Pravda

1 Gabriel Glover

He was relieved to be again among the Russians. Nothing to do with his head, or even his heart, but in his soul: some kind of internal alignment or tessellation. He looked up at the clock on the wall above the brown lift doors. He’d lost two hours with the delays. But the London panic had given way to cool urgency, a calculating haste. There would be the visa and passport queues. There would be the usual wrangle with the taxi driver—unless he agreed up front to pay the tourist price. And then there would be traffic on Moskovsky… An hour and a quarter and he should be there.

The doors opened. The other Europeans and the Americans hesitated. He pushed his way inside with the Russians and a Finnish businessman with a tatty attaché. Everyone was already smoking. He squashed up and breathed it in: the flavor of the tobacco—more aromatic, smokier. An old woman swathed in a heavy black shawl with her hair tied up in a scalp-tightening white bun began shouldering her myriad straps, grasping numberless bags, grimly determined to be the first out.

But he was quicker. He walked swiftly across the vast immigration hall—the high two-tone walls, light Soviet tan at the base and dark Soviet mahogany at the top. There were only two queues for nonresidents. He had hoped for three or four. The first was shorter but comprised disorderly families and excited tourists; the second was mainly businessmen, money people. Follow the money. Money, after all, had won.

He put down his bag. These last few miles always seemed such an incremental agony, especially when the previous thousand he had scorched across the curve of the Earth. And now the candor that he had been evading for the past thirty-six hours finally ambushed him: okay, yes, it was true, this call had been different. Much worse. Something was really wrong. Something serious. Otherwise why would he have gone straight to the airport this morning and taken the first flight via Hel-bloody-sinki?

The slab-faced man in the booth looked up from the pages of the passport and met his eyes through the bulletproof glass.

“Your name?”

“Gabriel Glover.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

There was a long scrutinizing pause, as if the official were formulating a difficult third question, something beginning with “why.” Gabriel straightened up, consciously pulling his shoulders back, as both Lina and Connie reminded him to do—one thing at least they had in common—and stood with proper posture at his full five-eleven. He was dressed half scruffily, in cheap jeans and scuffed boots, and half elegantly, in a dark tailored pure wool suit jacket and fine white shirt—as though he had not been able to make up his mind about who he really was or which side he was on when he set out. He had the figure of someone thin through restlessness, through exercise of the mind rather than of the body; he had liquid dark eyes and his hair was near-black and kicked and kinked at the ends, not so much a style as a lack of one, stylishly passing itself off. Immigration officials usually had him down as Mediterranean before they opened up his passport: Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires . . .

The official’s silence was becoming a test of stamina. He felt the urge to say something—anything—whatever confession was most required. But at last the Russian gave a grotesque smile followed by a parody of that long-suffering American imperative: “Enjoy.”

“Thank you.”

And his passport was returned to him slowly beneath the glass, as if it documented nothing but the transit excuses of a notorious pimp turned pederast turned priest turned politician. (Truly these people were the masters of contempt.) Now he had to wait for his luggage. They had forced him to check it in: too heavy.

For five minutes he fidgeted by the jaws of the empty carousel like an actor misguidedly aping madness. Then he could stand it no longer. He struck yet another deal with himself—no smoking in London, but okay, fine abroad—and set off to buy some cigarettes from the kiosk with the rubles he had left over from the last trip. When was that? Six weeks ago? No, less… Four weeks ago. This had to stop.

There was no relief at first—just acridity and watering eyes—but by midway through the second he was tempered, smoking greedily and watching the Russians. If ever there was a nation that understood waiting… And it occurred to him all over again why she had wanted to come back: because there was something that appealed to her particular vanity here, something fierce and irreducible, some semi-nihilistic condition of character.

He remembered her speaking about just this quality when he was a child. She too must have been quite young then, at one of the London parties, perhaps—he and Isabella, his twin sister, had been allowed to stay up, listening carefully for their cues in the adult conversation. She had been talking to Grandpa Max: “The difference between the Russian character and the Western is that we Russians have learned to live our days in the full knowledge that whatever transpires in the interim, the sun will eventually expand and humanity will be incinerated. It’s a way of life precisely opposite to the American Dream. Call it Russian fatalism if you like. But it gives us a sense of perspective, a sense of humor, and perhaps a certain dignity.”

He exhaled smoke through his nose. Her declarations and her pronunciations—was ever a person so convinced of the absolute truth of her latest opinion? She must have been unbearable when she was younger. Her voice was in his head too much these days, especially since the calls had started in earnest; indeed, there were moments when he found himself unable to distinguish his thoughts from hers. His luggage.

“You’re just like your father.”

“I’m not listening to this. That’s not even true. I’ve got to go to bed now.”

“You are still with Lina?”

(Lina’s voice through the open bedroom door: “Gabriel? Are you off the phone? Can you bring me some water? And put the lettuce back in the fridge.”)

“Since we spoke yesterday?” It was Sunday night. He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. “Am I still with Lina since this time yesterday? Yeah. Since yesterday, I’m still with Lina. The same as the last four years. Nothing has changed. Listen, I am—”

“And Connie?”

The line clicked irregularly, all the way across Europe.

“Nothing has changed in the last twenty-four hours.” He almost hissed the words. That was unusually devious and unnecessary, even by her standards. “But you know I can’t speak…”

“You can always speak to me.”

He had started whispering. “Lina is awake. It’s… it’s midnight. I have to go to bed.”

“Going sideways, going sideways, going sideways. Can’t go forward. Can’t go back. So you go sideways.”

“I’ll call tomorrow from work.”

“Like your father.”

“No. Stop. That’s it. I’ll call you tom—”

“Don’t go.”

Her voice contained a new note of… of what? Desperation?

“I promise I will call you tomorrow.”

“Gabriel.”

He felt her reaching in for his heart. And he felt his heart uncoil. “Okay. But I do have to go soon. And—and you should be in bed too. It’s what? Christ, it’s past three with you. It’s the middle of the night.”

“It’s difficult for you. I know.”

“What is? You’re not sounding great. You’re rasping. Seriously, is everything okay?”

“To inhabit yourself fully. Very few people do this anymore. But you and I, we try—correct? We try to hold the line… Even though this will cost us almost everything we have—this great indignity, this great antagonism, this great protest.” She coughed. “Which is itself pointless.”

He was unnerved now. More riddles. His attention wholly focused.

“But—listen to me.” She spoke more steadily. “You have to be fierce in the face of all the cowardice you see around you. And you have to say, ‘No. For me, no. I will not. I will not lie down and I will not give up. I will not do or be or become anything that you wish me to. However you disguise it, however you describe it—politics, religion, economics—I will continue to stand here and tell you that what you believe in is a lie and what you have become is a falsehood.’”

“Why—why—are you talking to me like this?”

Another cough and suddenly she became urgent. “Will you come tomorrow?”

“To Petersburg?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t. I’m at work tomorrow.”

“Your work is a joke. Come tomorrow.”

“I can’t just… Why are you laughing? Jesus—you’re coughing.” He continued to speak, but he knew that she could not hear. “Oh God… It’s getting worse.”

For nearly a minute he stood there listening to her hacking. But it was unendurable. So he started up again, shouting into the phone, regardless of waking Lina. “Can you hear me? Are you there? Hold the phone up.” A few seconds of quiet, her breathing like wind through rusted barbed wire. “Oh God… You’re crying.”

And then this: “Do you love me, Gabriel?”

She had never asked him such a thing. Not once.

“Yes. Of course. You know I do.”

“Say it in Russian.”

“Ya tyebya lyublyu.”

“Come tomorrow. Promise me.”

“You’ve got to move back to London. And you don’t have to live in the old house.” He would have set out that instant if he could have made it there any faster by doing so.

“Petersburg is my home. You must be here tomorrow. I will give you the money. I want to see you. I will talk. There are so many things I have to tell you.”

“I need a visa.”

“Come the day after, then. Get an express visa. I’ll pay.”

“Are you crying?”

“Promise me.”

“Okay. Okay. I promise.”

It was one thirty-five U.K. time when he finally hung up. Three and a half hours later, he was standing at the front of the already lengthening queue outside the Russian embassy on Kensington Palace Gardens, watching a grout-gray dawn seep slowly through the cracks in the east.

The driver was crazier than he had dared hope. He clasped the handrail above the passenger door, the muscles tensing in his upper arm as the taxi veered left onto Moskovsky. Wide and straight, the road into town was as Stalin-soaked in the monochrome of tyranny as the center of the city was bright and colorful with the light of eighteenth-century autocracy.

“Democracy is difficult for us, Gabriel,” she often said. “In Russia we are required to live within the pathologies of the strongest man—whatever he titles himself. That way we all know where we are and what we are doing. However bad it gets.”

The cars were moving freely—the battered Czech wrecks and tattered Russian rust crates, the sleek German saloons and the tinted American SUVs, overtaking, undertaking, switching lanes in a fat salsa of metal and gasoline. Still no phone network; it didn’t usually take this long. He shifted in the back seat, lit his fourth cigarette, and wound down the window as the cab slowed for the lights. A mortally decrepit bus bullied its way across the intersection, discharging plumes of what looked like… like coal dust. The pollution was worsening: particles seemed to hang heavy and brazen as nails in the lower air, a blunt parody of the fine mists that must have once come dancing up the Neva from the sea to greet great Peter himself as he rode out across the marshes to meet his enemies.

He would stay with the cab: twenty minutes and he’d be there. No need to jump out and take the underground. Gorolov-Geroev Park was just ahead now—he could see the scrub trees behind the tarnished railings, and there was the crooked-nosed old man with that same heavily lapeled sports jacket still selling books and magazines on the corner. Not really selling. More like minding them for someone or something never to come. Jesus, it was as if he had not been away. How many times was he going to have to do this?

He bent to look up. The sky was low and lowering. The plane had been in rainclouds for much of the descent. The wind must be carrying them inland from the west. He tried to listen to the music from the ill-tuned station on the car radio; it sounded like Kino. Something off Gruppa Krovi maybe—he couldn’t be sure—beauty and despair bound in razor wire and thrown overboard together, white-lipped now beneath the ice, thrashing it out, life and death. His sister would have known the exact song, the exact version. A current of anger joined the stream of his thinking. Isabella hadn’t been over for nearly a year. Longer, in fact—twenty-one months: Christmas—the Mariinsky—that vicious wind on the walk home, which froze the nose and iced the eyeballs, three atheists on their knees at Kazan Cathedral early the next morning.

The truth was that he wished he had managed to get hold of Isabella last night instead of leaving a message. The truth was that he was no longer sure of the truth. And he trusted his sister to apprehend things precisely—to seek out the quiddity of things and, once grasped, never let go, to insist, to assert, to confirm. Whereas for him… for him the truth seemed to be slipping away with each passing year, losing distinctiveness, losing clarity, losing weight. Duplicity, hypocrisy, and cant, the primary colors he once would have scorned, he now saw in softer shades. Perhaps this was the aging process: bit by bit truth grows faint until she vanishes completely, leaving you stranded on the path, required to choose a replacement guide from those few stragglers left among your party—Surly Prejudice, Grinning Bewilderment, Purblind Grievance.

The thin beep of his phone locating a network. He sat up smartly, let the cigarette fall outside the window, and pressed the last dial button. A child’s unmediated eagerness ran through him. With every second he expected her voice… But the ringing continued as if to spite him. And he began to picture the phone shrilling on the side table by the bay window—the dusty light, the red-cushioned casement seats, the chess set forever ready for action. He imagined her climbing from the bath, or hurrying from the shower, or fumbling with keys and bags at the door.

Eventually the line went dead.

He hit redial. They were coming toward Moskovskaya—he could see the statue of Lenin a little farther on, the right arm aloft—one of the few still standing. This time he listened intently to the exact pitch and interval of the ring tone. No answer. No bloody answer.

The line went dead again. She must be out. Maybe she was tired of waiting and he’d get there to find one of her notes on the table: “At café such and such with so and so, come and join”—as if he should know the café or the friend. Or maybe she was just refusing to pick up the phone for reasons she would soon be telling him—something dark and colossally unlikely involving organized crime, her time in the Secretariat. Redial. The fact was that he was utterly at a loss as to what she was really trying to communicate to him. The direct accusations, sly allusions, subject swerves, sudden changes of register that served (and were meant to serve) only to draw further attention to the preceding hints. Redial. Individual exchanges made sense, and yet when he got off the phone he could not discern what lay behind her pointed choice of subject, her denouncements, her fabrications. He gave up as the line went dead the fourth time. Why wasn’t she answering the bloody phone? And suddenly all his anger passed away. And he knew that he would do this forever if necessary.

His mobile had heated his ear and he put it down on the seat away from him as the driver slowed for the traffic again. And here they were crawling beneath mighty Lenin’s arm. “That failure,” she always said, “is our failure, Gabriel, is the failure of all of us. Such dreams expired. More dreams than we can imagine—all extinguished by that failure. Not just in the past but in the future too: and that’s the real sadness, the real tragedy. We have—all of us, the whole world—we have all lost our belief in our better selves. And the great told-you-so of capitalism will roll out across the earth until there is no hiding place. And every day that passes, Marx will be proved more emphatically right. And all the men and women waking in the winter to the slavery of their wages will know it in their heart.”

He stood for an anxious moment by the iron railings of the canal embankment, putting away his wallet and glancing up at the second-floor balcony. The tall windows were closed. But the curtains were not drawn. The driver struggled with the lock of the buckled trunk, the gusting wind causing his jacket to billow. Rain was coming. Gabriel could smell the dampness in the air. He took his bag and hurried across the street.

He reached the gates that blocked his way to the courtyard—like most in the old part of town, the flats were accessed from the various staircases within. And only now he remembered the need to punch in the security code. What was the number? He couldn’t recall. He pressed the buzzer and waited. Maybe she had been in the bath when he rang. Or maybe her phone wasn’t working. He simply hadn’t thought about this. He’d assumed she would be home. And if by some strange chance not, then he had all the keys to let himself in… but the security code? No. He’d forgotten all about the bloody security code.

He tried a few combinations at random. He jabbed at her buzzer repeatedly. Nothing happened. And there was no voice from the intercom. The first twist of rain came and he leaned against the gate to get beneath the shallow arch. Water began to drip onto his bag. Maybe he could try one of the other buzzers and explain… But even if they spoke English—unlikely—there was no way on earth they’d let him in; crime had seen to that. He pressed her buzzer again. He did not know what else to do.

No answer.

Abruptly the full force of his panic returned—a tightening in his throat, a clamping of his teeth at the back of his jaw, the sound of his own blood coursing in his ears. (The fear—yes, that was what it was—the fear in her voice on the telephone.) He looked around, face taut now, hoping for a car or another resident approaching. Someone to open the gate. Where was everybody? The whole of the city had vanished. This was insane. Over on the other side of the canal, two men were sprinting for shelter. They ducked down the stairs into the café opposite.

Yana. Of course. Yana would know the code. Yana’s mother was in and out all the time—cleaning, officially, though mainly consuming expensive tea and gossiping. Oh please Christ Yana’s working today. He picked up his bag and dashed across the bridge. The Kokushkin Bridge on which poor Rodya stared into the murky water to contemplate his crime—Gabriel, can you imagine it?

He was across. He dived down the café stairs, slipped on the wet stone and nearly fell, reached out for the door to stop himself, and somehow bloodied his knuckle as he crashed inside. But he cared nothing for the eyes that were on him as he walked over to the bar cursing under his breath.

“Is Yana here? Do you speak English?”

“Yes, I do.” The girl at the bar had a staff T-shirt: “CCCP Café: The Party People.”

“Is Yana here? Yana.”

“Yes. She is. What—”

“Can you get her?” He had not seen this girl before; he tried to ameliorate his manner, but to little effect. “Sorry. I’m sorry. Can you tell her Gabriel is here? It’s about Maria—she’ll know.”

“Okay.” The girl had registered his urgency and locked the till as quickly as she could. “Please. Wait here.”

“Yes. I’ll wait.” He glanced at the walls, which were pasted with lacquered old editions of Pravda: Khrushchev kissing a dead astronaut’s son, Andropov, Old Joe himself—always a shock to see that, yes, he was a person of flesh and blood and conversation—leaning forward to say something to the woman seated beside his driver as the state car processed down Nevsky Prospekt. How many times had he and Isabella tried to read these walls and recreate in their minds what it must have been—

“Gabe. Hi. Hello. How are you? I did not know you were coming back. Katja says you are a man who lost it.”

“Sorry. Yana, I’m just—I can’t get in.” He raised his thumb to indicate behind himself. “What’s the combination? The security gate. Do you know it?”

“Yes, of course.” She told him the number, becoming conscious of the alarm in his eyes. “Is everything okay? How long you here? I didn’t know you were coming back. It’s lucky you came today, though—I am going to Kiev tomorrow. I have to—”

“It’s a flying visit.” He interrupted her. “I just got in. But I’ll be back later. Promise.” He was already turning for the door. “We’ll go out. Definitely. You can tell me about what is really happening—the news isn’t clear.”

The rain had soused the cobbles but this time he crossed the bridge at a flat sprint, all the while keeping his eyes on the window above the balcony. Nobody paid him any attention—the random autumn flurries of wet weather that came squalling in off the Gulf of Finland often caused old and young alike to scurry and dash. A woman holding a magazine above her head left the shelter of the hairdresser’s canopy and scuttled to her car door.

He was back at the security gate. He pressed in the numbers. The metal doors began to swing open jerkily: a moment to marvel at how the simple fact of knowing the right combination was all the difference and then he was through, into the courtyard.

The rain was slicking his hair onto his forehead and causing him to blink. The cars within looked more numerous than the last time. He was unashamedly thinking with her voice now: There you go—capitalism’s pubescent little triumphs on every hand, see how they vaunt it. Water was gushing down the side of the building where the guttering was broken. His mind would not focus. But his heart was pestling itself mad against the mortar of the present, suffering now from some inarticulate dread—a terrifying feeling that came at him as he reached the staircase in the corner of the quadrangle, grinding his very quick to powder.

The stench of cat urine assailed him, slowed him, as he hit the stairs. She was a little demented, perhaps. Admit it. That’s why he couldn’t get at what she meant, what she was really saying to him. She contradicted herself twelve times a day, twelve times an hour, and who can believe someone who… Distraction, though, distraction, he breathed: back to now, back. Up we go. Up we go. Why wasn’t he running anymore? Maybe she was refusing to answer the entryphone on purpose. And the telephone. In two minutes she would be taking her perverse Petersburg pleasure in telling him how the criminal gangs were now calling door to door in the afternoons in the hope of being admitted without the need for time-consuming breaking-and-entering procedures. It’s not as bad as Moscow, but it’s very dangerous sometimes here, Gabriel. And there was another murder just over in Sennaya…

He turned to take the third flight. The seconds were stalling. He noticed details he had never noticed before. The filth and the smell, the colors, the lack of colors, the chipped and broken sad stone stairs, the million cigarette butts underfoot, the unconcealed pipes all caked thick with dust and grime forever wheezing and choking up and down and back and across the stairwell, the metal-slabbed apartment doors riveted with legions of bolts and locks and tarnished somehow—despite the steel—by nameless cats or poisonous leaks or dogs or rats… Her thick exterior padlock was undone.

So she must be in.

She must be in—because there was no possibility that she’d leave that padlock undone if she had gone out. She must be in. But he turned his key and entered the apartment in silence because he could not bring himself to call her name.

The light was dim. The wooden floor smelled of polish. He stepped onto the narrow carpet that ran down the center of the hall. And now he stopped moving altogether. The familiar pictures—his father in Paris in 1968, Isabella in New York, the Highgate house, his father on the telephone with a cigarette, Nicholas II and his family, he and his sister as babies in a pram, some famous clown white-faced in Red Square, the map of Europe stained with the brown ring mark of a wineglass over the Balkans, the icons, especially the bloody icons… These familiar pictures seemed suddenly remote, alien, unconnected with him, as though he had wandered into the flat of a vanished stranger whose life he must untangle.

Someone dropped something in the apartment above. He let his bag fall and ran, left, toward her bedroom. The door was open. The heavy curtains drawn. Her books piled untidily on the floor by her fallen lamp. Flowers thirsty in the vase. Her favorite shawl spread across the floor by the chest. A full mug of black tea by the bed. Pills. The upright piano. The bed itself empty. He ran back down the corridor, pushing doors as he went—bathroom, kitchen, study… But he slowed on the threshold of the last, the drawing room, as she called it—high ceilings, grand, with my tall windows for the White Nights, Gabriel, for the cool air in the summer, for the best view in all of Petersburg, where our history is made.

His mother was lying on the floor by the desk. He was on his knees and by her side in an instant. Her eyes were open but shrouded somehow in a shimmering film of reflected light. And when he called her name out loud at last and raised her up, her body was cold and slight. And she seemed to have shrunk, to be falling down—down into herself, down into the floor, seeking the earth. And there was neither voice nor breath from her lips.

2 Isabella Glover

Her dreams came just before dawn, stealing past the watch of the New York City night, slipping past the sentries of the heart. And this was a bad one. More of a nightmare, if truth be told. She flopped back down and closed her eyes and let old respiration soothe her modern nerves, concentrating on the out breaths, waiting for the chemical, physical, and emotional residue to drain away. And how real, she thought, this response of the body to the counterfeiting of dreams.

Isabella Glover stretched out to her full five-seven. Her hair, which reached almost to the shoulder, was so black that by some lights it looked almost blue. But her eyes were not quite as dark as her brother’s, nor so undefended, moving quickly beneath a protective sheen of silent laughter. She was thin, but no longer painfully so; light on her feet, gamine; the reluctant possessor of that rare quality, the precise opposite of blond, which seems to grow more intense the longer its presence remains in a room. And she had one of those not-immediately-beautiful-but-on-reflection-actually-very-beautiful faces that you see in Renaissance paintings of young Italian noblewomen carrying bowls of fruit.

She stared at the fault lines cracked across her ceiling. It was the letters that were causing all the trouble, of course.

Oh, shitting hell. Might as well get up.

She kicked back the sheet and sat on the side of the bed. She felt hot. She lifted her hair from the back of her neck. Yes, these winter pajamas, she now admitted to herself, were a totally unnecessary choice—more a statement than anything else: Don’t touch me, Sasha; the secret codes of our relationship have all been changed; I am not touchable by you—to touch me is now a violation punishable by outrage and complete withdrawal. (Men and women with their constant signals-intelligence chatter back and forth and all of it so unreliable.) She stood up and moved toward their little dresser to take a swig of the mineral water, which, she was pleased to discover, had lost its irritating sparkle overnight.

Unnecessary because of course Sasha never would touch her after an argument—his side of the bed was empty. He would be splayed out on the couch on the other side of the door. After an argument, he hadn’t got the nerve even to sleep in the same room as she, never mind anything else. So why bother with the pajamas? Just in case he suddenly transformed his entire personality and popped his head in to say sorry for shouting and being so rude and then promised never to be such a selfish, self-centered, self-obsessed two-year-old again? She took another, deeper swig. Or because she wanted to walk past him thus armored in the morning? To make visual the rupture? Intimacy and its withdrawal as a weapon… Not very subtle, Is, not very subtle.

She bit her lip.

So no, she would not go parading past in her bloody silly pajamas; she would not go banging into the bathroom; she would not make a sound. Lights would stay off. The kettle would not be boiled. There would be no statement, deliberate or otherwise, of her going to work—as I do every morning, by the way, Sasha, every single morning.

She looked across at the alarm clock again—a self-satisfied digital with lurid red numbers calling itself “The Executive.” His clock. It was only quarter past six—normally too early to call on Molly, her downstairs neighbor, except that three days ago Molly badly twisted her ankle and so was not sleeping and there was every chance she would be awake, the same as on Sunday, when the emergency text had come in: “In agony and bored.RUAwake?” This time, Isabella thought, she would text Molly—on the way to Veselka’s, just to check. Fetch the tea and whatever else Molly fancied and bring it back for her. A civilized breakfast before work, some lies about their boiler being broken, and then a bath (oh God, yes, a bath instead of that dribble of a shower) in Molly’s glorious tub. And, oh shit, she’d better remember to call her mother from the office this morning, before Petersburg went to sleep.

Her eyes went back to the latest communiqué, set down askew on top of the books on her bedside table and energetically inhabiting the envelope on which her mother’s calligraphic hand had rendered her own name in crimson ink. With deepening confusion, she had read it for a second time last night directly before going to sleep—a good way of distracting herself after the row with Sasha and his subsequent (rather protracted) storming out.

The new letter was a single page only, but far stranger than the previous one. Isabella crossed back to the bed and took it from the envelope. A Finnish stamp—like everyone else, her mother used one of the hotel mail services via Helsinki. Some stuff about the president, a disparaging mention of her brother’s so-called career in contract publishing, news of a bomb in Moscow and ten more people “ripped limb from limb” by the “bastards” in Chechnya, and then this: “So, dear Is, be sure to visit me first, before you visit your father. It is better that you understand from me Oh, you know how scheming he is, and he’ll be sure to distort everything. He will want to be certain that you love him, especially now he is getting older.”

Leaving aside the lingering oddness of her mother’s writing style—“I am a Russian never forget, Is, forced to slum it in second class with this fat little ruffian English, so full of himself and yet so empty and vague”—this new letter was seriously weird because Isabella had absolutely no intention of visiting her father, nor indeed of finding out where he was. Neither she nor her brother had spoken a single word to Nicholas Glover for more than ten years. Not since the death of Grandpa Max (when her father had turned up only to make sure he got all the money). And Isabella was certain that her mother knew this. So what the hell was she going on about? Seriously weird too because what was there to understand? What was there to distort? It was extremely difficult to tell what was real and what was fantasy, given the background level of histrionics and exaggeration that her mother liked to live with, and she was certainly not above coming on all portentous in order to secure a visit or whatever obscure point she had set herself to make.

For Christ’s sake—Isabella collapsed onto her back again, holding the letter aloft—the very act of writing on paper, in crimson ink, and using the mail was theatrical these days. There were times when she marveled (as if she herself were not involved) at her mother’s ability to target her sense of… sense of what? Shame? Guilt? Loyalty? Indebtedness? Conspiracy? Daughterliness? It was as if her own genes were coded to recognize and instantly respond to the parental call regardless of her private will as a separate thirty-two-year-old individual. All the same…

All the same, maybe this time it was something serious. And given that she had not written back after the two previous letters, she really had better call today. As soon as she got in.

