The street itself was mercifully quiet. They passed slowly along by the walls, both men peering up at the window. Arkady was listening, Oleg glancing around. There were very few lighted rooms in any of the other apartments on either side of the road. They drew level with the gated entrance. Arkady gripped one of the metal bars and pushed sharply. The lock rattled but nothing gave.
“Come on.” Abruptly Arkady crossed the canal without looking back and walked straight down the stairs that formed the entrance to the CCCP Café.
Oleg caught up with him and they stood together while their eyes readjusted to the heavier darkness of the stairwell.
“Here’s the money.” Arkady slipped an envelope from his track-suit trousers. “It’s all there.”
Oleg hesitated. “How are we going to get past the gate?”
“I don’t know.”
Oleg drew a deep breath, shrugged, and put the envelope in the breast pocket of his jacket, unwilling to count the notes or stow them within, given what he saw as the unlikelihood of his actually being able to do anything to earn them. It was not his fault if Arkady was insane. In fact, a good part of him was rather glad that his old business partner had clearly failed to think out any sort of plan, since they’d probably just have to forget about the whole job and that would be that. He wouldn’t hear from the mad bastard for another seven years or whatever it was. Get back to his little locksmith’s hole in the wall. Cut honest keys.
Oleg located his cigarettes and with them a mislaid cache of self-assurance. He exhaled. “We can’t just stand around and hope someone goes in or out. It’s nearly three now—nobody is going to come home at this time. Nobody nice, anyway.”
Arkady had his hands wrapped around his playing shoes. He said nothing. They climbed a few of the café steps together and looked across the bridge at the balcony. There were no lights on in the entire face of the building. The moon was behind clouds for the moment. Some sounds reached them from Sennaya Square—drunks, raucousness, shouts, not too far away. A car turned onto the embankment and began coming slowly toward them. But the headlights brightened with the acceleration—some old piece of Soviet-made shit and nothing to worry about. All the same, they dropped back down beneath street level.
Arkady half turned. “If we get up onto the balcony, will you be able to get us in through the windows?”
“Yeah, I—”
“How long?”
Oleg affected a businesslike whisper. “Depends. If it’s bolted, then I might be able to cut through them. But that could be twenty minutes. Depends. If it’s only locked, then I don’t know. Quicker. I can’t tell until I see. Is there an alarm?”
“I don’t know.”
Oleg exhaled a heavy jet of smoke.
“Okay.” Arkady produced some leather gloves from one of his pockets and began putting them on.
“But we can’t get onto the balcony, and even if we had some ladders, which we don’t, then we can’t just piss around breaking in up there. The whole street can see that fucking balcony.”
“There’s a ladder in the courtyard behind us. It’s padlocked, but that won’t be a problem, will it, my friend?”
“Is there?” The realization that Arkady must have been here earlier after all caused Oleg to fall back on his mettle. “Okay. We’re still going to be seen by anyone who comes up or down either side of the canal.”
“Only while you are going up it.” They were standing close, and Arkady was looking directly into Oleg’s face for the first time. “We’ll get the ladder. You go up. I take the ladder away. You get in. You open the front door from the inside. You come down here. You let me in through the security gate. I get inside. You can go.”
Oleg climbed two steps away—despite the gloom of the stairwell, the other’s eyes seemed to sear through him, as if to accuse him of lifelong cowardice and shirking. The moment of decision had come. He looked across the canal to reassess the balcony. The returning moon seemed to light the window in question. He hooked his thumbs to adjust his belt, which felt suddenly tight. The window would undoubtedly be easier than a quadruple-locked front door, which he had been dreading. There was at least that. In a way, the window would be a relief… But what if there was some sort of alarm? He turned back to Arkady. His chest had tightened with the smoke. He had asthma. He flicked his cigarette. “Okay, let’s get the ladder.”
“Good. Once you are up, I will take it away and nobody will know. I will wait. If you have a problem, whistle. Don’t worry. I’ll be listening.” Arkady grinned. “I have very good ears.”
He was leaning close to the gate beneath the shadow and he heard Oleg coming long before he saw him. He stood up straight and peered through the rails, his boots swinging around his neck, the playing shoes now on his feet. A moment later he made out the heavy shape of the locksmith walking hurriedly through the shadows of the inner courtyard.
Arkady’s voice was calm, to counter the agitation he sensed in the other’s footfalclass="underline" “I think the button is over there.”
Oleg grunted.
Even in the penumbra of the streetlamps Arkady could see the sheen of sweat on his companion’s high forehead.
The gate began to jerk open. Oleg had to stand back to let it swing inward. His voice was close to a hiss: “It’s the staircase in the corner. I propped the door so it can’t shut. There is nobody there. Everything is quiet. You’ll be—”
“Good.” Arkady was already slipping through.
For a moment their eyes met.
“Right, well, I’ll see you, Arkady Alexandrovitch.”
“Yes.”
And with that Arkady was gone.
Oleg turned on his heel and walked as quickly as he could in the direction of the demented anonymity of Sennaya Square.
Arkady stood alone in the darkness of her hall, his face expressionless. The front door was shut behind him. For a long while he remained quite still, listening for any sound of movement coming from the other apartments in the building. But aside from the muffled cough of a distant pipe, there was only silence. Gradually he was beginning to be able to make out the shapes of photographs on the wall.
He lifted his boots off his neck, put them down on the mat, turned to his right, and walked noiselessly toward the open doorway at the end, the direction from which he guessed Oleg must have entered. He wanted to be sure that the curtains were drawn before he began his business here tonight.
He found himself in a large room with high ceilings. Lighting from the street relieved the darkness, and he looked about at the unfamiliar shapes and their stretched shadows: a deep chair, a chaise longue, a large desk against the far wall, and a table to one side, in the shallow bay of the window. He walked over, treading as lightly as he could. Cold air was coming in at waist height through a small circular hole in the glass. Arkady cursed violently under his breath and drew the curtains. Evidently Oleg had been unable to deal with the locks and had cut through the pane to open the balcony windows from the inside.
Arkady’s business: he wanted names and addresses… He wanted contact with her family. And through contact, he wanted money. Not just a few thousand stolen rubles but the kind of money that would change his life—money to pay for the next two years at the conservatory, of course, but in his fiercest imaginings more than that: money to pay for a decent apartment, a proper piano, travel in Europe, flights to the U.S., big hotels in which he could fuck and sleep until four in the afternoon after all the hundred concerts he would play… The kind of bank-account-swelling money that the shit lice at the British and American embassies would consider enough to make him “safe” for visa approval. No more of this bullshit existence. He wanted the full life that was rightfully his. He wanted the life that she had denied him, the life to which he was entitled. Legitimacy. Everything or nothing.