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

He got them moving at least to cordon off the area, and had the sergeant radio from the van for more men, shovels and metal detectors. A little sham of organization never failed to hearten the troops, he felt.

'So we're  '

'We're carrying on, Sergeant. Until further notice.'

'Lovely morning,' Levin sneered.

The pathologist was older than the rest, a caricature Jew in the disguise of a militia captain. He had no sympathy for Tanya, the team's in situ specialist, who couldn't take her eyes from the faces. Arkady took her aside and suggested she start a base-line sketch of the clearing, then attempt a sketch of the position of the bodies.

'Before or after they were assaulted by the good major?' Levin asked.

'Before,' Arkady said. 'As if the major were never here.'

The team biologist, a doctor, began searching for blood samples in the snow around the corpses. It was going to be a lovely day, Arkady thought. On the far embankment across the Moskva River he saw the first stroke of light on the Defense Ministry buildings, the only moment of the day when those endless, dun-colored walls had a touch of life. All around the clearing the trees emerged into the dawn as wary as deer. Now snow flowers started to show red and blue, bright as ribbons. A day when all winter seemed ready to melt.

'Fuck.' He looked at the bodies again.

The team photographer asked whether the KGB hadn't already taken pictures.

'Yes, and they were fine for souvenirs, I'm sure,' Arkady said, 'but not for police work.'

The photographer, flattered, laughed.

Good, Arkady thought, laugh louder.

A plainclothes detective named Pasha Pavlovich showed up in the investigator's office car, a five-year-old Moskvich, not a sleek Volga like Pribluda's. Pasha was half Tartar, a muscular romantic sporting a dark bowsprit pompadour.

'Three bodies, two male, one female.' Arkady got into the car. 'Frozen. Maybe a week old, maybe a month, five months. No papers, no effects, nothing. All shot through the heart and two through the head as well. Go take a look at the faces.'

Arkady waited in the car. It was hard to believe that winter was over in the middle of April; usually it hung on grimly into June. It could have hung on to these horrors a little longer. Except for yesterday's thaw, a militiaman's full bladder and the way the moonlight hit the snow, Arkady could be in his bed, his eyes closed.

Pasha returned pumped up with outrage. 'What kind of madman could do that?'

Arkady motioned for him to get back in the car.

'Pribluda was here,' he said when Pasha was inside.

Saying the words, he watched the subtle change in the detective, the little shrinking created by a few words, the glance out to the clearing and back to Arkady. The three dead souls out there were not so much a terrible crime as they were a sticky problem. Or both, because Pasha was one of the good ones, and he already seemed more conscience-stricken than anyone else would be.

'It's not our kind of case,' Arkady added. 'We do some work here and they'll take it away from us, don't worry.'

'In Gorky Park, though.' Pasha was upset.

'Very strange. Just do what I tell you and we'll be fine. Drive over to the park militia station and get maps of the skating paths. Get lists of all the militiamen and food vendors who operated in this part of the park this winter, also of any public-order volunteers who could have been snooping around. The main thing is to make a big production.' Arkady got out of the car and leaned in the window. 'By the way, is there another detective assigned to me?'

'Fet.'

'I don't know him.'