The crowd was predominantly female and elderly, and Fyodor was growing disappointed, until the smell of lamb and cilantro attracted his attention. Like most heavy drinkers, he was not particularly interested in food, but the kebob shack from which the smells emanated seemed like a good place for the racketeers to congregate.
Oksana apparently thought the same-she sniffed the air and swallowed hard.
"Maybe they're in there, Fyodor said. Let's check it out."
"I'm hungry, Oksana said.
He should've felt guilty at that. Instead, he cased the market for the shoppers absorbed in examining the wares and the seams on the garments, liable as they were to fall apart at the slightest provocation. He walked past them, his hands now steady, dipping casually into pockets and purses, until a sweaty crumpled wad of bills lay in his hand. All set, he told Oksana. Come on, we'll get you something to eat. And for your rats, too."
The rats responded with enthusiastic shuffling under his coat, pressing to get closer to the sleeve openings.
Fyodor and Oksana entered the shack, indistinguishable from any other establishment of this sort. A sweaty individual in a wifebeater manned the counter, and the dense smells of onions and lamb mingled with the more delicate fragrance of cilantro and chives. The plastic tables stood empty, except for the one at the corner, where tobacco smell and low male voices hung thick. Out of the corner of his eye Fyodor noticed a swath of maroon and a flash of yellow, and stepped to the counter to order. They took their plastic plates filled with kebobs-chunks of greasy charred meat and a pitiful scattering of herbs for garnish-to the table by the door, where they could watch the thugs unobtrusively. Fyodor was tempted to get a shot of vodka, but decided against it. For once, he judged sobriety preferable. Besides, it was expensive nowadays. Gorbachev's quaint attempts to ennoble the national character by discouraging drinking were getting on Fyodor's nerves, and even though the push for alcohol-free weddings (which, Fyodor supposed, would eventually lead to immaculate conceptions) was largely over, prices never fell to their pre-Gorbachev levels.
Apparently, the thugs at the other table felt the same way. They were involved in an animated discussion about using a pressure cooker to make moonshine. It's perfect, one of them said. Judging by his sloping shoulders and mangled ears, he was a retired boxer. In a small apartment, yeah? You can use sugar, or grain, or potatoes, and then just distill it with the pressure cooker. I have a fermenting jar, fits behind the sofa in the kitchen, it's maybe thirty liters. Takes like an hour to put it through the pressure cooker to distill. Good stuff, barely smells or anything, and no hangover."
"My neighbor distills twice, said the one Fyodor surmised was Slava. He's a chemist, so he has all this equipment-Bunsen burners, and what not. And those twisty glass tubes."
"With the cooker you don't have to distill twice, the ex-boxer said. It comes clean the first time. Or you could just make wine-saves the trouble."
"Grapes are expensive, though, another thug said.
The ex-boxer waved his hand dismissively. Use raisins, he said. I don't get why they're cheaper than grapes, but there you go. More sugar per kilo, too."
Fyodor studied the man he assumed was Slava-younger than his companions and slim in a way that suggested erratic eating habits rather than a vigorous exercise regimen, he looked like the brains of the concern rather than its muscle.
Slava seemed distracted-he often glanced at his heavy metal watch that clanged with a quiet satisfaction of wealth, and rubbed his face, flashing several large rings every time he raised his hand. Fyodor noticed a slight trembling of his thin fingers, pale as the cuff of his cream-colored shirt. The cuff slid back, exposing what Fyodor took for a tattoo-a dark triangle surrounding three circles-and Slava pulled it up hastily. He looked up and Fyodor barely had time to look away. The afterimage lingered, and he whispered to Oksana, Did you see that tattoo?"
"It's not a tattoo, she whispered back through a mouthful of meat and cilantro. It's a burn."
"How do you know?"
She shrugged, chewing with great energy. Looks like it. She didn't eat her bread, but instead stuffed bits of it up her sleeves, where they disappeared with alacrity. The rats were hungry too. She passed Fyodor a slice, and he offered it to the rats that settled like a warm, breathing shroud around his middle, concealed by the coat but giving him a paunchy appearance.
The thugs ate in silence now, hurried along by the impatient glances and sighs of their leader.
Oksana whispered into her sleeve, and one of the smaller rats plopped to the floor, apparently climbing out of her boot.
Fyodor looked around, worried, but no one but him had noticed the brown streak of fur crossing the linoleum floor decorated with puddles of melted snow and dirt, and darting under the thug's table. Fyodor held his breath as the little rat, following Oksana's instructions, climbed up the chair leg and slid into the seat next to Slava. He seemed too preoccupied to notice the pink twitching nose and two small, strangely human hands examining the contents of his pocket. The rat had to duck as he opened his jacket and extracted a wallet from the inner pocket.
The thugs paid and exited, still talking about the relative advantages of sugar over raisins. Fyodor and Oksana waited for the door to slam closed, before paying for their meal. The rat had darted back, its head held high and something glistening in its mouth.
Oksana bent down to collect the reconnaissance rat onto her palm. She plucked the small round object from its mouth, and gave it to Fyodor.
A small sphere of green lunar glass rolled in his palm, warm and a bit wet. He thought he felt it pulsing with a suppressed breath and heaving of life, and he shuddered trying to imagine what it would be like, having one's soul encased in a tiny glass cocoon like a fly in amber.
They returned to Kolomenskoe. The traffic must've been bad-the thugs barely overtook them. Fyodor saw them from across the street of the park's central entrance, exiting the maroon Merc that matched their jackets, and stretching their legs.
"There's just no point in driving in Moscow, Fyodor said.
"It's not about speed, Oksana said. It's about being able to afford not to take the subway."
At this moment, Fyodor acutely missed the good old Soviet days, when everyone was poor enough for the subway, except a few apparatchiks with government-issued black shiny Volgas. He remembered his stepfather being keenly suspicious of everyone who had a car, assuming that it was ill-gotten, through bribery or theft; he was usually right, Fyodor thought, as much as he disliked agreeing with his stepfather.
He despised him a little too, for being such a working drudge, for wasting his life in gloomy joyless labor at one factory or another, never actively hating his job but not liking it either-as if there wasn't enough life left in him, oppressed by the routine and boredom, to summon even a shred of enthusiasm for either. As unenviable as Fyodor's life was, he comforted himself by saying that at least it wasn't as bleak as his stepfather's. He had no notion of where his actual father might be, but hoped for the sake of the man he had never met that it was not dreary.
"We need to find out whose soul this is, Oksana said.
"How do we do that?"
She nodded at the pack of jackdaws industriously pecking at the snow.
"Do you think it'd work? Fyodor said.
"It worked with Sergey and that rook, she said. We can try it."
"How do we catch one?"
Oksana glanced around to make sure there was no one watching them; Fyodor thought that to the passersby they were invisible, too ordinary to draw attention. When she was content that there was no one paying them any mind, she shook several rats out of her sleeves, and pointed them toward the birds.