Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [81]
“What did Rodionov say?” Arkady asked in spite of himself.
“ ‘Democratization of the Party … modernization of the militia … sanctity of the investigator’s independence.’ The usual cock in the usual vigorously moving hand. How would you like to do an interview?”
“No.”
“You could talk about what’s happening with the prosecutor general’s office. Talk about anything you want.”
The elevator arrived again and the woman with the bags backed in with the briskness of someone going for the authorities.
“No.” Arkady offered Stas a hand up. “I’m sorry about the mistake.”
Stas stayed on the floor, as if he didn’t mind being a heap of bones, as if he could win an argument from any position. “It’s early. You can hit people this afternoon. Come to the station with me now.”
“To Radio Liberty?”
“Wouldn’t you like to see the world’s greatest center of anti-Soviet agitation?”
“That’s Moscow. I just came from there.”
Stas smiled. “Just visit. You don’t have to do an interview.”
“Then why would I come?”
“I thought you wanted to see Irina.”
Now that he was in Stas’s Mercedes, Arkady couldn’t believe that he had ever thought it was a German’s car. The passenger seat was covered by a balding rug. The backseat was hidden under a nest of newspapers. With every curve, tennis balls rolled around his feet and with every bump volcanic clouds rose from the ashtray.
In a magnetic frame on the dashboard was a photo of a black dog. “Laika,” Stas said. “Named after the dog Khrushchev sent into space. I was just a kid and I thought, ‘Our first achievement in outer space is starve a dog to death?’ I knew right then I had to get out.”
“You defected?”
“In Helsinki, and I wet my pants I was so scared. Moscow claimed I was a master spy. The English Garden is full of spies like me.”
“The English Garden?”
“You’ve already been there,” Stas said.
When they emerged on a boulevard that ran by the psuedo-Greco museum of the Haus der Kunst, Arkady began to recognize where he was. Left was Königinstrasse, the “Queen Street” that Benz lived on. Stas turned right, and then along the park. For the first time Arkady noticed a sign that said ENGLISCHER GARTEN. Stas turned onto a one-way street with the red-clay courts of a tennis club on one side and a high white wall on the other. A dark row of beeches that grew along the wall screened whatever was behind it from the street. Bikes rested against a steel barrier that ran the length of the curb.
Stas said, “When I wake up in the morning, I ask Laika, ‘What’s the most perverse thing I can do today?’ I think today will be one of my most interesting ones.”
Parking was on the diagonal in front of the courts. Stas picked up a briefcase, locked the car and led Arkady across the street and through a gate of steel slats that was monitored by cameras and mirrors. Inside was a compound of white stucco buildings, with more cameras clinging to the walls.
Like anyone who had grown up in the Soviet Union, Arkady had two contradictory images of Radio Liberty. All his life the press had described the station as a front for the American Central Intelligence Agency and its loathsome collection of Russian stooges and traitors. At the same time, everyone knew that Radio Liberty was the most reliable source of information about Russia’s missing poets and nuclear accidents. Still, though Arkady had himself been accused of treason, he felt uneasy about Stas and where they were headed.
He had half-expected American marines, but the guards in the station’s reception foyer were German. Stas showed his ID and gave his briefcase to a guard, who pushed it into the leaded box of an X-ray detector. Another guard motioned Arkady to a desk protected by thick, lead-reinforced glass. The desk was bigger, the chairs plusher; otherwise there was