She puffed out her cheeks, kicked herself up again, crossed the room, and locked the letter in her private drawer with the others. Then, without opening the blinds, though conscious that the light was already sharpening against the skyline, she slipped on her sweat pants and sneakers and an old top. Amazing, really, that the New York birds still bothered with a dawn chorus.

Now the task was to get out without waking Sasha.

She opened their little closet—too shallow to hang anything in—and unhooked her charcoal suit. She felt relieved that the day was under way. She could be honest about her motives, too. She was leaving without waking him not because she feared further fighting, nor reconciliation, nor a silent standoff. It was less personal than that. She was leaving surreptitiously because she did not want to have to respond to, or negotiate with, another consciousness. No; what she wanted, above all else, was to start this day without his hijacking her psyche and making her cross or remorseful or resentful or mawkish or forgiving or having any other response she didn’t want to have to experience. For now, she wished only to be by herself in her own mind—a reasonable thing for a woman to wish for every so often. And when she was clear, when she was centered, then she would talk to Sasha. Really, it was just silly anyway.

She approached the door of the bedroom and inched it open. His head (at the end of the couch) would be just the other side. She stopped a millimeter before the point where she knew the creak would begin. And then she slipped through.

But all the long and narrow way past the sofa, taking care not to tread on the plate or the glass or knock over the bottle of armagnac that he had so affectedly taken to drinking, she knew that he was awake, pretending to be asleep. And after four years together, he knew that she knew. And she knew that he knew that she knew and so on and so on and so on and so why the bloody sham? And why, a second later, was she frowning with concentration as she tried to judge the exact force required to pull the front door of their apartment shut while making as little sound as possible?

Abruptly, and with a sickening feeling, she realized that her heart had a false floor and had been concealing its contraband throughout: she had been aware all along that he would be wide awake, and she had been aware that she would pretend he wasn’t. Jesus, was there no subject on which heart and mind might be candid with each other?

She slammed the door.

And then none of it mattered because she was hurrying down the tight stairwell, down the narrow corridor, down the steep stoop, and onto the freedom and anonymity and endless possibility of the sidewalk. New York’s forgiving embrace—inclusion in the shared idea of a city, however true or untrue. A union of states. The infinite context of America.

But just the same, she dared not allow her mind to look up, for she sensed that the tattered images of her dreams were still hung high on the masts of her consciousness like the ragged remainders of sails flapping after a storm.

Molly Weeks let her paper fall onto her lap, transferred her steaming takeout tea from left to right hand, and sucked her sensitive teeth, which, she occasionally reflected, were seven or so years younger than the rest of her and therefore still in their thirties. A conventional English girl from an actual convent school, Molly had married the American singer in a New Romantic band twenty-five years ago—the first of two feckless husbands—and she had since acquired that quick-switching manner wherein raw-hearted sensitivity vied with the don’t-mess attitude of the serial survivor. She wore thick-framed wedge-shaped glasses, her hair was a perpetually self-contending frizz of red and blond, and these days she was sole owner, chief executive, and chairman of the ever more successful MagicalMusic.com.

She spoke now with mock exasperation: “The world is going to all kinds of hell and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.” She adjusted her leg, the ankle of which was propped up on a pillow. “How’s the career, Is?”

The subject of Isabella’s job was one of their private jokes. Though, like most private jokes, it was also a way of dealing with a private seriousness: an abiding desire to encourage (and to liberate) on the part of the older woman; an abiding desire to evade for the time being on the part of her younger neighbor.

“Heading the same way.” Isabella, who was sitting on a dining chair that she had dragged in from the other room, abandoned the lifestyle article she was (hating) reading. “My own fault, though.” Isabella drew her finger quickly across her throat. “Last night.”

“Bad?”

“Uh-hmm. Definitely should not have told them that I drink a bottle of vodka every morning before I come into work.”

Molly chuckled and had to hold out her tea at arm’s length to prevent herself from spilling it. “This was the client party you told me about, right? The chairman and all the cheeses present?”

“Yep.” Isabella nodded. “All of them—Jerk, Snicker, Robe, and even the Smooth.” Isabella’s colleagues were well known by their various epithets.

“After everything we said about building mutually affirmative relationships in the workplace.” Molly approximated the disappointed face of the daytime-TV life coach.

Isabella played along. “I feel as though I’ve let my whole family down.”

Molly grinned. “I can’t believe they took you seriously.”

“They took me more than seriously. They looked at me like I’d just beheaded the secretary of state live on CBS.” Without flinching, Isabella sipped her tea, which was still ferociously hot, and suddenly remembered what she had been meaning to tell her friend. “Hey, you know there’s a new Russian restaurant opening up? Right around the corner from Veselka’s.”

“Another one? No way. You serious?” Molly was a champion of all things neighborhood.

“Really.” Isabella nodded.

“How do you know?” Molly shifted her ankle again.

“The waitress told me.”

“The waitress in Veselka’s? Which one?”

“Don’t know her name. The one with the suspicious expression that makes you think you must definitely be dining with terrorists or whatever.”

Molly expressed puzzlement and shook her head, the highest out-reaches of her crazed hair seeming to follow a moment behind, as if uncertain whether to go their own way or not.

“You know, Mol—heavy floral-pattern dresses.” Isabella laid her hand delicately over her chest. “Ruched.”

“Oh, you mean Dora.” Molly smiled her recognition.

“Yeah—Dora. She served me these ‘Earl Jeelings,’ as she calls them.” Isabella indicated her cup. “Then she came around the counter and sort of spat the news into my ear.”

“She does that.” Molly aborted an attempted sip. “Christ knows how they get this tea to stay so hot. What did she say?”

Isabella adopted a confidential air and mimicked the waitress’s rat-a-tat voice: “New place opening. East eleven. Says it’s Russian. But don’t even go there. Totally fake. Totally disgusting. They pee in the pelmeni. Waitresses illegal. All sluts.”

“But the new place is not actually open yet?”

“No.”

“So how does Dora know?”

“She’s seen ‘definite sluts’ going in for interviews, apparently. And she knows the chef. Famous for peeing in pelmeni the world over.”

Molly drew a faux-macho breath. “What the hell is pelmeni, anyway?”

“Dumplings. Stuffed with cabbage, cheese, mushrooms. That kind of thing. Gogol’s favorite.”

“Did Dora tell you that?”

“No… No, that was my mum.”

“Useful.”

“Very useful. Dietary preferences—I know ’em all, Turgenev to Tchaikovsky and back again. Just in case you ever need me to rustle up something for one of the great men of Russian culture.” Isabella wrinkled her nose. “I’d better jump in the bath now, if that’s okay. Wouldn’t want to be late for the office. I’ve got opportunity matrices to evaluate.”

“Sure. Go right ahead. Help yourself to one of those fizz-bomb things. They’re glorious. Really… fizzy.”

“Thanks. Don’t wait up. I may be a few days.”

Molly took a tentative sip of her milkless Darjeeling. She had a shrewd enough idea of what lay behind Isabella’s impromptu visit. For one thing, something was going on upstairs. She suspected that Isabella found Sasha unfulfilling—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Indeed, she knew for certain that Isabella found the general obviousness of masculinity tedious, since a common theme of their concert nights out together was Isabella being amusingly caustic about the clumsy gambits of stupid men. She did a great impression of the coy-but-almost-immediate way that they peddled inventories of their “interests”—"the shit fiction, the shit films, the shit music, the clichés, the clichés, Mol, the same old clichés.” And yet Isabella also seemed to do down the smart ones—for their dishonest charm, their self-satisfied pride in playing the man-woman game, their “cultivated eccentricities,” their “depth.” All of which analysis Molly had much sympathy for. Sasha and men aside, though, it also occurred to Molly that Isabella’s habitually sardonic chatter might be symptomatic of a deeper unease. The difficulty, however, was getting Isabella to open up. Evidently this stuff about broken boilers was total crap.

Thirty-five minutes later, Isabella came back into Molly’s bedroom, dressed now in her trouser suit and businesslike despite herself.

“Thanks for the bath, Mol. That was just what I needed.” She fetched her cup from the little bedside table and dropped it into a brown paper bag. Reality poured back into the vacuum of the vanished humor. “I’ll call tomorrow.”

“Do.”

Isabella’s eyes met those of her friend a moment and then traveled around the room as if looking for further cups that required disposing of. “Shall I bring your laptop over?”

“Yes. Thanks. That’s helpful. You’d better bring the power cable too, though.” Molly shifted her weight. “The battery connection keeps cutting out. I’ll plug it in down here.”

The laptop was on the tiny desk by the window. Isabella moved smartly around the end of the bed.

“You know,” Molly said, her voice gentle, her head following the passage of her friend. “You know, I’ve been thinking—you should put on those mini-concerts we keep talking about. Keep the momentum going—find some musicians who don’t look and behave like social-problem children and persuade your friends to come along. Your thing for Sasha’s birthday was cool. How many people? Two hundred. And everybody loved it. Everybody. And that was only piano and violin.”

“I know,” Isabella said. “But I’m not sure people would come—not if it weren’t some kind of a special occasion.”

“Oh, they would. Definitely. You have a pretty big e-mail list already.”

The wires into Molly’s computer were all twisted.

“All these things start small,” Molly continued. “You could use the place on Eleventh again.”

Isabella clicked her tongue. “Which one is the power here?”

“Sorry, Is—it’s the thickest cable. You might have to unplug it under the desk and feed it back up—otherwise that adaptor thing gets stuck. It’s a pain.”

Molly was right about the concerts, of course. But Isabella did not believe her neighbor really understood that such a course was far from easy. In the past twenty years (yes, since the Wall collapsed, dear, crazy Mother) modern life had speedily (and rather gleefully) drawn up and ranged all its best and biggest guns against anything remotely vocational. (Molly was the exception—and it had cost her dearly to find her niche.) The arteries of the world were becoming more and more sclerotic: if you were not creating money, then you were not creating anything. And sure enough, down on her hands and knees, Isabella heard herself citing the hoary old defense: “I’ve saved quite a lot, though—one more year and, well, I reckon I’ll have enough for a six-month sabbatical rethink.”

“If there’s anyone who could rescue that kind of music, Is… I mean, the classical audience is so pompous and self-regarding, such a bunch of pricks.”

Isabella stood, glanced out the window, and leaned over the desk, trying to thread the freed cord up from behind.

“But you’re not,” Molly continued. “You’re young and you’re clever and you’re… capable. The only thing… the only thing is to make a start.”

So keenly was Isabella aware of her neighbor’s change of tone (and the kindness behind it) that she suddenly felt embarrassed and could not bring herself to turn around. Embarrassed because she wanted both to embrace Molly and to run away from her at the same time. Embarrassed too that she might be guilty of in some way soliciting such sympathy. And worst of all, embarrassed because the acuity of the insight made her want to demur, deny, deflect, evade… when actually she well knew that she was only being cheered and reassured—reassured that here was an understanding ear, if ever she needed it. And yet what was the point of talking about this or that, when really—the floor of her mind now cracked apart and rose up like a swarm of agitated wasps—when really the whole mess needed sorting: dropping out and then begging her way back into Cambridge; a false-start career in law—years wasted; a change of plan; unbelievable amounts of work; then not managing more than three months with the cultish children of Magog at Harvard Business School; this new farce of a career at Media Therapy, also very difficult to lie her way into, with these human simulacra for colleagues. Not forgetting a disastrous series of so-called relationships with infants, a violent cheating manipulative bastard for a father whom (subconsciously) she had crossed the Atlantic to get away from and whom she sometimes felt the urge to pretend (in her sickest moments) had actually physically abused her, so that at least she would have some factual and universally recognized problem to cite as the cause of all her ungovernable feelings of revulsion and nausea toward him. And now the letters. She turned.

“You’re right, Mol, I know. I should call the guy again. That place on Eleventh is perfect. But… but it’s not as if I’m going to do this job for more than another year, maximum. I think I just had to get the green card and, you know, find a proper footing here after all the arsing around. If there’s one thing about America these days, it’s that you have to be legal. Land of the free and all that.”

She passed the computer with both hands.

Molly placed it beside her on the bed and looked up, her face a picture of understanding.

And instantly Isabella felt the urge to share something real with her friend. It was cruel to push people away all the time. Give something. Anything.

“I had an argument with Sasha last night, is all. After I got back from the work thing.”

“Was it hard-core?” Molly was almost disappearing with delicacy and the countereffort not to seem overdelicate for fear of further drawing attention to any tenderness.

“No. No, not really. Just stupid.” Isabella likewise was almost disappearing, but for burgeoning shame at having raised the subject at all. “He can be an idiot. And—you know this whole thing—he doesn’t work. Well, I suppose he does. But not in the way that we… that is conv—”

“Happen often?”

“No. Hardly ever.”

“Feel like a normal argument that a couple would have?”

“It was just about space. You know.” Isabella found a rueful smile.

“Yes, well, it’s tricky up on your floor. The apartments are half this size.”

Though she knew the time well enough, Isabella glanced deliberately at the old clock. “Damn. I really have to scoot. Here, let me plug you in.” She bent and then came up again all bustle and haste. “I’ll message if I’m up Thursday morning. It’s unbelievable—I’m going to be late again and I have a nine with the Snicker himself.”

“Go, lady, go.” Molly frizzed her hair. “Thanks for breakfast. And really, come down whenever. If I am alive enough to make it to the door, you can come in.”

Isabella looked sympathetically at the ankle. “You’d better take it easy on the ski-jumping and stuff today, Mol. You done with your tea?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Isabella put her friend’s cup into the brown bag for the recycle bin and collected the rest of her things for work.

“Okay. Bye,” Isabella said.

“See you,” Molly called after her. “Soon as I’m fixed we’re going to check out those sluts.”

Isabella let herself out, careful with the door and gratefully aware that Molly had chosen not to pursue her any further. One day, she resolved, she would sit down and tell Molly everything, instead of all this endless slipping and sliding around the edges. Sort Sasha. Sort work. Sort everything. Just get clear long enough to achieve a reasonable perspective and then…

It was twenty-four minutes from her building on East Thirteenth between Second and Third to the offices of Media Therapy on Greene. And she was in the habit of walking to work. It wasn’t so much that she liked the exercise, or the routine, or the therapeutic affect of witnessing firsthand the sheer size and scale of the city’s endeavors (indifferent to her own)—though all of these. It was more that in some only half-acknowledged way, she continued to take the visitor’s simple pleasure in a foreign city. (What was her father’s phrase? “Expats make the best natives.” Something faintly sinister like that…) She had lived here in New York nearly two years and three before that on and off (as much as various visas permitted), and she had been staying with Sasha at his mother’s place down on Murray on September 11. And though the wide-eyed tourist was long departed, there lingered a related sense of satisfaction at the recognition of certain places, or buildings, or institutions, or instances of what she sometimes termed to herself (for want of a better expression) New Yorknesses. No, it wasn’t the Empire State or the Rockefeller or any of that stuff anymore, but instead it was the pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap furniture shop run by grumpy Poles. Or it was the fact that she could find what she wanted quicker than the ever-changing sales staff in St. Mark’s Bookshop. Or that she liked to cross Third just here and walk through Astor Place where the East Village kids jostled around that big black cube. Or that she was as near indifferent to Washington Square as any New Yorker. Or that, best of all, she recognized some of the owners at the dog run. Same time, same place tomorrow? So their glances seemed to say. And in her mind she would return their query with a most dependable civic nod.

You bet.

She was on Mercer not far from the Angelika—Sasha’s favorite cinema—when her cell phone started ringing. She didn’t notice at first because an ambulance was howling and her remaining attention was partially on an English tourist buying a silly John Lennon beret from the street stand (So that’s who buys them…) and partially on an advertisement for shampoo that infuriated her every morning with its phony tone (Aren’t we just such close girly-girlfriends who just so understand each other, oh what secrets we share, oh how very much we know about each other’s lives—it was the insidious advertiser’s assumption of mutual intimacy that really killed her). And then, when she did realize that it was indeed her own cell that she could hear, she had to rummage in her bag (which she absolutely must get around to emptying) before she could find it. And next her mind became preoccupied with fabricating some excuse for being late—and how ridiculous it was that she probably woke up before all the other employees in the whole place and yet she was most likely the last to get in to the office. And when she finally looked at the screen, there was a generic message indicating that the caller was unknown. And the line was terrible. And she had to stand still and press the phone hard against her ear because of all the noise in the street and all the noise in her head and that’s how news comes: standing on the street on a morning like any morning talking to your brother, who’s saying that your mother is dead. Is really dead.

3 Arkady Artamenkov

The most significant hours of Arkady Alexandrovitch Artamenkov’s life had taken place two years ago, on a day when a cold and pelting rain was filling the million St. Petersburg potholes with a thick and sickly yellow mud and the air tasted more than usual of corrosion.

Late, silent, unshaven, he had splashed his way through the back streets to the appointed café, a recently opened place up from Moskovsky station near the Militia House of Culture, where women liked to showcase their hair and hold their mugs of coffee the wrong way round and never by the handles, the greater to emphasize their empathies. His own hair was wet and straggling. His greatcoat was sodden and heavy. And he knew full well that his boots and jeans were filthy and leaving marks of dirt as he made his way across the parquet wooden floors between the pale pine tables beyond the marble bar, water still streaming down his face.

“Arkady Alexandrovitch?”

It was the same fat, square-faced, red-haired woman who had called at his flat three days earlier. He stopped where he was but said nothing.

She came toward him along the length of the bar.

“Hello again. I’m so pleased you came. Good.”

He did not return her greeting, nor take her hand (momentarily offered, instantly reemployed), but met her eyes until she looked away. He had guessed that she was some sort of professional finder, maybe even thought of herself as a private detective. She spoke with a slight Georgian accent, which she tried to hide. She had a flashy cell phone, which she clasped in her hand as if it were jewelry. And today the dark tracksuit was gone; instead she was wearing the usual bullshit with which ugly women tried to fight the truth: an expensive crocodile bag, matching shoes, designer suit. Obviously she hadn’t been fucked in years.

Determinedly ignoring his silence, she continued: “Come this way. We have a quiet table at the back. I was only waiting at the bar because you might not have been able to see me.”

She sounded relieved. She was certain of her fee now. He followed, still silent, ignoring the looks from the two women sitting with their department store bags.

“Maria is not here yet, but she will be joining us in a few minutes. What would you like to drink? Some coffee or maybe—”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

A barely perceptible nod.

“Okay. Well…” She was at a loss for a moment.

He took off his greatcoat and placed it over the back of his chair. Then he sat down, leaving her standing awkwardly.

“Well, I am going to make a call and just check that Maria, your mother”—he watched her yank a false smile up across the rusting hulk of her flat face—“is on her way. So I’ll be back in two seconds. Please order whatever you want. Lunch is on us today!”

He was silent and he made no move. He was here only because he had nothing better to do.

Back then, Arkady was living with two others—one a fellow musician in his band of that time, Magizdat, the other a friend from the orphanage—in two rooms next door to one of the hostels behind Ligovsky Prospekt. When Zoya (for this was the finder’s name) had turned up at the door for the second time, he had decided to be in. He had come out with his shirt open, in scruffy jeans, unwashed, bare feet covered in powder. He had been in a good mood. He had been fucking the would-be actress from the cinema kiosk all morning. And he had been struck by the sheer physical difference between fair-skinned Polina and the swarthy pig-truck in front of him.

Zoya had wanted to go somewhere else, but he had said that he was busy and if she wished to talk, they could talk here. So she had sat down on the hall stairs and sprung open her briefcase and begun handing him photographs and documents, which he had glanced at without concentration and then handed back. All the while, the sounds of a football match came through the open door. Russia losing again. Either paid to lose or losing because nobody paid them. Hard to say. But then that was the main amusement in watching the national team play.

Five minutes later, when he had reentered the room, he had not told his friends anything but had simply laid back down on the floor with Polina to watch the rest of the game. He had kept Zoya’s card, had agreed to come to the café on the day she suggested and nothing else. He did not believe her story. The documents meant nothing to him. Could be forgeries, could be fakes. The photograph of the woman meant nothing. Could be anyone in the world. Because (as he well knew) this sort of bullshit happened to Russian children from orphanages a lot more often than the rest of the country realized. He had seen it himself: the time that Mongol had turned up for Sako, an athletics star with shrinking balls from his dormitory, for example—the point being that Sako had just come in third at shot put in the Olympics and was all over the bullshit papers and the television. No—the reality of the situation was that ninety-nine percent of the abandoned children in the Soviet Union were poor desperate scum when they were born, the parents were poor desperate scum when they fucked them into existence, and poor desperate scum all parties remained. And scum seldom wasted its time looking for long-lost more of the same. As far as Arkady was concerned, therefore, the only calculations to be made were these: was there any money and would it be easy to get without having to do anything?

Thus the single eventuality that Arkady Alexandrovitch was not prepared for when he set out that morning in the acid rain was that the woman he was about to meet might actually be his mother. But that’s what life is: one eventuality after another, and none of them prepared for.

She came ahead of Zoya, moving swiftly between the tables. She was a slight woman of a little less than average height, but there was a certainty and pride in her aspect that created the impression that she was taller, stronger, more intense and vital than the mere time-and-space coordinates of her corporeal presence. Her hair was tied back against her head and dark as sable. She wore a fine charcoal-gray coat, but her black clothes were unostentatious beneath. There was no jewelry—not even a wedding ring. She carried a slim, elegant bag under her arm, also black, pressed in tight against her. And it was only now, as she came right up to the table and stood before him, that he became aware of the effort that was she was making to hold herself in check. Her cheekbones told of a tightened jaw, her lips seemed almost blue, and a dozen tiny needles were knitting cross-purposes in her brow. Her eyes, sunken and turquoise like his own, were scouring his face as if by this act of such determined looking she might find his entire history plainly written there.

“My name is Maria—Maria Alexandrovna.”

Her accent was pure old Petersburg. He said nothing.

“You are Arkady Alexandrovitch Artamenkov?”

He nodded but he did not get up.

She turned. “Thank you, Zoya. Please leave us.” It was an order—an echo from a time long ago, before the Soviet era—and there was no accompanying smile.

Zoya bowed, suddenly a servitor, before backing away in the direction of the bar.

He watched this Maria Alexandrovna sit down, resolute. Outside the wide windows, the rest of Russia was carrying on with its life.

She faced him directly. He said nothing.

She had no interest in ordering anything either. So their menus lay untouched. They simply sat, mother and son, staring at each other, a lifetime’s silence, everything and nothing, between them.

“Arkady Alexandrovitch, may I call you Arkady?”

He remained silent. But his clothes were now drying from the heat rising within him.

“I… I wanted to see you. I hoped that we could… I hoped that we could talk.”

And suddenly, surprising himself, surprising the very air that they were breathing, and because he knew already by the recoil and thrashing of his heart that this woman was indeed his mother, he asked the one question he would not have asked if he had thought her mad or another crazy liar seeking solace, the first four words that came to him: “How do I know?”

“Know?”

“How do I know?”

She kept her eyes steady on him, breathed in, throat tight as she swallowed, and he watched her gather herself.

“You were born here in Petersburg. Your father was a government official. I was not married. I was twenty-two years old. He came to my flat one night. He was a violent man… He died.” She faltered a moment. Then the constricted rush to speak beset her again. “He does not matter. There were complications. But when you were born, my mother, your grandmother, took you away. She was trying to save my career, my prospects in the… in the Party. It was different then. Soviet times.” She raised her jaw a fraction. “I was married very quickly afterward. To a British man. I defected. I lived in London with two children and my husband… I could not come back for a long time. They would not permit it. For many, many years. I could not risk it. Until the Soviet era ended. Even then it wasn’t possible to remain for more than a few days. Not until recently have I been able to stay as long as I wish. So I found somewhere to live. And then I found Zoya. But I returned only to find you. It has taken too long. I am sorry.” She indicated an envelope protruding from her bag. “I have proof that your grandmother registered you at the orphanage. And I have proof that I am her daughter. You must believe the rest.” She paused. “I hoped… I hoped we could become friends. At least, I hoped you would tell me about your life.”

Even as he sat there expressionless, even as he sat there in silence, his blood was spuming white in the deep gorges of his veins. He could think of nothing, could neither speak nor move, could only feel.

“What are you? I mean… do you have work? Are you married yourself, Arkady?”

The one human-to-human bond that should come as guaranteed, without question, given unto all, she had denied him. She had abandoned him. How dare she turn up now? How dare she turn up now and sit here like this? How dare she think that he would ever want to see her, even to know of her existence? The stupid bitch. The stupid fucking bitch.

“I know this is probably very difficult for you… And I’m sorry. I don’t know quite… I… I want to know about your life. I want to help you… I can’t change anything but I… I want to make up for what I can. We could begin today. Slowly, of course. Make a start. On becoming friends at least.”

But all he wanted to do was hurt her as viciously as he could.

“Can you tell me anything about your life, Arkady?”

To ram her words back down her throat until she choked. To show her every second of it. All the years of bullshit he had been through. Every fight. Every beating. Every bruise. Do to her what had been done to him. Every last thing.

“Okay, well… let me tell you something about my life. After I left, I went to Paris with my husband…”

He was absolutely still, his face expressionless, steam visibly rising from his clothes. Yes, he was in the grip of pure, visceral feeling, but pulled in so many opposing directions that the net result was a kind of ferociously vibrating immobility. And the only cogent thought that he could register, the one thing he kept thinking, was that he did not want to give her even the impression that he hated her—no ledge of his spirit on which she might get the slightest purchase. Nothing. She had given him nothing. She would have nothing from him. She had not wanted him. Now he did not want her.

“…I did not discover my mother and my sister were dead until ten years ago. I knew nothing. I have lived another life, Arkasha… Arkady. For more than thirty years I have been another person. An exile. I wrote to them, of course, but I received nothing in response. Maybe they wrote back and their letters were stopped. I knew nothing. I did not know if I would ever find you. How could I know? I did not even know which orphanage they sent you to.” She shook her head and raised her hands to press her fingers to her brow. “And it has taken Zoya a long time. My God, when we found the records, it was your grandmother’s name on your certificate. Not my own name—as your real mother. Not my name. They tried to erase us both, but now here we are and we—”

He could take it no more; he stood up and said the only other words he would ever say to her: “I do not want to see you ever again.”

