Praise for
RED SQUARE

“As good as popular fiction should be.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Devilishly alarming … It lives up to the Red-noir standards of Renko and reminds us of the working human condition of love and death, lunacy and fun, that always seemed to be there beyond the cold war scrim.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“With its twists and turns and romantic subtext, played against a backdrop of decadence and despair, Red Square functions much like an off-shore Maltese Falcon. Yet Smith’s approach, while street-smart and wry is ultimately rich and affirmative.… What ultimately sets the Renko books apart is the careful writing, and, more importantly, the knowledge of the human heart that is carried through it, through them, first to last.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Welcome home, Arkady Renko. The hero of Gorky Park and Polar Star returns to Moscow in a thriller so dense with observation and atmosphere, it rivals John le Carré.… Renko [is] the most touching character to grace the pages of a novel since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.”

—Cosmopolitan

“Arkady Renko is one of the more memorable creations of cold-war fiction, as clever, guilt-ridden, and self-effacing as any George Smiley.”

—Newsweek

“A solid and entertaining winner.”

—New York Daily News

“Gripping … Vividly capture[s] the essence of the new Russia … The climax of Red Square takes place in Moscow during the hard-line coup attempt of August 1991. The texture of that remarkable time is captured quite adeptly: The moment is simultaneously tense and festive, bizarre and ordinary, grave and absurd. It’s Mr. Smith at his best.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Red Square is a pleasure to read. It moves well, its dialogue is superb and its depiction of underground Moscow is chilling. Just as we read, say, Tony Hillerman to learn about the Navajo, we read Martin Cruz Smith for a ringside seat at the messy brawls that passed for life in the last days of the Soviet Union.”

—Newsday

“Martin Cruz Smith is a fine writer, and not just by the standards of the thriller. Red Square, a serious novel of contemporary history, enlightens even as it entertains.”

—USA Today

“Ingenious … It’s Renko’s dispirited character that makes Red Square compelling.… Communism, capitalism—whatever the ism, there’ll always be a need for a good homicide cop.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“Cruz finds as much excitement, action, and suspense in international crime rings as he did during the Cold War.”

—Playboy

“Fabulous.”

—Cosmopolitan

“Smith’s work simultaneously possesses a wonderfully informed eloquence and a certain scrappiness.… He’s the master of muscular elegance.… There’s no one writing better thrillers today.… Arkady Renko [is] one of modern fiction’s greatest detectives.”

—Mademoiselle

“Mesmerizing … Spellbinding … The kind of intrigue, atmosphere, and excitement not seen from Smith since Renko’s megaselling debut in Gorky Park.… Brimming with political insight and psychological nuance.… A powerful reaffirmation of Renko’s love/hate for Russia as one of the great romances of thriller fiction.”

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The Soviet upheavals have fueled the glowing talent of Smith, America’s preeminent writer of Russia-based thrillers.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Title Page

Copyright

Red Square is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

2007 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition

Copyright © 1992 by Martin Cruz Smith
Dossier copyright © 2007 by Random House, Inc.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. MORTALIS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Little, Brown and Company for permission to reprint six lines from “The Last Toast” from Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated, and introduced by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward. Copyright © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. First appeared in American Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company.

The Don Swaim interview of Martin Cruz Smith is courtesy of the WOUB Center for Public Media and the Donald L. Swaim Collection in the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections at Ohio University. The interview can be heard in its entirety at Wired for Books, Wiredforbooks.org/martincruzsmith/.

eISBN: 978-0-307-80977-3

v3.1

I

MOSCOW
 
August 6–August 12, 1991

In Moscow, the summer night looks like fire and smoke. Stars and moon fade. Couples rise and dress and walk the street. Cars wander with their headlights off.

“There.” Jaak saw an Audi passing in the opposite direction.

Arkady slipped on headphones, tapped the receiver. “His radio’s out.”

Jaak U-turned to the other side of the boulevard and picked up speed. The detective had askew eyes set in a muscular face and he hunched over the wheel as if he were bending it.

