Those who stayed behind in town were struck by the silence that set solid in the streets, so dense it seemed possible to reach out and touch it. Little boys ran between the houses, sticking mug shots of Savage on the walls and entry ways. Above his picture, just like in a western, an award had been daubed in heavy ink. Saam raised it to three million.
«In memory of Coffin…»
«How are you going to pay?» Karimov asked him.
«Do you think they want the money? A hundred thousand's more than their wildest imaginings but they want blood. There's a wild beast in everyone. It's just that it can't get out. Give it its head and the whole pack will turn on its own!»
Karimov turned away in disgust. Outside, steam was coming out of the factory chimneys. The hills stood like sentries around the town. «There's a gangster in everyone and a prison guard too,» he thought. «And which you end up as depends on how the cards fall. Maybe you have to be both more than once in the course of a lifetime.»
In a small town, destinies are sewn together like patchwork. It only needs one to be ripped off for the stitching of the others to come out. Investigator Lapin roamed the quiet, deserted streets, looking at the pictures of Savage on every corner. He had been taught that to get an answer it helped to ask the right question. Now, though, Lapin had the answer in his pocket but there wasn't a question and he was trying to find one in the dust of the road and the faces of the downcast passers-by but it kept escaping from him like a criminal, vanishing around a corner. And yet the answer was written on every lamp-post and Lapin kept repeating it until it no longer made any sense.
«Savage, Savage,» mumbled the investigator, shaking his head. «Savage, Savage, SavageSavageSavage…»
A bar was open in a corner of an old house with dirty, peeling plaster. The grey bricks showed beneath like underwear. The cramped bar, packed to the ceiling, hummed like a hive and men, red-faced from the fug, stood around tall tables, blowing froth from their fat-bellied glasses and shuffling their feet. The bar took Lapin back to his childhood. His father would come here on Sundays, leaving him at the door. He would hastily down half a litre in one go, shake hands with friends, then taking his son by the hand, he would leave, ducking out of the low doorway. He would then buy him a small bar of chocolate and his son promised not to say a word about the bar to his mother: to keep shtum. He wouldn't have squealed anyway but the chocolate, like the glass of beer and the waiting by the door, were part of a ritual they observed for years until his father came home, beaten up, and cursing Coffin's gang.
Lapin moved towards a table where two workman with rough, dark faces exchanged placid invectives, seasoning their dispute with words as pungent as black pepper. One had lost his left eye and the other hid a crippled hand beneath the table. Lapin wondered whether they had been disfigured at the factory or in a drunken brawl.
«No, you ask him!» the one-eyed man said, issuing a challenge as he stared at Lapin with his single eye. «What's he say?»
«Exactly. What can he say?! It's a rotten generation,» came the dismissive reply.
«Maybe he has an opinion about that, about it being rotten?»
«A rotten opinion,» said his friend with another dismissive gesture.
Unable to resist, the one-eyed man himself leant towards Lapin.
«So, tell us, what can an ordinary person do when the cops are for sale and the courts are corrupt?»
Embarrassed, Lapin blushed, took a tissue out of his pocket and set about wiping down the sticky table.
«Go on then,» the one-eyed man insisted. «Does he have the right to take the law into his own hands?»
«Only if he's not doing something illegal,» Lapin blurted out, unsure how to answer.
The men exchanged a look.
«I told you, it's a rotten generation!»
«What if they did away with your mother, dragged off your wife and burnt your house down and everyone was in the pocket of the guy who did it?» the one-eyed man went on. «And then you took him out?»
«That's what prison's for,» replied Lapin, flushing more deeply still. «Otherwise what makes us better than gangsters?»
«When in Rome…» said the one-eyed man reaching for the nearest cliché.
«You can't fight killers by turning into one yourself or wipe out theft by stealing,» Lapin stubbornly maintained. «The court's for sale because we buy it and gangsters rule the roost because we've agreed to live by their rules.»
The men didn't answer, noses in their glasses. Their grim silence made Lapin uneasy and he left, without taking even a sip. He bought a chocolate bar from the stall. It fitted into the palm of his hand and, popping it in his mouth as he had as a child, he was sorry his father wasn't there with him to lift him up on his shoulders and tell him right from wrong and explain why his son's life was like an overcrowded tavern, where there were plenty of people but no-one to have a drink with.
The smoke of bonfires rose above the trees, and shouts and the barking of dogs were carried on the river, its waves the measure of its width. From his hill, Savage could see his pursuers in full view in the clearings among the trees. He could see the men stoking the flames and heating tins of food over the fire, eating hastily and throwing the tins for the dogs to lick clean. Salmon smacked her lips, imagining the aroma of the stew.
The more ground they covered, the gloomier people became, hearing in the murmur of the leaves the rustle of the banknotes promised as a reward for Savage's capture. When they came across one another, they pulled their hats down and hastened to hide in the trees.
Squelching through the swamp, a stumpy runt of a man, blue with tattoos, was on Savage's trail. His eyelids were without lashes and his heart without pity, his face hidden in scars. The first time he went to prison it was for killing two people in a fight and the second was for throwing a drinking companion out of a window because he declined to go to the shop. The runt didn't even have a knife with him, relying on fists as big as pumpkins. He had a torn-off mug shot of Savage in his pocket and would take it out in order to wind himself up still further. By the evening he was already looking on Savage as the source of all evils, hating him more than the prison guard who had burnt his face with a cigarette butt.
The one-eyed old man was more vicious, however. He took pleasure in killing, delighting in his bloodstained victims the way other hunters delighted in animal hides. His dog pulled on its lead as if it could sense that the fugitive was close at hand and the old man's one eye roamed over the forest as if his stare might be the net to catch Savage.
The soldiers wandered off in the forest like a herd of goats and the fat-faced officer dashed from side to side, gathering up his boys like mushrooms. Their lips were stained blue by berries and their smiles broader than a forest track. The soldiers massaged their shaved necks, itchy with gnat bites, and roared with laughter, pointing at one another. Picked up on the wind their laughter swept through the forest rolling down into the dank ravines. The soldiers covered miles of taiga and emerged on the rocky shore of a lake, so calm and smooth it seemed as easy to walk on as solid ground. They cast off their clothes and plunged into cold water that took their breath away. Their officer, stretched out on the shore, drank liquor from a flask and hesitated over whether to push on or turn back. He thought back to how Antonov used to supply food that was past its sell-by date and spurned even by the dogs while Coffin had bought up their weapons. He even got it into his head to acquire a grenade-launcher and was barely talked out of it. The entire unit had only a few submachine guns and many soldiers went right through their military service without firing a single shot. They were sent to work on municipal projects or construction sites and treated as gastarbeiter. The officer imagined himself in Savage's boots, shooting Coffin and strangling Antonov who choked on his own blood. Then he fled from his pursuers, the soldiers who had been put on his tail and the hunters with their dogs, who had oiled their guns as if they were chasing a wild animal. He could see his picture, pasted on the walls of the houses and imagined being surrounded and making a break for the border. He swallowed and thought he ought to go back, assume the role of a military court and shoot the unit commander. Tossing his flask aside, he jumped to his feet, yelling at the soldiers to get their kit on while his imagination painted the shooting scene.