“I… I understand.” Now, at last, despite the strength of her self-possession, her alarm was visible. Though still marshaling her dignity, she was shaking with the effort; she was desperate, and her lips were taut as she spoke. “I would like to help you, though. How can I help you? What do you need? At least tell me what you need.” She stood and faced him. “We don’t have to see each other ever again. I do understand. We don’t have to, but maybe I can make your life easier in some way. If you can just tell me a little bit about your life, then I could… I could… And Zoya will do everything. Between us. You don’t have to see me again, Arkady. But please let me help.”

Her face enraged him. Her voice made him deaf. He wanted to send her sprawling to the floor. He wanted to shout. To denounce her at the very top of his voice. That she should stand in front of him, to ask him one single question about his life. That she should think that he might care about her or any of this. It was all he could do to bend his rigid will to the single purpose of leaving without violence. But he did so. And only his eyes told as he put on his coat. He would give her no satisfaction. Nothing.

“You have Zoya’s number. If you change your mind.” She barred his way a moment, her eyes too, like those of her son, lit from within. “Call Zoya. She knows where I am. Anything you need.”

Then she stood aside.

He walked out into the rancid rain.

She watched him go.

They neither saw nor spoke to each other again.

It was Henry Wheyland who did the deal. And it was Henry Whey-land who now, two years later, circled the main room of flat number 1327 on the thirteenth floor of tower block number two, Kammennaya Street, Vasilevsky Island, St. Petersburg.

Undeniably, and though only forty-two years into his allotted, Henry looked ill: his wheat-stalk hair was fleeing his forehead, twin valleys razed behind; and he was extremely thin, which made him appear taller than his average height and created the general impression of too many bony angles, of awkwardness, of sleeves too short, fingers too long, shirt too wide, shoulders too narrow, of elbows, knees, wrists, and nail. But in actuality, Henry was feeling fine—as fine, indeed, as only an able and happily functioning addict can feel.

The space around which he turned was low-ceilinged, box-square, drab, and spartan. In every one of the other 520 apartments in the building, it would have been called the living room. Here, though, in apartment 1327, living was music and music was living and there was no worthwhile difference between the two. Indeed, the only furniture consisted of an upright piano, positioned centrally and raised on six or seven layers of torn carpet; a piano stool, likewise raised; a tattered sofa, a stereo, two of the best speakers Henry’s remaining funds could buy, and something like five thousand CDs, stacked, banked, and ranked along the dun-beige walls head high. And that was it. What saved the place from wretchedness was the vast window and the beauty of the view beyond: the Gulf of Finland.

Out there, unseen as yet by the rest of the city, a second line of rainclouds was smearing itself across the western horizon, advancing low and fast, a running smudge on the canvas where Baltic sky met Baltic sea. There would be another downpour before the afternoon was out.

Henry continued his circling, inclining in the manner of an academic before this or that pile of disks, matching inserts to boxes and returning the completed results to their rightful station in the library—a library without order or sense to any but himself. On such afternoons, he had come to suspect, Arkady Alexandrovitch’s ill humor was not really ill humor at all but nerves. Or, if not quite nerves—Arkady, six feet, lean as the last Siberian lynx, could never really be described as nervous—then perhaps the outward manifestation of the arrival of whatever unknowable incubus took possession of his body in the hours leading up to a performance.

Arkady, who had been lying in his customary position across the sofa for the past thirty minutes, now raised the long index finger of his left hand and pushed up the peak of his cap.

“Everything is bullshit today, Henry. Everything.”

“Surely everything is bullshit every day. This is Russia. This is life. What else do you expect?” Henry laid an errant disk gently in the case that he had at last located. “I’m afraid we’re all just waiting for the next big idea, society-wise. Sorry I can’t hurry it up for you.”

They spoke in English—Arkady was almost fluent these days, though his accent was inflected not only with the intonations of his native tongue but with his native disposition. “Everything I see or hear—full of bullshit. Every person I meet—full of bullshit. Every place I go—full of bullshit.” He let his head loll back on the ridge of the sofa’s arm so that he was addressing the ceiling. Or a much discredited eavesdropper. “Every minute, more bullshit.”

“It could be worse,” Henry said softly.

“Yes. We could be fucking goats on the TV to get famous.” Arkady pulled the English-language newspaper over his head. “Perhaps I will donate my balls to the war on terror.”

Henry considered the top of the piano, where a foolscap-sized flier advertising the evening’s concert had been placed carelessly over an untidy pile of sheet music. He picked it up, noticing again that all the scores beneath were perfectly clean—his flatmate never marked a single note for fingering. Arkady stared out from the color publicity picture. Large-handed, cragged, inscrutable: sunken and steady eyes, hollow cheeks (forever unshaven in light shades of brown that looked almost gray), unruly blond hair that straggled out from beneath the ubiquitous cap and over his collar—and all without the usual compensating vulnerability in the mouth or that carefully oblique invitation to would-be admirers in the artist’s brow. Not so much defiant as distant. Unconnected. Arkady Alexandrovitch was neither handsome nor plain, so Henry often thought, but like some feature of the landscape for which such fastidious descriptions were beside the point. A face that it was as pointless to oppose as it was to champion or implore. The face of a rag-and-bone man or a prophet-king returned in disguise.

Henry looked up. “I cannot believe you mean what you say, Arkasha.” He sometimes used the customary Russian nickname for Arkady, though he was careful never to say it with any hint of saccharinity. “Otherwise, why would you practice ten hours a day? But… well, even if everything is bullshit, I am afraid that the great dictatorship of the here and now continues. And as outraged and ill-equipped as we are, humanity is nonetheless commanded to get on with it. We have no other choice.” Henry glanced toward where his friend lay. “What time are you supposed to be there tonight?”

“I feel like a Swedish wankpit.”

“Around seven?”

“And it’s going to rain again.”

“What time are you supposed to be there tonight?”

“Half past ten.”

“I’ll walk with you—if you are going to walk.”

Arkady batted off the newspaper and placed his cap firmly over his face.

Henry smiled his anemic smile again and wandered over to the window to take stock of the weather: immediately to the left, the other tower blocks; below, street squalor, gray decay, refuse; to the right, acid-rain-stained concrete and a tall crane, like some oddly skeletal single finger; directly ahead, rusted docks that had never taken themselves seriously; disrepair and dilapidation on all sides, and yet none of it detained the eye for more than a moment—because spread across the wide horizon beyond was the sea, light-spangled and sapphire-glorious in the still commanding sun. And now—just now—the beauty was truly extraordinary: the sea, angle-lit from the south and here-and-there sparkling, was nonetheless shading darker and darker, slate to a bluish black, as that resolute line of bruised purple clouds low-scudded in from the west. The island of Kronstadt and the dam had already vanished, and in a few minutes those clouds would obscure the sun altogether.

It happened like this. Though son and mother never did see or speak to each other again, Henry found himself acting for Arkady while Zoya continued to work for Maria Glover. Perhaps some sense of a secular mission prompted Henry to intervene. Or perhaps it was some new and bold reckoning in his dispute with the God from whom he could not quite flee. Either way, the deal had been struck.

Many an intention had blurred since then, but even at the time, more than two years ago, Henry had chosen not to examine his motives too closely—were not most human interactions thus shaded? Just the same, were he capable of being honest with himself on the subject, Henry had sensed then (as he sensed still) that desire was down there, lurking and smirking among the innocents, if ever he had mind enough to look. And yet he could not face bearing his torch so deep, for fear of discovering who or what held sway in these darkest crypts. Besides which, when he was in his lighter mood, such thoughts seemed like huge misapprehensions, echoes of a daydream from a time long ago, before he canceled himself out, before he shut down his sex drive and opened up his veins.

In any case, theirs began as a straightforward friendship. Henry had been out with a group of mainly English expatriates at one of Arkady’s Magizdat gigs at the JFC Jazz Club. A veteran of a thousand classical concerts and five times as many recordings, he had thought that he recognized something exceptional in the Russian’s playing. Later, Arkady had joined the table—there was talk of gigs in Vilnius and Tallinn—and Henry had translated. Though it was no business of his, Henry had then offered to teach Arkady English at half his normal rate—out of an unmediated eagerness to assist such talent in any way he could. But perhaps Arkady surprised him by taking his offer seriously, turning up twice a week at eight in the morning at Henry’s old flat behind the Nevsky, well prepared and with the vocabulary learned. And perhaps Henry was pleased to be thus surprised.

Indeed, for the next six months, Arkady studied with the tenacious application of a last-chance student—far harder than the rest of Henry’s pupils. And within a few months they were practicing English conversation. Initially Arkady told Henry only the barest outlines of his circumstances—that he knew nothing of his parents and that he had grown up in Orphanage Number 11, called Helios, and that it was “like a house for the fucking of pigs.” But over the weeks Henry coaxed out the greater part of his history. (As so often happened, Henry noticed, Arkady was far more relaxed and open in his emerging second language. Curious, too, how quickly the Russians mastered obscenity.) Like a thick central pillar which alone supported the roof and around which everything else revolved was the main fact of Arkady’s life: that he had trained as a classical pianist. This confirmed what Henry had felt must surely be the case when he first heard him perform—though “trained” hardly described the experience that Henry discovered Arkady to have undergone. His various teachers had well and truly made him a pianist—fashioned him, beaten him, worshipped him, forced him, encouraged him, praised him, hounded him, persecuted him, pushed him, cajoled him, inculcated him, taught him his art in the least compromising and most effective of all teaching methods: old-school Soviet style. For as long as he had been able to read, Arkady had been reading staves. It was not Russian that was Arkady Alexandrovitch’s first language at all—it was music.

And it was no exaggeration to say that Arkady had been a child prodigy—the proud boast of Petersburg youth orchestras and the boy chosen to play for Gorbachev himself in 1984. “They love orphans for Soviet times, Henry. We do not have problem of mothers, fathers. We are heroes of the great state. No parents to take the glory away.” Certainly by the time he was seventeen, everything was set for Arkady’s smooth transition to the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and from there surely to Moscow and international stardom.

Then Mother Russia fell apart—again.

At first Arkady’s rightful place was merely postponed for a year. “There were problems, so many problems, Henry You just had to wait—this was the way. Always in this bullshit country, we wait. For what? For nothing.” He was nonetheless required to leave the orphanage and seek what work he could find as an electrician, the secondary training they had given him by way of Soviet-style existential comedy.

Then, when the long year had dragged itself reluctantly around the calendar, the place was arbitrarily postponed again. But still Arkady could not bring himself to face the facts: that the nature of bribery and corruption had undergone a complete reversal and that advancement was no longer about the Party system or Party sponsorship; that in the new Russia it was all about the money and the guns. In 1991 the orphanage shut down. In 1992 his piano teacher died. He lost access to the last good piano he had been using. The second year passed and he was told to apply to the conservatory all over again—through the new system. He did so, this time without a sponsor. By midway through 1993, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. Even then it took him half a decade to abandon the greater part of his hope. And so he spent the last years of the millennium selling smuggled stereos around the back of Sennaya Square by day and (as much as to sit by a functioning piano as to stay alive materially) playing bullshit music in the new hotel bars by night, hour after hour, his fingers aching like ten desperate would-be lovers trapped in ten deadly marriages for something real… the Hammerklavier’s embrace.

The shortage of playable pianos in Russia… Ah, yes—besides the English lessons, there was a second reason for the deepening of Henry and Arkady’s early association. Or perhaps it was the main reason. At any rate, a few months after Henry had begun teaching Arkady, he bought an upright C. Bechstein. Henry himself had once been a competent amateur, and maybe he did genuinely intend to pick up where he had left off at the age of eighteen—and yet, even as he and the seller’s three handsome sons heaved the piano through his front door, Henry knew well that Arkady would be the first to sit at the keyboard. Sure enough, as soon as the Russian saw it, he asked if he could play, and—the quagmire of the verb “to be” happily abandoned for the time being—Henry spent the next two hours sitting still at his teaching table, utterly rapt. Thereafter Arkady came around three or four times a week, practicing for hours on end, regardless of the lesson schedule.

Nonetheless, these two circumstances—teaching and piano—might not have led to their present arrangement in tower block number two had it not been for two further eventualities: the dwindling of Henry’s money and the unforeseen arrival of the woman whom Arkady referred to as “the stupid bitch.” Maria Glover changed both their lives overnight.

They were some six months into the English lessons. Arkady was now playing Henry’s piano several times a week. And yet Henry found out about the meeting between mother and son only some days after the event. The idea occurred to him more or less instantly, though: arrange for the woman to pay for Arkady to go to the conservatory. And get her to keep Arkady alive while he did so. Arkady would have to reapply, of course, and he would probably have to suffer the indignity of several auditions, but… But if he could prove himself at least as worthy of the department’s time as any of the adolescents he would be up against, then the main thing was the money. If need be, the woman, whoever she was, could pay in advance. Surely, Henry reasoned, it was worth a try. The problem was Arkady.

In all his other dealings, as far as Henry could tell, Arkady was as vulpine as everyone else in Russia, but on this one subject he was as silent and scornful as an anchorite. Henry pressed, but the Russian refused absolutely to contemplate a second meeting, refused to consider asking for anything through Zoya, refused even to talk about it. Eventually Henry offered to broker the question himself. Arkady merely shrugged—Henry could try if he wished, but it was nothing to do with him.

Thus meagerly enfranchised, Henry nonetheless set about his task with skill, a renewed sense of purpose, and no little interest, the only further Arkady-related difficulties being the finding of Zoya and the meeting with Maria Glover herself, for which he, Henry, was required to bring photographs of the Russian that he was forced (against his liking) to steal with the complicity of Polina.

In the event, the deal was relatively easy to secure. After a truly ferocious hour in the company of his friend s mother (during which he had to relate everything he knew about Arkady thrice over), Henry found Mrs. Glover suddenly tractable; she had been testing him, of course—interrogating him, or perhaps, as Henry later thought, mining him was a better way of putting it. Regardless, once her mood changed—abruptly, as if by a switch—she was more than ready to guarantee the funds in writing to the conservatory ahead of any audition. If Arkady won a place, she would not give the money to Henry (he did not ask for this, and he explained that Arkady would not accept it either), but she would pay the conservatory directly and in advance each term, the entire three years tuition as well as any dining, books, stationery, or other bills her son might incur. This without further question, Mr. Wheyland. I am not surprised to hear that you have trained as a teacher. And I further hope you will look out for my son for the duration of his studies. I trust you to do so. You will let me know immediately of his acceptance at the conservatory. Now that I have heard what you have to say, I am sure that he will be accepted. And from then on, he must have no other work or distraction until his career is made. You understand this?

She struck Henry in those moments—sitting in the casement window of her apartment, back to the light, face impassive, lips set—as a woman of great will, an exiled queen charging her courtier with the full authority of her divine right; and perhaps already inclined to duty, he felt her wish much as a command.

Of course he tracked down Arkady at his favorite pinball bar with the news that same afternoon, but the Russian never actually thanked him—not then, not ever. All the same, overnight, Henry’ s old place became a twenty-four-hour rehearsal room. Which was all the gratitude he needed.

Though nothing was left of Henry’s former life (buried, loathed, forcibly forgotten) save for the ever-decreasing remains of the money, there was nonetheless something vaguely pastoral about what happened thereafter. For it was Henry who had suggested that they find somewhere cheap together so Arkady could practice whenever he wanted and thus make the very most of the chance he had finally been given. Arkady was going to need a piano, after all. Further, Henry offered to pay for most of their food, the bills, and the rent, so that Arkady could concentrate full-time and give up the nights in the bars.

After a fashion, the arrangement worked. Arkady practiced all day (and disappeared most nights). Henry listened and listened and continued to help the Russian improve his English. And in this lopsided symbiosis, they lived.

Henry met Maria Glover only once more, some six months later, at her flat on Griboedova, as before—though this time ostensibly to check on the efficacy of their arrangements. Perhaps Arkady’s acceptance at the conservatory (communicated via Zoya) had furnished them both with the required validation—Henry to pursue his vocation more explicitly, Maria Glover to feel her obligation obliquely eased. At any rate, Henry found her that day in a lighter, more expansive mood. Perhaps glad of his Englishness too, she offered him tea and told Henry a little about herself, what she called “her second life” in London, her family there, her work on the newspaper of record. And thus charmed, Henry reciprocated by confessing something of his previous life too. That he had trained for the Catholic priesthood before abandoning the calling and becoming a full-time secondary school teacher, a job which, he explained, was these days almost impossible to do without incredible resources of stamina and insensitivity.

She asked him how he came to be in Russia. He explained that he had left his teaching job on his thirty-fourth birthday and that after his mother had died he had used the money from selling her small house in Reading to set off traveling. He described how he had come to Russia (after three years, mostly in India) overland, from the south, and fallen in love with Petersburg on his first visit.

She nodded as if such a conclusion were quite understandable and told him—with great feeling—that she had been born here. She reminisced a little about how the city used to be when it was Leningrad. He asked her how she had left. She told him she defected. She told him she had effectively “started again” in London. She became more and more loquacious. She told him a great deal and much that was personal, though she left out the names; and he began to form the impression that she was in some odd way trying to unburden herself, and that she was answering his polite curiosity with something like relief.

Then, precisely as the second hour ended, she put to him the question that he realized was the real reason behind her asking to see him again: did he, Henry, think it possible that she might hear Arkady play?

Henry was caught out. He was moved by her plea. And yet, knowing Arkady as he did and fearing Arkady’s reaction both toward Maria Glover and toward himself if he were ever to bring the two together again, he considered that he could not risk effecting such a meeting, even covertly. Despite all that she had told him, he felt he had little choice but to answer no.

4 Gabriel and Isabella

A brutalized dog whimpered in the shadow of the crumbling courtyard. Six P.M. now in Petersburg; eleven A.M. in New York; and this was just the fourth or fifth call of nine or ten between them. Gabriel sat by the window of Yana’s mother’s apartment, the telephone never in its cradle, the undernourished light lingering, the better to slip away unnoticed when he turned; Isabella heading uptown, battery running down, the New York morning like a set of freshly whitened teeth. She fixated, he terrified—real and unreal, one and the same.

“You have to go back there.”

“I’m not going back there.”

“You have to go back there.”

“Is, I am not going back there. I can t. You can go when you come or tom—”

“Gabriel, I need you to go back there today, tonight.”

“We’ll go together. When you get here.”

“Too late. It might be too late.”

“I can’t—”

“How was she again?”

“How was she?”

“How was she?

“I told you… I told you. She was on the floor. In the main room. What are you asking me?”

“There was nothing wrong with her?”

“Yes. She was dead, Is, she was dead.”

“For Christ’s sake. I know that.”

“What are you asking me, then?”

“I’m asking you… I’masking you if… She wrote me this letter… I’m asking you if it looked like she did it herself.”

“Jesus.”

“I mean… anything… was there anything strange about her? Anything that—”

“Is… Is, she had a stroke. That’s what happened. That’s all.” “How do you know?”

“Yana. The ambulance men said—there was dried saliva and other stuff—her skin was all mottled—they told Yana it looked like a stroke and I—”

“You sure? Can you check? Will there be an autopsy?”

“Is—”

“Did they say that there would be some kind of autopsy?”

“Is, for Christ’s sake. She didn’t want to kill herself. I spoke to her on the phone on Sunday night. She was… she was fine. So will you stop. Will you stop being such a crazy idiot. She’s dead. She is just dead. She died.”

Silence.

Gabriel again: “Shit. Shit, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. I’m sorry. I’ll be there tomorrow night if I can get my visa. I’m on my way to the embassy now.” Isabella breaking. “Sorry… I’m sorry. You are right—I’m being crazy and you’re there by yourself and… Gabs, will you be all right? Is Yana there? Or Arytom? Someone you can stay with?”

And so Gabriel pulling himself together. “I’m okay. Just make sure you get the visa and a flight, Is, that’s all you have to do. This had to happen one day.”

“I know. I know, I know.”

“And you were right about the consulate. They’re helping a lot. I’m… I’m talking with them again first thing. A guy called Julian Avery. When I called, they knew who I was. They remember Grandpa Max. They know who Mum was too—who we are, I mean. They’re going to help… with everything. We’re lucky, in a way.”

A long silence, and then Isabella asking the question: “Does he know?”

Another silence. Then: “Yes.”

“They contacted him?”

“Yes. The hospital contacted the consulate before me. The consulate guy—Avery—seems to know where he is. And he’s next of kin. So they got hold of him. They told him. He knows.” Gabriel drew his heaviest breath. “But we’re going to bury her here, Is. We’re not going to fly her home. She wanted to be buried in Petersburg. We’re going to do that as fast as we can. We’re not going to tell him. We’re going to do it before he can get here. That bastard can go fuck himself.”

5 Nicholas Glover

Nicholas Glover had in fact spent his entire adult life fucking himself. However, estranged as they had been these past ten years or so, neither Gabriel nor Isabella could know this; and even before their antipathy ossified, Nicholas knew well that they could scarcely have imagined the ongoing mêlée in which he lived. Indeed, in the past twenty-four hours, Nicholas had come to an awful and existence-rearranging realization: that the only other person in the world who might ever have grasped the true nature of his lifelong war was his wife—Maria, Masha, Mashka, Marushya.

But it was too late now. Too late to confide. Too late to be open. Too late to start the one journey that he might have taken with any hope of reaching understanding at the end. Was this a tragedy? At present, Nicholas had no idea. Because as of the past thirty minutes, he was ignoring all such thoughts, ignoring them with a strength of will which, had it been available to most other men, would have sent them rushing from their dreary lives pell-mell in pursuit of their disappearing dreams.

Yes, Nicholas was ignoring all thoughts save those directly associated with process and procedure. In these, at least, there was a kind of ease… As six o’clock chimed back and forth across the steeply raked Parisian rooftops, there was even some satisfaction in the sound of his handmade soles upon the medieval cobbles of the Rue des Barres. Everything procedural was taken care of. Thank Christ. Her rent was paid for another six months and then the flat would simply be leased to another tenant and his problem no longer. Her possessions, such as they were, Gabriel and Isabella could have. Welcome to them. Under Russian rules, all the money in her bank accounts would be returned to him… And even if this was not exactly the law, his solicitors could be instructed to make sure that it was done anyway. Who would challenge him? Surely nobody was going to fight him through the double jungle of a U.K. passport-holder (spouse, defector, repatriated) deceased on Russian soil. Not even Isabella. The Russian system could be relied upon to be as opaque as he required it to be. And what a relief that all could be conveyed through the Paris office; he had no wish to return to London. Even the wretched ache in his neck—a residual crick from his travels—seemed to have eased.

Almost jauntily, then, as if to put this improvement to the test, he looked up for the first time in two or three years at the crooked fa¸ade of the old building on the corner of the Rue du Grenier sur l’Eau—the oldest building in the city, so they said, beam-warped and brick-crooked as the eight hundred years of history it had witnessed. Yes, sixty-two was not so bad. Still in good shape. Still in sound mind. Still thinking. And still very able.

Yes, indeed: tout était dans l’ordre. Had he been carrying a cane to match his tailored linen suit, he might have twirled a spry thanks at the tourists now parting to let him make his way between their collective craning. Had he had a hat, he might have doffed it to the venerable old sisters now entering the mighty church of St. Gervais opposite. Good evening, sister, good evening, and a fine one too. Paris is behaving itself? The delicate scent of scandal, the salt tang of corruption, the sweet savor of vice—all vanished, all banished? Excellent. But now I must hurry home to my young friend, who has promised Tanqueray and tonic for my ills. And I am so very fond of him this evening.

Slim and trim, neither tall nor short, with pale eyes and a thin mouth (which between them disguised a fine, disparaging intelligence and a lifetime of immoderate appetite), Nicholas Glover had the kind of demeanor that Dorian Gray might have developed if that asinine portrait had never been painted and the young fool had relied instead on the excellence of his genes and the incisiveness of his wit to see him handsomely through to his sixties. His hair was turning white, still thick but close-cropped; his skin was clean-shaven and well attended to. Indeed, the only thing Nicholas took pains to conceal was his crooked teeth, which in the upper case were uneven and shading to yellow, and which in the lower were at war in such a manner as to have forced one another into partial overlap and sudden protruding angles. For this reason, a smile seldom parted his lips.

He stepped sprightly past the early diners at the café on the shallow steps and sprightly too across the main road, up onto the embankment, and so to the Pont Marie. The light was softening and even the lazy Seine seemed a little less raddled—the city’s favorite older woman come out once more, dressed in the flattering colors of the evening sun, slinking through the town again, turning heads, remarked upon, while her most loyal admirers, the distinguished old buildings on the Quai de Bourbon (likewise lit most handsomely in shades of pale sand and amber-yellow and blanc cassé), kept their devoted station. Bonsoir, Madame Seine, bonsoir; our compliments. The air, softening too, he thought, linen loosened by an afternoon of love… Ah, yes, he could see the satisfactorily large windows of his own apartment.

Alessandro would most likely be in the bath, drinking wine, no doubt (and not something cheap, the grasping little shit), listening to that terrible music of his. Dear God, how he loathed Alessandro’s music: some thirty-five-year-old ever-adolescent would-be chanteuse who couldn’t sing or play or write or dance, popping along with her pigtails and her pout for the benefit of whom? Seven-year-old girls and thirty-five-year-old gay men; it was so bloody… so bloody camp. And of course Alessandro would be singing out loud, planning all the while in that chichi little Soho head of his, planning what he wanted to extract from the evening. Nicholas sighed. Those childish emotional blackmails of poor Alessandro, those peasant clevernesses, which he no doubt considered compelling evidence of a subtle, emotionally attuned mind but which (hélas) were probably culled from the daily parade of inconsequence otherwise known as the “relationship” columns. Probably written by Gabriel. There was an irony. Nicholas narrowed his nostrils and exhaled slowly. He remembered (fondly) the time before that particular word achieved its current ubiquity; and he found it impossible even to think of it now except escorted by those two unyielding quotation marks: “relationship.” Give me the sincerity of nakedness and the honesty of desire, O God, and deliver me from the turgid bourgeoisie and all their favorite phrases.

