Red Square (15 page)

   
Fog was a great confuser. On a trawler, Arkady remembered a veteran seaman who had listened to a distant foghorn for an hour before discovering that the sound came from an open bottle ten metres away. 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo' - that's what she was humming. A classic. Unless no one was there, because suddenly she was silent. Waiting for her to start again, he tried to light a cigarette but the match was dowsed instantly and the cigarette crumpled into wet paper and tobacco. How hard was it raining? He heard her from a new direction, straight ahead and higher, nearly level with the lamps. Her voice faded, paused, and he heard the flexing of a diving board. There was a flash of white dropping through the steam and the swallowed splash of a clean entry.

   
Arkady resisted the temptation to clap for what was, he thought, an unusual dive at every stage: finding the ladder, climbing the rungs by feel, walking out on to the high board and keeping her balance while locating the board's end with her toes, finally pushing down against the strength of the board and flying off into . . . nothing. He expected to hear her surface; he imagined she would be an expert swimmer, the sort who did laps with languid, tireless strokes. But there was no sound besides the steady drumming of rain on the pool and the irregular, barely audible rush of traffic from the embankment road.

   
'Hello,' Arkady called. He stood and walked along the side. 'Hello.'

Chapter Twelve

The other customers in the 'Dream Bar' of the Kazan Railway Station carried suitcases, duffel bags, cardboard boxes and plastic bags, so Arkady didn't feel out of place with Jaak's radio. Julya's mother was a stocky peasant dressed in discards sent her over the years by a chic, long-legged daughter: rabbit-fur coat, denim skirt and lacy hose. She consumed sausages and beer while Arkady ordered tea. Jaak was half an hour late.

   
'Julya won't meet her own mother's train. She won't even send Jaak, oh, no. She sends a stranger.' She studied Arkady. His jacket smelled like wet washing and sagged around the gun in his pocket. 'You don't look Swedish to me.'

   
'You've got a good eye.'

   
'She needs my permission to go, you know. That's the only reason I'm here. But the princess is too good to come to the train herself. And now we have to wait?'

   
'Let me get you another sausage.'

 
  
'Big spender.'

   
They waited another thirty minutes before he took her outside to the taxi queue. Clouds smothered the spire lights of the two other railway stations across Komsomol Square. Taxis slowed as they approached the queue, perused the prospects and drove on.

   
'A tram might be faster,' Arkady said.

   
'Julya told me in an emergency to use this.' As she waved a pack of Rothmans, a private car skidded to a stop. She hopped in the front and rolled down the window to say, 'I'm warning you, I'm not going back home in any rabbit-fur coat. I may not go home at all.'

   
Arkady returned to the Dream Bar. Still no Jaak. He was never this late.

   
Kazan Station was 'the Gateway to the East'. The information hall had walls of flipping destination cards under a brick, mosque-like dome. A bronze Lenin, striding, right hand raised, looked strangely like Gandhi. A Tadzhik girl wore a brilliant scarf over braided hair and a dull raincoat over loose, multicoloured trousers. Gold earrings played at her neck. All the porters were Tartars. Arkady recognized Kazan mafia in black leather jackets making the rounds of their prostitutes, pasty-faced Russian girls in jeans. A shop in the corner dubbed music on cassettes. As an inducement it played the Lambada. Arkady felt like a fool carting the radio around. He had gone to his flat and stared at it for an hour before forcing himself to return it to its rightful owner, as if it were the only one in Moscow that could receive Radio Liberty. He would get one of his own.

 
  
On the outdoor platforms, Army patrols searched for deserters. In the cab of a locomotive Arkady saw two engineers, a man and a woman. He was seated at the controls, a muscular man stripped to the waist; she wore a pullover and coveralls. He couldn't see their faces but he could imagine a life on the tracks, the whole country passing by the window, eating and sleeping behind the momentum of a diesel engine.

   
Arkady returned to the Dream Bar, crossing a waiting room so crowded and still that it could have been a madhouse or a prison. Row after row of faces were raised towards a silent, rolling image of folk dancers on a television screen. Militia prodded sleeping drunks. Whole Uzbek families bedded on huge pillow-like sacks that contained all their earthly possessions. By the bar, two Uzbek boys in knitted caps played a Treasure Box. For five kopecks they manipulated a grip that controlled a robot hand within a glass case. The bottom of the case was covered with sand, and strewn on this miniature beach were prizes that could be, with luck, picked up and dropped to the winner in a sliding tray. A tube of toothpaste the size of a cigarette, a toothbrush with a single row of bristles, a razor blade, a stick of gum, a piece of soap. Each in turn slid out of the grasp of the hand. When he looked more closely, he could see that the prizes had been in the case for years. The yellow bristles, the curling wrappers, the veins in the soap were not so much treasure as trash occasionally sorted, never removed. But the boys played enthusiastically, undeterred, since the idea wasn't the getting as much as the grasping.

