When Stepanych walked into the café cheerful and guarded— the last time I’d seen him was ten years ago, but he was the same: gray hair buzzed short, fleshy face, shoulders like dumbbells, no eyelashes, wispy eyebrows, a smile as if to say that we’re off to the whorehouse now, and a repulsively familiar handshake— I had collected four dozen addresses in the form of a letter. I pressed send and went outside with Stepanych. The rain had already stopped: I would have gladly taken a stroll, but Stepanych didn’t go anywhere on foot—large emergency lights flashed by the doors of the Lexus with its tinted windows.
“So tell me, where are we going? And why not your father’s place?” Stepanych seemed like he wanted to pat me on the back.
“I can’t go there,” I said, turning away. “I rented an apartment. On Line 1.”
“We heard. Mikhail Viktorovich?” Mikhail Viktorovich looked like a trained bear: from under the hair on his hands you could see the blue of his tattoos. “The boss said that it was Line 1?”
“That’s right, Comrade Colonel.”
“Yes,” and now this was directed at me, “I understand you: alone, after something like that… You know, when it happened, I couldn’t believe it. Your old man suffered depression, now and again, but it never got so bad that he… He took on too much, you understand? But still, money can’t buy happiness, you agree?”
I said that I agreed. Nothing was reflected in the tinted windows. A wave of disgust and terror began to envelope me: thank God, it wasn’t far to go—we were practically the last ones to make it across the bridge and a minute later we were turning on to Syezdovskaya Street. I showed him where to park.
The whole time we were walking through the courtyard and climbing the stairs, I averted my gaze from the shadows and corners, so as not to see the old woman. Stepanych’s joking became more and more forced.
“You’re just like Lenin in Razliv.” I was already opening the door. “Guess only a communal apartment could beat this.” His voice filled the brightly lit room.
There wasn’t time to think whether I had turned off the lights or not—I stepped into the room, pointed at the suitcase in the corner, and walked to the blue patch of the jacket on the bed. I was on autopilot, acting according to my plan, which I had run through a thousand times in my head, but everything was swimming before my eyes and my hands became weak: the makeup bag wasn’t by the mirror and the jacket wasn’t in the same position as I had left it.
“Did you already open it?”
“What? I’ll give you the key right now.”
The key was in the pocket, but the Glock was gone. I tossed Stepanych the key, sat down on the bed, and, while he was fiddling with the lock, I listened to my heart beating so hard it seemed like it was hitting the bottom of my chest. My mouth was dry, sounds seemed to be coming to me from underwater, blinding light penetrated everything. Stepanych’s hulking figure appeared to take up half the room, he opened the suitcase, wheezing and swearing: from out of the suitcase a dead, bloodstained head with a sharp nose was looking at us, I felt sick, Stepanych took out a pistol from his jacket and aimed it at me, his mug was red, like a piece of raw meat, his eyes narrowed and had become predatory, he asked me what the fuck kind of game I was playing.
I forced myself to unstick my lips. “You know, Stepanych, when I realized it was you? I suspected you as soon as you offered to help, but I understood for sure when I put out that feeler here, and you called two days later to see whether I had told anybody. You couldn’t just sit tight. Well, and of course you thought that I was just a little fool”—I understood that he was listening, and if that was the case, then I needed to keep talking. “Everything worked out quite easily for you: you intimidate me, you show me a ‘90s’style shoot-out, evil Andrei Petrovich would hardly seize the company, and then good Uncle Stepanych would hint that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to sell everything off cheap, because after all we needed to hold onto the business to be a Stepanych, and Uncle Stepanych legally takes over the business of his old friend for a ridiculous price, and I don’t know anything about prices, so it’s the right thing to do. The funniest thing is that you were right about everything. Only I started feeling disgusted. How much would you have offered me, Stepanych? Would it have been enough to buy a Lexus? All the fall guys here ride around in a Lexus.”
“You psychotic little mongrel.”
“I don’t need all this crap, Stepanych, and my father didn’t need it either, only he didn’t understand that. But it would have made me sick to give it to the likes of you.”
“Where are the documents, you son of a bitch?” Stepanych yelled.
“You thought that you were hunting me, but I’ve backed you into a corner, Stepanych. And the papers are in the Moika. The documents are gone.”
Stepanych shouted for me to stop jerking him around, that I was a dead man, that I should tell him where the documents were, and that he was going to fuck me up good.
“Wake up, Stepanych,” I managed to say to him before I closed my eyes, signaling to Nadya, who was standing in the doorway, and she, as pale as a white bathroom tile, pressed the trigger and a shot rang out. “Wake up, you’re a dead man now.”
Laughing, I rolled out from under Stepanych, who was falling on top of me.
IV
I was getting ready to ask Nadya to leave with me, not knowing whether she would agree or not, but now she didn’t have a choice: I calmed her down with cognac and handed her the passport. She opened it and looked at her photograph.
“Isolde?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It’s not that… Will they come looking for us?”
“Yes. But they won’t find us.”
“I just wanted a look, I was curious. Was it very expensive?”
“A passport is just a piece of paper. Passports aren’t expensive, people’s trust is.”
We were sitting in the kitchen on the windowsill, the city was emerging from darkness, and you could see that overnight yellow fluff had covered the lindens in the Rumyantsev Garden. The first cars were streaming along the embankment: it was time. Nadya took a look at the tickets.
“I’ve never been to Sweden. And where do we go afterward?”
“Lisbon,” I joked.
“Why?”
“You must remember this…” I sang. She took up the melody and sang it almost in a whisper, while I put our things in the backpack.
It was icy and clear outside. Somewhere high up you could see white archipelagos of clouds against the blue ocean of the sky, and right overhead, just barely clearing the roofs of the houses, flocks of large grayish fish floated westward. We walked to the embankment and down to the water by the Krusenstern monument— I threw the package with the pistol and phone into the water. As we were climbing the stairs back up, I gasped in surprise—a hunchbacked old woman with a three-corned kerchief on her head was shuffling along the embankment, and when she turned to get a look at us, I saw her kind, round face and her big plastic-framed glasses. She was simply an old woman, she was feasting her eyes on us. Holding hands, we ran across the street and hailed a car to take us to the sea terminal. The radio was on in the car, and the news was about “the branch of a large company, whose owner three weeks ago…”—the yokel switched stations.
As we made our way—registration, passport control, security— to our cabin, exhaustion was transformed into a light emptiness in my head, I finally had a drink, we undressed and crawled into bed. I kissed her and embraced her; she resisted until the last and became tender only when there was no place left to go. Then she embraced me—the way you embrace a beloved being.