A shudder. He had reached the far side of the bridge—the Île St. Louis. Home. In the middle of the river. Two young policemen cycled by, and he slowed to watch their saddles until they disappeared past the Librarie Adelaide on Rue Jean de Bellay. Then he raised his small leather document-holder to return the wave of the waitress from the Café Charlotte, white skirt swaying above pretty brown knees. Would she let him paint her one day? He thought so, if he went delicately about it. And so he turned left, along the quay, until he came to number 15, once the residence of Emile Bernard, Créateur du Synthésisme (so the plaque said), where he popped the lock, entered the cool of the courtyard (cedar scent and the clove perfume of basil in bloom), and climbed the wide stone stairs of staircase D, dipped in the middle from four hundred years of just such footsteps.

But the interior gloom of the stairwell recalled the sorrow and heaviness of his recent journey (his mind racing down avenues he had not sanctioned, as it always did). Anger and sorrow. His deepest consciousness had always felt this way—a churn wherein anger and sorrow were mixed and remixed and mixed again with the ceaseless salt of his lust. Oh Christ, his wife was dead. Masha was dead. Marushya. No longer fundable as a living and breathing woman, as the only woman to whom he might have confessed himself. And already, as quickly as the evening was falling through the sky, the entirety of more than three and a half decades of his life seemed to him implausible. All the things he had never said. Or rather, all the things he had said, all the things he was always saying, but only to himself.

I am a bloody fool, Masha. A bloody, vain, and self-denying fool. Could you have understood this… this idle carcass of mine? Or did you always understand, despite my silence and deceit? I think you did. Could I have told you everything? I think I could. Even the worst of it? The very worst? Could I have told you and would you have understood? I tried… once or twice, I tried. But I was afraid you would not be able to bear it. Not want to hear it. I was afraid you would leave me. I was afraid of everything. I lived in chaos. I lived through chaos. I lived on chaos. And Christ, you never asked. Masha, you never asked… And I suppose I was grateful for that. I loved you because you didn’t ask. I loved you dearly. The others… All those hundred others, they always wanted something answered. Something settled. “How can you?” “Why do you?” “Why can’t you?” “Why don’t you?” They wanted me to provide “clarity”; they wanted me “to be honest.” Clarity—can you believe it, Masha? Yes: you would understand. I know you would. Because you know how difficult it is to hold the line against the thousand daily surrenders this craven new world requires, to keep on coming back for more, heart in pieces, soul in rags. Clarity! Oh, Masha… As if I… As if I, one man shuffling through all the disgusting piss and filth of this twenty-first century, one man at the tail end of a million desperate and profoundly unclear generations, none of whom have ever known the first thing about who they are, why they are, where they came from, what they are made of, where they it in, if they it in, why they are alive, why they die—as if I could provide anyone with any kind of clarity. But time and time again, Masha, I have been forced to this conversation: “Oh, but you can’t live like this, Nicholas,” they say. “Like what?” I ask. “With all this uncertainty and—you know—messing around.” “Messing around? You call this messing around? No, Christ, this is not messing around. This is the very opposite of messing around. This is as in earnest as it gets: you and I, naked and alone, here and now, in this bed, the rest of time and space irrelevant. The soul’s exchange, the body’s vow, the mind’s reprieve. Our most human nexus. I take this extremely seriously. It’s the only thing I take seriously. It’s the only thing I can take seriously.” (Is this hurting you? Should I stop? For four years I was only yours. I swear it. Not much in a lifetime, but it was four years. I swear to you. My best years.) “Come on,” they say, “be honest with me, Nicholas.” And then, Masha, I have to fall to silence as the questions rain down upon me… Because what you cannot say, what you must not say, is that you are living your whole life enacting the only honest, clear fact that you do honestly and clearly know: that nothing is honest and clear. (My God—you are smiling. You do know all this. You knew all along.) The cells, the DNA, the molecules of the blood—they all—they all—have different opinions, different opinions on everything, from euthanasia to the Hippocratic oath, from Israel to Palestine, from God made man to Man makes gods. They do not agree. There isn’t even a consensus. Not within me. And certainly not out there. Half the world is screaming for water and freedom when the other half is ordering cocktails and complaining about the service. (Didn’t you always say that, my Masha?) And what could I say to them about me? What could I tell them about what I feel? The head distrusts the heart. The heart ignores the head. The balls want to carry on regardless. It’s a total and utter mess. Chaos. “Come on: be honest with me, Nicholas, tell me what you honestly feel about the situation.” But what they really meant was “Be simple with me, Nicholas.” Be uncomplicated. Be straightforward. And simplicity—simplicity is the new code for… no—what am I saying?—simplicity actually means stupidity. What they’re really asking is “Be stupid with me, Nicholas.” The only way we can get through this is to be stupid: work, marriage, the war, God, love, and television. If we can just stay stupid, it will be okay. We promise. Honesty! Honesty—Masha, is it not the most monstrous piece of excrement that mankind has ever come up with? Human nature, consciousness itself, is famously indeinable, mysterious, mobile, responsive—is gloriously less constant, less intrinsic than the imaginings of rocks, trees, sheep. That’s the whole point. No, no, no—you get three goes at it, Masha: birth, death, and that little moment of both. The rest of the time you are fooling yourself and everyone around you. If you are alive and thinking and still interested in being alive and thinking, then you are necessarily unclear and you do not honestly know anything—you’re guessing, hunching, hoping. And that’s it. What I honestly feel—what I honestly feel! I could not write down what I honestly feel if I started now and did not stop till the last syllable of recorded time. And yes, I loved you, Masha, because you never once asked me to be clear or honest. Because you understood what being human actually means. And you weren’t afraid of it. Were you?

Or maybe this was all lies too. Maybe he was just making everything romantic, as he always, always did (the true sign of a monster). At the end of each of the culs-de-sac down which his mind careered, there was, he knew, a gaudy theater wherein savage satires were ever being staged. And to whom was he talking anyway? There was nobody left to tell. His wife was dead. He could not trust himself one inch.

Vanished entirely now was Nicholas’s dapper manner, and though dressed the same, he appeared in the doorway of his own bedroom like a man who spent every day of his life fighting hand to hand through Hades and back.

“You’re home!” Alessandro came out of the bathroom, steam chasing him, a towel wrapped around his waist and a dressing gown draped over his shoulders—an unusual modesty, Nicholas registered, and a symptom of uncertainty. Truly the young these days were so very, very obvious. Like the puerile century, they lacked charisma. But here at least was relief: the old salve of younger skin.

“Did it take all afternoon?”

“Yes, it did.” Nicholas put his slim diplomatic case on the polished marble surface of his dresser. Life, the great distraction, was stirring sluggishly in his blood. And Alessandro’s black hair was still wet and water ran from the curls on his forehead, causing him now to wipe his forearm across his brow—a little too slowly, Nicholas noticed. Despite the robe and towel, there was still, as always with Alessandro, a flirtatious door ajar. Evidently, though, the poor man had no idea what mood to expect. Understandable. Nicholas knew well enough that people lived in constant trepidation of his moods. (Had his temperament always been so changeable, or had he made it so—in order that people would fear him? He couldn’t remember. So much was dark beyond eighteen. All was secret and suspicious and… and bloody Soviet.) In any case, it was obvious that Alessandro was waiting for his cue. So, disregarding the infantile whine of the abysmal music, Nicholas forced himself to smile his tight-lipped smile.

“But the good news is that I do not have to go to London. They can do everything through the Paris office.”

“That’s great, Nick.” Alessandro fastened the gown but let the towel drop.

“And so tonight we are going to celebrate. Forget cooking. Forget that bloody concert.” Nicholas hated to have his name shortened. Either Alessandro did it deliberately to annoy him, or he did it because he wanted to insist on some sort of parity. What a farce. Through forty years of impatience, Nicholas still could not make up his mind which was more annoying, the guile of straight women or the wiles of gay men. They were as bad as each other. A tragedy, really, when what one really wanted was a straight man. But let Alessandro have his junior satisfactions; Nicholas’s mood at least was recovering.

“Le Castebin, I think.” Nicholas forced another smile. “Shall we? You can have your langoustines façon. And their new house Champagne—from Troyes, Gaston tells me—is sublime. We’ll dispatch a bottle each—why not? It’s a while since we got ourselves well and truly tight. Brahms is such a terrible bore anyway.” Nicholas realized that he had better show some interest. “And anyway, you… you must tell me about Greece. I want to know all the details. Did you get to Delphi? Did the oracle have news for us?”

“I was in Santorini.” Alessandro picked up the shirt lying ready on the bed. The dressing gown came off.

Nicholas looked, unreservedly. “You have caught the sun again.”

“I topped up on the sun bed with Freddie at the gym while you were away.” Alessandro enjoyed flattery more than anything else in the world and could tease it out of quick-drying cement if he applied himself.

The phrase “topped up” annoyed Nicholas, though. The word lurking behind it, the word “tan,” annoyed him too. And the name Freddie somehow infuriated him. Campness. But the revealed body—ah, the naked body of this… this other… The naked body of this other human being entranced him, engrossed him, bewitched him like a river god rising in vapors of jasmine and myrrh with a different violin sonata for each of his senses.

6 The Disendowed

Arkady and Henry emerged into the deepening twilight of the northern sky and set off along the potholed street that ran between the six dilapidated tower blocks similar to their own. With the exception of three old women dragging home their heavy handcart full of cheap fizzy drinks and expensive fake mineral water, weaving oddly on their invisible route through the worst of the ruts, everybody was drunk: the half-dozen old men sitting on the weedy verge around their upturned crate on legless chairs, seating ripped from abandoned cars; the heavily made-up girl now leaving block two with her infant in an improvised sling, her three-year-old and her five-year-old—cigarette cocked and burning—all in sullen attendance and ready for the ride into town and another night working together with the tourist bar spill; the gang of boys, nine- or ten-year-olds, standing around an old metal drum that they had somehow managed to ignite on the corner and every now and then reaching in with tar-caked hands to chuck fume-spewing firebombs at each other or any passerby they did not recognize, then swapping their vodka-spiked drink tins from hand to hand so they could blow cool air on their blackened fingers.

The two turned right, away from the few feeble street-lamps that would have taken them in the direction of Primorskaya metro station. Instead they walked toward the Smolensky cemetery, a woodland, half wild, half kempt, with winding paths, dense thickets, and sudden glades that sat square in the center of Vasilevsky Island—a shortcut on their way into town.

Still in silence, they came to the gap in the railings and the unofficial path, which led off the road and into the cemetery. Despite the sudden showers throughout the day, the ground underfoot was damp rather than muddy and they were able to walk with relative ease between the trees. Arkady carried his concert shoes around his neck, dangling by the laces; he was still wearing his cap; and he had rolled up his jeans a little to accommodate his boots. Henry, meanwhile, looked as incongruous as ever, his hooded top inside his arm-patched corduroy sports jacket, his black jeans cut too narrow.

At length they emerged onto one of the main cross-paths through the cemetery and Henry felt the need to speak. “Will the newspapers be there?”

“I forgot—Grisha came today,” Arkady said, as if it were he, not Henry, who had begun. “This morning, when you were teaching.”

Henry’s eyes went across, though his head did not turn. “Actually, I wasn’t. I was ringing up hotels and restaurants and nightclubs in London for little Ludmilla.” He had been supplementing his diminishing capital for five years with a haphazard income from teaching English as a foreign language, but he’d let the contacts shrivel. And though his habit was cheaper here than anywhere save Afghanistan itself, he was now down to a few thousand and he knew that something had to be done about money and soon. “My last pupil is leaving to join her friends, and her mother needed her teacher to argue room rates at the Covent Garden Hotel for two hours.”

“All your little bitches go to London. The British must believe Russia is made only of millionaires’ daughters. Or whores.”

“What did Grisha want?”

“A salsa partner.”

“I do not owe him any money,” Henry asserted, though whether to himself or to Arkady wasn’t clear. “He oversupplied me. I told him. I have paid him for what I asked for. I don’t need the extra he gave me. I told him that three times. He more or less forced me. So he can’t get all cross now if I am—”

“You understand well what he wants.”

“I don’t even know these people he seems to think I’m friends with. Not anymore. Most of the English, French, and Germans I used to hang around with have left or gone to Moscow or run out of excuses for doing nothing and returned home. People move on. Especially the foreign kids. The new crowd, whoever they are—Grisha probably knows them as well as I do.”

“Did you give him your shit back?”

“No.” Henry wished that he had taken measures to rectify the hole in his old black brogues. “How could I? I just won’t get any more for a while.”

Arkady’s eyes narrowed for a moment, then swept the sky. “I need a piss,” he said.

He stepped to the side of the track, where a once grand but now untended grave with an elaborate wrought-iron Orthodox cross was being choked by weeds.

Henry walked on alone toward the crossroads where the track that led to the central chapel met their own. It was thoroughly dark now. Ahead, the trees overhung in a complete canopy, branches shifting, though Henry could not feel any wind. An owl was hooting somewhere close by. He thought he saw its shape perched on a headstone. But it was only a trick of the ivy. Some cat or rat, rabbit or badger—he had no idea what—was rustling through the undergrowth to his left.

Unexpectedly, a cast of primitive superstitions he believed long forgotten revealed themselves in the forefront of his imagination. He smiled nervously to himself, drew rueful breath, and shook his head. Silly. Nonetheless, there was something about the Smolensky (and the answering crack of a twig) that caused him to wonder whether the place affected Arkady in the same way. After all, here they were, in a cemetery thronged with the Petersburg dead, a cemetery that had been built on the agonized bones of all those who had perished in hauling the city up from the marsh, and a cemetery whose perimeter was this very night ringed by their living and disendowed descendents—the desperate and the diseased—here they were, and Arkady was pausing unconcernedly to piss on an unknown headstone. One thing for certain: these ornate Old Believer crosses seemed to afford purchase only to the weeds. More places to bind and swathe.

He reached the crossroads and stood waiting. He often paused here on his way into town, by the main track down which the hearses came, day after day, followed always, he had noticed, by that stubborn delegation of white-haired women, forever in black, forever wailing, as if there were not time enough left in the world to get all the mourning done. But how quickly the generations forgot: his own father’s father, Henry had hardly known, and his great-grandfather not at all, no more who he was than where he was from. In so many brief years we become strangers to our own blood.

His pocket was vibrating.

Someone was trying to call him. No: there was a text message on his phone. Grisha. He thumbed it open. In Russian: “Your sugar bitch is dead.”

But in the time it took for him to turn and look for her son, he made the decision not to tell Arkady. Not until after the concert.

7 The Double Life

Ten-thirty in Petersburg. Seven-thirty in London. And the worst night of his life was squatting black and heavy in the shabby courtyard outside. He sat motionless in the window of Yana’s mother’s apartment, his face a picture of mute and frozen shock, staring out like some child marquis on the place where they had lately guillotined his mother. Opposite his vantage, the locksmith was closing up on the ground floor and the builders, two brothers from Belarus, worked with naked bulbs suspended from naked joists in the room above. A cat held mangy station at the bottom of the adjacent stairs, its back to the bags of sand. He continued to hold the phone in its cradle. Isabella would call back any moment and he would suddenly become animate again, everything would start over, everything would race and swerve and dart and fall. Yana’s mother was due to return from her gathering of special supplies. After their surreal trip to the hospital, Yana had gone back to the CCCP Café. But she would be home soon too. As would Yana’s brother, Arytom, carrying his endless manuscripts and proofs.

Gabriel let it ring once. His focus seemed to journey in from far away; his head lowered a moment, and abruptly he had the handset to his ear and he was back in the storm and swell of the present.

“Can you hear me properly now? Is this line better?”

“Yes. Forget my mobile. It—”

“I couldn’t get through.”

“Sorry, Lina. Isabella called again.” This was only the second time they had spoken since the afternoon, and already he knew that Lina was his savior and that he would never ever be able to do without her, not for one day, not for the rest of his life.

“Okay—this is definitely Yana’s landline? I can use this.”

“Her mother’s, yes. Yes, I think it’s fine.”

“Will you be okay there tonight, Gabriel?”

“Yes… I don’t know where I… I will be all right.”

Her voice became even more measured. “Okay, now, listen. I have booked you into the Grand Hotel Europe, Gabriel, where we stayed. For tomorrow. It’s all on my credit card. I don’t want you to even think about the money. We can talk in the morning about whether you want to go there. But I think you should have somewhere as a base. I’ve booked a twin, so you can be with Isabella. If you prefer to stay at Yana’s mother’s until later, then fine, but it’s there if you want. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

“Lina. God, you don’t… Thank you. Thanks.”

“And you have spoken with the consulate?

“Yes. Yes, I have. A guy called Julian Avery there—he’s being very helpful.”

“So don’t forget, I can call people from here too. I can call anyone you need—if it helps, I mean. I will be here on standby in the morning. There’s a lot I can do from here.”

“Okay.”

Gentle now: “We have to be practical for the time being.”

“Yes.”

“You are sure that you are going to have the funeral in Petersburg?”

“Yes. It’s what Mum wanted.”

“Right. Well, I’ll try to get a visa first thing tomorrow and I will be there… Thursday, Thursday night. Latest, Friday. Okay?” “If you can. But don’t—” “You have enough money?” “Yes.Yes… it’s all right. I have money.” “You have some food for tonight?” “I’m not—”

“I know. But you should try to eat something. Will Yana’s mother get you something?”

“It’ll be okay, Lina.”

“Just don’t… Just take care of yourself. You need all that fierce strength of yours. And try to focus on whatever you need to do. Try not to think too much, Gabriel. Sometimes just doing stuff is best—you know, fool the days, or you’ll go crazy. When is Isabella there?”

“Tomorrow evening. She’s getting her visa now and then she’ll fly.”

“Is she okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is Sasha coming?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

A pause. “Is there anyone here you want me to call tomorrow?”

This, he knew, was Lina’s way of approaching the question of his father. He loved her for her delicacy and for knowing him so well. He loved her for her endlessly decent strong sensible saving kind humanity. He loved her. “No. There’s nobody to call, Lina. But… But I don’t know. Tomorrow we should… we should try to think. Maybe there’s some of Mum’s old friends or something.”

“What time is it there?”

“Ten thirty-five.”

“Okay. You go now. I am going to call again at eleven-thirty your time, okay, before you go to bed? I love You’very much.”

“Thanks. Thanks for everything, Lina. I love you too.”

Lina’s voice vanished but he did not put down the phone. There was stillness. Sudden. Silent. His eyes glassed again and he was gone. The courtyard outside seemed to him now a darkened rough-made stage set for some great play about to begin, the hero appearing in a shaft of light as the door was thrown open, the shadowy and conniving chorus ushering themselves off (never quite fast enough), chanting their collective exhortation: “Gentlefolk, behold this, our man, at such sore odds with himself and his times.” His dearest hope had once been that he would become a director—some bold reinvigorator of the London stage, teaching the silly actors to stop their acting. It was his mother’s most fervent wish for him too, though she had stopped talking about the prospect in the past few years. In art we are in conversation with ourselves across the generations, Gabriel; this is the lodestar of our humanity. The rest is chasing food and money…

When he came back to the surface, he found that he was snatching at his breath and there was the taste of salt in his mouth, but he saw that his fingertips must have lingered all the while on the handset. He had not spoken to Connie since the morning—already another lifetime ago. And he dialed the numbers now as if they were inscribed above the secret door to the other chamber of his heart.

“Connie.”

“Hey, lover. Are you in Petersburg?”

“I’m—”

“Jesus.” She sensed it immediately. “What’s happened?”

“Con, my mother has died.”

“Oh, Gabriel.”

And somehow with her, with Connie, he could turn on himself, reach up behind and sever the taut wires of control. Somehow with her he had the strength to actually say it. Somehow with Connie he could give himself up.

“Oh, Gabriel.” Nothing else. A whisper that contained all the compassion that one person might feel for another; a whisper that somehow understood the fragile geometry of his soul.

“Oh, Gabriel.” Nothing else.

And at last his tears broke. A quiet, desolate crying that juddered through him as if he were dragging a blunted plow through every organ, every muscle, every nerve.

8 The Good Things Trick

She lay across the central four seats at the back of the plane, the thin airline blanket pulled over her face, accepting nothing from the flight attendants, hearing nothing of the other passengers’ stir and murmur. She had never in her life been afraid on flights before. But this time, although her eyes were closed, she was wretchedly awake, rigid with stillness, feeling every plunge and shudder of wing and fuselage, her mind contracted on a single image: a row of white-painted bolts working themselves loose, one after another, on some load-bearing metal strut 35,000 feet above the storm-tossed Atlantic. Only with an intense effort—by somehow ripping up her fixated brain by the roots and setting it to think of every good thing she had ever known in Petersburg—did she conquer her urge to beg for whatever it was the crew was rumored to carry for passengers who went insane.

The Good Things Trick was a mental discipline she had learned from her brother twenty-five years ago, one night when their parents were screaming at each other in the front of the car—late, lost, and circling in the dark, miles from the holiday cottage. She had practiced and honed it many times since then. But she had not tried for at least a decade. And she wondered if she still had the will.

The images came and went, came and went, came and lingered, came and stayed, illuminating the vast and vivid screen of her fine imagination… The new blini restaurant on Kolkonaya, behind the Nevsky Palace Hotel, with hot pancakes, savory and sweet, where she and Gabriel had sat one Christmas and wasted the brilliant blue of a Boxing Day sky reading the thin, out-of-date St. Petersburg Times, ordering more and more, saying nothing, drinking coffee after coffee, plates piling up in droll testimony to something gross or affirmative or just plain alive; or here, years ago, Yana’s grinning face and the endless varieties of vodka they were drinking together, true friends, after-hours at the CCCP Café, just opened, Highway 61 Revisited turned up as loud as the stereo would go; or here was her twenty-four-year-old self, before the millennium turned, having some sort of a thing with Arytom, and they had nearly fallen in the canal because they were so drunk and stoned—except it was iced over—and they had crept in past Yana’s mother and Yana herself to Arytom’s tiny room at the back of the apartment and made love in absolute silence, bedclothes forever slipping off her shivery shoulders, he looking up, eyes wide in the darkness, holding her head in his hands, lips parting without a sound when the moment came; or here she was during the White Nights of the tercentenary year in the middle of the sheer frenzy at Troika opposite those shabby-grand shadowed arches of Gostiny Dvor, the midnight sky, the long day’s ghost; or, yes, the first time back to officially-Petersburg-not-Leningrad! as an adult, the January after her grandfather Max died, turning off the Nevsky, down by the Fontanka Canal, where she had walked that night with her mother, a girl of nineteen no more, and it had seemed to her then that all the old palaces were lit in great amber teardrops by the glow of the streetlamps, in pink and yellow, in silvery damask, in ivory and pearl, and there were skaters already dancing on the ice, torches lit and chasing back and forth like children’s souls, and later it was so cold in the rented apartment that when she climbed out of the camp bed to find her coat to lay on top of her blankets, she could see her breath passing from her lips in the dim blue of the pilot light, flickering hopefully on though all the pipes were frozen tight.

The plane scored across the darkening sky like a misshapen crucifix tearing a wound in the heavens.

9 A Savage Freedom

Le Castebin was all candle-flicker, cream linen, and chiaroscuro. Their supper, though, was a little less solipsistic than usual. Partly because Nicholas allowed himself to become drunk more quickly than was customary and thus was prepared to give unusual voice to habitually concealed thoughts. And partly because Alessandro too was concentrating and responsive for once—eliciting information, seeking to draw Nicholas out, though for reasons of his own.

In truth, Alessandro’s sole and busy aim ever since Nicholas had disclosed the news of his wife’s death was to work out the new situation with regard to money. His most itchy hope: an allowance. Now, surely, given that Nicholas was no longing paying his wife’s fat rent or living expenses, there was a chance that the tetchy old tart might be prepared to rechannel at least a portion of this expenditure in Alessandro’s direction. Those funds that he wasn’t used to keeping for himself he would not miss—something like that. The question, therefore, was how much extra did Nicholas have with the hag out of the way? How much to pitch for? Certainly Alessandro deserved something regular. Because while this shitty little money thing with Nicholas continued, his inventory of the balance of pros and cons—the default loop of all Alessandro’s thoughts—kept coming up negative. Yes to Paris. Yes to the apartment and the parties therein. Yes to the restaurants and yes to the musical soirées and yes to opera and blah-de-blah-de-blah. All puttable-up with—as long as darling Nicky never got jealous of his trips to Greece. But having to ask for money all the time! No. Having to explain that he’d run out again. And oh the boring palaver with the fountain pen in the study—the silly old slut waving the check around for ten minutes, pretending to wait for the ink to dry. No. No. No. So if he could just get an allowance—even a small one for now—then everything would be as perfect as could be. Choose the moment, though. Be as charming as champagne. Actually (Alessandro was beginning to believe), it wasn’t going to be that difficult: Nicholas looked quite handsome tonight, with his short hair and those straight white eyebrows—the brutal but very fanciable father-general in the film about the sexy slacker of a son who hates the army but eventually rescues America just the same.

As was his habit, Alessandro made great play of his winsome desire for sweetness by reading out each of the possibilities—temptations narrowly resisted—until, at length, he declared that no, he couldn’t possibly have chocolate again and how about a coffee instead?

The waiter bowed—a man long ago departed from these shallows for distant oceans of indifference.

“How are you feeling, Nicholas? Are you tired? God, you’ve had the longest day. Thank you for this, by the way. I love eating with you.”

“You don’t have to say thank you. It’s not necessary.”

“Do you want to talk about your trip?”

“I’m not tired.”

This was true. Nicholas was not tired, or not locally so, at least. He returned his attention to his glass—the lazy bubbles drifting languidly to the surface. All that fizz and fuss seemed so long ago. Apart from Alessandro’s extraordinary physical beauty—and he really was Perugino-pretty—his great virtue was that he did not matter in the slightest. And occasionally Nicholas felt that he could say whatever the hell he wished to him, confident that he would neither understand nor reflect upon it.

Nicholas shifted his chair so he could pull his legs from under the table and stretch them out to one side.

“Life let her down, you know, Alessandro. Politics let her down. Russia let her down. London let her down. And I… well, I couldn’t give her what she wanted, what she needed. Poor woman. Poor bloody woman.” He shook his head.

“When did you two…” Alessandro swirled his remaining wine around his mouth, making it froth. “When did you two meet?”

