Gorky Park

  ‘How about the Navy?’

  ‘Be one of those fops with braid and a dress dagger? No, thank you. Anyway, they didn’t make him a marshal. He was “Stalin’s Arm”! When Stalin died, no one else could trust him. A marshal of the Army? Never.’

  ‘They killed him?’

  ‘Retired him. And I was allowed to degenerate into the investigator you see today. Pick a match.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing’ – Kirwill picked the short match and poured – ‘how people always ask how you became a cop, right? Three jobs always get that question: priests, whores and cops. The most necessary jobs in the world, but people always ask. Unless you’re Irish.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you’re Irish, you’re born into the Holy Name Society and you only go into one of the two branches, the police or the Church.’

  ‘The “Holy Name”? What’s that?’

  ‘That’s the simple life.’

  ‘How simple?’

  ‘Women are saints or cunts. Commies are Jews. Irish priests drink; the rest are fags. Blacks are sex-crazed and great fucks. The best book ever written was The Thirteenth, Greatest of All Centuries, by John J. Walsh, the nuns tell you. Hoover was queer. Hitler had a point. A district attorney will piss in your pocket and tell you it’s raining. Those are the facts of life and the Golden Rules; the rest is horseshit. You think I’m a pretty ignorant son of a bitch, don’t you?’

  There was no mistaking the contempt on Kirwill’s face. The amiability that had been on it a moment before – real when it was there – had vanished. Arkady had done nothing to cause the appearance of one expression or the disappearance of another. He had no more influence on Kirwill than he would have had on the sudden change in motion of a ship, or over the changing aspect of a planet. Kirwill leaned over the table, enveloping it with his arms, his eyes bright and close.

  ‘I’m not so goddamn ignorant. I know about Russians, I was brought up by Russians. Every goddamn Russian Stalin scared out of this pisshole of a country lived in my house.’

  ‘I heard your parents were radicals,’ Arkady said carefully.

  ‘Radicals? Fucking Reds. Irish Catholic Reds. Big Jim and Edna Kirwill, you’re goddamn right you heard about them.’

  Arkady glanced around the bar. Every other occupant was drunkenly intent on the television. Odessa scored again, and those who could whistled. A painful grip on Arkady’s wrist tugged his head around.

  ‘Big Jim and Edna, bleeding hearts of the Russian world. Anarchists, Mensheviks, you name it, if it was Russian and crazy, it had a home in New York City – our home. When nobody else would take them in. One permanent benefit for displaced Reds. I’ll tell you this, anarchists made the best car mechanics. Very mechanically minded, anarchists – comes from rigging bombs.’

  ‘The American left seems to have an interesting history—’ Arkady started.

  ‘Don’t tell me about the American left, I’ll tell you about the fucking American left. The limp-wrist Catholic Marxist movement, with all their cute magazine names like Work, Worship, Thought – as if any of them worked harder than lifting a sherry glass or passing a fart – or sniveling-after-Jesus names like Orate Fratres or The Gregorian Review. The Gregorian Review, I love that. A little monastic bum punching with Brother Marx. Only they were never around when the heads got busted, and the cops who did the busting trooped into church to get their clubs blessed. The priests were worse than the cops. Hell, the Pope was fascist. In America, to be a prince of the Church you had to be vicious, ignorant and Irish, that’s it. Beat on Edna Kirwill’s head, and she was four feet ten, and your kid’s confirmed at Saint Patrick’s. Why? Because for twenty years Red Star was the only Catholic journal with the balls to call itself Communist. Right out on the banner. That was the way Big Jim did things. He came from an old IRA family, built like a beer wagon, two hands that would cover this table’ – Kirwill spread his own immense hands – ‘and too fucking educated for his own good. Edna was lace Irish. Her folks had a brewery and she was going to be the family nun, that kind of family. That’s why Big Jim and Edna were never excommunicated because her old man kept buying retreats for the Church, three up the Hudson and one in Ireland. Of course, we had our own retreats – Joe Hill House, Maryfarm – deep intellectual conversations around the fireplace. De Chardin was a closet capitalist, yes or no? Should we boycott Going My Way? Oh, we were weekend monks. Did the Gloria with tomtoms, stained glass, gilded ikons. We fucking stank of brotherhood until the war was over and the Rosenberg trial started. Then all the monks pulled their hoods over their heads and asses and ran for cover except Big Jim and Edna and the same miserable Russians we started out with – which didn’t do us a hell of a lot of good with McCarthy and the FBI parked at the door. I was killing Chinese in Korea when Jimmy was born. It was a family joke. Hoover had Big Jim and Edna so trapped in the house that they’d gone back to screwing again.’

