CHAPTER 39

“Regina, we have to talk,” Venya Volkov whispered as he sat in his audition hall watching a young boy leap across the stage. His sweet caramel face was red from exertion, and his weak falsetto produced the standard dreck.

Regina wasn’t there. She’d disappeared. She hadn’t spent the night at the dacha. He knew she hadn’t been at their Moscow apartment, either. Well, that’s excellent, he thought. She has enough sense to understand.

“We have to talk,” he whispered yet again, trying to get used to the sound of the cliché on his lips.

He’d wanted to say it last night, but Regina wasn’t there, and he’d heaved a sigh of relief. It was probably best to wait. He had to launch this last project. He couldn’t leave without finishing what he’d started.

A month ago he’d decided to create a young superduo. A boy and a girl, no more than eighteen, but who looked like teenagers. Not today’s teenagers, racing on rollerblades with bandanas around their empty heads. They had to have the touching love of children, outside of time, outside any crudeness or worldly cynicism. A Romeo and Juliet for the new millennium. The main thing was to figure out the precise types.

He’d already found the girl. He’d chosen a first-year drama student, skinny as a rail. She had waist-length, ash-brown hair and huge black eyes set in a slender, almost translucent little face. Without makeup, she didn’t look more than fifteen. Her name was Yulia. She moved very well and her voice wasn’t too bad.

The boy had been harder to find. Today he’d decided to pick someone. This caramel one was the seventh one he’d auditioned today. Listening to his weak falsetto, Venya suddenly clapped and said loudly, “Stop!”

The boy stopped.

“Can you recite a poem?”

“A poem?” The boy batted his long eyelashes in confusion.

“Didn’t you study Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tyutchev at school? Recite something. Whatever you remember.”

“Uh-huh.” The boy nodded, thought a second, and began:

Uncle, tell me something.

Did Moscow burn for nothing?

Handed to the Frenchie…

“Oh my God.” Venya frowned. “Don’t you get it? Something about love. Well? ‘Shall I compare thee…’” he hinted.

“‘To a summer’s’… um… way?” the boy continued in confusion.

“‘Day!’” Venya raised his voice. ‘To a summer’s day.’ That’s all. You can go. Okay, who’s next?” he shouted, turning toward the door.

As soon as the next boy came in, Venya heaved a sigh of relief. Dark chestnut curls, round eyeglasses, big, bright blue eyes. Before the boy could climb onstage or open his mouth, Venya already knew he’d found his boy.

“Where’s Yulia?” He looked around.

“Here I am, Veniamin Borisovich!” came a delicate voice from the back row.

The girl had been sitting in the room the whole time. He’d totally forgotten about her.

“Go up onstage. Stand next to him.” Here it was, his final project. Romeo and Juliet. The rollout would take six months. He wouldn’t be here then. If Regina needed help, he’d help. He himself would do just the first two videos and choose what songs they would perform. And that was it.

“Regina, we have to talk,” he whispered for a third time.

“Veniamin Borisovich, did you say something?” Yulia asked from the stage.

“No. Nothing. Do you both know a good ballad?”

They whispered together. A minute later they started a duet:

Never leave me, springtime,

Never leave me, hope.

The boy turned out to have a decent voice, low and deep. And he had a good ear. Closing his eyes, Venya leaned back in his seat. The words and melody didn’t arouse any fire or trembling in him. He liked a ballad performed well, only…

He decided he wouldn’t say that hard cliché to Regina tonight. He needed a little longer. He knew Regina would hear him out calmly and wouldn’t make a fuss. She would treat his decision with understanding, sympathy even.

“Oh well,” she would say. “If that’s what you want, if that’s better for you, I’m prepared…”

And then she’d kill Lena.

She’d find a way. She wouldn’t miss again. Something unexpected would happen. An accident. For instance, the plane from Tyumen to Moscow would blow up in midair.

Let Lena get back and have a talk with her husband. Venya didn’t doubt for a second that she’d agree to his proposal. She belonged to him and him alone. Who else could his happiness, his youth belong to?

The whole long, terrible stretch of life called his youth compressed in his memory down to a few days, a few happy days in June 1982. There was nothing but that one vital love. Now she would come back to him. She already had. Lena Polyanskaya loved him. They’d be together. He was healthy. He hadn’t killed anyone.

“Oh, golden days, go on and on,” the boy and girl on stage sang with utter abandon.

