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REVIEWS, Page 98BOOKSThe Texture Of Chaos
By JOHN SKOW
TITLE: RED SQUARE
AUTHOR: Martin Cruz Smith
PUBLISHER: Random House; 418 pages; $23
THE BOTTOM LINE: This is a grand Russian cop opera for
lowbrows, with the battered hero still standing at the end.
Red Square, the third adventure of Arkady Renko, the
Russian detective of Gorky Park and Polar Star, touches the
imagination in a powerful, brooding way that seems very Russian.
Give or take Richard Price's Clockers, a story of New Jersey
cops and dope sellers that has some of the same strengths, it
may be the best thriller to appear in several years. But Edmund
Wilson's contemptuous dismissal of detective stories still
lashes: Is it feebleminded to care who killed Roger Ackroyd?
Or does Wilson's wisecrack fit? He had in mind inch-deep,
twittering, murder-in-the-vicarage whodunits. We do care about
Red Square, though not really because of the puzzle -- better
than routine but less than grand-master quality -- that the
author sets up and then solves. We know what to expect. The
shabby, battered hero, Arkady, unravels blackest villainy, as
he must, from Moscow to Munich, on to Berlin and back to Moscow;
unbelievably escapes, as he must, a variety of murderous
attacks; leaves a trail of defunct hard guys; and, as we knew
he would be when we opened the book, is still standing, bleeding
lightly, at the end.
If this were opera, and it comes close, the formulaic plot
and unlikely heroics wouldn't matter, and it wouldn't be
necessary to explain that it is what Arkady's obligatory
adventures let us experience along the way that stirs the mind.
So let's say that Red Square's music is extraordinary, and never
mind the libretto. Or if that's too flossy, say that the story's
texture, the dark background against which Arkady moves and
about which he shrugs and thinks his wry thoughts, is real in
a way that seems bitterly true. Clearly the thriller form, with
no artistic expectations whatsoever, can free the best writers
to produce superb stuff. Quite casually, between car chases and
dead bodies, Martin Cruz Smith has drawn stinging portraits in
caricature of three cities under attack by the future.
Sketching quickly, letting a line stand for a landscape,
the author shows us Moscow in the month before last year's
coup. Marxism's fragments still clog streets and government
offices. The ruble is nearly worthless. Murderous Chechen
bandits and corrupt former party officials war bloodily over
control of the new capitalism, which turns out to be the old
black market grown great. Ordinary people stand in lines for
food, and when they have time, go to work.
Arkady investigates the killing of an informant, a glossy
black marketeer, and is relieved of his duties when he gets too
close to the truth. He blackmails his boss for an air ticket and
follows the trail to Munich. The corruption here is prosperity
gone to fat. Needing to create a diversion in a parking garage,
Arkady jostles a swollen, glistening car. Its alarm screams.
Another jostled car and another; the German miracle bawls its
rage. On to post-Wall Berlin, awash in refugees and resentments,
smelling of money, poverty and developers' schemes. Arkady has
found his old love Irina, the Siberian beauty lost in the West
since Gorky Park, and they spend the night together on the tiled
floor of a raw, unfinished apartment.
They return to Moscow, Orpheus and Eurydice heading in the
wrong direction, just in time for the coup. Arkady, of course,
has dived one more time into the murk of his investigation and
come up with a kind of answer, which involves a massive theft
of Russian art missing since World War II. Dazed and wondering
-- Irina seeing Russia for the first time in years, he leaking
blood from a knife wound -- they join the huge crowd of unarmed
Muscovites who have gathered to protect the Parliament Building
from attack. A helicopter drops a star shell . . .
It's a marvelous ending, something thrillers often lack as
their puzzles are made plain and prosaic. Author Smith, the
thriller writer, has never hidden his sentimental fondness for
Russians. Arkady, a genius at disbelief and mulish stubbornness,
has stood for the rest, and as we lose him in the mass of people
awaiting the attack that will not come, the rest are shown to
be like him.