‘What’s available anyway? Red Army issue, some rusty British revolvers, maybe a Czech pistol or two. You take the east, Siberia, you might find a gang with a machine gun. Not here, nothing like you describe. Very well, who’s going to fire it? Besides myself, I can’t think of ten people in Moscow under the age of forty-five who could hit their grandmother at ten steps. They’ve been in the service, you say? This isn’t America. If we’ve been in any real wars for the past thirty years, do let me know. They don’t get a chance to shoot anyone, and besides, the training’s gone to the devil. Let’s be serious. You’re talking about an organized execution, and you and I know only one organization equipped for that.’
In the afternoon, Arkady kept calling Zoya’s school until they told him she’d left for the Union of Teachers athletic club. The club was a former mansion at the point of Novokuznetskaya just across from the Kremlin. Searching for the club’s gymnasium, he became lost until he went through a door and found himself on a small balcony that at one time had been for musicians. He looked down at what had been a ballroom. Defaced cupids decorated the high ceiling. The dance floor was covered with vinyl tumbling mats, shiny and redolent of sweat. Zoya was swinging on the uneven bars. Her gold hair was pulled into a bun, and she wore sweat bands on her wrists and woollen leg warmers. When she rolled under the lower bar, her legs spread like the wings of a plane, the muscles of her back and rear scalloped under her leotard. In a sweatsuit, arms folded, Schmidt watched from the mats. She reached, thumbs to forefingers, for the upper bar, about-faced in a spin to swing down to the lower bar, grunting against wood, raised herself in a handstand with toes to the ceiling, and reversed and rolled, legs apart, back to the high bar. She was not good enough to be graceful; what she had was a manic kind of momentum, like a clock’s wire pendulum wrapping and unwrapping around two poles. She swung down from the bars, and when Schmidt caught her with both hands at her waist, Zoya put her arms around him.
It was romantic, Arkady thought. Instead of a husband there should be a string quartet and moonlight. Natasha was right – they were made for each other.
Leaving the balcony, Arkady slammed the door hard so it gave the report of a gun.
He got fresh clothes from his apartment and, on his way to the Ukraina, Annals of Soviet-American Cooperation in the Great Patriotic War from the Historical Library. Maybe the KGB would have carted off their cartons by the time he reached the hotel, Arkady thought, and maybe Pribluda would be waiting. The major might even start with a little joke, establishing a fresh, more amiable relationship, perhaps describing their current misunderstanding as purely institutional. After all, the KGB was maintained out of fear. Without enemies, outside or within, real or imagined, the whole KGB apparatus was pointless. The roles of the militia and the prosecutor’s office, on the other hand, were to demonstrate that all was well. Years hence, Arkady imagined, the three killings might be discussed in law journals as Institutional Goal Conflicts in Gorky Park.
There were new cartons with the old ones at the Ukraina. Pasha and Fet were gone. Pasha had left a note saying the ikon angle was a bust, but that he did have a German on something else. Arkady crumpled the note, flipped it into the wastebasket and dropped his clean clothes on the office cot.
It was raining, drops hurtling down to the frozen river, steaming off the boulevard traffic. Through the rain, across the boulevard, in the foreigners’ compound, a woman in a nightgown stood at a lit window.
American? Arkady’s chest ached, the center swollen pink and tender where the fugitive in the park had hit him two nights before. He mashed out one cigarette and lit another. He felt strangely light – light of Zoya, light of home, slipping out of an orbit that had been his life, falling away from gravity.
Across the boulevard the woman’s window went dark. He asked himself why he wanted to sleep with a woman he’d never seen before and whose face was a blur behind a wet pane. He’d never been unfaithful, never even thought about it. Now he wanted any woman. If not that, to hit someone. Make contact, that was the main thing.
He forced himself to sit and listen to the January tapes of the businessman-provocateur Osborne. If he could fashion any link between Gorky Park and such a KGB favorite, he was sure Major Pribluda would step in. There was no reason to suspect Osborne despite the American’s contacts with Irina Asanova and the ikon dealer Golodkin. It was merely as if passing through a field one day Arkady had heard a hiss beneath a rock. Here lies a snake, said the hiss. The furrier had spent January and the first two days of February shuttling between Moscow and the annual fur auction in Leningrad. In both cities he fraternized with an elite of cultural and trade officials, choreographers and directors, dancers and actors, not with the sort of shabby citizens whose bodies had been found in Gorky Park.