  Dynamo finally scored, exciting bleary approval the length of the bar.

  ‘Then I got this personal bereavement leave to go home because they were dead. A double suicide – morphine, the only decent way to go. March tenth, 1953, five days after Stalin, when the Soviet Union was going to rise up from confusion and light the way to a Socialist Jerusalem. Only it wasn’t going to happen; it was the same old boat-load of butchers steering the same old tub of blood, and Big Jim and Edna plain died of mortal disappointment. Still, we had an interesting funeral. Socialists didn’t come because Big Jim and Edna were Communists; Catholics didn’t come because suicide was a sin; Communists didn’t come because Big Jim and Edna didn’t clap for Uncle Joe. So it was just the FBI, Jimmy and me. About five years later someone from the Soviet embassy comes around asking if we’d like to have Big Jim and Edna moved to Russia. They wouldn’t get slots in the Kremlin Wall – nothing so wonderful as that – but a nice plot in Moscow. Fairly amusing in retrospect. ‘The point of all this, me talking and you sitting there like you got an egg between your cheeks – the point is that I know you and your people. Someone in this city killed my little brother. You’re playing along with me now, but somewhere along the line because you want to go chasing after the guy who wasted your detective, or because your boss tells you to, or because you’re the fucker behind it all, you’re going to try to leave me with a hard-on and a rope around my neck. And I just want you to know that when you do I’m going to get you first. I just want you to know.’

  Arkady drove aimlessly. He wasn’t drunk. Sitting with Kirwill had been like sitting before an open furnace that burned vodka off in a vapor and left a futile energy. At every other block, red banners were being hoisted into place under floodlights. Snail-humped sanitation trucks browsed in the gutters. Moscow was sleepwalking toward May Day.

  Hungry at last, he stopped for a bite at Petrovka. The militia cafeteria was empty except for a table of girls from the private alarm room. Some people paid so many rubles a month for special burglar alarms. The girls were dead asleep, heads on their forearms. Arkady dropped change into a can for hard rolls and tea, ate one roll and left the rest.

  He had a sense that something was happening, but he didn’t know what or where. In the halls his footsteps sounded ahead of him like another man’s. Most of the officers on night duty were out on the annual push to clear the central city of drunks before May Day; conversely, on May Day it would be patriotic to be drunk. Timing was everything. Kirwill’s radicals, ghosts from an obscure chronology of dead passions that Arkady doubted even Americans knew or cared about – how could they have anything to do with murder in Moscow?

  In the communications room, two sergeants with loosened collars typed out radio messages that came in snatches, bits and ends, invisible litter from the outside world. Although there were no lights on the city map, Arkady stared at it.

  He moved on to the detective squad room. One man, alone, was typing up court transcripts. Trials were recorded in longhand and filed in type. Bulletins on the wall exhorted ‘Vigilance for a Glorious Week,’
and invited ‘Ski Groups to the Caucasus.’ He sat at a desk and dialed Central Telephone and Telegraph. Getting an answer on the twentieth ring, he asked about phone calls from the pay phones around Irina Asanova’s apartment.

  A voice clotted with sleep replied, ‘Investigator, I’ll send a list in the morning. I’m not going to read you a hundred phone numbers now.’

  ‘Any calls to the Rossiya Hotel from the pay phones?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hold on.’ The squad room had a single telephone book. Arkady scrambled through the ‘R’ pages to Rossiya. ‘Any calls to 45–77–02?’

  There was a snort of disgust on the other end, and then a long silence before the voice came back on. ‘At twenty-ten, a call was placed from public phone 90–28–25 to 45–77–02.’

  ‘Duration?’

  ‘One minute.’

