‘None.’
‘But that’s what you think happened.’
‘No. I only mean I haven’t found the motive. Motives are different. The perspective, as you said. Assume a man who visits, occasionally, an island of primitives. Stone Age people. He speaks their language, is expert at flattery, becomes friendly with the local chiefs. At the same time, he is aware of his superiority. In fact, he finds the natives ridiculously contemptible.’ Arkady spoke slowly, feeling his way, remembering the vaguely worded account of the German soldiers killed by Osborne and Mendel. ‘At some point, early on, he becomes involved in the murder of a native. During a tribal war, so that he’s not punished but rewarded. And in time he comes to relish the memory of the act the way another man enjoys recalling the details of his first woman. There is an allure in primitive society, don’t you think?’
‘An allure?’
‘A revelation to this man. He discovers what his impulses are, and he also discovers a place where he can carry out his impulses. A place outside civilization.’
‘What if he’s right?’
‘From his perspective he might be. The natives are primitive, there’s no doubt about that. But for all his civilized appearance, I suspect he feels the same loathing for everyone. It’s only on this primitive island that he’s open about it.’
‘Still, if he kills randomly, you wouldn’t catch him.’
‘But he doesn’t. First, he waits many years before indulging his violent impulse again. And he’s an amateur, even if an inspired amateur, and it is a curious fact that an amateur, once he’s carried out one crime successfully, almost always tries to copy himself as if he alone has the secret of a perfect crime. So there’s a pattern. Also, it’s carefully planned. A superior man by definition has to feel in control. Even to the record of Tchaikovsky’s cannon booming through the park, yes? He raises his gun in the bag, shoots down the brute, then the second man and the girl, skins their faces and fingerprints and escapes. Planning, however, can go only so far. It’s unfair, but there’s always the element of chance. Some vendor who’s taken her pushcart into the woods for a rest, boys hiding in the trees, lovers who will go anywhere for a bit of privacy. After all, where can lovers go in the wintertime? – ask yourself.’
‘Then there was a witness?’
‘What good is a witness? Their memories are indistinct after a day. After three months, frankly, I could get them to recognize anyone I wanted to. Only the killer can help me now.’
‘Will he?’
‘It’s possible. I could hide like a frog beneath the river and he would come and seek me out.’
‘Why?’
‘Because murder isn’t enough. Even the dullest man finds that’s true when the first flush is gone. Murder is only half the act. Don’t you think a superior man will personally, for real satisfaction, need to see an investigator like me reduced to impotence and futility, maybe even to admiration?’
‘Would that be much of a challenge, Investigator?’
‘Everything considered’ – Arkady stepped on a butt – ‘not much.’
They had reached the Novo-Arbatsky Bridge. From either side of it the pink stars of the Ukraina and the Foreign Ministry glowed to each other like beacons. Osborne’s limousine pulled alongside.
‘You’re an honest man, Investigator Renko,’ Osborne said in a voice mellowed to warmth as if, arduous journey over, he and Arkady had developed a tired but cozy informality. A grin was called forward as in the last-scene appearance of a character actor. ‘I wish you good luck now because I have only a week left in Moscow and I don’t think we will be seeing each other again. However, I don’t want you to leave empty-handed.’
Osborne lifted the sable hat from his head and set it on Arkady’s. ‘A gift,’ he said. ‘When you told me in the bathhouse that you always wanted a hat, I knew I had to give it to you. I had to guess the size, but I have a good eye for heads.’ He viewed Arkady from different angles. ‘It’s perfect.’
Arkady took the hat off. It was black as ink, with a texture of satin. ‘It’s lovely. But’ – he handed the hat back regretfully – ‘I can’t accept it. There are regulations about gifts.’
‘I’d be very offended if you refused.’
‘Very well, give me a few days to think about it. That way we have an excuse to talk again.’
‘Any excuse will do.’ Osborne shook Arkady’s hand firmly, then got into his limousine and rode across the bridge.
Arkady picked up his car at the Ukraina and drove on to the Oktyabrsky precinct station, where he asked about any foreigners noticed waiting in cars near the park around the time of the murders.
