interrupted. “Member of Moscow’s Golden Youth, member of the Communist party, rising star of the prosecutor’s office, hero who saved our dear dissident, Irina, years of Siberian exile atoning for that single act of decency, and now not only the prosecutor’s pet but his ambassador to Munich, able to hunt down your lost love, Irina. Here’s to romance.”
Irina laughed. “He’s just joking.”
“I understand,” Arkady said.
It was funny; in interrogation he had been naked, hosed down, insulted and hit, yet he had never felt as embarrassed as he did at this table. Besides being badly shaved, his stupid face was probably beet-red, he thought, because the evidence seemed to be that he was crazy. Evidently he had been crazy for years, imagining a connection between himself and this woman, who clearly shared no similar memory at all. How much had he imagined—their time hiding in his apartment, the shootings, New York? At the psychiatric isolator, when the doctors injected sulfazine into his spine, they used to say that he was crazy; now, over beer, it turned out that they had been right. He looked at Irina for any response, but she had the equanimity of a statue.
“Don’t take it personally. That’s just Stas.” She lit one of Stas’s cigarettes without asking. “Arkady, I hope you have some fun in Munich. I’m sorry I don’t have time to do anything with you.”
“That is too bad.” Arkady drank to that.
“But you’ll have friends at the consulate and you’ll be busy with your case. You always were a dedicated worker,” Irina said.
“A fool for work,” Arkady said.
“It must be a heavy responsibility, representing Moscow. The prosecutor sent his human face.”
“It’s kind of you to say so.” He was Rodionov’s “human face”? Was that what she thought?
Stas said, “That reminds me, we ought to do an update on the crime rate in Moscow.”
“On the deteriorating situation?” Arkady asked.
“Exactly.”
“You work together?” Arkady asked.
Irina said, “Stas writes the newscasts, I only read them.”
“Mellifluously,” Stas said. “Irina is the queen of Russian émigrés. She has broken hearts from New York to Munich and all stations in between.”
“Have you?” Arkady asked Irina.
“Stas is a provocateur.”
“Maybe that’s what makes him a writer.”
“No,” Irina said. “No, that’s what got him beaten at demonstrations in Red Square. He defected to the Americans in Finland, for which the Soviet prosecutor general you work for pronounced him guilty of a state crime with a sentence of death. Amusing, isn’t it? An investigator from Moscow can come here, but if Stas ever went back to Moscow he’d disappear. The same with me if I went back.”
Arkady agreed. “Even I feel safer here.”
“What is this case of yours? Who are you after?” Stas asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Arkady said.
Irina said, “Stas is afraid that I’m your case. Lately