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Praise for Gorky Park
“Reminds you just how satisfying a smoothly turned thriller can be.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Once one gets going, one doesn’t want to stop . . . . The action is gritty, the plot complicated, [and] the overriding quality is intelligence.”
The Washington Post
“A signal for rejoicing . . . The U.S. at last has a domestic le Carré.”
Time
“An imaginative coup . . . Gorky Park is the best novel of the year.”
Playboy
“First-rate . . . stunning originality . . . brilliant.”
Chicago Tribune Book World
“The most dazzling breakthrough in the suspense field since The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Brilliant . . . one of the best books of the season.”
Associated Press
“Gorky Park should take the reader by complete and satisfying surprise.”
Penthouse
“Marvelously exciting . . . highly original . . . spellbinding . . . Readers who never ordinarily read suspense fiction will be drawn to this novel.”
Publishers Weekly
For Em
Part One
MOSCOW
Chapter One
All nights should be so dark, all winters so warm, all headlights so dazzling.
The van jacked, stalled and quit on a drift, and the homicide team got out, militia officers cut from a pattern of short arms and low brows, wrapped in sheepskin greatcoats. The one not in uniform was a lean, pale man, the chief investigator. He listened sympathetically to the tale of the officer who had found the bodies in the snow: the man had only strayed so far from the park footpath in the middle of the night to relieve himself, then he saw them, himself half undone, as it were, and just about froze, too. The team followed the beam of the van’s spotlight.
The investigator suspected the poor dead bastards were just a vodka troika that had cheerily frozen to death. Vodka was liquid taxation, and the price was always rising. It was accepted that three was the lucky number on a bottle in terms of economic prudence and desired effect. It was a perfect example of primitive communism.
Lights appeared from the opposite side of the clearing, shadow trees sweeping the snow until two black Volgas appeared. A squad of KGB agents in plainclothes were led from the cars by a squat, vigorous major called Pribluda. Together, militia and KGB stamped their feet for warmth, exhaling drafts of steam. Ice crystals sparkled on caps and collars.
The militia – the police arm of the MVD – directed traffic, chased drunks and picked up everyday corpses. The Committee for State Security – the KGB – was charged with grander, subtler responsibilities, combating foreign and domestic intriguers, smugglers, malcontents, and while the agents had uniforms, they preferred anonymous plainclothes. Major Pribluda was full of rough early-morning humor, pleased to reduce the professional animosity that strained cordial relations between the People’s Militia and the Committee for State Security, all smiles until he recognized the investigator.
‘Renko!’
‘Exactly.’ Arkady Renko started immediately for the bodies and left Pribluda to follow.
The tracks of the militiaman who had found the bodies led halfway through the snow to the telltale humps in the center of the clearing. A chief investigator should have smoked a fine brand of cigarette; Arkady lit a cheap Prima and filled his mouth with the powerful taste of it – his habit whenever he dealt with the dead. There were three bodies, as the militiaman said. They lay peacefully, even artfully, under their thawing crust of ice, the center one on its back, hands folded as if for a religious funeral, the other two turned, arms out under the ice like flanking emblems on embossed writing paper. They were wearing ice skates.
Pribluda shouldered Arkady aside. ‘When I am satisfied questions of state security are not involved, then you begin.’
‘Security? Major, we’ve got three drunks in a public park—’
The major was already waving in one of his agents with a camera. With each picture the snow flashed blue and the bodies levitated. The camera was foreign and developed the pictures almost instantaneously. Proudly the photographer showed a photo to Arkady. The three bodies were lost in the flash’s reflection from the snow.
‘What do you think?’
‘Very fast.’ Arkady handed the photo back. The snow was being tramped down all around the corpses. Exasperated, he smoked. He ran his long fingers through lank black hair. He noticed that neither the major nor his photographer had thought to wear boots. Maybe wet feet would send the KGB on its way. As for the bodies, he expected to find an empty bottle or two nearby under the snow. Over his shoulder, beyond the Donskoy Monastery, the night was fading. He saw Levin, the militia pathologist, watching contemptuously from the edge of the clearing.
