“He had his birthday two months ago,” Pavel said, smiling at the thought of his son. “He laughs all the time. He always wants to see the joke. He’s got a great Russian sense of humor and he’s big like a bear.”
“Like his father, in other words.”
Pavel shook his head. “I don’t laugh enough anymore.”
“You worry too much.”
“And you don’t worry enough.”
“Go home, Pavel. That’s where you should be.”
“I want to be with you.”
Ruzsky laughed. “No you don’t.”
Pavel filled both glasses again. “Once more.”
They drank. Pavel looked at him. “I shouldn’t leave you here.”
“This is exactly where you should leave me and you know it. Go home to your wife and child.”
Pavel hesitated, staring into his empty glass. “Do you think we should… you know, pass on this case. Leave it?”
“Leave it?”
Pavel looked up, a deep unease in his eyes.
“How can we leave it?”
Pavel shrugged. “The Empress, the palace. The Okhrana. I know you saved me last time, lied for me, but I couldn’t… you know. Tonya wouldn’t come to Tobolsk, and these are bad times.”
“We broke the law. I was the chief investigator. If anyone was going to be punished, it should have been me.”
“Do you think that was what it was about?”
“What do you mean?”
“You think that you were punished because we broke the law?”
“I think Vasilyev wanted to bring the whole department down a peg, show us who was boss in this city.”
Pavel shook his head. “Sometimes you’re not such a brilliant investigator, after all.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You think he gives a shit about breaking the law?”
“No, but-”
“He’s the devil. You, more than Anton, posed a threat. You like digging around in things, you’re highborn and disdainful of anyone who doesn’t operate on the same moral plain.” Pavel raised his hand. “I mean it as a compliment. Above all, you’re difficult to control and impossible to intimidate. You’re dangerous. And I don’t like this case.” Pavel leaned back with a sigh. “I don’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t. It smells dirty. We should push it on to the Okhrana. They’ve got the bodies, they’re equipped for dealing with that kind of stuff. Why fight for it?”
They stared at each other in silence. Pavel lowered his gaze. “You’re thinking what love has reduced me to,” he said, reading Ruzsky’s mind.
“Of course I’m not.”
“I don’t mind if you are. They’re all I care about, Sandro.”
Ruzsky leaned forward to touch his friend’s hand. “Of course.”
“You think that I think you’re emotionally reckless,” Pavel went on, “but I don’t. We’re just different. Or perhaps you’ve never been in love.”
Ruzsky stared at the dancers. “Perhaps.”
Pavel stood reluctantly, but Ruzsky could tell he wanted to be at home, and he was determined not to accept charity. “Go on, go.”
“Be careful, Sandro.”
“I’m not a child.”
“I suppose this means we’re working tomorrow.”
“It’s up to you.”
“But I know you will be.”
Ruzsky shrugged. “It’s a Sunday, you have a wife and family. Stay at home. Go to church.”
Pavel put one giant hand on Ruzsky’s shoulder and then ambled slowly toward the door. Ruzsky watched him go and then turned back to the dance floor and the bottle of vodka. He poured himself another glass.
He was watching the prettier of the girls on the dance floor again when the waitress put down a wooden tray and slipped in beside him. The tray had on it fresh and pressed caviar alongside salted cucumbers and herring fillets. There was a cup of tea with lemon.
The girl looked like the one on the dance floor. They could have been-and probably were-sisters. She was smiling at him, her hand on his knee, her body tilted toward him so that the smell of her cheap French scent caught in his nostrils.
The audience cheered and clapped as the dancers reached a climax. The waitress poured two glasses of vodka, but with her left hand. Her right was massaging his thigh.
They drank and, as he put his glass down, her hand reached his groin. The girl’s face was in front of his now, her dark eyes searching his own.
She leaned closer still and her mouth was warm, her hand working beneath the table as the music seemed to get louder and louder.
The woman leaned back, her eyes still searching his. “Come,” she said, shifting away from him and taking his hand.
“No,” he said.
“You want to come.”
“No.”
“Upstairs.”
“No.”
She looked genuinely disappointed. “Your friend has gone.”
“And so must I.”
She stared at him a few moments more and then shook her head angrily. Ruzsky was too drunk and tired to care. As she marched away from him, he pushed himself to his feet, dimly aware of the eyes on him as he tried to walk steadily toward the door. On the other side of the room, he saw-or thought he saw-Stanislav the rat, watching him.
The journalist immediately turned his back and disappeared past a red curtain. Ruzsky pushed through the crowd and followed him up a dingy staircase beyond. It smelled of varnish, dirt, and cleaning liquid.
He reached a long corridor, with rooms off each side. As Ruzsky walked along it, he heard the unmistakable sounds of copulation. He stopped. “Stanislav?” He wondered why Pavel had brought him here. Was this what he thought he needed? Or was there something else?
“Stanislav?” he called again.
Ruzsky moved slowly forward to the source of the sounds and glanced in through the gap in the door. He saw a girl astride a large man, long blond hair hanging down her back. Whoever it was-and Ruzsky could not see the man’s face-he did not see how it could have been Stanislav.
Ruzsky turned around and retraced his steps.
He had not taken his overcoat off inside, and had felt warm for the first time today, but it only served to exacerbate the impact of the cold air as he stepped out into the street. It was snowing heavily again, a new wind whipping the flakes into tiny cyclones. He began walking, head bent, his mind spinning. He knew this was how people died in the winter. They emerged drunk from the warmth, fell over in a dark corner, and froze to death.
On the far side of the street, two likhachy drivers eyed him. It was a matter of honor that the likhach, drivers of the better sprung carriages, with soft rugs and velvet cushions, never touted for or haggled over a fare. There were no droshky drivers in sight-another indication of the kind of place Pavel had taken him to.
Ruzsky kept walking. He tried to shake the vodka from his mind. It was a few moments before he realized that he was not heading back to his apartment, but toward his father’s house on Millionnaya.
He passed a doorway and then stopped, his head spinning. He stepped back and looked closer, struggling to focus. There were two of them huddled together. “Anything you like,” one said. “Good price.”
They could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. One girl was blond, the other dark, both deathly thin and pale, clinging onto each other for warmth. Their clothes were ragged and their shoes threadbare and holed. “Both of us together?”
On the wall above them and crudely drawn was another depiction of the Empress of the Russias. She lay on her back, her skirt above her waist, stockings visible, her legs wrapped around a half-naked Rasputin whose trousers were down by his ankles. The caricature was graphic and above it was the word Niemka-German woman.
For a moment, Ruzsky was paralyzed as the girls tried to appeal to him and then he reached into his pocket, found a few scrunched-up rubles, and thrust them into their suddenly outstretched hands. He stumbled away.
The girls cried out and Ruzsky turned again to see them running toward a car that had pulled over by the side of the road, almost tripping over themselves in their eagerness to reach the open back door. They, like Ruzsky, instantly recognized its occupant.