Pravda Page 11

  The porch bulb was extinguished like a dare. The driveway darkened. He refocused on the opaque semicircular patterns left by the wipers. To his left, the rhododendrons shuffled outside the passenger window. To his right, he could sense his father ducking down a little to get a look inside the car from the steps. And even though he could not see directly for fear of turning his head, even though the narrow angle of dead ahead was all he permitted himself, still Gabriel knew at once that this was the moment, that this was the test—that he must not move at all, not even the shiver of an eyelash; he must remain as still as the headstones in Highgate Cemetery.

  His breathing stopped. And he summoned all the will he had in his eight-year-old soul. He would not breathe again until. He would not breathe again. He would not breathe.

  His father was gone!

  The front door shut.

  He had done it.

  He was alone.

  For the next five minutes triumph surged through him. But just as quickly as it had arrived, his jubilation began to seep and shrink away, his veins to hollow. Pins and needles attacked his foot. The trees shifted again, disturbing the shadows. And all of a sudden he felt uncertain and scared. He tried to rally. He bent everything he had to the single purpose of containment. He sealed off his mind. He shut his eyes. His foot was killing him. Needle pin, pin needle. But the pain was something he could concentrate on, at least. The spasm must pass. If only he could survive the next minute. Survive the next minute. Count up to sixty.

  He was totally convinced an hour must have elapsed, maybe longer. He was okay, though. He had come through it in some sort of waking sleep or trance or something. And the cramp had disappeared. And he reckoned he was good for the full adventure, whatever that might be. He allowed himself to relax slightly. Yeah, it was like he was in the book he was reading about three boys who ran a detective agency somewhere in faraway San Francis—

  Shit!

  His sister's light was on, directly above. And now off. And now on. And now off. Signals ... No, Is, no. Don't wreck it. Please don't wreck it. Off. On. Off. On. Off. Off. Staying off ... Of course, she would be able to see him better with no light. She must be looking out right now. All he had to do was signal in return. He could sense her face, just above and beyond the ceiling of his self-permitted vision. But once again he knew that the movement of a single nerve would mean mutiny and total collapse, and he would be up and out, and she would sneak down and open the front door, and he would run straight to his room, and she would come running after him, asking him all kinds of Isabella questions. So don't look up. How long would she be there? What was she doing? Was she waving? Don't look up. Don't look up.

  The engine had cooled completely when the first serious shiver passed through him and the night began in earnest. The house now loomed like a phantom liner. He was sure of less and less. He could not tell the murmuring of the trees from the murmurs inside his own mind. Voices he had not sanctioned muttered rival commentaries in his head. Familiar faces came and went behind shadowy windows he could not see. And there was only his own stillness left to be relied upon.

  His last conscious thought came as dead midnight fell. His chin dropping to his chest and the shivering properly upon him, he became dimly aware that Highgate church bells were chiming—twelve? Was it twelve? His feet and legs had long gone but it was still quite warm beneath him. Nestle into this warmth and let it spread up through him like a hot fountain. Count the church bells.

  He was a stranger to the world after that. The fog rose as forecast from London below, creeping and stealing up Highgate Hill, whispering forth blind comrade the frost, until the windscreen rimed and the red hood turned all to pearl. But Gabriel was no longer looking through conscious eyes, because a feverish waking sleep had overtaken him and he was a pilgrim now, wandering through a bone-strewn valley in the story of a dark and evil land. Several times he thought perhaps he could make out the shape of Isabella s face again—his mysterious twin watching at her window, by his side, or over his shoulder—but he could not be certain. And anyway he did not want to lose count on his journey.

  He was still sitting there at four, when Maria Glover s headlights swept the driveway. At first she dismissed the evidence of her own copy-sore eyes; then she thought it must be a thief. But when the shape still did not move (a bowed head silhouetted through silvered glass), she killed her engine and stepped out of the car, leaving the lights on. The three seconds that it took to cross the gravel were filled with a mother's horror—she could not guess what or how or why, and surely it could not be Gabriel? But it was. Even then, she put her hand to the door handle expecting to meet resistance—he must be locked in. And yet, save for the adhesion of the frost, there was none.

  She said his name. First in a question, then almost a shout, then in her most tender voice. "Gabriel? Gabriel. Gabriel." But he was too far gone to turn or to speak, in a convulsion of sleep and starts, shivering and staring and stiff in all his bones, and long past answering even if he had wanted to. So then she tried to pick him up, as if he were still a baby, and somehow she managed to lift his legs enough to get them outside the car and swivel him around and raise him toward her, all this while saying his name over and over. But one step backward and his knees gave way and she had to catch him. His hands were frozen but his forehead was searing hot.

  13 A Plan

  "If you think you can do it, then do it," Henry said.

  "I can do it." Arkady was hunched on the piano stool, his back to the keyboard.

  "But I don't like it."

  "I do not ask if you like it. You tell me that she has family. This is how we find them."

  "How do you know there is nobody there?"

  "I know."

