Gorky Park Read online

  Arkady had reached the premise that the victims were inmates who, upon being released from the Isolator, were murdered by fellow gang members. When prison officials refused to accept his phone calls, he could have marked the case ‘Pending’ under Vladimir jurisdiction. His record wouldn’t have been affected, and everyone knew he wanted to go home. Instead, he dressed in his chief investigator’s uniform, presented himself at the prison, demanded and read the release log and found that while no inmates had been recently released, the day before the bodies were found two men had been placed in the custody of a Major Pribluda for interrogation by the KGB. Arkady phoned Pribluda, who bluntly denied receipt of the prisoners.

  Again the investigation could have come to a halt. Instead Arkady returned to Moscow, went to Pribluda’s office in the KGB’s shabby Petrovka Street branch and found on the major’s desk two red rubber balls bearing elliptical scars. Arkady left a chit for the balls and took them to the forensic lab, where their marks matched point by point the victims’ teeth.

  Pribluda must have taken the two drugged inmates directly to the river’s edge, stuffed the rubber balls into their mouths to stifle any outcry, shot them, picked up the spent shells and, with a long-bladed knife, removed the evidence of the slugs. Maybe he thought it would look as if they’d been stabbed to death. Dead, they’d hardly bled. The torn bodies froze quickly.

  Arrests had to be approved by the prosecutor. Arkady went to Iamskoy with the homicide charge against Pribluda and a request for a warrant to search Pribluda’s office and home for firearms and a knife. Arkady was with the prosecutor when the call came that, for reasons of security, the KGB was taking over the investigation of the bodies found by the Kliazma. All reports and evidence were to be forwarded to Major Pribluda.

  The walls wept. Besides surface rivers, ancient underground rivers burrowed through the city, blind and unseen currents with lost directions. Sometimes in winter half the basements in Moscow cried.

  Arkady replaced the files.

  ‘Did you find what you wanted?’ The corporal stirred.

  ‘No.’

  The corporal saluted encouragingly. ‘Things always look better in the morning, they say.’

  By regulations, Arkady should have returned the car to the office lot. He drove home. It was after midnight when he rolled into a courtyard off Taganskaya on the east side of town. Rough wooden balconies stood out from the second floor. His apartment was dark. Arkady let himself in the communal entrance, climbed the stairs and unlocked his door as quietly as he could.

  He undressed in the bathroom, brushed his teeth and carried his clothes out with him. The bedroom was the largest room of the apartment. A stereo was on the desk. He lifted the record from the turntable and read its label in the shadowy light from the window. ‘Aznavour à l’Olympia.’ Beside the record player were two water glasses and an empty wine bottle.

  Zoya was asleep, her long golden hair over her shoulder in a single braid. The perfume Moscow Night scented the sheets. As Arkady slid into bed her eyes opened.

  ‘’S late.’

  ‘Sorry. There was a murder. Three murders.’

  He watched the thought finally register behind her eyes.

  ‘Hooligans,’ she murmured. ‘That’s why I tell the children not to chew gum. First it’s gum, then rock music, then marijuana and . . .’

  ‘And?’ He expected her to say sex.

  ‘And murder.’ Her voice trailed away, her eyes closed, the brain barely roused enough to enunciate its cardinal rule and now safely unconscious again. The enigma he slept with.

  In a minute, fatigue overcame the investigator and he was asleep too. Asleep, he was swimming through black water, downward toward blacker water in smooth, powerful strokes. Just as he thought of turning toward the surface, he was joined by a beautiful woman with long dark hair and a pale face. In her white dress she seemed to be flying downward. As always she took his hand. The enigma he dreamed.

  Chapter Two

  Naked, Zoya peeled an orange. She had a broad, child’s face, innocent blue eyes, a narrow waist and small breasts with nipples as tiny as vaccination marks. Her pubic hair was shaved to a narrow blond stripe for gymnastics. Her legs were muscular and her voice was high and strong.

  ‘Experts tell us that individuality and originality will be the keynotes of the Soviet science of the future. Parents must accept the new curriculum and the new math, both of which are progressive strides in the building of an even greater society.’ She stopped to watch Arkady looking at her and drinking his coffee on the windowsill. ‘You could at least exercise.’

