Red Square (21 page)

   
On foot, the odds were different. A fire extinguisher hung on the wall of the bay. Arkady lifted it from its hook and bowled it, making the driver jump in a particularly ungainly fashion. Arkady hit him on the way down. While the man tried to rise, Arkady ripped the rubber hose from the extinguisher, wrapped it around the driver's neck and dragged him out of the bay into the light.

 
  
Even with his neck squeezed up around his chin and ears, the driver was obviously Stas. Arkady unwound the hose and Stas sagged against a wheel.

   
'And a good morning to you.' Stas felt his neck. 'Talk about living up to your reputation.'

   
Arkady squatted beside him. 'I'm sorry. You scared me.'

   
'
I
scared
you
? My God.' He swallowed in a tentative manner. 'That's what they say about Dobermans.' He gagged and felt his chest.

   
At first, Arkady was afraid Stas was having a heart attack until he produced a pack of cigarettes. 'Got a light?'

   
Arkady held out a match.

   
Stas said, 'Fuck it. Take one for yourself. Beat me up, steal my cigarettes.'

   
'Thanks.' Arkady accepted the offer. 'Why were you following me?'

   
'I was watching you.' Stas cleared his throat. 'You told me where you were staying. I couldn't believe they'd bring their favourite investigator all the way from Moscow to put him up in a hole like that. I saw that weasel Federov leave and followed you to the station. I wouldn't have kept up with you for long in the crowd, but you stopped at the phone. When I came back with the car, you were still there.'

   
'Why?'

   
'I'm curious.'

   
'You're curious?' Arkady noticed a woman who came out of the lift and froze, bags swaying like pendulums, at the sight of two men sitting on the floor beside a car. 'Curious about what?'

   
Stas shifted on to a more comfortable elbow. 'About a lot of things. You're supposed to be an investigator, but you look to me like a man in trouble. You know, when that shit Rodionov, your boss, was in Munich the consulate made a big fuss about him. He even visited the radio station and gave us an interview. Then you come and the consulate wants to bury you.'

   
'What did Rodionov say?' Arkady asked in spite of himself.

   
'Democratization of the Party . . . modernization of the militia . . . sanctity of the investigator's independence.' The usual cock in the usual vigorously moving hand. How would
you
like to do an interview?'

   
'No.'

   
'You could talk about what's happening with the prosecutor general's office. Talk about anything you want.'

   
The lift arrived again and the woman with the bags backed in with the briskness of someone going for the authorities.

   
'No.' Arkady offered Stas a hand up. 'I'm sorry about the mistake.'

   
Stas stayed on the floor, as if he didn't mind being a heap of bones, as if he could win an argument from any position. 'It's early. You can hit people this afternoon. Come to the station with me now.'

   
'To Radio Liberty?'

 
  
'Wouldn't you like to see the world's greatest centre of anti-Soviet agitation?'

   
'That's Moscow. I just came from there.'

   
Stas smiled. 'Just visit. You don't have to do an interview.'

   
'Then why would I come?'

   
'I thought you wanted to see Irina.'

Chapter Eighteen

Now that he was in Stas's Mercedes, Arkady couldn't believe that he had ever thought it was a German's car. The passenger seat was covered by a balding rug. The back seat was hidden under a nest of newspapers. With every curve, tennis balls rolled around his feet and with every bump volcanic clouds rose from the ashtray.

   
In a magnetic frame on the dashboard was the photo of a black dog. 'Laika,' Stas said. 'Named after the dog Khrushchev sent into space. I was just a kid and I thought, 'Our first achievement in outer space is starve a dog to death?' I knew right then I had to get out.'

   
'You defected?'

   
'In Helsinki, and I wet my pants I was so scared. Moscow claimed I was a master spy. The English Garden is full of spies like me.'

   
'The English Garden?'

   
'You've already been there,' Stas said.

   
When they emerged on to a boulevard that ran by the pseudo-Greco museum of the Haus der Kunst, Arkady began to recognize where he was. Left was Königinstrasse, the 'Queen Street' that Benz lived on. Stas turned right, and then along the park. For the first time Arkady noticed a sign that said
englischer garten.
Stas turned on to a one-way street with the red-clay courts of a tennis club on one side and a high white wall on the other. A dark row of beeches that grew along the wall screened whatever was behind it from the street. Bikes rested against a steel barrier that ran the length of the curb.

   
Stas said, 'When I wake up in the morning, I ask Laika, 'What's the most perverse thing I can do today?' I think today will be one of my most interesting ones.'

   
Parking was on the diagonal in front of the courts. Stas picked up a briefcase, locked the car and led Arkady across the street and through a gate of steel slats that was monitored by cameras and mirrors. Inside was a compound of white stucco buildings, with more cameras clinging to the walls.

