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  On the spur of the moment, and because she felt uncomfortable whenever someone was being kind or genuine, Isabella said, "Well, listen, if you want to send all the British orders straightaway in bulk—in one go, I mean—then I'll give you the address of my mum and dad's old place in London. It's huge and more or less empty. You can store everything there for now. Then I can sort them and post them off individually from inside the U.K. next week."

  "Thanks. But I should be fine." Molly had crossed to the table by the window. She walked back toward Isabella now, smiling mischievously. "I got you this—for the plane." She held up a CD.

  "Molly."

  "It just came in—it's nothing. Accept a little present with good grace, girl."

  "What is it?"

  "It's just alternative versions—outtakes—from the Street Legal sessions. You said it was your favorite album."

  "It is." Isabella felt guilty and grateful and deeply touched all at the same time. "And my brother's. He'll be jealous."

  Molly stood in front of her friend a moment. "I want to be hearing from you, though. I want news. And next time you can tell me the whole story top to bottom. Deal?"

  "Deal."

  "Okay, let's hang this lot up." She picked up an armful of Isabella's clothes from the back of the sofa. "Is this a gold miniskirt?"

  29 The Fell Hand

  The night lay heavy in its final hour. But his dreams were alive and restless, slipping back and forth across the borders of his consciousness, smuggling terror one to the other. One moment he was swimming against the Seine's current, desperate, lurching and gasping for breath, the side of his mouth somehow paralyzed, and the next he was beached in his bed, swaddled but immobile, head pulsing with a stretched and swollen pain that he could not relate back to his distress in the water. Then, suddenly, asleep and yet terrified of falling asleep. Then needing to drag himself up physically; the smell of Vaseline and excrement. Then back in the water, the numbness spreading, the whole right side of his body like the weight of some lifeless other, some dead thing. And then child-scared and thrashing ... And suddenly he was lying wide awake on his back in the swarming darkness, kicking and convulsing with his left arm and leg, adult-terrified and dizzy and his breath coming short. Except it was not like any waking he had ever known, and his brain seemed as if it too were a separate being—seemed to swell and labor in a strange sort of stupefied horror even as he thought that the nightmare must surely pass. And yet now, as he opened his eyes, it went on—no nightmare but something else, something worse, something real. The shadows of the room shifted and blurred, and he could neither raise himself to sit up properly nor clear his eyesight so as to see anything save these dark, indistinct shapes. He was wet with fear. And the fear and shock were already giving way to panic—panic that he could not move his right side, panic that he could not see, panic that the pain in his head seemed to be billowing outward, shadowing even the retreating area of his mind that was able to panic. He was drooling onto his nightshirt, and he realized that his lip was sagging. And now he stopped thinking about anything but saving his own life. He began to call out for Alessandro, hoping that he was asleep in the guestroom but not knowing, not knowing, unable to remember anything. But trying to call out the boy's name over and over. (A stranger, a prayer, a piece of ass.) His own voice, though, sounded mad to him, sounded like the cry of a wild animal caught in some excruciating trap, dying in the night. He couldn't say the boy's name right. But he kept calling out. Any noise would do. As much noise as he could make. And if not ... if not, if Alessandro was away somewhere else, then he had to reach the telephone. (The pain in his head everywhere now, so that he had to think like a man seizing acrid breaths in quick pockets of air amid the rolling smoke.) His cleaner had the keys. (Cleaners, pieces of ass, whores.) All his strength and all his monumental will to live focused on the single objective: to reach the cell phone by his bed and communicate that he needed immediate help. He called out again. But the sound was a hideous distortion—vowels only, yowled and croaked. He was Quasimodo reborn, howling out—Paris deaf. And if he could not speak, if spoken words were gone, then he would have to send a message, thumb it in. Send for help. Come on, move, you bastard. Move. Even his name did not matter. Move, you bastard. Move. The will to live.

  Part III

  DECEMBER

  All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,

  and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his

  real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.

