Red Square (29 page)

   
'Thanks, but I won't be staying,' Arkady said.

   
Stas swung in front of the building and killed the engine. 'I thought you need a place.'

   
'I needed to get away from the consulate. You're generous. Thanks,' Arkady said.

   
'You can't just walk off. Look, the truth is that you don't have a place to sleep.'

   
'Right.'

   
'And you don't have much money.'

   
'Right.'

   
'But you think you can survive in Munich?'

   
'Right.'

   
Stas said to the dog, 'He's so Russian.' He told Arkady, 'You think some special destiny is protecting you? Do you know why Germany looks so neat? Because every night the Germans pick up Turks, Poles and Russians and put them in sanitary jails until they're shipped home.'

   
'Maybe I'll be lucky. You showed up when I needed you.'

   
'That's different.'

   
Stas got no further before the Porsche eased alongside.

   
The sports car moved back and forth, eyeballing Arkady and Stas. An electrically controlled window slid down, revealing the driver wearing dark sailing glasses with a r red cord. His smile seemed to have more than two rows of teeth.

   
'Michael,' Stas said.

 
  
'Stas.' Michael had the kind of American voice that cut through the sound of a car engine. Arkady recalled a cool introduction to the station's deputy director at Tommy's party. 'Have you heard about Tommy?'

   
'Yes.'

   
'Sad.' Michael observed a moment of silence.

   
'Yes.'

   
Michael became more businesslike. 'I was just coming to ask you about it.'

   
'You were?'

   
'Because I heard that your friend, the visiting Investigator Renko from Moscow, was with our Tommy last night. And who do I see here but Renko himself?'

   
'I was just leaving,' Arkady said.

   
'Good, because the station president would really like to have a few words with you.' Michael pushed open the passenger door of the Porsche. 'I just want you, not Stas. I'll bring you back, I promise.'

   
Stas said to Arkady, 'If you think Michael is any kind of salvation, you're insane.'

Michael drove the Porsche with one hand and used a cellular phone with the other. 'Sir, I have Comrade Renko in tow.' He gave Arkady a grin. 'In tow, sir, in
tow
. We hit a gap between radio receivers. These phones work on line of vision.' He cupped the phone on his shoulder to shift gear. 'Sir, we'll be there in a second. I wish you'd wait until I get there. In a second.' He dropped the phone in a sleeve between the bucket seats and offered another glimpse of his dark glasses and bright smile. 'Fucking technical incompetent. Well, Arkady, I've been checking up on you and you're an interesting guy. From what I hear, you're a maverick. I found you in Irina's file. It's safe to say that now you're in Tommy's file, too. Does trouble just follow you, or what?'

   
'Were you following Stas?'

   
'I admit I was, and he led me right to you. The side trip to the train station gave me a scare. What did you take out of the locker?'

   
'A fur hat and an Order of Lenin.'

   
'It looked like a little plastic box. A familiar kind of box. I can't place it and it's driving me crazy. You know, as deputy director for security I have excellent relations with the local police. I can find out in a roundabout way what you and Tommy were doing last night, or else you can simply tell me. Only one way gets you extra credit.'

   
'Extra credit?'

   
'Let me put it more simply: money. What we can't afford is any mystery about one of our employees being killed. We hoped that the bad old days of the Cold War were behind us. I'm betting they are.'

   
'Why? You might lose your job; they might shut the station.'

   
'I'm looking ahead.'

   
'So is Max Albov.'

   
'Max is a winner. He's a star. Like Irina, if she polished her English a little more and chose her friends a little better.' He glanced over. 'President Gilmartin is going to ask you about Tommy. Gilmartin is head of Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe. He's the front-line voice of the United States and he's a busy man. So if you're cute, then fuck you and you can eat dog food. If you're honest, then there's a bonus for you.'

   
'It pays to be honest?'

   
'Exactly!'

   
The Porsche surged ahead of the traffic like a speedboat, and Michael smiled as if Munich were tossing in his wake.

They crossed to the east side of the city and the largest houses, short of palaces, that Arkady had ever seen. Some of them were modern, stark Bauhaus plaster and steel tubing. Others looked almost Mediterranean, with glass doors and potted palms. A few were either miraculously surviving or painstakingly reconstructed examples of
Jugendstil
; mansions covered with playful, vinelike fa
ç
ades and curving eaves.