“That’s it. We’re here,” the killer said hoarsely, and he fell on the snow.

Lena looked around. There wasn’t any hermitage, just a small, snow-drifted mound. Vasya was lying on the snow with his eyes shut. The morning sun was pounding his face. Lena sat on a fallen trunk, feeling dizzy.

The last section of the journey had been almost easy. She’d gotten her second wind. She started to think she wasn’t even tired and could go on as long as need be. Only now, having stopped, did she realize she was dead on her feet.

The killer lay on the snow with his eyes shut for ten minutes. He knew how to relax completely and give each cell in his body a respite. Even the pain in his injured shoulder didn’t bother him. Lena shut her eyes, leaned against a tree trunk, and fell instantly into a deep sleep.

He didn’t attempt to wake her. He picked up a suitable birch branch and used it to sweep clear the dugout’s entrance. The job took him less than half an hour. When the entrance was cleared, the killer collected fir-branch litter and spread several layers of it on the bottom of the refuge. Only after that did he wake up Lena.

She opened her eyes and for a moment couldn’t understand where she was. She felt a little better after her brief nap, but her body ached and demanded more rest.

“No helicopter so far,” the killer said. “You have to look and see what’s happening with my shoulder. We’ll sit at the entrance, and as soon as we hear a helicopter, we’ll hide inside.”

“Fine.” Lena nodded and immediately thought, But what if it’s a different helicopter? Not the crooks’?

But she didn’t say a word.

From the many pockets of his leather jacket, the killer retrieved a small flat flask, a Finnish knife in a thick leather sheath, and a bar of chocolate. Neatly removing the wrapper, he broke off four squares, gave two to Lena, and put two in his own mouth.

“Eat slowly. This is all our food for the next few days,” he said. “Later, I’ll try to boil some snow for water.”

Under his jacket, Blindboy was wearing a thick sweater, and under his sweater he was wearing a striped T-shirt that made the bloody hole in the upper part of his right shoulder look particularly nasty. Lena was amazed at how easily he moved the injured shoulder, pulling the sweater and T-shirt over his head.

“You’re not cold?” she asked when he’d undressed to the waist.

“Look at my shoulder,” the killer replied.

“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor,” Lena warned as she examined the bleeding wound.

“I know. But we don’t have a doctor. Use snow to wipe away the blood.”

“What do you have in your flask?”

“Alcohol.”

“Then why snow? It could get infected.”

“There’s not much alcohol. It’ll come in handy. But the snow here is clean, so pure it’s basically sterile. Just do what I tell you.”

Lena dug a handful of soft snow out from under the hardened ice crust and began carefully wiping the blood around the wound. The killer didn’t even wince.

“The bleeding’s not bad; it’s nearly stopped. I think I can feel the bullet,” Lena told him. “Do you have a handkerchief? It needs bandaging.”

“No. It does need bandaging, but that comes later. Right now you’re going to take out the bullet.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You’re going to make an incision and pull out the bullet. Then you’ll bandage it up.”

Lena examined the wound one more time. She could feel the bullet right under the skin. A doctor could probably have pulled it out in ten minutes, even in these conditions. But Lena had never pulled out anything more than a splinter, but she knew Vasya was right. She had to pull out the bullet. Otherwise infection could set in.

“Don’t be scared,” he said gently. “I know human anatomy pretty well. There aren’t any major arteries there. I can feel it right under the skin. There’s no one but you to do this. And it has to be done.”

All Lena found in the pockets of the stranger’s peacoat was a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She unzipped the inside pocket and searched it. Five hundred dollars, that was it. She needed a clean handkerchief. She took off the peacoat and pulled the hem of her long knit shirt out of her jeans and cut off a strip of fabric about thirty centimeters wide with the Finnish knife. Then she cut a few smaller scraps from that strip. And then she carefully rubbed her hands, the knife blade, and the edge of the wound with alcohol. Taking a deep breath and crossing herself, she stretched the skin around the wound a little and made a precise cut with the knife.

“Well done,” the killer praised her. “Do you see it?”

“Yes.”

Lena saw the dark metal tip. The bullet was smaller than she thought it would be. She tried not to think about the pain she was inflicting on Vasya Slepak. Her fingers were slender and deft, but for the first time in her life she regretted she didn’t have long nails. They would have helped her snag the bullet.