  Henry met the other's eyes but found no reciprocity and so sent a scrawny hand back through the point of his widow's peak. It was Wednesday, early evening, and this was the first time Arkady had said anything other than monosyllables all day.

  "I can go and see Zoya. Maybe she will give us something—an address—if I go and see her in person."

  "Zoya does not care one fuck about it."

  "I could pay her."

  Arkady did not respond.

  Henry raised himself from the sofa and walked toward the window. Though he kept it out of his voice, he had little enthusiasm and less money for this idea. (He must find some new pupils. Build it up all over again. How had he let his teaching shrivel so far?) Things were still okay: he had just over three thousand dollars in cash, plus a few more scraps and scrapings in his old English bank account. He had paid Grisha for his regular score—though, admittedly, he had not settled for the extra so enthusiastically advanced and Arkady was right: he should not have accepted it. He planned to skip a pickup and use the oversupply for the two weeks after his regular ran out. Still, he knew he should sort things out soon if he wished to avoid falling into Leary's debt, through contrivance or otherwise. He probably should have gone down to Stavischek a few days ago. But too much of immediate importance had been happening: the canceling of the weekend's follow-up gigs and Arkady's subsequent silence; a delegation of Mongeese (minus Yevgeny, who perhaps knew better) arriving in the morning and nobody getting anything out of Arkady; Sergei himself turning up at lunchtime, waving a newspaper review (to no effect) and then weighing in with various threats and bribes and curses until Arkady finally manhandled the fat manager bodily out the door while Sergei, suddenly afraid, started bleating and moaning until he was safely outside, whereupon he began shouting and swearing again—that he would get his money back on the lost takings and that Arkady would never play again in Petersburg. So Henry had contented himself with sending Grisha a text message. He'd be down with the money for the rest on Friday. Dear Lord, he loathed it that the wretched creature was so much in his life. When those moments of clarity came, it was Grisha's face that spoke most powerfully for coming off.

  Henry turned back to face the room. "I could pay Zoya to give us whatever she has on file relatin
g ... relating to Maria Glover." The name sounded horribly grating as he uttered it.

  Arkady took off his cap, leaned forward, and balled it in his fist. "Zoya is bullshit. You leave message and message. She never phones you. She knows nothing. Because if she knows something, then she calls you back so you know she is ready to be paid again. This is how it works." He raised his eyes and spoke through the fall of his hair. "She knows nothing. If you see her yourself and you pay her, you will only find this afterward. Forget Zoya. She is Gypsy scum. You should have made friends with the real bitch when you had your tongue in her ass."

  Henry sat back down on the sofa and seemed to fold in on himself like a bat trapped in a room too long in daylight. He did not know what to do, or how best to be, or help, or anything. And he was becoming agitated. It was past his time.

  "This term is almost certainly paid," he began again. "Therefore I reckon we need ... we need twenty thousand dollars, more or less, to get you through to the end of the third year."

  Arkady was staring at the backs of his hands, which were still clasped around his cap.

  So Henry continued. "Twenty thousand may not be so much to them. Or it may be that she has left it to you in her will. We should hold on. She's only been dead a day or two. We should see what comes next. Her relatives might get in touch any time now." His words were sounding prissy even to his own ear. He pressed on hastily. "We have until Christmas—assuming the money is settled for this term. We should wait for news."

  Arkady straightened up, the better to scoff. "We wait for nothing. We do something. Or we sit here playing with our balls like fuck-monkeys." He turned around to face the keyboard. Slowly he shut the lid. "This family, they do not know me. Nobody knows me."

  Henry had never felt Arkady's anger hang so full and naked in the room; the air seemed to be choked with emotional cordite. A power of projection he had not properly understood until now.

  Arkady addressed the score open on the stand. "I do not continue if I cannot finish. I do not waste my time and my life anymore. It's bullshit." He stood up. "We write a letter to say I cannot play for a month. I hurt my hand. I will go only to theory lessons. And in the meantime, we do what we must do. This way we find out what there is to know. We get information. Then we decide. I am tired of wasting time."

  "But you can still play. You can still practice. Why do we need to pretend that you—"

  "No."

  Henry's right hand patted rapidly but softly at his knee. There was no point arguing anymore—about Arkady's hand, about the plan, about anything; it was like disputing with the weather. "Okay. If you can do it without risk, then do it."

  Arkady went into his bedroom, then reappeared a moment later wearing his greatcoat. "I have to find a friend of mine and see what he is doing tomorrow night. A man called Oleg maybe will phone your mobile. Take his number."

  Henry nodded, hand still patting, conscious that the credit on his phone was running out. "You coming back before? Or shall I meet you at the ground?"

  They had a long-standing plan to watch Zenit Petersburg play. Arkady, Yevgeny, and a few others were going.

  "Meet there." Arkady picked up and pocketed the few ruble notes that Henry had put down on top of the piano and then turned on his heel.

  Henry listened to the Russian leave, feeling the sudden amplification of self-recrimination now that he was alone. He had no tolerance for his own emotions. He simply could not endure them, their terrible power to consume him. He rose quickly, passed into his bedroom, and closed the door.