“We met in Russia—in Moscow—at a party, actually. One of my father’s little get-togethers with his Soviet acquaintances. She had just started working in the Secretariat. She was a rising star and she was accompanying some idiot from the Party. She was… she was a very clever woman.” Nicholas looked directly at Alessandro. “She defected to marry me, you know. Abandoned it all six months later: family, job, and friends. Her home. Can you imagine anyone understanding that now? Defecting. The sheer risk. The absolute finality of the severance.” Nicholas set his glass down, two long fingers pressing at the base, and spoke softly. “Knowing you can never go back. Making a decision like that takes courage. Real courage.”

Like all small-time egotists, Alessandro was in the habit of believing every remark to pertain in some way to himself—oblique praise or oblique criticism. And so now he sought to assert his own courage. But could see no obvious opportunity and so chose the next best thing—an indirect attack on what he perceived to be Nicholas’s cowardice. “When did… when did she know?”

Nicholas ignored the question. “We had three or four good years—yes, it’s hard to believe now, but we did. Even when the children arrived. We were always friends. Or at least we always understood each other. Understood the exact nature of each other’s knots, even if we could not exactly undo them… You might find this hard to believe, Alessandro, but actually I think we were happy. Really.”

Alessandro widened his eyes and said breathily, “In love.”

But Nicholas was way past his usual irritation at his lover’s illimitable falsity. “For Christ’s sake, it was impossible not to be happy: young—young and in Paris, sharing a single room in Zola country with a Russian defectress who had left everything to be with me. My God, it seems like a different city…” He tailed off. The mention of those days had made him aware of how old he was, how old he suddenly felt. And the fact that Alessandro hadn’t been born when he had married. When he had married. How in Christ’s name did these things happen? Life passed faster and faster: whole decades racing by like rushing landscapes glimpsed from the window of a perpetually accelerating train. He finished his wine, the taste a welcome reminder of the present. He had never had money back then—or even the prospect, if he was to be honest.

“Did you always live in Russia?” Indulge the old bitch, Alessandro thought, lull him deeper into this softness of spirit.

“I was at boarding school in England, Alessandro. I lived in a dormitory full of boys.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot about that. Sounds perfect.”

“But yes, Russia was home. In the holidays, anyway. From the age of eleven until Cambridge.”

“St. Petersburg?”

“No. Moscow, when my father was at the embassy officially, and then Leningrad afterward, when he was sent there to do whatever the bloody hell he was doing.”

Alessandro tilted his head. “You never talk about your family.”

“You know that I was married, you know—”

“No, I mean your—you know—your dad and all that. Your old family. The Glovers.” Alessandro had glimpsed a path through the trees ahead. By way of family… to money. Family money. There was plenty of that, he was certain. He allowed himself a blink. “Your dad—the spy.”

“My father wasn’t a spy.” Nicholas returned his lover’s gaze directly. “My father was a shit.”

“Oh.” Alessandro withered beneath the sudden flare of disdain. “I thought he was at Cambridge with all those others…”

Wearily, Nicholas suspected he was hearing the story that Alessandro liked to spin to his sun-bed friends at the gym. And suddenly he wanted to exterminate the myth once and for all, even where its peddling did not matter.

“My father was a bloody fool. He liked to pretend that he was friends with the big men, but he wasn’t. I doubt they even knew who he was. He was peripheral, small-time, and he never got the top job.”

“The ambassador?”

“He liked to believe he could have been the top dog if not for his greater use elsewhere. But it’s bloody rubbish. He was like a randy little rat—and he got caught inseminating half of Moscow. Both sides can smell a man like that straightaway. Totally compromised from early on… And the others, as you call them—well, perhaps they were in it for principles, so one is asked to believe. But my father—my father, it turns out, was in it for nothing more than cheap Russian skirt. And bribes. Took it from anyone and everyone like a rent boy.” Nicholas made a conscious effort to relax his jaw. “He was a cheat and probably a thief too. All those paintings we have are the rewards of his conniving, bribing, smuggling. He lined his pockets by lining the pockets of the people who let him line his pockets. The clash of ideologies could have been a game of bloody brag for all he cared. It only mattered insofar as he could bet on it.”

Alessandro sucked his coffee spoon. “But he was still a sort of… mystery man?”

Nicholas shut his eyes a moment, determined not to allow the Italian’s insistent banality to exasperate him. “I suppose… I suppose-pose he must have been up to something, because the British let him go to Leningrad as the unofficial consul instead of recalling him. Which also means the Soviets must have let him go to Leningrad. Which means something was going on. Because—yes, you’re right—ordinarily our Red friends didn’t want Englishmen snooping around the naval yards. I doubt, though, that he was of much actual use to anyone. Probably only got away with it because he was so easily blackmailed by all sides and… Christ, you have no idea how very sick the whole world was then.” He paused. “And my father was the sickest person in it.”

“God, it must have been so weird.”

Nicholas looked at the ceiling. That the great dark leviathans’ struggle of the cold war should now be reduced to “weird”… His mind turned away. And suddenly he had an image of himself as a boy, playing backgammon with his nanny in the courtyard of the embassy, every single summer holiday afternoon of his adolescence wasted—not allowed to leave the house, not allowed to do anything but wait. That was Russia. Waiting for it to end.

“It was lonely,” he said after a moment.

“Hmmm… I bet your father wasn’t very good at expressing his emotions.” Alessandro’s face betrayed thought. “And you know, probably that’s why you don’t like expressing emotions. No, seriously. You were not allowed to feel, so you learned to touch. These things”—he rested his chin on his cupped hands—“they so get passed on.”

Nicholas smiled tightly. Perhaps he had Alessandro wrong after all. Perhaps there was an intelligence in there, lurking beneath all the crème caramel.

“I have no idea,” he said. “We hardly spoke to each other for the last thirty years of his life.”

“Anyway,” Alessandro continued, as if it were all part of the same thought, “I still think being an art dealer is pretty glamorous and enigmatic, and your father made a lot of money in his business, didn’t he?”

“Business.” Nicholas finished his wine. “What exactly is business?”

“You told me he even conned the president into swapping a picture. Buy them as bargains, sell them as treasures.” Alessandro tilted his head first one way, then the other. “Equals make a tidy profit.”

“The general secretary, not the president. And not the general secretary himself, but his dealer.” Nicholas sighed. “Yes, he did, Alessandro. He made a lot of money shafting everyone. He understood corruption intimately and it was the one thing he was very good at. Probably because he believed in absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not even art. A curious sort of freedom. But he must have surprised even the Russians with his venality.” Nicholas looked directly at his lover again. “Let’s go to Berthillons and get an ice cream. I want to walk. I’m tired of sitting. And you are not really listening.”

But Nicholas was wrong. Alessandro had been listening as never before. Indeed, as far as he was concerned, this was the most interesting conversation they had ever had—the first emotional confidences that Nicholas had shared. And the first real hint, therefore, that he, Alessandro, might have acquired some purchase on what was going on inside. (The display of feelings: very important.) The only problem being, Alessandro reckoned, as he now stood up and squeezed the side of his tongue hard between his perfect teeth, that the moment to ask for an allowance had gone. Maybe later, though—maybe on the walk down the quay. Or maybe tonight was a bad time altogether. Hard to judge. Maybe all of this was because Nicholas was—would you believe it?—upset. Now that was a new one.

The two men, thinking very different thoughts about their very different lives, walked side by side until they came to the Quai de Bourbon, where they turned left, homeward, once more along the river’s edge. And now, oblivious of the covert impatience in Alessandro’s self-conscious step, Nicholas began to linger a little, looking out across the river toward the Quai de l’Hôtel de Ville and the lights of the city rising red beyond. He had started feeling old again. His knees hurt with pain he dared not have confirmed or named, and sixty-two—sixty-two—sixty-two felt… plain elderly. Neither wiser nor mellowed nor yet magnanimous, but merely elderly. Infirm, unwise, uncertain—as though he personally had seen the world repeat the same mistakes too often, leaving him with no intelligent choice but faithlessness and nothing to do about it but await the onset of failing faculties.

They were approaching their entrance when he stopped and exhaled slowly. “You go on in, Alessandro. I’m going to wait out here. I want to… I think I want to watch the river or go for a walk or something.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine.”

Alessandro nibbled at his cone. “What do you—”

“Or go out, if you want to. Out to a club, I mean.” Nicholas raised his hand to his lover’s back, aware (with the slim fraction of his mind that he allowed to think about it) that Alessandro would be secretly relieved by this sanction but would have to pretend not to have had the thought. A thin grimalkin disappeared beneath a fat black car. To hasten the process, Nicholas turned to face Alessandro and found his most conciliatory tone. “I’m serious. I’m no good tonight. Go. Phone your friends and have fun. I don’t mind. Really.”

Alessandro was now at a loss. His earlier reading of the evening was melting with the last of his ice cream. Yet still he was beset by the urgent need to achieve his goal while everything remained possible. He bent his head childishly toward Nicholas’s chest, a gesture executed for no better reason than to buy time in which to decide whether or not now was the moment to ask. Oh God. No. No—discretion was the better part of, he thought, best to leave it. Best not to risk it. And so why not? Why not go out? After all, maybe Nicholas actually wanted to be alone. A bonus evening! But best not to get back too late and better make sure nothing happened. God, the old general might even cry in the night, and he’d really better be there for that.

Nicholas fed him what was left of his own ice cream, wanting the whole charade over quickly, wanting to save Alessandro even the necessity of saying anything else, wanting desperately to be alone. “There’s a cab coming. I’ll stop it for you. Here, take…” He reached for his wallet.

Alessandro would have liked to have changed but realized that the delay would seriously annoy Nicholas. He patted his pocket, seeking the reassurance of his mobile phone. “Are you sure, Nicholas? I mean, I am happy—I had no plans to—”

“I’m probably going to walk… down to Notre Dame or something.”

“That will be nice. Clear your head.”

“Yes.”

Alessandro accepted the money with studied casualness.

The cab pulled up and wallowed by the curb.

“I won’t be late.” Alessandro kissed the tips of his fingers and placed them on Nicholas’s cheek.

And Nicholas turned back to the river.

The Seine was as dark as history itself, and only the faint sound of its lapping at the embankment below gave the lie to its seeming stillness. Nicholas leaned forward onto the stone wall so that he could see down to the narrow bank-side path. The trees had been pollarded that afternoon and the night air was scented still with sap. He raised his eyes. The severed branches like great misshapen agonized limbs. And above them, the brightest of the stars—names he had learned and forgotten, learned and forgotten—needling their pinpoint antiquity through the city sky. Paris would be cooler tonight. But he knew he would not be able to sleep, and he knew that neither whisky nor coupling would help. For the first time in more than thirty years, Nicholas wanted the company of his blood—not the amicable converse of friendship, not the parley of a lover, but the marrow-talk of kin and consanguinity.

But there was no kin anymore. No kin save for Gabriel and Isabella, and neither, he knew well, could be persuaded to say so much as a single word to him, even were he to pay them in sweat or tears—not in letter, not by telephone, and never again in person. And he could not blame them. He had never once tried to talk to them.

Though wasn’t it true that he had not been allowed to talk to them? Not about anything that really counted. Masha had strictly forbidden it. And she was their great protectress. (In some way, he thought, her Russian pride actually measured its strength by keeping secrets.) Then again, he could never quite be trusted. Whatever the cause—fatally distracted, indifferent, drunk, indolent, dissipated, dissolute, or preoccupied, he knew not what—the fact was that he had surrendered all familial sway to her in return for his savage freedom. Ah, grandest of all ironies: that she had been the one to care for them—their minds, their health, their hearts, the well-being of their twin susceptible souls. And thank God, for that was perhaps the only noble act in his entire life that he had managed to stand by. But still, perhaps a call… No. It was too late, and there was no way to begin. Profoundly, Gabriel and Isabella did not understand him, did not know him—neither as a man nor as a human being. Did not even know who he really was. After all these years… Christ, the bloody madness of it all. The bloody mess.

He stood up straight and walked another few yards, eyes tracking from one lighted window to the next. He suspected himself of maudlin self-indulgence. But the truth was, he had not thought it would affect him. Or not like this. His own tedious egotism, he knew, was causing the forefront of his mind to think about her death as a prelude to his own. But deeper than that, behind the facile and the obvious, there was something else, something intangible but real and hitherto unperceived: a hollowness he had not known the shape of before; a hollowness where his conscience should have been, perhaps. And somehow this emptiness, though composed of nothing, had prickled and tremored through the day like some forgotten disease. Slight but certain. Hardly anything. Nothing.

He turned back to the river and now—as a nameless night barge came stealing by, floodlights fore, freight unknown—now her face came back to him, not as he had last seen her but young: black, black hair, those wide turquoise eyes full of tenacity and temerity, the easy disparagement of her cheekbones, the thin cracked lips, the high-bridged nose, the proportions of her frame, taut, wiry, flat-chested (the better to wear her impenetrable breastplate in battle, he had realized)—she struck him in this moment’s vision as if she were some princess of the tundra come south for obscure reprisals.

He looked up. Two lovers were walking toward him, the young man with his arm strong around the woman, seeking the Seine’s blessing and a quiet place to kiss. They stopped a little way along, his hand on the contour of her body. Ah… now this he did understand. The sweet mercy of lust. The day’s anxiety was but a passing mood after all. And what was conscience but mood wearing a uniform?

10 The Chernobyl Mongeese

Barbara was busy amid the flurry and congestion of the ticket desk but she waved him through over the heads of the people in the queue. He was a regular at Fish, though less and less these days, and she had once been his student. He passed inside, inching like a stick insect along the bare wall of the congested corridor, excusing himself in Russian as he entered the cavernous main room, treading gingerly around stretched-out legs and vulnerable hands spread on the floor, squeezing between chairs, picking his way toward the miniature wooden table that was reserved (as promised by Sergei, the manager) in the center of the second row, directly beneath the low vertex of the brickwork arch above his head. Here the acoustics were as good as the room allowed.

He sat down, shut his eyes a moment, then opened the complimentary mineral water provided, which of course was neither complimentary nor mineral—Sergei’s “table tax” and the back-room tap giving the lie to both claims. But there was no chance of attaining the body-soaked bar, all the way at the far end of the room. So he took a deep gulp.

Now that he was alone, his mind scrambled to reach a clear understanding of what the news meant—for Arkady, but also for himself. The source was depressingly reliable: Grisha, messenger (dealer) for and associate (henchman) of the even more indeterminately extracted Leary—full name Learichenko—the syndicate-sanctioned regional controller of all matters poppy in Petersburg and the man who usually knew most things most often most quickly. Yes, Maria Glover was definitely dead. No doubt about it. Presumably, therefore, Grisha (and so Leary) thought that he, Henry, was also living off Maria Glover and that her death was the blow that would send him into their arms.

It was Grisha who had twice asked Henry to push among the ever-growing but ultra-cautious expatriate community. Henry knew the reasons why well enough: the money from many of the Russian addicts was desperately difficult to come by, constant work to extract and easily dried up (into corpses), while the better clients—the seriously wealthy Russians—were more than likely connected and went over Leary’s head via Moscow or direct; so what Leary wanted most of all was Eurotrash, wealthy expatriates who would trust only a Western dealer.

But of course Grisha and Leary were wrong in their suppositions about Maria Glover’s support. Henry had in fact been using his own money—what was left of the fifty thousand pounds he had made selling his damp little house. (Not much now, not much. He picked at the label of his water with his fingernails.) And yet… and yet they were also right. Because what mattered most to Henry was what mattered most to Arkady. And as far as the Russian was concerned, Henry realized, the whole edifice had collapsed this last hour (with the cold and unforgiving instantaneousness of death) into a sudden rubble of questions. Had she left a will? Was Arkady provided for? Arkady had just started his second year. This term’s tuition would probably have been paid already. They’d know soon enough if not. Certainly, without her funding, the corrupt members on the committee (in the papers again for embezzlement this very week) would refuse Arkady his place for the remaining year and a half, regardless of his teacher’s petitions. If he were not given some kind of a legacy, then Arkady would be out. No final concert. No launch. No expectation and no concomitant resource or opportunity. No graduation of any sort. More or less back where he started. Good. Brilliant, even. But amateur.

Unless—Henry’s mind began to move forward again—the wider family might be persuaded to help. (How many more people was Sergei going to cram in here?) Henry cursed himself. He couldn’t remember what anyone in Maria Glover’s family was called. Idiotic of him. He should have developed the acquaintance. She had seemed open enough—willing. But—damn, damn, damn—he could not now be sure if she had mentioned a single person by name, let alone where they lived or what they did. Where were her “new” children? Was her husband dead? She had never said one way or the other. Would any of them know anything at all about Arkady? He very much doubted it. God, he had been a fool; but then, you don’t expect people to die—no matter how often it happens, you just don’t expect it.

Sitting there at his tiny table (label now shredded, cheap glue sticky on his fingers), Henry could think of only one thing to try: call Zoya as soon as possible, during the intermission. Make inquiries. Discover what she knew. A shameful thought slipped nimbly through the door after the others: that Arkady might never get out of the flat after all. Henry cringed involuntarily, glanced around, almost as if to see whether his mind might have been somehow overheard, and then began to survey the room more thoroughly to distract himself.

Over by the entrance, a clutter of students were having their hands stamped with the indecipherable fluorescent insignia of the club. Sergei himself—a startlingly faithful doppelg&adie;nger of Mussolini if ever there was one—came bustling through the door again and started remonstrating with them (all jowls and chops and slather) to move farther inside, though clearly there was nowhere farther inside for them to move to, since along both brick walls, all the way back to the buried bar, people were standing three deep. It was now quarter past ten and Fish was as full as he had ever seen it. Fifteen minutes to go. Clearly the word was abroad: people were not here to see the support acts.

The lugubrious hum and chunter of a hundred Russian conversations reverberated off the curve of the shallow-arched ceiling, making individual exchanges impossible to catch or follow. Henry saw that additional chairs were being sneaked between the tables, blocking the way, so that latecomers could cram in with their friends. He assessed the crowd. Most were younger—the students and those whose dress indicated that they would be going on afterward to other clubs. But by no means all. Fish could seldom have had such a mixed clientele. The real surprise was the number of older people. A group of weathered old-timers sat immediately to his left—aficionados, judging by their modest glasses of beer and heavy brown suit jackets worn over sweaters despite the heat, men who must have tiptoed through the dark decades listening to their heroes with the volume down. Even more unusually, right at the front there was a table drinking champagne—unheard of in Fish—the women with their dedicated approximations of the latest Hollywood hair, bedizened in designer jeans and jewelry, and the forty- or fifty-year-old men in Armani or Gucci; either business or the government, Henry thought. Institutional mafia. His mouth felt dry. He took the last gulp of water. The students were laying down newspaper: they had decided simply to sit on the floor right in front of the stage; he watched as one filled his glass covertly from a flask while another, a young woman, demonstrated with her arms what she obviously felt was the ostentatious posture adopted by some pianist or other—music students, then, from the conservatory.

Aside from the erroneous plural of “mongoose” (which he would have taken a teacher’s pleasure in correcting), the irony of the entire concert, Henry realized, was that Arkady himself was the only person uneasy about the numbers: one of the Russian’s few articulated fears—and the reason he had disbanded Magizdat—was that he might become well known for jazz before he had finished his course and had the chance to establish himself as a concert pianist. And Henry could now see that Arkady was right: this was the Chernobyl Mongeese’s first night in nearly a year, and already he was in danger of gathering a following again—locally, at least—for his hobby rather than his true work. The Petersburg Times was almost certainly here. Arkady used a stage name, but there would be a picture, unless he had somehow arranged for that to be prevented. (The stage dimmed and Henry felt a tangible charge of anticipation enter the room, seeming to draw energy to itself.) And yet if everything were about to collapse again, would Arkady continue to cling to his ambition? Would he stick to his self-imposed rule—that the Mongeese would live for three nights and three nights only? Or, if the money stopped, would Arkady’s desire finally give out as well?

The house lights went all the way down. The room shrank. And suddenly, waiting in the dark with three hundred other eager bodies, Henry felt the piercing needle of his conscience followed by the all-consuming flood of his duty. Obsessed compulsion or sober free will, he did not care; this was what he must do. Keep trying. Find a way. Don’t give up. Not yet. Make Arkady finish the fucking course. At least ask the family first. And he, Henry Wheyland, would be the man to tell his friend of his mother’s death—right after the concert.

There was an agonized whine. Then an amplified voice asking for quiet sounded from the stage. Sergei stood at the principal microphone, his pate glistening beneath the spot and his tormented T-shirt straining against his bulbous stomach as he spoke. He completed his introduction by naming each member of the band in turn, then raised his arms and began clapping above his head. The charge leaped the gap, the fuel was ignited, and the answering applause ricocheted off the brick. Someone with spiky hair came out from the back of the stage, hand up against the glare of the spot, crazed shadow on the black wall behind. He was followed by another, taller figure. The other stage lights went up. The clapping was redoubled. Sergei jumped heavily down. And one by one, the Chernobyl Mongeese came forward, looking less like musicians than men accustomed to breaking rocks on some forgotten desert chain gang, long days of thirst and shuffling—unkempt, ruefully aware of the intimacy of their work, determined to look anywhere but at the audience.

Despite their individual talents, Henry could tell they were conscious of the fragility of their impromptu ensemble. Since last year’s series—also for three nights only—he knew well that they had rehearsed only twice all together. They took up their various positions: Yevgeny (the drummer, and the only other from Magizdat) dragged his snare closer; the double bass player settled, then resettled his spike; trumpet player and saxophonist, instruments lowered, fingers already flexing over valves, looked away from the audience, inward, at Yevgeny, as though aware that his patient placings and careful rearrangings—stool a little to the left, cymbal a fraction to the right—were the necessary rites by which their observances must begin. Arkady, meanwhile, unable to adjust his seat up or down, simply sat there, waiting, staring blankly at his hands.

There was a moment of pure silence.

Then, suddenly, there it was, manifest among them: the age-old miracle of music. Where before there had been people-din, chair-scrape, glass-chink, fractured, fractious, fragmentary sound, now there was only the startling beauty of harmony and rhythm and order, of tone and skill, the compelling narrative of human talent expressing itself.

They began by playing something that Henry did not quite recognize, something with a walking bass line that beckoned insolently to the putative soloists on either side of the beat, daring them to cut loose. From the second row, his gaze could settle anonymously on his friend; but for the moment he shut his eyes and channeled his entirety into listening, seeking to recalibrate his classical English ear, to appreciate the slip and the shuffle, the skid, the slide, seeking to understand better what this free form of music meant to Arkady, for whom all kinds of playing were part of an endless continuum. He was reminded now that he had first fallen in love with his friend’s gift when he had heard Arkady performing jazz, not practicing sonatas or concerti. There was the extraordinary clarity of his articulation and his breathtaking improvisational skill, but neither of these qualities had appealed to Henry the most; rather, it was Arkady’s generosity. Then (as now—for here came the piano, dancing to the fore again), there was something deeply affecting about listening to a man with such an evident gift play so selflessly with and for (and even through) musicians who had a fraction of his ability. More than that: over time, Henry had realized that when Arkady was performing in an improvisational environment, he seemed somehow to participate in his fellows’ struggles—to savor their triumphs, suffer their mistakes—as if all of this were part of the wider effort of musicians the world over to help one another understand the mysterious syntax of their language.

In no other part of his life did Arkady exhibit even so much as a warm mood. Yet Henry could hear him now as they entered the second number—something careful and more intricate, with less swagger and more intimacy—could hear him taking care not to impede the others, nudging along with the bass (elbow to elbow at the back of the class), joking with the trumpet (after you; no, after you), playful rival to the saxophonist (beat that, pal), but never intrusive. He was everywhere and nowhere; he was forward, he was back; he was side to side; all the while conducting an urgent but underlying conversation with the others that somehow mattered absolutely but never distracted from the main oration.

Henry opened his eyes. He recognized this second tune. Something he knew in another context—something he had heard Billie Holiday sing, perhaps? A version of “Loveless Love”? Maybe. Arkady was in his usual loosened-up posture now, leaning back, sitting deep in the music, playing easy progressions, letting the saxophonist lead. But it was a deceptive relaxation, for in reality, Henry knew, his friend was using the easy wandering of the song to acquaint himself with the various deficiencies of the strange keyboard, quickly adjusting the weight of each finger to compensate for the odd ash-burned felt or random vodka-soaked damper, all in preparation for the time when he would break loose and make the instrument sing on its own. Almost as much as the music itself, Henry liked the intimacy of this knowledge, observing something he alone could see. Sometimes Arkady appeared to coax the keys with the flat-fingered elegance of Horowitz; sometimes he came at them with the near-vertical attack of Thelonious Monk. By the end of the song, though, Henry could tell that the Russian had learned the entire keyboard; notwithstanding their variously tendered sick notes and excuses (as the band swung straight into the third number), Arkady Alexandrovitch now had the notes running up and down in perfectly produced lines, as though they were the very specimens of good health and endeavor.

Henry disliked intermissions—the whole of his life was an intermission. He didn’t drink, and there was no chance of gaining the bar in any case. But he was glad of the air.

Outside, Moskovsky station was more than usually heavy with police; something was happening, or somebody suspected that something was about to happen. The open wound of the terror-torn south, blood seeping up the railway lines, dripping into the cities one bead at a time, and the same solution here as everywhere else in the world: tighten the tourniquet. With one finger in his ear against the remorselessly careering traffic, Henry could not raise Zoya in person. Her number was ringing, which was something, but either she was asleep or she wasn’t answering. It was getting late, but still… you would hope that of all people, private detectives would pick up after-hours calls.

He drew a lungful of the damp air; tonight it felt as if the sky itself were weighed down by something vast and alien above. There would be a proper thunderstorm soon. The weather made him nervous. The police made him nervous. The cars swinging madly around the war monument made him nervous. Maria Glover’s death made him nervous. Everything made him nervous. Everything—except his fix, his boy. He tried again and this time left a message. This is Henry Wheyland. I met you last year regarding Arkady Alexandrovitch. I understand that Maria Glover has passed away, and we wondered if you could…

To the people hurrying by, he looked more like the glimpse of some Grimm-conceived scarecrow than a human being, standing there in the half-light of a cigarette shop, the letters of the station illuminated behind him—MOSKOVSKY VOKZAL, his jacket hanging slack on his frame as he murmured things into an ancient cell phone in a slightly academic Russian, for whom?

From the moment the Mongeese came back on, Henry could see that Arkady knew his mother was dead. Something in his manner told. Told that everything in his world had been detonated again. Told that here was a man changed—changing—even as he took his seat. Though they could not know the reason, the whole room seemed to feel the change too, seemed to be craning forward collectively, as if the rumor had gone around that they were about to witness some pivotal moment of nature.

