## Gorky Park ### Gorky Park  #### Metadata * Author: [[Martin Cruz Smith]] * Full Title: Gorky Park * Category: #books #### Highlights * They were Viskov, F. N., and Viskova, I. L. In 1946 they constituted a 'center of anti-Soviet activity' by operating a rare-book store that harbored the scribblers Montaigne, Apollinaire and Hemingway. (Location 398) * consults me, Mayor Promislov consults me, because I know how to (Location 442) * benefits the state benefits them. By tearing down their houses we protect (Location 444) * was that while major crimes — murder, assault and robbery — were (Location 463) * was a city in itself, with its own burgeoning population of technicians, artists, censors and extras — an extraordinary number of extras because of a penchant of Soviet films for crowd scenes, because no hard budget Soviet films could afford crowds, and because for many young people gaining an actor's pass to Mosfilm even as an extra was to be born again. (Location 664) * The crowd was interested. Anyone in the immediate vicinity with nothing better to do — electricians, chauffeurs, Mongols in body paint, little ballerinas as timid as over bred dogs—watched in rapt silence at the drama of filming, so much more interesting than the drama that was being filmed. (Location 673) * ′I truly despair!' Misha exploded. 'You'll never know who to cultivate. Two days ago, I was lunching at the Writers Union with the eminent historian Tomashevski.' The small craft that was Misha was off on a new tack with a fresh wind. 'That's the sort of man you should know. Respected, charming, hasn't produced a piece of work in ten years. He has a system, which he explained to me. First, he submits an outline for a biography to the Academy to be absolutely sure his approach is consistent with Party policy. A crucial first step, as you'll see later. Now, the person he studies is always an important figure — that is, someone from Moscow — hence Tomashevski must do his Russian research close to home for two years. But this historical character also traveled, yes, lived for some years in Paris or London; hence Tomashevski must do the same, apply for and receive permission for foreign residence. Four years have passed. The Academy and the Party are rubbing their hands in anticipation of this seminal study of the important figure by the eminent Tomashevski. And now Tomashevski must retire to the solitude of a dacha outside Moscow to tend his garden and creatively brood over his cartons of research. Two more years pass in seminal thought. And just as Tomashevski is about to commit himself to paper, he checks with the Academy again only to learn that Party policy has totally about-faced; his hero is a traitor, and with regrets all around, Tomashevski must sacrifice his years of labor for the greater good. Naturally, they are only too happy to urge Tomashevski to start a new project, to plow under his grief with fresh labor. Tomashevski is now studying a very important historical figure who lived for some time in the South of France. He says there is always a bright future for Soviet historians, and I believe him.' (Location 884) * After all, the KGB was maintained out of fear. Without enemies, outside or within, real or imagined, the whole KGB apparatus was pointless. (Location 1388) * 'You're of two minds, Sergei. Please tell me, because criticism is constructive. It defines our purpose and leads to unanimity of effort.' (Location 1433) * 'But you can't do Camus's The Stranger for a Soviet audience. A man takes the life of a total stranger for no reason but ennui? It's purely Western excess. Middle-class comfort leads inevitably to ennui and unmotivated murder. The police are used to it, but here in a progressive socialist society no one is tainted by ennui.' (Location 1446) * 'And you've been working, since before the sun came up. He thinks I don't know his hours,' Iamskoy told the justice. 'The most creative worker and the hardest worker. Don't the two always go together? Enough! The poet lays down his pen, the killer lays down his ax, and even you, Investigator, must rest from time to time. Come with us.' (Location 1564) * 'Individualism is just another name for Vronskyism,' the first secretary said. 'And self-centered intellectualism,' the academician said, 'the kind that feeds itself on careerism and flatters itself with superficial success until even the basic, tacit interests of the greater structure are undermined.' (Location 1617) * always wanted a fur hat,' Arkady said. 'And to meet Americans. I hear they're just like us — big-hearted and open. And to visit New York and the EmpireStateBuilding and Harlem. What a life you must lead traveling around the world.' (Location 1676) * 'What I want to know is why Leningrad has all the great poets. I don't mean Yevtushenko or Voznesensky, I mean great poets like Akhmatova and Mandelstam. You know the poetry of Mandelstam?' 'I know he's out of favor with the Party.' 