"Smith, Martin Cruz - Gorky Park" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

The other investigators were leaving, putting on their home-bound expressions and pulling on their coats. Their earnest coats, Arkady thought as he watched from the top of the stairs. Their better-than-a-worker's Soviet cloth. He wasn't hungry, but the activity of eating appealed to him. He felt like a walk. He got his coat and went out.

He walked south all the way to the Paveletsky train station before his legs took him into a cafeteria where there was a buffet of whitefish and potatoes awash in vinegar. Arkady moved on to the bar and ordered a beer. The other stools were occupied by railroad workers and young soldiers quietly drunk on champagne: sullen faces between malachite bottles.

A slice of bread with butter and sticky gray caviar came with Arkady's beer. 'What's this?'

'From heaven,' the manager said.

'There is no heaven.'

'But we're there now.' The manager smiled with a full set of steel teeth. His hand darted out to push the caviar closer to Arkady.

'Well, I haven't read today's paper,' Arkady conceded.

The manager's wife, a gnome in a white uniform, came out of the kitchen. When she saw Arkady, she broke into a smile so powerful  it filled out her cheeks and drew attention to her lively eyes  that she seemed almost beautiful. Her husband stood proudly by her.

They were Viskov, F. N., and Viskova, I. L. In 1946 they constituted a 'center of anti-Soviet activity' by operating a rare-book store that harbored the scribblers Montaigne, Apollinaire and Hemingway. 'Interrogation with prejudice' left Viskov crippled and his wife mute (a suicide attempt with lye), and they were given what was jokingly called at the time 25-ruble notes: twenty-five years' hard labor in the camps (a humor of the time when Security and the Militia were one and the same institution). In 1956 the Viskovs were released and even offered the chance to operate another bookstore, though they declined.

'You were in charge of a cafeteria by the circus, I thought,' Arkady said.

'They found out my wife and I were both working there against regulations. She only comes in here to help on her own time.' Viskov winked. 'Sometimes the boy comes in to help as well.'

'Thanks to you,' Comrade Viskova mouthed.

God, Arkady thought, an apparatus accuses two innocent people, abducts them to slave camps, tortures them, rips out the heart of their adult lives, and then when one man from the apparatus treats them with the rudiments of decency, they are fountains of joy. What right did he have to a kind word from them? He ate his caviar, drank his beer and got out of the cafeteria as quickly as politeness allowed.

Gratitude was a dog at his heel. After a few blocks he slowed because the hour was one of his favorites, the evening a maternal black, windows small and bright, the faces on the street bright as windows. At this time of day he felt he could have been in any Moscow of the past five centuries, and he wouldn't have been surprised by the sound of hooves in mud. In a store window shabby dolls were small, perfect Pioneers; a battery-driven Sputnik circled a moon-shaped lamp that urged 'Look to the Future!'

Back at his office, Arkady sat in front of his cabinet and went through his files. He began with crimes by firearm.

Murder. A lathe operator returns home to find his wife screwing a naval officer, and in the ensuing struggle the worker uses the officer's gun on its owner. The court took into consideration that the officer should not have been carrying a gun, that the defendant was attested by his union to be a diligent laborer, and that he repented his act. Sentence: ten years' deprivation of freedom.

Aggravated murder. Two black marketeers fall out over a division of profits and both are amazed, one fatally, when a rusty Nagurin pistol works. Profit is the aggravating circumstance. Sentence: death.

Armed assault. (Some assault.) A boy with a wooden replica of a gun removes two rubles from a drunk. Sentence: five years.

Arkady went through his straight homicide files searching for crimes he might have forgotten, murders that displayed careful planning and cool boldness. In knives, hatchets, bludgeons and manual strangulation, however, there was little care or coolness. In three years as a deputy investigator and two as chief investigator, he'd encountered fewer than five homicides that rose above childlike stupidity, or following which the murderer hadn't presented himself or herself to the militia drunkenly boastful or rueful. The Russian murderer had great faith in the inevitability of his capture, all he wanted was his moment onstage. Russians won wars because they threw themselves before tanks, which was not the right mentality for a master criminal.

Arkady gave up and shut the file.

'Boychik.' Nikitin opened the door without knocking and inserted his head, followed with his body, and sat on Arkady's desk. The chief investigator for government liaison had a round face and thinning hair, and when he was drunk his smile screwed his eyes into Oriental slits. 'Working late?'

Did Nikitin mean Arkady was working hard, too hard, futilely, successfully, that Arkady was smart, a fool? Nikitin conveyed it all.

'Like you,' Arkady said.

'I'm not working  I'm checking on you. Sometimes I think you never learned anything from me.'

Ilya Nikitin was chief homicide investigator before Arkady and, when sober, the best investigator Arkady had ever known. Except for the vodka, he would have been a prosecutor long ago, but saying 'except for the vodka' in Nikitin's case was like saying 'except for food and water'. Once a year, yellow with jaundice, he was sent to a spa in Sochi.