Finally she got ahold of it, and she showed the killer the small, elongated piece of lead.

“You can throw it away,” he said.

She soaked another scrap with alcohol, carefully wiped the wound, and used the last long piece of fabric to tightly bind his shoulder.

“Very nicely done, Lena Polyanskaya. With skills like that, why didn’t you become a doctor?” the killer asked, pulling on his T-shirt.

“I’m not asking you why you don’t write poetry anymore, Vasya Slepak, and why you became a killer, am I?” She smiled weakly in reply. “Can you give me another piece of chocolate? A very little one.”

“Here.” He broke off two squares and held out both to her. “You earned it. Wash it down with snow. Only don’t swallow it right away. Let it melt in your mouth. It’ll be a little like cold cocoa.”

“Yes, an excellent breakfast.” Lena took out the pack of cigarettes from the coat pocket.

Parliaments again. That’s probably all the crooks in the taiga house smoked. She held the pack out to Vasya, but he shook his head.

“I don’t smoke. Now tell me, who framed my father?”

He asked the question so simply and ordinarily that Lena was taken aback.

“Gradskaya,” she said quietly after a long pause. “Your father was framed by Gradskaya. Volkov killed the girls.”

The killer’s face turned to stone. His eyes turned completely white. Lena turned away.

“And now all of it in detail,” he said. “In great detail, from the very beginning.”

That was when they heard a helicopter in the distance.

“Get into the dugout,” the killer ordered.

A few seconds later they found themselves in pitch darkness, on the soft fir litter. The helicopter was getting closer.

What if it’s not the crooks? Lena thought. What if it’s Seryozha?

“I’m listening,” the killer said quietly.

Lena started telling him everything from the very beginning. She talked for a long time, and the helicopter kept circling. The sound would move away and then come back. Every time the helicopter flew close by, Lena fell silent. But Blindboy hurried her along.

“Go on!”

She finished her story, lit a cigarette, and quietly asked, “How did you find me and why?”

“Gradskaya put a hit on you,” he said after a long silence.

“You accepted the contract?”

“I didn’t take any money.”

“But you didn’t refuse?”

“If I’d refused, she would have hired someone else. Or tried to do it herself again.”

“Why didn’t she come to you straightaway?”

“I don’t kill women with small children. She knows that. In Moscow you had your daughter, but here you’re alone.”

“Did you kill Mitya?” Lena asked.

“Yes.”

“Were you supposed to stage my death, too?”

“No. Not you.”

“How did you do it… to Mitya?”

“I did it the way I was ordered. I climbed in the window, knocked him out while he was sleeping, injected a large dose of morphine in his wrist, dragged him out of bed. The rest you know.”

He spoke so calmly and in such an ordinary way, it was as if he were sharing a recipe.

“You made just one mistake,” Lena said thoughtfully. “Just one. You injected the morphine in his right wrist. But Mitya wasn’t left-handed.”

“I injected it in the arm that was hanging from the bed. It was easier that way. I didn’t think about which it was, right or left.”

“What if his wife had woken up?”

“I wasn’t hired to do the wife. But she couldn’t have woken up. She was too high, and I did it all very quietly.”

The helicopter had flown away while Blindboy was talking. It was quiet now. The killer peeked out of the dugout.

“I’m going to light a fire now,” he said. “Help me gather tinder. Only don’t take fir. Fir smokes a lot.”

He cut a layer of bark off a young birch, rolled it into a neat cone, and deftly secured it with a flexible twig. Sitting by the fire, Lena watched the killer make a pot from birch bark.

“Are you planning to boil water in that?” she asked.

“What else?”

He filled the birch pot with snow and secured it over the fire between two forked sticks. The snow melted and he added more. Half an hour later, the pot was full to the brim with melted water, which quickly boiled.

“Why didn’t it burn?” Lena said, surprised.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “That’s what the Khanty taught me.” Carefully removing the pot from the fire, he held it out to Lena.

They sat there taking turns sipping the hot water, handing the bark pot back and forth.

“Didn’t you feel sorry for Mitya?” Lena asked cautiously. “You must have recognized him.”

“Yes,” the killer nodded. “I did recognize him. But this is my job.”

“Why did you take pity on me?” Lena tried to keep her voice from breaking. She spoke slowly and softly, almost in a whisper.

“Because you once took pity on me.”

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