'Ah, but he's dead, and that improves his political position wonderfully,' Arkady said. 'Anyway, look at our MoskvaRiver. Broken up like a concrete street. Then take Mandelstam's NevaRiver "heavy as a jellyfish." That says so much in a phrase.' (Location 2649) * Proust said that you could seduce any woman if you were willing to sit and listen to her complain until four in the morning. (Location 2769) * 'But industry must progress. A country is like a body. First the muscle, later the hair lotion.' (Location 2816) * 'Now you're lying to me. Your only interest is dead bodies, not someone's friends. Your friends you'd care about, not mine.' It was a throwaway accusation, but she'd hit home. The only reason he'd come to the studio was for Pasha. He changed the subject. 'I've looked at your militia record. What was this anti-Soviet slander of yours that got you expelled from the university?' (Location 2848) * Divers kicked up a spinning murk, the winter's silt. Sealed floodlights were lowered into the water. A hand (Location 2879) * On impulse, Arkady reached and upended her purse, spilling its contents, mainly paper packets of Pentalginum, a pain-killer containing codeine and phenobarbital, sold over the counter, the housewife's addiction. 'How many of these a day do you take?' (Location 3053) * 'It's a funny thing' — Kirwill picked the short match and poured — 'how people always ask how you became a cop, right? Three jobs always get that question: priests, whores and cops. The most necessary jobs in the world, but people always ask. Unless you're Irish.' (Location 3169) * Hotels were out of the question; it was illegal to take a hotel room in your own city. (What good reason could a citizen have for not being home?) Something would turn up. (Location 3394) * the silence Arkady thought — he didn't know why — of the Asiatic folktale of life. Perhaps it was the abrupt peacefulness of the figure in the chair. The tale had it that all life was preparation for death, that death was a passage as natural as birth, and that the worst a man could do in his life was to struggle to avoid death. (Location 3472) * There was a mythical tribe where all births were without crying and all deaths were without agony. (Location 3474) * 'It's like arguing about a color neither of us has ever seen.' (Location 3669) * 'What it comes down to,' Arkady said, 'is that everything I've told you is an extraordinarily elaborate lie or the very simple truth.' (Location 3735) * Ten years of marriage to Zoya had amassed at 2 percent interest per year a savings account of 1,200 rubles, from which she had already withdrawn all but 100 rubles. A man can stay ahead of killers, but not his wife — former wife, Arkady corrected himself. (Location 3740) * As she talked she rubbed her hands on her arms and paced the floor. 'My grandfather was the first Siberian in my family. To begin with, he was chief engineer of waterworks in Leningrad. He committed no crime, but you remember the order of the day was "All engineers are wreckers," and so he was put on a train east to serve fifteen years' hard labor in five different Siberian camps before he was freed in perpetual exile — which is to say he had to stay in Siberia. His son, my father, a teacher, was not even allowed to volunteer against the Germans because he was the son of an exile. They took away his internal passport so that he could never leave Siberia. My mother was a musician and was offered a position with the Kirov Theater, but she couldn't accept because she was the wife of a son of an exile.' (Location 3820) * 'Do you know where you have to hit a sable with a rifle bullet at fifty meters? In the eye, or the pelt is ruined. Very few hunters could do that, and none like Kostia.' (Location 3843) * 'You know what the "Siberian dilemma" is?' 'No.' 'It's a choice between two ways of freezing. We were out on a lake fishing through the ice when a teacher of ours fell through. He didn't go far, just down to his neck, but we knew what was happening. If he stayed in the water he would freeze to death in thirty or forty seconds. If he got out he would freeze to death at once — he would be ice, actually. He taught gymnastics, I remember. He was an Evenki, the only native on the teaching staff, young, everyone liked him. We all stood about in a circle around the hole holding our poles and fish. It was about minus forty degrees, bright and sunny. He had a wife, a dentist; she wasn't along. He looked up at us; I'll never forget that look. He couldn't have been in the water for more than five seconds when he pulled himself out.' (Location 3850) * 'They need line engineers on the new Baikal track.' Viskov moved reluctantly at first to a new subject. 