  14 The Ratchet

  "Says it's beef on the packs, Is, but we did an undercover defrost and it's not."

  "What, then?"

  "Larry says it could be some kind of rat from Peru. They got big fuckers out there."

  "Wish I had taken a year off. Sounds brilliant."

  "We're going to try and write about it for the local paper."

  "Thought you wanted to be a theater director, not a journalist."

  "Larry's secretly filming it—for a documentary. I'm telling him what to film. How is it going at college? What's it—"

  "So why write about it?"

  "Fund the documentary."

  "Yeah ... bet the local paper pays big for pieces from undercover student meatpackers. I'll tell you when you get here."

  It was December 1991. Isabella had just (unofficially) dropped out of Cambridge—failed to complete even a single term, appalled beyond reasonable doubt by her fellow students' staggering mixture of naivete and smugness. But she'd been home for only one strained (though mercifully meal-free) Sunday evening with her mother, who was clearly suffering from a fervently denied but virulent depression of her own, when the news came that Grandfather Max had died on an unholy bender in Scotland. A distillery tour, a walk on the Black Cullin, skinny-dipping. His heart.

  Gabriel, meanwhile, was working double shifts with his friend Larry, packing frozen foods in Southampton, trying to earn money to fund what remained of his year-off travels, because "Dad won't give me a penny and I wouldn't take it from the bastard anyway." Though Isabella calculated that by the time her brother had saved enough to make it across the Channel, it would be next September and he'd have just a month before he started at university himself.

  Gabriel clicked his tongue. "I'll be back Friday ... I'll just have to take the afternoon off. They're not going to like it. We're not supposed to have any holidays, and the bosses get their hard-ons from firing casuals. The service is definitely on Saturday?"

  "Yeah."

  "Jesus, Is, it's so brutal, isn't it?"

  "I just can't believe he's actually dead."

  "Do they know anything about what happened?"

  "It was a series of heart attacks, apparently. Mum says that the people with him told her he kept trying to crawl across the mountain—even when it had started. He wouldn't lie down. But he had been swimming or something, so he must have been half naked." She paused. "I just wish I had gone to see him more often—you know."

  "Me too."

  She cupped the receiver. "I'm trying to persuade Mum to get Dad to pay for us to fly to Petersburg and deal with anything that needs to be dealt with. It's an excuse, but—you know—I reckon that Mum will be allowed back soon. I can tell she'd love to go."

  "Is she upset?"

  "Kind of ... yes."

  "Is Dad back?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "Mum doesn't know where he is exactly. We can't call him."

  "Jesus Christ. What the fuck is he doing?"

  "We don't even know if he knows about Grandpa."

  "Where the fuck is he? Oh ... oh shit."

  She heard the pips and then the receiver clattered.

  "Oh bollocks, the money is running out again. I've got no more coins." He spoke quickly. "Tell Mum I'll phone tomorrow and speak to her again."

  "Okay. See you at the weekend. Bye bye bye bye."

  The old house stood at an odd diamond shape to the road so that it met visitors with a corner angle and seemed to present two different aspects, both designed to be the front. The modest, badly kept lawns gave no clue. And nobody was sure quite when Max had bought it. Sometime during the war, was the rumor.

  Isabella sat with her mother in the long basement kitchen warmed by the ancient cooker, neither of them knowing where Nicholas was—Paris somewhere?—passing the time watching the portable television, waiting for him to show up or call and trying to measure the mightiness of history in two-minute segments between show biz and sports. And all the while the telephone kept ringing with Foreign Office officials, the odd MP, old friends, clipped-speech men whom neither of them had ever met, asking for Nicholas and wishing them sincere condolences in his absence; and her mother furious and sarcastic half the time, nostalgic and maudlin and tearful the rest; and Isabella panicked and petrified half the time, thankful and relieved the rest, that the overwhelming stupidity or wisdom or madness or vindication of her leaving Cambridge had somehow been overshadowed.<
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  "Grandpa Max gone, Izzy. Dear oh dear—there's a chapter finished. Hard to believe, isn't it? Very hard. And just as the Soviet Union is finally put to death as well. Can you believe it? Can you believe anything?"

  "Shitting hell."

  "Please don't use bad language."

  Isabella looked away from the screen. "I quite liked Gorbachev. Is he going to stay with us in some capacity?"

  "He's better than the fat drunk." Her mother paused. "But poor Gorby was finished a year ago, Is. And now there is no Soviet Union to rule—even were he able to cling on, which he isn't. Now we have this CIS," she scoffed. "The Commonwealth of Independent States. But of course it's rubbish. There will be chaos. We need a great man now, Izzy, if Russia is to survive. A strongman."

  "You mean a tyrant?"

  "Exactly so."

  "Mum, your worldview scares me."

  "Yours me, Isabella." Her mother lit another cigarette. "Yours me."

  "I don't have one."

  "Exactly. You don't believe in anything. Which is understandable." She waved out the match. "You cannot believe in anything—if you have learned your history lessons. But still, you are the rising generation."

  "And we want marzipan and chocolate." Isabella rose, her chair scraping on the floor.