Red Square (19 page)

Hanging on to the bar on either side of Arkady were a pair of Turks, each with a faraway gaze. Filling the seat before him was a woman holding a ham that rocked back and forth on her knee like a baby.

   
What were the chances of anyone following him? Not great, considering the difficulty of trailing someone in an urban setting. According to Soviet technique, to carry out surveillance of a cautious mobile target demanded five to ten vehicles and thirty to a hundred people. Arkady didn't personally know because he'd never had more than enough manpower and cars to follow someone around a room.

   
At the train station stop, he returned to the same waiting hall where he had been an hour before. Some call boxes were in the open, but upstairs he found telephone booths and books for different cities on a stainless-steel counter. In Moscow phone books were so rare they were kept in safes, but these weren't even chained.

   
The books were confusing because of the sameness and strangeness of German names, full of consonants in death throes, and the variety of advertisements that filled more than half the pages. Under 'Benz', the only Boris had an address on K
ö
niginstrasse. There was no listing for any business called TransKom.

   
The phone booth had a rounded clear plastic door. Arkady decided he knew just enough German to talk to an operator. He thought she said she had no number for TransKom.

   
Then he called Boris Benz.

   
A woman answered. 'Ja?'

   
Arkady said, 'Herr Benz?'

   
'Nein.' She laughed.

   
'Herr Benz ist im Haus?'

   
'Nein. Herr Benz ist auf Ferien gereist.'

   
'Ferien?' On holiday?

   
'Er wird zwei Wochen lang nicht in M
ü
nchen sein.'

   
Away for two weeks? Arkady asked, 'Wo ist Herr Benz?'

   
'Spanien.'

   
'Spanien?' Two weeks in Spain? The news was just getting worse.

   
'Spanien, Portugal, Marokko.'

   
'Nein Russland?'

   
'Nein, er macht Ferien in der Sonne.'

   
'Kann ich sprechen mit TransKom?'

   
'TransKom?' The name seemed new to her. 'Ich kenne TransKom nicht.'

   
'Sie ist Frau Benz?'

   
'Nein, die Reinmachefrau.' The house cleaner.

   
'Danke.'

   
'Wiedersehen.'

   
As Arkady hung up he thought that this was about as basic as a conversation could get without drawing pictures. So he had talked to a housemaid who said Boris Benz would be away on summer holiday for the next two weeks and who had never heard of TransKom. The only real information was that Benz had gone south for the Mediterranean sun. Apparently Germans did this. By the time he returned to Munich, Arkady would probably be back in Moscow. From the cassette, he pulled Rudy's fax and dialled the transmitting number shown on the top of the page.

   
'Hello,' a woman answered in Russian.

   
Arkady said, 'I'm calling about Rudy.'

   
After a pause, 'Rudy who?'

   
'Rosen.'

   
'I don't know any Rudy Rosen.' There was something slovenly about the voice, as if she wouldn't take a cigarette from her mouth.

   
'He said you were interested in Red Square,' Arkady said.

   
'We're all interested in Red Square. So what?'

   
'I thought you wanted to know where it was.'

   
'What is this, a joke?'

   
She hung up. In fact she did what any normal person would, given such a stupid riddle, Arkady thought. Because he had failed was no reason to blame her.

   
On the same floor he found a bank of self-operated luggage lockers for two Deutschmarks a day. He made another circuit of the hall before returning, putting coins in the slot, placing the cassette in an empty locker and pocketing the key. Now he could return to the flat or go back out on the street without fear of losing the evidence, which seemed a great accomplishment considering his state of confusion. Or a pitiful achievement considering how little time he had - according to Platonov, one day.

   
He returned to the phone-book counter, opened the Munich book, flipped to 'R' and to 'Radio Liberty-Radio Free Europe'. When he called the number an operator answered only, 'RL-RFE.'

   
Arkady asked in Russian to speak to Irina Asanova, then waited what seemed forever for her to come on the line.

   
'Hello?'

   
He had thought he was prepared, but he was so startled actually to hear her that he couldn't speak.

   
'Hello. Who is this?'

