“Where on Petro?”
“One three six.”
“You want a bottle?” Ivan held up a vodka bottle pulled from under the seat. “Two rubles.”
The passenger reached forward and took the bottle. He opened it in darkness as the cab moved slowly forward, and he drank deeply, waiting for the sting of cheap vodka. Maybe it would give him a moment, just a moment of clarity. He felt if he could just break through, be sure, there would be a tremendous surge of power, strength. He wanted to be fully awake and aware. A man cannot cope if he is not awake and aware, not in control. He had learned that from Granovsky. He did not want to be a dreamer. He had almost been lost in dream those years earlier at the hospital. But there had been no comfort in the dream. It had sucked him deeper and deeper, drowning, as he called for wakefulness and had not been heard. It had taken long, and his family had abandoned him at his father’s decree. Slowly he had awakened and felt the touch of objects and people. He had gradually gotten better. Then he had met her, had met Granovsky. Granovsky had helped him. They had both helped him move from dream to reality, but he felt the tug of the dream again and knew he might slip back if he did not make a mighty effort. It had to be stopped. If he could be sure that he had done it, then it might stop. He drank from the bottle and this seemed to help.
“It’s not the best, not American or Czech,” said the driver, unable to turn his fat neck, “but it’s not bad, right?”
The passenger said nothing. He thought. He would wait for her. But what if his father’s voice were right? What if he hadn’t done it? He leaned forward toward the sweat smell and solidness of the driver, who sensed him and was startled.
“My problem,” said the passenger, “is that I’m not sure if I did something tonight. If I didn’t do it, I can’t take the next step. Each thing must come in order. To do one without having done the other would make me a fool. Do you understand?”
The driver grunted. He had hauled drunks and lunatics through the streets of Moscow for over thirty years and he had learned not to argue, simply to listen and agree. Ivan Sharikov had his own problem, the pain in his back that was too severe to ignore.
“Moscow is a city of pain,” said the passenger.
“True,” said the driver. The cab skidded on a patch of ice on the bridge across the Moscow River and spun slightly. The passenger said something else, but the driver was too busy with the skid to pay attention, though he caught the last few words:
“…it again, but I couldn’t go back, could I?”
“No,” the driver agreed, “you couldn’t.”
For blocks the passenger was silent, and then fear came. He felt himself sinking into the dream. He felt panic and knew he had to talk, to claw with the fingers of his mind to stay in the world of cold and pain. In the rear-view mirror, Ivan could see the passenger sweating as if it were half time in a summer soccer game.
“You can’t know what it is like. Something has to be done. I have to feel, touch, know I’m here. If I did it, I have a purpose, things to do. I can wait for her.”
At best, drunk, at worst, mad, Ivan was thinking, and he sped up slightly, afraid of skidding but eager to get rid of the sweating, babbling passenger and get to his room where he could wrap a blanket around his back.
“If I act in this world, I stay in this world. You understand?”
“Yeah,” grumbled Ivan.
“He told me that. Granovsky told me that, and he was right. I used to think the whole world was a fake, cardboard sets like a play with everyone acting their roles. I used to think there was another world quite different from ours, and I could get to it if I could just get past one actor on the street, just make it around a corner before they had time to set up another façade. I have a sense of that coming back now. There’s no point asking you because if you’re part of it, you’ll lie. You see. I’m thinking logically again.”
The passenger now leaned back into darkness and covered his face with his hands.
“It’s logical,” said the passenger. “The only way to know is to do it again and do it right and feel it, have evidence, blood, something.”
“Right,” said the driver, pushing the Volga to its swaying limit. “Just relax. We’ll be there in a minute.”
“Then rooms would not grow and things would feel,” came the muffled voice from the rear followed by the sound of breaking glass.
“Hey,” shouted the driver in anger mixed with fear, trying to look over his lump of a shoulder. “I just had that seat cleaned and…”
At the corner of Petro Street and Gorky Place, eighty-year-old Vladimir Roshkov and his fifty-year-old son Pyotr were about to cross the street on their way to their small clothing store. The basement had flooded and they wanted an early start to clean it up before the business day began. The taxi came around the corner sideways in a mad skid catching Pyotr’s pants on a bumper, stripping him, and throwing him against a street light. Vladimir jumped back, looked at his startled son, and watched the taxi bounce over the curb and come to a solid stop against the wall across the street. Pyotr stepped forward dazed, bruised, and confused, and thought only of getting back home and putting on a pair of pants. Anger took a few moments to hit the father and son, who were strong, solid, and very slow of thought. When it came, it came to them both at the same moment and they strode toward the now silent cab. They took a few more steps forward and stopped.
The black figure was covered with blood, but it was not the blood that stopped them. It was the fact that the man was laughing softly, not the laugh of hysteria, but the laugh of gentle pleasure. The man looked at the two figures in front of him, one in the snow without pants, laughed and ran down Petro Street. By the time the Roshkovs recovered their wits and hurried after him, the man was almost out of sight. They stopped, panting, with no heart for the pursuit and headed for the taxi.
The wind was whipping Pyotr’s bare legs, and his father could not help thinking this would mean the police and questions and hours lost in draining the basement. He opened the front door of the cab saying to his son, “Go call the police-”
As the door came open, the body of Ivan came tumbling out into the street, a lump of human with a face as red as his country’s flag.
“Go, fast,” said Vladimir, waving at his son and considering whether the two of them should simply run away. He decided that someone might have seen them by now and to run might make them suspects in this murder. As Pyotr hurried bare-legged across the street and back to find a phone, a groan or sound came from the heap of blood in the snow.
Vladimir forced himself to the side of the man and leaned forward.
“Yes,” he said. “My son is getting the police. Don’t worry.”
“Granovsky,” said Ivan Sharikov the cabman.
“Granovsky?” repeated Vladimir Roshkov.
Ivan nodded his bloody face in agreement and went silent.
“Are you dead?” said Vladimir Roshkov.
“I don’t know,” replied Ivan the cabman who promptly died.
The young police officer parked the yellow Volga in Dmitri Ulyanov Street and sat looking straight ahead the way he had been taught to do. He wondered why the Inspector did not get out of the car immediately and rush into the building, but he did not let his curiosity show with even the twitch of his face. He tried to think of nothing and was surprised at how easy it was to do so.
Rostnikov knew that once he plunged into this case-with pressure from above and a good chance that he would come up with nothing-the days and the nights would begin to blend, he would grow weary and irritable; he would be uneasy until he had a desk full of possibilities and a suspect to talk to. If it was to be as it had been in the past, these were his last moments of ease before embracing the agony of the investigation and the torment of other people’s tragedies. He planned nothing. The case would define itself, carry him into branching streams and dead ends. He would float or fight as he saw fit, trying not to drown in paperwork and bureaucracy.