Red Square Page 8

  'Party card?'

  'We collect business cards and have a drawing once a month for a bottle of Chivas Regal.' Borya controlled a smile, barely.

  Arkady felt like an idiot. Not an ordinary idiot, but an out-dated, socially uninformed idiot.

  Borya put down his driver and proudly led Arkady to the buffet. In chairs upholstered in red and black Marlboro colours were more Japanese in baseball caps and Americans in golfing shoes. Arkady suspected that Borya had hit upon the exact decor of an airport lounge, the natural setting of the international business traveler. They could have been in Frankfurt, Singapore, Saudi Arabia – anywhere – and for this very reason felt at home. Above the bar a television showed CNN. The crowded buffet offered an array of smoked sturgeon and trout, red and black caviar, eggplant caviar, German chocolates and Georgian pastries around bottles of sweet champagne, Pepsi, pepper vodka, lemon vodka and five-star Armenian cognac. Arkady was dizzy from the smell of food.

  'We also have karaoke nights, putting tournaments and corporate parties,' Borya said. 'No prostitutes, no hustlers. It couldn't be more innocent.'

  Like Borya? The man had not only gone from football to the mafia but had made the second, steeper evolutionary leap to entrepreneur. The way his Western sweater draped his shoulders, the directness of his eyes, the freer gestures of clean hands all said: businessman.

  Borya gave a discreet, proprietary wave and a uniformed waitress immediately arrived from the buffet and set a plate of silver herring on the table in front of Arkady. The fish seemed to swim before his eyes.

  Borya asked, 'Remember unpolluted fish?'

  'Not well enough, thanks.' Arkady dug a last cigarette from a pack. 'Where do you get the fish?'

  'Like anyone else. I trade this, barter that.'

  'On the black market?'

  Borya shook his head. 'Direct. Rudy said there wasn't a farm or fishing collective that wasn't willing to do business if you could offer more than rubles.'

  'Rudy told you what to offer?'

  Borya held Arkady's eyes with his. 'Rudy started out as a football fan. He ended up as an older brother. He simply wanted to see me happy. He gave me advice. That doesn't sound like a crime to me.'

  'It depends on the advice.' Arkady wanted to provoke a reaction.

  Borya's eyes were clear as water, without a ripple. 'Rudy always said there was no need to break the law, just to rewrite it. He looked ahead.'

  'Do you know an Apollonia Gubenko?' Arkady asked.

  'My wife. I know her well.'

  'Where was she the night Rudy died?'

  'What does it matter?'

  'There was a Mercedes registered in her name at the black market about thirty metres from where Rudy died.'

  Borya took a little longer to answer. He glanced at the television, where an American tank was rolling through a desert. 'She was with me. We were here.'

  'At two in the morning?'

  'I often close after midnight. I remember we went home in my car because Polly's was in a garage being repaired.'

  'You have two cars?'

  'Between Polly and me, two Mercedes, two BMWs, two Volgas and a Lada. In the West people can invest in stocks and bonds. We have cars. The trouble is, as soon as a nice car goes to the garage, someone borrows it. I can try to find out who.'

  'You're sure she was with you? Because a woman was seen in it.'

  'I treat women with respect. Polly is her own person, she doesn't have to answer to me for every second of her time, but that night she was with me.'

  'Did anyone else see you here?'

  'No. The secret of business is you stay close to the cash register and lock up yourself.'

  'There are a lot of secrets in business,' Arkady said.

  Borya leaned forward and spread his hands. Although Arkady knew he was a big man, he was surprised at the wingspan. He remembered how Borya the player used to roar out of the Central Army goal to stop penalty kicks. Gubenko let his hands fall. His voice was soft. 'Renko?'

  'Yes?'

  'I'm not going to kill Kim. That's your job. If you want to do society a favour, kill Makhmud, too.'

  Arkady looked at his watch. It was eight p.m. He had already missed the first broadcast and his mind was starting to wander. 'I have to go.'

  Borya steered Arkady through the bar. Another discreet signal had been sent because the waitress caught up to them with two packs of cigarettes which Borya stuffed into Arkady's jacket.

