Nataliya leaned against the wall beside him. “What I said about Nadezhda… about her telling us someone was going to pay her debt. I bet Larissa told her about you, and she took the story for her own. She does that sort of thing. Takes scraps of other people’s lives and sews them into an autobiography.” She looked off along the corridor. “I’m sorry for what I said. If I’d known it was you and Larissa…” Her voice lost some value, some richness. “Maybe it’ll be different for you two.”
Her solicitude, which Chemayev suspected was only prelude to further abuse, snapped him out of his funk. “No need to apologize,” he said. “I haven’t taken anything you’ve said seriously.” He headed off along the corridor.
“Oh… right! You have the surety of love to support your convictions.” Nataliya fell into step beside him. “I’m curious about love. Me, I’ve never experienced it. Mind telling me what it’s like?”
Chemayev’s headache grew worse; he increased his pace. They came round a sharp bend and he saw an elevator door ahead.
“All I want’s a hint, you understand. Just tell me something you know about Larissa. Something only you with your lover’s eye can see.”
Enraged, Chemayev spun her about to face him. “Don’t talk anymore! Just take me to Yuri!”
Half-smiling, she knocked his hands away and walked toward the elevator; then she glanced back, smiling broadly now. “Is this how you treat her? No wonder she lies to you.”
Inside the cramped elevator, chest-to-chest with Nataliya, Chemayev fixed his eyes on a point above the silky curve of her scalp and studied the image of Stalin’s NKVD chief, Beria—the mural on the walls repeated the motif of those in the corridor and the bar, but here the figures were larger, giving the impression that they were passengers in the car. Contemplating this emblem of Soviet authority eased the throbbing in his head. Maybe, he thought, in the presence of such an evil ikon his own sins were diminished and thus became less capable of producing symptoms such as anxiety and headaches. The old thug looked dapper, dressed in a double-breasted blue suit, sporting a red flower in his lapel instead of a hammer-and-sickle pin, quite different from the photographs Chemayev had seen in which he’d worn executioner’s black. His quizzical expression and pince-nez gave him the air of a schoolteacher, stern yet caring, a man whom you’d detest when you studied under him, but whom you would respect years later when you realized the value of the lessons he’d taught. Not at all the sort of character to preside over purges and summary executions, watching from a distance, betraying no more emotion than would a beetle perched on a leaf.
Inching upward, the elevator creaked and groaned—the sounds of a torture chamber. The exhausted cries of victims, the straining of mechanical torments. Nothing like the noiseless efficiency of the one that had brought him to the theater. The car lurched, passing a floor, and Chemayev’s thoughts, too, lurched. He reawakened to Nataliya’s presence, felt her eyes on him. Bitch. He wanted to beam the word into her brain. What right did she have to ask him personal questions? Tell me something you know about Larissa, something only you with your lover’s eye can see. What did she expect? That he’d bare his soul to her? Fat chance! There were lots of things he could have told her, though. A year-and-a-half’s worth of things. Thousands of intimate observations. The problem was, his head hurt too much at the moment for him to think of any.
The elevator door rattled open and Chemayev stepped out into a corridor with cement walls, smelling of urine and vomit, illuminated by the ghastly dim light from an overhead bulb. The floor was littered with empty bottles, crushed plastic containers, soggy newspapers, dead cigarette packs, used condoms. Partially unearthed from a mound of debris, a crumpled Pepsi can glittered like treasure. Heavy metal blasted from somewhere close by. At the far end of the corridor a lumpish old man with stringy gray hair falling to his shoulders was wielding a mop, feebly pushing a mound of trash into the shadowy space beneath a stairwell. Along the walls stood buckets of sand—for use in case of fire. Chemayev turned to Nataliya, who gestured for him to proceed. As they passed, the old man peered at him through the gray snakes of his hair, his face twisted into a frown, and he smacked his lips as if trying to rid himself of a nasty taste.
