Justice is blind. It wears a blindfold when it passes judgement. The innocent are always hardest hit. Savage was fed up of being the scapegoat of his own destiny. He set about putting right his mistakes as if his former life had been merely a sketch that he had now decided to rewrite, with the sin of doing nothing his main transgression. In the past, he would imagine slapping his boss across the face as he stood to attention in front of him. He would lower his gaze when he saw his daughter with the gangsters and stay silent when he longed to call out. He had thought mistakes were actions but now he had suddenly realized that the biggest mistakes of our lives are actions we don't carry out, the turnings we don't take, the words we don't say. No-one can enter the same river twice but life can be lived twice or several times over in a single life time, re-drawing its length and breadth. Or it's possible not to live even one life, leaving behind miles of roads untraveled and rivers of unshed tears and to die without being born. Savage had been born on that evening in the square when he shot Coffin and read his life's new commandment in the latter's evil gaze: «Thou shalt kill!»
Carefully lifting the trapdoor, he tried to make out the conversations coming from Antonov's flat. It seemed as if he could see the Councillor's wife through the wall in her flowing silk housecoat, pacing from room to room, lips pursed, tormented by boredom. When she left the house, the scent of her expensive perfume lingered in the entrance hall and Savage knew from the smell that she had gone out.
The Antonovs had a servant. She was a grey-haired woman who had come from a closed factory settlement, leaving behind the grave of her husband, twenty years of her life and her futile hopes. The Antonovs used her patronymic rather than her first name and the latter had been erased from her memory. Mumbling away to herself, she called herself simply Petrovna. Savage recognized her by her shuffling gait and the sigh with which she put her heavy shopping bags down on the floor while she looked for the keys to the flat.
Antonov came home early. He sniffed at the stale odour that had appeared in the entrance hall. His bodyguards escorted him right to the door. Savage lay above the trapdoor but hung back, listening to Petrovna babbling as she opened the door to Antonov. In a flash of insight, he realized his plan was crazy, he would never pull it off, and he laughed at himself, wondering how he had ever dared to think he could. He had been mocked by the words «even a fly would hurt him» and now all of a sudden he had decided he was a cold-blooded killer. But then the hunger that blurred his thoughts dulled his feelings and only an animal fury remained. As Savage fell into a half sleep, his teeth chattered in anticipation of what he was about to do.
Savage heard the clatter of the lift arriving and looked through the crack. Saam stood on the landing and two of his henchmen had gone to the floor below. The gangster rang the bell, one long note and three short ones, and Savely realized it was a prearranged signal.
Antonov came out in his dressing gown, sleepy and bad-tempered. Saam lent in to whisper in his ear.
«Savage? Bollocks!» exclaimed the Councillor pulling away. «No-one else it can be! I've checked out my guys. I've got rid of the others. Who else is there?»
Antonov shivered:
«Even a stick may fire once in a blue moon, but twice and you've got a serial killer.»
«So who's next?» Saam grinned, raising his eyebrows.
«Do you think he's not all there?» asked Antonov.
«Are you really bothered if the guy who kills you is crazy or not?»
Antonov thought back to his conversation with Krotov but hesitated to relay it to Saam.
«You're looking in the wrong place,» he said choosing his words carefully. «Someone set you up. It's too complicated for an avenger of the people.»
Saam could read wrinkles and find hidden meaning in what was left unsaid and the pauses between words. He believed there was a double bottom in everyone and didn't even trust himself. He could sense Antonov wasn't telling him the whole story but he didn't know how to make him talk. Stamping out his cigarette with his heel, he ran down the stairs without saying goodbye. With a frightened check round the corners, Antonov hurried back into the flat, making sure all the locks were securely fastened.
The hallucinations brought on by hunger made the world seem distorted, grotesque and alien. They had frightened Savage in the beginning but he soon got used to them, unable to tell his morbid fantasies and reality apart. After the taiga, living within four walls was like being in a coffin: the walls closed in, the ceiling appeared about to collapse and the floor seemed to be an oozing, squelching swamp so that Savage was constantly running his hand over it to persuade himself it was made of concrete and the squelching sounds were coming from the leaky pipes. Hunger made his stomach ache as if he'd swallowed a knife and his head hurt from the constant dizziness. He lay on a mattress, feeling like a rag doll unable to move without a puppet master.
That Saturday evening, however, he felt ten times stronger as if someone had pulled invisible strings to set his wizened body in motion. Antonov tumbled out of the lift, laughing contentedly and giving off a harsh smell of brandy that reached even the attic. Dismissing his bodyguards, he disappeared through the iron door that snapped shut like a prison cell. Savage descended from his sanctuary and rang the bell — one long note and three short ones — his hand over the spy hole. Antonov rattled the locks. «Who is it?» he asked in a drunken drawl as he threw open the door. Seeing a filthy, ragged down-and-out, he pulled a face and was about to slam the door, when Savage stuck out his foot. It was then that Antonov, instantly sober, recognized the foul-smelling tramp as Savage. He stamped on Savely's foot but the latter grabbed his shirt front and pulled him close, his stale breath making Antonov feel ill. He pushed Savage away and he tumbled down the stairs, almost breaking his neck. Everything went black and he struggled to get his breath, gulping in air like a fish out of water. Savage felt his face and realized he'd broken his nose. It was leaning drunkenly to one side. Antonov hurled himself at Savage and started kicking him as if he were beating a carpet. But Savely didn't feel the blows and only thought that even a film hero would have passed out by now whereas he still lay there, clutching his wire in his bloody hands. The drunken Antonov could hardly stand, collapsing onto Savage who threw the wire round his neck. He was no longer aware of any pain or terror or revulsion. He pulled the noose tighter, listening to Antonov splutter as the blood choked him. Savage remembered him as the fat little boy at school who had turned away when he offered him his hand. «If we could be told the story of our lives like the libretto for a ballet,» Savage thought, «or meeting a person we could see in a flash everything that we'd go through, we would go mad. You can't cheat Fate. She will deceive you time and again and God forbid that you should come across her when she's out of temper!»
Lying beside the now limp body, Savage was about to sink into the oblivion of sleep. «Daughters flower after hours»: Coffin's voice rang in his head. «After hours indeed!» And Savely hit the body in the face. He looked at Antonov, disfigured in death, gathered his last strength and crawled down the stairs as if he'd lost the use of his legs. Blood streamed from his broken nose, leaving stains on the steps.