  Although he was tall and thin, a roll of fat showed through his undershirt when he slouched. His uncombed hair drooped. It malingered, he thought, like its owner.

  ‘I am preserving myself for comparison with yet greater societies,’ he said.

  She leaned over the table to scan underlined passages in the Teachers Gazette, collecting orange pits in her hand along with the peels, her lips moving all the while.

  ‘But individuality must not lead to egoism or career-ism.’ She broke off to glance at Arkady. ‘Does that sound good to you?’

  ‘Leave out careerists. Too many careerists in a Moscow audience.’

  As she frowned and turned away, Arkady ran his hand down the deep furrow of her spine.

  ‘Don’t. I have to get this speech ready.’

  ‘When is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Tonight. The District Party Committee is choosing one member to speak at the city-wide meeting next week. Anyway, you’re hardly one to criticize careerists.’

  ‘Like Schmidt?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered after a moment’s thought. ‘Like Schmidt.’

  She retired to the bathroom, and through the open door he watched her brushing her teeth, patting her flat belly, applying lipstick to her mouth. She addressed the mirror.

  ‘Parents! Your responsibilities do not end when your working day is done. Is egoism tainting the character of the student in your home? Have you read lately the statistics concerning egoism and the only child?’

  Arkady slid off the sill to see the article she’d underlined. The title was ‘A Need for Larger Families.’ In the bathroom, Zoya thumbed a disk of birth control pills. Polish pills. She refused to use the coil.

  Russians, procreate! the article demanded. Fertilize a glorious roe of young Greater Russians lest all the inferior nationalities, the swarthy Turks and Armenians, sly Georgians and Jews, traitorous Estonians and Latvians, swarming hordes of ignorant yellow Kazaks, Tartars and Mongols, backward and ungrateful Uzbeks, Ossetians, Circassians, Kalmuks and Chuckchis tip with their upraised organs the necessary population ratio between white, educated Russians and dark . . . ‘So it is shown that childless or one-child families, superficially suitable to working parents in the urban centers of European Russia, are not in the greater interest of society if we starve the future of Russian leaders.’ A future starved of Russians! Incredible, Arkady thought as Zoya stretched on her exercise bar.

  ‘—the student who has been introduced to originality must be all the more rigorously trained ideologically.’ She lifted her right leg level with the bar. ‘Rigorously. Vigorously.’

  He thought of mobs of forlorn Asians stumbling through the streets of the Pioneer Palace, arms out, crying, ‘We are starved of Russians.’ ‘Sorry,’ a figure calls from the empty Palace, ‘we are all out of Russians.’

  ‘—four, one, two, three, four.’ Zoya’s forehead touched her knee.

  On the wall behind the bed was an oft-repaired poster of three children – African, Russian and Chinese – with the slogan ‘A Pioneer is a Friend to Children of All Nations!’ Zoya had posed for the Russian child, and as the poster became famous so had her bluntly pretty Russian face. The first time Zoya was pointed out to Arkady at the university it was as ‘the girl in the Pioneer poster.’ She still looked like that child.

  ‘Out of conflict comes synthesis.’ She took deep breaths. ‘Originality com
bined with ideology.’

  ‘Why do you want to make a speech?’

  ‘One of us has to think of his career.’

  ‘This is so bad?’ Arkady approached her.

  ‘You make a hundred and eighty rubles a month and I make a hundred and twenty. A factory foreman makes twice as much. A repairman makes three times that on the side. We don’t have a television, a washing machine, even new clothes I can wear. We could have had one of the used cars from the KGB – it could have been arranged.’

  ‘I didn’t like the model.’

  ‘You could be an investigator for the Central Committee right now if you were a more active Party member.’

  As he touched her hip, the flesh there contracted, imitating marble. Her breasts were white and hard, their ends stiffened pink. This very combination of sex and party was the graphic illustration of their marriage.

  ‘Why do you bother taking those pills? We haven’t screwed in months.’

  Zoya grabbed his wrist and pushed it away, squeezing as hard as she could. ‘In case of rape,’ she said.

  Children around the courtyard’s wooden giraffe peeked out of snowsuits and caps as Arkady and Zoya got into the car. On Arkady’s third try, the ignition turned over and he backed onto Taganskaya.