  The mother and daughter made their way around the tables. They shared the same fine features and grey eyes. When the woman spoke, she had a faint lisp; Arkady was relieved to hear an imperfection,

  'Borya, the teacher's waiting for you.'

  'The pro, Polly. The pro.'

  'Armenian nationalists attacked Soviet Internal troops again yesterday, inflicting ten deaths and as many wounded,' Irina said. 'The object of the Armenian attack was a Soviet Army depot, which they ransacked, removing small arms, assault rifles, mines, a tank, a personnel carrier, mortars and anti-tank guns. The Moldavian Supreme Soviet yesterday declared its sovereignty, three days after the Georgian Supreme Soviet did the same.'

  Arkady set the table with brown bread, cheese, tea and cigarettes and sat facing the radio as if it had come to dinner. He should have returned to Rudy's flat yet here is the man with no will, in time for her broadcast. With apocalyptic news she had, but it didn't matter.

  'Rioting continued in Kirgizia between Kirgiz, and Uzbeks for the third straight day. Armoured personnel carriers patrolled the streets of Osh after Uzbeks took control of the downtown tourist hotels and directed automatic fire at the local offices of the KGB. Deaths in the unrest now total two hundred and the question of draining the UzgenCanal to find more bodies has been raised.'

  The bread was fresh and the cheese was sweet. A breeze drifted in at the open window and the curtain stirred like a skirt.

  'A Red Army spokesman admitted today that Afghan insurgents have penetrated the Soviet border. Since Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, the border has become accessible to drug runners and to religious extremists who are urging Central Asian republics to begin a holy war against Moscow.'

  The sun hung on the northern horizon, onion domes and chimneypots. Her voice was a shade huskier and her Siberian accent sounded more schooled and sophisticated. Arkady remembered her gestures, sometimes flamboyant, and the colour of her eyes, like amber. Listening, he found himself leaning towards the radio. He felt ridiculous, as if he should be holding up his side of the conversation.

  'Miners in Donetsk yesterday demanded the resignation of the government and the removal of the Party, and announced the start of a new strike. Work stoppages have also begun in all twenty-six mines in the KaragandaBasin and in twenty-nine mines in Rostov-on-Don. Mass rallies in support of the strikers were held by miners in Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk and Vladivostok.'

  The news was not important; he hardly heard it. It was her voice and breath transmitted across a thousand miles.

  'Last night in Moscow, the Democratic Front rallied outside GorkyPark to call for the "de-legalization" of the Communist Party. At the same time, members of the right-wing "Red Banner" met to defend the Party. Both groups demanded the right to march in Red Square.'

  She was Scheherazade, Arkady thought. Night after night she could tell tales of oppression, insurrection, strikes, and natural disaster, and he would listen as if she were spinning stories of exotic lands, magical spices, flashing scimitars and pearl-eyed dragons with scales of gold. As long as she would talk to him.

  Chapter Seven

  * * *

  At midnight, Arkady waited across from the Lenin Library, admiring the statues of Russian writers and scholars that hovered along the roofline. He remembered what he had heard about the building being ready to collapse. True enough, the statues looked ready to jump. When a shadow emerged and locked the door, Arkady crossed the street and introduced himself.

  'An investigator? I'm not surprised.' Feldman wore a
fur hat, carried a briefcase and looked like Trotsky, down to a goat's beard of snow white. He started a vigorous shuffle towards the river and Arkady fell in step beside him. 'I have my own key. I didn't steal anything. You want to search?'

  Arkady ignored the invitation. 'How do you know Rudy?'

  'It's the only time to work. I thank God I'm an insomniac. Are you?'

  'No.'

  'You look like one. See a doctor. Unless you don't mind.'

  'Rudy?' Arkady tried again.

  'Rosen? I didn't. We met once, a week ago. He wanted to talk about art.'

  'Why art?'

  'I'm a professor of art history. I told you I was a professor on the phone. You're a hell of an investigator, I can tell already.'

  'What did Rudy ask?'

  'He wanted to know everything about Soviet art. Soviet avant-garde art was the most creative, most revolutionary period in history, but Soviet man is an ignoramus. I couldn't educate Rosen in half an hour.'

