Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Author:Martin Cruz Smith [Smith, Martin Cruz]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780517106990
Publisher: Random House Value Publishing
Published: 2012-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

13

It was raining. The floors creaked idly. In the apartments above and below, Arkady heard the occasional footfall of housecleaning. On the hall stairs, the sideways climbing of an old woman. There had been no knocks at the door, no phone calls.

Irina Asanova lay facing him, her skin as wan as ivory now that her fever was broken. He was still in his clothes. At first he’d tried to find some other place to curl up, but there were no chairs or sofa, not even a rug, and in the end they’d shared the bed. Not that she’d known or that it mattered. He lifted his watch. 9 A.M. Slowly, so as not to wake her, he rose and walked in stockinged feet to the side of a window and looked down into the courtyard. No face looked up. He’d have to move her, but he didn’t know where. Not her place. Hotels were out of the question; it was illegal to take a hotel room in your own city. (What good reason could a citizen have for not being home?) Something would turn up.

Four hours’ sleep was enough. The investigation carried him along. He felt it rising like the bulk of a wave, bearing him, bones and body, in rumpled clothes.

The girl clutched her blanket against her cheek, good for another four hours of deep sleep, he guessed. He’d be back by then. It was time to see the general.

Enthusiasts Road, where prisoners used to start their journey to Siberia on foot, went by the Hammer and Sickle tractor works to Route 89, a truck run of narrow concrete, flat mud countryside and villages set as close to the ground as potatoes east all the way to the Urals. Arkady drove forty kilometers before turning north on a macadam road toward a village called Balobanovo, past figures sowing okra and beans, and fields of uniformly brown cows, then on a dirt road through woods so dense that drifts of snow untouched by the sun blanketed the ground. Between branches he could see the river Kliazma.

At an iron gate he got out and walked the rest of the way. No cars had been through recently. In the middle of the road, last year’s grass stood dead and tall. A fox dashed almost under his feet and he braced automatically for the general’s dogs, but the woods were silent except for the drizzle of rain.

After ten minutes’ walk, he came to a two-story house with a steep metal roof. On the other side of the circular yard, he knew, was a long stairway going down to the riverbank where there was—had been, at least—a dock with a skiff and, anchored well into the stream, a float on orange oil cans. There had also been peonies in wooden buckets along the dock, and a tub of ice manned by two aides-decamp in white jackets and white gloves. For parties, Chinese lanterns would hang over the dock and be strung all the way up the stairs, a trail of moons rising straight to the sky.

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