He hung around Primorskaya station, scared that he would miss him, nursing tea that was forever cooling. Three hours later, at eleven, Grisha arrived in his car. They went for a ride. Henry agreed to meet with Leary the following day. He gave Grisha his money. And Grisha, all grins and goodwill, gave him a little extra in return.
He climbed out by the bank of the Neva. He waited while Grisha pulled cautiously away—mirror signal maneuver, fog lights on, a scrupulous and law-abiding driver. The wind had dropped, but snow was falling thickly again, flakes like crumbled Eucharist, sticking to everything. The river was frozen. He stuck his hand out and took the first car that came skidding in to the curb. At the lights the man offered him half a bottle of vodka—very special, he said. He gave the man the rest of his money. Just what he needed to make sure.
Tsoikin was gone. The room was empty now save for the dust, the stereo, and the tattered sofa. He found an unused syringe in his desk. (Had he been saving it there for this? It now seemed so.) He put on the only CD he had kept, seeking Beatus vir, in memoria aeterna. He knew his tolerance level would have dropped. But he prepared a bigger hit than his usual. He drank some of the vodka as he did so, wincing against the sting. Vivaldi’s voices sang. He thanked God for his good veins, thanked God that he had taken care to rotate. He swigged another slug of vodka. He thought, I do not want to be here. He thought, This is my friend. He thought, This is coming home. He thought, Don’t push it all in at once. Push and stop. Push and stop. Push and stop.
And when it came, it was like the pure-purer-purest relief and the tranquil-happy surge of every good thing in the world, every sweet taste, every scent, every sound, and then an ever-flooding and perfect absence; and the music played and he didn’t care, and his breathing slowed, and he really didn’t care, and he lay back, and he felt himself going going going and he didn’t care. And his breathing slowed a little more. And he knew he was going over. He knew he was going over. But he didn’t care. His soul at last was circling that most blissful zero, angels falling, ragged wings ripped and broken, circling that very center of nothingness.
And on the seventh day he was dead.
42
Blood Fever
London was in a damp and rheumy mood when he awoke at six; his windowsill wet with the night-long tears of some passing ghost or other. A hundred generations of Londoners seemed to have been weeping in the streets when he set off half an hour later. The parked taxi opposite, the red pillar box on the corner, the trees and the lampposts—all seemed to loom at him out of the murk as if to signify a cold aggression on the part of his new surroundings. So suddenly did the first figure he encountered appear that he almost fell into the dead pools of the other’s eyes before he had time to stand aside. They stopped a moment before passing each other, and the stranger muttered something unintelligible, which Gabriel’s imagination took to be more of the same: “What are you doing here? Get out of the way. Yes, you, asshole.”
Perversely, he was relieved that he wasn’t sleeping. Now that he had been off work for a week, he would have resented waking up in the cold darkness and setting out for this breakfast meeting if it meant missing out on lying warm in his bed. But for the first time in his entire adult life, his bed was womanless and had become little more than a cradle for nightmares, waking or otherwise.
He emerged onto the main road at the bottom of Haverstock Hill, walked past the Salvation Army, and crossed for the tube station. There was no real reason for him to be going. Though that did not bother him: there was no real reason for doing anything. Actually, there was a reason: perhaps he half wanted to find out a little something about the job himself. Or was this too an effort on behalf of his subconscious to pretend? In fact, he didn’t give a fuck about TV. Why lie to himself? He would rather edit the new bottled-water magazine in the Roland Sheekey basement than waste his life’s dwindling energy making yet more crap for Channel Eight and its ten million catatonic viewers. Hard these days to convey how little he cared for what people did, said they did, wanted to do. His life henceforward, he feared, would be all about disguising himself, concealing his natural reaction, burying it deep. Oh Christ… Not yet six days and he missed Lina like his own limbs. And Connie, whom he must not call again. Never again—unless and until he was clear. His head ached, physically ached, so that he thought maybe he really did have the flu. He went underground.
Thirty-seven minutes later he surfaced at Westminster and was surprised to see the day no better established in the presence of the mother of all parliaments. Opposite, even Big Ben seemed a little less sure of itself, its assertion of height—bigness generally—less convincing than ever, its Gothic angles all shapeless and shrouded in the still clammy air. The time was only seven-thirty. He was hopelessly early. He decided to walk out onto Westminster Bridge. He could easily make his way back to the café in good time—have something hot and warm and wait for Becky and Isabella to arrive.
The sleepless Thames rolled on beneath. The top of the Eye was blurry in the mist, the great wedge of the South Bank barely distinguishable from the gray of the sky, air, and river. Embankment Place seemed less a building than the carapace disguise of some mighty insect—sleeping, awaiting the allotted hour. And the air was so dense with the hoary damp that it felt as though his jump would have been no great fall but slowed, bit by bit, by thicker and thicker vapors until the water swallowed him with barely a splash.
He stood awhile in his coat, hands warming in the pockets, gazing downriver. London was awakening. He had the impression that the entire city was working to keep the city going so that the entire city could work there. He would have liked a job on the river. That would be good: to see the living Thames every day. To work the water. Some sort of pollution-monitoring patrol. Or something to do with boat registration, perhaps. Rescue the odd whale. Something that started early. Something real. What river jobs were there?
He turned and began to walk slowly back, looking up again at two of the four faces of that ever-ticking clock. And suddenly he felt the stabbing hurt of memory again—his mother’s only half-joking belief that he would one day be prime minister. (Madly, he encouraged her voice every time it came now, preferring this pain of bereavement to the possibility of her vanishing.) That she had believed this of him, her confidence in him, her certainty, her ready support for any step he might take on this chosen path, her thermonuclear opposition to anything that might dare to stand in his way—these things pierced him to the heart. And here he was, all alone with the utterly insane fact that he could not pass the Palace of Westminster without feeling it to be some kind of challenge (there was plenty of time yet), the utterly insane fact that she had somehow made even the great British parliament her mouthpiece—had somehow enlisted it as surely as if all within and even the chambers themselves were merely vassals of her greater spirit. The sheer power of this: to make all things pertain to her will.
He was still early. Becky and Isabella were due at eight-fifteen. He decided to wait inside—a choice he immediately realized was a mistake, given his unhealthy state of mind. La Cantina was one of those phony places he found spiritually weakening, the whole “concept” more than likely conceived by some pathologically mediocre little masturbator of a city boy with individual interior decor supplied by the inevitably “artistic” girlfriend. Oh Christ. He looked around, wondering whether he was ill or not: polished light wood and chrome everywhere, the newspapers in racks, eggs Benedict for an outrageous sum of money, and a bad wine list presented on a blackboard as if (just this minute) written out in the hand of a motivated and cheeky member of staff. Dotted about, a clientele that deserved nothing less. He went for the sofa in the window and ordered himself a tomato juice and some coffee. He simply couldn’t read the newspapers anymore, and he had forgotten his book, so he just sat there, wishing they would turn the awful pretend jazz off, glancing around, trying not to hear the conversation coming from a nearby table.