  'Did he ask about any paintings in particular?'

  'No. But I catch your point and it is amusing. For years, the Party demanded Socialist Realism and people hung paintings of tractors on their walls and hid avant-garde masterpieces behind the toilet or under the bed. Now they're dragging them out. Suddenly Moscow is full of art curators. You like Socialist Realism?'

  'Socialist Realism is one of my weakest areas.'

  'Are you talking about art?'

  'No.'

  Feldman regarded Arkady with a more wary, interested eye. They were in the park behind the library, where steps ran between trees down to the river near the southwest corner of the Kremlin. Spotlights made the lower branches into lattices of gold that turned to black.

  'I told Rosen that what people forget is that there actually was idealism at the beginning of the Revolution. Starvation and civil war aside, Moscow was the most exciting place in the world to be. When Mayakovsky said, "Let us make the squares our palettes, the streets our brushes," he meant it. Every wall was a painting. There were painted trains, boats, aeroplanes, balloons. Wallpaper and dinner plates and gum wrappers were all created by artists who genuinely thought they were making a new world. At the same time women were marching for free love. They all believed anything was possible. Rosen asked how much one of those gum wrappers would be worth now.'

  'The same question occurred to me,' Arkady admitted.

  Feldman stomped down the stairs in disgust.

  'Since avant-garde art was not approved, you chose a fairly suicidal speciality. Is that how you got used to working late at night?' Arkady asked.

  'Not a totally stupid observation.' Feldman stopped short. 'Why is red the colour of revolution?'

  'It's traditional?'

  'Prehistoric, not traditional. The two earliest habits of the apeman were cannibalism and painting himself red. Soviets are the only ones who still do it. Look what we did to the genius of the Revolution. Describe Lenin's tomb.'

  'It's a square of red granite.'

  'It's a Constructivist design inspired by Malevich. It's a red square on Red Square. There's more to it than just Lenin laid out like a smoked herring. Art was everywhere in those days. Tatlin designed a revolving skyscraper taller than the EmpireStateBuilding. Popova drew high fashions for peasants. The artists of Moscow were going to paint the trees of the Kremlin red. Lenin did object to that, but people thought that anything was possible. Those were days of hope, days of fantasy.'

  'You lecture on this?'

  'No one wants to hear. They're like Rosen, they only want to sell. I spend all day authenticating art for idiots.'

  'Rosen had something to sell?'

  'Don't ask me. We were supposed to meet two days ago. He didn't come.'

  'Then why do you think he had something to sell?'

  'Today everyone is selling everything they have. And Rosen said he'd found something. He didn't say what.'

  At the embankment Feldman looked around with such fervour that Arkady could nearly imagine painted trees in the Kremlin gardens, amazons marching on

  Gorky Street

  , dirigibles towing propaganda posters under the moon.

  'We live in the archaeological ruins of that new world that never was. If we knew where to dig, who knows what we would find?' Feldman asked and trudged on alone across the bridge.

  Arkady wandered along the embankment wall towards his flat. He didn't feel sleepy, but he didn't feel like an insomniac. Just the word made him restless.

  He found no amazons along the river. There were fishermen baiting hooks. A couple of years of his exile had been spent on a Pacific trawler. He had always appreciated how at dusk the rustiest, most nondescript ship became a dazzling and intricate constellation of stars, with fishing lights on masts, booms, gunwales, bridge, ramp and deck. It occurred to him now that the same could be done for Moscow's nocturnal fishermen, with batteries and lamps on their hats, belts and the tips of their poles.

  Maybe the problem wasn't insomnia. Maybe he was crazy. Why was he trying to find out who killed Rudy? When an entire society was collapsing like so many rotten beams, what difference did it make who murdered one black-market speculator? Anyway, this wasn't the real world. The real world was out there where Irina lived. Here he was one more shadow in a cave, where he couldn't sleep anyway.

  Straight ahead the silhouette of St Basil's stood like a crowd of turbaned Moors backlit by the all-night floodlights of the square. In shadow at the stone base of the cathedral were about a hundred soldiers from the Kremlin barracks in full field gear with radio packs and submachine guns.