If Chemayev had any doubt as to where he stood, it was dispelled by what he saw from the window at the foot of the stairs—he was gazing down onto the parking lot of Eternity, a view that could only be achieved from high up in one of the krushovas. This surprised him, but he was becoming accustomed to Yuri Lebedev’s curious logic. As he started up the stairs, the music was switched off and he heard voices in the corridor above. At the top of the stairs, lounging against a wall, were two men in jeans and leather jackets, one with a shaved scalp, nursing a Walkman to his breast, and the other with a mohawk that had been teased into a rooster’s crest. They eyed Chemayev with contempt. The man with the Mohawk blew Nataliya a kiss. His face was narrow, scarcely any chin and a big nose, looking as if it had been squeezed in a vise. A pistol was stuck in his belt.
“Private party,” he said, blocking Chemayev’s path.
“I’ve got an appointment with Yuri,” Chemayev told him.
The bald guy affected a doltish expression. “Yuri? Which Yuri is that?”
“Maybe Yuri Gagarin,” said his pal. “Maybe this pussy wants to be an astronaut.”
“Better let him pass,” said Nataliya. “My friend’s a real assassin. A faggot like you doesn’t stand a chance with him.”
The man with the pistol in his belt made a twitchy move and Chemayev grabbed his hand as it closed around the pistol grip; at the same time he spun the man about and encircled his neck from behind with his left arm, cutting off his wind. The man let go of the pistol and pried at the arm. Chemayev flicked the safety off, pushed the pistol deeper into the man’s trousers.
The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Go easy, okay!”
Chemayev wrenched the gun free and waved both men back against the wall. “Are you crazy?” he asked Nataliya. “Why did you antagonize him?”
She moved off along the corridor, heading for a doorway thronged with partygoers. “I have so few chances to watch you be masterful. Indulge me.”
Chemayev shook his forefinger in warning at the two punks and followed her. The pistol—a nine-millimeter—didn’t fit his holster; he wedged it in the waistband of his trousers, at the small of his back.
The first thing he noticed about the party was that the instant he stepped through the door the stench of the hallway vanished, as if he had penetrated an invisible barrier impermeable to odors. The smells were now those you might expect of any Moscow gathering: perfume, marijuana and cigarette smoke, bad breath, the heat of people pressed together under the sickly lighting, crowded into an unguessable number of rooms. People of every description. Students in sweaters and jeans; old ragged folks with careworn faces, the sort you’d expect to find in the krushovas; beautiful women in couturier gowns; street prostitutes—some equally beautiful—in vinyl micro-minis and fake furs; men dressed like Chemayev himself, members of a mafiya or businessmen with more-or-less reputable interests; musicians with guitars and violins and horns; homosexuals in drag; uniformed soldiers; jugglers. In one corner several fit-looking men wearing jerseys tossed a soccer ball back and forth; in another two actors played a scene to an audience consisting of a blond middle-aged woman in a lab coat and thick spectacles, a thickset man in a wrinkled suit, the very image of a Party hack, and a pretty adolescent girl wearing leg warmers over her tights, holding a pair of ballet slippers. On occasion, as Chemayev and Nataliya forged a path, being pinched and fondled and grabbed in the process, incredible sights materialized, as fleeting as flashes of lightning. A geisha’s painted face appeared between shoulders; she flicked out a slender forked tongue at Chemayev, then was gone. Soon thereafter he caught sight of a small boy whirling as rapidly as a figure skater, transforming himself into a column of dervish blue light. And not long after that they squeezed past a group of men and women attending a giant with a prognathous jaw and a bulging forehead who, kneeling, was as tall as those gathered around him; he reached out his enormous hands and flickering auras manifested about the heads of those he touched. To someone unfamiliar with Eternity these sights might have seemed miraculous; but to Chemayev, who had witnessed similar curiosities on the stage of the theater, they were evidence of Yuri’s talent for illusion. He accepted them in stride and kept pushing ahead. Once he saw a brunette who might have been Larissa laughing flirtatiously on the arm of a slender blond man; he called to her, knocked people aside in his determination to reach her, but she disappeared into the crowd.