  ‘Natasha asked us to go to the country tomorrow.’ Zoya stared at the windshield. ‘I told her we would.’

  ‘I told you about that invitation a week ago and you didn’t want to,’ Arkady said.

  Zoya pulled her muffler over her mouth. The car was colder inside than out, but she hated open windows. She sat armored in her heavy coat, rabbit-fur hat, muffler, boots and silence. At a red light he wiped condensation from the windshield. ‘I’m sorry about lunch yesterday,’ he said. ‘Today?’

  Her eyes narrowed sideways at him. There’d been a time, he remembered, when they’d spent hours under warm sheets, a cozy frost on the window. What they’d talked about, he admitted, he couldn’t recall. He’d changed? She’d changed? Whom could you believe?

  ‘We have a meeting,’ she answered at last.

  ‘All the teachers, all day?’

  ‘Dr Schmidt and I, to plan the gymnastic club’s part of the parade.’

  Ah, Schmidt. Well, they had so much in common. He was, after all, secretary of the Party District Committee. Adviser to Zoya’s Komsomol council. Gymnast. Mutual labor was bound to engender mutual affection. Arkady fought the impulse for a cigarette because it would have made the picture of a jealous husband too complete.

  Students were filing in when Arkady reached School 457. Though the kids were supposed to be uniformed, most wore their red Pioneer bandannas with neat hand-me-downs.

  ‘I’ll be late.’ Zoya hopped quickly out of the car.

  ‘All right.’

  She clung to the car door a moment longer. ‘Schmidt says I should divorce you while I can,’ she added, and shut the door.

  At the school entrance the students shouted her name. Zoya looked back once to the car and Arkady, who was lighting a cigarette.

  Clearly a reversal of Soviet theory, he thought. From synthesis to conflict.

  The investigator turned his mind to the three murders in Gorky Park. He approached them from the point of Soviet justice. Justice, as much as any school, was educational.

  For example. Usually drunks were merely held overnight in a drying-out station and then shoved toward home. When the number of drunks in the gutters – despite the rising cost of vodka – simply got to be too much, an educational campaign about the horrors of alcohol was launched, that is, drunks were thrown in jail. Pilferage in factories was constant and enormous; it was the private enterprise side of Soviet industry. Ordinarily a factory manager so clumsy as to be caught was quietly given five years, but during a campaign against pilferage, he was loudly ordered shot.

  The KGB was no different in its fashion. The Vladimir Isolator served as an educational function for hardcore dissidents, ‘but only the grave can correct the hunchback,’ and so for the worst enemies of the state there was an ultimate lesson. Arkady had finally learned that the two bodies found by the Kliazma River were a pair of recidivist agitators, fanatics of the most dangerous sort: Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  There was something about religion that turned the state into the frothing maw of a rabid dog. God wept, God wept, Arkady said to himself, although he didn’t know where he’d picked up the expression. The whole upsurge in religiosity, the market in ikons, the restoration of churches had the government whirling like a paranoid. Putting missionaries into prison was simply feeding them converts. Better a stern lesson, a red rubber ball to stifle them, the sort of anonymous end that best generated ominous rumors, even the frozen river bent to an educational purpose.

  Gorky Park, though, was no far-off river bank; it was the purest heart of the city. Even Pribluda must have visited Gorky Park as a fat child, a gross picnicker, a grunting suitor. Even Pribluda should know that Gorky Park was for recreation, not education. Also, the bodies were months, not days, old. The lesson was cold, too old, pointless. It wasn’t justice as Arkady had come to expect and detest.

  Lyudin was waiting behind a desk covered with the apparatus of specimen slides and photographs, smug as a magician surrounded by hoops and scarves.

  ‘The forensic department has gone all out for you, Chief Investigator. The details are fascinating.’

  Lucrative, too, Arkady assumed. Lyudin had requisitioned enough chemicals to stock a private warehouse, and probably had.

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘You know the principle of gas chromatography, the effect of a moving gas and a stationary solvent material—’

  ‘I mean it,’ Arkady said. ‘I can’t wait.’