By the time he left, a broad orange sun had come out. It slid between the cables of the Krimsky Bridge. Bits of it glittered like coins from ministry windows. Pools of it burned into the quay road where he and Osborne had walked shortly before.
Chief Investigator Ilya Nikitin, his thin hair combed wet straight back over his round head, squinted orientally through the smoke of the cigarette clamped between his teeth. He lived alone in the Arbat district in a narrow house where paint flaked from the walls and plaster dropped from the ceilings to be lost among the stacks of books, dusty and tagged with slips of yellowed paper, that rose two and three meters tall and five volumes thick. Arkady remembered triple-paned windows that had looked out on the river and the Lenin Hills, but the view existed only in memory. Stacks had grown in front of the windows, into the kitchen, up the stairs and into the bedrooms of the second floor.
‘Kirwill, Kirwill—’ Nikitin carefully pushed aside files of Partial Amendments of the Charter of the All-Union Publishing-Polygraphic Combine to uncover an almost empty bottle of Rumanian port. He drank while he winked and started crawling up the stairs. ‘So you still come to Ilya when you need help?’
When Arkady first joined the town prosecutor’s office, he inferred from Nikitin that the man was a genius and a progressive, or a genius and a hard-liner. An author of legal reforms or a Stalinist. A drinking companion of the Negro singer Robeson or a confidant of the reactionary novelist Sholokov. At the very least, a genius of gnostic hints. A figure of white or black painted by his own winks, supported by the names he dropped.
There was no doubt that Nikitin had been a brilliant chief investigator of Homicide. Though Arkady would build the case, it was always Nikitin who came into the interrogation room with two bottles and a leer, to emerge hours later with a pliant, shamefaced killer. ‘Confession is all,’ Nikitin explained. ‘If you won’t give people religion or psychology, at least let them confess to a crime. Proust said that you could seduce any woman if you were willing to sit and listen to her complain until four in the morning. At heart, any murderer is a complainer.’ ‘For the bribes, boychik,’ Nikitin explained when Arkady asked why he transferred from Homicide to Government Liaison.
‘Kirwill. Reds. Diego Rivera. The Battle of Union Square.’ Twisting to look back, Nikitin asked, ‘You do know where New York City is?’ He slumped a step, dislodging a book, which carried two more down the stairs, then another. After a precarious moment the slide subsided.
‘Tell me about Kirwill,’ Arkady said.
Nikitin wagged his head like a finger. ‘Correction: Kirwills. Red Star.’ He gathered his strength to crawl through a second-floor hall narrowed by walls of books.
‘Who were the Kirwills?’ Arkady asked.
Nikitin dropped his empty bottle, stumbled over it with his knee and rolled onto his back, belly wedged between the stacks, helpless. ‘You stole a bottle from my office, Arkasha. You’re a thief. You can go to the devil.’
At Arkady’s eye level was a hard crust of cheese and half a bottle of plum wine on top of a book entitled Political Oppression in the United States, 1929–1941. Holding the bottle under one arm, he flipped through the book’s index. ‘Can I borrow this?’
‘Do me a favor,’ Nikitin said.
Arkady dropped the wine into Nikitin’s hands.
‘No.’ Nikitin
let the bottle slip away. ‘Keep the book. Don’t come back.’
Belov’s office was a monument to the war. Small grainy soldiers marched across newspaper photographs. Framed headlines on newsprint as fine as tissue declared: ‘Valiant Defense on the Volga,’ ‘Bitter Resistance Snuffed Out,’ ‘Heroes Praise Homeland.’ Belov’s mouth gaped in sleep, bread crumbs on his lower lip and the front of his shirt. A beer stood in his hand.
Arkady took the other chair and opened the book he’d taken from Nikitin.