   
Michael pulled into the driveway of the grandest of the mansions. On the front lawn a man was setting up a combination umbrella and table.

   
Michael led Arkady across the grass. Although no drops were falling, the man was dressed in a raincoat and rubber boots. About sixty, with a noble brow and jowls, he regarded Michael's arrival with a mixture of exasperation and relief.

   
'Sir, this is Investigator Renko. President Gilmartin,' Michael said.

   
'A pleasure.' Gilmartin gave Arkady a firm sportsman's hand and then sorted through a tool box on the table for the shiniest pair of pliers. A wrench and screwdriver had already spilled on to the lawn.

   
Michael pulled off his sunglasses and let them hang from the cord. 'I wish you'd waited for me, sir.'

   
'The goddamn Germans are always complaining about my dish. The grief. I have to have a dish, and this is the only place with clear sight of satellites unless I put it on the roof, and then would the Heinies scream.'

   
Now that Arkady looked he saw that the umbrella was actually camouflage, striped fabric over a satellite dish three metres wide. Dish and table were bolted to the ground.

   
'The boots are a good idea,' Michael said.

   
'I've been around broadcasting long enough to know better safe than sorry,' Gilmartin said. He told Arkady, 'I was with the networks for thirty years until I decided I didn't like the direction the medium was going. I wanted to have an impact.'

   
'Tommy,' Michael reminded him.

   
'Yes.' Gilmartin fixed Arkady with a stare. 'Dark Ages, Renko. We've had trouble in the past. Murders, break-ins, bombings. You blew up our Czech section a few years back. Tried to stab our Rumanian chief to death in his garage. Electrocuted one of our nicest Russian contributors. But we never lost an American, and those were the days when we were admittedly CIA. Prehistoric. We're funded by Congress now.'

   
'We're a private corporation,' Michael said.

   
'Delaware, I believe. My point is, we're not secret agents.'

   
'Tommy was an inoffensive guy,' Michael said.

   
'The most inoffensive guy I ever met,' Gilmartin said. 'Besides, the days of rough stuff are supposed to be over, so what were you, a Soviet investigator, doing with Tommy when he died?'

   
Arkady said, 'Tommy had an historical interest in the war against Hitler. He asked some questions about people I knew.'

   
'There's more to it than that,' Gilmartin said.

   
'There's a lot more to it,' Michael agreed.

   
'The station is like a family,' Gilmartin said. 'We watch out for each other. I want to know the whole unvarnished story.'

   
'Such as?' Arkady asked.

   
'Was there sex involved? I don't mean you and Tommy. I mean were there women?'

   
Michael said, 'The president means that if Washington goes through Tommy's laundry, are they going to find dirt?'

   
Gilmartin said, 'It doesn't matter to them that prostitution is legal in Germany. American standards are set in Peoria. Even a hint of scandal here always brings accusations of corruption and high living.'

   
'And reductions in funding,' Michael said.

   
'I want to know everything you and Tommy did last night,' Gilmartin said.

   
Arkady took a moment to choose his words. 'Tommy came to the pension where I was staying. We talked about the war. After a while I said I'd like some fresh air, so we got into his car and drove around. We did see a group of prostitutes off the motorway. At that point I left Tommy and he drove alone back to the city. On the way he had an accident.'

   
'Did Tommy have sex with a prostitute?' Gilmartin asked.

   
'No,' Arkady lied.

   
'Did he talk to a prostitute?' Michael asked.

   
'No,' Arkady lied again.

   
'Did he talk to any Russians besides yourself?' Michael asked.

   
'No,' Arkady lied a third time.

   
'Why did you separate?' Gilmartin asked.

   
'I
did
want to see a prostitute. Tommy refused to stay.'

   
Michael asked, 'How did you get back to Munich?'

   
'The police picked me up on the side of the road.'

   
'A sorry night on the town,' Gilmartin said.

   
'None of it was Tommy's fault,' Arkady said.

   
Michael and Gilmartin exchanged looks that made a silent conversation; then the president lifted his eyes and considered the sky. 'It's awfully thin.'

