Without speaking, the woman gave me slippers, choosing one of the larger pairs out of a drove of them loitering around the door. Las didn’t bother to take his shoes off – and she didn’t react to that either.
Strange. Such simple habits are usually the most stable of all. She should either have asked both of us to change our shoes or not bothered to offer me any slippers, in keeping with the fashionable European traditions that are so slow to take hold in Moscow, with its wet climate and its mud.
There was a skinny kid sitting on the sofa in the sitting room with a laptop on his knees. From the laptop a wire snaked across the floor to a pair of speakers. The young lad looked at us and turned down the volume of the speakers but he didn’t even say hello, which was really strange for an eastern boy. I scanned his aura too. Human.
‘This way …’
We followed the woman through to the bedroom. She opened the door to let us go on in and, without speaking, closed it behind us, staying out in the hallway.
Oh, something bad was going on around here …
Bisat Iskenderov was lying on the made-up bed in just his shorts and singlet, watching the TV hanging on the wall facing the bed. Everything in the place was in average Moscow style, with almost no national character at all, absolutely no personal touch: furniture from IKEA, a carpet at the head of the bed (I thought they didn’t hang them up like that any longer, that the tradition had died out with the old, stagnant Brezhnev days), a women’s magazine on one of the night tables, an anthology of detective stories on the other. A bedroom like that could have been in any Russian town or city. The man lying on the bed could have been Ivan the manager or Rinat the builder.
I don’t like flats that don’t bear the stamp of their owner.
‘Hello, Bisat,’ I said. ‘We’re from the department. What happened to you? Are you ill?’
Bisat looked at me and shifted his gaze back to the screen. It was showing a popular programme – a young female doctor with kind eyes was telling people about periproctitis. ‘And now we’ll ask someone wearing a T-shirt or a shirt without a collar to come up on stage from the audience …’
‘Hello,’ Bisat replied. ‘Nothing happened. I’m fine.’
‘But you abandoned your watch …’ I said.
And I looked at him through the Twilight.
At first I thought there must be something wrong with me.
Then I realised it wasn’t me. But that wasn’t reassuring at all.
‘Las, take a peek at his aura …’ I said quietly.
Las wrinkled up his forehead and answered: ‘I can’t seem to see it …’
‘That’s because it isn’t there,’ I confirmed.
Bisat waited patiently while we talked. Then he answered: ‘I abandoned the watch because there was no point in staying on duty.’
‘Tell me about the man you talked to before you left,’ I said.
‘I don’t get this,’ Las said thoughtfully. ‘Are there really people who don’t have any aura?’
‘Now, imagine that the neck of the T-shirt is really …’ the female presenter told us from the screen.
‘Before I left I talked to Dima Pastukhov,’ said Bisat. ‘He’s a decent man …’
‘Before that!’ I told him. ‘Before Dima!’
‘Before Dima I talked to the woman in the tobacco kiosk,’ said Bisat. ‘She’s quite an attractive woman, but very thin …’
‘No, wait,’ I told him. ‘Bisat, when Pastukhov got stomach cramps and he went into the airport building – remember? You stopped a man coming out of the arrivals hall …’
‘But he wasn’t a man,’ Bisat objected very calmly.
‘Then who was he?’ I exclaimed.
‘I don’t know,’ Bisat said as imperturbably as ever. ‘But not a man. There aren’t any people like that.’
‘All right, tell me what this not-man looked like,’ I told him. ‘And what you talked about.’
‘He …’ For the first time Bisat thought about his answer. He even displayed a certain degree of animation, reaching out his hand and scratching his stomach. ‘He had light hair. Very tall. A short beard. Blue eyes. I asked him for his ID. He said there was no need for that. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. I … I was going to ask him what he thought he was doing. But I didn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘Your partner Dima described this … not-man … differently.’
‘I don’t know how he described him,’ Bisat replied calmly.
I sighed, gathered together a little Power in my hand and cast the Socrates spell – a temporary but irresistible desire to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth – in the policeman’s direction.
Hurtling through the Twilight, the hazy blob of the spell passed straight through Bisat and carried on through the wall out into the street. Oh-oh, now someone was in for it …
‘Try the “Dominant”,’ suggested Las.
I shook my head, looking at the man lying on the bed. A normal man, who couldn’t care less about anything now. He had no aura. And spells passed clean through him.
‘That won’t help. Let’s go, Las.’
‘But …’
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
Bisat turned back to the screen again. The presenter was happily explaining: ‘And so, in these delicate folds and wrinkles …’
The policeman’s wife was waiting for us in the hallway. The music was still playing, only more quietly now.
‘We’ll be going,’ I said awkwardly. ‘You know … you’ll probably get more phone calls. And people will call round … from work.’
‘I want to take him away,’ the woman said suddenly.
‘Where to?’
‘Home … To Azerbaijan. There’s an otachi there – Yusuf. He cures people with herbs. He cures everything. He’s not just a herb doctor, he’s a gam.’
‘A wizard?’ I asked.
The woman nodded and pursed her lips tightly.
‘Take him,’ I said. ‘Only first show him to our healer, all right?’
The woman looked at me suspiciously.
‘He’ll come to see you today,’ I said. ‘A good healer. Believe me.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ the woman asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted.
‘It’s like he’s lost his soul,’ said the woman.
‘Wait for the healer,’ I told her.
We walked out of the flat. I looked into the Twilight – the blue moss had crept even further away from the door. It didn’t like what was going on in there.
‘Come on, Las,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to see Gesar, and quick.’
But we had to stop for a minute outside the building. Standing in front of the entrance was a young couple – a girl with an expression of simultaneous fury and bewilderment on her face and a young man who was declaring enthusiastically: ‘And I only kissed your sister, and that was when I was drunk. But I slept with Lenka once, she came round when you were out …’
‘We have to tidy things up here,’ I decided. ‘I’ll deal with the girl, and you remove the Socrates from the guy and make him forget everything.’
‘Do we really have to?’ Las asked pensively. ‘It’s his own fault – let him take the consequences.’
‘Mistakes have to be corrected,’ I said. ‘At least, those that can be corrected.’