Gorky Park

  ‘You are sincerely surprised to see me alive.’

  ‘That, too, I admit.’ Osborne let the lamp drop. ‘You once said you could hide from me, that you could hide beneath the Moskva River and I would come and seek you out. I didn’t believe you, but you were right.’

  Osborne left the gun on the table while he lit a cigarette. Arkady had forgotten the almost Arab darkness, the lean elegance and silver hair. And, of course, the touches of gold in the cigarette case and lighter, the ring, watchband and cuff links, the amber flames in the eyes, the dazzling smile.

  ‘You’re a murderer,’ Arkady said. ‘Why would the Americans let you meet me?’

  ‘Because the Russians let me meet you.’

  ‘Why would we let you?’

  ‘Open your eyes,’ Osborne said. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Furs.’

  ‘Not just furs. Blue mink, white mink, standard mink, blue fox, silver fox, red fox, ermine, lynx, karakul. And Barguzin sables. Over two million dollars’ worth of furs in this room, and there are fifty more like it along Seventh Avenue. This is not a matter of murder; it’s a matter of sables and always has been. I didn’t want to murder the Kirwill boy and Kostia and Valerya. After the help they’d been to me, I would have been perfectly happy if they had gone on living quietly anywhere in the world. But what would you have done? The Kirwill boy insisted on publicity; he had an obsession for telling his story to the world upon his triumphant return to New York. Maybe he wouldn’t have told about the sables in his first press conference, but he surely would have by his tenth. Here I was fighting the world’s oldest monopoly, I had put in years of effort and risk; should I make myself vulnerable to the self-aggrandizement of a religious fanatic? What sane man would have? I confess I did not mind doing away with Kostia, either. No, he would have extorted money from me the day after he got here. Valerya, though, I regret.’

  ‘You hesitated?’

  ‘Yes.’ Osborne was pleased. ‘I did hesitate before I shot her, you’re correct. I find that confession gives me an appetite. We’ll have something to eat.’

  They rode down in the elevator and found the limousine waiting in the bay. The car took them north on the Avenue of the Americas. Much more than Moscow would have been at this hour, New York was awake; Arkady could feel it in the snake rush of traffic. Above Forty-eighth Street the avenue was flanked by stark office towers of glass, not unlike Kalinin Prospekt.

  At Fifty-sixth Street, the car stopped and Osborne led Arkady into a restaurant, where they were ushered to a banquette of red velvet by a maître d’ who greeted Osborne by name. There were fresh-cut lilies on each table and enormous sprays of flowers in alcoves, French Impressionist oils on the wall, crystal chandeliers above, pink tablecloths and an obsequious captain. The other diners were older men in pinstriped suits and younger women with lacquered faces. Arkady still half expected Wesley or the police to burst into the restaurant and arrest Osborne. Osborne asked whether Arkady wanted something to drink; Arkady declined, and Osborne ordered a Corton-Charlemagne ’76. Was Arkady hungry? Arkady lied and said no, and Osborne ordered a grilled gravlax with dill sauce and pommes frites for himself. Just the silverware on the table was dazzling. I should be putting the knife through his heart, Arkady thought.

  ‘The Russian émigrés pour through New York, you know,’ Osborne said. ‘They write down that they’re going to Israel, but at Rome they make a right turn and come here. I help quite a few, as many as is practical; after all, some of them know quite a lot about furs. Some of them, though, I can’t do anything for. I mean the ones who were waiters in Russia. Do you know anyone who could hire a Russian waiter?’

  The wine had a golden color. ‘You’re sure you don’t want any? Anyway, there are more than enough émigrés. Very sad, most of them. Candidate members of the Soviet Academy of Science who are sweeping school halls or fighting each other over scraps of translation work. They live in Queens and New Jersey and have little houses and big cars they can’t afford. Of course, one can’t criticize; they’re doing the best they can. They can’t all be Solzhenitsyns. I’d like to think I did something to promote Russian culture in this country. I sponsored a great deal of cultural exchange, you know. Where would American ballet be without Russian dancers?’

  ‘What about the dancers you informed on to the KGB?’ Arkady asked.