   
'But if Renko sticks to it, it's not bad. He's Russian, after all. They're not going to have a year to boil it out of him. And remember, Tommy drove an East German Trabant, not a very roadworthy car. That's what we zero in on: the car was a deathtrap.' Michael patted Arkady on the back. 'You're probably lucky to be alive.'

   
'Losing Tommy must be a blow,' Arkady said to Gil-martin.

   
'More a personal tragedy. He wasn't in any decision-making role. Research and translations, right?'

   
'Yes, sir,' Michael said.

   
'Though they're important,' Gilmartin hastened to add. 'Michael's Russian is better than mine, but I think it's fair to say that without our able translators the Russians on the staff would run amok.'

   
Gilmartin's attention moved to his other concern. He pointed his pair of pliers at loose bolts that had rolled into a fold of the diagram. 'Know anything about satellite dishes?' he asked Arkady.

   
'No.'

   
'I'm afraid I may have moved something out of alignment,' Gilmartin confessed.

   
'Sir, we'll think about windload, check the signal and make sure you didn't damage any cable,' Michael said. 'Looks like a good job.'

   
'Think so?' Reassured, Gilmartin stepped back for a better view. 'You know, this would be even more convincing if we brought chairs out and got people to really use this as an umbrella.'

   
'Sir, I don't think you'd actually want people drinking lemonade under a microwave receiver.'

   
'No,' Gilmartin said. He scratched his chin with the pliers. 'Maybe just the neighbours.'

Chapter Twenty-Three

Stas lived alone . . . and not alone. Moving through the hall meant elbowing Gogol and Gorky. Poets from Pushkin to Voloshin resided in a closet. The elevated thoughts of Tolstoy filled shelves above a Swedish sound system, CDs and television set. Newspapers and magazines were stacked by year. The least slip, Arkady thought, and a man could die under an avalanche of stale news, music, fantasy, romance.

   
Stas said, 'I don't like to think of it as messy. I prefer to think of it as life lived at full tide.'

   
'It looks like full tide,' Arkady said.

   
'Hotels are lacking in soul,' Stas said.

   
Laika sat by the door. Arkady could barely see her eyes through fur, though he felt them following his every move.

   
'Thanks, I have somewhere to go,' he said.

   
After the visit to the station president, Arkady had spent the rest of the day watching Benz's house. It was dusk now and light was seeping from the room. He had decided to ride on the underground until it shut down, or to buy a cheap ticket for an early morning train so he could wait at the station. That way he would at least be more migrant than vagrant. He had come to Stas's place only for his bag.

   
One question kept forcing itself to the front of Arkady's mind. It was so obvious that it was hard work not asking. 'Where is Max staying?'

   
'I don't know. One drink before you go,' Stas said. 'I suspect you're in for a long night.'

   
Before Arkady could protest or get around the dog and out of the door, his host was in the kitchen and back with two glasses and a bottle of vodka. The vodka was iced. 'Fancy,' Arkady said.

   
Stas filled the glasses halfway. 'To Tommy.'

   
The cold vodka gave Arkady's heart a brief squeeze on the way down. Alcohol didn't seem to affect Stas; he was a frail reed that stood up to the flood. He refilled the glasses. 'To Michael,' he offered. 'And the snake that bites him.'

   
Arkady drank to that and set the glass on a stack of papers out of Stas's reach. 'I'm just curious. You go out of your way to annoy the Americans. Why don't they fire you?'

   
'German labour law. The Germans don't want any foreigners on their welfare rolls, so once one has a job it's almost impossible to dismiss him. There are meetings between the American management and the Russian staff at the station. By law, the reports are written in German. It drives the Americans crazy. Michael tries to fire me once a year. It's wonderful, like starving a shark. Anyway, I put good programmes on the air.'

   
'You like to embarrass him?'

   
'I'll tell you what real embarrassment is - when the Jews on the staff accused the station of anti-Semitism, took it to a German court and
won
. That's embarrassment. I don't want Michael to forget episodes like that.'

   
'When Max defected back to Moscow, wasn't that embarrassing?'