The 1930 Union Square Rally was the largest public gathering ever organized by the CPUSA. Unemployed workers eager to hear and be heard by the vanguard of social justice thronged to the square in numbers even greater than leaders anticipated. Despite the fact that New York Police Commissioner Grover A. Whalen ordered no subways to stop in the vicinity of the square, estimates of the throng exceeded 50,000 people. The police and their agents took other measures to break, splinter or muffle the will of those in attendance. During the singing of ‘The Internationale,’ undercover agents of the so-called Radical Squad infiltrated the square. Provocateurs attempted without success to instigate attacks against uniformed police. No film cameras were allowed to record the glorious rally on the instructions of Commissioner Whalen, who sputtered later, ‘I saw no reason for perpetuating treasonable utterances, and I don’t mean to engage in censorship.’ His statement typified the contradictory roles of police in a capitalist society: one role as keeper of the peace conflicting with its paramount role as headbreaking watchdog of the exploiter class.
Arkady skipped over a message of solidarity from Stalin that was read to the excited throng.
A peaceful march to City Hall was then proposed by speaker William Z. Foster. As soon as the crowd began to move, however, their way was blocked by an armored police truck. Thus was the signal given by Whalen to police troops massed in side streets. On foot and on horseback à la Cossacks the police fell on unarmed men, women and children. Negroes, especially, were targets of assaults. A Negro girl was held upright by one officer while his cohorts beat her around the breasts and stomach. James and Edna Kirwill, editors of Red Star, a journal of the Catholic Left, were clubbed to the ground in their own blood. Mounted police rode down equally both Party members bearing placards and citizens who were only passersby. Party leaders were assaulted and arrested. Kept in cells, they were allowed no lawyers or bail, in accordance with Commissioner Whalen’s declaration that ‘These enemies of society are to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.’
The chief investigator for Industry opened two rheumy eyes, licked his lips and sat upright.
‘I was just,’ he began, grabbing at his beer as it started to tip, ‘looking at some factory directives.’ He wadded the remains of a sandwich, cast it into the wastebasket with an effort that brought a burp, and glared at Arkady. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘I was just looking in a book, Uncle Seva,’ Arkady said. ‘The book tells me,“Enemies of society are to be driven out regardless of their constitutional rights.” ’
‘That’s easy,’ the old man answered after a moment’s thought. ‘By definition, enemies of society don’t have constitutional rights.’
Arkady snapped his fingers. ‘There you are,’ he said.
‘That’s first grade stuff.’ Belov waved away flattery. ‘So what do you want? You only listen to me these days when you want something.’
‘I’m trying to find a weapon that was thrown into the river in January.’
‘Onto the river, you mean. It was frozen over.’
‘True, but maybe not everywhere. Some factories still discharge warm water into the river, where the ice might never form. You know the factories better than anyone else.’
‘Pollution is an area of major concern, Arkasha. There are firm directives concerning the environment. You were the one who always used to complain to me about the factories when you were a kid. You were a regular pain in the ass.’
‘Clean warm water, maybe discharged under a special industrial continuance.’
‘Everyone thinks they’re a special case. Discharging waste water into the Moskva within city limits is strictly forbidden, thanks to people like you.’
‘But industry must progress. A country is like a body. First the muscle, later the hair lotion.’
‘True, and you think you’re making fun of me, Arkasha, when you say something that’s true. You’d rather be in a fancy city like Paris. You know why they have such big boulevards there? The better to shoot down Communists. So don’t come griping to me about pollution. Agh!’ When Belov rubbed his face it shifted like pudding. ‘What you want is the Gorky Tannery. Under a very special continuance, they do discharge treated water. All the dye is out, understand. I have a map . . .’
Belov rooted through his desk drawers and found an industrial map, an orange-and-black affair that unfolded to tablecloth dimensions.
‘Gloves, notebooks, holsters, that sort of thing. Here—’ His finger descended to the quay beside Gorky Park. ‘An effluent pipe. The river is iced there, but it’s just a crust. Something heavy could drop through it and the crust would form again in an hour or so. So, Arkasha, what do you think the chances are that a man throws a gun in the river in the only place the ice is not a meter thick?’
‘How did you know I was looking for a gun, Uncle?’
‘Arkasha, I’m just old. I’m not totally senile and I’m not deaf. I hear things.’
