Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

the city that looked abandoned. The neon signs above the factories were half dark, half lit, delivering illegible messages. The river itself was as black and still as asphalt.
        Arkady's living room had an enamel-topped table with a coffee can filled with daisies, armchair, good brass lamp and so many bookshelves that the room seemed to have been built against a dam of books, a paperback bulwark from the poet Akhmatova to the humorist Zoschenko, and including Makarov - the .9mm pistol he kept behind the Pasternak translation of Macbeth .
         The hall had a shower and WC and led to a bedroom with more books. His bed was made, he gave himself credit for that. On the floor were a cassette player, headphones and ashtray. Under the bed he found cigarettes. He knew he should lie down and close his eyes, yet he discovered himself wandering back through the hall. He still wasn't sleepy or hungry. Merely as an occupation he looked into the refrigerator again. The last items were a carton of something called 'Berry of the Forest' and a bottle of vodka. The carton demanded a mauling to permit a stream of brown, gritty juice to plop into a glass. To judge by taste, it was either apple, prune or pear. Vodka barely cut it.
        'To Rudy.' He drank and filled the glass again.
        Since he had Jaak's radio he placed it on the table and turned on a garble of short-wave transmissions. From distant points of the earth came spasms of excitable Arabic and the round vowels of the BBC. Between signals the planet itself seemed to be mindlessly humming, perhaps sending those positive forces the hypnotist had talked about. On a medium band he heard a discussion in Russian about the Asian cheetah. 'The most magnificent of desert cats, the cheetah claims a range that extends across southern Turkmenistan to the tableland of Ustyurt. Distribution of these splendid animals is uncertain since none has been seen in the wild for thirty years.' Which made the cheetah's claims about as valid as tsarist banknotes, Arkady thought. But he liked the concept of cheetahs still lurking in the Soviet desert, loping after the wild ass or the goitered gazelle, gathering speed, darting around tamarisk trees, leaping skyward.
        He found he had gravitated to the bedroom window again. Veronica, who lived below, said he walked a kilometre from room to room every night. Just claiming his open range, that's all.
        A different voice on the radio, a woman's, read the news about the latest Baltic crisis. He half listened while he considered the land mine at Kim's address. Arms were stolen from military depots every day. Were army lorries going to set up shop at every street corner? Was Moscow the next Beirut? Filmy smoke hung over the city. Below, the same smoke swirled around empty vodka cases.
        He drifted back to the living room. There was a strange slant to the broadcast, yet the voice itself sounded vaguely familiar. 'The right-wing organization "Red Banner" stated that it planned a rally tonight in Moscow's Pushkin Square. Although Special Forces are on the alert, observers believe the government will once again sit on its hands until chaos escalates and it has the excuse of public order to sweep away political opponents on both the right and the left.'
        The indicator needle was between 14 and 16 on the medium wave and Arkady realized he was listening to Radio Liberty. The Americans ran two propaganda stations, the Voice of America and Radio Liberty. VOA, staffed by Americans, was a buttery voice of reason. Liberty was staffed by Russian émigrés and defectors, hence offered vitriol more in character with its audience. An arc of jamming arrays had been built south of Moscow simply to block Radio Liberty, sometimes chasing the signal up and down the dial. Although full-time jamming had stopped, this was the first time since then that Arkady had heard the station;
        The broadcaster talked calmly about riots in Tashkent and Baku.