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

'Exactly. It's very high-class. Anyway, I don't like the word prostitute.'

Putana was the word most often used for high-class hard-currency prostitutes. Arkady had the feeling, that Julya wouldn't like that word either.

'Julya's a multilingual secretary,' Jaak said. 'A good one, too.'

A man in a tracksuit set his sports bag on a chair, sat down, and ordered a cognac. A few sprints, a little cognac; it sounded like a good Russian regimen. He had the knotty hair of a Chechen, but worn long at the back, short at the sides, with a curly fringe dyed an off-orange. The bag looked heavy.

Arkady watched the attendant. 'He doesn't seem happy. Rudy was always here when he counted. If Kim killed Rudy, who's going to protect him?'

Jaak read from a notebook. 'According to the hotel, 'Ten entertainment machines leased by TransKom Services Cooperative from Recreativos Franco, SA, show total average reported receipts of about a thousand dollars a day.' Not bad. 'The tokens are counted daily and checked daily against meters in the backs of the machines. The meters in the slot are locked in; only the Spanish can get into them and reset them.' You saw...'

'Twenty bags,' Arkady said.

Jaak calculated. 'Each bag holds five hundred tokens and twenty bags is two and a half thousand dollars. So that's a thousand dollars for the state and fifteen hundred a day for Rudy. I don't know how he did it, but by the bags he beat the meters.'

Arkady wondered who TransKom was. It couldn't be just Rudy. That kind of import-and-lease needed Party sponsorship, some official institution willing to be a partner.

Jaak turned his eyes to Julya. 'Marry me again.'

'I'm going to marry a Swede, an executive. I have girlfriends in Stockholm who've already done it. It's not Paris, but the Swedes appreciate someone who's good with money and knows how to entertain. I've had proposals.'

'And they talk about the Brain Drain,' Jaak said to Arkady.

'One gave me a car,' Julya said.

'A car?' Jaak was more respectful.

'A Volvo.'

'Naturally. Your bottom should touch nothing but foreign leather.' Jaak implored her, 'Help me. Not for cars or ruby rings, but because I didn't send you home the first time we took you off the street.' He explained to Arkady, 'The first time I saw her she was wearing gumboots and a mattress. She's complaining about Stockholm and she came from somewhere in Siberia where they take anti-freeze to shit.'

'That reminds me,' Julya said, unfazed, 'for my exit visa I may need a statement from you saying you don't have any claims on me.'

'We're divorced. We have a relationship of mutual respect. Can I borrow your car?'

'Visit me in Sweden.' Julya found a page in her magazine that she was willing to deface. She wrote three addresses in curly script, folded the margin and tore it along the crease. 'I'm not doing you a favour. Personally, Kim is the last person I'd want to find. You're sure I can't buy you lunch?'

Arkady said, 'I'll just treat myself to one more cube before we go.'

'Be careful,' Julya told Jaak. 'Kim is crazy. 'I'd rather you didn't find him.'

On the way out, Arkady caught another glimpse of himself in the bar mirror. Grimmer than he thought, not the kind of face that woke up expecting sunshine. What was that old poem by Mayakovsky? 'Regard me, world, and envy: I have a Soviet passport!' Now everyone just wanted a passport to get out, and the government, ignored by all, had collapsed into the sort of spiteful arguments that erupted in a whorehouse where no customers had come to call in twenty years.

What could explain this shop, this country, this life? A fork with three out of four tines, two kopecks. A fishhook, twenty kopecks, used, but fish weren't choosy. A comb as small as a seedy moustache, reduced from four kopecks to two.

True, this was a discount shop, but in another, more civilized world wasn't this trash? Wouldn't it all be thrown away?

Some items had no discernible function. A wooden scooter with rough wooden wheels and no pole, no bars to hang on to. A plastic tag embossed with the number '97'. What were the odds someone had ninety-seven rooms, ninety-seven lockers or ninety-seven anything and was only missing the number '97'?