  Red Square itself rose as a vast hill of cobblestones. To the left, the Kremlin was illuminated, bricks nearly white, with swallowtail battlements that were grace notes on a fortress that seemed to stretch as far as the Chinese Wall. The spires above the gates looked like churches that had been captured, roped, dragged from Europe and erected as trophies to a tsar, topped now by ruby stars. Shimmering in upturned lights, the Kremlin was midway between reality and dream, an immense, oppressive vision. From the gate at SpasskyTower a black sedan issued like a bat and flitted across the stones. Far off, at the head of the square, a four-storey banner for Pepsi covered the facade of the ArmyMuseum. To his right the classical stone face of GUM, the world's largest and emptiest department store, shrank into the dark. From the roof of GUM and from the Kremlin wall, cameras constantly monitored the square, but no floodlights were bright enough to penetrate the valley of shadow in the centre of the square, where Arkady was. No individual there would be more than a blip on a grey screen. The sheer size of scale and awesome vacuum of the square didn't so much uplift the soul as both hide it and suggest how inconsequential it was.

  Except for one soul. When Lenin lay dying, he begged for no memorials. The mausoleum Stalin built for him was a vengeful pile of crypts, a squat ziggurat of red and black under the battlements of the Kremlin wall. Empty tiers of white marble flanked it, the area where dignitaries would sit for the May Day parade. Lenin's name was inscribed in red letters above the door of the tomb. At the door, two guards of honour, boy sergeants with white gloves and faces as pale as waxworks, swayed with fatigue.

  Ordinary traffic was barred from the square, but as Arkady turned away from the tomb a black Zil rolled out of

  Cherny Street

  and, racing at official speed, crossed in front of GUM towards the river and sank into the dark around St Basil's. Tyres squealed, a sharp sound of protest that reverberated the length of the square.

  The Zil came back. Because the car's headlights were dark, it was too late when Arkady realized it was coming straight at him. When he started to run for the museum, the Zil followed, its bumper almost on his heels. He darted left towards the tomb and the big car roared by and cut in front. He dodged the rear bumper and headed for

  Cherny Street

  . The Zil tipped, settled and lumbered towards him in a wider circle, the car's centrifugal force accelerating.

  When his escape intersected th
e car's arc, Arkady dove. He rolled, rose and started dizzily back towards St Basil's but slipped on the stones. Headlights rose up. He fell to one knee and raised his arm across his eyes.

  The Zil stopped directly in front of him. Four uniforms emerged from the halos exploding in his eyes. General's dark-green dress uniforms with brass stars, fringed shoulder boards and mosaics of medals behind ropes of golden braid. As his vision returned, Arkady saw that the men inside the uniforms were strangely shrunken, holding each other up. As the driver got out he almost fell. He wore a civilian sweater and jacket, topped by a sergeant major's cap. He was drunk and his eyes were leaking tears that rolled from his eyes to his jowls.

  'Belov?' Arkady asked as he stood.

  'Arkasha.' Belov's voice was as deep and hollow as a barrel. 'We were at your address and you were not at home. We went to your office and you weren't there. We were just driving around when we saw you, and then you ran.'

  Arkady dimly recognized the generals, though they were grey and stunted versions of the tall, impressive officers who used to trail behind his father. Here were the staunch heroes of the Siege of Moscow, the tank commanders of the Bessarabian offensive, the vanguard of the push to Berlin, each of the four properly wearing an Order of Lenin awarded for 'a decisive action that significantly altered the course of the war'. Except that Shuksin, who had always slapped his boots with a crop, was now so shrivelled and bent that he was hardly much higher than the top of those boots, and Ivanov, who had always claimed the privilege of carrying his father's field case of plans, was as stooped as an ape. Kuznetsov had turned as round as a child, whereas Gul was a skeleton, his vigour and ferocity reduced to bristles of hair jutting from his eyebrows and ears. Though Arkady had hated them all his life – despised them, really, because they abused him out of sycophancy rather than evil – he was astonished at their feebleness.