A Coup for Arkady : RED SQUARE, <i> By Martin Cruz Smith (Random House: $23; 418 pp.) </i>

Martin Cruz Smith. Can he tell a story? With the best of them. Can he serve up a menu of moods? Better than Rendell, better even than Simenon. With Smith you get eggroll.

With Smith you get motivation, equivocation, character shaped by circumstance; a fine feel for place, time and people; a dialogue with history.

The last chapter of “Red Square” is played out in August of 1991 at the makeshift barricades in front of the Russian Parliament building. Inside, Boris Yeltsin is hunkered down against the coup, against the Red Army. Outside:

“Men with attache cases and women with shopping bags had come directly from offices and bakeries to the battle line. . . . Students played guitars and sang sappy songs about birches and snow. . . . Ancient veterans linked their arms and puffed up the ribbons on their chests. A battalion of street cleaners, women in black coats and scarves, stood like a row of witnesses. . . .

“Everywhere was a common look of astonishment, as if they had all ventured individually to drop their lifelong masks and show their faces. Middle-aged teachers, muscular truck drivers, wretched aparatchiks and feckless students wandered with expressions of recognition. As in I know you . And among all these Russians not a bottle. Not a one.”

It is an epochal moment, a moment of unsullied truth best rendered by a novelist. And even on one of her proudest nights, Russia begins to come unstuck.

The irony is savored by Arkady Renko, Soviet special investigator who is 49 parts cynic to 51 idealist. Arkady is back from exile in Siberia, where Smith dispatched him after star turns in “Gorky Park” and “Polar Star.” Bucking a police directorate that is no less lethal with its back to the buckling wall of bureaucracy, Arkady undertakes to solve the murder of one Rudy Rosen.

Rudy, an Arkady informant, is also a private banker to the mafias, “a would-be Rothschild who catered to Russia’s most primitive capitalists.” In an open-air black market where anything can and is bought and sold, and in full view of Arkady, Rudy is blown into a benevolent Russian sky along with an Audi full of “francs that looked like delicately hand-tinted portraits, lire with fantastic numbers and Dante’s face, oversized Deutsch marks brimming with confidence . . . “

Nobody seems to care about Rudy’s murder except Arkady, his Estonian deputy, and a pathologist named Polina whose hair, along with the rest of her, is permanently set in tight buns. Nobody in charge wants to poke into the affair because the various mafia gangs virtually run a cannibalized city that is weak-kneed over the prospect of free enterprise. The mafia not only feeds on the Russian economy, it is the Russian economy.

Further, it is entirely possible that some of Arkady’s superiors are up to their Orders of Lenin in scam. Nor is it lost on Arkady that “there were two types of Soviet investigations: one that uncovered information, and the more traditional type that covered it up.”

The chase--Moscow, Munich, Berlin and back--starts in Rudy’s apartment, where a keening fax keeps asking: “Where is Red Square?” More than the cobbled plain before the Kremlin, Red Square also is the name of a Munich sex club, the title of a priceless abstract painting, even a particularly nasty mix of volatile chemicals.

Arkady’s aide is scaring up some clues too, until he (and a ranking Soviet official) fetches up in the lime pit of a farm collective’s butchering house, so vividly described it makes you gag.

Connecting the dots, albeit faintly, is a scheme to import German slot machines in exchange for female “tour guides,” the kind your mother warned you about. The trading company is nominally headed by the regretted Rudy, the manager of a suburban sports club and a consummately elusive man with a name in each camp--Boris Benz.

With a nudge from the bureaucrats, who’d just as soon see him elsewhere, Arkady flies to Munich in lukewarm pursuit of Benz. More urgent is a rendezvous with Irina Asanova, quondam lover who now broadcasts on Radio Liberty, and who continues to wonder why Arkady puts his grubby job ahead of an Easy Street commensurate with his intellect.

So does Arkady: “When an entire society was collapsing like so many rotten beams, what difference did it make who murdered one black-market speculator? . . . The real world was out there where Irina lived.”

Max Albov wonders too. An urbane, amoral charmer with unprecedented access to both sides of the curtain (and one of Irina’s most ardent suitors), Max, in Munich, sees Arkady as “a specimen from the past. It’s as if (he’d) arrived from ancient Rome, chasing someone who offended Caesar.”

A specimen indeed: a loner with a bad accent in a land that despises his people; baffled--and tempted--by German plenty; hunted, in the end, by both the German police and what’s left of the KGB.

Along Arkady’s twisting route are the spectacular crash-and-burn of a plastic-bodied Trabant; a bordello with four-wheel drive; a knife fight in the sanguine murk of a steam bath--a chase after people whose allegiances (and identities) are forever flexible. . . .

The novel is beautifully controlled. Clues are doled out grudgingly, as in real life. Herrings are appropriately red. With Smith, the reader is expected to work as hard as the investigator. The rewards are insights, grace notes, gut checks.

On American lawmen: “The FBI doesn’t believe any defectors. Jesus could ride an ass out of Moscow and they’d open a file on him.”

In Moscow, “Chocolate was an exotic myth, a whiff of history, like the Aztecs.”

In a Munich cafeteria, “The Poles had suits, no ties and the expression of aristocrats temporarily short of funds. The Rumanians chose a round table, the better to conspire. Americans sat alone and wrote postcards.”

Again in Munich: “Wouldn’t you like to see the world’s greatest center of anti-Soviet agitation?” “That’s Moscow. I just came from there.”

There is wit here; eloquence; a little Orpheus and Eurydice; some lowdown slashing; a lot of story. With Smith, you get--dare one say it?--literature.