‘What things?’
‘Things.’ Belov looked at Arkady, then to the framed heroics on the wall. ‘I don’t understand things anymore. It used to be a person could believe in the future. There were cliques, errors in judgment, purges that perhaps went too far, but at heart we were all pulling together. Today . . .’ Belov blinked. The old man had never unburdened himself to Arkady like this before. ‘The Minister of Culture is dismissed for corruption, she made herself a millionaire, she built palaces. A minister! Didn’t we try to change all that?’
Mosfilm’s day of outside shooting was over.
Arkady followed Irina Asanova around the set of a log cabin and birches propped into place by wire struts. He felt electrical cables under squares of sod. Despite a sign that warned NO SMOKING, the girl smoked the cheapest cardboard-and-tobacco papirosi cigarette in the old lacquered holder. Her raffish Afghan jacket was open to a flimsy cotton dress and a pencil that hung from a string around her neck, and this somehow accented the grace of her neck. Her long brown hair was loose, and her eyes looked boldly at Arkady almost at his level. The mark on her cheek was faded in a red glow that had nothing to do with the setting sun. It was the glow Tolstoy described on the faces of the artillery men at Borodino, an exultant flush as the battle came closer.
‘Valerya Davidova and her lover Kostia Borodin were from the Irkutsk area,’ Arkady said. ‘You came from Irkutsk, you were Valerya’s best friend there, you wrote her from here, and when she died here she was wearing your “lost” skates.’
‘You’re going to arrest me?’ Irina challenged Arkady. ‘I went to the Law Faculty, and I know the law as well as you. You need a militiaman present if you’re going to arrest me.’
‘So you told me before. The man found with Valerya and Kostia was an American named James Kirwill. You knew James Kirwill at the university. Why do you keep lying to me?’
She moved away from his questions, leading him in a circle around the make-believe cabin. For all her bravado, he felt as if he were stalking a deer.
‘Don’t take it personally.’ She looked back. ‘I generally lie to your kind.’
‘Why?’
‘I deal with you the way I’d deal with a leper. You’re diseased. You’re a member of a leper organization. I don’t want to be infected.’
‘You were studying law to become a leper?’
‘A lawyer. A doctor, in a sense, for the defense of the healthy against the sick.’
‘But we’re talking about murder, not disease.’ Arkad
y lit a cigarette of his own. ‘You’re very brave. You expect some Beria to come out here and eat a baby before your eyes. I must disappoint you; I’m only here to find the person who killed your friends.’
‘Now you’re lying to me. Your only interest is dead bodies, not someone’s friends. Your friends you’d care about, not mine.’
It was a throwaway accusation, but she’d hit home. The only reason he’d come to the studio was for Pasha.
He changed the subject. ‘I’ve looked at your militia record. What was this anti-Soviet slander of yours that got you expelled from the university?’
‘As if you don’t know.’
‘Pretend I don’t,’ Arkady said.
Irina Asanova was still for a moment, the way he’d seen her when he first came to the studio, lost in a self-confidence or self-absorption that was a world unto itself.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘I prefer your counterparts from Security. At least there’s honesty in slapping a woman. Your approach, your phony concern, shows a weakness in character.’
‘That’s not what you said at the university.’
‘I’ll tell you what I said at the university. I was in the cafeteria talking to friends, and I said I would do anything to get out of the Soviet Union. Some Komsomol creeps were listening at the next table. They turned my name in, and I was dropped from the student roster.’
‘You were kidding, of course. You should have explained.’
She stepped closer so that they were almost touching. ‘But I wasn’t kidding, I was totally serious. Investigator, if someone right now gave me a gun and told me I could get out of the Soviet Union if I killed you, I’d shoot you where you stand.’
‘Seriously?’
‘I’d do it gladly.’
She pressed her cigarette into the birch beside Arkady. The white skin of the tree blackened and smoked around the ember, and bits of skin flamed and curled away. Arkady suffered the remarkable sensation of pain, as if the warm stab were being pressed against his heart. He believed her. The truth had gone from her into the tree and into him.