St. Petersburg Noir

TRAINING DAY by Andrei Kivinov Kupchino ^{Translated by Polly Gannon}

Rise and shine, Eagle Scouts! You’ve got a report.” Leaving the door to the rec room open and not waiting for us to wake up, Evseyev returned to duty. I wasn’t asleep anyway. I was just lying there with my eyes closed on top of an ancient, disintegrating overcoat spread out on some chairs I had pushed together. That was in contrast to Farid Ismagilov, the Tatar, snoring loud enough to wake the dead. I still hadn’t learned to fall asleep at three in the afternoon. That was understandable: I didn’t have enough practice. Although the idea of a postprandial nap made sense. If there’s an opportunity to sleep during the day, use it. That way, at night, you won’t keep yawning and nodding off if something happens. Farid, over there, was a guy with a lot of practice.

I got up off the chairs and put on my brown shoes. The standard-issue black ones didn’t fit me, so I had to settle for civilian ones. The officers frowned on them, but the civilian population didn’t give a damn, so I wasn’t worried. No big deal, it’s not like shoes are your uniform cap. I straightened my tie, then nudged Farid, still sleeping on the bench.

“Mister Driver, we’ve got a report to check out. Let’s get going.”

Farid woke up, rubbed his eyes, and yawned, exhaling a lethal reek of bacon and garlic. A Muslim, he scarfed down bacon for lunch despite the injunctions of the Koran. They called him Driver because he drove the official kozel jeep. In his free time, that is, when he wasn’t sleeping. Rank: sergeant; age: thirty-three; disposition: Nordic, sometimes gloomy, with a slight chance of showers. Inclined toward mild, daily drunkenness. Whether he was an athlete or a good family man, I didn’t know yet. Rooted for the Rubin Kazan soccer team.

“We’ll check it out later. It’s our legitimate quiet time.”

“Yeah, but felons don’t get a quiet time.”

Evseyev, the duty officer, was playing a game of erotic Tetris on an office computer, forming a naked minor on the screen. Or, in his words, drawing up a duty roster. This drawing up of a roster was not easy: every time Evseyev got above knee level, he had to start all over again. It irritated him to no end. His assistant was fastidiously interrogating a reticent drunkard who smelled of piss. He steered the man toward the “aquarium” (the drying-out tank) with a gentle kick, and sprayed apple-scented air freshener around the room.

“So, what’s with the report?” Farid said, kneading his neck.

Without glancing up from his “duty roster,” Evseyev handed us a piece of paper covered with what looked like chicken scratch.

“Here’s the address. The paramedics called. Dead on arrival. Forty-two-year-old male. Asphyxiation. Allegedly choked on meat dumplings. Go take a look. If anything seems suspicious, call and I’ll send the operative. And if there’s no sign of foul play, do the usual routine.”

The usual routine. It was my first day on duty, and I had no clue what the routine was. I mean, I knew it in theory—I had taken a three-month course for police investigators—but instructions and regulations were one thing, “the usual routine” was something else. I didn’t let on, naturally. I nodded and took the address as though it was something I did every day. If worse came to worst, Farid would tell me what to do. He’d been in the department more than ten years. He’d give me a shoulder to lean on.

When we went out into the courtyard, the weather was doing its best to discourage any sort of work ethic. It was like being in a thriller. Gray thunderheads, spitting rain, slithery mud, a screaming wind. Indian summer had given way to an abrupt early winter. I have to say that in St. Petersburg there’s no real spring, summer, or fall. It’s one eternal season of early winter. Even in the July heat people escape from here to warmer climes. You’ve just got to put up with it and not start howling when some Lexus speeds by, splashing you with dirty water. Because St. Petersburg is the president’s hometown.

Sopping wet leather shoes were no match for the standard-issue leather kersey boots. But they hadn’t given me those. Said there was a shortage of kersey leather in the country, and that kersey boots had gone out of style a long time ago, anyway. Not flashy enough, I was told.

Farid chased away a filthy crow sitting on the hood of the kozel and, cursing, tightened the metal wire around the bumper that fastened it to the body of the jalopy. The kozel was even more experienced than the driver. It had lost part of its engine in gang wars. Its gear box and suspension had been severely wounded, and its scratches and battle scars were too numerous to count. It had received a medal of honor for “Endurance,” undergone treatment in the field hospital, and continued to serve under the proud moniker of G-Wagen, which some witty cynic had spelled out in black paint on the yellow hood.

