I briefly resisted, but let him talk me into waiting one more day.
“Stay calm, my dear boy, and don’t let your nerves get the best of you: if Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, then the mountain can go fuck itself! “ He roared with laughter, evidently trying to reassure me.
Strangely enough, I really was reassured after our conversation—so much so that when I was buying tickets, I kidded the blushing girl at the counter, although more than anything I wanted to turn around and see if somebody was listening behind my back. Just in case, I didn’t say anything out loud, wrote everything down on a piece of paper and handed it to the fair snub-nosed girl.
Then I headed back home and slept, clutching my cell phone, and in the evening went to Toasted. The call found me on Labor Square, which was deserted (it’s always deserted—and there seems to be something particularly appropriate about that): the unfamiliar, ordinary voice asked if I was the one they were looking for, and then gave my name and patronymic, and so on, blah blah blah. Afterward, I immediately dialed Stepanych’s number.
“There, you see, what did I say! What was the message?”
“That perhaps I might be interested in their proposal.”
“Where did they set up the meeting? Is that southwest? Now listen. They’ll probably try to get you into their car and take you to a dacha somewhere. You cannot get into a car under any circumstances. My guys will be there”—Stepanych relayed his plan the whole time I was walking to Toasted. According to him this was going to be a full-scale military operation, only without helicopters.
“It seems overly complicated, Stepanych—you’re sure nothing’s going to go wrong?”
“Patience, Cossack.” I’d suddenly become a Cossack.
As I pushed the glass door open, I experienced a brief fit of nostalgia from the longing seeping through from the future: that perhaps I was in Toasted for the last time. And if there’s something I feel bad about in this whole story, it’s that there wasn’t a chance to properly say goodbye to Miss Piercing. I was thinking about this when I fell asleep. (On that last night I kissed Nadya-Isolde especially tenderly, and she responded, but the hand that had set out on the journey around her stomach was almost immediately deported back home; instead she hugged me and fell asleep.)
I also needed to ask the siren to sing her little song. I had been whistling it nonstop for the past day—it had stuck in my head, but this last day proved to be a long one. Even though I got up late, Nadya had already vanished; all that remained was her makeup bag by the mirror. I straightened up the apartment, went out to buy some bread, had breakfast—it was almost evening when I grabbed my laptop and went to the bank’s website, the name of which was written down on the crumpled piece of paper. Andrei Petrovich was listed third under the heading Administration. For the last time, as I combed my fingers through my hair, I checked myself and my plan: everything was in order.
I told the secretary that I was from the FSB’s Department of Personal Security. And I told Andrei Petrovich that I wanted to talk with him regarding a document from a large company’s administrative file. And that it was possible that someone had more interesting and more realistic proposals than those that had already been made.
“In an hour? I’ve got a meeting in an hour, how about tomorrow?”
“Reschedule your meeting, Andrei Petrovich, or you’ll end up in a ridiculous position. Like the financial analyst.”
Andrei Petrovich had no choice but to agree. But he didn’t drive up in a Lexus, he had a Bentley. He stepped out—from the driver’s seat, of course—and, naturally, he didn’t see anybody: some people simply don’t see bright blue jackets with hoods, even when the jacket pockets are sticking out like they have a Clock 19 in there. He put on his coat, walked over to the parapet, clasped his hands together behind his back, and pointed his sharp-nosed head in the direction of the arch—out of old habit some scum are still moved by beauty, even while they’re thinking about investments. At that moment her shadow escaped from the car’s whale-like maw: she was looking straight at me, smiling reassuringly, and, growing cold with loathing that I could possibly have something in common with that dead monster, I suddenly understood that this was probably how my mother would have looked had she managed to grow old before dying, but the most terrifying thing of all was that the old woman did not walk away, until now it had only been in my dreams that she didn’t walk away; squinting at me, she slowly raised her hand, at first it seemed that her hand was simply shaped like a pistol, but I suddenly realized that she was indeed holding a pistol, and now I wanted more than anything for her to shoot it, and I even mentally whispered to her, Pull the trigger, pull—and Andrei Petrovich carefully lay down on the slippery, grassy dung.
I put the Glock back into my pocket and glanced around: the half-dark embankment (the streetlights weren’t on yet) was empty; the old woman once again merged with the shadows. Up to this point I had been acting solely according to my own precise reckoning, but now I experienced a surge of inspiration: I took the suitcase from the passenger seat—it was packed tight and heavy, it looked decadent, like all expensive leather—and I found the key (because it was locked) in the pocket of the lawyer’s jacket, opened it up, and after crossing the parapet, I shook the contents out into the Moika (the second phone I no longer needed ended up there with a splash as well). And even empty the suitcase was still very heavy, as if the leather had preserved the memory of its crocodile—I just barely dragged it to the apartment, and only there, in the silence, did I call Stepanych (the phone was blinking with eight missed calls).
Stepanych was a bundle of nerves, but I cheered him up.
“Anton? I’m beside myself, I don’t think they were looking out for the guy.”
“Everything’s fine, Stepanych, the guy was looking out for himself.”
“What happened?”
I kept my silence.
“Okay, so it’s not a conversation for the phone.”
“Stepanych, I have the suitcase.”
“What? The suitcase?” Seemed that I managed to surprise him. “How?”
“It’s not a conversation for the phone. I got lucky.”
Stepanych remained silent for several moments, then asked me to wait a bit—I could hear him talking on another phone about the next flight.
“Now then, Anton, I’m getting on a plane, I’ll be there soon, we’ll talk it over.” A pause. “You know what? Your father and I were partners…”
“I know, Stepanych.”
“In a word, you surprised me.”
I couldn’t just sit there in the apartment. Or go to Toasted either—not only because I shouldn’t drink; the main thing was that either I would have to come back with Nadya (and thereby introduce a factor of unpredictability, which I didn’t need at all), or I would have to hint to her that she shouldn’t come today—and she would be sure to think that I’d paid for a girl. I had prepared everything—the suitcase was in the corner, the jacket on the bed—and I went out. It was raining buckets again, and on the embankment I took cover in a trolley—the whistling submarine was almost empty, so I took a seat by the window and observed, absolutely fascinated, how to my right over the abyss of the Neva hovered the specter of the fortress, and then the sparkling garland of palaces plunged and surfaced, and already across the river—from the broad bay of the square a trolley was dragged along into the narrow mouth of Nevsky Prospect. I still had three hours to kilclass="underline" I took a seat in the aquarium-like café and opened my laptop.