   
Stas took a deep breath. 'It was embarrassing to me and to Irina. Actually, it was embarrassing to everyone. We'd had security problems before.'

   
'Michael said so. An explosion?'

   
'That's why we have the gates and big walls now. But to have the head of the Russian section defect back to Moscow is a security problem on a different level.'

   
'I'd think that Michael would hate Max even more than he hates you.'

   
'You'd think so.' Stas looked at his empty glass. 'I've known Max for ten years. I was always struck by how he could get along with the Americans and us. He changed, depending where he was and who he was with. You and I are Russians. Max is liquid. He changes shape. He fills the container whatever the container is. In a fluid situation, he's king. He came back from Moscow more of a businessman than he was before. The Americans can't help believing Max because he's like a mirror. To them he looks like another American.'

   
'What kind of business is he involved in?'

   
'I don't know. Before he left he used to say a fortune could be made out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said it was like any huge bankruptcy; there were still assets and property. What's the biggest landowner in the Soviet Union? Who owns the biggest office buildings, the best resorts, the only decent apartment houses?'

   
'The Party.'

   
'The Communist Party. Max said that all it had to do was change its name, call itself a company and restructure. Dump the shareholders, keep the goods.'

Arkady wasn't sure at what point he had set his bag down, but he discovered himself sitting on the couch. Bread, cheese and cigarettes were on the table. A floor fixture pointed light in three directions. The balcony door was open to street sounds and night air.

   
Stas filled the glasses again. 'I wasn't a spy. The KGB called demonstrators and defectors either spies or mentally ill. Russians understand that. The part I didn't expect was that the Americans would think that it was a KGB plot to insert the dangerous Stas into the unsuspecting West. Some of the CIA believed it.
All
of the FBI believed it. The FBI doesn't believe
any
defectors. Jesus could ride an ass out of Moscow and they'd open a file on him.

   
'There were, real heroes. Not me. Men and women who crawled through minefields into Turkey or ran through gunfire to reach an embassy yard. Who threw away careers and lost their families. For what? For Czechoslovakia, Hungary, God, Afghanistan. Which doesn't mean that they weren't compromised. You understand, but Americans don't. We grew up with informers. Among our friends and families there were always informers. Even among heroes there were informers. It's complex. A woman, an old lover from Moscow, visits Munich. Michael demands to know why I see her when everyone knows she's an informer. But that doesn't mean I don't still love her. We have a writer at Liberty whose wife worked at an Army base teaching the Russian language to American officers, screwing them and getting information for the KGB so she could live like a decent Western woman. She spent two years in jail. That doesn't mean her husband didn't take her back. We all talk to her. What are we going to do, pretend she's dead?

   
'Or we arrive compromised. An artist, a friend of mine, was called in by the KGB before he left Moscow. They said, 'We never put you in a camp, so no hard feelings. All we hope is you don't slander us to the Western press. After all, we think you're a wonderful artist and you probably don't realize how difficult it is to survive in the West, so we'd like to give you a loan. In dollars. We won't tell anyone and you don't need to sign a receipt. After a few years you pay it back with interest or no interest, when you can, just between us.' Five years later he publicly sent them a cheque and demanded a receipt, but it took him that long to realize how cheaply he'd been compromised and cancelled out. How many other loans are out there?

   
'Or we go crazy. There's the writer who went to Paris. A famous writer who survived the Gulag and wrote under the pen name of Teitlebaum. It was revealed that he informed for the KGB. He wrote a defence and said, no, no, it wasn't him who informed, it was Teitlebaum!

   
'And occasionally,' Stas said, 'we're killed. We open a letter bomb or get jabbed with the tip of a poisoned umbrella, or drink ourselves to death. Even so, at one time we were heroes.'

   
Laika stretched like a sphinx in the middle of the floor. Arkady couldn't see the dog's eyes as much as feel their force. Her ear might turn towards the sound of a particularly noisy car on the street four storeys down, but her focus remained on him. He said, 'You don't have to explain yourself to me.'

   
'I do, because you're different. You aren't a dissident. You saved Irina, but everyone wants to save Irina, that's not necessarily a political act.'

   
'It was more personal,' Arkady admitted.