  ‘Well’ – the lab director sighed – ‘to be quick about it, the chromatograph found in the clothes of all three victims very fine grains of gesso and sawdust, and on the pants of GP-2 a minute trace of gold. We sprayed the clothes with luminol, removed them to a darkroom and observed fluorescence, indicating blood. Most of the blood was, as expected, that of the victims. The smallest spots, however, were not human but of chicken and fish blood. We also found a very interesting pattern on the clothes.’ Lyudin held up a drawing of the clothed bodies in the positions they had been found. There was a shaded area on the front of the supine female, and along the upper arms and legs of the flanking males. ‘In the dark area, and only in the dark area, we found traces of carbon, animal fats and tannic acid. In other words, after the bodies were partially covered by snow, probably within forty-eight hours, they were also lightly covered with ash from a nearby fire.’

  ‘The Gorky Tannery fire,’ Arkady said.

  ‘It’s obvious.’ Lyudin couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘On February three, a fire at the Gorky Tannery covered a large area on the Octobryskaya District with ash. Thirty centimeters of snow fell from February one and two. Twenty centimeters fell from February three to five. If we had been able to maintain the snow in the clearing intact, we might even have been able to detect an undisturbed layer of the ash. Anyway, that would seem to date the crime for you.’

  ‘Excellent work,’ Arkady said. ‘I doubt we need to analyze the snow now.’

  ‘We also analyzed the bullets. Embedded in all the bullets were varying amounts of the victims’ clothes and tissue. The bullet marked GP1–B also yielded bits of tanned leather unrelated to the victim’s clothes.’

  ‘Gunpowder?’

  ‘None on the clothes of GP1, but faint traces on the coats of GP2 and GP3, indicating they were shot at a closer range,’ Lyudin added.

  ‘No, indicating they were shot after GP1,’ Arkady said. ‘Anything on the skates?’

  ‘No blood, gesso or sawdust. Not very high quality skates.’

  ‘I meant identification. People put their names in their skates, Colonel. Have you cleaned the skates and looked?’

  At his own office on Novokuznetskaya, Arkady said, ‘This is the clearing in Gorky Park. You,’ he told Pasha, ‘are Beast. De
tective Fet, you are Red, the skinny guy. This’ – he set a chair between them – ‘is Beauty. I’m the killer.’

  ‘You said there could be more than one killer,’ Fet said.

  ‘Yes, but just this once we’re going to try this front to back instead of trying to fit facts to a theory.’

  ‘Good. I’m a little weak on theory,’ Pasha said.

  ‘It’s winter. We’ve been skating together. We’re friends, or at least acquaintances. We’ve left the skating path for the clearing, close by but shielded from the path by trees. Why?’

  ‘To talk,’ Fet suggested.

  ‘To eat!’ Pash exclaimed. ‘That’s why anyone skates, so you can stop and have a meat pie, some cheese, bread and jam, certainly pass around some vodka or brandy.’

  ‘I am the host,’ Arkady continued. ‘I picked this place. I brought the food. We’re relaxing, some vodka under our belts and we’re feeling good.’

  ‘Then you kill us? Shoot a gun from your coat pocket?’ Fet asked.

  ‘Probably shoot your own foot if you try that,’ Pasha answered. ‘You’re thinking about that leather on the bullet, Arkady. Look, you brought the food. You couldn’t bring that much food in your pockets. In a leather bag.’

  ‘I’m handing out the food from the bag.’

  ‘And I don’t suspect a thing when you lift the bag close to my chest. Me first because I’m the biggest and roughest.’ Pasha nodded – his habit when he was forced to think. ‘Bang!’

  ‘Right. That’s why there’s leather on the first bullet, but no gunpowder on Beast’s coat. Gunpowder does escape through the hole in the bag with the next shots.’

  ‘The noise,’ Fet objected, and was waved down.

  ‘Red and Beauty don’t see any gun.’ Pasha was excited, his head nodding furiously. ‘They don’t know what’s happening.’

  ‘Especially if we’re supposed to be friends. I swing the bag to Red.’ Arkady’s finger pointed at Fet. ‘Bang!’ He aimed at the chair. ‘By now, Beauty has time to scream. Somehow I know she won’t, I know she won’t even try to run.’ He remembered the girl’s body between the two men. ‘I kill her. Then I shoot the two of you through the head.’