  —KARL MARX, Communist Manifesto

  CONSANGUINITY

  30 Vsevolod Learichenko

  Cold was crawling through the city like an invisible fog, crawling into every cranny, crawling into every cubbyhole, across the slums, up through the tower blocks, down along the Neva, elbowing aside all other concerns, crawling up the fat legs of its familiar winter throne. In three days the tyranny would be established anew. And those in the converted palaces and executive apartments would be forever on the threshold of their homes and offices and restaurants, forever putting on or taking off their heavy cloaks and furs and gloves and brightly colored department-store scarves; those on broken chairs watching TV in their subdivided rooms had already donned their redarned sweaters, their shawls, their ancient coats for the duration; and those lying in the lean-tos beneath the shadow of the power station now rose swaying to their feet and came out like thin sickened jackals scavenging for new cardboard, rags, rubbish to burn in their oil drums.

  Henry lingered, shivering in the swelter of the superheated bank. He kept patting at himself—hand to knee, hand to cheekbone, one hand on the knuckles of the other. The first snow was falling on the Nevsky outside, and a filthy quagmire of evil gray was already caking the ground. He had mistimed it. In the past few days he had been forced to use only twice. The sickness was beginning, and he wasn't sure he could last. He wanted Arkady gone. Go, you bastard, go. He needed that passport bought and paid for. The train left at eight. He needed to be alone, back in his cell, the door barred against himself. Belly full of sleeping pills. He had absolutely no faith in his endurance, nor in his spirit, least of all in the veracity of his intention to actually stop. He had done this only once before, and had lasted less than twenty-four hours. And he was afraid, terrified.

  He closed his eyes, seeking other thoughts, another Henry. But for a moment there was no other Henry to turn to. Addiction was his entirety. He was sweating—sweating, shivering, shaking. His last hit had been more than thirty-two hours ago. His nose was running. And the roots of his teeth felt like a jagged line of glass splinters in his gums. He bit his cheek. Maybe he should buy one last hit—Leary might even give him some. He wanted wanted wanted wanted. He could not trust himself with this money as far as the end of the Nevsky. Just get home for now. Then maybe buy some. No. No no no no. No, come on, Henry.

  The worst of the nausea wave passed and he screwed himself up and stepped through the door. The road was striped from the center with gray sludge—plain gray, dark gray, darker gray, and black gray, churned and squashed and churned again by the endless traffic. The blackest gray at the edge where the exhausts of the filthy buses disgorged their worst. The snow not as a blanket, he thought, but as some kind of blotting paper instead, revealing at last the colors of the truth. He pulled his collar up and his woolen bobble hat down. Buried deep in the inside pocket of the huge greatcoat he wore was the very last of his money and his passport. He would not tell Arkady, but he had borrowed right to the limit of his meager overdraft.

  Concentrating on his footsteps—his old black leather Sunday service shoes utterly inadequate, the hole ever-worsening—he walked right toward the river, moving slowly through the crowds on the treacherous surface. Though indistinguishable on the outside from most others passing by, likewise bound in coats and hats and scarves and blinking snow out of their eyes, Henry was thinner now than he had ever been. And beneath his hat he had shaved his head.

&n
bsp; He kept his eyes down and stared at the ground. He prayed rosaries by way of trying to claw back some calmness, mumbling to himself, his hands struggling to pat even where he had jammed them into his armpits. The pavement had turned into a thickening medley of slush and mottled gray ice. Pedestrians were squelching, sliding, sloshing along. Hard to believe that from the moment the snow left heaven until the moment it touched the earth, it was virgin white.

  Arkady's coat felt unendurably heavy, as though his skeleton might give way beneath its weight. And his bones ached as though they were being gnawed by emaciated rats from within. But the wind —a capricious Beria to Stalin's steely cold—was coming down the river to tighten the regime (he could feel it now as he passed beneath the Admiralty), and to remove the coat was unthinkable. He had a sudden cramp in his gut and tightened his jaw's clench against it. He began to shuffle to avoid jogging his stomach more than necessary and to minimize the risk of slipping on his gripless soles. His toes were numb.