'The pay has double bonuses, triple vacation time, an apartment, refrigerator stocked with food — everything. There'll be Party creeps out there, but not as many as here. I'll start a new life, build a cabin in the woods, hunt and fish. Can you see it, a former convicted murderer with his own shotgun? That's where the future is, out there. You'll see, when I have kids they're going to grow up different. Maybe in a hundred years we'll tell Moscow to fuck off and have our own country. What do you think of that?' (Location 3913) * doesn't matter how ridiculous a lie is if the lie is your only chance of escape,' she said. 'It doesn't matter how obvious the truth is if the truth is that you'll never escape.' (Location 3953) * 'I don't think it's a KGB operation. The KGB announces it is taking over a case; they don't steal the evidence. The apartment we visited should have been sealed for a year; that's the way the KGB operates. The bodies in the park should have been "discovered" within a day. That's the way the KGB operates, they don't let a lesson grow cold. (Location 4039) * He drank chifir. Chifir was tea concentrated not twice or ten times but twenty times. In the camps a starving man could work three days straight on a few cups of chifir. Arkady had to stay awake. The moment he was asleep he would be robbed. (Location 4479) * Osborne released the handle. 'Why?' he asked. 'You can't be willing to die simply to make an arrest to please Soviet justice. Everyone is bought, from the top to the bottom. The whole country's bought — bought cheap, cheapest in the world. You don't care about breaking laws, you're not that stupid anymore. So what is there to die for? Someone else? Irina Asanova?' (Location 4634) * honest with yourself,' Iamskoy suggested, 'and admit I'm doing you a favor. Besides your father's name, you're losing nothing — no wife, no children, no political consciousness and no future. You remember the upcoming campaign against Vronskyism? You would have been the first to go. That's the sort of thing that happens to individualists. I warned you about it for years. You see what comes of ignoring advice. Believe me, this way is better. Why don't you sit down?' (Location 4681) * In fact, the one thing your friend missed was what he was probably aiming for, the abdominal aorta. Still, you had no blood pressure when you came in; then we had to contend with infection, peritonitis, filling you with antibiotics with one hand and draining you with the other. That pool you were in was filthy. The one fortunate thing was that apparently you hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours previous to being stabbed; otherwise the spread of infection would have been straight through your digestive tract, and not even we could have saved you. Amazing, isn't it, how life can turn on a bite of food, something as insignificant as that? You're a lucky man.' (Location 4745) * but you were each indirectly involved, and you were and still are involved with each other. With your wide experience as an interrogator and her long experience as a suspect, you hope to confuse and outlast us. You have unreal expectations. All criminals have unreal expectations. You and the Asanova woman are both suffering from the pathoheterodoxy syndrome. You overestimate your personal powers. You feel isolated from society. You swing from excitement to sadness. You mistrust the people who most want to help you. You resent authority even when you represent it. You think you are the exception to every rule. You underestimate the collective intelligence. What is right is wrong, and what is wrong is right. (Location 4965) * Not of ordinary life. Ordinary life was an endless queue of backs, of the next man's breath. In ordinary life people went to offices and did terrible things, and went home and, still in the jumble of a communal apartment, drank, swore, made love, waged war for a bit of dignity and somehow survived. Irina rose above this mob. She flaunted extraordinary beauty in a ragged jacket, she wore a mark on her cheek as honesty, she didn't care for petty survival. In many ways she was not a person at all. Arkady understood other people well; as an investigator it was his talent. He didn't understand Irina, and he suspected he might never penetrate vast areas of her unknowability. She had appeared as another planet and taken him in tow. He had followed, but he didn't know her, and it was he who had switched allegiance. (Location 5034) * 'Every year, Arkady Vasilevich, men come from all the nations of the world to sit at these desks and spend seventy million dollars for Soviet furs. The Soviet Union is the world's leading exporter of furs. We always have been. The reason is not our minks, which are inferior to the Americans', or lynx, which are too few, or karakul, which, after all, is sheepskin; the reason is Soviet sable. Gram for gram, sable is worth more than gold. How do you think the Soviet government reacts to losing its monopoly on sable?' (Location 5152) * 'You're sure you wouldn't like to share this with me?' Osborne asked. 