  ‘If I hadn’t, the dancers’ friends would have. That’s the fascinating thing about the Soviet Union: everyone informs right from the nursery. Everyone has dirty hands. They call it “vigilance”. I love that. Anyway, that was the price. If I wanted to promote goodwill and understanding by bringing Soviet artists to the United States, the Ministry of Culture wanted me to inform on who I brought. I did have to inform on some would-be defectors, but generally I just tried to weed out as many bad dancers as possible. I have high standards. I probably had a beneficial effect on Soviet dance.’

  ‘You don’t have dirty hands, you have bloody hands.’

  ‘Please, we’re at the table.’

  ‘Then tell me how it is that the American FBI lets you, a murderer, a man who informs for the KGB, walk around this city and come here to eat.’

  ‘Oh, I have enormous respect for your intelligence, Investigator. Think about it just for a second. I know you will understand.’

  Surrounding conversations wafted among tablecloths and cut flowers and the discreet rattle of a pastry cart. Osborne waited confidently for Arkady’s understanding. The understanding came, faintly to begin with, then with a more definite shape, and Arkady was struck by its utter logic and palpable symmetry, as a deer’s eye would be if a lion half in shadow stepped fully into the sun. Whatever hope he had left died when he spoke.

  ‘You’re an informer for the FBI,’ Arkady said as the thought fully formed. ‘You informed for the KGB and for the FBI.’

  ‘I knew that you of all men would understand.’ Osborne smiled warmly. ‘Wouldn’t I have been a fool to inform for the KGB without informing for the bureau? Don’t be disappointed; that hardly makes America as bad as Russia. It just happens to be the way the bureau operates. Ordinarily the bureau relies on criminals, but I hardly get involved in that sort of operation. I simply passed on gossip. I knew the gossip would be appreciated by the bureau because the same gossip was so much appreciated in Moscow. The bureau was even more desperate for it. Hoover was so afraid of mistakes that he had as good as gone out of the business of watching the Russians for the last ten years he was alive. The KGB had a man in the bureau’s Central Files, and Hoover didn’t even dare clean the section out because he was afraid the news would get around. I made it a point to work only with the bureau’s New York office. Like any other national firm, the best men are in New York, and they’re so touchingly middle-class, so happy to mix with me. And why not? I wasn’t any “hit man” from the Mafia, I didn’t ask for money. In fact, they always knew they could come to me for a helping hand when they had personal financial trouble. I gave them extraordinarily good prices on coats for their wives.’

  Arkady recalled Iamskoy’s lynx coat and the sable hat Osborne had offered him.

  ‘I’m as patriotic as the next man,’ Osborne said, and nodded at the people at the table behind Arkady. ‘Or rather, as the next man happens to be chairman of the board of a grain company that has just established a dummy distillery in Osaka that will funnel his grain to the Soviet Union’s Pacific ports, I’m even more patriotic than the next man.’

  A plate of grilled gravlax was set in front of Osborne, at its side a dish of pommes frites almost as thin as Russian string potatoes. Arkady was starving.

  ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like to share this with me?’ Osborne asked. ‘It’s absolutely delicious. At least some wine? No? It’s a curious thing’ – he went on talking while he ate – ‘it used to be that whenever Russian émigrés arrived in America they would start a restaurant. They served wonderful food – beef Stroganov, chicken Kiev, paskha, blini and caviar, sturgeon in jelly. That was fifty
years ago, though. The new émigrés can’t cook at all; they don’t even know what good food is. Communism has erased Russian cuisine. Now, there’s one of the great crimes.’

  Osborne had coffee and a tart from the pastry wagon. The desserts wore marbleized sugar and soft toques of whipped cream.

  ‘You won’t have a bite? Your former prosecutor, Andrei Iamskoy, would have devoured the entire cart.’

  ‘He was a greedy man,’ Arkady said.

