MOSCOW MURDERS
Smith, Martin Cruz
MOSCOW MURDERS GORKY PARK by Martin Cruz Smith Random House. 365 pp. $13.95. We are numbly aware that somewhere in a Pentagon inner sanctum generals are planning nuclear war. In the Kremlin,...
...The sex, alas, is as perfunctory as the bouts of drinking, perhaps because the female characters are a generally passive lot...
...Yet he does eventually rec-ognize his limitations and, when it comes to identifying the victims, knows enough to consult the dwarfish expert on reconstruct-ing the physiognomy of prehistoric skulls at the Soviet Academy's Institute of Ethno-logy...
...Though this private detente is frowned on by their political overseers, these unlikely sleuths use basic police tech-niques, rough up unsavory informants, and plant electronic bugs in every flowerpot...
...Arkady is a rather slow-witted detective...
...When a murder must be solved, Smith would have us believe that Arkady Renko, a simple cop from Moscow, joins forces with James Kirwell, one of New York's finest, who is searching for his brother in Russia...
...Though the "whodunit" section of Gorky Park unfolds early, the reader is swept along by the tale of obstacles the well-connected killer is able to put between himself and his pursuers...
...The villain of Gorky Park would have us believe he aspires to the "unmotiva-ted act" of Camus's The Stranger, but his more pressing motive seems to be insatiable appetite for caviar...
...It takes him forever to realize that his acro-batic teacher of a wife is romping with a gymnastically inclined partner instead of grading papers...
...Ideology proves no barrier when machismo forges common bonds between the Mus-covite downing tumblerfuls of vodka and the New Yorker who prefers boilermakers...
...Peat bog fires in the suburbs lend a smoky atmosphere to Arkady's settling of accounts with his KGB guardian...
...Harvey Fireside (Harvey Fireside, who writes frequently on human rights issues, teaches politics at Ithaca College...
...But where Dostoevsky's murderer found final re-demption in confession and suffering, Smith's is impervious to such moral appeals...
...He makes the Russian landscape come alive, though he spent only a fortnight there as a tourist in 1973...
...The book opens with an unusually gruesome tableau, a triple murder at a wintry Moscow park, which at once engenders a jurisdictional dispute between the city homicide department and the sinister agents of the secret police...
...And he stitches this murder-ous affair into an international intrigue that finds FBI and KGB agents playing the same bureaucratic games, with the payoff a Corner on the world market for precious f?rs...
...He wrote "Soviet Psychopri-sons...
...Arkady's tenacity is meant to rival that of the archetypal detective Porfiry Pe-trovich, who tracked down Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment...
...Such details are deftly injected into the plot...
...Among the authentic bits (culled from Hedrick Smith's The Russians) are mosaic reincarnations of Lenin in the Moscow subway, the incredi-ble trades conducted out of earshot of the State appraisers at the city's used car market, and the annual hunt for wild mushrooms to be chased by appropriately flavored brands of vodka...
...As we spin along these insane orbits and call it routine, it is comforting to stop for a bit of harmless fantasy, the kind pro-vided by Martin Cruz Smith in Gorky Park...
...Professor Andreev whips up a lifelike face that jolts reluctant witnesses into testi-fying...
...His mock-serious diversion involves rather ordinary people doing each other in with such old-fashioned implements as guns and knives...
...In any case, metaphysi-cal speculations form discordant notes in this action drama, where seductive young dissidents are ready to trade their bodies for tickets abroad and every Soviet official has his price but is Willing to bargain...
...These victims have not only been shot, but their faces have also been flayed, as if by a sadistic hunter, to de-stroy their identity...
...It also justifies Arkady's middle-aged crisis by his disenchantment with an insipid wife...
...Whenever the cynicism is about to over-whelm the satire, Smith manages to divert us with some local color...
...The central love interest serves mainly to shift the action from Moscow to a bewilder-ing climax of falling bodies in Staten Island...
...Arkady, the local bloodhound, soon realizes he is after bigger game than his customary Russian criminal begging to confess the morning after both his murderous passion and his li-quor ration are spent...
...He shatters our stereotypes by making his hero the chief homicide investigator of the Moscow police, his villain a Western business-man "magically dripping money from his every pore...
...The clues all point to a master criminal with whom Arkady's fate becomes entwined: "What two men know each other as well as a killer and his investigator...
...If you are stuck at home this summer, you might escape the depressing political news by Gorky Park's fictive tour of an in-triguingcountryside where "grass gone wild contained all manner of flowers and young grasshoppers bright as jade...
...In the Kremlin, their opposite numbers are con-cocting scenarios for their destruction of the world...
...If the tough cops are not particularly complex characters, nor their feats of de-duction especially amazing, the plot of this suspense novel lets Smith pull off a three-fold tour de force...
Vol. 45 • September 1981 • No. 9
