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

Pasha spat on the snow and said, 'There was a little bird, who repeated what he heard  '

'Okay.' There was bound to be an informer in this kind of case; not only did the investigator bow to the fact, he welcomed it. 'We'll be pulled off this mess that much sooner, with everyone's cooperation.'

When Pasha had gone two trucks rolled in bearing militia trainees and shovels. Tanya had the clearing marked in grids so that the snow could be shoveled meter by meter without losing sight of where evidence was found, though Arkady hardly expected any this long after the murders. Appearance was his goal. With a grand enough farce, Pribluda might call before the day was out. At any rate, the activity bolstered the militiamen. They were basically traffic cops and were happy even if the traffic consisted of themselves. Otherwise, they were not generally happy. The militia enlisted farm boys right out of the Army, seducing them with the incredible promise of living in Moscow, that residence denied even to nuclear scientists. Fantastic! As a result, Muscovites regarded the militia as some sort of occupying army of shitkickers and brutes. Militiamen came to see their co-citizens as decadent, depraved and probably Jewish. Still, no one ever returned to the farm.

The sun was really up now, alive, not the ghost disk that had haunted winter. The trainees dawdled in the warm breath of the wind, eyes averted from the center of the clearing.

Why Gorky Park? The city had bigger parks to leave bodies in  Izmailovo, Dzerzhinsky, Sokolniki. Gorky Park was only two kilometers long and less than a kilometer across at its widest point. It was the first park of the Revolution, though, the favorite park. South, its narrow end nearly reached the university. North, only a bend of the river cut off a view of the Kremlin. It was the place everyone came to: clerks to eat lunch, grandmothers with babies, boys with girls. There were a Ferris wheel, fountains, children's theaters, walks and club pavilions hidden all through the grounds. In winter there were four skating rinks and skating paths.

Detective Fet arrived. He was nearly as young as the trainees, with steel-rimmed glasses and blue ball-bearing eyes.

'You are in charge of the snow.' Arkady gestured to the growing piles. 'Melt it and search it.'

'In which laboratory would the senior investigator want this process carried out?' Fet asked.

'Oh, I think some hot water right where they are would do the job.' Because this might not sound impressive enough, Arkady added, 'I want no snowflake unturned.'

Arkady took Fet's buff-and-red militia car and drove off, crossing the Krimsky Bridge to the north side of the city. The frozen river ached, ready to break. It was nine o'clock, two hours since he'd been roused from bed, no breakfast yet, just cigarettes. Coming off the bridge, he waved his red ID at the militiaman directing traffic, and sped through stopped cars. A privilege of rank.

Arkady had few illusions about his work. He was senior homicide investigator, a specialist in murder in a country that had little well-organized crime and no talent for finesse. The usual victim of the ordinary Russian was the woman he slept with, and then when he was drunk and hit her over the head with an ax-probably ten times before he got it right. To be blunt, the criminals Arkady arrested were ordinarily drunks first and murderers second, and far better drunks than murderers. There were few more dangerous positions, he had distilled from experience, than to be the bestfriend of or married to a drunk, and the entire country was drunk half the time.

Icicles hung wet from gutters. The investigator's car scattered pedestrians. But it was better than two days before, when traffic and people were shades lumbering through a hive of steam. He looped around the Kremlin on Marx Prospekt and turned up Petrovka Street three blocks to the yellow six-story complex that was Moscow Militia Headquarters, where he parked in the basement garage and rode an elevator to the third floor.

The Militia Operation Room was regularly described by the newspapers as 'the very brain center of Moscow, ready to respond within seconds to reports of accidents or crimes in the safest city in the world.' One wall was an enormous map of Moscow divided into thirty borough divisions and studded with lights for one hundred thirty-five precinct stations. Ranks of radio switches surrounded a communications desk where officers contacted patrol cars ('This is Volga calling fifty-nine') or, by code name, precincts ('This is Volga calling Omsk'). There was no other room in Moscow so ordered and restful, so planned, the creation of electronics and an elaborate winnowing process. There were quotas. A militiaman on the beat was expected to report officially only so many crimes; otherwise he would put his fellow militiamen on their beats in the ludicrous position of reporting no crimes at all. (Everyone recognized there had to be some crime.) Then the precincts one by one trimmed their statistics to achieve the proper downturn in homicide, assault and rape. It was an efficiently optimistic system that demanded tranquility and got it. On the great map only one precinct light blinked, indicating that the capital city of seven million inhabitants had passed twenty-four hours with but a single significant act of violence reported. The light was in Gorky Park. Watching this light from the center of the Operating Room was the commissioner of militia, a massive, flat-faced man with a chest of service ribbons on his general's gold-braided gray uniform. With him were a pair of colonels, deputy commissioners. In his street clothes Arkady was slovenly.

'Comrade General, Chief Investigator Renko reporting,' Arkady said, according to ritual. Had he shaved? he asked himself. He resisted the temptation to run his hand over his chin.

The general gave the faintest of nods. A colonel said, 'The general knows you are a specialist in homicides. He believes in specialization and modernization.'

'The general wants to know your initial reaction to this matter,' the other colonel said. 'What are the chances of an early resolution?'

'With the world's finest militia and the support of the people, I feel confident we will succeed in identifying and apprehending the guilty parties,' Arkady answered forcefully.

'Then why,' the first colonel asked, 'has there not even been a bulletin to all precincts for information about the victims?'

'The bodies had no papers, and being frozen, it's difficult to say when they died. Also there was some mutilation. There will be no identification of the usual order.'

After a glance at the general, the other colonel asked, 'There was a representative of State Security at the scene?'

'Yes.'

The general finally spoke: 'In Gorky Park. That I don't understand.'

In the commissary, Arkady breakfasted on a sweet roll and coffee, then fed a two-kopek piece into a public phone and called. 'Is Comrade Teacher Renko there?'

'Comrade Renko is occupied in a conference with a committee from the district party.'

'We were going to have lunch. Tell Comrade Renko... tell her that her husband will see her tonight.'