  ‘Exactly. It was all Iamskoy’s doing, you know. I’d been paying him for years for one thing and another – introductions, small indiscretions, ever since the war. He knew I wouldn’t be returning to the Soviet Union and decided to strike for a final grand sum; that’s why he led you to me in the bathhouse. Every time I thought I’d shaken you loose, he whipped you on a little more. Not that you needed much encouragement. He said you were an obsessive investigator and he was right. A brilliant man, Iamskoy, but greedy, as you said.’

  They left the restaurant and walked up the avenue, Osborne’s limousine keeping pace beside him in the street, just as another limousine had once followed them on the Moskva River embankment. After a few blocks they reached a pair of equestrian statues rearing over the entrance to a park. Central Park, Arkady said to himself. They entered, the limousine still behind them, a few snowflakes drifting before its headlights. Were they going to kill him in the park? Arkady wondered. No, it would have been easier to do that in Osborne’s workroom. A brightly painted horsedrawn carriage trotted by an old-fashioned light standard. Arkady smoked to damp his hunger.

  ‘Filthy Russian habit.’ Osborne lit a cigarette of his own. ‘It will be the death of us. Do you know why he hated you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Iamskoy.’

  ‘The prosecutor? Why would he hate me?’

  ‘There was some business about an appeal to the Supreme Court where he got his picture into Pravda.’

  ‘The Viskov appeal,’ Arkady said.

  ‘That’s the one. It ruined him. The KGB didn’t set up one of their own generals as Moscow town prosecutor in order for him to start publicizing the rights of convicts. After all, the KGB is like any other bureaucracy, and a powerful man, especially a rising star, has powerful enemies. You gave them just the weapon they needed. Iamskoy was slandering Soviet justice, they said, or promoting a personality cult for himself, or mentally ill. There was going to be a big campaign about it. That appeal ruined him, and you forced him into it.’

  In Central Park a former chief investigator learns why the dead Moscow town prosecutor hated him, Arkady thought. Yet what Osborne said sounded right. He remembered the bathhouse conversation with Iamskoy and the secretary to the prosecutor general and the academician and the justice. The hints about the coming campaign against Vronskyism had been aimed at Iamskoy, not at Arkady!

  He heard rock music, and through the branches his eyes found the colored lights of a skating rink some distance away. He could make out motion on the ice.

  ‘You should see the park in the snow,’ Osborne said.

  ‘It’s snowing now.’

  ‘I love the snow,’ Osborne confided.

  The flakes were scattered around each lamp and in the headlight beams. A brass silhouette saluted Arkady from a pedestal.

  ‘I’ll tell you why I love the snow,’ Osborne said. ‘I’ve never told anyone this. I love it because it hides the dead.’

  ‘You mean in Gorky Park.’

  ‘Oh, no. I mean Leningrad. I was an idealistic young man when I first went to the Soviet Union. Yes, like the Kirwill boy, maybe worse. No one worked harder to make Lend-Lease succeed. I was the American on the scene, I had to keep up with the Russians, had to do more, on four hours’ sleep a night, half starving for months at a time, shaving and getting into clean clothes only when I had to go to Moscow to the Kremlin so that I could beg some secretary to Stalin, some drunkard with grease on his chin, to allow me to add some food and medicine to the trucks we were trying to get into Leningrad. Of course, the siege of Leningrad was one of the great battles, one of the turning points in human history, the army of one mass murderer throwing back the army of a fellow mass murderer. My role, the American role, was to keep the carnage rolling as long as possible. We did it, too. Six hundred thousand Leningraders died, but the city didn’t fall. It was a war that went from house to house; we’d lose a street in the morning and gain it back at night. Or gain it back a year later and find all the dead from the year before. You learned to appreciate a deep snow. When the shooting stopped they talked to each other with loudspeakers. The Russian loudspeaker would tell the German soldiers to shoot their officers; the German loudspeaker told the Russians to shoot their children. “Better to shoot them than make them starve to death. Give up, bring your rifle and we’ll give you a chicken,” the Germans said. Or, “Andrei So-and-so, your two daughters have been found eaten by your Soviet neighbors.” This insulted me because I was responsible for getting food into the city. When some Wehrmacht officers were captured, Mendel and I brought some chocolates and champagne and took them for a picnic. We thought we’d release them later and they’d go back over the German lines with stories about how well fed we were inside the city. The Germans laughed at us. They had a thousand stories about the bodies they found as they fought their way into the city. They laughed at me in particular. They were curious about the American who fed the Russians. Did I seriously think, they asked, that it was the few rations we dropped from planes or got through on sleds that were keeping a million people alive? They roared with laughter. Couldn’t I think of anything more available? Didn’t I already have the answer? they said. I found I did, and then I killed the German officers. But I had the answer.’ They came out of the park onto Fifth Avenue, a dividing line between the public and the rich. Chandeliers glittered in windows; doormen stood under canopies. The limousine coasted to a side street to wait while Osborne led Arkady into the nearest building. A uniformed elevator operator took them to the fifteenth floor, where there was only one door. Osborne unlocked it and motioned Arkady in.

