Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [88]
“That’s what a consulate is for,” Arkady said. “Maybe I can help.”
Federov took a deep breath. “No. I think you’re about the last person I would choose as my assistant.”
“Maybe we could get together tomorrow, have lunch or tea, even dinner?”
“I’m on the run tomorrow. Delegation of Ukrainian Catholics in the morning, lunch with the folkloric chorus, catch up with the Catholics at the Frauenkirche in the afternoon, and an evening revival of Bertold Brecht. Full up. Anyway, you’ll probably be flying home by then. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m really busy. If you want to do me a favor, don’t come back.”
“Could I at least make a call?”
“No.”
Arkady reached for the phone. “The circuits to Moscow are always busy. Maybe I could get through from here.”
“No.”
Arkady picked up the receiver. “It’ll be quick.”
“No.”
As Federov grabbed the receiver, Arkady let go and the consular attaché stumbled backward, tipping over another pail of water. Arkady tried from the wrong side of the desk to catch him; instead, he swept all the passports from the desktop. Red booklets landed on the carpet, in puddles, in pails.
“You idiot!” Federov said. He scrambled around the pails to pick up passports before they sank. Arkady used handfuls of stationery to soak water from the carpet.
“That’s useless,” Federov said.
“I’m trying to help.”
Federov blotted passports on his shirt. “Don’t help me. Just go.” A thought occurred to him as palpably as the squeal of a brake. “Wait!” Eyes on Arkady, he gathered all the passports onto his desk. Breathing hard, he counted them out carefully not once but twice and checked to be positive that the contents were, even if damp, still intact. “Okay. You can go.”
“I’m very sorry,” Arkady said.
“Just leave.”
“On the way out, should I warn people below about the water?”
“No. Don’t talk to anyone.”
Arkady regarded the overturned pails, the floodplain of the carpet. “It’s a shame, such a new office.”
“Yes. Good-bye, Renko.”
The door opened and a woman crowned by a felt hat draped with pearls peeped in. “Dear Artur Arturovich, what are you doing? When do we eat?”
“In a second,” Federov said.
“We haven’t eaten since Minsk,” she said.
She took a brave position inside the door and other folkloric singers followed. As they flowed into the room, Arkady went in the opposite direction, squeezing past skirts and ribbons, dodging thorns.
In a Polish secondhand shop west of the train station, Arkady found a manual typewriter with spindly type bars, shabby plastic case and Cyrillic characters. He turned it over. On the base was a stenciled military number.
“Red Army,” the shop owner said. “They’re getting out of East Germany and what the bastards don’t want to take, they sell. They’d sell the tanks if they could.”
“May I try it?”
“Go ahead.” The shop owner was already moving to greet a better dressed, more likely customer.
From his jacket Arkady took folded stationery and rolled a page into the machine. The paper was from Federov’s desk. At the top was the embossed letterhead of the Soviet consulate, complete with hammer and sickle set in golden sheaves of grain. Arkady had considered trying to write in German, but he didn’t trust his grasp of barbed Gothic letters. Besides, for a certain roundness of style, only Russian would do.
He wrote:
Dear Herr Schiller,
This note is to introduce A. K. Renko, a senior investigator from the Moscow prosecutor’s office. Renko has been assigned to inquire into questions concerning a proposed joint venture between certain Soviet entities and the German firm “TransKom Services,” in particular the statements of its representative, Herr Boris Benz. Since the activities of TransKom and Benz may reflect badly on both the Soviet government and the Bayern-Franconia Bank, I hope we share a mutual interest in resolving this matter as rapidly and quietly as possible.
With every good wish,
A. A. Federov.
The close sounded grandly Federovian to Arkady. He pulled the sheet out and signed