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

'With the burned ones you have to open the camera aperture all the way just to get any detail,' Polina said.

Detail? 'The body is shrunken,' Arkady said, 'too badly charred to be immediately identifiable as male or female, child or adult. Head is resting on the left shoulder. Clothes and hair are burned off; some skull shows through. Teeth do not appear salvageable for moulds. No visible shoes or socks.'

Which didn't really describe the new, smaller, blacker Rudy Rosen riding on the airy springs of his chariot. It didn't capture his full transformation into tar and bone, the particular nakedness of a belt buckle hanging in the pelvic cavity, the wondering sockets of the eyes and the molten gold of his fillings, the trousers stripped for speed, the way his right hand gripped the steering wheel as if he were cruising through hell, and the fact that the pearlized wheel had melted like pink toffee on his fingers. It didn't convey the mysterious way bottles of Starka and Kuban vodka had liquefied and pooled, how hard currency and cigarettes had vanished in a puff. 'Everybody needs me.' Not any more.

Arkady turned away and saw that as black as Rudy Rosen was, Minin's face registered nothing but satisfaction, as if this sinner had suffered barely enough. Arkady took him aside and aimed him at some of the searchers among the militia who were stuffing their pockets. The ground was strewn with goods abandoned in the panic of the evacuation. 'I told them to identify and chart what they found.'

'You didn't mean for them to keep it.'

Arkady took a deep breath. 'Right.'

'Look at this.' Polina probed a corner of the back seat with her hairpin. 'Dried blood.'

Arkady went over to the Zhiguli. Jaak was in the back seat, questioning their only witness, the same unlucky man Arkady had met when he was waiting to talk to Rudy. The mugger with too many zlotys. Jaak had tackled him just inside the fence.

According to his ID and work papers, Gary Oberlyan was a Moscow resident and hospital orderly, and, by the looks of his coupons, due for a new pair of shoes.

'You want to see his ID?' Jaak said. He pulled back Gary's sleeves. On the inside of the left forearm was the picture of a nude sitting in a wine glass and holding the ace of hearts. 'He likes wine, women and cards,' Jaak said. On the right forearm was a bracelet of spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. 'He loves cards.' On the left little finger, a ring of upside-down spades. 'This means conviction for hooliganism.' On the right ring finger, a knife through a heart. 'This means he's ready to kill. So let's say Gary did not wash up in a basket of reeds. Let's say Gary is a multiple offender who was apprehended at a gathering of speculators and who should cooperate.'

'Fuck you,' Gary said. In the daylight his broken nose looked welded on.

'Still have your forints and zlotys?' Arkady asked.

'Fuck you.'

Jaak read from his notes. 'The witness states that he spoke to the fucking deceased because he thought the deceased was someone who owed him money. He then left the nicking deceased's car and was standing at a distance of approximately ten metres about five minutes later when the fucking car exploded. A man the witness knows as Kim threw a second fucking bomb into the car and then ran.'

'Kim?' Arkady asked.

'That's what he says. He also says he burned his fucking hands trying to save the deceased.' Jaak reached into Gary's pockets to pull out handfuls of half-burned Deutschmarks and dollars.

It was going to be a warm day. Already the dewiness of dawn was turning to beads of sweat. Arkady squinted at a sunlit banner that hung limply across the top of the western tower. 'NEW WORLD HOTEL!' He imagined the banner filling with a breeze and the tower sailing away like a brigantine. He needed sleep. He needed Kim.

Polina knelt on the ground on the passenger side of the Audi.

'More blood,' she called.

As Arkady unlocked the door to Rudy Rosen's flat, Minin pressed forward with a huge Stechkin machine pistol. Definitely not standard issue.

Arkady admired the weapon but he worried about Minin. 'You could saw a room in half with that thing,' he told him. 'But if someone's here, they would have opened the door or blown it off with a shotgun. A pistol won't help now. It just scares the ladies.' He dispensed a reassuring nod to the two street sweepers he'd gathered as legal witnesses to the search. They answered with shy glimpses of steel teeth. Behind them, a pair of forensic technicians pulled on rubber gloves.

Search the home of someone you don't know and you're an investigator, Arkady thought. Search the home of someone you do know and you're a voyeur. Odd. He'd watched Rudy Rosen for a month but never been inside before.

Upholstered front door with peephole. Living/dining room, kitchen, bedroom with TV and VCR, another bedroom turned into an office, bathroom with whirlpool. Bookcases with hardback collections of culture (Gogol, Dostoyevsky), biographies of Brezhnev and Moshe Dayan, stamp albums and back issues of Israel Trade, Soviet Trade, Business Week and Playboy. At once, the forensic technicians began a survey, Minin one step behind them to make sure nothing disappeared.

'Don't touch a thing, please,' Arkady told the street sweepers, who stood reverentially in the middle of the room as if they had stepped into the Winter Palace.

A kitchen cabinet held American scotch and Japanese brandy, Danish coffee in aluminum-foil bags; no vodka. In the refrigerator, smoked fish, ham, pтtщ and butter with a Finnish label, a cool jar of sour cream and, in the freezer, a chocolate bar and an ice-cream cake with pink and green frosting in the shape of flowers and leaves. It was the sort of cake that used to be sold in common milk shops, and was now a fantasy found only in the most special buffets Ц a little less rare, say, than a Fabergщ egg.