Arkady tapped out a cigarette. First of the day. Well, it was one A.M., so it wasn’t much to brag about.

“Closer,” he said, and pulled the phones off. “Let’s be sure it’s Rudy.”

Ahead were the lights of the peripheral highway that circled the city. The Audi swung onto the ramp to merge with highway traffic. Jaak edged between two flatbed trucks carrying steel plates that clapped with every undulation of the road. He passed the lead truck, the Audi and a tanker. On the way, Arkady had caught the driver’s profile, but there were two people in the car, not one. “He picked someone up. We need another look,” he said.

Jaak slowed. The tanker didn’t pass, but a second later, the Audi slid by. Rudy Rosen, the driver—a round man with soft hands fixed to the wheel—was a private banker to the mafias, a would-be Rothschild who catered to Moscow’s most primitive capitalists. His passenger was female, with the wild look achieved by Russian features on a diet, somewhere between sensual and ravenous, with short, stylishly cut blond hair brushed back to the collar of her black leather jacket. As the Audi passed, she turned and sized up the investigators’ car, a two-door Zhiguli 8, as a piece of trash. In her thirties, Arkady thought. She had dark eyes, and a wide mouth and puffy lips, parted slightly as if starving. As the Audi swung in front, it was followed by the sound of an outboard engine and the appearance of a Suzuki that inserted itself between the two cars. The motorcycle rider wore a black dome helmet, black leather jacket and black high-tops that sparkled with reflectors. Jaak eased off. The biker was Kim, Rudy’s protection.

Arkady ducked and listened to the headset again. “Still dead.”

“He’s leading us to the market. There are some people there, if they recognize you, you’re dead.” Jaak laughed. “Of course then we’ll know we’re in the right place.”

“Good point.” God forbid anyone should exercise sanity, Arkady thought. Anyway, if anyone recognizes me it means I’m still alive.

All the traffic squeezed off the same exit ramp. Jaak tried to follow the Audi, but a line of “rockers”—bikers—swarmed in between. Swastikas and czarist eagles decorated their backs, all wreathed in the rising smoke of exhaust pipes stripped of mufflers.

At the end of the ramp, construction barriers had been pushed to one side. The car bounced as if they were crossing a potato field, and yet Arkady saw silhouettes that loomed high against the faint northern sky. A Moskvitch went by, its windows crammed with swaying rugs. The roof of an ancient Renault wore a living-room suite. Ahead, brake lights spread into a pool of red.

The rockers drew their bikes into a circle, announcing their stop with a chorus of roars. Cars and trucks spaced themselves roughly on a knoll here, in a trough there. Jaak killed the Zhiguli in first; the car had no neutral or parking gear. He emerged from the car with the smile of a crocodile who has found monkeys at play. Arkady got out wearing a padded jacket and cloth cap. He had black eyes and an expression of bemusement, as if he had recently returned from a long stay in a deep hole to observe changes on the surface, which wasn’t far from the truth.

This was the new Moscow.

The silhouettes were towers, red lights at the top to warn off planes. At their bases were the chalky forms of earthmovers, cement mixers, stacks of good bricks and mounds of bad, rebars sinking into mud. Figures moved around the cars and more were still arriving, an apparent convention of insomniacs. No sleepwalking here, though; instead, the swarming, purposeful hum of a black market.

In a way it was like walking through a dream, Arkady thought. Here were cartons of Marlboros, Winstons, Rothmans, even despised Cuban cigarettes stacked as high as walls. Videotapes of American action or Swedish porn sold by the gross for distribution. Polish glassware glittered in factory crates. Two men in running suits arranged not windshield wipers, but whole windshields, and not merely carved out of some poor sod’s car, but new, straight from the assembly line. And food! Not blue chickens dead of malnutrition, but whole sides of marbled beef hanging in a butcher’s truck. Gypsies lit kerosene lamps beside attaché cases to display counterfeit gold czarist rubles in mint condition, sealed and sold in plastic strips. Jaak pointed out a moon-white Mercedes. Further lamps appeared, spreading the aura of a bazaar; there might be camels browsing among the cars, Arkady thought, or Chinese merchants unrolling bolts of silk. An encampment to themselves was the Chechen mafia, men with pasty, pocked complexions and black hair who sprawled in their cars like pashas at their ease. Even in this setting, the Chechens enforced a space of fear.

