Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [94]
Irina shrugged. “Max was a friend and support for years. It’s wonderful to see him here again.”
“I can tell he’s popular.”
“No one knows why he went back to Moscow. He helped you, so you have no reason to complain.”
“I wish I’d been here,” Arkady said.
If I stood and crossed the room, he thought. If I crossed the room and simply touched her, could a touch be the bridge? No, her face said.
“It’s too late now. You never followed me. Every other Russian here emigrated or defected. You stayed.”
“The KGB said—”
“I would have understood if you’d stayed for a year or two, but you stayed forever. You left me alone. I waited in New York; you never came. I went to London to be closer; you never came. When I found out where you were, you were doing exactly what you did before, being a policeman in a police state. Now here you are, finally, but not to see me. You’re here to arrest someone.”
Arkady said, “I couldn’t come without—”
Irina asked, “Did you think that I’d help you? When I think of the time when I did want to see you and you weren’t here, thank God Max was. Max and Stas and Rikki—everybody here had the nerve, one way or another, swimming, running or jumping from windows, to escape. You didn’t, so you have no right to criticize any of them, or question any of them or even to be with them. As far as I’m concerned, you’re dead.”
She took a pack of cigarettes with her and left the kitchen as Tommy danced in, humming a polka, gathering olives and chips. His legs were drunk. On his head was a German helmet. In the helmet was a hole.
Arkady knew the feeling.
The Bayern-Franconia Bank was a Bavarian palace of limestone blocks under the practical hat of a red tile roof. The inside was all marble, dark wood and the discreet hum of computers calculating mysterious interest rates and currency exchanges. Led up an elevator and down a hall with rococo cornices, Arkady felt intimidated, as if he were trespassing in the church of a foreign rite.
There was something padded and posed about Schiller. He sat rigidly behind his desk, about seventy, with clear blue eyes in a pink face. Silver hair was brushed back from a narrow forehead. A linen handkerchief showed above the pocket of a dark young suit. A man in a windbreaker and jeans, with a tan that flowed into blond hair, stood at Schiller’s side. His blue eyes and expression of restrained contempt were the same as the banker’s.
Schiller scrutinized the letter that Arkady had typed on Federov’s stationery. “You are what a senior Soviet investigator looks like?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so.”
Arkady handed over his red identification book. He hadn’t noticed before how much the corners were worn, the bindings torn. At arm’s length Schiller scrutinized the picture. Even shaved, Arkady felt he looked as if he had sat on his clothes before dressing. He fought the impulse to pinch a crease in his pants.
“Peter, will you examine this?” Schiller asked.
“You don’t mind?” the other man asked Arkady. It was the sort of courtesy extended to a suspect.
“Please.”
Peter turned on the desk lamp. As he held a page under the light his jacket rode up to show a holster clip and pistol.
“Why didn’t Federov come with you?” Schiller asked Arkady.
“He apologizes. He’s with a church group this morning, then folk-singers from Minsk.”
Peter gave back the ID. “Do you mind if I call?”
Arkady said, “Go ahead.”
Peter used the phone while Schiller kept watch on his visitor. Arkady looked up. On the ceiling, fat cherubs with tiny wings were painted in mid-flutter against a plaster sky. Walls of Dresden blue colored the air a somber gray. Oil portraits of ancestral bankers hung between engravings of merchant ships. The good burghers looked embalmed, then painted. On a bookshelf were tomes on international law arranged by year and, in a crystal dome, a brass clock with a pendulum that wrapped itself around a pole. He noticed a black-and-white photograph of rubble and burned walls. A roof had collapsed