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

'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?'