   
'You stayed. People who knew Irina knew about you. You were the ghost. She tried to reach you once or twice.'

   
'Not that I know of.'

   
'What I'm trying to say is that we made a sacrifice to be soldiers on the right side. Who knew that history was going to change? That the Red Army would end up as camps of beggars in Poland? That the Wall was going to fall? They thought the Red Army was a danger? Now they're worried about two hundred and forty million Russians eating their way to the English Channel. Radio Liberty isn't quite the front line any more. We're not jammed; we have correspondents now in Moscow; we regularly interview people in the Kremlin.'

   
'You won,' Arkady said.

   
Stas finished the bottle and lit a cigarette. His narrow face was wan, his eyes two bright matches. 'Won? Then why only now do I feel like an émigré? Say you leave your native land because you were forced out, or because you thought you could help more from the outside than in? Democrats of the world applaud your noble effort. But it wasn't because of any effort of mine that the Soviet Union dropped to its knees and stretched out its long neck. It was history. It was gravity. The battle isn't in Munich, it's in Moscow. History has marooned us and gone in a different direction. We don't look like heroes any more; we look like fools. Americans look at us - not Michael and Gilmartin, they're concerned about their jobs and keeping the station alive - but other Americans read headlines about what's happening in Moscow and look at us and say, "They should have stayed." It doesn't matter whether we were forced out or risked our lives or wanted to save the world; now Americans say, 'They should have stayed.' They look at someone like you and say, "See, he stayed." '

   
'I didn't have a choice. I made a bargain. They'd only leave Irina alone if I stayed. Anyway, that was long ago.'

   
Stas peered into his empty glass. 'If you'd had the choice, would you have left with her?'

   
Arkady was silent. Stas leaned forward and waved smoke away to see him more clearly. 'Would you?'

   
'I was Russian. I don't think I could have gone.'

   
Stas was silent.

   
Arkady added, '
My
staying in Moscow certainly had no effect on history. Maybe
I
was the fool.'

   
Stas stirred, went to the kitchen and returned with another bottle. Laika kept her attention on Arkady in case he produced a bomb, a gun or a sharpened umbrella against her master.

   
'Irina had a difficult time in New York. She was in films in Moscow?' Stas asked.

   
'She was actually a student until she was thrown out of the university. Then she got work at Mosfilm as a wardrobe mistress,' Arkady said.

   
'In New York she did stage costumes and make-up, fell in with an artistic crowd and worked in art galleries, first there and then in Berlin, all the time defending herself from saviours. The pattern was always the same: an American would fall in love with Irina and then rationalize it as a political good deed. I think Radio Liberty must have been a relief. To give him credit, Max was the one who recognized how good she was. She wasn't a regular at first, just filling in, but he said there was a quality in her voice on the air, as if she were speaking to someone she knew. People listened. I was sceptical at first because she had no professional training. He gave me the job of teaching her how to hit her marks and watch the clock. People have no idea how fast they talk. Irina could run through a script once and almost have it memorized. With training, she was the best.'

   
Stas opened the bottle. 'So there we were, Max and I, two sculptors working on the same beautiful statue. Naturally we both fell in love with Irina. We did everything together - Max, Stas and Irina. Dinners, skiing in the Alps, musical sidetrips to Salzburg. An inseparable trio, neither Max nor I ever gaining an edge on the other. I didn't actually ski. I read down in the lodge, secure in the knowledge that Max was making no romantic headway on the slopes because, in fact, our trio was really a quartet.' He poured the vodka. 'There was always that man in Irina's past. The one who saved her life and stayed, the one she was waiting for. How could anyone beat a hero like that?'

   
'Maybe no one needed to. Maybe she just got tired of waiting,' Arkady said.

   
They drank at the same time, like two men chained to the same oar.

   
'No,' Stas said. 'I'm not talking about long ago. When Max went to Moscow last year I thought I was in command of the field. But I was outmanoeuvred to a degree I never anticipated, in a manner that only proves Max's genius. Because you see what Max did?'

   
'No,' Arkady admitted.

   
'Max came back. Max loved her and he came back for her. It was what I couldn't do and what you never did. Now he's the hero and I'm demoted to mere "dear friend".'