‘The bodies look like they’ve been here a long time,’ Arkady said. ‘In another half hour our specialists can uncover them and examine them in the light.’
‘Someday this will be you.’ Pribluda pointed to the nearest body.
Arkady wasn’t sure he’d heard the man correctly. Bits of ice glimmered in the air. He couldn’t have said that, he decided. Pribluda’s face turned in and out of the light of the headlights, a card half up a sleeve, eyes small and dark as pips. Suddenly he was discarding his gloves.
‘We’re not here to be taught by you.’ Pribluda straddled the bodies and began scooping away dog-fashion, throwing snow left and right.
A man thinks he is hardened to death; he has walked into hot kitchens covered from floor to ceiling in blood, is an expert, knows that in the summer people seem ready to explode with blood; he even prefers winter’s stiffs. Then a new death mask pops out of the snow. The chief investigator had never seen a head like this before; he thought he would never forget the sight. He didn’t know yet that it was the central moment of his life.
‘It’s murder,’ Arkady said.
Pribluda was unperturbed. At once he was brushing snow from the other heads. They were the same as the first. Then he straddled the middle body and pounded its frozen overcoat until it cracked and he peeled it open, and he cracked and peeled open the dress underneath.
‘No matter.’ He laughed. ‘You can still tell she’s a woman.’
‘She was shot,’ Arkady said. Between her breasts, which were dead-white, nipples and all, was a black entry wound. ‘You’re destroying evidence, Major.’
Pribluda cracked open the coats of the other two bodies. ‘Shot, all shot!’ He exulted like a grave robber.
Pribluda’s photographer illuminated his progress in flashes of Pribluda’s hands lifting stiff hair, digging a lead slug out of a mouth. Arkady noticed that besides the mutilation of the heads, the three victims also all missed the last joints of their fingers, their fingerprints.
‘The men shot through the skull as well,’ Pribluda washed his hands in the snow. ‘Three bodies, that’s a lucky number, Investigator. Now that I’ve done the dirty work for you we’re even. Enough,’ he ordered the photographer. ‘We’re going.’
‘You always do the dirty work, Major,’ Arkady said when the photographer had trudged away.
‘What do you mean?’
; ‘Three people shot and carved up in the snow? That’s your kind of work, Major. You don’t want me to investigate this. Who knows where it could lead?’
‘Where it could lead?’
‘Things get out of hand, Major. Remember? Why don’t you and your men take over the investigation now, and I and my men go home?’
‘There’s no evidence I can see of a crime against the state. So you have a case a little more complicated than usual, that’s all.’
‘Complicated by someone tearing the evidence apart.’
‘My report and photographs will go to your office’ – Pribluda delicately tugged on his gloves – ‘so you will have the benefit of my labor.’ He raised his voice so that everyone around the clearing would hear him. ‘Of course, if you do uncover anything relating to a possible offense concerning the Committee for State Security, you will have the prosecutor inform me immediately. You understand, Investigator Renko? Whether you spend a year or ten years, the minute you learn something you’ll call.’
‘I understand perfectly,’ Arkady answered as loudly. ‘You have our complete cooperation.’
Hyenas, crows, blowflies, worms, the investigator thought as he watched Pribluda’s cars back away from the clearing. Night creatures. Dawn was coming up; he could almost feel an acceleration in the roll of the earth to the rising sun. He lit another cigarette to get the taste of Pribluda out of his mouth. Filthy habit – like drinking, another state industry. Everything was a state industry, himself included. Even the snow flowers were starting to show at the least prompting of morning. At the edge of the clearing, the militiamen still gawked. They’d seen those masks popping out of the snow.
‘It’s our case,’ Arkady announced to his men. ‘Don’t you think we should do something about it?’
He got them moving at least to cordon off the area, and had the sergeant radio from the van for more men, shovels and metal detectors. A little sham of organization never failed to hearten the troops, he felt.