After he had tightened the wire, Farid loaded himself into the vehicle and passed me a hand crank. I stuck the crank under the bumper. Mustering up all my strength, I grabbed the handle with both hands and gave it a turn clockwise. Nada.

“Harder,” Farid said. “It’s not a beer bottle.”

“You shouldn’t have stopped the engine.”

“If you gave me more gas, I wouldn’t have to.”

Our jalopy started up on the fourth attempt. The joyful roaring of the engine resounded through the courtyard, its blue exhaust filling the air. I dropped the crank under the seat and jumped in. We were rolling. Finally.

We didn’t have too far to go. Our precinct was based in Kupchino, a Petersburg bedroom community, settled at one time, according to legend, by merchants. Or maybe not. In any case, nowadays the people who lived here were just the same as the people living in any other part of Petersburg, and probably the entire country. The places we inhabit have no bearing on the way we think and live. That’s a proven fact.

Our precinct covered fifty hectares, all told, and it counted about 100,000 people. They lived mainly in Khrushchev-era buildings—architectural monuments unprotected by either the government or UNESCO. The people who lived in them were responsible for their upkeep. The ones who didn’t drink. I had only spent a few weeks here as a police inspector when I understood that was a clear minority. Very clear.

In addition to watching over the populace, my tasks included regular twenty-four-hour on-call duty. I had to go with the driver to all kinds of events that were not distinguished by any significant criminality: domestic violence, drunken brawls, petty vandalism, and other amoral phenomena that disrupted the peace of ordinary citizens. Naturally, my job was not just to go there, but to react quickly and adequately, adhering to the letter of the law, if possible. And if not—not adhering to it.

As I already mentioned, today was my debut; or, rather, my training day. Like any other novice, I was nervous. Thank goodness, before lunch it all went as smoothly as could be. No mass riots or technogenic catastrophes. A few scuffles between neighbors, and a fight in a café where a crusading customer refused to pay for an order that he had already more than half-consumed. Ismagilov had dealt with all these incidents without much effort. He never even pulled out the Jedi baton, a product of some factory’s rubber division, from his broad belt. The fight was broken up and the brazen customer was shaken down for a few rubles with the use of the magic words “detention” and “downtown.” Usually the Star Wars began after six in the evening, when the weary proletariat returned home after its labors and grabbed any means at hand for letting off steam and reducing stress. I was hoping that today wouldn’t produce many marvels. You can’t put too much strain on a lieutenant’s shoulders that have yet to be tested, or on the brain of someone fresh out of engineering school.

I had never had to file paperwork on a murder—not when I was in college, or even in the service—so I was feeling some emotional anxiety. I just wasn’t used to procedures like this. Actually, I had no experience whatsoever. They had taken us on a field trip to the city morgue during our training, but I pretended I was mortally ill and copped out of it. I had no desire to examine internal organs in their natural state. I’d rather look at a picture in a textbook on forensic medicine, or, better yet, not see it at all. Now I was reaping the questionable rewards of my own squeamishness. Farid didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it. He’d seen it all in his ten years with our outfit. It was all still ahead of me, though. But there was nothing you could do about it. I had chosen this path myself when I decided to devote my younger years to fighting domestic crime, and, if I was lucky, to getting a place of my own in the bargain. It was cramped living in one small apartment with my parents and brothers.

Not long ago I had been at a funeral. A relative on my mother’s side, an eighty-seven-year-old man, had died. We stood by the coffin in the morgue to say goodbye, everyone crying, of course. A few other coffins containing the deceased surrounded us. Suddenly, a seriously drunk fellow burst in, looked around, and then, pushing aside all my relatives, cried out, “Goodbye, Mama!” and flung himself into my dead relative’s crossed arms. In spite of the tragic pathos of the moment, everyone standing around the coffin broke into laughter, myself included. After that everyone started crying again, but not like before. Laughter through tears; a patch of light, a patch of darkness…

Next to a shopping center Driver slowed down and dashed out to buy cigarettes in a little dive with the nostalgic name 3.62. I seemed to remember that was how much a half-liter of vodka cost when I was a kid. Farid had a discount there—he checked out their daily scuffles. By the door a soaking wet beggar sat in the rain on a piece of cardboard, exhorting the public through a megaphone to donate money to him for bread. He amplified his voice without shame or timidity, like a guide on Nevsky Prospect inviting tourists on a canal boat ride. “Hurry up, hurry up! Just one piece of bread! Don’t pass up your chance to help the needy. You won’t be sorry in the next world!”