'It's absolutely delicious. At least some wine? No? It's a curious thing' — he went on talking while he ate — 'it used to be that whenever Russian émigrés arrived in America they would start a restaurant. They served wonderful food — beef Stroganov, chicken Kiev, paskha, blini and caviar, sturgeon in jelly. That was fifty years ago, though. The new émigrés can't cook at all; they don't even know what good food is. Communism has erased Russian cuisine. Now, there's one of the great crimes.' (Location 5606) * Kirwill passed the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 'What's the point?' he asked. 'We love it. The number one cause of death for young men in America is murder. That body's hardly hit the ground before it's a star on television, everybody has a chance to be a star. We've got wars and better than wars — psychos, rapists, queers, cops, chainsaw massacres. Step outside and get shot, stay inside and watch television. We're talking art form. Bigger than Detroit, better than sex, native art and industry rolled into one, what the Renaissance was to Italy, chopsticks to the Chinks, Hamlet without the slow parts — we're talking car chases here, Arkady, me boy. The guys getting killed for real are lost in the shuffle, life's losing stuntmen. How can you care when you can see a better murder in slow motion, plus special effects, with a beer in one hand and a tit in the other? Better than real cops. All the real cops are in Hollywood; the rest of us are fakers.' (Location 5949) * 'Our Soviet murders are secret,' he said. 'We're backward in terms of publicity. Even our accidents are secret, officially and unofficially. Our killers generally only boast when they're caught. Our witnesses lie. Sometimes I think our witnesses are more afraid of the investigator than the killers are.' From the New Jersey side of the river he looked back at Manhattan. At the end of a million lights, two white towers reached into the night. He wouldn't have been surprised to see two moons above them. 'For a time, I thought I wanted to be an astronomer, but then I decided astronomy was a bore. The stars only interest us because they're so far away. Do you know what would really interest us? A murder on another planet.' (Location 5958) * Arkady's throat was dry and he took a long drink. 'There are not many road signs in Russia, you know.' He laughed. 'If you don't know where a road goes, you shouldn't be on it.' 'Here we live on road signs. We consume maps. We never know where we are.' (Location 5964) * shackle of the padlock in the neighboring cage. The sable inside (Location 6452) # Gorky Park  ## Metadata - Author: [[Martin Cruz Smith]] - Full Title: Gorky Park - Category: #books ## Highlights - They were Viskov, F. N., and Viskova, I. L. In 1946 they constituted a 'center of anti-Soviet activity' by operating a rare-book store that harbored the scribblers Montaigne, Apollinaire and Hemingway. (Location 398) - consults me, Mayor Promislov consults me, because I know how to (Location 442) - benefits the state benefits them. By tearing down their houses we protect (Location 444) - was that while major crimes — murder, assault and robbery — were (Location 463) - was a city in itself, with its own burgeoning population of technicians, artists, censors and extras — an extraordinary number of extras because of a penchant of Soviet films for crowd scenes, because no hard budget Soviet films could afford crowds, and because for many young people gaining an actor's pass to Mosfilm even as an extra was to be born again. (Location 664) - The crowd was interested. Anyone in the immediate vicinity with nothing better to do — electricians, chauffeurs, Mongols in body paint, little ballerinas as timid as over bred dogs—watched in rapt silence at the drama of filming, so much more interesting than the drama that was being filmed. (Location 673) - ′I truly despair!' Misha exploded. 'You'll never know who to cultivate. Two days ago, I was lunching at the Writers Union with the eminent historian Tomashevski.' The small craft that was Misha was off on a new tack with a fresh wind. 'That's the sort of man you should know. Respected, charming, hasn't produced a piece of work in ten years. He has a system, which he explained to me. First, he submits an outline for a biography to the Academy to be absolutely sure his approach is consistent with Party policy. A crucial first step, as you'll see later. Now, the person he studies is always an important figure — that is, someone from Moscow — hence Tomashevski must do his Russian research close to home for two years. But this historical character also traveled, yes, lived for some years in Paris or London; hence Tomashevski must do the same, apply for and receive permission for foreign residence. Four years have passed. The Academy and the Party are rubbing their hands in anticipation of this seminal study of the important figure by the eminent Tomashevski. And now Tomashevski must retire to the solitude of a dacha outside Moscow to tend his garden and creatively brood over his cartons