   
'Arkady.'

   
He recognized her voice, but after all he had been listening to her broadcasts. There was no reason for her to remember his.

   
'Arkady who?'

   
'Arkady Renko. From Moscow,' he added.

   
'You're calling from Moscow?'

   
'No, I'm here in Munich.'

   
The phone was so quiet he thought that he might have lost the connection.

   
'Amazing,' Irina said finally.

   
'Could I see you?'

   
'I heard they'd rehabilitated you. You're still an investigator?' She sounded as if surprise was rapidly evaporating into irritation.

   
'Yes.'

   
'Why are you here?' she asked.

   
'A case.'

   
'Congratulations. If they let you travel, they must have a lot of faith in you.'

   
'I've been listening to you in Moscow.'

   
'Then you know I have a broadcast in two hours.' Papers rustled in the background to emphasize how busy she was.

   
'I'd like to see you,' Arkady said.

   
'Maybe in a week. Give me a call.'

   
'I mean soon. I won't be here long.'

   
'This is a bad time.'

   
'Today,' Arkady said. 'Please.'

   
'I'm sorry.'

   
'Irina,'

   
'Ten minutes,' she said, once she had made it clear that he was the last man on earth she wanted to see.

Chapter Sixteen

A taxi took Arkady to a park where the driver pointed out a path that, led him to long tables, chestnut trees and a pagoda-shaped, five-storey wooden pavilion. 'The Chinese Tower', Irina had told him to say.

   
In the shade of beech trees, diners carried giant steins of beer and paper plates that sagged under roast chicken, ribs, potato salad. Even the litter the breeze blew his way smelled good enough to eat. The lapping of the conversation and the steady pace of consumption had an unanticipated, sensual languor. Munich was still unreal to him. He had the sudden apprehension not that he was walking in a dream, but that he was someone's nightmare visiting the real world.

   
He had feared he might not recognize Irina, but there was no mistaking her. Her eyes were a little larger, seemingly darker, and she still possessed a quality that selfishly gathered light only for her. Her brown hair was redder and cut shorter, a starker frame to her face. She wore a gold cross over a black, short-sleeved sweater. No wedding ring showed.

   
'You're late.' She gave Arkady a handshake.

   
'I wanted to shave,' he said. He had bought a disposable blade and used it at the train station. Cuts on his chin tracked his haste.

   
'We were about to leave,' Irina said.

   
'It's been a long time,' Arkady said.

   
'Stas and I have a newscast to get ready.' She didn't appear to be excited or nervous, just pressed by a heavy schedule.

   
'Not quite yet.' A man, all bones wrapped in a loose sweater and baggy trousers, with bright, tubercular eyes, arrived with three foaming steins of beer. He was Russian, Arkady knew immediately. 'I'm Stas. Do I call you Comrade Investigator?'

 
  
'Arkady is fine.'

   
The skeleton in the sweater sat by Irina and laid his hand over the back of her chair.

   
'May I?' Arkady took the chair facing them and said to Irina, 'You look wonderful.'

   
'You look good, too,' Irina said.

   
'I don't think anyone is thriving in Moscow,' Arkady said.

   
Stas raised his stein and said, 'Drink up. The rats are leaving the ship now. Everyone's coming for a visit. Most of them are trying to stay. In fact, most of them are trying to get work at Radio Liberty; we see them every day. Well, who can blame them?' He watched a buxom girl collecting empties. 'Waited on by Valkyries. What a life.'

   
Arkady sipped for politeness' sake. 'I heard you -
'

   
'So, Arkady, you've had rather a chequered career,' Stas interrupted. 'Member of Moscow's Golden Youth, member of the Communist Party, rising star of the prosecutor's office, hero who saved our dear dissident Irina, years of Siberian exile atoning for that single act of decency, and now not only the prosecutor's pet, but his ambassador to Munich, able to hunt down your lost love, Irina. Here's to romance.'

   
Irina laughed. 'He's just joking.'

   
'I understand,' Arkady said.

