But he could walk no farther and he had come far enough and the point, if there was one, was that he should not injure himself or be late on account of sticking to a smaller vow when the larger sacrifice was what really mattered. A ride from here would make little or no difference; Arkady would have a few rubles, surely. What were a few rubles in so many thousands anyway? Yes, he had come far enough. He crossed the road and stuck out his arm. A brown Lada skidded to a halt almost immediately, bald tires gliding through slush. Henry climbed in, rubbing at his knee. Across the river, the buildings of the English Quay watched him through the snow.
By chance or design, Arkady was already waiting on the curb when the Lada drew up—boots on, mittens and some giant old and ugly striped sweater that Henry had never seen before. Christ, he’s going to be cold, Henry thought; and then he remembered that he himself was wearing his friend’s coat.
Arkady opened the far door and leaned in.
“Okay?”
“Yes. We’ll be a few rubles short.” Henry looked across. He felt the need to explain, to apologize. “Sorry—I meant to walk. I hurt my hand, I—”
“Doesn’t matter.” Arkady got into the car, his knees squashed against the front seat, and gave the address in Russian—up by the Black River.
The driver nodded, eyes briefly in the rearview, crunched the brittle engine into first gear, and began to turn around, yanking at the wheel as though it were the door to a breached compartment on a submarine.
“I will tell Leary,” Arkady said. “The bastard will enjoy it anyway… Shows him how he has everything—every ruble. That we have nothing left. Not even to pay for a fucking ride back.”
Henry’s lips worked. He felt nauseous again, unable to acknowledge anything. Maybe it was the engine fumes being pumped in by the car’s cheap little heater. He unfastened the coat, reached inside, and handed his friend the plastic wallet.
“This is everything.”
“I can go alone,” Arkady said.
“No.”
They had stopped at the end of the street, the driver waiting for a gap in the careering traffic.
“You do not have to come.”
They both knew that he was hoping for an extra hit.
“I am coming.”
Arkady met his eye. “Okay.”
Henry wound the window down—stiff and awkward on the ratchet—and turned his head to breathe the icy air. Under the cover of snow, the darkness was slipping in.
The driver was young and in a hurry to earn his money. The car slewed. The wipers squeaked and the heater scraped. Henry watched the lights of the other cars coloring the snow. Of course it had turned out that Kostya’s contact was Grisha, which meant Leary. Bitter wasn’t the word for it. (There were far better words in Russian.) And yet it was to Vsevolod Learichenko—Uncle Seva, as Grisha called him—that the two were now driving. Arkady knew of nobody else. Petersburg was not such a big city. Moscow, London, New York, Los Angeles, even Paris, there might have been alternatives. Fake-passport purchase was still easy enough with money and contacts, Henry understood, but not half as easy as the newspapers pretended. The biggest danger was of being scammed by amateurs. Paradoxically, you were safest going with the gangs. Or you risked being arrested at the airport, your money already spent, your forgers long disappeared. They could have gambled and gone to Moscow, but they were in a hurry, and there was something perversely persuasive, Arkady reasoned, in trusting Leary: since he had already reduced them to nothing, he would not therefore risk cheating them further. Leary would assume, rightly or wrongly, that Arkady (a native of the city, unlike Leary himself, and friends with fringe citizens enough) would seek some kind of violent recompense if further torture were inflicted. An unnecessary irritation that Leary would not wish for. Far better to have Arkady well served. Far better to have Henry on his staff. Far better to keep out of petty troubles. So Arkady had calculated Leary would calculate. And Henry had been in neither mood nor condition to argue.
The car slithered to a stop. Henry sucked at his injured hand, then clutched at his leg, which was twitching again, threatening cramp. The snow was thicker than ever as the two climbed out. Arkady went to the driver’s window to hand over the rubles for the ride. Henry eased his way around the back of the car, little scoops of snow wedging themselves through the hole in his shoe. Arkady was pointing at a low covered passageway wide enough for a single cart.
The center of Leary’s operation—or one center of it, at least—appeared to be a filthy, soot-blackened brick building six stories high, constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century on the outskirts but stranded now amid a squalid swath of scum and shortage that stretched like a tide mark around the edges of the city. Henry shuffled over and stopped beneath the shelter. He had taken off his hat in the car, and he looked like some bewildered creature of the gulag—shaven-headed, gaunt jaw chewing on nothing, kneading at his hat with both hands. Arkady came over at a run and ducked within.
The passageway was heaped with putrescent rubbish—cans, split plastic bags, rancid food, old clothes—a rotten mouth that swallowed them whole. They groped their way forward until ahead of them they saw a curtain of snow, pale strands of saffron lit by a weak lamp beyond. They passed through, into yet another minicourtyard.
And this time hell wasn’t down but up. They climbed the communal stairs in the darkness as far as an innocuous door on the second floor. Here they stood still with their hands where they could be seen through the spy hole and waited for the unlocking process to begin. When the door finally opened, it was Grisha—face like a cheese grater, fingers like bratwurst—who motioned them inside.
They were led to a large front room, which, save for an incongruously yellow bicycle helmet hanging from a nail by the blinded window, was entirely bare.
“Wait there.”
Grisha went back out into the corridor and began to relock the main apartment door.
There was nowhere to sit, so they stood. Henry’s nose was streaming, his body sodden with sweat inside the greatcoat, despite the cold. He was praying that the cramps would not come back. Time snagged like a forgotten rag flapping on a barbed-wire fence.
An hour later—or it might have been five minutes or three days—Grisha reappeared.
“Let’s go.”
“Where?” Arkady asked. They were speaking in Russian. “This way.”
“How long is this going to take?”
“You have to go somewhere?”
“I have to take my dog to fuck your mother again. She already paid for it.”
Grisha turned and answered him with a grin like a scar.
Through his ache, Henry wondered vaguely what was going to happen. But Grisha carried on walking. Henry thought that maybe they were going out into the communal hall again, but instead they continued down the corridor, past a series of shut doors on the right, and entered a room at the opposite end of the apartment, this one furnished haphazardly, as if uncertain whether a lounge, an office, or a doctor’s waiting room.
“Wait here.”
Grisha disappeared, and they heard a moment’s conversation in Russian as he opened another door and then nothing again.
Arkady looked around with mixed scorn and tense wariness. “Now he has let you see this place, you know that he will kill you if he thinks you fuck with him.” He addressed Henry directly in English. “I am serious. This is not a child’s thing. People die in this world all the time. Nobody cares.”