“What about the witnesses?” Martin said. “The bartender and the DJ and the busboy and the rest, who have told the police they saw you strangle Ms. Volovnaya? What do you say to them?”
Smerdnakov hit the table again, hard, this time with the flat of his hand. “I say they are fucking wrong!” he shouted. “They got the wrong guy!”
“Okay, calm down,” Martin said. “Think about it from the jury’s point of view. How could they get the wrong guy, all those people?”
Frowning, Smerdnakov leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Down in this club it is dark, and there is much cigarette smoke,” he said at last. “Maybe these people, they saw me when I was picking her up and holding her in my arms, I don’t know. But I did not kill her! Someone else did!”
“So here’s the big question,” Martin said, forcing himself to meet the Russian’s eyes again. “Who did it? Got any ideas?”
Smerdnakov scratched his cheekbone with one beautiful fingernail. “Must be one of the men we came in with,” he said. “I think then they were new friends, but maybe they were old enemies. In my work I have many enemies.”
Martin let this comment pass. He studied his page of doodles again, adding a very carefully drawn spoon.
“Okay, so you find your girlfriend dead,” he said in a voice as completely without inflection as he could make it. “You don’t call the police; you don’t call the hospital. You go back upstairs and you dance for another half hour until the police come because somebody else called them. How do you explain that?”
“I tell you,” Smerdnakov said, “if you give me a cigarette.”
Martin sighed. “First of all, I don’t smoke,” he said, “so I don’t have any cigarettes. Second, as I’ve told you before, it’s illegal to smoke in public buildings in the District of Columbia. We’re talking a five-hundred-dollar fine. Now if you’ll—”
“You Americans are a bunch of cocksuckers!” Smerdnakov interrupted. “In this country any kid can pick up a gun and shoot another kid and get a couple of years on probation. But smoking is illegal, a big crime!”
“Alexei,” Martin said patiently, “we were talking about the dancing.”
Smerdnakov threw up his hands. “It is the way we are in Russia,” he said. “Only a Russian would understand this. Many terrible things happen to us: wars, famine, communism. We are used to such terrible things. We can’t cry every time somebody dies, or we would never be able to breathe for the tears. Stalin he killed forty millions! So we must remain tough, hard. My sweet Katinka is dead. So what do I do, cry? Maybe inside, but not outside, no! In Russia, in the gulag, I see many people die, men, women, children. I know I can do nothing to bring my Katinka back, she is dead. So I go upstairs to dance and drink and forget. The police, everything else, they come soon enough, no matter what I will do.”
Smerdnakov withdrew into himself when he had finished this speech. He crossed his arms over his chest, and his eyes went slightly out of focus. But Martin was excited. He felt Alexei had just handed him the key to unlock this case. He jumped out of his chair and paced the small room twice. On his second pass he paused before the narrow window that gave out on the Superior Court building across the street. A bit of sun had pierced the low clouds, and the peeling bronze nymph in the garden over there seemed to glow in a pool of her own mysterious light.
Behind him now, Alexei stirred, cleared his throat. “Come on, asshole,” he said, but this time his voice was wheedling, cajoling. “Can’t you get me a cigarette?”
The next afternoon, perched on a concrete planter in Judiciary Square eating a banana, Martin saw a man coming through the lunchtime crowds with his head down, staring at the ground as if searching for something precious he had lost. It wasn’t until the man got closer that he realized it was McGuin. Somehow, without seeming to look ahead at all, McGuin was making straight for him. Martin wondered how McGuin managed such feats of navigation until he saw something glittering in the man’s right hand. A small square of mirror. But that didn’t make the skill involved in just getting from point A to point B any less impressive: it must be hard seeing the world as an upside-down reflection.
“Tried calling you all day,” McGuin said gruffly. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Out of the office mostly,” Martin said, taken aback. “What’s up?”
“Next time, check your messages,” McGuin said. “We’ve got a meeting in a half hour.”
Martin looked at his banana, slightly confused. “You mean, right now?”
The FBI Headquarters building is an ugly yellowish concrete pile that takes up the entire block bordered by 9th and 10th and D and E. With its rows of honeycomb windows, it always reminded Martin of an enormous hive in which the bees make no honey and are better left undisturbed.
“What’s this all about, McGuin?” Martin said, pausing on the sidewalk in front of the entrance on 10th.
“You’ll find out in a minute,” McGuin said, and pushed him through the automatic doors and into the narrow arch of the metal detector. This device went off and before he was allowed to pass, Martin was forced to remove his watch, his keys, and loose change and then undergo a frisking from a stern-faced guard with a device resembling an electronic fraternity paddle.
Inside, the long, bland corridors were suffused with a hush and a stale, waxy smell that Martin associated with church. He had been here twice before on other cases, and each time, for reasons he could not articulate, the place made his skin crawl. Perhaps it was because in a certain sense, everyone was a potential criminal to the FBI. Somewhere, locked away in a vault below street level, there still existed top secret surveillance files on thousands of innocent American citizens, including such people as Hemingway, Greta Garbo, John Updike, the creators of Howdy Doody, Jimi Hendrix, Vanna White.
Martin followed McGuin into the big steel elevator, heavy and slow as an armored car, and up to a conference room on the seventh floor. Chairs upholstered in beige vinyl stood empty around a long metal table topped with plastic wood. On the wall a framed picture of J. Edgar Hoover and another of the president. In one corner, beside the American flag, a coffeemaker steamed quietly.
“Help yourself to coffee,” McGuin said, settling himself at the table. “It was fresh this morning.”
“You seem just a little too comfortable around here,” Martin said, and he sat down in a chair at the far end of the table from McGuin.
The investigator’s lip curled. “What do you mean by that, Wexler?” he said.
“I mean an FBI file on Smerdnakov appeared on my desk last week. Any idea how it got there?”
“No,” McGuin said, and he didn’t say anything more.
The two of them sat in strained silence for ten minutes. The sound of traffic heading up Constitution toward the vanilla ice-cream-scoop dome of the Capitol did not penetrate the fortress-thick walls. Martin couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched by surveillance cameras, and he began to sweat imperceptibly. Finally the door opened and a man in a rumpled gray suit entered the room, carrying two thick files bound with large rubber bands. He was tall and gangly, of an indeterminate age between forty and sixty. His brown hair was parted over the bald spot on top of his head.