of research. Two more years pass in seminal thought. And just as Tomashevski is about to commit himself to paper, he checks with the Academy again only to learn that Party policy has totally about-faced; his hero is a traitor, and with regrets all around, Tomashevski must sacrifice his years of labor for the greater good. Naturally, they are only too happy to urge Tomashevski to start a new project, to plow under his grief with fresh labor. Tomashevski is now studying a very important historical figure who lived for some time in the South of France. He says there is always a bright future for Soviet historians, and I believe him.' (Location 884) - After all, the KGB was maintained out of fear. Without enemies, outside or within, real or imagined, the whole KGB apparatus was pointless. (Location 1388) - 'You're of two minds, Sergei. Please tell me, because criticism is constructive. It defines our purpose and leads to unanimity of effort.' (Location 1433) - 'But you can't do Camus's The Stranger for a Soviet audience. A man takes the life of a total stranger for no reason but ennui? It's purely Western excess. Middle-class comfort leads inevitably to ennui and unmotivated murder. The police are used to it, but here in a progressive socialist society no one is tainted by ennui.' (Location 1446) - 'And you've been working, since before the sun came up. He thinks I don't know his hours,' Iamskoy told the justice. 'The most creative worker and the hardest worker. Don't the two always go together? Enough! The poet lays down his pen, the killer lays down his ax, and even you, Investigator, must rest from time to time. Come with us.' (Location 1564) - 'Individualism is just another name for Vronskyism,' the first secretary said. 'And self-centered intellectualism,' the academician said, 'the kind that feeds itself on careerism and flatters itself with superficial success until even the basic, tacit interests of the greater structure are undermined.' (Location 1617) - always wanted a fur hat,' Arkady said. 'And to meet Americans. I hear they're just like us — big-hearted and open. And to visit New York and the EmpireStateBuilding and Harlem. What a life you must lead traveling around the world.' (Location 1676) - 'What I want to know is why Leningrad has all the great poets. I don't mean Yevtushenko or Voznesensky, I mean great poets like Akhmatova and Mandelstam. You know the poetry of Mandelstam?' 'I know he's out of favor with the Party.' 'Ah, but he's dead, and that improves his political position wonderfully,' Arkady said. 'Anyway, look at our MoskvaRiver. Broken up like a concrete street. Then take Mandelstam's NevaRiver "heavy as a jellyfish." That says so much in a phrase.' (Location 2649) - Proust said that you could seduce any woman if you were willing to sit and listen to her complain until four in the morning. (Location 2769) - 'But industry must progress. A country is like a body. First the muscle, later the hair lotion.' (Location 2816) - 'Now you're lying to me. Your only interest is dead bodies, not someone's friends. Your friends you'd care about, not mine.' It was a throwaway accusation, but she'd hit home. The only reason he'd come to the studio was for Pasha. He changed the subject. 'I've looked at your militia record. What was this anti-Soviet slander of yours that got you expelled from the university?' (Location 2848) - Divers kicked up a spinning murk, the winter's silt. Sealed floodlights were lowered into the water. A hand (Location 2879) - On impulse, Arkady reached and upended her purse, spilling its contents, mainly paper packets of Pentalginum, a pain-killer containing codeine and phenobarbital, sold over the counter, the housewife's addiction. 'How many of these a day do you take?' (Location 3053) - 'It's a funny thing' — Kirwill picked the short match and poured — 'how people always ask how you became a cop, right? Three jobs always get that question: priests, whores and cops. The most necessary jobs in the world, but people always ask. Unless you're Irish.' (Location 3169) - Hotels were out of the question; it was illegal to take a hotel room in your own city. (What good reason could a citizen have for not being home?) Something would turn up. (Location 3394) - the silence Arkady thought — he didn't know why — of the Asiatic folktale of life. Perhaps it was the abrupt peacefulness of the figure in the chair. The tale had it that all life was preparation for death, that death was a passage as natural as birth, and that the worst a man could do in his life was to struggle to avoid death. (Location 3472) - There was a mythical tribe where all births were without crying and all deaths were without agony. (Location 3474) - 'It's like arguing about a color neither of us has ever seen.' (Location 3669) - 'What it comes down to,' Arkady said, 'is that everything I've told you is an extraordinarily elaborate lie or the very simple truth.' (Location 3735) - Ten years of marriage to Zoya had amassed at 2 percent interest per year a savings account of 1,200 rubles, from which she had already withdrawn all but 100 rubles. A man can stay ahead of killers, but not his wife — former wife, Arkady corrected himself. (Location 3740) - As she talked she rubbed her hands on her arms and paced the floor. 