  At the far side of the little park, he thought he heard someone behind him and turned ... He stopped a moment, his jaw working, looking back, standing by the railings beneath the Bronze Horseman, Peter's mount rearing against the snake of treason. There was nobody. He peered back into the snow, seeking if not the who, then at least the why and the how. But his past was all confused, fretful, restless. He could no longer find the main vein.

  But it was there—beneath, beside, between all the other damaged tributaries of the blood, twisting, twining—the thread of his life.

  Old Henry, Henry Stuart Wheyland, was the only issue of a loveless marriage, brought up by a mother whose latent Catholic piety rapidly ossified following not a divorce but a parting-of-the-ways trauma into a great and rigid structure of brittle dicta, observances, rituals matched only by the adoration she gave to her one and only holy child. Henry rewarded her with endless exam successes—a flare for chess, for reading, for doggedly enjoying choral music in the face of the wholesale mockery and ridicule of his fellows. He was altar boy and sacristan, teacher's pet, assiduous student, and seminarian—all before he dared to look himself in the eye.

  Then his mother died. Called to Jesus one evening crossing the road outside the junior school, where she had been putting up decorations in preparation for the school play. Called to Jesus by a minibus driver with a belly full of cheap beer, navigating with his knees, one hand pincering a cigarette, the other clamping to the side of his head a cell phone in which could be heard the recorded voice of a woman promising all callers that her pussy was getting wetter and wetter.

  And that was it for Henry. The gates opened, and ready or not, real life came swarming through. Faith was quickly revealed as a farce, belief a beguilement, the whole religious enterprise simply a mighty and mesmerizing distraction from the heart of existence. A colossal and redundant folly. The crisis was not a crisis, it was the termination. He had an audience with his bishop and told him that he could not go on.

  Continuing to live in his mother's house, he retrained as a teacher. He read and read and read. He traveled alone to London—to concerts, spending his tiny inheritance on tickets, modest meals out, solo gin and tonics. Two years later he was qualified and teaching at a comprehensive school. But he was nervous, awkward, jittery, and the children could smell his fear. They savaged him. He drank cheap wine in the evening. His classes were a joke—the only quiet pupils were those who were openly doing their homework for another subject. He considered it a success if he could get through the week without any physical violence in his class. He started to drink at lunchtime. His afternoon rages quietened the children for a while. And he resorted to forcing them to read aloud. But still they mocked him, by breaking off whenever they felt like it. Emily Brontë sucks fat donkey ass, they said, what was the point? And he could not remember what he was supposed to say in response. Perhaps they were right: perhaps she did suck fat donkey ass.

  He sold his mother's little home in the real estate boom, he paid off her little mortgage. He added the sum to her little legacy and set off for Asia, relatively rich. Good for at least as many years as he could see ahead, assuming he wasn't profligate. And for a while it worked. He was born again. He was still young enough, and nobody suspected the failed teacher, the seminarian, the skinny priggish schoolboy.

  Through Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Philippines, then by plane to Tunis, Tripoli, and Cairo, from Egypt to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Greek islands for a summer; then back east to India—India east, south, west, and north, an odyssey within an odyssey. He acquired the dusty disguise of the traveler And for a time, at least, the chugging contentment of momentum was his. A quiet beer on the go from noon where possible, his sipping spirits where not.

  And yet all the while a shadow of awkwardness continued to track him, forever at his back—however far he went, however fast he went there. Shy, clumsy, tongue-tied and graceless with the women, ignored by the men, he was forever ill at ease among his fellow travelers, save for a brief half-hour between inhibited sobriety and introverted drunkenness. Gradually, gradually, the truth that his youth had failed to grasp stole upon him: that no traveler alive yet escaped himself. And this realization caused his mind to falter and slump, and he began to see the world in its old familiar ways again. But worse: because now, he realized, he had replaced his former parochial hopelessness with the hopelessness of entire continents; the futility of addressing himself to schoolchildren had become the futility of addressing populations. Everywhere humanity seemed to seethe and shriek before him, redder yet in tooth and claw than nature ever dared to be. The Hindus hate the Muslims, it whispered, and the Muslims hate the Hindus; the Jews hate the Arabs and the Arabs hate the Jews; the Protestants hate the Catholics, the Catholics hate the Protestants; the Sunis hate the Shiites and the Shiites hate the Sunis; Animist versus Orthodox versus Islamic versus Hindu versus Buddhist versus Hindu versus Sikh versus Islamic versus Jew versus Christian versus Jew versus Islamic versus Orthodox versus Animist—caste, creed, and capital, the unholy trinity and the keenest blades of the cutting world. Too many fucking people fucking. And so, one multicolored afternoon, to a certain dragon's lair with Anthony, a fellow teacher of English as a foreign language.

  The exact moment of his fall was never clear to Henry. Perhaps the first pipe. Perhaps the hundredth. Perhaps later. In any event, he stopped drinking altogether. If a balm for the eczema of his spirit was all this time what he had been seeking, then this was a better balm than his wildest imaginings. He never touched booze again. He went north with Anthony, where it was easier. They crossed into Pakistan—Lahore, Gujranwala, Islamabad. They fell in with others. They passed east into Kashmir. Anthony went to Thailand. But (cool now, relaxed) Henry made his home in a commune of sorts with Dutch, American, Scots, French, and various Scandinavians. Others passing through. Captain Charlie and his wife, Anjum, ran the place, had been there since 1965. There were other teachers, aid workers traveling, an English-language Web site designer, bad musicians, lapsed missionaries, students, wasters ... Henry and his new friends sat high on escarpments and looked down the iridescent valleys while their pipes bubbled. He dreamed of paradises lost and found. He laughed and was at ease with the women and the men alike. Nine months passed. He worked a little at teaching again, happy to have rediscovered a vocation. One May day he was paid well to go to a young lawyer's home village, near the border with Jammu, to help two younger brothers with their English. The commission was for a month. But Henry became sick after four days and had to go back to the commune and return the money. He did not even realize that he had withdrawal symptoms. It was one of the Scots, Craig, who told him that he was hooked.

  In the late summer there were new rumors of helicopters. People began to leave. The military was said to be arriving. Police. Some of the local boys stopped coming for the cricket at Captain Charlie's pitch; Charlie blamed the Americans "for ruddy well polarizing the ruddy world." One afternoon the little Internet place in town refused to let Henry u
se the computer. Meanwhile, Craig and Amy, a New Yorker pretending to be Canadian, were going north in three weeks. There was a road open. They could get forty-eight-hour transit visas.

  Henry caught the bus with them. Overnight, in Kabul, Amy acquired a cache of unopened syringes—from the army, she said. You needed less, much less, this way. It was better than smoking and cheaper.

  And so Henry moved on.

  Dushanbe, Tashkent, Qaraghandy, Astana ... and eventually to Russia. Omsk. Their chief difficulty not scoring but the supply of clean needles. Henry was lucky. He had good veins.

  A week or so later, Amy went one stage further and got married for money. So Henry caught the train for Moscow with Craig.

  The relationship was no longer casual. He had to take it seriously. Time to settle down. Become a creature of habit. He taught a little in Moscow, rented a place with Craig in a clean and decent flat near the Ismailova Park. He used twice a day. He still had plenty of money. New Henry was ... cool.

  By the time he made his first visit to Petersburg six months later, Henry was shooting up only to return himself to normal. The drug was having no other effect. He went back again and again (on what he called the Anna Karenina train), and each trip to Petersburg enchanted him further—the easier size of the city, the relative safety, and its beauty. The music. (So much music so close by.) At some point in the interim Craig started stealing from him. So before the winter came, he decided to move again, taking his two ballasts with him—the satchel and the scag bag—to keep him on an even keel. He found a generous and reliable dealer. He fell in love.

  Henry came now to the wide-openness of the river, where the wind was driving the snow obliquely, closer in, so that the cars were forced to slow and loomed one after another out of a closing veil of yet more gray. Already there were swirls of thickened water in the Neva below, ice forming in darkening slabs, the remaining river running strange and contrariwise in channels in between. He went on, face turned away from the angle of the snow. Momentum.