«You're like someone colour blind. You don't distinguish half-tones,» the prosecutor smirked. «But, after all, life isn't black and white.»
«What is it then?» Lapin asked, looking up.
«Grey.»
Lapin yelled inwardly, «It's grey for grey people and black and white for black and white people!» Aloud, he said nothing. But, as if he'd read his response, the prosecutor's face suddenly darkened and, spinning round on his heels, he left without saying goodbye.
They didn't meet again after that evening and when Lapin called at his boss's office, he ran up against the thick mascara of his secretary's eyelashes like bayonets at the ready.
He had now spent an hour sitting outside the prosecutor's office but no-one asked him in.
«Perhaps he's forgotten about me?» he asked, leaning towards the secretary as she typed. She was wearing a brightly coloured spotted dress and her full breasts swelled above the neckline like rising dough.
«He doesn't forget anything,» the woman ground out in irritation. «He's busy.»
Lapin attempted to count the spots on her dress and lost count every time. Noticing the investigator staring at her fixedly, the woman looked him up and down contemptuously. Lapin got up and walked the length of the shelves laden with files. He drew a finger over them to count them, reading all the titles on the spines, then sat down again. Suddenly, he leapt for the door to his boss's office and yanked the handle with all his strength.
Looking up, the secretary gazed at him in triumph.
«It's locked!»
Lapin flopped onto a chair.
«Is he there?» he asked without any particular hope.
The woman didn't answer. She continued to type, burying herself in the flashing screen. Squinting short-sightedly, she dictated something quietly to herself and, by reading her lips Lapin could make out an official letter couched in bureaucratic tongue-twisters.
The office door swung wide open, slamming into the wall, and his boss emerged.
«Ah, Lapin,» he said, distracted, wiping his glasses on the edge of his jacket. «Don't sit there. I'm busy. Get back to work.»
«But the Savage case…» the investigator tried to say.
«There is no Savage case!» the prosecutor broke in. «It's gone back to the police. There's a new suspect in the case and Missing Persons are handling Savage now.»
Lapin was taken aback but the prosecutor donned the expression he reserved for feisty defence lawyers.
«It's got nothing to do with you anymore. And stop getting under my feet!»
Lapin ran into the senior investigator on the stairs. He was running up taking two steps at a time. Lapin grabbed the stair rail and decided he wouldn't get out of his way but since he didn't step aside either they bumped shoulders painfully.
Turning round, the senior investigator measured Lapin with a glance, looking him up and down, and said, with a sneer:
«You know, life is just like being in court. Some people get to be the judge, some get to be the prosecutor and some live their lives as if they are on the bench facing trumped up charges!»
Severina had disappeared as though she'd never existed. A new cleaner had appeared at the banya, a young girl with short legs, bleached hair and a nose ring. She walked barefoot on the cold ground and spat in her hands before taking up her mop.
«So where's the girl who was here before you?» Lapin asked, catching her at the door.
«How should I know?» she said dismissively. «I never saw her.»
«Do many people ask about her?»
«Saam goes on about it every day: has she turned up, is there any news, has anyone said anything…»
After the children's home, Severina was assigned a room in a hostel with an ashtray-stinking corridor, where the light bulbs were always being stolen. There was a shared shower on every floor. The shower room was small and dark as a larder and the water drained away through a black hole in the floor. The shower itself was made from a thick hose, fixed to the tap. The doors had been staved in and the women would put up a shower curtain, while the men washed in full view, splashing water into the corridor so that puddles formed in the corners.
The plank floor buckled as if someone had been buried beneath it. It seemed about to kiss the low ceiling that was losing flakes of dirty plaster. Her own room was so small that Severina felt like she was putting a tee-shirt on when she went in and with two people it became tight as a coffin. «It might be like a gas chamber but it's mine!» the girl said, running her hand along the painted wall.
Severina was rarely in the hostel, making her way to her room late at night when no-one could see her. She would lock the door and tiptoe in an attempt to prevent the floorboards creaking. She wouldn't answer any knocks at the door, pretending she wasn't there. She was afraid of the police coming after her but they had long since forgotten all about her and only Lapin collared her and tried to persuade her to tell him all she knew. Severina maintained a stubborn silence.
Lapin couldn't forget her begging change for cigarettes from passers-by, then marking out hopscotch on the road and hopping, a smoking cigarette held tightly between her teeth. Sometimes she had seemed to be a little woman, at others a child who had grown up too soon. Now she had aged as if her life had gathered pace like someone running on the spot. She was visibly shrivelling and it was almost impossible to recognize the person who used to be Severina in the unsightly, pinched little old woman with the burnt face. The girls at the banya nicknamed her Salmon and it stuck like a leech. She even used the nickname herself.
Lapin was often at the banya, waiting for Severina behind a thick pine, sticky with resin, and she would sneak away from the prying attendant to go and see him. They would walk in the forest where no-one could see them together. Lapin would bring news from town in the hope that the girl would soon decide to make the confessions he was sure were on the very tip of her tongue, and Severina would ask about Coffin's murder as if she was hoping for new details from each retelling.
«The chair toppled over and Coffin fell to the floor. There was blood everywhere. Savage threw the gun away and ran out of the square,» said Lapin for the umpteenth time.
«Didn't anyone stop him?» Severina asked, kicking a stone on the path with the toe of her shoe. «Didn't anyone go after him?»
«No! It was as if they'd all been struck by lightning!»
«So who killed Trebenko? Was that him too?» The colonel's smug face rose before them.
Lapin shrugged: «Hardly. One of his own people.»
«What about Antonov?»
The investigator shook his head, kicking the cap off a worm-eaten mushroom with his boot.
«It was him,» the girl said with certainty. «I know. He'll kill them all. Tell me how he shot Coffin again!» she asked and, laughing, Lapin told it all over again from the very beginning.
After Krotov's death Severina vanished without trace and Lapin had little hope of seeing her alive again.
On his way back from the banya, he went through the forest, thinking back to the day he had given her the teddy bear she hid drugs in and thought that life always makes blind use of us. There was no Severina, no elderly watchman thrown on the bench outside the police station with his neck wrung, no Krotov promising support, there was just tiny little Lapin, all on his own, plodding through the rusty-yellow autumn forest where he was as much alone as he was in town. The trees exchanged whispers as if swapping the latest news. The wind like a drunken bully-boy buffeted his back. Dry leaves lay like handprints on the pale reindeer lichen and Lapin remembered Savage who was no doubt roaming the taiga now, imagining like him that the trees were gossiping and the wind jostled him challenging him to a fight.
There, in the path, arms crossed, stood Saam. Lapin started and looked around. He slowed his pace and the gangster sneered, taking an unfiltered cigarette from behind his ear and rolled it in his fingers.