Osborne: You’re famous as a director of war films. You love war. Americans love war. It was an American general who said ‘War is heaven.’
In the Annals of Soviet-American Cooperation in the Great Patriotic War, Arkady found Osborne mentioned twice:
During the siege, most foreign nationals vacated the port. One who did not was the American Foreign Service officer J. D. Osborne, who worked shoulder to shoulder with Soviet colleagues to minimize the destruction of goods on the docks. Throughout the most intense shelling, General Mendel and Osborne could be found in the outskirts of the city laboring under fire to supervise the almost immediate repair of damaged tracks. The intent of Roosevelt’s so-called lend-lease policy was fourfold: to prolong the struggle between the Fascist aggressors and the defenders of the Soviet homeland until both combatants were drained of blood; to delay opening a Second Front while he bargained for peace with the Hitler Gang; to place the fighting Soviet people in unending financial debt; and to reestablish Anglo-American hegemony throughout the world. It was individual Americans who had the vision to strive for a new global relationship.
A few pages later:
. . . one such infiltration of Fascist raiders trapped the transportation group led by General Mendel and the American Osborne, who fought their way to safety using handguns.
Arkady remembered his father’s jokes about Mendel’s physical cowardice (‘shitty pants, shiny boots’). Yet with Osborne, Mendel was a hero. Mendel had gone to the Ministry of Trade in 1947, and shortly after, Osborne received a license for the export of furs.
Detective Fet suddenly popped into the office. ‘I thought since you were here, Investigator, I might listen to more of my tapes,’ he said.
‘It’s late. Wet out, Sergei?’
‘Yes.’ Fet laid his dry overcoat on a chair and sat down at a machine. We’re not even being that subtle, Arkady thought. The young man went through the motions of balancing his glasses on his knob of a nose and laying out his sharpened pencils. Probably there was a microphone in the office, and they’d got fed up with listening to a man reading and listening to his own headset and ordered poor Fet into the breach. That showed real interest. Very good.
Fet hesitated.
‘What is it, Sergei?’
Familiarity made Fet uncomfortable. The detective shifted like a small locomotive gathering steam. ‘This approach, Investigator—’
‘It’s after hours, call me Comrade.’
‘Thank you. This approach we’ve taken – I can’t help but wonder whether it is the correct one.’
‘Me, too. We start out with three dead bodies, and go off on a tangent with tapes and transcripts of people who, after all, are welcome visitors. We could be absolutely wrong, and all this could be a waste of time. Is that what you were thinking, Sergei?’
Fet seemed to have lost his breath. ‘Yes, Chief Investigator.’
‘Please call me Comrade. After all, how can we link cooperative foreigners to this crime when we don’t know who the victims were or what they were really killed for?’
‘That’s what I was thinking.’
‘Why not, rather than foreigners, choose a selection of ice-skate clerks, or amass the names of all th
e people who visited Gorky Park this winter? Would that be better, do you think?’
‘No. Maybe.’
‘You’re of two minds, Sergei. Please tell me, because criticism is constructive. It defines our purpose and leads to unanimity of effort.’
The concept of ambiguity made Fet more uneasy, so Arkady helped. ‘Not of two minds. In mind of two different approaches. Is that better, Sergei?’
‘Yes.’ Fet started afresh: ‘And I was wondering whether you knew of some aspect in the investigation that I didn’t, which has led us to such a concentration on the recordings of State Security?’
‘Sergei, I have complete faith in you. I also have complete faith in the Russian murderer. He kills from passion and, if possible, in private. True, there is a housing shortage now, but as that situation improves there will be even more homicides in private. Anyway, can you imagine a Russian, a son of the Revolution, luring three persons in cold blood to an execution in Moscow’s foremost cultural park? Can you, Sergei?’
‘I don’t quite understand.’