'My grandfather was the first Siberian in my family. To begin with, he was chief engineer of waterworks in Leningrad. He committed no crime, but you remember the order of the day was "All engineers are wreckers," and so he was put on a train east to serve fifteen years' hard labor in five different Siberian camps before he was freed in perpetual exile — which is to say he had to stay in Siberia. His son, my father, a teacher, was not even allowed to volunteer against the Germans because he was the son of an exile. They took away his internal passport so that he could never leave Siberia. My mother was a musician and was offered a position with the Kirov Theater, but she couldn't accept because she was the wife of a son of an exile.' (Location 3820) - 'Do you know where you have to hit a sable with a rifle bullet at fifty meters? In the eye, or the pelt is ruined. Very few hunters could do that, and none like Kostia.' (Location 3843) - 'You know what the "Siberian dilemma" is?' 'No.' 'It's a choice between two ways of freezing. We were out on a lake fishing through the ice when a teacher of ours fell through. He didn't go far, just down to his neck, but we knew what was happening. If he stayed in the water he would freeze to death in thirty or forty seconds. If he got out he would freeze to death at once — he would be ice, actually. He taught gymnastics, I remember. He was an Evenki, the only native on the teaching staff, young, everyone liked him. We all stood about in a circle around the hole holding our poles and fish. It was about minus forty degrees, bright and sunny. He had a wife, a dentist; she wasn't along. He looked up at us; I'll never forget that look. He couldn't have been in the water for more than five seconds when he pulled himself out.' (Location 3850) - 'They need line engineers on the new Baikal track.' Viskov moved reluctantly at first to a new subject. 'The pay has double bonuses, triple vacation time, an apartment, refrigerator stocked with food — everything. There'll be Party creeps out there, but not as many as here. I'll start a new life, build a cabin in the woods, hunt and fish. Can you see it, a former convicted murderer with his own shotgun? That's where the future is, out there. You'll see, when I have kids they're going to grow up different. Maybe in a hundred years we'll tell Moscow to fuck off and have our own country. What do you think of that?' (Location 3913) - doesn't matter how ridiculous a lie is if the lie is your only chance of escape,' she said. 'It doesn't matter how obvious the truth is if the truth is that you'll never escape.' (Location 3953) - 'I don't think it's a KGB operation. The KGB announces it is taking over a case; they don't steal the evidence. The apartment we visited should have been sealed for a year; that's the way the KGB operates. The bodies in the park should have been "discovered" within a day. That's the way the KGB operates, they don't let a lesson grow cold. (Location 4039) - He drank chifir. Chifir was tea concentrated not twice or ten times but twenty times. In the camps a starving man could work three days straight on a few cups of chifir. Arkady had to stay awake. The moment he was asleep he would be robbed. (Location 4479) - Osborne released the handle. 'Why?' he asked. 'You can't be willing to die simply to make an arrest to please Soviet justice. Everyone is bought, from the top to the bottom. The whole country's bought — bought cheap, cheapest in the world. You don't care about breaking laws, you're not that stupid anymore. So what is there to die for? Someone else? Irina Asanova?' (Location 4634) - honest with yourself,' Iamskoy suggested, 'and admit I'm doing you a favor. Besides your father's name, you're losing nothing — no wife, no children, no political consciousness and no future. You remember the upcoming campaign against Vronskyism? You would have been the first to go. That's the sort of thing that happens to individualists. I warned you about it for years. You see what comes of ignoring advice. Believe me, this way is better. Why don't you sit down?' (Location 4681) - In fact, the one thing your friend missed was what he was probably aiming for, the abdominal aorta. Still, you had no blood pressure when you came in; then we had to contend with infection, peritonitis, filling you with antibiotics with one hand and draining you with the other. That pool you were in was filthy. The one fortunate thing was that apparently you hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours previous to being stabbed; otherwise the spread of infection would have been straight through your