“Well, I’m standing across from a big archway.” I told him that he needed to drive slowly around New Holland.
“New Holland? What’s that?”
I explained that the dark patch to his right was New Holland; that seemed to make him happy.
“And so where are you then?”
His car whizzed by a couple of times; the headlights picked out the fish eyes of the puddles and the wet tentacles of the bushes on the other side of the ditch—he wasn’t being tailed. The third time I stepped out from my cover in advance and, after opening my umbrella with a loud smack, I walked over to his vehicle—turned out he has a Lexus. The guy was uncommonly sociable and seemed pleased with life.
“Why sit in the back? Want to come up front?”
I declined.
“Where are we going? Want to stay here for a bit? Or drive around? Go figure, I’ve been living in this city for twenty years and didn’t know it was called New Holland.”
The man was impeccable—suit, leather seats, and chocolate laced with cocaine. He even had a business card: Financial Analyst. I chuckled when he held it out to me.
“Basically, as far as your situation goes…” He somewhat cheerfully but with a great deal of confusion started to explain about my situation, who he called and who he talked to; I didn’t know any of the names. “To be honest, they laughed at me when I told them. Like, Do you need Gazprom too? and so on. And I started to have doubts myself, like maybe it was a practical joke or something.” He kept glancing in the rearview mirror, trying to get a good look at me, but I knew where to sit. “Basically, there was a call this morning. They said that maybe there is something, but, like, they want to hear something definite and so on and so forth. Andrei Petrovich—does the name mean anything to you? Me neither. He said he was Andrei Petrovich. Basically, the way it’s going to work…” He started to explain with visible pleasure how much money he wanted.
Through the tinted window you could only see the pale corners wrapped in a gloomy shroud—streetlights, windows, stop signals—whirling, turning, turning—and I thought that’s how the pale luster of stolen gold (you know, the gold is always stolen) would look from the porthole of a submarine gliding along the bottom of the sea.
“So should we talk tomorrow?” He stopped the car at the same gateway where I got in.
I had already grabbed hold of the door handle, but I thought that I should say something, even if he didn’t believe me.
“If you want my advice,” I said, “disappear as quickly as possible. Throw away your cell phone, change your clothes, abandon your car, and take a commuter train as far away as you can. It would be best if you didn’t even stop by your place.”
“What??”
What else did I need to explain to him? The door softly swooshed closed behind me; I was about to open my umbrella, but it turned out that the rain had stopped. He revved the Lexus, then the car jumped forward and hurtled away through the puddles.
I turned around: in front of me, wrapped up in a greasy velour coat, stood a little old woman—and when she raised her head (it was bald, that head; wisps of hair hung here and there, but it appeared more like mold that had set in from dirt and damp), I would have cried out, if fear and loathing hadn’t left me dumbstruck, because she had tenacious and greedy eyes, one of which she winked at me, after twitching her nose as the Lexus drove away—and I almost let out a groan, in any case some sort of wailing sound began to arise from under my ribs, but the old woman had already passed me by and was scurrying away. Her hands were folded behind her back, and her raggedy empty bag swung back and forth.
Cold, black waves of terror washed over me one after the other. To find myself in the emptiness and darkness of an apartment would have been like death. I needed a crowded, noisy place as much as I needed air to breathe—the terrible old woman’s eyes kept dancing in front of me. I flinched. All I could see was the predatory, damp darkness.
The rhythm of my gait, the senseless snatch of conversation— “We’ll think about it”—made my heart begin to thump as if it had broken loose from a chain. It suddenly occurred to me that because of all the scrambling around I did today, I seemed to have forgotten to take my pills, and so I should take them—but the main thing was that maybe there wasn’t anything particularly terrible in that effing simple old woman from Kolomna. Nevertheless, the glass door of Toasted was lit up, and it would have been silly not to drop in.
Turned out she sings. The evening was coming to an end— that’s probably why she was singing something dreamily melancholy. I managed to drain half a glass in the time that she kept repeating a hundred times: “When you die asleep your dreams will keep on going… When you die awake you just die… “
Later, when she got down from the stage and took the seat next to me, to get the conversation going (and she turned out to be very, very pretty: an exquisite face with wide eyes, sculpted cheekbones, and determined, thickly painted lips) I asked her about the song. She turned toward me, took a sip from her glass, and said: “It’s a Buddhist song. About the right way to die.”
I think that I’m only now beginning to understand what she had in mind; but then I simply didn’t pay any attention—I was much more taken with the movement of Nadya’s lips. She asked me what I did, I said that I was a private investigator (and jokes about a hat, cigar, and the femme fatale), I asked her how old she was (“You look sixteen, but when you sing—it’s like you’re thirty-five”), then we walked around (it was clearing up in the city, and it started to look like an antique silver damask; I was forced to admit that I hadn’t been in the city for more than a decade, so I didn’t know where you could go now to get a decent bite to eat), she kept asking me about London, and I kept trying to make her talk: I wanted to hear her voice again and again, all night long—finally we ended up on Repin Street and decided it was stupid for her to try to find a taxi and take her God knows how far.
I’d like to meet the man who wouldn’t have mentally undressed her if he found himself in my shoes. But when we were heading up and I tried to kiss her, she slipped away and said that she wasn’t going to sleep with me. I sighed and made a farting noise with my lips (we were drunk), but no means no, all those schoolboy games—an hour on the T-shirt, an hour on the bra, an hour on the pants, an hour on the panties, and an hour and a half to persuade her to spread her legs, and then to be too fed up to want anything besides giving her a smack on the head—no, no, that’s not for me; I poured myself a cognac, showed Nadya where the bathroom was, and went to bed. As I was falling dead asleep, I remembered that I still hadn’t taken my pills.
II
Next morning I found her lying next to me in bed (“Sorry, there weren’t any sheets anywhere, and you were already asleep…”)— but how could I help myself from making a pass at Isolde in the morning, and what kind of Tristan am I with a hangover? She plunged deeper into sleep, I went to the kitchen to squeeze some juice, and I had almost a full glass when the phone started ringing and I remembered that I was supposed to meet Yura. I walked over to the window, moved the curtain aside, and saw that he was circling the column as he explained that he had already been waiting five minutes. I told him to calm down and sit on the bench for another ten minutes, finished squeezing the juice, put a glass by Isolde’s bedside and my spare set of keys next to the glass—you see, I like sentimental gestures.