“Fine,” he said. “Fine. Don’t rush.”
Not that he was going to take any of their money, of course, despite the fact that they never gave him anything and surely owed him by now—no, he wouldn’t even check how much there was, not until she rounded the corner—and not then either. He stuffed the wallet in his pocket and stood staring into space. After a while, the air abruptly grew a shade grayer, as if some giant fish in the cloudy waters over which the skies were sailing had flipped belly up, turning toward him its darker back. Snowflakes began to scratch his exposed face, hands, neck with tiny needles of wetness. “About time!” a voice shrieked ahead.
Emerging from his trance, Alexander peered into the drifting snow.
The kiosk shutter had been lifted, its insides lit. He saw the top of a woman’s head bent in the window. Oh great, he thought, and I don’t even know how many napkins Mother wants or whatever; but, since the circumstances seemed to call for it, he pulled the wallet out anyway, and glanced inside—and was startled to find a handful of large bills, more than he had ever seen at once, two months’ salary at least, he estimated, holding his breath now.
“Can anyone tell me what the devil they’re selling?” a man’s gruff voice asked in his ear.
His face hot, Alexander snapped the wallet shut. “No clue,” he muttered, turning.
The man was his father’s age, dressed in an oversized torn jacket, his chin unevenly sketched out with stubble, his right cheekbone slapped with the shadow of an old bruise.
“Hold my place, will you,” he said happily, sending an exhalation of mingled drink and sweat toward Alexander, and ambled off.
“Thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, that one,” someone threw after him with disapproval. “Better men have tried and failed.”
The line was already contracting, gathering itself, rearing up like a caterpillar about to creep forth. Alexander waited, clutching the wallet tightly. People shuffled forward one by one; he could now make out, in the glare of the lightbulb, the darkening roots of the kiosk woman’s bright hair. The afternoon was just beginning to vibrate with the aftershocks of some heated altercation at the kiosk window when the man in the torn jacket returned.
“Concert tickets,” he declared, and spat richly on the ground. “Can you believe it? All these fools have waited days for concert tickets!”
The announcement dropped into the crowd, and a heavy, openmouthed silence settled on it. Then a chorus of troubled voices rippled through, widening like circles on the water.
“Concert?”
“Did someone say ‘concert’?”
“What kind of concert, did you hear?”
The man choked on a curt laugh. “Folk dancing, boot-slapping, waltzing, violin-trilling, it’s all the same to me, I’m not hanging around for some symphony. It’s freezing, my throat’s dry, I’m off to get myself something to warm up and cheer the soul. How about it, my friend?”
“Me? Sure, whatever,” Alexander said with a nonchalant shrug, and abandoned his place in the line.
They moved through the frozen black-and-white city in silence.
“So, do your tastes run to simple or refined?” the man asked after a few blocks.
Alexander looked at him blankly.
“Vodka or cognac?” the man elaborated.
Alexander thought of the time when he and two classmates had met after school, emptied their pockets of ice cream money, bus money, absentminded neighbors’ money, sent in the tallest of the three, whose upper lip was already shaded with the premonition of a mustache, and afterward sat for some hours on a bench in the park, waiting for the darkness to dim their eager conspiratorial faces. Later they passed the bottle one to another until the world grew bright and angry before turning muddled, which was when the third classmate, the one without a mustache, claimed that this stuff wasn’t real vodka anyway but some horrible cheap concoction corroding their innards, even as he took another, unfairly generous swill, and that it probably wouldn’t burn if they set a match to it. Alexander left to accost frightened passersby for matches, and by the time he came back his two classmates had quarreled terribly and the shorter of the two had a cracked lip, though in the end he turned out to have been right, for a poisonous purplish, or maybe bluish, flame flickered briefly, then went out, and Alexander was spectacularly sick in the bushes.
“I’m a cognac man,” he said.
“Excellent, I know just the thing, then,” said the man merrily.
They strode through the streets, diving into alleys, cutting across passageways, walking in the shadow of a drunken fence for a spell. Alexander prided himself on knowing his neighborhood down to every boil of graffiti on its concrete expanses, but he was beginning to feel disoriented by the time the man stopped to pull open the door of an old apartment building. Pale spills of the January daylight dimly fleshed out an unclean staircase descending into nether regions, its top steps gleaming with the slush of many snow-coated footsteps.
Alexander hesitated on the threshold. He had no idea where he was.
“Care to join me, then?” the man’s voice boomed from the bottom of the stairs. “Don’t worry, you’ll be all right if you stick with me.” And when Alexander caught up, the slippery steps he had run down resounding like deep, rapid beats in his heart, he guessed at a quick brightening of the man’s teeth in the underground murk. “Of course, if you tell anyone about this little place, well—” Smiling still, the man drew a finger across his throat.
With a cold kind of thrill, Alexander realized he did not know whether the man was joking.
They traveled through low, faintly lit corridors at a brisk pace, pipes erupting moistly beside them, pockets of sudden hot air gushing into their faces with the concentrated smells of fried onions and detergent from the floors above. Then the man veered off, threw his shoulder against a wall. Invisible hinges moaned, and unexpectedly they were outside, stepping into a large courtyard closed off by low buildings.
Alexander halted. A derelict church slumped among the snowdrifts in the middle of the yard, gilt still streaking down its domes, shallow lakes of paint splashed on the peeling plaster. Of course, there were dozens like it in the city, tucked away in many forgotten, decaying corners, some with laundry drying between the twisted columns of their porches, others echoing shelters for colonies of crows or packs of homeless dogs; yet what surprised him about this one was the restless, purposeful activity he seemed to detect underneath its sagging arches.
He squinted to see better.
Strikingly stylish fellows were darting in and out of the gaping doorway.
“Hey there, you awake?” the man tossed over his shoulder as he too disappeared inside the ruin. Alexander ran.
When the church’s shadow fell over him, the brisk, frosty air of the midwinter day seemed to alter, growing somehow looser, damper; unsettling smells of urine, dust, and dissolution reached him through the slits of the empty windows above. Again he hesitated, then, with a small shudder, followed the echoes of the man’s assured steps inside. The sun had not yet set, but it was almost night within; the chill deepened here, and the cavernous dimness hung heavy on the crossing beams of many lanterns. Their flares of cold white light called into transient existence the hands, boots, faces of men loitering among a bewildering profusion of objects piled on invisible crates along the walls or revealed in brief flashes from under the sleek lining of the men’s leather jackets. As Alexander hurried across the ancient stones, trying not to wonder about the unpleasant sound of something bone-dry crunching underfoot, he glimpsed a bouquet of silver spoons with intricate handles; a pitcher with a pointy stopper that broke a flashlight’s ray into pieces and threw one jagged bright edge into his eyes; a fanned-out pack of curious-looking pictures, which appeared tantalizingly as so many pale curves in the shifting twilight and at which he wouldn’t have minded taking a closer peek; a magnificent, hefty knife, right next to the cracked icon of an old saint whose stark gaze condensed out of the darkness and pursued him uncomfortably for a few steps before melting back into the darkness; a small army of bottles glinting in a pool of light from a kerosene lamp hanging on a hook overhead—