  Enough light entered from the windows for Arkady to see that he was standing in the foyer of a large apartment. Osborne flicked a light switch and nothing happened. ‘The electricians were here today,’ he said. ‘I suppose they’re not finished.’

  Arkady entered a room with a long dining table and only two chairs, and on through a pantry with open, empty cabinets, and into a study with a television still in its packing case and light fixtures ripped from the wall. He counted eight rooms, all nearly stripped except for a rug or chair as a token of more to come. There was also a familiar scent.

  He was drawn to the living room, where casement windows framed the park below, far more beautiful from a height. He saw the deep black of lakes and ponds, and the white oval of the skating rink. Around the park was a palisade of apartments and hotels, overhead a vault of clouds.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ Osborne asked.

  ‘A little empty.’

  ‘Well, in New York the view’s the most important thing.’ Osborne took another cigarette from his case. ‘I sold my Paris salons. I had to put the money somewhere, and a second apartment here is as good as anything else. To be honest, Europe simply isn’t safe for me. That’s been the most difficult part of the trade – the guarantees of physical safety.’

  ‘What trade?’

  ‘For the sables. Fortunately, I’ve stolen something worth giving back.’

  ‘Where are the sables?’

  ‘American fur ranching is done largely around the Great Lakes. But maybe I lied to them; maybe I have the sables in Canada. Canada is the second largest country on earth; it would take them a while to search it. Or maybe I have them in Maryland or Pennsylvania; there’s some ranching down there. The problem is that in spring all my new kits will be thrown, all of them sired by my Barguzhinskys, and there’ll be that many more sables to account for. That’s why the Russians have to trade now.’

  ‘Why tell me
?’

  Osborne joined him at the window. ‘I can save you,’ he said. ‘I can save you and Irina.’

  ‘You tried to kill her.’

  ‘That was Iamskoy and Unmann.’

  ‘You tried to have her killed twice,’ Arkady said. ‘I was there.’

  ‘You were a hero, Investigator. No one wants to take that away from you. I sent you to the university to save Irina, after all.’

  ‘You sent me to be killed.’

  ‘And we saved her, you and I.’

  ‘You killed three of her friends in Gorky Park.’

  ‘You killed three of my friends,’ Osborne said.

  Arkady felt cold, as if the windows had opened. Osborne was not sane, or not a man. If money could grow bones and flesh it would be Osborne. It would wear the same cashmere suit; it would part its silver hair the same way; it would have the same lean mask with its expression of superior amusement. They were high above the street. The apartment was empty. He could kill Osborne, he had no doubt of that. He didn’t have to listen to another word.

  As if Osborne had heard Arkady’s thoughts, he pulled out his gun again. ‘We have to forgive each other. Corruption is part of us, it’s the very heart of us. It was born in Iamskoy, Russian Revolution or no Revolution. It was born in you as well as me. But you haven’t seen the entire apartment . . .’

  Arkady in front, they walked down the hall to a room he hadn’t entered before, and whose windows also overlooked the park. There were a bureau and a mirror, a chair and night table and a large, unmade bed. The scent he had recognized when he first entered the apartment was strongest here.

  ‘Open the second drawer of the bureau,’ Osborne said.

  Arkady did so. Laid neatly inside were new men’s underwear and socks. ‘So someone’s moving in,’ he said.