Coming out of the dive, Farid the Muslim sinned against the Koran yet again. Instead of extending charity as he was supposed to according to the one of the five pillars of Islam, he chased off the beggar. He called it “checking his license.”

Our multicultural duo sped over to a nine-story building that rose up just behind the shopping center. A few minutes later the G-Wagen screeched to a halt by the entrance, next to an ambulance with a sleeping driver in it. Farid turned off the engine; leaving an empty cop car with the engine running wasn’t advisable. There were always people willing to take it for a spin. This wasn’t Beverly Hills, after all. Better to let the inspector spin the hand crank one more time.

I noticed a large warning sign on the moldy wall of the building:

Thanks to the residential supervisor for his concern. Next year the word “balcony” would have to be replaced with the word “wall.”

We ducked into the entrance hall. It was so leaky and damp it seemed to be raining inside the building. I went up in the ramshackle elevator. Farid walked up to the fifth floor. They say that after a certain incident he had become “elevator shy.” Once, some big bosses decided to check on how one of the then-inspectors was dealing with a routine domestic violence call. The bosses were big in the literal sense too—two of them two-hundred-pounders at the very least. The inspector was also not given to shunning God’s bounty, judging by his amplitude. Plus Farid himself. The higher-ups didn’t want to walk all the way up to the last floor, so they all squeezed into the elevator together. The elevator up and ground to a halt halfway; it couldn’t cope with the load. To add insult to injury, not one of them was carrying a cell phone or a walkie-talkie. They called out to the residents for help. Like, “We’re police, we’re responding to a call, we’re stuck! Call the repair service!” “Ah, the pigs? Well, you got just what you deserve!” It’s no secret how ordinary citizens view us, in spite of the heroes on TV. Some of them even started jeering. “We’re going to rip off your car while you’re in there sweating!” Farid nearly had a stroke. They stood there in complete darkness between the fifth and sixth floors for nearly two hours, praying that the cable wouldn’t snap. Since then Farid refuses to set foot in an elevator, even in his own building. He takes the stairs, and only the stairs. Besides, it’s good for the heart.

The apartment where the drama was being played out was a completely ordinary, no-frills, working-class affair. Two small rooms, a kitchenette, and a narrow hallway. The deceased was lying on a bed in the room closest to the entryway, where his wife and son had carried him. His wife—his widow, rather—wasn’t sobbing, as I would have expected. She sat silent at the head of the bed and stared at her husband. She was in shock.

A paramedic filled us in. The wife and son had been watching TV, while the head of the family was in the kitchen eating. He was a construction worker and was grabbing a quick meal; the construction site was next door, and it was cheaper to eat at home. He was running late, and swallowed a dumpling whole, it seemed, without chewing it. When he was choking, trying to cough it up, he fell and broke a plate. When the wife and son ran into the kitchen, he was writhing on the floor, clutching at his throat. The son rushed to the telephone, the wife tried to extract the dumpling, but it was lodged there and wouldn’t budge. Asphyxiation. The paramedic had no doubts about the cause of death. An accident. He had removed the dumpling from the dead man himself.

After leaving us their number, the paramedics rushed off on another call. I went into the kitchen. A broken plate on the floor, a few stray dumplings in the corners—those were the only traces of the incident. I would probably agree with the paramedic that it seemed impossible to contrive an accident like that, to “make it happen” on its own. And there was no reason to, either. I was young and inexperienced, of course, but just by looking at the wife I could state with certainty that homicide was out of the question.

The son came into the kitchen: a kid, about sixteen, pale as a wall poster bleached by the sun. “I’ll clean it up now,” he said, nodding toward the shards.

“Don’t do that. Go get the neighbors. We need two witnesses. And get your father’s ID too.”

While he was trying to talk the neighbors into coming over, I called Evseyev and reported the situation.

“Question the next of kin, and cough up a report for sending the body to the morgue,” the duty officer said. “And get back here on the double. More reports are about to start pouring in. I’ll send someone to pick up the body.”

That was about what I had planned to do. Cough up a report and question the relatives, as they taught us in the training course.