   
It was funny; in interrogation he had been naked, hosed down, insulted and hit, yet he had never felt as embarrassed as he did at this table. Besides being badly shaved, his stupid face was probably beet red, he thought, because the evidence seemed to be that he was crazy. Evidently he had been crazy for years, imagining a connection between himself and this woman, who clearly shared no similar memory at all. How much had he imagined - their time hiding in his flat, the shootings, New York? At the psychiatric isolator, when the doctors injected sulphazine into his spine, they used to say that he was crazy; now, over beer, it turned out that they were right. He looked at Irina for any response, but she had the equanimity of a statue.

   
'Don't take it personally. That's just Stas.' She lit one of Stas's cigarettes without asking. 'Arkady, I hope you have some fun in Munich. I'm sorry I don't have time to do anything with you.'

   
'That's too bad.' Arkady drank to that.

   
'But you'll have friends at the consulate and you'll be busy with your case. You always were a dedicated worker,' Irina said.

   
'A fool for work,' Arkady said.

   
'It must be a heavy responsibility, representing Moscow. The prosecutor sent his human face.'

   
'It's kind of you to say so.' He was Rodionov's 'human face'? Was that what she thought?

   
Stas said, 'That reminds me, we ought to do an update on the crime rate in Moscow.'

   
'On the deteriorating situation?' Arkady asked.

   
'Exactly.'

   
'You work together?' Arkady asked.

   
Irina said, 'Stas writes the newscasts, I only read them.'

   
'Mellifluously,' Stas said. 'Irina is the queen of Russian émigrés. She has broken hearts from New York to M
ü
nich and all stations in between.'

   
'Have you?' Arkady asked.

   
'Stas is a
provocateur
.'

   
'Maybe that's what makes him a writer.'

   
'No,' Irina said. 'No, that's what got him beaten at demonstrations in Red Square. He defected to the Americans in Finland, for which the Soviet prosecutor general you work for pronounced him guilty of a state crime with a sentence of death. Amusing, isn't it? An investigator from Moscow can come here, but if Stas ever went back to Moscow, he'd disappear. The same with me if I went back.'

   
'Even I feel safer here,' Arkady agreed.

   
'What is this case of yours? Who are you after?' Stas asked.

   
'I can't tell you that,' Arkady said.

   
Irina said, 'Stas is afraid that I'm your case. Lately we've been seeing a lot of visitors in Munich. Family members, friends from before we left.'

   
'Left?' Arkady asked.

   
'Defected,' Irina said. 'Dear old grandmothers and former soulmates who keep telling us everything is fine and that we can go home again.'

   
Arkady said, 'Nothing is fine. Don't go back.'

   
'It's possible that at Radio Liberty we have a better idea of what's happening in Russia than you do,' Stas said.

   
'I hope so,' Arkady said. 'People outside a burning house generally have a better view than the people inside.'

   
Irina said, 'Don't worry. I've already told Stas it hardly mattered what you said.'

   
The sigh of a tuba marked the start of a waltz. Musicians in lederhosen had appeared on the first floor of the pavilion. Otherwise, Arkady saw little besides Irina. The women at other tables were beer-fed, slim, brunette, white-blonde, in slacks and skirts, and all of a German sameness and safeness. With her wide Slavic eyes and self-possession, Irina was unique, an ikon at a picnic. A familiar ikon. Arkady could have traced in the dark the line from the lashes of her eye, over the curve of her cheek to a corner in the softness of her mouth; yet she had changed, and Stas had put the name to it. In Moscow she had been a flame in the wind, so desperately outspoken that she was a danger to anyone near her. The woman Irina had become was someone colder and in control. The queen of the Russian émigrés was only waiting for Stas to finish his beer so she could leave.

   
Arkady asked her, 'You like Munich?'

   
'Compared to Moscow? Compared to Moscow, rolling in broken glass is nice. Compared to New York or Paris? It's pleasant, but a little quiet.'

   
'It sounds as if you've been everywhere.'

   
'And you, do you like Munich?' she asked.

   
'Compared to Moscow? Compared to Moscow, rolling in Deutschmarks is nice. Compared to Irkutsk or Vladivostok? It's warmer.'