The band played ensemble for a few bars. The saxophone took a short solo over the chord sequence. The trumpet followed. And then, almost hurriedly, they were back together. This was a song not so much fast as urgent, a song of avowal in an importuning six/eight.

One by one, the other musicians began to withdraw from the tune, like a ballet chorus inching toward the wings in anticipation of the grand jeté of the principal male. The horn players stepped back from their microphones, a quickened fade; then, stealthily, the bass player likewise dropped away, leaving just Arkady and Yevgeny. Old friends, these two, and Henry found himself leaning toward their play along with everyone else. Arkady began to let his fingers work a little faster, running mini-scales around and around and up and down, loosening the knots of time, until the beat itself began to crumble away and Yevgeny likewise disappeared into silence.

And suddenly the piano was alone.

There was something tight in the lines of Arkady’s brow that Henry had not seen before. Something strange was happening to Arkady’s relationship to the piano too. It was as if he had begun to live—breathe, talk, move—only through the keyboard. As if the instrument were becoming part of him, the keys no more than an extension of his arms and his arms merely a lateral articulation of the keys, the dampers, the singing wires themselves. To eye now, as well as to ear, pianist and piano were one and the same. As a man might inhabit his own body, so Arkady appeared to inhabit the mass or density of his instrument, as if he had assumed command not only of sound but also of the space and time that the piano occupied—could ever occupy—as if every capability of the instrument was known and understood and all alike were his to deploy or withhold on the instant. As if the quick of his will was alive in the grain of the soundboard.

At first he stayed with what was familiar—clearly recognizable variations on the tune, each bowing decorously and paying due respect to its progenitor; but bar by bar he began to stretch convention, risking more, straying further. The room’s breath was stilled and the tune was unrecognizably transformed, and the notes were shimmering and shimmying, pouring and pouring, cascading out of the piano in great glittering waterfalls of sound, dazzling, dancing, and yet each individual purposely lit in its own special livery of color and tone. He was playing as Henry had never heard him play: back and forth across rhythm and time signatures, the first beat of the bar long ago discarded (though hiding somewhere, Henry could sense, in between notes). And yet the Russian seemed determined that no single person be left behind on his journey, so he kept doubling back to the almost-forgotten tune, sounding echoes in adjacent registers, raising finger posts, urging the whole club along with him, stragglers too, all bound, faster and faster, for some new upland of music that he wanted to show them… And now, just as they were all arriving on the very summit, just as people were raising their hands to clap, as if by magic, he was gone. Vanished through some secret trapdoor, only to reappear somewhere far below them all… And where did all this sudden sadness come from? Or was this the tune again? Not quite. Not quite. Something else, something heartbreaking, something profound, something solemn… And then, just as Arkady seemed lost for good, here he came once more, racing back with his left hand to greet the momentarily beleaguered audience, a wide grimace spreading across his face that became now almost a grin, and in three quick figures he had brought the whole swirling madness under control, and—astonishingly, astoundingly—there was that old beat again, that importuning six/eight, and one by one the other musicians picked up their instruments and stepped forward and Arkady was back in the original key and his arms were open wide in warm-hearted musical invitation, and in they all came in perfect formation, because yes, there it was again—beat number one, and only in that moment of resolution, somehow, did the entire solo make sense, and the old men in their Soviet jackets were clapping and even the endless self-appraisal of the Gucci couples was finally vanquished, and on the Mongeese went, all together, Arkady looking around, catching the eyes of the others, finger briefly raised to poke them up a semitone from F to F sharp, the nightmare key, but no matter or fear, for all five of them were playing as if there were nothing else in the world to say or do but sound these very notes this night in this very order, and neither Henry nor anybody else in the club ever saw or heard anything like it ever again, because on learning that his fragile world might be about to collapse back into the misfortune and misery from which it had so briefly risen, Arkady Alexandrovich had taken a private vow: to free himself from the endless agony of these contingent circumstances, to never again sit down to play another piano until he knew for certain that he could play forever or not at all and be damned.

11 The Narrow Angle of Dead Ahead

At noon the following day, Wednesday, Gabriel walked due west along Nevsky, passing among the crowds clustering at the metro station, looking neither right nor left but waiting self-possessed in their midst to cross at the lights, then on again, stepping up the high curb and so to the Kazansky Bridge—cries in coarse Russian from below, the canal-tour boats, a tout shouting in English, the muddy water silent. Glancing neither down nor across the dusty road at the great curved colonnades of Kazan Cathedral, he went on, the narrow angle of dead ahead all that he permitted himself.

The crowd congealed, forcing him to slow almost to a halt. He felt as if he were deep underwater now: he could not hear and people loomed, swam at him, disappeared on either side. He seemed to have lost time and connectedness too: the day past, the day present, all days future—impossible to believe in, impossible to experience, minutes swollen to years, hours shrunk to seconds.

He had hoped to appear anonymous today, in blue jeans (wallet in the front, following the manner of his father, to counter pickpockets real or imagined), in cornflower blue shirt with breast-pocket cigarettes, in light brown running shoes, with black backpack over one shoulder, in sunglasses. A would-be tourist. Except… except that it was such a beautiful day. And how could all these people not be aware? How could they not guess? He brought the heel of his hand to his cheekbone and dropped quickly into the dim underpass, away from the sun, moving to the outer stream of the throng, slowing, then stopping, then trying to press himself unobtrusively into the side shadow of the illegal-CD seller’s stall, turning his face to the gray nothing of the wall, removing his glasses, bringing thumb and forefinger to bear additional pressure on his eyelids, already squeezed tight shut against this new leak.

He was horrified that he had started. Somehow, with Connie tears were limitable, containable, there was someone to pull him out; but on his own—Christ. There was no control. He was terrified that he might cry forever.

He had not slept a single moment. For all its kindness, the careless life of Yana’s bedroom had become a kind of torture. The soft pillows, the posters, the photographs, the ancient teddy bear, the casual tangle on the dressing table. And so all through the long night, all he could think to do was smoke at the window. Because… because it seemed as meaningless to speak as to cry, to pray as to wish, to sleep as to stare, meaningless even to feel. Nothing changed: she was dead, forever dead.

No one in the underpass had noticed. But soon the storekeeper was sure to wonder what he was doing, part the side curtain, peer around and ask him what he wanted. No matter. He was already moving on, already emerging into the enthusiastic sun, already stepping past the old woman’s cart of drinks, placed deliberately athwart the pedestrian stream on the pavement.

There were bound to be bad moments, of course. On the first day. And it was only the first day—yes, it was bound to be bad. This much he knew. Had he not edited an entire issue of Self-Help! on this very thing? Grief comes in tightly bound packages, his experts said: vast at first—mighty deliveries that take days and nights to unwrap, waiting on the doorstep of consciousness first thing each morning; but they become gradually smaller, less regular. Or at least you learn how to deal with them. How to go on living despite.

But if this wisdom meant anything, which he doubted, then he understood it only in the abstract, as a man understands that the Earth is hurtling through space. Simply, he did not feel old enough for this to have come to him yet. And he wished to God that he weren’t so alone today. He just had to make it through until Isabella arrived. That’s all he had to do. Hold it together.

Most of all he wished he could trust himself again; he wished that his heart would stop playing tricks on him: one moment he was sure of it, the next a new reality would unveil itself and beckon him further within and he would find himself in a completely new place—suddenly steeled, or suddenly destroyed, or suddenly businesslike, or desperate, or resolute, or resigned, or full of a new despair, or madly joyful. And each time he thought he had entered the right and final chamber. And each time it was not so.

Just now—past the bank and the tourist-crammed Literaturnoe Café—just now, for instance, he had felt as lucid as he could ever remember feeling in his whole life. His mind as sharp and clear as a ten-year-old swimmer’s. Then he had turned right, off the Nevsky, the Triumphal Arch ahead, and suddenly he was fogged and reeling and seasick again. It was the other people passing by that did it—seeming to him to be no longer individuals, nor even crowds, but merely animate reminders of the context of his mother’s death. It was all this evidence of birth, of life, of soon-to-come death, all this evidence of the teeming world that somehow made it worse, somehow drove the swelling sadness harder down the channels of his heart. And it was the sun in the great square ahead, the uncontrived beauty of a day she would never see—the incongruity (for surely there could not be such a loss on a day like this); the very azure of the sky; and yes, there ahead, before him now, the pale beauty of the Winter Palace. Let’s see one more painting today—let’s see what Mr. Rembrandt can show us about human nature. It was the other people. It was the sun. It was the Winter Palace. It was people, sun, and Winter Palace that sent him desolate against the cold stone walls and held him fast in the shadow of the arch.

Then he came jolting and shuddering and shaking out of it. And he was standing in the queue for his ticket, noticing details of other people’s clothing, breathing his way determinedly out of whatever latest insanity he had been in, and a rational coping-calmness suffused him. Not clarity this time, nor nausea, but yes, a curious, coping, soft-focus calmness. And he believed (with fervent relief) that he knew himself again. Christ, this must be shock, this must be it! And he realized that of course these others did not know his mother had died—how could they?—and that they did not suspect him of crying or grief or madness or anything else, and that they were just a happy French family, standing in line like him for a ticket to the Hermitage Museum, just a group of German students, just two old—what?—Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, he had no idea. Simply other people, neither hostile nor friendly.

A ticket for one, please. No concessions.

And then he went over everything coolly again, forward and backward: Lina, Isabella, Julian Avery (he jogged up the wide Rastrelli stairs), his gratitude to Yana. He must do something to thank her and her mother, and Arytom too. (Left past that ludicrous ceremonial coach that the tourists loved.) And Jesus—Yana’s face as she told him to leave the room and collect some of his mother’s fresh clothes while she wiped his mother’s body clean of dried saliva and the discharge he had pretended not to notice. (Left past the tapestries.) Then Yana, so young, urging him to leave the clothes, which smelled of his mother on the floor, and go! go now, Gabriel! go! and wait in the kitchen. And those unreal minutes staring at a Chinese-patterned tea caddy. (Ignoring silly little Cezanne.) Then Yana shouting that it was okay to come in now. (Moving from Winter Palace to Hermitage.) Then Yana in solemn, solemn Russian on his mother’s phone. The world’s most solemn language. (Toward the Peacock clock, which always made him smile, and so self-consciously forcing himself to do so three steps early, dreading that none would otherwise come.) And then their arms around each other (hanging garden to the left) as they sat there on the window bench in the middle of a rainstorm, waiting for the ambulance, his mother lying on the floor because he couldn’t bring himself to move her and had no idea where to move her to, except the bed, which seemed as pointless as the ambulance itself.

Turn right.

Rembrandt.

Portrait of Rembrandt’s mother.

Acquired for Catherine in 1767. Gabriel, look at her eyes: very slightly askew. Thin lips. Black silk dress. But she’s not looking directly back. And I don’t think she was really his mother.

He sat on the chair on which his mother always liked to stop, and closed his eyes.

12 Night Watch

The night was scratched forever on the thin varnish of his childhood; its exact disfiguring pattern likewise etched on every single pane through which he might look back. In the drafty old-fashioned kitchen in the basement of the Highgate house, the halfpast seven radio had predicted fog, predicted cold, predicted bad conditions for motorists. But father and children and the children’s two friends were all in other rooms, unconscious of flights grounded or the murky freeze fingering its way up the Thames.

It began just before eight.

First the record jumped; then the needle broke and the dancing stopped; then, slowly, the ruptured stump began to drag itself across the vinyl. The newly purchased speakers clawed, rasped, snarled, screeched, but all the same, he heard his father’s fury before Nicholas had even left his study in the room above.

Gabriel stopped dead still, his sister the same. A sidelight fizzed, then appeared to brighten, and the room seemed to stretch itself taut in terrified anticipation.

Next, too much rush and panic.

And somehow, as they scrambled over the improvised disco floor, Gabriel (in Superman socks) lost his footing on the polished parquet and—hands flailing to counter the slip—knocked the actual stereo, bounced the needle back onto the record, scratching the shiny black surface a second time and causing the speakers once more to yowl. Even as he was losing his balance, he saw his sister’s teeth sink into her lip in pursuit of a plan that might alleviate the worst of what was to come. By the time he had bounded up again—less than an instant later (denying himself even the luxury of a complete fall) and now with the same aim as Isabella—she was already moving past him toward their father’s vast vinyl collection. The needle was broken, but at least they could hide the record.

He fumbled with the deck. His father was on the creaking stairs. The needle arm wouldn’t lift for a moment, then freed itself. He swung around, looking for the sleeve. He wished with all his heart that he might magic his friends away. Instead they were frozen quivering-still, the realization that there was reason to fear out of all proportion to the damage done beginning to thumbnail itself into their faces.

Too late. As the storm broke through the door, Gabriel was only halfway to putting the ruined disk back in its sleeve and his sister halfway to setting a replacement on the turntable.

In truth, as Nicholas entered the room, he had already abandoned any adult restraint and was borne in a riptide of childish emotions. The evening’s wine had thinned his blood, flooding the labyrinths of his intelligence all the more easily. His evening hijacked, even in the midst of its resentful torpor, he had caught them at it: deceit. Deceit—on top of their standing on the furniture, on top of their dancing about the place when he had expressly told them it was forbidden for this precise reason, on top of their willful inability to play fair when he had chosen to ignore their disobedience for the past hour. On top of everything else. At moments such as these he felt too young to be their father, too close: a dangerous rival, not custodian. And he was quite unable to command himself, even in front of eight-year-old children. He stood glowering on the threshold, gripping the door handle with long fingers, scouring one face and then the next.

“What the bloody hell is going on?”

The children could find no place to look, so bowed their heads.

In three infuriated strides he crossed to his new stereo.

“What the bloody hell have you done?” This spoken under his breath but so that the room could well hear—as (with his infinite sympathy for inanimate objects) he detached the broken needle, revolved it between finger and thumb, and laid it gently down.

He turned, his voice rising in a steady climb to a furious shout: “I’ve just bought this, Gabriel.” This was true, though the money was not his and had been meant for a very different purpose. “And it is not for you to be messing about with. Do you hear? Have you any idea how much these things cost? Have you any bloody idea?”

Only now did he see the ruined record in the boy’s hand: two deep scores the color of sun-bleached bone in the shape of a jagged V.

“You little shit.”

Though Gabriel knew well what was coming, he was caught by the speed of the strike and took the first blow full across the ear. The second caught him awkwardly coming the other way, across the opposite cheek, before he could raise his arm to protect himself. The pain delayed a moment, then rushed at him. Tears surged to the corners of his eyes and he was lost to the torture of fighting them back in front of his friends, face spun toward the wall.

Fury was heaving through Nicholas, gorging and swelling on itself, raging back and forth far beyond this moment, out across his whole life, annihilating all ancillary thought save for the resounding certainty of his own outraged conviction: that this—this night after night of staying in and looking after these bloody children—this had never been part of the bargain, that he had been cheated, that he (and he alone) was the victim of gross and iniquitous injustice. He was visibly swaying. Isabella was standing still in front of him, clasping the replacement record two thirds unsleeved across her chest, her wide eyes looking up at him, unblinking. The effort required not to say what he bloody well wanted to say almost defeated him. Serve the old bastard right And yet… and yet, as always, something—something about Isabella, perhaps, or something in the expressions of the other two, or something residing in the deeper terror of what he would do or become or have to face without the money, without the house, without the daily collateral—something held him back. Instead he cuffed the girl lightly across the top of her head.

“Right, get your bags, get your things—you two, Susan, Dan, you are both going. Right now. Bloody move.”

The friends had been motionless in their terrified tableau vivant since he had come in: the one standing unnaturally upright with hands strictly by his side, a child soldier traumatized to attention in front of the old fireplace; the other on the sofa, aware that her feet had been all this while on the furniture and so awkwardly half crouching as if in the act of disguising this fact. Now, released from the spell, the two gave themselves fully to efficiency and haste, as if unconsciously glad of the emotional cover they provided.

And already Nicholas felt himself tiring. His wretched circumstances at the age of thirty-eight, the thought of his wife out at her self-righteous work all night (“My own money, Nicholas, I make my own money, to spend how I will”), the house itself—all of it pressed in on him now, corralling him back to the more subdued ire of his habitual corner. The torrent was receding. His intelligence was re-emerging, asserting itself. And he could sense the shadow of his rage smirking at the histrionics of its master. Still, he had bound himself into the entire tedious performance—furious parent disciplines disgraceful children for the duration of an entire bloody evening. So he set his face.

“What the hell are you waiting for, Isabella? Get in the bloody car.”

Gabriel sat in the front, the seat belt too high and chafing at his neck. His father was driving—the contortion of face and body far worse for being imagined rather than directly looked upon—driving with undue gesture and haste, braking too hard for the pedestrian crossing, accelerating unnecessarily as he pulled away.

Nicholas swore, then swerved hard into a petrol station. He got out to dribble another teacup’s worth into the tank; he ran the car perpetually on the brink of empty and there was never enough for there and back.

Gabriel shifted for the first time and took the chance to look into the back. His sister’s gaze was fixed on his seat, as if she expected smoke to coil any moment from the point of her stare. The others too were unnaturally still: a grazed knuckle on the armrest of the door, a disco girl’s polka-dot-painted fingernail digging into the fake suede of the upholstery.

“Your dad is mad.” White-faced, Susan mouthed the words and whirled her index finger at her temple.

There was nothing Gabriel could say.

They drove on. And the silence in the car seemed a worse agony than the shouting and the striking that had gone before, seemed to hold them all rigid as surely as if they were each pinned with a hundred tacks through pinches of the skin. And Gabriel felt instinctively, without the restrictive formality of articulation, that it was neither fear nor resentment that kept them all from meeting any other’s eye; it was the shame. The livid, writhing embarrassment of every moment now being lived through: the shame of the blows—witnessed blows—henceforth indelible in their individual histories; the shame of what lay ahead, of what he and Isabella must both face at school, of what would be known about them; and, worst of all, lurking beneath all these like some poisoned underground lake, the shame of the discovery that their father—champion, guarantor, backer—had turned out not to be the idol of their public boast but a public betrayer instead. This the most painful shame. And a shame he felt without the adult luxury of the long view, of independent resource—though immortal all the same for that.

But it was not the ride to Acton that Gabriel remembered most of all when he shut his eyes. It was the rest of the night.

Nothing had been eased and nothing spoken ninety minutes later, when the vast Victorian house reared up in the headlights. His father turned off the engine and stepped out of the car, his distance the shortest to the front door. But Gabriel sat very still, watching his sister walk around the hood while Nicholas fumbled for his key. Without looking back and expecting him to follow, they both disappeared inside, leaving the door ajar and a narrow triangle of light on the frayed gray mat.

But Gabriel did not move. Something held him there.

It was not exactly his conscious intention. But a minute passed and he simply remained motionless.

Then another minute came and went.

And still he did not shift to unbuckle his seat belt. But found himself staring dead ahead: the porch light, at this exact position of parking, somehow revealed the otherwise invisible smears on the windscreen left behind by long-vanished rain.

Three minutes passed in this observation and his attitude did not change—upright, legs together, as if ready for a new journey, selfconsciously breathing through his nose. And though yet without plot or purpose, the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And with each additional second, his resolve seemed to be hardening; yes, the more he sat, the more he knew that he had to go on sitting. And the more he sat, the harder it was to move. And that was all there was to it. Somehow he had become a fugitive from his own decisions—a boy in an adventure story, locked in the basement, stock-still, ear to the door, listening to the baddies decide what they were going to do with him.

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 relating… 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.

“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.

Her mother gestured at the television “So here—we bequeath you this desperate, flailing, lopsided world, in a worse and better state than we ourselves received it. We ask only that you look after it as best you can. And make sure that when your time is over, there’s something to pass on. For truly, Izzy, this unlikely blue ball is it. This blue ball is all there is.”

“Anything else you need to tell me?” Isabella tried a second cupboard.

Her mother looked across and smiled. “Whenever you have the chance, try to raise your head from the busy living of your life. And if everything seems compromised or unworthy, then remember the simple and fundamental aim: to reduce human suffering wherever you find it. At least you can be sure that this is a good plan, regardless of God, money, fashion, and the bloody news.”

“Please don’t use bad language, Mum.”

“I meant news of blood.”

“Aha!” Isabella eased the bar out from behind a wall of condiment jars. “Toblerone. Jesus, Mum, you must be the only person in the world who still buys this stuff. Not quite what I was after, but there’s no sense being all judgmental about things before we’ve tried them, is there?” Isabella came back to her chair at the table.

“Your father’s favorite,” her mother said softly. “Half each. You break, I choose.”

Isabella snapped the bar in half and said, “I can’t believe that they are going to let all the states split off.”

“Do not be so sure. Soviet times are over.” Her mother took the smaller piece. “But now we see what happens when Russia wakes up.”

“Do you reckon there’s going to be fighting?”

Her mother nodded. “Lots of things will happen in the night, and we will never know.”

The television cameras left the Kremlin and returned to the studio in Shepherd’s Bush where assembled experts prepared to expatiate.

“Oh, Isabella, will you look at their smug faces. They’re disgusting, these people. Where do they come from? And my good God—listen to that stupid newsreader’s voice! She can hardly read the cue. No idea what she says or what any of it means. These people make me sick. Even that pretentious buffoon of a reporter in Moscow is better than this silly tit. Surely you have some intelligent people in this country somewhere? They can’t all be like this. For the love of Pete. And they think the good guys have won—ha. Idiots. Idiots. Idiots with their news. The KGB will win, you fools. Oh yes—and I’m sure Mr. Bush and the baby Jesus and the World Bank and the pope and all the lovely boards of directors are delighted tonight. Singing into their swill. Well, I leave you in their very good company and care.”

The two fell silent for another while, sitting at the kitchen table, watching the screen together, sometimes turning the sound up in curiosity, sometimes down in disgust, their minds on the different matters of their different ages, though all the while conscious of their fellowship and common cause against their precisely identified private array of culprits, major and minor. The chocolate disappeared peak by peak.

By and by Isabella asked, “How will Dad know?”

“He will find out.”

“Do you think he’ll be back in time?”

“Of course he will.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so sure.”

“Because… because when that bell goes, Izzy, your father is up and out of his corner as hard and as fast as any man you will ever meet.”

And find out somehow Nicholas did. The following day he arrived home at noon, having cut short his “business” in Paris. “I bloody did call. About fifty times from the hotel before I set out. But the bloody phone was engaged all the bloody time, so I decided to stop messing about and get in the bloody car.” And throughout the cremation, the obituaries in the newspapers, the formalities with the solicitors, the surreal service and wake (organized not by Nicholas but by Randolph, an old friend of Max’s whom nobody quite knew)—throughout all of this, it appeared to Isabella that her father took no trouble at all to hide his relief—his glee — that finally, “at long bloody last,” the paintings, the Jaguar, the houses in Leningrad and Scotland, were all 100 percent his. And all the money. The greatest fear of his life, he was happy to proclaim—to strangers, friends, and family alike—was that “the old goat would shaft me one more time.”

Thin as a corkscrew but outwardly as cool as any eighteen-year-old woman had ever been, Isabella wound in and out of the many shadows of the weekend.

Gabriel returned from Southampton on the Friday night and there was an almost immediate row, Nicholas having volunteered Gabriel to go around to Randolph’s house (halfway across London in Holland Park) to help out first thing in the morning, Gabriel furious that he had not at least been consulted before getting to the real point of his anger: that Nicholas was now disappearing for weeks on end without bothering to tell their mother where he was going.

Her mother, meanwhile, continued to whisper about “returning” and—unbelievably—taking Isabella’s father’s side against her brother.

And for the first time, with the fresh eyes of the returning student, Isabella began to consider her parents’ relationship for what it truly was—fractured, incoherent, erratic; mutually critical, disdainful, dismissive, emotionally terse, emotionally illiterate. And yet, she observed, there was a bilateral understanding, which, though never explicit or remarked upon, was near absolute—lived out in a series of elaborate codes and oblique conversational procedures. In fact, she now realized, her mother was always pretending to her father’s view, as soon as he showed up, though all parties knew her avowals to be utterly false.

In the car on the way to the service, for example, Isabella’s secret was detonated out of the blue and her mother suddenly pronounced: “Izzy, don’t expect us to support you, if you intend to live at home.” (The sheer distancing cruelty of that “intend.”) Then, next minute, her father was blithely affecting the opposite—considerate, thoughtful, compassionate: “Is, this is the great opportunity of your life. You need to think very carefully about what you are doing.” When in fact Isabella knew full well—they all knew full well—that her mum did not care one kopek about money and would have supported her forever, until the last drop of her working blood, and that of course her father did not care one idle flick of his contemptuous wrist about Cambridge as a “great opportunity” or otherwise, having been there himself, to the very same college, and having declared on several painfully public occasions, including the day that she had got her offer of a place to study modern languages, that the university was a convenient depository for “the most boring people in the country—a mini-Australia for the criminally tedious.”

On the Sunday, the day after the funeral, when they were all four alone, the ratchet wound itself up another notch. Isabella could hardly believe that they were going to attempt to dine together as a family, but this indeed was the stated plan for the afternoon. “Lay the table, Is, we’ll be back in an hour”—delivered with total Pravda-like conviction as her mother put on the green raincoat that she wore four seasons around and made for the heath with a silent Gabriel… leaving Isabella and her father alone together in the large room at the front of the house, Isabella in the tatty chair by the empty grate, Nicholas standing by the window, watching out for she knew not what.

It was one of those days when no matter where she sat or how many layers she put on, Isabella found that she simply could not warm her bones. The whole house was cold. (Her mother was pretending that the heating was necessarily rationed via the timer and had in fact been on all morning, her father that it was broken. Both were lying—someone had simply switched it off.) There was also something wrong with the workings inside the grandfather clock, so that each movement of the minute hand was accompanied by a just-audible scrape. She was downstairs only because she was awaiting the imminent arrival of her boyfriend, Callum, whom she had told to come over and pick her up, with the idea that they might go down into Camden and see one of his rival Brit-pop band’s gigs, and whom she did not want intercepted by her father. Though going out, she knew, would aggravate mother, father, and brother alike. Or maybe nobody would care at all.