‘So we’re—’
‘We’re carrying on, Sergeant. Until further notice.’
‘Lovely morning,’ Levin sneered.
The pathologist was older than the rest, a caricature Jew in the disguise of a militia captain. He had no sympathy for Tanya, the team’s in situ specialist, who couldn’t take her eyes from the faces. Arkady took her aside and suggested she start a base-line sketch of the clearing, then attempt a sketch of the position of the bodies.
‘Before or after they were assaulted by the good major?’ Levin asked.
‘Before,’ Arkady said. ‘As if the major were never here.’
The team biologist, a doctor, began searching for blood samples in the snow around the corpses. It was going to be a lovely day, Arkady thought. On the far embankment across the Moskva River he saw the first stroke of light on the Defense Ministry buildings, the only moment of the day when those endless, dun-colored walls had a touch of life. All around the clearing the trees emerged into the dawn as wary as deer. Now snow flowers started to show red and blue, bright as ribbons. A day when all winter seemed ready to melt.
‘Fuck.’ He looked at the bodies again.
The team photographer asked whether the KGB hadn’t already taken pictures.
‘Yes, and they were fine for souvenirs, I’m sure,’ Arkady said, ‘but not for police work.’
The photographer, flattered, laughed.
Good, Arkady thought, laugh louder.
A plainclothes detective named Pasha Pavlovich showed up in the investigator’s office car, a five-year-old Moskvich, not a sleek Volga like Pribluda’s. Pasha was half Tartar, a muscular romantic sporting a dark bowsprit pompadour.
‘Three bodies, two male, one female.’ Arkady got into the car. ‘Frozen. Maybe a week old, maybe a month, five months. No papers, no effects, nothing. All shot through the heart and two through the head as well. Go take a look at the faces.’
Arkady waited in the car. It was hard to believe that winter was over in the middle of April; usually it hung on grimly into June. It could have hung on to these horrors a little longer. Except for yesterday’s thaw, a militiaman’s full bladder and the way the moonlight hit the snow, Arkady could be in his bed, his eyes closed.
Pasha returned pumped up with outrage. ‘What kind of madman could do that?’
Arkady motioned for him to get back in the car.
‘Pribluda was here,’ he said when Pasha was inside.
Saying the words, he watched the subtle change in the detective, the little shrinking created by a few words, the glance out to the clearing and back to Arkady. The three dead souls out there were not so much a terrible crime as they were a sticky problem. Or both, because Pasha was one of the good ones, and he already seemed more conscience-stricken than anyone else would be.
‘It’s not our kind of case,’ Arkady added. ‘We do some work here and they’ll take it away from us, don’t worry.’
‘In Gorky Park, though.’ Pasha was upset.
‘Very strange. Just do what I tell you and we’ll be fine. Drive over to the park militia station and get maps of the skating paths. Get lists of all the militiamen and food vendors who operated in this part of the park this winter, also of any public-order volunteers who could have been snooping around. The main thing is to make a big production.’ Arkady got out of the car and leaned in the window. ‘By the way, is there another detective assigned to me?’
‘Fet.’
‘I don’t know him.’
Pasha spat on the snow and said, ‘There was a little bird, who repeated what he heard—’
‘Okay.’ There was bound to be an informer in this kind of case; not only did the investigator bow to the fact, he welcomed it. ‘We’ll be pulled off this mess that much sooner, with everyone’s cooperation.’
When Pasha had gone two trucks rolled in bearing militia trainees and shovels. Tanya had the clearing marked in grids so that the snow could be shoveled meter by meter without losing sight of where evidence was found, though Arkady hardly expected any this long after the murders. Appearance was his goal. With a grand enough farce, Pribluda might call before the day was out. At any rate, the activity bolstered the militiamen. They were basically traffic cops and were happy even if the traffic consisted of themselves. Otherwise, they were not generally happy. The militia enlisted farm boys right out of the Army, seducing them with the incredible promise of living in Moscow, that residence denied even to nuclear scientists. Fantastic! As a result, Muscovites regarded the militia as some sort of occupying army of shitkickers and brutes. Militiamen came to see their co-citizens as decadent, depraved and probably Jewish. Still, no one ever returned to the farm.
