Saam looked him up and down and then stood and headed for the exit.
«Put the music on. Let them enjoy themselves. So that they don't go away and say our town's mean and inhospitable!» he called to the barman and the speakers screamed back into action.
In the morning, shivering in the cold wind, the Muscovites stuck three puffy-faced girls into a car and off they went through the sleeping streets, the horn blaring as loudly as possible. The rest of the girls, dragging their feet, left the bar and melted into backstreets and alley-ways where their heels rang out in the quietness.
The disappearance of the visitors from Moscow, who failed to return to their hotel, was discovered in the afternoon when they didn't show up at the factory either. They didn't answer their mobiles and their hire car had last been seen at the Three Lemons. With a shrug the bouncers said their guests had left in the morning, taking three girls with them, and the barman produced a lengthy bill with four zeros together with the broken crockery. The alarm was sounded in the evening and the police alerted. Patrol cars wailed, rooftop lights flashing, as they hurtled along the forest roads.
«We're all visitors in the North!» a bittern boomed in the bushes as they brought the smashed car, full of broken bodies, up from an overgrown gully.
It was quiet and empty in the bar. The cleaner swept away the drunken laughter that had crept into the cracks between the floor boards, the trampled cigarette butts and the sweet wrappers. A fan chased away the stale air that had gathered below the ceiling. The chairs were put on the tables, legs up, and the women's dust-grey yearning hung in tatters from the cobwebs.
«Southerners are greedy,» said the barman, resuming his usual line with a little yawn as he wiped the glasses. «People in the temperate zone are evil…»
Saam picked at his eggs distractedly agreeing with his chatter.
«And we're hospital here in the North!»
«What about Muscovites?» Saam looked up at the barman, his pupils narrowed like a snake's ready to pounce.
«Muscovites are rich,» the barman replied without batting an eyelid. «But they don't know when to stop.»
Savage woke early in the morning before the alarm clock went off. He was woken by the sound of car horns and shouting coming from the street. Bare branches traced the sky and banged on the window and Savage had a vision of Antonov hammering on the glass, his hands reaching for his throat.
A leaky tap took him back to the taiga reminding him of the wash-stand the Saami had rigged up from a plastic bottle suspended from a tree. In the mornings, Salmon, sputtering like a cat, washed her face in the icy water and her cheeks turned so red they looked frost-bitten. Savage drove away these recollections that tore at his heart. In the corridor, he bumped into his daughter coming back from a party. Vasilisa smelled of brandy and acrid male sweat. The kisses on her lips gave her away.
«Let's get away from here, little one,» Savage suggested, taking her chin in his hand. «There are so many towns. Pick any of them!»
«You go,» Vasilisa muttered drunkenly. «No-one'll miss you.»
Swaying she went to her room where she collapsed, fully dressed, onto the bed.
Here and there the lamp-posts still displayed the yellowed pictures of Savage although he had long since become a victim rather than a criminal. People had discussed his ordeals, spicing up what they'd heard with inventions of their own, until their tongues were swollen with gossip. And the plump woman, who was hanging her washing out on the balcony, already believed that she had actually seen Karimov aiming a gun at Coffin.
«Mum, did he kill them all or not?» asked Vasilisa, rubbing her puffy eyes. «Sometimes I don't think he actually fired.»
Mrs Savage tore herself away from her love story and looked her daughter up and down.
«If he'd been capable of killing someone…» she began. She pursed her lips and slammed the book closed. «If he'd been capable of anything at all, I would have lived like Antonov's wife — half the year on holiday, the other half at the beautician's.»
Vasilisa lay down beside her, her head on her mother's shoulder, and thought back to the night in Antonov's car, when he stroked her legs as he talked to her father through the open window.
«I sometimes think that what never happened did happen and what actually happened was made up…» she whispered, gnawing at a hangnail.
Mrs Savage hugged her daughter. She recalled how a blushing Savely had been too shy to speak to her and had bought her a bunch of roses that he left on window sill in the lobby, unable to bring himself to give it to her. She read once in a women's magazine that «a domineering man makes a good lover but a hen-pecked man makes a good husband». Frosted lipstick in place, she had pressed his bell. Savage hovered self-consciously at the door and she went in without being asked. The next morning, she kissed him on the forehead and proposed. Now, as she looked back over their life together she felt that her past was full of gossip, advice, film serials, empty chatter and other people's husbands like a scarecrow stuffed with straw, like an old glossy magazine that becomes unbearably dull when you've seen its tawdry headlines a thousand times.
Knocking gently, she pushed open the door of her husband's room and, sinking into a chair in front of him, she stared at the bridge of his nose. Savage switched the TV off with the remote and silence hung in the room like an axe.
Savely looked at his wife as she sat in the chair but what he saw was her, stretched out on the ground, pulling off her boot with its broken heel, and running through the forest barefoot, swearing, as she tried to keep up with Saam. «He won't last long in the forest. Where else is he going to go? He hasn't got any friends or relatives» — her words rang in his ears and Savage thought that women have many faces and none of them is real.
«Savely,» his wife began, crossing her legs. It occurred to them both that this was the first time she had used her husband's name. «Savely, tell me, did you kill them all?»
Biting her lip, she straightened her housecoat with a nervous gesture. Savage said nothing, looking at his wife in consternation, twisting the control he was holding and choosing his words carefully.
The previous day she had been with the lover she saw whenever his wife went to visit her sick mother. Toppling her onto the marital bed, he tickled her neck with a moustache as stiff as a brush.
«For three months he lived in the woods, frightened of being sent to jail for something he didn't do,» the man laughed as he unbuttoned her blouse. «You can't find losers like that for love or money.»
Mrs Savage pushed him away in a fury.
«He'll come and kill you for sleeping with his wife. We'll see how much you laugh when you get shot in the head.» She tried to fasten up her blouse but got the buttons mixed up.
She broke her long nails trying to fasten it and the saying went round in her head that «once you've missed the first button hole, you'll never finish the job».
The man paled and put an arm around her shoulders in an attempt to make amends.
«Did you hear what he did to Antonov?» Mrs Savage ground out vengefully. She pulled down her skirt and the man's eyes bulged.
When she was putting on her coat and straightening her hair at the mirror, he suddenly burst out laughing.
«Oh, come on. He apologizes when you tread on his foot. They're calling him Sissy at work. Can you imagine?» He continued to laugh, pulled off her coat and laid her down on the floor.
Mrs Savage continued to fiddle with the edge of her housecoat, looking curiously at her husband.
«Savely,» she said again and her voice trembled. «Please tell me you killed them!»
She moved to sit next to him on the bed and covered his hand with her own hot one that to him felt as cold as a corpse's.