She was pretending to look through the neat file of official-seeming documents left behind on the small table by Walter Earnshaw, solicitor and new best friend of her father’s. Somehow or other her father had arranged for everything to be transferred to him; she was dimly aware that she and Gabriel should be studying things more carefully, but leaving aside their utter naivete and hopeless lack of resources, it seemed ridiculous to check up on her own father. In any case, her real attention was swooping, perching, and beating its wings elsewhere—far, wide, near and back again. After another minute she abandoned the charade and addressed her father’s back, thinking that this was at least some kind of an opportunity to communicate to him the sincerity of her mother’s hopes.

“Dad, you know… you know, you should get Mum a place in Petersburg. I bet you can buy stuff there now.”

He did not turn around.

“It’d be a great investment. Everything is opening up again.” This wasn’t true, or if it was, Isabella had no way of knowing it to be so. But she said it to appear insider-informed in front of her father. And to provoke him. The word “investment,” she hoped, would do that.

“We have our own priorities,” he said to the windows.

“Mum has been talking about it nonstop since I got back. Honestly, you should see her—she’s glued to the news, and every time there’s a picture of Petersburg she starts pointing at the TV. She really, really wants to go back—even if it’s only for a while. You know she does. She was planning a trip with me in any case. We could search for flats. She would love to be able to go there a few months every year.” Not looking up, she added, “Now you have all that money, you probably won’t even notice some of it gone.”

That did it.

Her father turned. “Oh, don’t worry, Isabella, as soon as I die, you—”

“You know that’s not what I am talking about.”

“You can all go and hang around Leningrad as much as you like.” He fixed her with his eyes. “Why exactly have you left Cambridge? And please don’t tell me that it’s got anything to do with that bloody boy. What is his name?”

They were speaking to each other directly now.

“Jesus.” Isabella was conscious of a heat rash on her chest. All her life she had been caught between these two sufferings: the one—trying to goad her father into engaging with her, and the other—her hurt at his cruelty when he finally did so. “I don’t care about the money, Dad. I’m just saying that you should buy Mum somewhere to live—or rent something. And why not back in Russia? We can sell Grandpa’s house and buy a small flat. She hates this place. It… it’s cold and it’s empty. And I know you are away more or less all the time—fair enough—and she needs some new thing, you know—something she cares about in her life. Just imagine: she’s not been back since she was… well… well, since she left with you. She’d love to see Petersburg again. She’d love to stay there. I really think—”

“Isabella, I want to be clear about this.” Seemingly insensible of the cold, he stepped forward, his shirt, as ever, without a single crease. “We’re not paying for you to hang around here. If you’re at Cambridge, that’s a different matter. We’ve always said that we’re prepared to support you until you finish university. But that’s it. After that you are on your own. So if you are serious about leaving, then don’t think that you can waste the next three years finding yourself here.”

“What the hell makes you think I want to live here?”

“I have no idea what your plans are—that is your business. You can live where you please, of course. Here included.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“But if you are not going to complete your degree and if you do expect to live here, then I will expect you to pay maintenance to your mother. You can’t just swan around the world as you please. You’re an adult now.”

“Dad, for Christ’s sake.”

“Isabella, please.”

“I am talking about Mum.” She was aware that her anger was increasing in direct and dangerous relation to her father’s calmness—affected or genuine, she could not tell. But her eighteen-year-old self had no capacity for restraint—and so she went on harder, her throat as red as her knuckles were white.

“I’m not going to live here. So don’t worry. I’m just asking you to consider being decent to Mum—helping her—just once. God.”

“That is between your mother and me.”

His expression, his measured tone, even the way he was standing there looking at her was as patronizing as she had ever known. She wanted now to rouse him to outright anger. She wanted it more than anything. She wanted to prize out his feelings—any feelings.

“I don’t care, I really don’t fucking care what you have to say about me or my life or anything else. I don’t care what you think or what you do. I just want you once—once—to consider someone other than yourself.”

“Isabella, please stop being so tiresome. Your life is entirely your own. To fail with exactly as you please.” He sat down slowly, crossed his thin legs, and reached for the documents, pulling them across the table toward himself.

“Don’t talk to me like that. How dare you? Not one thing you ever started have you finished. You’ve never done anything. You’ve spent your entire adult life swanning around. You’re a total fraud, Dad. A fraud, a failure, and a small-time bully.” She had him now. She had never ever said anything like this to him. She went on, her hot fury the counter to his cold. “Just look at you, sitting there like a pompous little prick—how do you even live with yourself? Well, let me tell you something: I don’t care about your crap either. Whatever it is. I don’t care. Maybe it is too late for Mum. But I—I don’t need you. I don’t need to hear your pathetic little lectures. I don’t need your money, which isn’t even yours, or your control-freak attempts to use it. Gabriel thinks you’re an arsehole, Dad. But I—I think you’re just plain mediocre. So—you know what? Fuck off.”

She made as if to get up. She was rigid with the effort not to cry.

“Isabella, sit down.”

“Why?”

“Sit down.”

“What’s the point?” Her voice was cracking. She wanted to run from the room.

“Sit down.”

All the same, she sat back—suddenly feeling like a child but holding her face tight as stone.

He leaned forward, his voice quiet and deadly clear. “I am sick—sick to the back teeth—of you and your bloody brother. The pair of you. You seem to think just because you feel a thing, that makes it externally true. You—you in particular—seem to live at the mercy of whatever juvenile emotions you are suffering. And please don’t kid yourself, Isabella. Because in this you’re just like all the others out there, all the earnest young women scraped into the polytechnics to do their ghastly gender studies and sociology courses, heads stuffed full of daytime TV and magazines, all the whining Princess Diana housewives who have conveniently forgotten how stupid they were at school and how stupid they continue to be. No, don’t kid yourself—you are just like them. Just because you feel upset, they assume that it’s your right to be upset. Just because you aren’t intelligent enough to do anything but feel, you want the rest of us to live within the tyranny of whatever the insecurity of the day might be. You… You go away for a couple of months and you come back with your head stuffed full of all this rubbish. You disappoint me.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you, Dad.”

“Nothing intelligent, clearly.”

She was crying and there was nothing she could do to hide it. “You are full of shit.”

The doorbell was ringing.

“Your boyfriend? What’s his name?”

She was determined to walk slowly, not run.

“I sincerely hope you have not left Cambridge on his account. Apart from being embarrassingly slow-witted and a terrible musician, he’s queer. That’s all.”

15 Grisha

A wearer of grievance, a bearer of grudge, shaven head slightly too large for torso, torso slightly too large for legs, and legs slightly too large for feet—this was the squat figure who trod the grimy corridor on the thirteenth floor of tower block number two, Kammennaya Street, Vasilevsky Island, St. Petersburg. Grigori, Gregory, Gregol—known variously here, known nefariously there, in Brindisi, London, Bucharest, but passing these past few years, on and off, in Russia, under the general name of Grisha. A man for whom all the million eddies and currents of human interaction had long ago been distilled down to a single granule of conviction: that the world owed him, so fuck it.

And tonight was just more grist to that rutted mill. Henry Whey-land had not paid what he was due. That was bad enough. (He swapped the angle grinder he was carrying from one hand to the other.) Worse, though, was that Grisha knew the delay was not the result of Henry’s having a lack of rubles but the result of Henry’s having a lack of respect. And if there was one thing that stuck in Grisha’s gullet, it was lack of respect. Indeed, for Grisha, respect was everything. He would have retraced his steps and faced down a mongrel dog if he came to suspect that it might have sniggered as he passed. And anyway, he was acting on orders.

Now was that everything?

He put down the angle grinder and addressed his Slovak employee in Russian: “Gunt, what the fuck is that?”

Gunter heaved up the indicated power tool from the floor and brandished it like a mighty sword.

“Tyrannosaw,” he said with a smirk.

Twenty minutes later, and a little to his own surprise, Grisha (groping unconsciously for his groin) found himself entering Arkady Alexandrovitch’s bedroom with a degree of trepidation. Though he was 100 percent certain that at this very moment the Russian was with Henry, watching Zenit’s Wednesday night game, still his mind seemed to be on tiptoes and his toes themselves a little ginger inside the stretched and swollen udders of his fat white Nikes. Yeah: something had him jumpy in here, no doubt about it.

He sighed.

It wasn’t right.

He stopped just inside the threshold and eventually located his cigarettes in one of the front pockets of his twelve-compartment combat trousers. He raised the packet as if to swig from a bottle and let the first to slide out lodge between his sticky lips before shaking the rest back in. He then set about tracking down his Zippo, patting first one leg, then the other, up and down, forward and backward. Combat—a very compartmentalized business. Keep stuff separate, that’s the thing about combat. Where the hell?

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 physical 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.

Instead, Isabella smiled, openly and freely, as she did only in her brother’s company.

“Sorry, Gabs. My phone doesn’t work, or I would have called you again. There was a security nightmare in Berlin. Some complete wankers on a stag jerking around. And we lost another hour. But I couldn’t face going back to buy another phone card. I just wanted to get here.”

“You seen the news?” he asked.

“Yeah, it was on the TV while we were waiting to board. And Pulkovo was like an army barracks when we landed. It’s awful—weird.”

The nature of death itself, or death’s meaning, had somehow changed.

“The Russian TV has stopped showing it,” Gabriel said. “Nobody knows who is in charge or what is really going on.” He shrugged heavily, and Isabella saw how extraordinarily tired her brother was. There were broken blood vessels in his eyes. And his face was blank. He really was exhausted. She had wondered how she would behave when she arrived. Now she knew: a reaction to her brother’s evident wretchedness—she was going to be all competence and coping.

They were still standing. Isabella glanced around. “Okay, well, I think I’m going to grab a shower and then let’s get—”

“Julian Avery is coming over,” Gabriel interrupted, still a little frenetic but seemingly unable to moderate anything. “Now, in fact—in five minutes. We’re meeting him here. Sorry, but I wanted to—”

“The guy from the consulate?”

“Yes. They’ve been—they’ve been brilliant. I mean, Christ knows what would have—”

“Don’t.” Isabella bit her lip. “Shit. I think that’s him.”

Isabella looked behind her. A short, surreptitiously overweight man was crossing the lobby toward the bar. Julian Avery moved with surprising alacrity, his walk a double-time waddle. He had not seen them.

Isabella drew a deep breath. “Okay. Right. So…” She hooked her hair behind her ear. “Shall we all get some coffee, then?”

“Good idea.” Gabriel nodded. “I was wondering what to drink.”

“Hang on a sec.” She put down her bag on one of the chairs.

Gabriel spoke softly. “They are being very can-do. Because of Grandpa Max, I suppose. God knows how they have even heard of him. It must be fifteen years since he left.”

“They remember everything in the Foreign Office.” Isabella took off her scarf. “They will have known exactly who Mum was too, since she had a British passport. You know how it is. They always know everything, somehow. Okay, let’s go.”

Avery had begun flicking through his briefcase, which he had propped on a stool. Now he stood smartly to greet them. He wore a blue, round-necked, fine merino wool sweater and beige slacks, and Isabella guessed his age as late thirties, but he had one of those fair English faces that appear to change hardly at all between the loss of freckles and fifty-five. His features were genially unremarkable, she thought, save for his hair, which was wound in the tightest possible curls, and his unusually large ears.

She introduced herself, her name sounding strange as she said it out loud. She felt suddenly very British, the granddaughter of Maximilian Glover.

“Julian.” He took her offered hand with a demure nod. “I can’t say how sorry we all are. My condolences. It must be a very difficult time.”

“Thank you.”

Gabriel presented himself and said, “We thought coffee, but please, feel free to—”

“Coffee is fine.”

The barman nodded and they went back to Gabriel’s table and sat down, Isabella taking the chair opposite Avery.

“Thank you so much for coming over here tonight—it’s very kind of you,” she said.

“No, not at all.”

Almost businesslike, she opened her bag for pen and notebook. She was conscious that this was overdoing it but could not stop herself. Since she had taken Gabriel’s call outside the Angelika, a renegade part of her had been noticing the increase in unintentional words, involuntary actions. “We were only now saying how grateful we are for your help. Thank you so much for coming out.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

“I’ve only just arrived from the airport, I’m afraid, so we haven’t really had a chance to catch up. And we’re both pretty much at sea. With more or less everything we need to be doing…”

“Of course.” Perhaps taking his cue from Isabella’s pad, Avery adopted an air of quiet professional practicality, leaning forward a little, small hands joined, fingers loosely knitted, thumbs pointing toward the mirrored ceiling. “Okay. Well, first of all, the good news is that we have managed to jump the cemetery queue and short-cut some of the other bureaucracy—with the kind help of your father. Your mother can be buried at the Smolensky graveyard on Vasilevsky, which is, I understand, in accordance with her wishes. That’s official as of close of play today.”

Without needing to look over at him, Isabella felt the entire force field of her brother’s attention change direction. So now she spoke quickly, fearful of what he might say if she did not. “Sorry, I’m totally behind here. I live in New York.” This was also unnecessary, but she felt the need to invoke the strength somehow resident in the city’s name.

Avery had a way of moving his head from one side to the other every so often, as if he were required to hear things with each of his ears in turn in order to quite believe them.

“I’ve been on flights for the last God knows how long,” she explained. “And I haven’t had a chance to speak with my father. I don’t think Gabriel has either.” She did not look across but kept on as casually as she could. “Is our father helping?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I assumed…” Avery hesitated, but only for a second. “I assumed you had all had the chance to talk.”

“No. Not yet.” Isabella smiled adeptly. She could not tell how much Avery was reading into their strange lack of familial communication. “We were going to go through everything after we had spoken to you.”

“Right. Well, I should… I should fill you in.” The coffee was set down, and Avery was silent until the waiter had left. “I had a conversation with your father earlier today. Just after I spoke with you, Gabriel, this afternoon. Actually, he rang me. I’m sure he will tell you all of this… He was calling to confirm that he would be meeting all the expenses. Unfortunately, there is something of a cemetery… er, shall we say a cemetery system operating here in Petersburg, and, well, certain people have to be paid… Though as I say, everything is now settled on this score, as of this afternoon.” He sipped his coffee. “Once that side was sorted out, the rest was just a matter of contacting the relevant people at the hospital and the undertakers—and, of course, the people who organize the service itself. I have passed all three sets of details on to your father’s solicitors. I understand that it is his intention to meet these expenses as well. But as I say, once the cemetery is confirmed, and the service, the rest is comparatively straightforward. So Friday should, fingers crossed, be just a matter of details.”

Again she spoke quickly. “That’s really great news—about getting a space at the cemetery, I mean.” Only now did she risk a glance at her brother. He had his hand to his forehead and she could not see his face. “And it’s a massive relief to know that it’s all being done so quickly. Is it okay if I give you a call first thing tomorrow and check if there is anything you need us to do—once I’ve had a chance to catch my breath?”

“Yes, of course.” Avery raised a manicured finger and thumb to his stiff shirt collar. “I can be the liaison, if that’s helpful—in case your father gets through to me first, or you need a man on the ground, as it were.”

His eyes expressed genuine sympathy; an intelligent man, well used to dealing delicately with distressed human beings. And she was grateful for that kind “gets through”—as if there would really be any trouble with their father “getting through” to his children if he, or they, had wished it.

“Thank you—that might be useful.” She knew that the natural end of the conversation had been reached. She paused a moment and then asked, “Will there be an autopsy?”

Avery turned his head a fraction, as if to allow his left ear a chance to confirm the impressions of the right, but if he was surprised at this ambush, neither his face nor his manner betrayed it. “No. In the case of an older person’s death, where there are no suspicious circumstances, then there is not usually an autopsy.”

There was a moment’s silence. Avery slowly rotated his head. Though he had sensed the disquiet previously, Isabella had now taken him into a much murkier place altogether. And she realized that rather than adding anything to his statement, he would wait until she spoke again. Silence was his natural holding pattern; he was a diplomat, after all. She was just about to ask another question when suddenly, to her complete surprise, Gabriel sat forward for the first time.

“And there’s no problem with her being a British national… who defected and all of that?”

Again without changing tone or manner, Avery directed his attention to her brother. “Yes… you are right—it’s a strange situation. There might have been an issue with nationality. I was talking to your father about this. But… well, the truth is, I think we can assume that the Russians know who your mother is and that they don’t have a problem.” He finished his coffee, pleased perhaps to be back on familiar consular ground. “I would be amazed if they didn’t know her. They knew your grandfather of course, very well. And they will have known your father too. And all defections were treated with extra-special… er, attention, shall we say? So even if she used her married name when she came back, I’d be surprised if they did not know that she was Maria Gavrilov originally. In fact, your own surname, Glover, might well be flagged on their computers—I know it’s a common enough name, but they might well cross-check. Again, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

It was a clever putting-at-ease question of her brother’s, Isabella realized. He had interrupted only to move things on after her autopsy inquiry—as if to take over now that she had gone crazy. Perhaps she had.

Avery continued. “My guess, for what it’s worth, is that they used her original return application politically—granted her a visa to show that the new Russia was not the same as the Soviet Union. If anything, they will quite like the fact that as a Russian she wanted to be buried here. I don’t think we need worry about all of that.”

Isabella cut in. “Did my father say that he would be coming on Friday?” She knew this was brutal, but she also knew that the question had to be asked and that if she left her brother to his own devices, he would never ask it.

And this time Julian Avery’s hesitation was obvious. “No. No… Actually, he didn’t mention it. I… I presume he would want to be here, but I can’t—”

“Not necessarily.” It would be better if she just said it. “Our parents were separated.”

“I see.”

Gabriel did not allow the silence to lengthen. “And will the service be in the Russian Orthodox tradition?”

“Yes. Was that your mother’s faith?”

“Mum didn’t have any.” This from Isabella.

“But,” Gabriel pursued, “I assume that we have to have a Russian Orthodox service at the Smolensky?”

“Yes.” Avery nodded slowly. “It may be possible to arrange something else, but not before Friday.”

“Oh God no, don’t worry.” Isabella gave a wan smile. “Everything you have done is… is really helpful. We don’t want to change anything. We’re just grateful that it’s all going to be dealt with so painlessly.”

The security man passed behind them again, his face set and seeming to say, Terror does not sleep and neither do I.

She had dropped her bags in their room and now sat waiting for Gabriel to return. He had gone to fetch yet more cigarettes. This did not feel like the Russia she knew. Indeed, this hotel, this lobby bar, wasn’t her Russia, her Petersburg. In countless visits to the city, she had been here—what, twice before? Once with her grandfather, as she recalled. She looked around: two escort girls, laughing quietly and sipping their mineral water at one of the narrow tables in the corner; two slack-bellied businessmen drinking untidily at the bar, lecturing the blank-faced barman. An elderly American couple. It was past midnight. But something like midafternoon as far as her body was concerned. She knew for certain that she would not sleep, not soon, probably not at all. Indeed, ever since she had arrived, her brain had been moving so quickly that she had experienced the peculiar sensation of not being able to rely on reality, as if she were driving so fast that the scenery ahead was only just managing to construct itself in time, as if she were having to do far more than merely read the road, as if she were having to guess how the world was going to fashion itself. Their father had certainly outflanked them thus far—not only did he know about the death and the funeral plans, he was paying for everything already. But would he come? Gabriel’s only thought would be how to keep him away. And her brother was right: their father was all corruption and tarnishing; their father could find a way to taint even the truthfulness of sorrow. And yet she could not help wondering what he would feel—as a human being, if nothing else. What was her father feeling right now, for instance?

She smothered these questions quickly with the thick blanket of her loyalty as Gabriel reappeared, and in doing so had one of those odd moments which come only infrequently when you have known someone forever—longer: she suddenly saw her brother clearly as a stranger might. Yes, he was handsome in what she always thought of as his famous-for-something-but-nobody-is-sure-what look, but now his slight scruffiness, his tousled hair, his loose shirt, his jeans, his battered boots—they somehow told against him. Where before there had been a casual confidence dressing down, she now saw anguish dressing up. His manner no longer said, “I don’t care to manage any better—take it or leave it,” but instead, “This is the best I can manage.”

“How you feeling?” she asked.

“Fantastic. All go.”

Isabella smiled. “I mean, can you take a drink or are you going to crash?”

“I’d love a drink. I would absolutely love a drink.” Gabriel eased into his seat and grimaced. “I didn’t sleep last night—in fact, I can’t remember when I last slept. I’m totally wasted. What you thinking?”

“I’m thinking vodka. It can only help.”

“Tonics separate?” Gabriel found a lopsided grin.

She smiled in return. Vodka that was worth tasting—it meant they were in Russia together again.

Gabriel put up his hand to catch the attention of the barman and unwrapped the new packet of cigarettes. “But if I burst into tears, get me to the lifts. I’m serious. It’s been happening all day.”

“You won’t. You’re too tired.” Isabella held out her palms. “Chuck the cigarettes, then.”

“You smoking again?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

After that, everything external slowly faded away until there was just the two of them talking to each other, moving slowly across the ice toward the discussion that they knew they must have. On any other subject they could be as frank and as open as it was possible for two human beings to be; but on the subject of their father—and on this subject alone—there was convention and even taboo between them.

“What are we doing here, by the way?” Isabella asked.

“Lina. Lina sorted it all out. She says not to worry about anything… and I was too… I was too battered to argue… so I just checked in.”

“Right.” Unlike everyone else, Isabella understood without judgment the exact nature of her brother’s situation. And above all her other concerns on the subject, she worried about the hidden damage it was doing to him. But all that was for another day. “Is Lina coming?”

Gabriel shook his head. “Probably not, now it’s looking like Friday.”

Isabella considered. “I’d better go to the flat tomorrow. I suppose we’re going to have to ship Mum’s stuff home. Maybe not the furniture. But all the rest—her private papers, her books and everything. We should start.”

Her brother smiled sadly. “We’ll spend the day. Go through it together.”

She watched him sip his vodka, then hold it on his tongue for a few seconds, tasting.

“She had begun to call quite a lot,” he said. “It was getting pretty mad. Every night.”

“Mad?”

“I didn’t mean that. Not mad. I mean she was becoming more roundabout—she was saying more and more roundabout stuff that always seemed to imply other things.” Gabriel raised an eyebrow ruefully. “As well as all the usual lectures on how to live your life and the state of the world.”

Isabella swallowed and felt the burn. “Hard to know whether or not to take all that stuff seriously.”

Her brother sucked his teeth. “She did,” he said.

“Yes.” Isabella nodded slowly. “You know, in the last few months she kept writing to me about Thomas Jefferson.” She affected a declamatory voice. “‘All attempts to influence the mind by temporal punishments, or burdens, or civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness…’You know the routine.”

Gabriel nodded slowly.

The vodka was working its magic on their willful blood. Isabella took another sip. “Do you ever think about those summers when she used to drive us around Europe—on her own in that old car?”

“All the time.” She saw the lines around her brother’s eyes as he spoke. “Nothing but concentration camps and art galleries for weeks on end.”

“And don’t forget every house that the great composers ever lived in,” Isabella added. “Mozart’s cradles and Beethoven’s death masks. Jesus, she must have driven us a thousand miles every summer.”

Her brother shut his eyes a moment and screwed up his face—against the vodka’s bite, perhaps. “You know she was ill?”

Isabella looked away, momentarily taken aback, though this was one of her suspicions. “Ill in what way?”

“She was coughing—coughing really badly on the phone. The last time she called she had this… this fit. I’m not joking—she was coughing for about five minutes.” Gabriel straightened and extended his arm before him, his cigarette between fingers. “You know what, Is? I think she had cancer and I think she knew it. I think that’s why she was ringing me. I think she found out recently. I think the stroke might have been a blessing.”

Isabella forced herself to relax her forehead.

“She smoked all her life. It happens, Is. It happens all the time.”

“Yes… yes, I know.” Isabella tipped tonic into what remained of her vodka. “Actually, I’ve been thinking the same.”

“You have?”

“Yes… I mean, not specifically cancer. But I’ve been thinking that she might have been ill.” And now Isabella saw what she had been looking for: a chance to take those last few steps. “It would explain something that she wrote in her last letter. She said that I should make sure that I visited her here, in Petersburg, before I… before I visited Dad.”

Her brother was silent.

Isabella asked, “Do you think he’s going to come?”

“Who, Dad?” As if she meant anyone else.

“Yes—Dad.”

But Gabriel, either too tired or past caring or vodka-quelled, surprised her again by speaking in a flat and emotionless voice. “He’s only been back here once since they got married. And that was to sell Grandpa Max s house and plunder all his stuff. He hates this place.”

“Yeah, you’re right… But this is slightly different, isn’t it? It’s not like they re divorced.”

“Is, Dad doesn’t give a fuck about Mum.” She watched him put out his cigarette. “All he will care about is recouping the money we made him give her. They haven’t spoken properly for ten years.”

Isabella wanted to ask her brother how he knew this. But she guessed that he didn’t, that it was a belief, a quasi-religious assertion. Gabriel loathed their father as much as he loved their mother, and to such an extent that he could not countenance the fact that the two of them had ever got on at all. Their marriage was opaque to him—an abomination he refused to consider. And now was not the time to dispute this or indeed any of the hundred credos of their family lore.

“Are you bothered about his paying for things?”

“Let him pay. Even if he is trying to make us feel guilty. It doesn’t matter. The result is that Mum gets buried where she wanted to and has a decent funeral.”

“Do you think he’ll try and get in touch?”

“Not with me.”

She felt the challenge behind this and automatically rose to it. “Well, he’s hardly going to call me direct either, is he? The last few times I saw him, I took good care to tell him he was a bastard and a failure.”

“He won’t come. He won’t try to get in touch. he’ll just do everything through his brand-new puppet at the consulate.”

“That’s not fair. Julian is a decent bloke.”

“Maybe.” Gabriel finished his drink. “Why did you ask about all that autopsy shit?”

She was caught out by the question but knew she had to tell the truth—and immediately, because even in his current state, her brother wouldn’t miss the hesitation. Sometimes the speed and accuracy with which he read people reminded her of… her father.

“I had this mad idea Dad killed her.”

Gabriel shook his head. “Jesus, Is. You are more fucked up than I am.”

But this was her other suspicion.

17 A Plan Enacted

There was no point in locking the door. The cardboard they had tacked over the gaping wound in the wall would fool no one. In any case, there was nothing left to steal. So he pulled it shut and made his way into the darkness of the unlit stairwell.

Once on the street, he paused and looked around for a moment, as if assessing the fighting weight and shape of the night. He set off at a slow jog, following the same route they had taken two nights previously on the way to the gig—through the gap in the railings and into the cemetery. His muscles felt loose and limber and he moved with the ease of fitness, listening to the fall of his own step, the rasp of his own breathing. Above the swaying trees, a gibbous moon seemed to follow him, slipping from cloud to cloud.

On the far side of the cemetery, he saw a group of figures gathered by the gate on the corner of Maly Prospekt. He slowed. Ordinarily he would have taken the most direct route and run straight at them, through them, beyond them. But tonight he did not want any distraction. So he ducked left, soundlessly crossing first one grave, then another, careful with his footing on the wet stones, until he came to the small parallel path. Here the trunks were thick and the way was darker and he had to slow for fear of low twigs and thorns scratching at his face, unwilling (from lifelong habit) to use his hands as protection. Dogs were barking somewhere, discordant, out of time.

He climbed the railings and emerged onto the roadside opposite the canning factory. In the shadow of an overhanging pine, he paused a moment to check that the envelope had not slipped out of his pocket. He was an anonymous figure dressed in dark colors: Henry’s V-neck pullover over gray T-shirt, his old tracksuit bottoms, his boots, and his playing shoes around his neck. The money was still there.

He went on through the mostly dead Vasilevsky streets, stray cats all that he saw, until he reached the river. Then he slowed his jog to a brisk walk and crossed the Neva on the Leytanta Bridge, the river as black tonight as liquid obsidian.

Entering the central district, he stiffened a little, continuing at a more casual pace, ready to appear drunk should a car slow or show undue interest. Soon enough he was sloping along the banks of the Kryukova Canal by the pitchy water of New Holland—a derelict place, unvisited by all but small-time criminals, addicts, and the gangs of homeless insane. Though he kept his head down and his gaze on the pavement in front of him, he was listening, his meticulous ear primed for the slowing note of an engine or the fall of another step. He knew well that it was in these dead hours, when Petersburg slipped off its creamy European robes and revealed itself a mean and swarthy peasant once more, that the real business of Russian life got done. Boy and man, he had seen it: the black Mercedes rolling down the half-lit street, the tinny police car idling, smear-faced street girls slipping like sylphs along the railings of the canals, and the drugged and the drunk always watching from their darkened doorways, glassy-eyed and desperate, crawling back and forth between heaven and hell, one scabby knee at a time. And all of it dangerous. He glanced up.

A figure had appeared on the pavement ahead.

“Arkady.”

“Oleg.”

They did not shake hands but, after a moment’s mutual assessment, fell swiftly into step, walking side by side in the direction of the Mariinsky Theatre. The other was a man of average height but on the brink of irreversible obesity, balding, with a puffy, pastry-fond face, small eyes, and the fastidious manner of the superfluous employee.

“You’ve not changed, Arkasha.”

“You’ve lost your hair and you are fatter.”

They spoke in the most familiar Russian.

“I was married. There is nothing to do but eat and talk about food. You have the money?”

“You should do some exercise,” Arkady said. “Or you will die even faster. Yes, I have the money. Not here, though. Do you have what you need?”

“Yes.” Oleg raised the hand that was carrying a dark sports bag a fraction. “But you know, I can’t do the security gate. I told you that.”

“You did.”

Oleg was already regretting that he had agreed to meet his old school friend again—and fuck the money. He had forgotten: like nobody else he had ever met, Arkady Alexandrovitch made him immediately nervous, made him feel as if everything he said or did was somehow a low-down lie. They had shared bunks in the final two years, which was as close to close as anyone came back at the orphanage. Arkady was somebody that most of the others left alone, even the ugliest of the bastards—someone you couldn’t change, reason or fight with, someone who would always go crazier faster. And Oleg had felt privileged to be one of the few that Arkady spoke to about anything. Then they’d been phartsovschiks together in the 1990s for a while, trading small-time contraband on the black market, Arkady bringing him the stuff to sell from God knew where and no questions asked. That had been a frantic time. And even now, years later, there was something flattering about Arkady’s asking for help. Plus the money. Okay, not fuck the money. The money was good. But the inescapable truth was that he, Oleg, had not actually picked a single lock in five years. And somehow he sensed that Arkady knew this. Still, if it came to it, he could just give the banknotes back. Arkady wouldn’t kill him, and he could live with five more minutes of the other’s scorn. There was curiosity too: what was it all about? Arkady Alexandrovitch was no common thief.

They jinked left, waited at the lights, then walked out in the open, across the wide courtyard in front of the Mariinsky. A police car was crawling toward the river, window down, cigarette glowing, but it was following a group of tourists fresh from one of the clubs, staggering along with their arms around their prostitutes. The Russians would be ignored.

Arkady had not said where they were going. And Oleg felt it would betray too much anxiety to ask. So it was only when they had circled around the back of the conservatory, crossed the Griboedova on the bridge of lions, and entered the narrower streets where Arkady began to slacken his pace that Oleg guessed they must be getting closer.

“Are we breaking into one of the Dostoyevsky flats?” Oleg spoke too loudly, smirked, and shifted his sports bag again.

But Arkady seemed not to have heard. Instead he now slowed right down, as if to maximize the walk-by time, and motioned casually toward the building on the corner, facing the next bridge.

“The first-floor apartment,” he said softly. “With the balcony.”

Oleg nodded, glad of the semblance of professionalism.

The street itself was mercifully quiet. They passed slowly along by the walls, both men peering up at the window. Arkady was listening, Oleg glancing around. There were very few lighted rooms in any of the other apartments on either side of the road. They drew level with the gated entrance. Arkady gripped one of the metal bars and pushed sharply. The lock rattled but nothing gave.

“Come on.” Abruptly Arkady crossed the canal without looking back and walked straight down the stairs that formed the entrance to the CCCP Café.

Oleg caught up with him and they stood together while their eyes readjusted to the heavier darkness of the stairwell.

“Here’s the money.” Arkady slipped an envelope from his track-suit trousers. “It’s all there.”

Oleg hesitated. “How are we going to get past the gate?”

“I don’t know.”

Oleg drew a deep breath, shrugged, and put the envelope in the breast pocket of his jacket, unwilling to count the notes or stow them within, given what he saw as the unlikelihood of his actually being able to do anything to earn them. It was not his fault if Arkady was insane. In fact, a good part of him was rather glad that his old business partner had clearly failed to think out any sort of plan, since they’d probably just have to forget about the whole job and that would be that. He wouldn’t hear from the mad bastard for another seven years or whatever it was. Get back to his little locksmith’s hole in the wall. Cut honest keys.

Oleg located his cigarettes and with them a mislaid cache of self-assurance. He exhaled. “We can’t just stand around and hope someone goes in or out. It’s nearly three now—nobody is going to come home at this time. Nobody nice, anyway.”

Arkady had his hands wrapped around his playing shoes. He said nothing. They climbed a few of the café steps together and looked across the bridge at the balcony. There were no lights on in the entire face of the building. The moon was behind clouds for the moment. Some sounds reached them from Sennaya Square—drunks, raucousness, shouts, not too far away. A car turned onto the embankment and began coming slowly toward them. But the headlights brightened with the acceleration—some old piece of Soviet-made shit and nothing to worry about. All the same, they dropped back down beneath street level.

Arkady half turned. “If we get up onto the balcony, will you be able to get us in through the windows?”

“Yeah, I—”

“How long?”

Oleg affected a businesslike whisper. “Depends. If it’s bolted, then I might be able to cut through them. But that could be twenty minutes. Depends. If it’s only locked, then I don’t know. Quicker. I can’t tell until I see. Is there an alarm?”

“I don’t know.”

Oleg exhaled a heavy jet of smoke.

“Okay.” Arkady produced some leather gloves from one of his pockets and began putting them on.

“But we can’t get onto the balcony, and even if we had some ladders, which we don’t, then we can’t just piss around breaking in up there. The whole street can see that fucking balcony.”

“There’s a ladder in the courtyard behind us. It’s padlocked, but that won’t be a problem, will it, my friend?”

“Is there?” The realization that Arkady must have been here earlier after all caused Oleg to fall back on his mettle. “Okay. We’re still going to be seen by anyone who comes up or down either side of the canal.”

“Only while you are going up it.” They were standing close, and Arkady was looking directly into Oleg’s face for the first time. “We’ll get the ladder. You go up. I take the ladder away. You get in. You open the front door from the inside. You come down here. You let me in through the security gate. I get inside. You can go.”

Oleg climbed two steps away—despite the gloom of the stairwell, the other’s eyes seemed to sear through him, as if to accuse him of lifelong cowardice and shirking. The moment of decision had come. He looked across the canal to reassess the balcony. The returning moon seemed to light the window in question. He hooked his thumbs to adjust his belt, which felt suddenly tight. The window would undoubtedly be easier than a quadruple-locked front door, which he had been dreading. There was at least that. In a way, the window would be a relief… But what if there was some sort of alarm? He turned back to Arkady. His chest had tightened with the smoke. He had asthma. He flicked his cigarette. “Okay, let’s get the ladder.”

“Good. Once you are up, I will take it away and nobody will know. I will wait. If you have a problem, whistle. Don’t worry. I’ll be listening.” Arkady grinned. “I have very good ears.”

He was leaning close to the gate beneath the shadow and he heard Oleg coming long before he saw him. He stood up straight and peered through the rails, his boots swinging around his neck, the playing shoes now on his feet. A moment later he made out the heavy shape of the locksmith walking hurriedly through the shadows of the inner courtyard.

Arkady’s voice was calm, to counter the agitation he sensed in the other’s footfall: “I think the button is over there.”

Oleg grunted.

Even in the penumbra of the streetlamps Arkady could see the sheen of sweat on his companion’s high forehead.

The gate began to jerk open. Oleg had to stand back to let it swing inward. His voice was close to a hiss: “It’s the staircase in the corner. I propped the door so it can’t shut. There is nobody there. Everything is quiet. You’ll be—”

“Good.” Arkady was already slipping through.

For a moment their eyes met.

“Right, well, I’ll see you, Arkady Alexandrovitch.”

“Yes.”

And with that Arkady was gone.

Oleg turned on his heel and walked as quickly as he could in the direction of the demented anonymity of Sennaya Square.

Arkady stood alone in the darkness of her hall, his face expressionless. The front door was shut behind him. For a long while he remained quite still, listening for any sound of movement coming from the other apartments in the building. But aside from the muffled cough of a distant pipe, there was only silence. Gradually he was beginning to be able to make out the shapes of photographs on the wall.

He lifted his boots off his neck, put them down on the mat, turned to his right, and walked noiselessly toward the open doorway at the end, the direction from which he guessed Oleg must have entered. He wanted to be sure that the curtains were drawn before he began his business here tonight.

He found himself in a large room with high ceilings. Lighting from the street relieved the darkness, and he looked about at the unfamiliar shapes and their stretched shadows: a deep chair, a chaise longue, a large desk against the far wall, and a table to one side, in the shallow bay of the window. He walked over, treading as lightly as he could. Cold air was coming in at waist height through a small circular hole in the glass. Arkady cursed violently under his breath and drew the curtains. Evidently Oleg had been unable to deal with the locks and had cut through the pane to open the balcony windows from the inside.

Arkady’s business: he wanted names and addresses… He wanted contact with her family. And through contact, he wanted money. Not just a few thousand stolen rubles but the kind of money that would change his life—money to pay for the next two years at the conservatory, of course, but in his fiercest imaginings more than that: money to pay for a decent apartment, a proper piano, travel in Europe, flights to the U.S., big hotels in which he could fuck and sleep until four in the afternoon after all the hundred concerts he would play… The kind of bank-account-swelling money that the shit lice at the British and American embassies would consider enough to make him “safe” for visa approval. No more of this bullshit existence. He wanted the full life that was rightfully his. He wanted the life that she had denied him, the life to which he was entitled. Legitimacy. Everything or nothing.

With the curtains closed, there was no sense working in the dark. So he crossed over to the desk and bent to follow the flex of the lamp, his gloved fingers seeking the switch. His eyes had grown used to the dimness and he blinked a little when the room suddenly declared itself in detail: paintings of landscapes and a portrait of someone he did not recognize on the wall, a chandelier, thick rugs on the floor, another lamp by the chaise longue, a stack of English-language magazines on a low table he had not seen between the chairs, an expensive stereo with twin freestanding speakers in front of the wall opposite, which was, he now saw, one vast bookcase, crammed and bursting.

He turned back to the desk. The surface was empty save for a map of the Moscow underground and some lens-cleaning solution. There were no photographs… Another car was passing along the embankment. He stiffened, listening. But the engine note did not change; it was not stopping. He breathed in sharply through narrowed nostrils. He opened the drawers. They were all empty. He slid them shut, stood back, and looked around. A single courier’s shipping carton lay on the floor by the side of the desk. The label simply displayed the number six. He took off the lid: newspaper clippings, bills, official-seeming letters in English that he did not understand, but no personal correspondence. Obviously somebody had already been here and started clearing up.

He walked around the room, treading softly in his soft shoes, searching more closely. A small wooden box on the bookshelf caught his eye, but inside was only an expensive-looking mahjong set. Fuck. It felt like she lived here alone. Was she divorced? Was her husband dead? It didn’t matter: someone close to her had been here… And whoever it was—child, husband, friend—they would see that hole in the window when they came back. So now he would have to take something valuable to obscure the real reason for his coming. Thanks to that fat swine-fucker. Because if they thought that the burglar had come not for money but some other reason, they would be alerted, and when he later turned up asking for a new life, they might just work out how he had come to find them. He could say that she had given him their names and addresses, of course, but he could not afford for them to think of him as even possibly suspicious.

The heating pipes stirred again, but this time he paid them no heed. Frustrated, he began to go through the books, hoping for a handwritten name inside one of the covers—a gift which the giver had signed. He had a dangerous urge to find some music—to play something as loud as the stereo would go. He bit his tongue. He cursed Oleg again. He’d try the other rooms, but chances were that boxes one to five were already gone. All he needed was names and addresses. What about the kitchen or, better, the bedroom? Or—or maybe the photographs… for names, at least.

The light in the entrance hall did not work, so he had only the residual illumination thrown through the doorway from the main room to see by. But it was enough. He had not realized the extent of the display before. The entire wall was covered—a big map, pictures of dancers, icons, the Romanov family, a clown, other figures from history he did not recognize; but it was the photographs nearer the light that drew him, held him.

He knew nothing of the people framed there—nothing save that which he now saw for the first time. His eye devoured these pictures: a family, the moments of a family’s story captured. He stood close in, his head turning this way and that, transfixed. He snagged again on the faces of two children in school uniforms—a boy and a girl, no more than seven or eight, both smiling, the girl in front. They looked strikingly similar. Next, a photograph of four people taken, presumably, on holiday—this time the boy and girl were awkward and not smiling, thirteen or fourteen, and there was a thin man with fair hair and tight lips staring back into the lens, and her…

He stood back again. Here it all was on the wall in front of him: the life he did not have, the child he had never been, the story that was no this… Here was the boy in a university gown. Here, the girl in a red bridesmaid dress—long dark hair, pretty. And again the four of them, outside a big old house, the boy and girl grown up, none of them smiling this time, the thin man in jeans looking away, a sports car. Here was the thin man talking into a telephone—older this time, smoking, white hair. Here she was with the thin man when they were both very young, sitting somewhere on a bench, with a pram. Here the boy with his head sticking out of a tent. And here a woman about his own age, with short black hair, standing facing the photographer with the sun in her eyes and her arms spread out on railings behind her—it was the same girl as in the other pictures. And behind her—that was New York. His eyes swarmed the wall. He read the words below the pictures—Nicholas, Gabriel, and Isabella. Names. At Cambridge. Down in Devon. Highgate. In the study. Paris. Camping in the Black Forest. Moscow. New York. He leaned in again. And his eye settled on the smallest photograph of all, just off the center of the display: a portrait of… of his mother—proud, clear-eyed, and untroubled in some uniform he did not know from the old times. She was young: twenty, twenty-one. More than a decade younger than he was now. The thought whispered in his blood: she may already have been carrying him inside her. His mother. His mother. He had never allowed those syllables to form, even in the deepest caves of his most secret mind. He turned away.

His throat felt tight and he wanted to screw up his face for some reason. He… He… He needed something to steal. Down here must be her bedroom. Where was the light switch? This place was so dark. He had the names. Fuck the addresses. Maybe there was some jewelry in here. Take something valuable. And get out of this terrible place… He found the switch and the light came blazing on, horribly bright, and he forced himself to take another step into the room, squinting a little, and then… And then he saw her piano.

But even now, standing stranded, motionless in the bedroom of the mother he had never known, Arkady Alexandrovitch Artamenkov did not recognize the prickling in the corners of his eyes for what it really was. Like everybody else in the thinking world, he assumed he was going mad.

18 A Funeral

They walked behind the funeral cart in a deep and painful rut of self-consciousness. The wind was harrying in from the east, causing the clouds to race and the sun to come and go and come and go as if dashing from one to the next. Neither Gabriel nor Isabella could absorb or respond to or even quite believe what was happening in front of their eyes. Instead they made their way—reeling, disciplined, half apologetic, half aghast—like two intelligence agents plunged unexpectedly into the bloody bayonet business of life-and-death on the frontline. Indeed, the whole extremely-bright-sunlight-then-sudden-shadow day had thus far been as alien as any they had ever experienced.

A wiry gray-haired man wearing a threadbare liveried tunic sat up high, driving two skin-and-bone black horses, all three reluctant: the horses to walk, the man to use his whip. The horses pulled a cart. And on the cart was a pale wood coffin, in which the body of their mother must surely be feeling every jolt. Gabriel came along behind and to the right, dressed in hastily bought cheap black trousers and a dark shirt; Isabella was on the left a little way off in her black work suit, black hose, and her office shoes—used to cabs, sidewalks, and lobbies, not gravel, not potholes. Behind the twins, Yana and Yana’s mother, both in the long skirts of Russian mourning. And behind them, four near-strangers all wearing their most svelte and somber tailoring—Avery, officially representing their father; Avery’s wife, Sophie (in sunglasses); and two others from the office, whom Julian had introduced but whose names neither twin knew nor would ever remember.

Surprised alike by the formality of what the rite required and the Dalísque actuality of the horses, and yet way past both surprise and actuality, the twins had met with the others at the main entrance to the Smolensky cemetery. They had now been walking five minutes and already it was absolutely unendurable and absolutely had to be endured.

Gabriel had desolately (and happily) concluded that everything that ever happened was far, far beyond his control. Likewise, he had long since abandoned any attempt to apprehend the narrower significance and implication of what losing a parent actually meant. Each moment manufactures itself into a vast and hideous writhing universe-wide reality regardless, he thought; what business could it be of his? Nobody had the slightest idea what was actually going on. The horses were sweating steadily and the smell came and went on the gusts of the wind. His mother had always hated animals. We have enough excrement in our cities. Meanwhile the cart bumped and banged and the coffin shifted an inch here, back a few centimeters there, and he worried that perhaps it might slide right off and dive nose-first onto the gravel, splintering the wood, two dead legs shooting out the end, buckling, body following, crumpling, snapping, folding under its own weight. What was the flexibility of lifeless human sinew? What was the elasticity of death? At any moment he expected his mother to sit up and harangue them for such uneven treatment.

If anything, Isabella was even further away from reality, her thoughts droning around and around like a maddened bee trapped in an empty jar—amazed, upset by, resigned to, and yet bitterly angry with the numbness of her own head as she smacked it repeatedly against the invisible borders of her new circumstances. Give me something in here to sting and I will gladly give up my life to sting it. Only this has to stop. (Besides that, her feet were starting to hurt.) Her only real feeling, she felt, was that she could not feel. The best she could manage was the strange sensation of imagining that she was an old woman, older than her mother, sitting somewhere on a retirement home couch watching events as if they were footage of her thirty-two-year-old self in Petersburg—footage that had somehow become part of a documentary film about the legacy of defection. Or estrangement. Or the working life of animals. They were passing under trees, and another cloud had obscured the sun, and the semidarkness was as mad as the intense light that had caused her to squint only a second ago. The horses had become even more reluctant, so that the pace slowed even further… They might as well have crawled to the grave on their hands and knees. Would have been quicker. She wanted it over. She wanted it done.

But perhaps it was not the horses, nor the threadbare livery of the driver, nor the uneasy trees that most prevented the two from finding a way to access whatever feelings they had both imagined the funeral of their mother would evoke. Perhaps instead it was the old women… For waiting ahead at the main cemetery crossroads were five such, swathed in heaviest black. And without acknowledgment or query, these old women now filed slowly into step on either side of the coffin, flanking bewildered Gabriel and furious Isabella. Who they were and where they came from, nobody appeared to know. Neither did anyone wish to take responsibility for asking, or for telling them to go back there. (Part of the arrangements? Part of the package? Normal? Not normal?) And for the next ten minutes, these five walked beside the cart as well—now sighing, now incanting, now silent, continually crossing themselves. Some final delegation dispatched from the twilight fringes of the living to murmur Maria Glover to her judgment.

And for all anyone cared, Isabella thought, they could indeed be her mother’s sisters. Because the fact was, they knew next to nothing about their own mother’s family. They had never met a single living soul who shared their mother’s blood. (How much farther? How much farther?) Just an austere photograph of a severe woman: Russian Granny, Oksana. That a life could end like this. That this is what it all came down to. Who was this woman they were burying today? Who were all these people already buried? It was all too hasty; there was no time even to attempt to find her mother’s family, no time to do anything; the whole business felt mad mad mad and Isabella wondered if Gabriel was right to insist on having it all done here and so quickly. But then, what did it matter? And where else could her mother be buried? And what family? And what friends? At least they knew for sure now that their father could not show up. Not unless he was planning a surprise at the open grave.

And for all anyone knew, Gabriel thought, these old women might simply be actresses sent in as part of the day’s skillful conspiracy to subvert its own crazed reality—a conspiracy of which he was well aware but could do nothing. (The October wind was fresh, though, and took away the smell of the horses, and that was good. They must be nearly there. How much longer? How much longer?) And it was amazing how swiftly life could come at you when it felt like it. You thought you were moving fast—seasons passing unmarked, anniversaries barely celebrated, numbers careering forward on all the checks you had to write—but then these sort of things happened and you realized that Time hadn’t even got out of first gear. You realized that when Time really opened up and hit the gas, there was no telling how fast it might go—famine and floods crammed into the working week, entire lives passing away and forgotten in five short days, the heavens and the earth fashioned in six. Jesus, the incredible speed of it all—a routine Sunday night in Tufnell Park, the telephone, Monday in the visa queue, Tuesday hop on a plane, and by Friday this. And when time was racing, everything became impossible to understand or process or deal with. Of course it did. And, dear God, the utter intolerableness but utter necessity of what he had been required to talk about, consider, decide upon these last days—and mostly through Yana’s honest and well-meaning translations: “Do you like that we see your mother’s face for our praying, or do you like she keeps a special mask, like a wail, for the dead faces—so we can see but Masha is still little bit covered, like a wedding… a wedding material from the brides… It’s a wail, yes? You understand?”

They came around a shallow kink in the path and out from beneath the trees again. The way ahead, the last few hundred yards, was smoother underfoot, or so it seemed—marked out by manicured roses and thorns and fourteen crooked white headstones. If he did die up there on Calvary, then the last thing he would have wanted was resurrection. Not this, Father, not this shit again.

There was an awkward delay before they were allowed to enter the chapel. (Lid back on one coffin and haul it out the back; lid off a new one and haul it in the front.) So for a while they were all required to stand around outside, at a loss, as the sun kept on coming and going, coming and going, and the swaying trees appeared taller than ever. Nobody knew the name of the black birds that wheeled against the sky. But something like a robin settled on an iron cross close to where the twins now stood a little apart.

Isabella spoke first, her voice low but clear, as if she did not really care who heard: “Why can’t we just bury her? What’s going to happen in here? How long is it going to be? I want it to be over.”

Gabriel was cold in his shirt now they’d stopped walking. “I think they have to… I think it’s part of the service or whatever. Avery said you choose a rite and you have to go along with the whole procedure if you want a site here. Maybe the church people insist. Or the owners. God knows.”

“I wish they would keep God out of it. It’s just such horseshit. And it’s making me hate. And I can’t, I can’t—”

“I know, I know, but Is… Ssshhh.” His voice was oddly calm. “It doesn’t matter. You know that. Nothing we say or think or do here now comes even close to what is actually happening or what anything actually means.”

“I feel like I’m dead. I feel like Mum’s living and we’re dead here. Stuck.”

“It’s just us, Is, and what we think she thinks. It’s just her thoughts imagined in our minds. And… I think… I think she’d laugh. She’d laugh. At this. At us two. Wouldn’t she?”

“I can’t stand that fat priest or those awful women pretending to mourn. She’s my mother.” She bit her lip. “Why do we have to wait out here while they do whatever they’re doing in there? She belongs to us, not to that fat bastard or those fucking witches.”

“Sshh. Is, come on.” His arm found his sister’s shoulder.

“They’re only here because they want someone to be there when they croak themselves.” Her voice was thickening. “They’re shit scared, all of them—cowards. I want this to be over. I feel like we’re being buried here. And nobody is noticing.”

“Hey, I’m noticing. I’m always noticing. I notice everything.”

“Me too.”

He bent his head and smiled gently at her. “That’s the problem.”

She blinked against her tears. “You’re right. We should stop noticing everything.”

“Learn to get over it,” he murmured.

There was a pause, filled only by a snatch of wind. Then Isabella said, “I can’t get over anything.”

“Me neither. I can’t get over anything at all. Not one thing that happens in the damn world can I get over.” The doors scraped and clattered open and another cadre of black birds took to the sky. “You were right, Is—we should have done it ourselves. Driven out somewhere quiet and far away. Burned her body on the steppe. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of lonely places.”

Inside the small chapel, the walls were covered in dark icons. The priest walked around and around the open coffin. The old women held their candles in their left hand so that they could cross themselves with their right. And the chanting swelled and fell in a minor key that seemed to have journeyed west with the wind from far away, wherever the heart of Russia lay, somewhere in some sacred valley. Now and then, partially obscured by the trees as they moved outside, the sun came streaming in through the plain windows high above, so that there were dappled patches of shifting light on the floor, the walls, the mourners, the priest, on Masha’s immutable face. She wore no veil.