Rudy Rosen’s Audi was in a choice central location near a truck unloading radios and VCRs. A well-behaved line had formed outside the car under the gaze of Kim, who stood, one foot on his helmet, about ten meters away. He had long hair that he pushed away from small, Korean features. His jacket was padded like armor and open to a compact model of the Kalashnikov called Malysh, Little Boy.

“I’m getting in line,” Arkady told Jaak. “Get some license-plate numbers, then watch Kim.”

Arkady joined the queue while Jaak loitered by the truck. From a distance, the VCRs seemed solid Soviet goods. Miniaturization was a virtue for consumers of other societies; generally, Russians wanted to show what they bought, not to hide it. But were they new? Jaak ran his hand along the edges, searching for the telltale cigarette burns of a used machine.

There was no sign of the golden-haired woman who had come with Rudy. Arkady felt himself being scrutinized, and turned toward a face whose nose had been broken so many times it had developed an elbow. “What’s the rate tonight?” the man asked.

“I don’t know,” Arkady admitted.

“They twist your prick here if you have anything but dollars. Or tourist coupons. Do I look like a fucking tourist?” He dug into his pockets and came out with crumpled bills. He held up one fist: “Zlotys.” He held up the other: “Forints. Can you believe it? I followed these two from the Savoy. I thought they were Italian and they turned out to be a Hungarian and a Pole.”

“It must have been pretty dark,” Arkady said.

“When I found out I almost killed them. I should have killed them to spare them the pain of trying to live on fucking forints and zlotys.”

Rudy rolled down the window on the passenger side and called to Arkady, “Next!” To the man waiting with zlotys, he added, “This will take a while.”

Arkady got in. Rudy was well wrapped in a double-breasted suit, an open cashbox on his lap. He had thinning hair combed diagonally across his scalp, moist eyes with long lashes, a blue cast to his jowls. A garnet ring was on the hand that held a calculator. The backseat was an office of neatly arrayed file boxes, laptop computer, computer battery, and cases of software, manuals and computer disks.

“This is a thoroughly mobile bank,” Rudy said.

“An illegal bank.”

“On my disks I can hold the complete savings records of the Russian Republic. I could do a spreadsheet for you some other time.”

“Thanks. Rudy, a rolling computer center does not make for a satisfying life.”

Rudy held up a Game Boy. “Speak for yourself.”

Arkady sniffed. Hanging from the rearview mirror was something that looked like a green wick.

“It’s an air freshener,” Rudy said. “Pine scent.”

“It smells like armpit of mint. How can you breathe?”

“It smells cleaner. I know it’s me—cleanliness, germs—it’s my problem. What are you doing here?”

“Your radio’s not working. Let me see it.”

Rudy blinked. “You’re going to work on it here?”

“Here is where we want to use it. Behave as if we’re conducting a normal transaction.”

“You said this would be safe.”

“But not foolproof. Everybody’s looking.”

“Dollars? Deutsche marks? Francs?” Rudy asked.

The cashbox tray was stuffed with currencies of different nationalities and colors. There were francs that looked like delicately hand-tinted portraits, lire with fantastic numbers and Dante’s face, oversized Deutsche marks brimming with confidence and, most of all, compartments of crisp-as-grass green American dollars. At Rudy’s feet was a bulging briefcase with, Arkady assumed, much more. Tucked by the clutch there was also a package wrapped in brown paper. Rudy lifted the hundred-dollar bills from the tray to reveal a transmitter and microrecorder.