  Arkady hung up, dialed the Rossiya number and asked for Osborne. Mr Osborne was out of his room, the clerk said. Osborne was meeting Irina Asanova.

  In the garage, Arkady ran to his car and swung onto Petrovka Street, one-way south. There was little traffic. Assuming that she had called Osborne, Arkady thought, then it was at her initiative, even insistence. A minute was more time than needed to merely state a meeting place; she’d demanded one. Where? Not in Osborne’s room, and not someplace where he would seem out of place and conspicuous. Not in a car – that could catch the eye of a militiaman, and if not in a car, then Osborne wouldn’t be driving her home. Public transportation stopped at twelve-thirty. Arkady’s watch said twelve-ten. The truth was, he didn’t know if they were meeting, or where or when. He could only try the obvious.

  He turned into Revolution Square, cut his motor and rolled to a stop in the shadow between streetlights. This was the nearest metro station to the Rossiya, also a direct line to her neighborhood. A militia emergency car raced by, blue overhead lights flashing, no siren. For once Arkady regretted the lack of a radio in his car. He felt his heart pound. He tapped the steering wheel. His excitement told him that he was right.

  Revolution Square opened at its north on Sverdlov Square, at its south on Red Square. He kept watch on the shapes emerging from the glow of Red Square, a haze bright as snow crystals that filtered past the giant front of G.U.M., the Government Universal Store. But footsteps came from all directions, tugging his eyes one way and then another. Out of the steps, some strolling, some running for a train, he picked out the sound of her stride. Irina Asanova came in sight around the corner of the department store, hands in her jacket pockets, her long hair behind like a flag. She entered the metro station’s glass doors directly across from Arkady’s car. He saw two men, one at each side of the entrance, fall in behind her.

  Inside the station, Irina had her five kopeks ready. When he entered, Arkady had to get change from a machine. By the time he was on the down escalator, she was far ahead, along with the two men she still hadn’t noticed. They were in overcoats and hats, guises of drabness that could be found on every third or fourth step of an escalator that descended two hundred meters – bomb-shelter depth – beneath the city. Yet it was an hour for romance; there was a staggered swoon of couples, men one step lower than the women on whose bosoms they rested their heads. Impassive as sweatered cushions, the women stared ahead at the unreeling ceiling, to glare possessively when Irina pushed by. The two men in overcoats pushed forward behind her, as did Arkady from farther back. Where the escalator’s descent ended at the low white gullet of the ceiling, Irina stepped off and vanished, and the two men in overcoats followed.

  The passages of the lower station had marble floors, crystal chandeliers, rounded walls of mosaics, revolutionary panoramas of flesh-, gun- and fire-colored stones that hid the hiss and tremor of unseen trains. Arkady ran past two small Mongolian soldiers dragging a single heavy suitcase past a mosaic of Lenin addressing Bolsheviks. A musician stepped along in glassy pumps near Lenin rallying factories. Tired couples dawdled where Lenin hunched over a manifesto. Arkady couldn’t see Irina Asanova, and he couldn’t hear the echo of her steps over his own running. She had simply disappeared.

  At the end of the passage, low arches led to a passenger platform. A train was just pulling out, strangers behind steel and glass, the old folks and veterans slipping into the seats provided for them, lovers daring to sway together, becoming a blur, a whiptail, then two red lights in the tunnel. Arkady didn’t think she was on the train, but he couldn’t be sure. Over the track the light-bulb numerals of a large digital clock changed from 2:56 to 0:00 and started to count up again. During rush hour, trains were never more than a minute apart, so that there was always a hushed, insistent trembling in the tunnels, and at night, even toward the end of service, no train was more than three minutes after the previous one. Platform conductors, sturdy grandmothers in blue uniforms, metal flags in their hands, made the rounds of the benches and whispered to reluctant lovers, ‘Last train coming . . . last train.’ Arkady asked about a tall, young, good-looking woman with long brown hair, and the conductor, misunderstanding, shook her head sympathetically. He darted across the passage to the opposite platform for trains in the other direction. The passengers there were a mirror of the ones he’d left, except for the Mongolian soldiers, who sat on their suitcase like a pair of prize dolls waiting to be won.

