Read Online Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith - Free Book Online Page A

big, not too small. Then they had to pass militiamen stationed at the door to check coupons for out-of-towners trying to buy vodka marked for Moscow. As Arkady watched, a satisfied patron left the store, cradling his bottle like an egg, and the queue inched forward.
        There was a selection, which was what was holding up Arkady's queue: meat or cabbage pies. Since the filling was sure to be no more than a suggestion - a delicate soup ç on of ground pork or steamed cabbage, a fine line within dough first steeped in boiling fat and then allowed to cool and congeal - it was a choice that demanded a fine palate, not to mention hunger.
        The vodka queue also stalled, held up by a customer who had swooned on his way into the shop and dropped his empty. The bottle rang as it rolled to the gutter.
        Arkady wondered what Irina was doing. All morning he had denied to himself that he was thinking about her. Now, with the chiming of the bottle, the very strangeness of the sound, he saw her having her midday meal not on the street but in a Western cafeteria of gleaming chrome, brightly lit mirrors, smoothly rolling trolleys bearing white porcelain cups.
        'Meat or cabbage?'
        It took him a moment to return.
        'Meat? Cabbage?' the vendor repeated and held up identical-looking pies. Her own face was as round and coarse, her eyes sunk in a crease. 'Come on, everyone else knows what they want.'
        'Meat,' Arkady said. 'And cabbage.'
        She grunted, sensing indecision rather than appetite. Maybe this was his problem, Arkady thought, lack of appetite. She got his change and handed over two pies embellished by paper napkins dripping grease. He checked the ground. No dead flies, but the ones buzzing around looked depressed.
        'You don't want them?' the vendor asked.
        Arkady was still seeing Irina, feeling the warm pressure of her and smelling not the rancid fumes of grease but the clean crispness of sheets. He seemed to be moving quickly through progressive stages of insanity, or else Irina was moving from oblivion to the unconscious, then to the conscious areas of his mind.
        As the vendor leaned over the barrow, a transformation took place. In the middle of her face appeared what was left of a girl's embarrassment, of sad eyes lost between jowls, and she shrugged apologetically with round shoulders.
        'Eat them, don't think about it. It's the best I can do.'
        'I know.'
        When Jaak brought the sodas Arkady awarded him both pies.
        'No, thanks.' Jaak recoiled. 'I used to like them before I started working with you. You ruined them for me.'

 
     
    Chapter Five
     
     
    On Butyrski Street, past a long shopfront of lingerie and lace, was a building of barred windows with a driveway that dipped by a guardhouse down to entrance stairs. Inside, an officer issued numbered aluminum tags to Arkady and Jaak. A grille with a heart-shaped pattern slid open and they followed a guard across a parquet floor, down a stairwell with rubber treads and into a corridor of calcined stucco lit by bulbs in wire cages.
        Only one person had ever escaped from Butyrski Prison and that was Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. He had bribed the guard. In those days a ruble meant something.
        'Name?' the guard asked.
        A voice behind the cell door said, 'Oberlyan.'
        'Article?'
        'Speculation, resisting arrest, refusal to cooperate with proper organs - what the fuck, I don't know.'
        The door opened. Gary stood stripped to the waist, his shirt tied turban-style around his head. With his rakishly broken nose and torso of tattoos, he looked more like a pirate marooned on a desert island for a dozen years than a man who had spent one night in jail.
        'Speculation, resisting and refusal. Great witness,' Jaak said.
        The interrogation room had a monastic simplicity: wooden chairs, metal desk, ikon of Lenin. Arkady filled out the protocol form: