Pravda Page 13

  At last the zone just above the back of his left knee grudgingly relinquished the required tool. And so, relieved and taking considerable comfort in the procedure, he now lit up with stagy deliberation.

  Better.

  Much better.

  How did he ever manage before cigarettes? Life must have been terrible. No wonder he'd started smoking at ten. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that was why his childhood was such a piece of shit. Should have started much earlier, should have started at two. He flipped the lighter shut.

  Now then: what we got?

  The room was more or less bare: a double mattress on the swept concrete floor, bed neatly made, thin cream blanket, white sheet folded over at the top. And that was just about it. No curtain or blind on the window (which, like those in the lounge, looked out on the Gulf of Finland), no mirror, no wardrobe, no desk, no chest, no chair, no posters or pictures, no pinups, nothing. For fuck's sake, these two lived like monks. He pivoted. There were five or six serious nails hammered into the wall behind him, on which a few items of clothing hung flat: two white shirts, a gray greatcoat, a pair of black trousers, a dinner jacket. Beneath these, two wooden boxes, both containing what looked like underclothes. A pair of shoes. Nothing else.

  Grisha exhaled thoughtfully through flared nostrils—twin off-road exhausts under heavy acceleration—and approached the wide window, walking carefully by the side of the bed. It was upsetting, was what it was: the room had a scrubbed and dusted feel, as though someone had washed everything only an hour ago. Shifting blood, lifting DNA. He looked about him. There was no money in here. (Grisha could intuit money in a place, like a water diviner sensing that delicate underground tremble.) The windowsill yielded neither residue nor discoloration to the pink of his stubby finger. The floor was everywhere stripped and bare. And the pillow, which he now bent to touch, was freshly laundered. Grisha saw that Arkady would be able to look up through the window into the sky from his bed—very nice. Grisha was tempted to lie down himself and stretch out, think, smoke, have a piss.

  Hello ... There was something that looked like a book in the bed, slipped in between the sheets.

  Filth?

  Curious, comforted, Grisha dropped to his haunches, picked it up, and flipped through.

  No ... it was music. Fucking music. No words, no pictures, no tits, no pussy. Just notes. Not even a rogue arse. Grisha's expression grew distant, thoughts developing slowly but steadily, like graffiti declaring itself letter by letter on a waste-ground wall. Wait ... Yes, that was it. The answer he had been looking for. How to fuck everything even faster. No need for any further consideration. Leary would love it. Grisha grinned grotesquely. He replaced the music, stood up, flicked his ash carefully into his cupped palm, and left the room.

  And so to the main business.

  Grisha next entered Henry's room, smashing the door hard against the wardrobe inside as he opened it. Much smaller in here, and darker too. Almost messy by comparison. Now then—where? A single mattress, likewise on the floor. A small window. The freestanding wardrobe. A high shelf heavy with books running down either side of the room. A chest of drawers. A school desk and a chair covered in clothes. Two boxes of needles stacked with the hospital insignia on the side. A black garbage bag under the desk. Where would a skinny little shit-stabber keep his money?

  Grisha surveyed the ceiling, hoping for giveaways. No breaks or cracks or panels. Nothing. The floor was the same flat Soviet-crap concrete as Arkady's, save for a rug. He bent and flipped it: nothing. The stunted baseboards were all intact. He dragged the wardrobe out from the wall. Nothing obvious back there. He turned to face the room again. Surely not under the ... He upended the mattress. Nothing. Ripping off the sheet, he checked all the way around. No slits. No pouches. Nothing.

  All right then, so be it, let's do this properly. Grisha ground his cigarette into the twisted rug and unsheathed his prized Uzbek knife.

  For the next fifteen minutes, he devoted himself to a thoroughly efficient and concentrated search in which everything, absolutely everything, was tipped out, tipped over, upended, yanked, emptied, slit, spilled, split, dumped. And all things passed beneath Grisha's eyes—gravel-gray piggy little nugget-sifters—and many through his greasy palms, but nothing for more than the second it took to ascertain their status as harborers of money or otherwise.

  He worked with surprising energy and the absorbed gibbonlike strength that his odd dimensions gave him. Truth be fucking told, it wasn't often these days that he got the chance to go back to basics, and he had to admit that he rather enjoyed it ... Enjoyed it too much, maybe, because, as he now realized, he hadn't been thinking. Grisha grimaced. That was the problem: you got carried away; you forgot yourself. Good job Gunter was on guard and not here to witness this minifailure. He drew breath.

  Time for another snout.

  He lit up, sucked in, and sat down, resting heavily on the corner of the overturned desk. With Henry it was all very straightforward: find the money, find the man; take the money, destroy the man. And no amount of ancillary damage would really matter two bitch's shits to Henry once he discovered the money was gone. Leary's work was easily done. Grisha could chainsaw the walls in half if he felt like it. Henry wouldn't notice. Because money was what guaranteed Henry's supply and protecting supply was all the poor bastard was capable of caring about. (And also, since he, Grisha, was Henry's supplier, finding the money was all that was necessary to bring him in.) But where?

  The fucking books!

  A moment of genius.

  Butt-fucker.

  Obvious, yes, but that's genius for you—a mixture of the obvious and the inspired. Grisha rubbed his cupped palm back and forth across the stubble of his razed number-two scalp. He could not be sure where exactly these moments of brilliance came from—there was some unknowable black magic going on deep in the sightless coal mines of his interior, and every so often news of a diamond would come smoking up some unexpected shaft or other and he would be as amazed as the next man.

  Almost ruefully, he stood on Henry's creaking wooden chair—a compact titan towering above the shredded landfill—and began working his way quickly along the shelf, picking up each book and dangling it by the spine, pages hanging as he shook them back and forth, hurling the rejects at the wall when he was satisfied.

  It was the Bible that first gave up the booty. Twenty-dollar notes flapped out and fluttered to the floor. He stepped down and began carefully to gather the scattered bills, smoothing them as he did so.

  He ran the painful ulcer on the tip of his tongue along the jagged range of his molars, considering. Then, with a feeling of almost embarrassing mental communion with his prey, he clambered back up and began work on the opposite shelf.

  Right.

  Again!

  No doubt about it: he really was on a roll. The vegetarian cookbook yielded another minisquall. But it was the dense immensity of the English dictionary that really delivered the goods. And this time the notes fell heavier, having long been pressed together.

  So there was an additional degree of sway in Grisha's shoulder-dipping walk as he made his way down the short internal corridor toward the front door. Three thousand two hundred dollars all told—Henry Wheyland's only future.

  With an atypical flourish, Grisha put down his ergonomic backpack (containing the money), stuck his mighty head through the man-sized hole in the thin wall that separated the interior of the flat from the dim communal hall beyond, and greeted his colleague in Russian again.

  "All right, Gunt?"

  Gunter was sitting on the floor to the right of the hole, away from the pile of dust and debris, with his back to the undamaged and still thrice-locked front door, keeping watch by playing a shooting game on his cell phone. He held up his hand to indicate that a critical moment in the action was upon him. Then he hit Pause and turned his head, which, like that of his employee for the evening, was shaven, scarred, and substantial, though Gunter could at least claim the requisite physica
l frame to go with it.

  "Yeah," Gunter said. "All right."

  The bulb at the end of the corridor by the stairs was blinking on and off.

  "Anything?" Grisha asked.

  Gunter nodded across the hall in the direction of the opposite apartment. "Piglet dick and his fat whale opened up to see what was going on."

  "And?"

  "Shit theirselves." Gunter smirked, indicating the range of power tools that lay around him. "You got everything you want?"

  "Yeah," Grisha grunted. "One more job, though." The halogen light in the hall of the flat gave him an odd sort of halo, as if he had just broken out of heaven.

  "What?"

  "Gimme." Grisha pointed at the masonry chainsaw with diamond-tipped chain and hydraulic power pack (pure diesel—for reinforced concrete and serious brickwork) and then backed away from the hole so Gunter could swing the heavy tool through.

  And thus armed he made his way back.

  The bulb in the main room blew as he reentered, and everything was cast into the uncertain near-darkness of the residual light pollution. But Grisha did not pause, pulling at the ripcord of the engine even as he walked, power pack slung casually over one brutal shoulder.

  There was a moment, though, just before the engine caught—a moment when the pale moon rode out above the low clouds over the sea beyond and bathed the keys in the ivory light of one last benediction. A moment when the piano seemed to inhabit its shape as never before, gathering luster to its grain as if some innocent pausing for one last prayer before she sweeps her hair from her neck and inclines her head for the axe. Then all was noise: the whine and whir of chain blades cleaving unresisting wood, the scream of a sundered soundboard, the crunch and snap of collapse, dust, debris, splinters, shards, then the crazed twang of severed notes passing away on the instant into so much dead, tangled, voiceless wire.

  16 The Grand Hotel Europe

  Wednesday evening. And in all his life, Gabriel would never again await the arrival of another human being with such anxiety. He was tired in a way he had never believed possible. Coming out of the lifts, past two armed security men, he had thought about sitting at the bar, but as he had approached (and then stood staring at a free stool), he had been forced into the audience of two suits, not even drunk yet, talking loose and loud about their plans for tackling Chechnya, talking in the abstract, inhumanly, as if, like everything else in the world, death and destruction were best dealt with in the manner of a forthright marketing campaign, nothing that a few PowerPoints couldn't handle. And he had seen the eyes of the Russian barmen as they turned away to mix the drinks.

  So now he was sitting alone, as far away as possible, in the far corner of the Grand Hotel Europe's belle époque lobby bar, beneath walls of burnished gold and an unreachable empyrean of mirrors, bolt upright in the capacious desolation of his lounge chair. He dreaded having someone drop into one of the three adjacent seats. He dreaded having to interact with the waitress to order a drink. He dreaded how much his drink might cost. He dreaded the impossibility of the night ahead, the desertion of sleep. All he could think to do was to smoke. Listening to the poor pianist summon spirit for his nightly schmaltz was out of the question; reading the endless masturbation in the international business papers was out of the question too. Eating was out—the expense aside, his appetite had completely disappeared. (Indeed, the very thought of food made him feel sick, as if it were some kind of insult or transgression against the ever-ravenous dead.) The television—the television was utterly out of the question...

  There had been another bomb and the pictures had been coming through all afternoon: sons lying on the ground, legs twisted and half covered by bloodstained blankets; fathers carrying their bruised, limp-limbed daughters across broken glass; yet more mothers crying. There was fresh violence in the air. Barbarity and a cold-skinned fear. Even in the hotel, police and security men—newly authorized, self-assured, righteous—were everywhere: on the doors, outside his window, in the lobby. The whole city (country, world) felt as though it were under imminent threat, besieged and bewildered. By whom? For what reason underneath all the other reasons? The news was deeply unreliable. What would happen next was uncertain. And where the hell was Isabella?

  All he could do was smoke.

  It was almost eleven, and she was therefore an hour late. And so ... And so he lit another cigarette from the previous. He wanted a proper drink but did not dare, for fear of not being able to stop, for fear of being drunk when she finally arrived. Oh God. Probably just a delay. Her phone didn't work outside the U.S. He checked the time. Julian Avery from the consulate was coming at eleven-fifteen. He had gratefully made the appointment earlier in the afternoon, assuming that they would be able to go through everything together with Isabella as soon as she arrived and utterly forgetting (or not thinking about) the convenience or otherwise of the late hour to Avery himself, who had said nothing of it but calmly promised to be there as though it were all in a day's work, which perhaps it was. He had thought Isabella would have time to shower and change. Now he didn't know whether to call Avery and cancel or see him on his own. Give it five minutes.

  He looked up. In the mirrors above his head he saw a man, much older than himself, sitting upside down in a chair, looking back at him as if he were about to fall and smash his face open on the floor. He fidgeted with his virgin mary. He fought the war with his desire to order a vodka. He closed his eyes.

