And basically, Olya wanted that.
Only she couldn’t work out if she wanted it now or later. With Oleg or with someone else.
But she’d already promised to go. And Olya Yalova didn’t like to break her promises.
The side street greeted her with a cold wind blowing from the direction of the Three Stations on Komsomol Square – and with a sudden, surprising darkness. Surprising because the street lamps were on, the windows in the apartment blocks and the shop signs were glowing. But for some reason their glow failed to dispel the gloom: the tiny spots of light were suspended in the night, bright but powerless, like the distant stars in the sky.
Olya even stopped for a moment. She glanced round behind her.
What sort of nonsense was this? She’d be there in three minutes. One minute, if she ran. She was a hundred and seventy-five centimetres tall and she had better muscles than lots of young guys. She was in the centre of Moscow, it was seven o’clock in the evening, and there were plenty of people around, on their way back home.
What was she afraid of?
It was just that she was afraid of going to Oleg’s place!
She couldn’t even keep her promise. She’d promised too much, and now she’d got scared just like a little girl. But she was a grown woman… almost a grown-up already… almost a woman…
Olya adjusted her woolly hat with its pompom, arranged the sports bag on her shoulder more comfortably (towel, clean panties and a pack of panty-liners – Olya suspected that she would need them tomorrow) and quickened her stride.
Junior Police Lieutenant Dmitry Pastukhov wasn’t on duty. He wasn’t even in uniform when he raised his arm to stop a car on the corner of Protopopov Lane and Astrakhan Lane. The reasons why Dima Pastukhov was here at this hour of the day might upset his wife, so we won’t go into the details. All that can be said in Dima’s defence is that he was holding a plastic bag containing a box of Rafaello chocolates and a bouquet of flowers, both bought from a vending machine nearby, in the Billa supermarket.
Dima didn’t give his wife flowers and chocolates very often, only once or twice a year. Which in this particular case, strangely enough, is a mitigating factor.
‘What do you mean, five hundred?’ Dima haggled feistily. ‘Three hundred’s the top price at the outside!’
‘Have you any idea how much petrol costs?’ the dusky southern driver asked just as feistily from behind the wheel of his battered Ford. Despite his non-local appearance, he spoke perfect, cultured Russian. ‘Call an official taxi – no one will take you for less.’
‘That’s why I flagged down a private car,’ Dima explained. In his own mind he was basically prepared to pay five hundred – it was quite a distance – but force of habit made him haggle anyway.
‘Four hundred,’ the southerner declared.
‘Let’s go,’ said Dima, and glanced round the street, for no particular reason, before ducking into the car. The girl was standing only five steps away. Swaying and looking at Dima.
She was a tall girl with a curvaceous figure, and in the semi-darkness she could have passed for a grown woman. But right now the light from the street lamp was falling straight onto her face – and it was the face of a child.
The girl had no cap on her head, and her hair was tousled. Tears were pouring from her eyes. Her neck was bloody. Her nylon ski-jacket was clean, but there were streaks of blood on her light-blue jeans.
Dima put the plastic bag and the bouquet on the car seat and dashed over to the girl. Behind him the driver swore a convoluted oath when he spotted her.
‘What’s wrong?’ Pastukhov exclaimed, grabbing the girl by the shoulders. ‘Are you okay? Where is he?’
Somehow Pastukhov was quite sure that the girl would tell him immediately where ‘he’ was, and Pastukhov would overtake the scumbag and arrest ‘him’ and, if Pastukhov got lucky, some part of ‘him’ would get smashed or broken in the process.
But the girl spoke quietly.
‘Are you a policeman, then?’
Pastukhov, not really fully aware that he wasn’t in uniform, nodded.
‘Yes. Yes, of course! Where is he?’
‘Take me away from here – I’m cold,’ the girl said plaintively. ‘Please take me away.’
The rapist was nowhere nearby. The driver clambered out from behind the steering wheel and took out a baseball bat from somewhere (everyone knew that almost no one in Russia played baseball, but sales of bats were comparable with those in the US). A married couple strolling along Astrakhan Lane saw the girl, Pastukhov and the driver – and ducked into the supermarket. But a kid with a school satchel, moving along Protopopov Lane in the opposite direction, stopped and whooped in delight, so joyfully that Pastukhov immediately recalled the Bible’s enthusiasm for corporal punishment in the raising of children.
‘You can’t leave the scene of the incident right now…’ Pastukhov began.
Then he stopped short.
He saw where the blood was coming from.
Two tiny holes in the girl’s neck.
Two bite marks.
‘Let’s go,’ he declared and tugged the girl towards the car. She didn’t resist. It was as if, once she’d decided to trust him, she’d stopped thinking about anything at all.
‘Hey, she needs to go to the police,’ said the driver. ‘Or the hospital. The Sklifosovsky’s not far, hang on.’
‘I am the police,’ said Pastukhov, pulling his ID out of his pocket and sticking it under the driver’s nose. ‘No Sklif. Sokol Metro station, and step on it.’
‘Why Sokol?’ the driver asked in amazement.
‘That’s where the Night Watch office is,’ said Pastukhov, laying the girl in the back seat and thrusting her handbag under her head. He put the girl’s feet on his knees. Dirty melting snow dripped off her ‘winter’ trainers. But that way her neck didn’t bleed on him. It was a good thing that a vampire’s saliva stopped the blood flowing after it had fed.
The bad thing was that vampires didn’t always stop in time.
‘What Night Watch?’ the driver asked, puzzled. ‘I’ve lived in Moscow for twenty years, and I don’t remember anything like that.’
And you won’t remember afterwards, either, thought Pastukhov, but he didn’t say it out loud. After all, when he himself had first paid a visit to the Others he hadn’t been completely certain they would leave him his memories, either.
But never say never.
‘If you drive fast,’ he suggested, ‘I’ll give you a thousand.’
The driver explained eloquently where Pastukhov could stick his thousand and stepped on the gas.
The girl lay with her eyes closed. Either she had fainted or she was in shock. Pastukhov cast a sideways glance at the driver – he had his eyes glued to the road. Then, feeling like a rapist and a pervert, Pastukhov cautiously parted the girl’s legs.
The crotch of the jeans was clean, not stained. At least no one had raped her.
Although, to be blunt, from Pastukhov’s point of view sexual rape would have been the lesser evil by far. It would have been more normal.
Part One
MANDATORY ACTIONS
CHAPTER 1
‘YOU’VE BEEN STUCK there too long,’ said Gesar.
‘Where?’ I enquired.
‘Not “where”, but “on what”,’ the boss said, without looking up from his papers. ‘On your backside.’
If the boss started getting rude for no good reason, it meant he was seriously perplexed about something. He wasn’t in a temper – that always made him exquisitely polite. He wasn’t frightened – that always made him sad and lyrical. So he was preoccupied and perplexed.