   
After an hour and a half, Arkady gave up. Jaak wasn't coming.

The Lenin's Path Collective Farm was north of the city on the Leningrad Highway. Women bundled in scarves against the rain held up bouquets and buckets of potatoes to cars and lorries passing by.

   
Where Arkady left the motorway, the road turned immediately to a dirt lane that rose and fell through a village of dark cabins with painted eaves, newer houses of breeze blocks, and gardens of tomato poles and sunflowers. Black-and-white cows wandered on the road and through the yards. At the end of the village the road split into two tracks. He chose the one that was more deeply rutted.

   
The country around Moscow was flat potato fields. Picking was still done bent over, by hand. Students and soldiers were ordered out for the harvest, straggling behind peasants who tirelessly filled sacks; at any time, scavengers could always glean a few potatoes from a field. But he saw no one at all, only mist, turned earth and a glow in the distance. He followed the road to a burning pile of cardboard boxes, burlap and corn husks. It was a dirty country habit to mix trash with brown coal for incineration. Not usually in the evening, though, and not in the rain. Around the fire were livestock pens, lorries and tractors, water and petrol tanks, barn, garage, shed. Collectives were smaller farms where workers shared according to the time they put in. Someone should be on watch, but no one answered his horn.

   
Arkady got out and before he was aware of it stepped into water that overflowed the yard from an open pit. The sharp odour of lime overlaid ambient barnyard smells. In the pit, rubbish, slops and animal bones stripped of skin floated in a stew that was pocked by rain. The fire was half as tall again as he was. It blazed in some sections and smouldered in others, individual flames blossoming around newspapers, gnawing on spoiled potatoes. A can rolled from the top of the pyre to the bottom, next to two neatly placed man's shoes. Arkady picked one up and as quickly dropped it. The shoe was hot, literally steaming.

   
The whole yard glowed. The tractors were ancient models with rusty harrow discs, but both lorries were new, one the lorry from which Jaak had bought his radio. Tractor attachments - reapers, balers, ploughs - were laid out along the shed; morning glories had grown around them, twined around tines, their petals folded for the night. Nothing stirred in the pens; there were no piggish grunts, no nervous clacking of a goatbell.

   
The garage was open. There were no working switches but the light of the fire was sufficient for Arkady to see a white four-door Moskvitch with Moscow plates squeezed between oil cans and a tyre vice. The car doors were locked.

   
The barn was cement, with empty stalls on one side. The other side was a slaughterhouse. A coat hung on a wall. It took a while for Arkady to see it was a pig on a hook. The pig was upside down and it droned not with bees but with flies. Below it was a pail covered in cheesecloth black with crusted blood. Beside it was a long tallow paddle for stirring fat. The floor was cement, with blood grooves leading to a central drain. Against one end were butchering blocks, meat grinders and tallow pots as big as kettle drums on hooks standing before a hearth. On the blocks were perfume vials labelled 'Black Bear Bile - Highest Quality', with a label in Chinese on the other side. There were also vials labelled 'Deer Musk' and 'Powdered Horn'; the latter bottles claimed both Sumatran origin and the rejuvenating powers of rhino horn.

   
The shed's double doors stood ajar, bent where a crowbar had forced the lock. Arkady swung them wide to the light of the fire. Unpacked VCRs, CD players, personal computers, hard disks and video games were stacked to the ceiling. Tracksuits and safari wear hung on racks, and a Japanese copier stood on slabs of Italian marble - all in all, a scene like a customs depot, except it was in the middle of a potato field. The Lenin's Path Collective hadn't worked as a real farm for years, he realized. On the floor was a prayer rug; on a card table were dominoes and a newspaper. The paper's headline was in Arabic script, but the masthead was half in Russian and said
Grozny Pravda
.

   
Arkady went outside to the fire. It was uneven, blazing through woodshavings here, creeping through damp hay there. Paint rags burned in their own aura of colours. He pulled out a burning hoe shaft, poked in the flames and found nothing but charred brand names, Nike falling over Sony crashing on to Luvs, threatening to collapse over him.

