Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [99]
Arkady turned in his seat to look behind them again. If something was impinging on his consciousness, there was nothing in sight but the haze of the city.
Ahead, the road forked north toward Nuremberg, south to Salzburg. Tommy turned right, and as soon as they came off the curve and through an underpass Arkady saw what appeared to be a pink island in the dark. He didn’t know what he had expected—Kremlin walls or St. Basil’s domes rising like phantoms by the autobahn? Whatever, something more than a one-story building of white stucco framed in red neon, with a square red light bleeding into the air beside a sign that said RED SQUARE and, in more demure cursive, SEX CLUB. AS he got out of the Trabi he thought that nothing you dream is as strange as what you see.
The inside of the club was so washed in red lights that it was difficult to focus, but Arkady did notice women in garter belts, black stockings, push-up bras and corsets. The theme was established by brass samovars on the tables and fluorescent stars on the walls.
“What do you think?” Tommy scooped his shirt back into his belt.
“Like the last days of Catherine the Great,” Arkady said.
It was interesting how intimidated men were at a house of prostitution. They had the money, the choice, the chance to leave. Women were servitors, slaves, mattresses. Yet the power, at least before sex, was inverted. The women, ogled in their lingerie, sprawled on love seats as comfortably as cats; the men betrayed the tics of the undressed. American soldiers stood at a horseshoe bar. Approached by a prostitute, they nervously played out a charade of charm and seduction while she maintained a face so slack and bored that she could have been asleep. What amazed Arkady was that the women actually were Russian. He heard it in their accents and whispers to each other, saw it in the pallor of their skin, the tilt of their eyes. He saw a woman in pink silk as broad-shouldered as a farm girl from the steppe who might have wandered west in her underwear. She whispered to a more delicate friend with huge Armenian eyes and a body stocking of black lace. When he looked at them he couldn’t help wondering why. How did imported Russian prostitutes differ from German ones? In wing-spread, submissiveness, the ability to heal? They pointed to him. They could spot it; he was Russian, too. He asked himself how desperate he was for love, or at least for a facsimile of it. Did the need shine from him or did he look as dead as a charred match?
He reminded Tommy, “You said that Max Albov came back to Munich smelling like a rose.”
Tommy said, “If anything, I think we respect Max more. I bet he’ll make a million.”
“Doing what? Did he say?”
“Television journalism.”
“He mentioned a joint venture.”
“Properties, assets. He says a man who can’t make money in Moscow couldn’t find flies on shit.”
“Sounds inviting. Maybe everyone should go back to Moscow.”
“That was the idea.”
Tommy couldn’t take his eyes off the women. He looked red-faced and overheated just by proximity, pressing his shirt against his belly, raking his hair with thick fingers, signs of an excitement Arkady did not share. Love was the mountain breeze, sunrise and nirvana, sex was a roll in the leaves, paid sex was the taste of worms. But it had been so long since he had known either sex or love, who was he to judge? One man imagines paid sex to be coarse and deadening, the next man finds it simple and direct. Does the second man have less imagination or more money?
Every race has its catalog of features. A Tatar heritage of narrowed, upward-slanting eyes. Slavic oval outline and rounded brow. Small lips, skin pale as snow. None of the women looked like Irina, though. Her eyes were broader and deeper, more Byzantine than Mongol, both more open and more hidden in their look. Her face was less oval, lighter in the jaw, her mouth fuller, more articulate. It was curious—in Moscow he heard Irina five times a day. Here, silence.
Sometimes he thought of normal, alternative lives he and Irina