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

Arkady apologized and left. A second door led up stairs littered with birdseed to a metal door. He knocked and pressed himself against the wall. 'Kim, we want to help you. Come out so we can talk. We're friends.'

Someone was inside. Arkady heard the careful easing of a floorboard and a sound like rustling sheets. When he pounded the door, it popped open. He walked into a storeroom that was dark except for a shoebox that was burning from the top down in the middle of the floor; he smelled the lighter fluid that had been poured on to it. Around the walls were television cartons, on the floor a bare mattress, tool kit, hot plate. He pulled the curtains aside and looked out of the open window at a fire escape leading down to a yard knee-deep in pet-shop junk: birdseed bags, steel netting, dead chicks. Whoever had been here was gone. He tried the switch. The light bulb was gone, too. Well, that showed forethought.

Arkady made a complete circuit of the room, looking behind the cartons, before he returned to the burning box. The sound of the flames was soft and furious at the same time, a miniature firestorm. It wasn't a shoebox. The side of it said 'Sindy' and showed a doll with a blonde ponytail sitting at a table, pouring tea. He recognized it because Sindy dolls were the most popular import in Moscow, displayed in every toy-shop window, non-existent on the shelves. The box's illustration also showed a dog, perhaps a Pekingese, that sat at the doll's feet and wagged its tail.

Jaak rushed in to stamp out the fire.

'Don't.' Arkady pulled him back.

The fire line edged down into the picture. As Sindy's hair burst into flame, her face darkened in alarm. She seemed to raise the teapot, then stand as her upper half was consumed. The dog waited faithfully as paper burned down around him. Then the entire box was black, twisted, spider-webbed with red, turning grey and gauzy, with a layer of ashes that Arkady blew away. Inside was a land mine, lightly charred, its two pressure pins up, triggered, still waiting for Jaak's foot to push them down.
Chapter Three

Arkady drew a cartoon car on a piece of paper. Crayons, he thought, were about the only thing he lacked. Amenities for rehabilitated Special Investigator Renko included desk and conference table, four chairs, files, and a closet that held a combination safe. Plus two 'Deluxe' portable typewriters, two red outside phones with dials and two yellow intercoms without. He had two windows dressed with curtains, a wall map of Moscow, a rollaway blackboard, an electric samovar and an ashtray.

On the table Polina spread a black-and-white 360-degree panorama of the construction site and approaching shots of the Audi, then detailed colour shots of the gutted car and driver. Minin hovered zealously. Jaak, forty hours without sleep, stirred like a boxer trying to rise before the count of ten.

'It was vodka that made the fire so bad,' Jaak said.

'Everyone thinks of vodka,' Polina sneered. 'What really burns are seats because they're polyurethane. That's why cars burn so quickly, because they're mostly plastic. The seat adheres to the skin like napalm. A car is just an incendiary device on wheels.'

Arkady suspected that not so long ago Polina had been the girl in pathology class with the best reports, illustrated and footnoted in punctilious detail.

'In these photographs, I first show Rudy still in the car, then after we've peeled him off and removed him, then a shot through the springs to show what fell through from his pockets: intact steel keys, kopecks melted with floor rubbish, hardware from the seat, including what was left of our transmitter. The tapes burned, of course, if there ever was anything on them. In the first photographs you'll notice that I have circled in red a flash mark on the side wall by the clutch.' She had indeed, right by the charred shinbones and shoes of Rudy Rosen's legs. 'Around the flash mark were traces of red sodium and copper sulphate, consistent with an explosive incendiary device. Since there are no remains of a timer or fuse, I assume it was a bomb designed to ignite on contact. There was also petrol.'

'From when the tank blew,' Jaak said. Arkady drew a stick figure in the car and, with a red pen, a circle around the stick feet. 'What about Rudy?'

'Flesh in that condition is as hard as wood, and at the same time bones break as soon as you cut. It's hard enough to pick the clothes off. I brought you this.' From a plastic bag Polina produced a newly buffed garnet and a hard puddle of gold, what was left of Rudy's ring. The cool pride on her face reminded Arkady of the sort of cat who brings mice to its owner.

'You checked his teeth?'

'Here's a chart. The gold ran and I haven't found it, but there are signs of a filling in the second lower molar. This is all preliminary to a complete autopsy, of course.'

'Thank you.'

'Just one thing,' she added. 'There's too much blood.'

'Rudy was probably pretty cut up,' Jaak said.

Polina said, 'People who are burning to death don't explode. They're not sausages. I found blood everywhere.'

Arkady squirmed. 'Maybe the assailant was cut.'

'I sent samples to the lab to check the blood type.'

'Good idea.'

'You're welcome.' Chin up, contemptuous from then on of the proceedings, she even sat just like a cat. Jaak diagrammed the market on the blackboard, showing the relative positions of Rudy's car, Kim, the queue of customers, then, at a distance of twenty meters, the lorry with VCRs. A second grouping was arranged in a loose orbit of ambulance, computer salesman, caviar van; then more space and half an orbit that included Gypsy jewellers, rockers, rug merchants, the Zhiguli.