‘Don’t you see, Sergei, there are elements of a joke in this murder?’
Fet straightened with revulsion. ‘A joke?’
‘Think about it, Sergei. Put your mind to it.’
Making excuses, Fet left a few minutes later.
Arkady went back to Osborne’s tapes, using earphones, determined to finish the January reels before going to sleep on the cot. In the table lamp’s moon of light he set three matches on a piece of paper. Around the matches he drew an outline of the park clearing.
Osborne:
‘But you can’t do Camus’s The Stranger for a Soviet audience. A man takes the life of a total stranger for no reason but ennui? It’s purely Western excess. Middle-class comfort leads inevitably to ennui and unmotivated murder. The police are used to it, but here in a progressive socialist society no one is tainted by ennui.’
‘What about Crime and Punishment? What about Raskolnikov?’
‘My very point. For all his existentialist rambling, even Raskolnikov just wanted to get his hands on a few rubles. You’d be as likely to find an unmotivated act here as you would be to find a tropical bird outside your window. There would be mass confusion. Camus’s murderer would never be caught here.’
Around midnight he remembered Pasha’s note. On the detective’s table was a report clipped to the dossier of a German national called Unmann. Arkady leafed through it with red eyes.
Hans Frederick Unmann was born 1932 in Dresden, married at eighteen, divorced at nineteen, dismissed from the Young Communists for rowdyism (criminal charges for assault dropped). Joined the Army in 1952 and, during the reactionary turmoil of the following year, accused of bludgeoning rioters (charges of manslaughter dropped), then finished his service as a guard at the Marienbad stockade. Employed for four years as chauffeur to the secretary of the Central Committee for Trade Unions. Reinstated in Party in ’63, remarried the same year and employed as foreman in an optics factory. Five years later, dismissed from Party for beating his wife. In short, a brute. Unmann was back in the Party and attached by Komsomol to maintain discipline among German students in Moscow. His photo showed a tall, bony man with sparse blond hair. Pasha’s report added that Golodkin had supplied prostitutes for Unmann until the German ended the association in January. There was no mention of ikons.
There was a reel on Pasha’s machine. Arkady jacked in Pasha’s earphones and turned the machine on. He wondered why Unmann broke off with Golodkin, and why in January?
Arkady’s German wasn’t as good as it had been in the Army, but it served to decipher the outright physical threats that Unmann used to keep his students in line. From the sound of their voices, the German students were adequately terrified. Well, Unmann had a great job. One or two terrified kids a day, and the rest of his time to call his own. He’d smuggle cameras and binoculars from Germany, and probably bullied the students into doing the same for him. Of course, no ikons; only visitors from the West wanted Russian ikons.
Then Arkady heard a tape of a caller telling Unmann to meet him ‘at the usual place’. A day later the same caller told Unmann to be outside the Bolshoi. The next day ‘the usual place,’ and two days later somewhere else again. No names were used, no real conversation was held, and what conversation there was, was in German. It took a long time for Arkady to convince himself that the anonymous friend was Osborne because Unmann had never appeared on the Osborne tapes. Osborne called Unmann, never the other way around, and Osborne apparently called only from pay phones. Then there would be a wrong intonation in the anonymous caller’s voice, and Arkady would think his identification was insane.
He set up two machines and listened alternately to Osborne and Unmann tapes. He built an ashtray pyramid of butts. Now it was a matter of patience.
At dawn, after seven hours of listening, Arkady walked outside the hotel to revive himself. Around the empty taxi stand, hedges crackled in the wind. As he gulped air he heard another sound, a rhythmic thud from far overhead. Workmen were tapping the parapets of the Ukraina’s roof for the false notes of bricks loosened by the winter.
Back in the room, he started on Unmann’s February tapes. On February 2, the day of Osborne’s departure from Moscow to Leningrad, the anonymous man called.
‘The plane’s delayed.’
‘It’s delayed?’
‘Everything is going fine. You worry too much.’
‘You never do?’
‘Relax, Hans.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘It’s a little late to like or not like anything.’
‘Everyone knows about those new Tupolevs.’