   
As he stepped back, he noticed that the reflections of the fire betrayed a narrow track of footsteps leading between the slaughterhouse and the shed to a meadow of tall wild grass that obscured two berms, low earthen walls serving no apparent purpose. At the end of one, cement steps went down to a steel hatch with a wheel lock that wore a bar and heavy padlock.

   
The second berm had a similar hatch without a bar. Arkady opened it and stepped inside, crouching because he felt how tight the space was. His lighter produced a weak glow, enough for him to see that he had stumbled into an Army war bunker. Command bunkers - capsules of buried, reinforced concrete like this - had been built all around Moscow, then mothballed when the nuclear holocaust didn't arrive. Elaborate venting and radiation monitors surrounded the hatch. On a long communications desk were a dozen phones; two of them he recognized from his own service as radio-frequency phones, artifacts of the past. There was even a high-speed Iskra system, phone and code modem intact. He lifted a receiver and got an earful of static, but was astonished that the line was alive at all.

   
He returned to the yard. There was too much water to make out individual tyre treads. He walked the periphery without finding any other tracks except to the road, and he had come that way. It struck him that since the lorry and tractor tyres weren't smeared with lime, the overflow was recent. There was no flooding anywhere else.

   
In the reflection of the fire the overflow was molten gold, though Arkady knew that in daylight it would look like watered milk. He guessed the pit was about five metres square. He sank the hoe; the pit was at least two metres deep. An object bobbed to the surface that resembled a cross-section of sausage; it rolled to show the circular jowls, cone ears and snout of a pig, a face made smooth and hairless by corrosive lime, then rolled and sank again. Feathers and hair lay pasted on the scum. A stench deeper and more profound than simple rot pervaded the mist.

   
Arkady reached into the middle of the pit with the hoe and hit metal. He hit metal and glass. As he walked back and forth along the pit he traced the outline of a car beneath the surface. By now he was breathing in shallow gasps not only because of the smell. He thought he heard Jaak inside the car; he was beating on the roof of Julya's Volvo and screaming. Not that the sound escaped the pit, but Arkady could feel it.

   
He pulled off his jacket and shoes and dived in. He kept his eyes closed against the lime and felt his way down the side window to the door, found a handle and pulled without success because of the pressure of the water. He broke the surface, breathed and dove again. The motion of his dive disturbed the pit and unseen things rose, poking, prodding, as if trying to nudge him from the door. The second time he came up for air, the surface of the pit was crowded with the sweetmeats of the bottom, overwhelming with the smell of death.

   
On the third dive, he got both legs against the car and opened the door a crack. That was enough. As water leaked in, pressure equalized, faster by the second. He held on because he wasn't going up and down again. As the door opened, water flowed in with a rush, Arkady with it. He swam blindly on to the front seat, then climbed into the back, where Jaak was starting to float.

   
The door shut with the suction of the water. Eyes still closed, Arkady located the inside handle, but the door wouldn't budge and he couldn't get decent purchase for his feet with Jaak bobbing every which way around him. What a tight, well-made car, Arkady thought. He rolled down the window and, as the car filled up, the door eased open and he kicked himself out, towing Jaak behind him.

   
He crawled over the lip of the pit and pulled the detective by the arms up on to the yard. Jaak didn't look too bad - wet, eyes wide, curly hair matted like a lamb's - but he was too cold and uncooperative, without a pulse at the wrist or neck, and his irises could have been glass. Arkady tried the kiss of life, lifting Jaak's arms and then beating life into his chest until a raindrop exploded in the centre of one of Jaak's eyes and he didn't blink. Without trying, Arkady's hand found a small entry wound at the back of Jaak's skull. No exit wound. Small calibre; the slug had probably just bounced around the brain.

   
The pig bobbed to the crowded surface of the pit. No, this head was smaller, ears shorter, followed by the surfacing X-form of outstretched limbs. Arkady realized that his problem getting out of the car had been because there had been two bodies, not one, in the back seat. What a regular fishing hole, this pit! With the hoe he pulled the body close and dragged it up beside Jaak. It was an older man, not Korean or Chechen, the features slack and dirty but familiar. Killed the same way, a hole in the back of the skull that the tip of his little finger fitted in. A black mourning band on the left sleeve was how Arkady recognized him. It was Penyagin.