   
Like anyone who had grown up in the Soviet Union, Arkady had two contradictory images of Radio Liberty. All his life the press had described the station as a front for the American Central Intelligence Agency and its loathsome collection of Russian stooges and traitors. At the same time, everyone knew that Radio Liberty was the most reliable source of information about Russia's missing poets and nuclear accidents. Still, though Arkady had himself been accused of treason, he felt uneasy about Stas and where they were heading.

   
He had half expected American Marines, but the guards in the station's reception foyer were German. Stas showed his ID and gave his briefcase to a guard, who pushed it in the leaded box of an X-ray detector. Another guard motioned Arkady to a desk protected by thick lead-reinforced glass. The desk was bigger, the chairs plusher; otherwise there was a generic sameness to American and Soviet reception areas, an international design to accommodate the travelling pacifist and the bomb-heaving terrorist.

   
'Passport?' the guard asked.

   
'I haven't got it,' Arkady said.

   
'His hotel is still holding it,' Stas volunteered. 'It's that fabled German efficiency we hear so much about. This is an important visitor. The studio is waiting for him right now.'

   
Reluctantly the guard accepted the trade of a Soviet driver's licence in exchange for a visitor's pass. Stas peeled off the backing and slapped it on to Arkady's chest. A glass door buzzed, and they pushed through into a corridor of cream-coloured walls.

   
Arkady stopped before they went any farther. 'Why are you doing this?'

   
'Yesterday, I told you I didn't like it when lightning hit the wrong man. Well, you definitely have all the marks of a singed body.'

   
'Aren't you going to get in trouble for bringing me in?'

   
Stas shrugged. 'You're one more Russian. The station is full of Russians.'

   
'What if I meet an American?' Arkady asked.

   
'Ignore him. That's what we all do.'

   
The hall had a thick American carpet instead of a Soviet runner. At a half march, half limp, Stas led him by display cases that illustrated stories Radio Liberty had reported to the Soviet Union: Berlin airlift, Cuban missile crisis, Solzhenitsyn, invasion of Afghanistan, Korean airliner, Chernobyl, Baltic crackdown. All the photographs were captioned in English. Arkady felt he was gliding through history.

   
If the halls were tidy and American, Stas's office had the anarchy of a Russian repair shop: desk and rolling chair, anonymous furniture wearing a shawl at the window, wooden filing cabinet, huge, audiotape splicer and armchair. This was the bottom layer. The desk was covered by a manual typewriter, word processor, telephone, water glasses and ashtrays. On the shawl were two electric fans, two stereo speakers and a second computer monitor. A portable radio and spare computer keyboard stood on the cabinet. On the tape player were reels of tape, both loose and rolled. Everywhere - on desk, window-sill, cabinet, armchair - towered unsteady, ominous stacks of newsprint. A wall telephone drooped from an accordion extender. At a glance, Arkady knew that apart from the typewriter and desk phone not a single item worked.

   
He leaned over the desk to admire pictures on the wall.

   
'Big dog.' It was the same dark and hairy beast who rode in the dashboard frame. Here Laika had been captured by the lens in a car, savaging a snowman, sprawled across Stas's lap. 'What breed?'

   
'Rottweiler and Alsatian. Usual German personality. Make yourself comfortable.' He cleared newspapers off the armchair and followed Arkady's eyes around the room. 'Well, they gave us all this electronic shit with useless software. I disconnected it, but I keep it around because it makes the bosses happy.'

   
'Where does Irina work?'

   
Stas closed the door. 'Down the hall. The Russian section of Radio Liberty is the largest. There are also sections for the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Baltics, Armenians, Turkics. We transmit in different languages for different republics. Then there's RFE.'

   
'RFE?'

   
Stas folded himself into the desk chair. 'Radio Free Europe, which serves Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Rumanians. Liberty and RFE employ hundreds of people in Munich. The voice of Liberty to our Russian audience is Irina.'

   
He was interrupted by a scratch at the door. A woman with bristling white hair, white eyebrows and a black velvet bow waddled in with a handful of bulletins. Her body had gone to fat, but she scrutinized Arkady's pinched suit with the slow-rolling eyes of an aged coquette. 'Cigarette?' Her voice was lower than Arkady's.

   
From a drawer stuffed with cartons, Stas opened a fresh pack for her. 'Ludmilla, you are always welcome.'

   
When Stas lit the cigarette for her, Ludmilla leaned forward and closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were on Arkady. 'A visitor from Moscow?' she asked.

   
Stas said, 'No, the Archbishop of Canterbury.'

   
'The DD likes to know who comes in and out of the station.'

