Grisha exhaled thoughtfully through flared nostrils—twin off-road exhausts under heavy acceleration—and approached the wide window, walking carefully by the side of the bed. It was upsetting, was what it was: the room had a scrubbed and dusted feel, as though someone had washed everything only an hour ago. Shifting blood, lifting DNA. He looked about him. There was no money in here. (Grisha could intuit money in a place, like a water diviner sensing that delicate underground tremble.) The windowsill yielded neither residue nor discoloration to the pink of his stubby finger. The floor was everywhere stripped and bare. And the pillow, which he now bent to touch, was freshly laundered. Grisha saw that Arkady would be able to look up through the window into the sky from his bed—very nice. Grisha was tempted to lie down himself and stretch out, think, smoke, have a piss.
Hello… There was something that looked like a book in the bed, slipped in between the sheets.
Filth?
Curious, comforted, Grisha dropped to his haunches, picked it up, and flipped through.
No… it was music. Fucking music. No words, no pictures, no tits, no pussy. Just notes. Not even a rogue arse. Grisha’s expression grew distant, thoughts developing slowly but steadily, like graffiti declaring itself letter by letter on a waste-ground wall. Wait… Yes, that was it. The answer he had been looking for. How to fuck everything even faster. No need for any further consideration. Leary would love it. Grisha grinned grotesquely. He replaced the music, stood up, flicked his ash carefully into his cupped palm, and left the room.
And so to the main business.
Grisha next entered Henry’s room, smashing the door hard against the wardrobe inside as he opened it. Much smaller in here, and darker too. Almost messy by comparison. Now then—where? A single mattress, likewise on the floor. A small window. The freestanding wardrobe. A high shelf heavy with books running down either side of the room. A chest of drawers. A school desk and a chair covered in clothes. Two boxes of needles stacked with the hospital insignia on the side. A black garbage bag under the desk. Where would a skinny little shit-stabber keep his money?
Grisha surveyed the ceiling, hoping for giveaways. No breaks or cracks or panels. Nothing. The floor was the same flat Soviet-crap concrete as Arkady’s, save for a rug. He bent and flipped it: nothing. The stunted baseboards were all intact. He dragged the wardrobe out from the wall. Nothing obvious back there. He turned to face the room again. Surely not under the… He upended the mattress. Nothing. Ripping off the sheet, he checked all the way around. No slits. No pouches. Nothing.
All right then, so be it, let’s do this properly. Grisha ground his cigarette into the twisted rug and unsheathed his prized Uzbek knife.
For the next fifteen minutes, he devoted himself to a thoroughly efficient and concentrated search in which everything, absolutely everything, was tipped out, tipped over, upended, yanked, emptied, slit, spilled, split, dumped. And all things passed beneath Grisha’s eyes—gravel-gray piggy little nugget-sifters—and many through his greasy palms, but nothing for more than the second it took to ascertain their status as harborers of money or otherwise.
He worked with surprising energy and the absorbed gibbonlike strength that his odd dimensions gave him. Truth be fucking told, it wasn’t often these days that he got the chance to go back to basics, and he had to admit that he rather enjoyed it… Enjoyed it too much, maybe, because, as he now realized, he hadn’t been thinking. Grisha grimaced. That was the problem: you got carried away; you forgot yourself. Good job Gunter was on guard and not here to witness this minifailure. He drew breath.
Time for another snout.
He lit up, sucked in, and sat down, resting heavily on the corner of the overturned desk. With Henry it was all very straightforward: find the money, find the man; take the money, destroy the man. And no amount of ancillary damage would really matter two bitch’s shits to Henry once he discovered the money was gone. Leary’s work was easily done. Grisha could chainsaw the walls in half if he felt like it. Henry wouldn’t notice. Because money was what guaranteed Henry’s supply and protecting supply was all the poor bastard was capable of caring about. (And also, since he, Grisha, was Henry’s supplier, finding the money was all that was necessary to bring him in.) But where?
The fucking books!
A moment of genius.
Butt-fucker.
Obvious, yes, but that’s genius for you—a mixture of the obvious and the inspired. Grisha rubbed his cupped palm back and forth across the stubble of his razed number-two scalp. He could not be sure where exactly these moments of brilliance came from—there was some unknowable black magic going on deep in the sightless coal mines of his interior, and every so often news of a diamond would come smoking up some unexpected shaft or other and he would be as amazed as the next man.
Almost ruefully, he stood on Henry’s creaking wooden chair—a compact titan towering above the shredded landfill—and began working his way quickly along the shelf, picking up each book and dangling it by the spine, pages hanging as he shook them back and forth, hurling the rejects at the wall when he was satisfied.
It was the Bible that first gave up the booty. Twenty-dollar notes flapped out and fluttered to the floor. He stepped down and began carefully to gather the scattered bills, smoothing them as he did so.
He ran the painful ulcer on the tip of his tongue along the jagged range of his molars, considering. Then, with a feeling of almost embarrassing mental communion with his prey, he clambered back up and began work on the opposite shelf.
Right.
Again!
No doubt about it: he really was on a roll. The vegetarian cookbook yielded another minisquall. But it was the dense immensity of the English dictionary that really delivered the goods. And this time the notes fell heavier, having long been pressed together.
So there was an additional degree of sway in Grisha’s shoulder-dipping walk as he made his way down the short internal corridor toward the front door. Three thousand two hundred dollars all told—Henry Wheyland’s only future.
With an atypical flourish, Grisha put down his ergonomic backpack (containing the money), stuck his mighty head through the man-sized hole in the thin wall that separated the interior of the flat from the dim communal hall beyond, and greeted his colleague in Russian again.
“All right, Gunt?”
Gunter was sitting on the floor to the right of the hole, away from the pile of dust and debris, with his back to the undamaged and still thrice-locked front door, keeping watch by playing a shooting game on his cell phone. He held up his hand to indicate that a critical moment in the action was upon him. Then he hit Pause and turned his head, which, like that of his employee for the evening, was shaven, scarred, and substantial, though Gunter could at least claim the requisite physical frame to go with it.
“Yeah,” Gunter said. “All right.”
The bulb at the end of the corridor by the stairs was blinking on and off.
“Anything?” Grisha asked.
Gunter nodded across the hall in the direction of the opposite apartment. “Piglet dick and his fat whale opened up to see what was going on.”