   
Stas set down his empty stein. Arkady had never seen anyone so thin drain beer so quickly. At once Irina rose, in command, ready to hurry back to real life.

   
'I want to see you again,' Arkady said in spite of himself.

   
Irina studied him. 'No, what you want is for me to say that I'm sorry you Went to Siberia, that I'm sorry if you suffered on my account. Arkady, I
am
sorry. There, I said it. I don't think we have anything else to say.' With that she left.

   
Stas lingered. 'I hope you are a son of a bitch. I hate it when lightning hits the wrong man.'

   
Because she was tall, Irina seemed to sail between tables, her hair back like a flag.

   
'Where did they put you up?' Stas asked.

   
'Across from the train station.' Arkady mentioned the address.

   
'Sort of a dump,' Stas said, surprised.

   
Irina finally disappeared into a crowd arriving on the other side of the tower.

    
'Thanks for the beer,' Arkady said.

   
'Any time.' Stas hurried after Irina, manoeuvring around tables with a limp that seemed more a gesture of determination than a handicap.

   
Arkady stayed seated because he didn't trust himself to walk. He felt he had come a long way to be run over by a lorry. Tables were filling all the time, and he wanted the beer garden to close in over him. Here, beer had a sedative effect leading to calm, reasoned conversation. Couples young and old enjoyed civilized steins. Men with fierce eyebrows poured their concentration into chessboards. The tower with the company band was about as Chinese as a cuckoo clock. No matter; he had wandered into a village where he was not known, neither welcome nor rejected. He would settle for invisible. He sipped the good beer.

   
What was really terrible, truly frightening, was that he did want to see Irina again. Humiliating though the experience had been, he realized he would accept more of it to be with her, which revealed a capacity for masochism that he never knew he had. Their encounter had been so grotesque as to be comic. This woman, this memory he had carried like an extra chamber of the heart and found after so long, seemed barely to recall his name. Well, there was a disproportion of emotion that was - to use her word - amusing. Or evidence of insanity. If he was wrong about Irina, perhaps he was wrong about the history he thought they shared. Reflexively he touched his stomach and felt the groove of scar tissue through the shirt. Though what did that prove? Maybe he had punctured himself with an umbrella one day on the way to school, or been pinned by a statue of Lenin as it fell. In half his statues Lenin pointed towards the future. It was a well-known dangerous finger.

   
'What's so hilarious?'

   
'Pardon?' Arkady came out of his reverie.

   
'What's so hilarious?' The place across the table had been taken by a large man with a florid face and crisp white shirt. A small wool hat perched on a head as bald as a kneecap. He held a beer in one hand and protected a whole roast chicken with the other. Arkady noticed that the entire table was elbow-to-elbow with people hoisting drumsticks, ribs, pretzels, golden beers.

   
'You're enjoying yourself?' the man with the chicken asked.

   
Arkady shrugged rather than unveil a Russian accent.

   
The man's eyes darted to his Soviet coat. He said, 'You like the beer, the food, the life? It's nice. We worked forty years to have it so.'

   
The rest of the table paid no attention. Arkady realized he hadn't eaten anything except an ice cream. The table was so awash in food that he almost didn't need to. The band slid from Strauss to Louis Armstrong. He finished the beer. Of course there were beer bars in Moscow, but there were no steins or glasses, so patrons filled cardboard milk cartons. As Jaak would have said, 'Homo Sovieticus wins again'.

   
Not that everyone recognized the fact. When Arkady opened a map, the man across the table nodded, suspicions confirmed.

   
'Another East German. It's an invasion.'

Retreating, Arkady headed towards the nearest buildings over the treeline, which proved to be offices for IBM and the tower of a Hilton. The lobby of the hotel could have been an Arab tent. Each chair and divan was occupied by a man in flowing white keffiyeh and jellaba. Many were elderly, with canes, walkers and worry beads; Arkady assumed they had come to Munich for medical attention. Dark boys in Western slacks and button-down shirts played tag. Their sisters and mothers were in Arab dress; married women wore ornate plastic masks showing only their chins and brows, and trailed heavy perfume through the air.