   
'Then he should be honoured,' Stas said.

   
Ludmilla gave Arkady a last sweep of her eyes and went out of the door, leaving a vapour trail of suspicion.

   
Stas rewarded himself and Arkady with cigarettes. 'That was our security system. We have cameras and bulletproof glass, but they don't compare to Ludmilla. The DD is our deputy director for security.' He looked at his watch. 'At two steps a second, thirty centimetres a step, Ludmilla will reach his office in exactly two minutes.'

   
'You have security problems?' Arkady asked.

   
'The KGB blew up the Czech section a few years ago. Some of our contributors have died from poisoning and electrocution. You could say we have anxiety problems.'

   
'But she doesn't know who I am.'

   
'Undoubtedly she has seen the identification you left at the desk. Ludmilla knows who you are. She knows everything and understands nothing.'

   
'I've put you in a difficult situation, and I'm in the way of your work,' Arkady said.

   
Stas patted the bulletins. 'Because of these? This is the daily budget of wire service reports, newspapers and special monitoring reports. I'll also talk to our correspondents in Moscow and Leningrad. From this flood of information, I will distil about a minute of truth.'

   
'The newscast is ten minutes long.'

   
'I make up the rest.' He added quickly, 'Only joking. Let's say I pad. Let's say I don't want to put Irina in the position of telling the Russian people that their country is a rotting corpse, a Lazarus beyond resurrection, and that they should lie down and not even try to get up.'

   
'You're not joking now,' Arkady said.

   
'No.' Stas leaned back to release a long sigh of smoke; he actually wasn't much wider than a bent chimneypipe, Arkady realized. 'Anyway, I've got all day to trim the budget, and who knows what newsworthy disasters will happen between now and airtime?'

   
'The Soviet Union is fertile ground?'

   
'I must be modest. I only harvest, I do not sow.' Stas fell silent for a moment. 'Speaking of the truth, I can well believe that the bloodiest, most cynical Soviet investigator could fall in love with Irina, jeopardize family and career, even kill for her. Afterwards, as I heard it, you received a Party reprimand, but the only punishment was a short tour in Vladivostok, where you had a soft job with the fishing fleet shuffling papers in an office. Then you were brought back to Moscow to help the most reactionary forces stifle business entrepreneurs. I heard that the prosecutor's office could barely control you because you were such a well-connected Party member. So when you joined us at the beer garden yesterday, you were not the plump apparatchik that I expected. I noticed something else.' He rolled his chair forward; he moved more agilely on casters. 'Give me your hand.'

   
Arkady did so and Stas spread the hand to look at scars that crossed the palm laterally. 'Those aren't paper cuts,' he said.

   
'Trawl wires. The fishing equipment is old, so the wires fray.'

   
'Unless the Soviet Union has changed more than I knew, hauling a bloody net is hardly the usual reward for a favourite of the Party.'

   
'I lost the trust of the Party a long time ago.'

   
Stas studied the scars like a palm reader. It struck Arkady that he had that heightened level of concentration that came from years of being either crippled or confined to bed. 'Are you after Irina?' he asked.

   
'My business in Munich has nothing to do with her.'

   
'And you can't tell me what that business is?'

   
'No.'

   
The phone rang. Although dust seemed to rise with the clamour, Stas equably regarded the phone as if it were waving from a distant shore. He checked his watch. 'That'll be the deputy director. Ludmilla has just told him that a notorious investigator from Moscow has infiltrated the station.' He studied Arkady. 'It just occurred to me that you're hungry.'

The station cafeteria was on the floor below. Stas led Arkady to a table, where a German waitress in a black-and-white dirndl took their orders for schnitzel and beer. Young, fresh-faced Americans went outside to the garden. The tables inside were occupied by an older, largely male
émigré
population that lingered under a haze of cigarette smoke.

   
'Won't the director look for you here?' Arkady asked.

   
'In our own canteen? Never. I usually eat at the Chinese Tower; that's where Ludmilla will head first.' Stas lit a cigarette, gave a preparatory cough and inhaled as he swept the room with his bright gaze. 'It makes me nostalgic to see the Soviet empire. Rumanians sit at their own table there, Czech table there, Poles there, Ukrainians over there.' He nodded to Central Asians in white short-sleeved shirts. 'Turkics there. Turkics hate Russians, of course. The problem is that these days they go ahead and say it.'

   
'Things have changed?'

   
'For three reasons. One, the Soviet Union started falling apart. As soon as the nationalities there started going for each other's throats, the same thing happened here.

   
Two, the canteen stopped serving vodka. Now you can only have wine or beer, which is thin fuel. Three, instead of the CIA, now we're run by Congress.'