“Pretend I want to buy rubles,” Arkady said.

“Rubles?” Rudy’s finger froze over the calculator. “Why would anyone want to buy rubles?”

Arkady played the transmitter’s power switch back and forth, then fine-tuned the frequency. “You’re doing it, buying rubles for dollars or Deutsche marks.”

“Let me explain. I’m exchanging. This is a service for buyers. I control the rate, I’m the bank, so I always make money and you always lose. Arkady, nobody buys rubles.” Rudy’s small eyes swelled with sympathy. “The only real Soviet money is vodka. Vodka is the only state monopoly that really works.”

“You have some of that, too.” Arkady glanced at the rear floor, which was littered with silvery bottles of Starka, Russkaya and Kuban vodka.

“It’s Stone Age barter. I take what people have. I help them. I’m surprised I don’t have stone beads and pieces of eight. Anyway, the rate is forty rubles to the dollar.”

Arkady tried the On button of the recorder. The miniature spools didn’t move. “The official rate is thirty rubles to the dollar.”

“Yes, and the universe revolves around Lenin’s asshole. No disrespect. It’s funny, I deal with men who would slit their mother’s throat and are embarrassed by the concept of profit.” Rudy became serious. “Arkady, if you can just imagine profit apart from crime, then you have business. What we’re doing right now is normal and legal in the rest of the world.”

“He’s normal?” Arkady looked in the direction of Kim. His eyes fixed on the car, the bodyguard had the flat face of a mask.

Rudy said, “Kim’s there for effect. I’m like Switzerland, neutral, everybody’s banker. Everybody needs me. Arkady, we’re the only part of the economy that works. Look around. Long Pond mafia, Baumanskaya mafia, local boys who know how to deliver goods. Lyubertsy mafia, a little tougher, a little dumber, just want to improve themselves.”

“Like your partner, Borya?” Arkady tried tightening the spools with a key.

“Borya’s a great success story. Any other country would be proud of him.”

“And the Chechens?”

“Granted, Chechens are different. If we were all rotting bones, they wouldn’t mind. But remember one thing, the biggest mafia is still the Party. Never forget that.”

Arkady opened the transmitter and slapped out the batteries. Through the window he noticed customers growing restless, though Rudy seemed in no hurry. If anything, after his initial nervousness, he was in a serene, valedictory mood.

The problem was that the transmitter was militia goods, never strong cause for confidence. Arkady twisted the connecting jacks. “You’re not scared?”

“I’m in your hands.”

“You’re only in my hands because we have enough to put you in a camp.”

“Circumstantial evidence of nonviolent crimes. Incidentally, another way to say ‘nonviolent crimes’ is ‘business.’ The difference between a criminal and a businessman is that the businessman has imagination.” Rudy glanced at the rear seat. “I have enough technology here for a space station. You know, that transmitter of yours is the only thing in this car that doesn’t work.”

“I know, I know.” Arkady lifted the contact prongs and gently slipped the batteries back in. “There was a woman in your car. Who is she?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. She had something for me.”

“What?”

“A dream. Big plans.”

“Is greed involved?”

Rudy let a modest smile shine. “I hope so. Who wants a poor dream? Anyway, she’s a friend.”

“You don’t seem to have any enemies.”

“Chechens aside, no, I don’t think I do.”

“Bankers can’t afford enemies?”

“Arkady, we’re different. You want justice. No wonder you have enemies. I have smaller aims like profit and pleasure, the way sane people live around the world. Which of us helps other people more?”

Arkady hit the transmitter with the recorder.

“I love to watch Russians fix things,” Rudy said.

“You’re a student of Russians?”

“I have to be, I’m a Jew.”

The spools started to roll. “It’s working,” Arkady announced.

“What can I say? Once again I’m amazed.”

Arkady laid transmitter and recorder under the bills. “Be careful,” he said. “If there’s trouble, shout.”

“Kim keeps me out of trouble.” When Arkady opened the door to leave, Rudy added, “In a place like this, you’re the one who has to be careful.”

