"Smith, Martin Cruz - Arkady Renko 03 - Red Square" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

MOSCOW

6 August - 12 August 1991




Chapter One



In Moscow, the summer night looks like fire and smoke. Stars and moon fade. Couples rise and
dress and walk the street. Cars wander with their headlights off.
'There.' Jaak saw an Audi passing in the opposite direction.
Arkady slipped on headphones, tapped the receiver. 'His radio's out.'
Jaak U-turned to the other side of the boulevard and picked up speed. The detective had askew
eyes set in a muscular face and he hunched over the wheel as if he were bending it.
Arkady tapped out a cigarette. First of the day. Well, it was one a.m., so that wasn't much to
brag about.
'Closer,' he said, and pulled the phones off. 'Let's be sure it's Rudy.'
Ahead were the lights of the ring road that circled the city. The Audi swung on to the ramp to
merge with ring road traffic. Jaak edged between two flatbed lorries carrying steel plates that
clapped with every undulation of the road. He passed the lead lorry, the Audi and a tanker. On
the way, Arkady had caught the driver's profile, but there were two people in the car, not one.
'He picked someone up. We need another look,' he said.
Jaak slowed. The tanker didn't pass, but a second later the Audi slid by. Rudy Rosen, the
driver - a round man with soft hands fixed to the wheel - was a private banker to the mafias, a
would-be Rothschild who catered to Moscow's most primitive capitalists. His passenger was
female, with the wild look achieved by Russian features on a diet, somewhere between sensual
and ravenous, with short, stylishly cut blonde hair brushed back to the collar of her black leather
jacket. As the Audi passed, she turned and sized up the investigators' car, a two-door Zhiguli 8,
as a piece of trash. In her thirties, Arkady thought. She had dark eyes, and a wide mouth and
puffy lips, parted slightly as if starving. As the Audi swung in front, it was followed by the sound
of an outboard engine and the appearance of a Suzuki 750 that inserted itself between the two
cars. The motorcycle rider wore a black dome helmet, black leather jacket and black hightop
shoes that sparkled with reflectors. Jaak eased off. The biker was Kim, Rudy's protection.
Arkady ducked and listened to the headset again. 'Still dead.'
'He's leading us to the market. There are some people there, if they recognize you, you're
dead.' Jaak laughed. 'Of course then we'll know we're in the right place.'
'Good point.' God forbid anyone should exercise sanity, Arkady thought. Anyway, if anyone
recognizes me it means I'm still alive.
All the traffic squeezed off the same exit ramp. Jaak tried to follow the Audi, but a line of
'rockers' - bikers - swarmed in between. Swastikas and tsarist eagles decorated their backs, all
wreathed in the rising smoke of the exhaust pipes stripped of silencers.
At the end of the ramp, construction barriers had been pushed to one side. The car bounced as
if they were crossing a potato field and yet Arkady saw silhouettes that loomed high against the
faint northern sky. A Moskvitch went by, its windows crammed with swaying rugs. The roof of
an ancient Renault wore a living-room suite. Ahead, brake lights spread into a pool of red.