‘A crash? You think only Germans can build anything.’
‘Even a delay. When you get to Leningrad—’
‘I’ve been to Leningrad before. I’ve been there with Germans before. Everything will be fine.’
For an hour Arkady slept.
Chapter Seven
The dummy was a featureless pink plaster head in a ratty wig, but it was hinged at the ears so that the face could split open down the middle and reveal an inner structure of blue muscles and a white skull as intricate as a Fabergé egg.
‘Flesh doesn’t sit on a vacuum,’ Andreev said. ‘Your features, dear Investigator, are not determined by intelligence, character or charm.’ The anthropologist set the dummy aside and took Arkady’s hand. ‘You feel the bones in there? Twenty-seven bones in your hand, Investigator, each articulating in a different way for a definite purpose.’ Andreev’s grip, strong for such a small man, tightened, and Arkady felt the veins shifting within the back of his hand. ‘And flexor muscles and extensor muscles, each with different sizes and attachments. If I told you I was going to reconstruct your hand, you wouldn’t doubt me. The hand seems a tool, a machine.’ Andreev let go. ‘The head is a machine for nervous response, eating, seeing, hearing and smelling – in that order. It is a machine with proportionately larger bones and less flesh than a hand. The face is only a thin mask of the skull. You can make the face from the skull, but you can’t make the skull from the face.’
‘When?’ Arkady asked.
‘In a month—’
‘A few days. I have to have an identifiable face in a few days.’
‘Renko, you’re the typical investigator. You haven’t heard a word I said. I barely decided to do the face at all. The procedure is very complicated, and I’m doing it in my spare time.’
‘There is a suspect who will be leaving Moscow in a week.’
‘He can’t leave the country, so—’
‘He is.’
‘He’s not Russian?’
‘No.’
‘Ah!’ The dwarf’s laugh erupted. ‘Now I see. Don’t tell me any more about this, please.’
Andreev climbed a stool and scratched his chin and looked up at the skylight. Arkady was afraid he would refuse to have anything more to do with the head.
‘Well, she did come to us largely intact except f
or the face and I took photographs of her, so I won’t have to spend any time building the neck and jawline. The muscle attachments were still on the face, and we photographed and sketched those. We know her hair color and cut. As soon as I can get a cast from a clean skull, I suppose I could begin.’
‘When can you get a clean skull?’
‘Investigator, such questions! Why don’t you ask the cleaning committee?’
Andreev reached and pulled open a deep drawer. Inside was the box Arkady had brought the head in. Andreev knocked off the lid. Inside was a shiny mass, and it took Arkady a moment to see that the mass was moving and was composed of beetles, a mosaic of jewellike insects feeding over and inside bright bone.
‘Soon,’ Andreev promised.
From the militia teletype room on Petrovka Street, Arkady sent out a new homicide bulletin, not just west of the Urals this time but all-republic, including Siberia. He continued to be disturbed by the fact that the three bodies were unidentified. Everyone had papers; everyone watched everyone else. How could three people be missing for so long? And the only connection to anyone was the ice skates of Irina Asanova, who was from Siberia.
‘In a place like Komsomolsk they’re ten hours ahead of Moscow,’ the teletype operator said. ‘It’s night there already. We won’t get an answer until tomorrow.’
Arkady lit a cigarette and, with his first inhale, went into a coughing fit. It was the rain and his banged-up ribs.
‘You ought to see a doctor.’
‘Know a doctor.’ He put a fist to his mouth and left.
When Arkady arrived, Levin was in the autopsy room working over a body with maroon lips. Seeing him hesitate at the door, the pathologist wiped his hands and came out.
‘Suicide. Gas, plus cutting both wrists and the neck,’ Levin said. ‘New joke. Secretary Brezhnev calls Premier Kosygin into his office and says, “Aleksei, my dearest comrade and oldest friend, I have just heard a disturbing rumor that you are Jewish.” “But I’m not,” Premier Kosygin answers with shock. Secretary Brezhnev takes a cigarette from his gold case, lights it, nods’ – Levin’s narrow head mimicked all this – ‘and says, “Well, Aleksei, think about it.” ’