As the line outside pressed forward, Kim pushed it back with rapid shoves. He gave Arkady a black stare as he brushed by.

Jaak had bought a shortwave radio that hung like a space-age valise from his hand. The detective wanted to stow his purchase in the Zhiguli.

On the way to the car, Arkady said, “Tell me about this radio. Shortwave, long-wave, medium-wave? German?”

“All waves.” Jaak squirmed under Arkady’s gaze. “Japanese.”

“Did they have any transmitters?”

They passed an ambulance that offered vials of morphine in solution and disposable syringes still in sterile American cellophane. A biker from Leningrad sold acid from his sidecar; Leningrad University had a reputation for the best chemists. Someone Arkady had known ten years before as a pickpocket was now taking orders for computers; Russian computers, at least. Tires rolled out of a bus straight to the customer. Women’s shoes and sandals were arrayed on tiptoe on a dainty shawl. Shoes and tires were on the march, if not into the daylight, at least into the twilight.

There was a white flash and a gust of glass from behind them, in the middle of the market. Perhaps a camera bulb and a broken bottle, Arkady thought, though he and Jaak started to return in the direction of the disturbance. A second flash erupted like a firework that caught each face in recoil. The flash subsided to an everyday orange, the sort of fire men start in an oil can to warm their hands on a winter’s eve. Little stars rose and danced in the sky. The acrid smell of plastic was tinged by the heady bouquet of gasoline.

Some men staggered back with sleeves on fire and, as the crowd spread and Arkady pushed through, he saw Rudy Rosen riding a blazing phaeton, upright, face black, hair aflame, hands clasped to the wheel, brilliant in his own glow but motionless within the thick, noxious storm clouds that whipped from the interior and out the gutted windows of his car. Arkady got near enough to look through the windshield at Rudy’s eyes sinking into the smoke. He was dead. There was that silence, that gutted gaze in the middle of the flames.

Around the burning car other cars were moving. Spilling rugs, gold coins, VCRs, a mass evacuation flowed to the gate. The ambulance lumbered off, plowing over a figure in its headlights, followed by a Chechen motorcade. Cycles split into several streams, searching for gaps in the site fence.

Yet some men stayed and, as the stars drifted overhead, fought to catch them. Arkady himself leaped and plucked from the air a burning Deutsche mark, then a dollar, then a franc, all lined with worms of burning gold.

Although the ground was still in shadow, Arkady could see that the site was a layout of four twenty-story towers around a central plaza; three of the towers were faced in precast concrete while the last was still in a skeletal girders-and-crane phase that in the hopeful light of dawn appeared both gargantuan and frail. On the ground floors, he supposed there would be restaurants, cabarets, perhaps a cinema, and in the middle of the plaza, when the earthmovers and cement mixers were gone, a view of tour buses and taxis. Now, however, there were a forensic van, the Zhiguli and the black shell of Rudy Rosen’s Audi sitting on a black carpet of singed glass. The Audi’s windows were hollow and the heat of the fire had exploded and then burned the tires, so at least it was the stench of burnt rubber that was strongest. As if listening, Rudy Rosen sat stiffly upright.

“Glass seems to be evenly distributed,” Arkady said. Polina followed with her prewar Leica and took a picture every other step. “Glass is melted closer to the car, which is a four-door Audi. Left doors shut. Hood shut, headlights burned out. Right doors shut. Trunk shut, taillights burned out.” There was nothing to do but get on his hands and knees. “Fuel tank is blown. Muffler separated from exhaust pipe.” He got up. “License plate black now but a Moscow number is legible and identified as property of Rudik Rosen. By the wide spread of glass, origin of fire seems to have been inside the passenger compartment, not out.”

“Pending expert reports, of course,” Polina said to maintain her reputation for disrespect. Young and tiny, the pathologist wore one coat and one smirk summer and winter, her hair piled high and stabbed ferociously with pins. “You should get the thing up on a lift.”

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