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

wave? German?'
'All waves.' Jaak squirmed under Arkady's gaze. 'Japanese.'
'Did they have any transmitters?'
They passed an ambulance that offered vials of morphine in solution and disposable syringes
still in sterile American cellophane. A biker from Leningrad sold acid from his sidecar;
Leningrad University had a reputation for the best chemists. Someone Arkady had known ten
years before as a pickpocket was now taking orders for computers; Russian computers, at least.
Tyres rolled out of a bus straight to the customer. Women's shoes and sandals were arrayed on
tiptoe on a dainty shawl. Shoes and tyres were on the march, if not into the daylight, at least into
the twilight.
There was a white flash and a gust of glass from behind them, in the middle of the market.
Perhaps a camera bulb and a broken bottle, Arkady thought, though he and Jaak started to return
in the direction of the disturbance. A second flash erupted like a firework that caught each face in
recoil. The flash subsided to an everyday orange, the sort of fire men start in an oil can to warm
their hands on a winter's eve. Little stars rose and danced in the sky. The acrid smell of plastic
was tinged by die heady bouquet of petrol.
Some men staggered back with sleeves on fire and, as the crowd spread and Arkady pushed
through, he saw Rudy Rosen riding a blazing phaeton, upright, face black, hair aflame, hands
clasped to the wheel, brilliant in his own glow but motionless within the thick, noxious storm
clouds that whipped from the interior and out of the gutted windows of his car. Arkady got near
enough to look through the windscreen at Rudy's eyes sinking into
the smoke. He was dead. There was that silence, that gutted gaze in the middle of the flames.
Around the burning car other cars were moving. Spilling rugs, gold coins, VCRs, a mass
evacuation flowed to the gate. The ambulance lumbered off, ploughing over a figure in its
headlights, followed by a Chechen motorcade. Motorbikes split into several streams, searching
for gaps in the site fence.
Yet some men stayed and, as the stars drifted overhead, fought to catch them. Arkady himself
leaped and plucked from the air a burning Deutschmark, then a dollar, then a franc, all lined with
worms of burning gold.




Chapter Two



Although the ground was still in shadow, Arkady could see that the site was a layout of four
twenty-storey towers around a central square - three of the towers were faced in pre-cast
concrete while the last was still in a skeletal girders-and-crane phase that in the hopeful light of
dawn appeared both gargantuan and frail. On the ground floors he supposed there would be
restaurants, cabarets, perhaps a cinema, and in the middle of the square, when the earthmovers
and cement mixers were gone, a view of coaches and taxis. Now, however, there were a forensic
van, the Zhiguli and the black shell of Rudy Rosen's Audi sitting on a black carpet of singed
glass. The Audi's windows were hollow and the heat of the fire had exploded and then burned
the tyres, so at least it was the stench of burnt rubber that was strongest. As if listening, Rudy
Rosen sat stiffly upright.
'Glass seems to be evenly distributed,' Arkady said. Polina followed with her pre-war Leica
and took a picture every other step. 'Glass is melted closer to the car, which is a four-door Audi
1200. Left doors shut. Bonnet shut, headlights burned out. Right doors shut. Boot shut, rear