  Earlier that afternoon he had returned from the Hermitage to find the light on his bedside phone flashing. Another message from Isabella, Isabella-brief as always: "Hi, it's me—hope you are okay. I'm at Tegel. And I am on a Petersburg flight. Thank Christ. I don't have to go via Moscow. Arrives at eight-thirty your time. Be with you tennish. See you tonight. Grand Hotel Europe. Take care."

  So then an almost crazed euphoria had seized him. He retuned the radio to the Russian thrash-rock station and smoked thick and deep out the window, looking at the Russian Museum—a strange echo of the White House or vice versa, he did not know. He did not know anything. (He had said this all his life, facetiously, but now at last he knew he really meant it: he did not know anything.) But it didn't matter. The worst that could happen was that he might die—not so bad. Happens to everyone. If she could do it, so could he.

  Five minutes later he had calmed, gathered, reordered, found some Chopin, and lain down. But just as sleep was ushering him away from himself, Avery had called, and he had begun (absurdly) pretending to have a cold as he rehearsed his thanks over and over, insisting on being as well as he could be, in the circumstances. Holding up. In the circumstances. And unthinkingly, mind all over the place again, surfing his mad excitement that Isabella was coming, he had made the arrangement to meet up with Avery at eleven-fifteen in the lobby bar.

  So next, feeling freshly vulnerable, he had called Connie ... And had been so touched and taken aback at her sheer human kindness and wisdom and perception and support (when really all he had ever been to her was a pointless heart-clawing complication) that he had begun to choke again—not this time for his mother, but because he couldn't believe that Connie could be so good to him, couldn't believe that he knew a woman this selfless and compassionate. And soft-spoken Connie had talked him all the way back to steadiness, so that when he hung up he had felt able to call Lina again and thank her for everything and tell her, in a stable voice, that he was okay and the hotel was such a huge relief and that Isabella was due and that the funeral was already being organized, and that they hoped for this Friday, and that if it went ahead on Friday, then she, Lina, need not be crazy and fly out because he'd be home Saturday, in three days, since there was no way he was going to hang around, and had she got her visa back yet? And yes, he was okay. And speak again tonight, before Isabella arrived.

  After that he had taken a bubble bath, listening to the news on BBC World—wars, famine, armies on the march, and then all of a sudden the bomb, and hell seemed loosed again, outside, inside, everywhere—and so he'd
climbed out to see the pictures, and then, exhausted, distraught, appalled to the point of epilepsy, he'd turned everything off and tried once more to sleep. And that's when he had fallen to thinking that perhaps his mother's death had begun directing his only-just-subconscious in a new and unwanted direction ... that each reluctant step he was being forced to take away from her as a living reality was in fact leading him back toward the shadow of his father. But not to sleep. Not to sleep. Rather, it was as though grief's corrosion had somehow rusted over his eyes so that he couldn't open them even had he so wished.

  "Hey, Gabs, you awake?"

  He started, catching his knee on the table.

  "Is—Jesus. You scared the shit out of me."

  He stood up, drowsy and confused.

  And so they faced each other, standing in the selfsame square meter of the swarming planet at last, the selfsame genes, the selfsame history: Isabella with her hair longer than usual, curling a little against the pale cream of her scarf; Gabriel with his shorter than when they had been together last, clean-shaven and thinner too than he had been for a long time.

  "I made it," she said.

  "Jesus, Is, I think I passed out ... I thought you had ... I thought something..."But he could not marshal words to sense.

  "I'm sorry. Security stuff." Isabella speaking softly, her usual hint of subversive humor banished entirely. "How you doing?"

  "I'm actually okay—I'm just ... I'm just really tired. I should have slept this afternoon. But..."

  And for the first time in their adult lives, brother and sister embraced. There was no thinking; it was pure compulsion—too quick for the ruthless intellectual habits of their nature, their nurture. But when they parted, neither was visibly distressed—Gabriel's dark eyes ever unguarded, Isabella's slightly smiling—as if they had silently agreed that for tonight at least, process and organization would be their joint enterprise. As if tears were for people much less tired than they. As if all that might have to be said could wait.