  Arkady left the platforms and started back up the passage, reentering the glitter of revolutionary mosaics, sidestepping the last stragglers running for the train. He was sure he hadn’t gone past her. A washwoman knelt by a bucket of ammonia scrubbing the marble floor. Lenin said he’d use gold for plumbing; marble in the subway was close enough. The washwoman’s head mimicked the rotation of her hand. For the length of the passage Lenin inspired, berated, meditated in stone cartoons. Between the mosaics on one side were three doors. The chandeliers winked, signaling that the next train would be the last of the night. In the alternate light and dark, Lenins waked and faded.

  Arkady opened a door marked by a red cross and found a closet of oxygen tanks, fire extinguishers, bandages and leaning stretchers, the props of emergency. A door marked PROHIBITED was locked. The second door marked PROHIBITED swung open easily and he slipped through it.

  He found himself in an area the size of a locomotive cab. A red bulb was reflected by banks of meters. Another wall was a crosshatch of circuit breakers and chalk strikes. From the floor he picked what first looked like a rag. It was a scarf, black under the bulb.

  An iron door was marked DANGER. Arkady pushed it open and stepped into the train tunnel. He was on a metal catwalk chest-high in the tunnel. The air was reverberant, gray from the light that seeped from the faraway platform. Irina Asanova lay on the track directly below, her eyes and mouth open, as a man in an overcoat arranged her legs. The other man, who was on the catwalk, swung a sap at Arkady.

  Arkady took two hits on his arm and felt a warm numbness from the elbow down. He had learned from Kirwill in Gorky Park, though. As the other man drew back to bring a blow directly to the soft fontanel in the center of the skull, Arkady savagely brought his foot up to that larger, softer area between the legs. The man folded like a chair and dropped his weapon. Arkady gathered it up and swung in one motion, snapping the man’s head back. The man sat down on the catwalk, one hand over his groin, one hand catching the dark burst of blood from his nose. Arkady looked down the tunnel to the far-off platform clock, surprised he could see it so distinctly. 2:27.

  The man on the track regarded the scuffle above him with the mild dismay of a manager whose assistant has been brushed aside by an overbearing customer. His face was scarred like street snow: a professional’s face. His little eyes looked over a snub-nosed TK, the KGB’s pocket pistol, that was aimed at Arkady’s chest. Irina wasn’t moving. Whether she was alive, Arkady couldn’t tell.

  ‘No,’ Arkady said, and looked again toward the passenger platform. ‘They’ll hear it.’

  The man on the track nodded in a reasonable way and dropped the gun into his coat, then looked toward
the platform clock and turned back to Arkady with a reasonable suggestion. ‘Too late. Go home.’

  ‘No.’

  At the very least, Arkady had thought he could prevent the man from getting off the track and onto the catwalk, but in one step the man had his hands on the catwalk railing, and with the next he swung athletically over it to Arkady’s level. Arkady flailed with the sap, his newly won weapon, hitting nothing but overcoat and railing until the man kicked him away, squeezed past his fallen colleague and advanced in terse, mechanical steps while Arkady retreated. Arkady took another kick in his stomach while he covered his tender chest in panic, then another, bringing a deep grunt. The professional face speculated, like a doctor searching for a vein. Here? There? His hands and feet were not as hard as Kirwill’s, and not drawn back from reach as cleanly. Arkady dropped the sap, smothered the next kick and pulled. The man grabbed the catwalk railing for balance, allowing Arkady to slip in a fist. A second punch, better aimed to the heart, even dropped the man. Without complaint he rose, locking with Arkady, first trying to butt and then to gouge. As Arkady twisted away, they spilled over the railing and toppled down onto the tracks.

  Arkady landed on top, but felt something slap into his belt. Raising himself, he saw a knife blade sticking through the man’s overcoat pocket. The man rolled free and pulled a spring-operated knife that he held thumb up, blade flat. Hatless now, exposing a sharp V hairline, he also revealed for the first time a personal interest in his work. The blade circled and stabbed, first a peck to the eyes and then a thrust to the body. The blade winked, then tapped the rails for emphasis. Arkady stumbled backward over Irina. Remarkably, as the man moved in with his knife, his eyes developed orange cores, brilliant moth eyes as if he were lit from within.