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

Perhaps it was the idea of buying. The idea of a market. Because this was a cooperative shop and people wanted to buy... something.

On the third table was a bar of soap, shaved and shaped out of a larger, used bar of soap, twenty kopecks. A rusty butter knife, five kopecks. A blackened light bulb with a broken filament, three rubles. Why, when a new bulb was forty kopecks? Since there were no new light bulbs for sale in the shops, you took this used bulb to your office, replaced the bulb in the lamp on your desk and took the good bulb home so that you wouldn't live in the dark.

Arkady slipped out of the back door and walked across the dirt towards the second address, a milk shop, cigarette in his left hand, which meant that Kim had not been inside the cooperative. Up the street, Jaak seemed to be reading a newspaper in a car.

There was no milk, cream or butter in the milk shop, though the chill rooms were stacked with boxes of sugar. The empty counters were staffed by women in white coats and caps who wore the boredom of a rearguard. Arkady lifted a sugar box. Empty.

'Whipped cream?' Arkady asked an assistant.

'No.' She seemed startled.

'Sweet cheese?'

'Of course not. Are you crazy?'

'Yes, but what a memory,' Arkady said. He flashed his red ID and walked around the counter and through the swinging door into the rear. A lorry was in the bay and a delivery of milk was being unloaded, directly into another, unmarked lorry. The manager of the shop came out of a chill room; before the door snapped shut, Arkady saw wheels of cheese and tubs of butter.

'Everything you see is reserved. We have nothing, nothing!' she announced.

Arkady opened the chill room door. An elderly man huddled like a mouse in a corner. In one hand, he clutched a certificate naming him a volunteer citizen inspector to combat hoarding and speculation. In his other hand was a bottle of vodka.

'Staying warm, uncle?' Arkady asked.

'I'm a veteran.' The old man touched the bottle to the medal on his sweater.

'I can see that.'

Arkady walked around the storeroom. Why did a milk shop need bins?

'Everything here is special order for invalids and children,' the manager said.

Arkady opened a bin to see sacks of flour stacked like sandbags. When he opened another, pomegranates rolled around his feet and over the storeroom floor. A third bin, and lemons poured over pomegranates.

'Invalids and children!' the manager shouted.

The last bin was stacked with cigarettes.

Arkady stepped carefully around the fruit and exited through the bay. The men loading the milk tucked their faces away.

From the back of the shop, his cigarette still in his left hand, Arkady walked across a yard seeded with broken glass to the main street. On it, apartment buildings rusted in seams along drainpipes and window casings. Cars had the creased and rusted look of wrecks. Kids hung on to a rust-orange roundabout without seats. The school seemed to be built of bricks of rust. At the end of the street, the local Party headquarters was sheathed like a sepulchre in white marble.

At Julya's last address for Kim, Arkady dropped the cigarette as he approached a pet shop whose plaster had fallen from its facade in large, geographic sections. He heard Jaak and the car rolling close behind.

The only animals for sale seemed to be chicks and cats peeping and mewing in wire cages. The shop assistant was a Chinese girl carving what looked like liver for a customer. When the liver stirred Arkady saw that it was actually a spreading mound of bloodworms. He stepped behind the counter and into a back room as the girl followed with her cleaver and warned, 'This is no entry.'

In the back were sacks of wood shavings and chicken pellets, a refrigerator with a calendar for the Year of the Sheep, shelves with tall glass jars of teas, mushrooms and fungi, man-shaped ginseng and items labelled only in Chinese characters, but which he recognized from the herbal shops he had seen in Siberia. What looked like tar in a jar was black-bear bile; a larger bottle held a lumpish mass of coagulated pig's blood, good for soup. There were dried seahorses and deer penises that resembled peppers. Bear paws, another illegal delicacy, were stacked on a rope. An armadillo stirred, half-alive, on a string.

'No entry,' the girl insisted. She couldn't have been more than twelve and the cleaver looked as long as her arm.