digestive tract, and not even we could have saved you. Amazing, isn't it, how life can turn on a bite of food, something as insignificant as that? You're a lucky man.' (Location 4745) - but you were each indirectly involved, and you were and still are involved with each other. With your wide experience as an interrogator and her long experience as a suspect, you hope to confuse and outlast us. You have unreal expectations. All criminals have unreal expectations. You and the Asanova woman are both suffering from the pathoheterodoxy syndrome. You overestimate your personal powers. You feel isolated from society. You swing from excitement to sadness. You mistrust the people who most want to help you. You resent authority even when you represent it. You think you are the exception to every rule. You underestimate the collective intelligence. What is right is wrong, and what is wrong is right. (Location 4965) - Not of ordinary life. Ordinary life was an endless queue of backs, of the next man's breath. In ordinary life people went to offices and did terrible things, and went home and, still in the jumble of a communal apartment, drank, swore, made love, waged war for a bit of dignity and somehow survived. Irina rose above this mob. She flaunted extraordinary beauty in a ragged jacket, she wore a mark on her cheek as honesty, she didn't care for petty survival. In many ways she was not a person at all. Arkady understood other people well; as an investigator it was his talent. He didn't understand Irina, and he suspected he might never penetrate vast areas of her unknowability. She had appeared as another planet and taken him in tow. He had followed, but he didn't know her, and it was he who had switched allegiance. (Location 5034) - 'Every year, Arkady Vasilevich, men come from all the nations of the world to sit at these desks and spend seventy million dollars for Soviet furs. The Soviet Union is the world's leading exporter of furs. We always have been. The reason is not our minks, which are inferior to the Americans', or lynx, which are too few, or karakul, which, after all, is sheepskin; the reason is Soviet sable. Gram for gram, sable is worth more than gold. How do you think the Soviet government reacts to losing its monopoly on sable?' (Location 5152) - 'You're sure you wouldn't like to share this with me?' Osborne asked. 'It's absolutely delicious. At least some wine? No? It's a curious thing' — he went on talking while he ate — 'it used to be that whenever Russian émigrés arrived in America they would start a restaurant. They served wonderful food — beef Stroganov, chicken Kiev, paskha, blini and caviar, sturgeon in jelly. That was fifty years ago, though. The new émigrés can't cook at all; they don't even know what good food is. Communism has erased Russian cuisine. Now, there's one of the great crimes.' (Location 5606) - Kirwill passed the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. 'What's the point?' he asked. 'We love it. The number one cause of death for young men in America is murder. That body's hardly hit the ground before it's a star on television, everybody has a chance to be a star. We've got wars and better than wars — psychos, rapists, queers, cops, chainsaw massacres. Step outside and get shot, stay inside and watch television. We're talking art form. Bigger than Detroit, better than sex, native art and industry rolled into one, what the Renaissance was to Italy, chopsticks to the Chinks, Hamlet without the slow parts — we're talking car chases here, Arkady, me boy. The guys getting killed for real are lost in the shuffle, life's losing stuntmen. How can you care when you can see a better murder in slow motion, plus special effects, with a beer in one hand and a tit in the other? Better than real cops. All the real cops are in Hollywood; the rest of us are fakers.' (Location 5949) - 'Our Soviet murders are secret,' he said. 'We're backward in terms of publicity. Even our accidents are secret, officially and unofficially. Our killers generally only boast when they're caught. Our witnesses lie. Sometimes I think our witnesses are more afraid of the investigator than the killers are.' From the New Jersey side of the river he looked back at Manhattan. At the end of a million lights, two white towers reached into the night. He wouldn't have been surprised to see two moons above them. 'For a time, I thought I wanted to be an astronomer, but then I decided astronomy was a bore. The stars only interest us because they're so far away. Do you know what would really interest us? A murder on another planet.' (Location 5958) - Arkady's throat was dry and he took a long drink. 'There are not many road signs in Russia, you know.' He laughed. 'If you don't know where a road goes, you shouldn't be on it.' 'Here we live on road signs. We consume maps. We never know where we are.' (Location 5964) - shackle of the padlock in the neighboring cage. The sable inside (Location 6452)