“And?”
“Shit theirselves.” Gunter smirked, indicating the range of power tools that lay around him. “You got everything you want?”
“Yeah,” Grisha grunted. “One more job, though.” The halogen light in the hall of the flat gave him an odd sort of halo, as if he had just broken out of heaven.
“What?”
“Gimme.” Grisha pointed at the masonry chainsaw with diamond-tipped chain and hydraulic power pack (pure diesel—for reinforced concrete and serious brickwork) and then backed away from the hole so Gunter could swing the heavy tool through.
And thus armed he made his way back.
The bulb in the main room blew as he reentered, and everything was cast into the uncertain near-darkness of the residual light pollution. But Grisha did not pause, pulling at the ripcord of the engine even as he walked, power pack slung casually over one brutal shoulder.
There was a moment, though, just before the engine caught—a moment when the pale moon rode out above the low clouds over the sea beyond and bathed the keys in the ivory light of one last benediction. A moment when the piano seemed to inhabit its shape as never before, gathering luster to its grain as if some innocent pausing for one last prayer before she sweeps her hair from her neck and inclines her head for the axe. Then all was noise: the whine and whir of chain blades cleaving unresisting wood, the scream of a sundered soundboard, the crunch and snap of collapse, dust, debris, splinters, shards, then the crazed twang of severed notes passing away on the instant into so much dead, tangled, voiceless wire.
16
The Grand Hotel Europe
Wednesday evening. And in all his life, Gabriel would never again await the arrival of another human being with such anxiety. He was tired in a way he had never believed possible. Coming out of the lifts, past two armed security men, he had thought about sitting at the bar, but as he had approached (and then stood staring at a free stool), he had been forced into the audience of two suits, not even drunk yet, talking loose and loud about their plans for tackling Chechnya, talking in the abstract, inhumanly, as if, like everything else in the world, death and destruction were best dealt with in the manner of a forthright marketing campaign, nothing that a few PowerPoints couldn’t handle. And he had seen the eyes of the Russian barmen as they turned away to mix the drinks.
So now he was sitting alone, as far away as possible, in the far corner of the Grand Hotel Europe’s belle époque lobby bar, beneath walls of burnished gold and an unreachable empyrean of mirrors, bolt upright in the capacious desolation of his lounge chair. He dreaded having someone drop into one of the three adjacent seats. He dreaded having to interact with the waitress to order a drink. He dreaded how much his drink might cost. He dreaded the impossibility of the night ahead, the desertion of sleep. All he could think to do was to smoke. Listening to the poor pianist summon spirit for his nightly schmaltz was out of the question; reading the endless masturbation in the international business papers was out of the question too. Eating was out—the expense aside, his appetite had completely disappeared. (Indeed, the very thought of food made him feel sick, as if it were some kind of insult or transgression against the ever-ravenous dead.) The television—the television was utterly out of the question…
There had been another bomb and the pictures had been coming through all afternoon: sons lying on the ground, legs twisted and half covered by bloodstained blankets; fathers carrying their bruised, limp-limbed daughters across broken glass; yet more mothers crying. There was fresh violence in the air. Barbarity and a cold-skinned fear. Even in the hotel, police and security men—newly authorized, self-assured, righteous—were everywhere: on the doors, outside his window, in the lobby. The whole city (country, world) felt as though it were under imminent threat, besieged and bewildered. By whom? For what reason underneath all the other reasons? The news was deeply unreliable. What would happen next was uncertain. And where the hell was Isabella?
All he could do was smoke.
It was almost eleven, and she was therefore an hour late. And so… And so he lit another cigarette from the previous. He wanted a proper drink but did not dare, for fear of not being able to stop, for fear of being drunk when she finally arrived. Oh God. Probably just a delay. Her phone didn’t work outside the U.S. He checked the time. Julian Avery from the consulate was coming at eleven-fifteen. He had gratefully made the appointment earlier in the afternoon, assuming that they would be able to go through everything together with Isabella as soon as she arrived and utterly forgetting (or not thinking about) the convenience or otherwise of the late hour to Avery himself, who had said nothing of it but calmly promised to be there as though it were all in a day’s work, which perhaps it was. He had thought Isabella would have time to shower and change. Now he didn’t know whether to call Avery and cancel or see him on his own. Give it five minutes.
He looked up. In the mirrors above his head he saw a man, much older than himself, sitting upside down in a chair, looking back at him as if he were about to fall and smash his face open on the floor. He fidgeted with his virgin mary. He fought the war with his desire to order a vodka. He closed his eyes.
Earlier that afternoon he had returned from the Hermitage to find the light on his bedside phone flashing. Another message from Isabella, Isabella-brief as always: “Hi, it’s me—hope you are okay. I’m at Tegel. And I am on a Petersburg flight. Thank Christ. I don’t have to go via Moscow. Arrives at eight-thirty your time. Be with you tennish. See you tonight. Grand Hotel Europe. Take care.”
So then an almost crazed euphoria had seized him. He retuned the radio to the Russian thrash-rock station and smoked thick and deep out the window, looking at the Russian Museum—a strange echo of the White House or vice versa, he did not know. He did not know anything. (He had said this all his life, facetiously, but now at last he knew he really meant it: he did not know anything.) But it didn’t matter. The worst that could happen was that he might die—not so bad. Happens to everyone. If she could do it, so could he.
Five minutes later he had calmed, gathered, reordered, found some Chopin, and lain down. But just as sleep was ushering him away from himself, Avery had called, and he had begun (absurdly) pretending to have a cold as he rehearsed his thanks over and over, insisting on being as well as he could be, in the circumstances. Holding up. In the circumstances. And unthinkingly, mind all over the place again, surfing his mad excitement that Isabella was coming, he had made the arrangement to meet up with Avery at eleven-fifteen in the lobby bar.
So next, feeling freshly vulnerable, he had called Connie… And had been so touched and taken aback at her sheer human kindness and wisdom and perception and support (when really all he had ever been to her was a pointless heart-clawing complication) that he had begun to choke again—not this time for his mother, but because he couldn’t believe that Connie could be so good to him, couldn’t believe that he knew a woman this selfless and compassionate. And soft-spoken Connie had talked him all the way back to steadiness, so that when he hung up he had felt able to call Lina again and thank her for everything and tell her, in a stable voice, that he was okay and the hotel was such a huge relief and that Isabella was due and that the funeral was already being organized, and that they hoped for this Friday, and that if it went ahead on Friday, then she, Lina, need not be crazy and fly out because he’d be home Saturday, in three days, since there was no way he was going to hang around, and had she got her visa back yet? And yes, he was okay. And speak again tonight, before Isabella arrived.