Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith Read Free Book Online

and black helmets, with shields and clubs. Armed insomniacs - the worst kind, Arkady thought.
     
    The prosecutor's office had offered him a modern flat in a suburban high-rise of apparatchiks and young professionals, but he had wanted to feel he was in Moscow. That he was, in the angle formed by the Moscow and Yauza rivers, in a three-storey building behind a former church that produced liniment and vodka. The church spire had been gilded for the '80 Olympics, but the interior had been gutted to make way for galvanized tanks and bottling machinery. How did the distillers decide which part of their production was vodka and which was rubbing alcohol? Or did it matter?
        While he was removing windscreen wipers and rear-view mirror for the night, Arkady remembered Jaak's short-wave radio, still in the boot of the car. Radio, wipers and mirror in hand, he considered the food shop on the corner. Closed, naturally. He could either do his job or eat; that seemed to be the option. If it was any consolation, the last time he had made it to the market he'd had a choice of cow head or hooves. Nothing in between, as if the bulk of the animal had disappeared into a black hole.
        Since access to the building could be gained only by punching numbers into a security box, someone had helpfully written the code by the door. Inside, the letter boxes were blackened where vandals had shoved newspapers in the slots and torched them. On the second floor, he stopped by a neighbour's for his mail. Veronica Ivanovna, with the bright eyes of a child and the loose grey hair of a witch, was the closest thing to a guard the building had.
        'Two personal letters and a phone bill.' She handed them over. 'I couldn't get you any food because you didn't remember to give me your ration card.'
        Her flat was illuminated by the airless glow of a television set. All the old people in the building seemed to have gathered on chairs and stools around the screen to watch, or rather to listen, with their eyes closed, to the image of a grey, professorial face with a deep, reassuring voice that carried like a wave to the open door.
        'You may be tired. Everyone is tired. You may be confused. Everyone is confused. These are difficult times, times of stress. But this is the hour of healing, of reconnecting with the natural positive forces all around you. Visualize. Let your fatigue flow out of your fingertips, let the positive force flow in.'
        'A hypnotist?' Arkady asked.
        'Come in. It's the most popular programme on television.'
        'Well, I am tired and confused,' Arkady admitted.
        Arkady's neighbours leaned back in their seats as if from the radiant heat of a fireplace. It was the fringe of beard from ear to ear and under the chin that gave the hypnotist a serious, academic cast. That and the thick glasses that enlarged his eyes, as intense and unblinking as an ikon's. 'Open yourself up and relax. Cleanse your mind of old dogmas and anxieties because they only exist in your mind. Remember, the universe wants to work through you.'
        'I bought a crystal on the street,' Veronica said. 'His people are selling them everywhere. You place a crystal on the television set and it focuses his emanations directly on you, like a beacon. It amplifies him.'
        In fact, Arkady saw a row of crystals on her set.
        'Do you think it's a bad sign when it's easier to buy stones than food?' he asked.
        'You will only find bad signs if you're looking for them.'
        'That's the problem. In my work I look for them all the time.'
     
    From his refrigerator Arkady took a cucumber, yoghurt and stale bread that he ate standing at an open window, looking south over the church towards the river. The neighbourhood had ancient lanes on real hills and an actual wood-burner's alley hidden behind the church. Behind the houses were yards that used to hold dairy cows and goats, which sounded good now. It was the newer parts of