The sun was really up now, alive, not the ghost disk that had haunted winter. The trainees dawdled in the warm breath of the wind, eyes averted from the center of the clearing.
Why Gorky Park? The city had bigger parks to leave bodies in – Izmailovo, Dzerzhinsky, Sokolniki. Gorky Park was only two kilometers long and less than a kilometer across at its widest point. It was the first park of the Revolution, though, the favorite park. South, its narrow end nearly reached the university. North, only a bend of the river cut off a view of the Kremlin. It was the place everyone came to: clerks to eat lunch, grandmothers with babies, boys with girls. There were a Ferris wheel, fountains, children’s theaters, walks and club pavilions hidden all through the grounds. In winter there were four skating rinks and skating paths.
Detective Fet arrived. He was nearly as young as the trainees, with steel-rimmed glasses and blue ball-bearing eyes.
‘You are in charge of the snow.’ Arkady gestured to the growing piles. ‘Melt it and search it.’
‘In which laboratory would the senior investigator want this process carried out?’ Fet asked.
‘Oh, I think some hot water right where they are would do the job.’ Because this might not sound impressive enough, Arkady added, ‘I want no snowflake unturned.’
Arkady took Fet’s buff-and-red militia car a
nd drove off, crossing the Krimsky Bridge to the north side of the city. The frozen river ached, ready to break. It was nine o’clock, two hours since he’d been roused from bed, no breakfast yet, just cigarettes. Coming off the bridge, he waved his red ID at the militiaman directing traffic, and sped through stopped cars. A privilege of rank.
Arkady had few illusions about his work. He was senior homicide investigator, a specialist in murder in a country that had little well-organized crime and no talent for finesse. The usual victim of the ordinary Russian was the woman he slept with, and then when he was drunk and hit her over the head with an ax – probably ten times before he got it right. To be blunt, the criminals Arkady arrested were ordinarily drunks first and murderers second, and far better drunks than murderers. There were few more dangerous positions, he had distilled from experience, than to be the best friend of or married to a drunk, and the entire country was drunk half the time.
Icicles hung wet from gutters. The investigator’s car scattered pedestrians. But it was better than two days before, when traffic and people were shades lumbering through a hive of steam. He looped around the Kremlin on Marx Prospekt and turned up Petrovka Street three blocks to the yellow six-story complex that was Moscow Militia Headquarters, where he parked in the basement garage and rode an elevator to the third floor.
The Militia Operation Room was regularly described by the newspapers as ‘the very brain center of Moscow, ready to respond within seconds to reports of accidents or crimes in the safest city in the world.’ One wall was an enormous map of Moscow divided into thirty borough divisions and studded with lights for one hundred thirty-five precinct stations. Ranks of radio switches surrounded a communications desk where officers contacted patrol cars (‘This is Volga calling fifty-nine’) or, by code name, precincts (‘This is Volga calling Omsk’). There was no other room in Moscow so ordered and restful, so planned, the creation of electronics and an elaborate winnowing process. There were quotas. A militiaman on the beat was expected to report officially only so many crimes; otherwise he would put his fellow militiamen on their beats in the ludicrous position of reporting no crimes at all. (Everyone recognized there had to be some crime.) Then the precincts one by one trimmed their statistics to achieve the proper downturn in homicide, assault and rape. It was an efficiently optimistic system that demanded tranquillity and got it. On the great map only one precinct light blinked, indicating that the capital city of seven million inhabitants had passed twenty-four hours with but a single significant act of violence reported. The light was in Gorky Park. Watching this light from the center of the Operating Room was the commissioner of militia, a massive, flat-faced man with a chest of service ribbons on his general’s gold-braided gray uniform. With him were a pair of colonels, deputy commissioners. In his street clothes Arkady was slovenly.