“My dear boy, don’t worry, I know the price. The premium for fucking with your head is an extra 50 percent. Well?”
Yura heaved a sigh and said that he would try. “Exactly the same kind?”
“No, it’s for a girl.”
“I should have known, people don’t change,” Yura burst out laughing.
The noise from the water in the bathroom had stopped, so I quickly finished what I had to say to Yura and threw the phone down. Nadya was beautiful, like a newly born Venus, and she even let me kiss her, but when I tried to slide my palm under her bathrobe, she pulled away and said that she didn’t sleep with cheeky private detectives.
“So who do you sleep with?” What else was there to say?
“Only with those who know the right way to die,” she said, and then stuck her tongue out at me.
I had completely forgotten about my pills—-I’d remembered several times, but reluctantly: I was enjoying this sensation of self-control and concentration, and I needed to keep feeling like that: it was a winning combination, but only if I played my cards right. Moreover, I just wasn’t up to taking them; in the evening I fell asleep on the same bed as Nadya (but alas not under the same sheet), and in the morning I woke up next to her—that’s just how things turned out.
The keys stayed with her once again—I left before light, before dawn, in order to catch Yura, and she and I didn’t meet until evening at Toasted. Coming back from Yura’s, I got lost in the Kolomna streets which are as straight as pipes—I deliberately decided to return on foot: at first it was amusing, I didn’t ask directions on purpose, the streets and the river twisted around, came together (I probably hadn’t sobered up completely). The Pryazhka flowed into the Moika, the Moika pretended to be the Kryukov, the Kryukov ran off to one side, it seemed like several hours had passed, I was deeply agitated, cursing under my breath—when I finally dragged myself to the apartment, Nadya was already gone, and I collapsed on the bed, putting the phone down nearby. On the pillow lay her hairs, just like the day before yesterday.
I had night sweats, tossed and turned from one side of the bed to the other, and only at Toasted that night—Miss Piercing kept giving me a hard time, and among other things claimed I’m lying when I say that I’m a private detective, private detectives don’t just sit around drinking in bars all day long; on the contrary, Nadia retorted, that was all they did, and she sang a bit of “As Time Goes By,” but I nevertheless had to answer the question about what I was investigating (the loss of a document from a leading company’s managerial file, I duly reported to the ensuing serving of her giggles)—did I remember that earlier in the day I had been wrenched from sleep by Stepanych’s phone call and he’d told me to be ready for anything, and kept stressing that his guys, who were sitting there waiting like a fire brigade, would be on the move as soon as the alarm was sounded.
“We can’t get by without the guys?”
“Maybe in your Berlins and Londons you can get by without the guys, but here you snooze you lose, or as the Germans say, In die grossenFamiliennicht with the beak klats-klats! (I at once recalled how as I child all those generals with whom my father had business would make me feel sick with their stupid jokes.)
Miss Piercing kept pestering me, and I didn’t understand why, until—it seems it wasn’t that night—I asked her almost out of nowhere whether she was into women, and it turned out that I hit it on the nail. After Stepanych’s call (or to be more precise, after I remembered it in the club) I saw with the clarity of an advertising photo of a resort flooded with sunshine that the main thing for me was not to come unhinged.
An additional complication was that I had become restless, I couldn’t sit still, I was rushing up and down streets, checking whether I was being followed (I covered my tracks: I’d walk through courtyards, transfer from one trolley to another, go around in circles), or I’d try a bit of shadowing myself—from time to time it seemed like I glimpsed that ill-fated old woman. I was tormented by the certainty of what was taking place and at the same time by the suspicions aimed at me, and this vile murk was cut through here and there by moments of fruitless illumination: so, I understood that by sending me away, the old man, of course, wanted to protect me from the necessity of thinking about the company (he evidently took it as his and only his personal hell), although he talked about a PhD, but even he had hardly formulated for himself the main thing—that he wanted to get me out of the cold trap of Petersburg, even at the cost of being obliged to remain in it forever; after all, the old man had taken the position that the only way for him to leave Petersburg was a bullet fired from the barrel at a speed of 350 meters a second.
It was easier at Toasted. Miss Piercing and I engaged in banter, I’d point out some girl—”She’s pretty, isn’t she?”—and she’d wave me away (and when she got really wrecked, she’d become candid: “Beauty is in the movement of the soul, and they all have cellulite instead of a soul”—while trying not to look at Nadya), while Nadya and I got drunk, then went for a stroll, and off to my place.
I slept with Nadya the sleep of the dead (she unfailingly and good-heartedly declined my ritual solicitations), and in the afternoon the vile old woman was catching up to me in my dreams— in the worst of these I was riding with her in the backseat of a car and was afraid to turn toward her because I didn’t want to give myself away, but I couldn’t help it and started to steal furtive glances at her: she remained indifferent, didn’t budge, and from her nostril appeared the squirming end of a transparent brown worm brought out by the rain, it slowly knocked against her lip, first here, then there, gathering together and unfurling the rings of its segments—it was precisely from that dream that Yura’s call jolted me awake, and, still writhing from terror, I scribbled on a scrap of paper the name of the bank where the BMW was registered.
This dream chased me down another time, when I was out walking (morning, after a rainfall—the damned rain kept coming down) and I saw that the road teemed with worms and remembered that this had already happened once—a long time ago, when I was a kid (my left arm held tight in my mother’s warm hand), staring in wonder at the Worm Kingdom: you couldn’t take a step anywhere.
Stepanych didn’t call; from time to time I began to doubt myself, my plan, fearing that basically this was all raving nonsense and that I had come tearing to Petersburg on business, that Stepanych had in fact called—until this nightmare finally ended: Yura came through with the documents. But I was worn out.
III
The last two days: all that remained was to create out of water the reptiles and so forth as set down in the Bible all the way up to man. In the morning I called Stepanych and said that I couldn’t take it anymore (it was the absolute truth: I couldn’t).
“It doesn’t matter, Stepanych, nothing’s working out. I’ll tell them to prepare a press release and an appeal to the public prosecutor.”
“Just a sec, Anton, hold on.” Stepanych moved to a quiet spot so he could talk. “Can you hear me? Anton, my dear boy, I can’t forbid you from doing anything,” he said softly and persuasively; in the background, loud and smug men’s voices were discussing something. “But I don’t advise it, my dear boy, I don’t advise it. First of all, because as I told you, a half an hour after your press release they’ll start throwing money around on the market. The company will lose millions. You’ll lose. And second, because we’re almost there, just a little bit longer and we’ll have them by the neck. Wait a little. The main thing here is control— and not to be afraid, don’t be afraid.”