‘In her room.’
‘Is she still alive?’
Stepanin shrugged.
‘I’m calling an ambulance.’
‘No.’
Sheremetev reached for his phone.
Stepanin grabbed his arm. ‘I can’t let you do that, Kolya.’
‘You can’t stop me.’
‘Can’t I?’ He hurled Sheremetev across the room.
Sheremetev crashed under a bench, smashing the back of his head against a steel leg and knocking over a large bin of refuse that covered him in chicken carcases and offal and a stinking brown sludge that oozed over his shirt.
Stepanin rushed to him. ‘Are you okay? I told those fucking potwashers to empty that stuff—’
Sheremetev kicked at the cook, striking him hard on the knee, and got to his feet while Stepanin jumped in pain, slipping on chicken guts. He ran. The cook ran after him. He got to the kitchen door and… a wall of surly, drunken guards confronted him, not showing any signs of amusement now.
One of them pushed him down on a chair.
‘He stinks,’ said another, holding his nose.
Stepanin had followed him out. ‘Have some fricassee,’ he said, dishing up a fresh helping of the chicken.
‘I don’t want it,’ said Sheremetev.
‘It’s fine!’ said the cook, and he angrily shoved a forkful into his own mouth to demonstrate its safety.
‘You expect me to eat while you’ve poisoned a woman and she’s dying? I’m not hungry.’ Sheremetev rubbed at the back of his head where he had hit the bench. His fingers came away smeared with blood.
‘Eat!’
‘Vitya, you can’t kill her!’ cried Sheremetev.
‘Of course I can.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want her to go away.’
‘Very good way of making her,’ slurred a guard, wagging a finger. ‘Excellent plan.’
‘Not like this!’
‘Yes like this!’ snapped the cook. ‘Exactly like this!’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’
‘Well what if…’ Sheremetev’s mind raced. An idea sprang to his mind. ‘What if she agrees to go? What if she signs something saying she resigns?’
‘That’s fucking ridiculous!’ retorted Stepanin. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because… otherwise she’s going to die. What if she signs it and then we send her to the hospital and we say you realised you made a mistake with her food and accidentally poisoned her? Then she’s gone, just like you want. We have the paper. She’s resigned.’
Stepanin’s eyes narrowed. Sheremetev watched him anxiously. It occurred to him that he had got the idea from Oleg’s suggestion that he get Vladimir to sign a request to have Pasha released. He didn’t think it had been a very smart suggestion when Oleg suggested it, and in this situation, the version of the idea he had come up with was even more absurd, worse than something in a movie. On the other hand, the cook’s behaviour was so erratic that he might just be persuaded by it.
Stepanin shook his head. ‘No. She’d come back.’
‘She had Artyusha shot,’ said one of the guards. ‘She’s got to die!’
The other guards nodded.
‘Did Artyusha say that?’ said Sheremetev.
There was silence for a moment. ‘He’d want us to do it,’ said the guard, but something in his tone was less than certain.
Sheremetev knew nothing about gangsters apart from what he had seen in movies, and he had totally misjudged Artur Lukashvilli, but he had a feeling that a gang boss didn’t keep a bunch of men like this under control by letting them kill whoever they felt like killing. ‘What happened the last time you killed someone Artur didn’t tell you to kill?’
The question hung in the air.
‘Remember Tolya?’ murmured someone.
The guards glanced nervously at each other. A couple of them grimaced. ‘We should take her to hospital,’ one of them said.
Stepanin looked at them in dismay.
‘Come on, lads,’ said Lyosha. ‘Let’s go and get her! We’ll say it was all the cook’s idea.’
‘No!’ cried Stepanin. ‘No one gets her!’ He turned on Sheremetev. ‘She’s not going to hospital! Understand? I’ve told you before! I’ve got three hundred thousand dollars. To open my restaurant, I need five! Five! And I’ve only got three!’
The guards glanced at each other.
‘She is not… going… to hospital!’ shouted Stepanin, shaking Sheremetev by the shoulders.
Another guard appeared in the doorway. He went quickly to Lyosha and whispered into his ear.
Lyosha nodded. ‘Well,’ he said to Stepanin, ‘looks like it’s not a question any more.’
‘Has someone taken her already?’ asked one of the guards.
‘Idiot!’ said Lyosha, giving him a slap on the head. ‘She’s dead.’
There was silence.
‘Fuck!’ muttered one of the guards.
Sheremetev looked up at Stepanin, who was still standing over him. In his moment of triumph, the cook seemed to be frozen, bewildered.
‘Looks like you’ve got what you wanted,’ said Lyosha.
Still Stepanin didn’t speak.
‘Vitya,’ said Lyosha to the cook, ‘what was that you said before?’
‘What?’
‘You said something about three hundred thousand dollars.’
The cook’s face reddened. ‘No.’
Lyosha came closer.
‘No, that was just talk… just…’ Stepanin looked around. The other guards were coming nearer as well.
‘Don’t lie to me, Vitya,’ said Lyosha. ‘If you lie to me, you’re lying to Artyusha. And do you know what Artyusha does to people who lie to him?’
The other guards surrounded him now.
‘Silence costs,’ said Lyosha. ‘For poisoning someone, it can cost a lot. Hundreds of thousands, Vitya.’
‘That wasn’t what we agreed!’ cried Stepanin. ‘We both wanted to get rid of her!’
‘But you did it, Vitya. We… who’s to say we even knew?’
Stepanin looked frantically around. ‘What about him?’ he shouted suddenly, pointing at Sheremetev.
‘Him?’ Lyosha laughed. ‘What does he have? Three hundred thousand kopecks? Besides, he didn’t poison anybody.’
Stepanin stared at him, ashen-faced.
‘You,’ said Lyosha to Sheremetev, ‘I don’t have to warn you what will happen if you say anything to anyone.’
Sheremetev shook his head. ‘No,’ he murmured. ‘You don’t.’
‘Go.’
Sheremetev stood. He threw a last glance at Stepanin, whom he had once thought of as a friend. The cook, surrounded by Artur’s drunken men, looked back at him, eyes full of a desperate regret, but for what – for killing Barkovskaya, or letting slip in front of Artur’s men the amount of money that he had – Sheremetev didn’t know.
He left the dining room, stinking from putrefying kitchen juices. The guard in the entrance hall silently watched him. The journey up the stairs was unreal. Barkovskaya was dead. Dead! It was inconceivable. He stopped. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe it was some kind of an act that they had put on as a joke and soon Stepanin was going to come up and boom at him with a big grin: ‘What fuckery!’
No, that wasn’t going to happen. She was dead, really dead, and they were going to throw her in with the chickens. He was scared to look out a window in case he saw them carrying her to the pit.
What more could happen? The day had started full of hope. Today, he had thought, he would get the money to get Pasha out of jail. And it had ended with nothing. No money, no hope – nothing. He had been abused, degraded, pummelled, discarded. First by thieves, then by murderers. Sheremetev was filled with a fierce, impotent rage. He felt like flinging out his arms and crying to the heavens: What else can you do to me? What? Do it now, while you have the chance, because soon there’ll be nothing left of me!