I went back into the hallway. Without entering the room, I asked the widow to help her son find the documents. The woman nodded and left. I stood in the doorway, unwilling to go in and be face-to-face with the dead man. Like I said, I wasn’t used to it. It’s one thing at a funeral, but another thing entirely in domestic circumstances. I wasn’t squeamish or suspicious, I didn’t believe in the living dead, but I couldn’t shake those zombie movies from my mind. Maybe I could just draw up the report right here in the doorway? I thought. It’s not a murder, after all. There’s no need to search for evidence or find fingerprints. Especially since they already moved the body from the kitchen into the room, disrupting the original circumstances of the incident…

I peered at the dead man. He was clothed in the dark-green jacket that construction-site foremen usually wear. He must have really been in a hurry, since he didn’t bother to take it off while he was eating. Poor guy. The paramedic had wrapped a bandage around his head and jaw, like someone with a toothache. Suddenly I imagined that the fellow was about to sit up, take off the bandage, and smile, saying that it was all a joke and everyone was invited in to finish off the dumplings.

“What’s holding you back?” Farid’s voice sounded somewhere behind me.

“I’m just not used to it, that’s all.”

“Aw, c’mon, he won’t bite.” He entered the room calmly and leaned over the builder’s face. “It’s as clear as day. He died all by himself. Nothing to be afraid of.”

Sure. He won’t bite…

The neighbors arrived: two old ladies. As you’d expect, both of them shaking their heads, “what-a-pity” and “woe-is-me.” I asked them to come into the room and observe the examination. I sat down on a stool by the head of the body and took out an official form. If this had been my hundredth case, I wouldn’t have been nervous. I could have filled the thing out with just my left hand in five minutes. But a debut is a debut, so the whole thing took about forty minutes. I didn’t want to show my inadequacy. Recalling the instructions they gave us during the course, I began describing the circumstances from the general to the specific, as clearly and legibly as possible, and without making any spelling errors. This wasn’t exactly easy. First, I’m no Leo Tolstoy, and second, a dead man lying right next to you doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. I couldn’t find the right words. I kept losing my train of thought, so I ended up describing the clothes the dead man was wearing twice. I had no time to do it over, and you weren’t allowed to cross things out, so I just left everything as it was. Farid checked in on me a few times and tried in annoyance to hurry me up. The old lady witnesses patiently carried out their duties as citizens, whispering about what a wonderful neighbor he had been, although sometimes he took a drop too much. I could have done with a little drink myself. Just a tad—for the confidence.

When I was done with the report, I dismissed the neighbors and went into the other room to question the wife. That took another forty minutes. The woman was in a sort of stupor, understandably enough. She answered in monosyllables. After she signed the report without even reading it, new characters appeared on the scene.

There were two of them. Both wore baseball caps and dark green canvas jackets that looked like firemen’s suits. The older one, who looked about forty, carried a roll of black plastic under his armpit. The second one, about ten years younger, was holding a folded stretcher like a spear. They looked like the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. A glitter in the eyes and a faint but familiar smell pointed to the presence of low levels of alcohol in their blood.

“Hello, ma’am. We’re from the morgue,” the first one said. “We’re here for the deceased.”

The widow nodded.

“May we take it?” This question was addressed to me.

“Yes, we’re all done here.”

“Where is he?”

“The next room.”

The two turned around and disappeared into the hallway, where Farid’s voice could be heard.

“You’re fast today.”

“Yeah, it’s the third stiff since morning. They’re dropping like flies.”

While they were attending to the body of the builder, I explained the formalities of ordering a funeral to the widow, although I didn’t actually know a thing about it. Then I drafted a cover letter for an autopsy and took it to the orderlies. They were already carrying the body out. They had tied an oilskin tag with a number on it to the wrist, and for some reason had removed the bandage around the jaw. It was a sorry sight. The widow stayed behind in the room, probably afraid she would break down. The son held the door.

Farid asked them to tow-start our G-Wagen. They agreed. After they had carried the dead body out onto the landing, they returned to the apartment and called the widow.

“Our condolences, ma’am,” the older one said, removing his baseball cap and smoothing down his unwashed hair. “Maybe we should drink to his memory? Just a shot or two? So that everything will go smoothly, like it should. So we’ll be able to deliver the body safely and all that…”

The widow nodded again in silence and went out to the kitchen. The orderlies followed behind. We stayed in the hallway.

“Won’t you have some?” she said, poking her head out.

“No,” Farid answered. “We’re on the job.”

Then he whispered to me that I shouldn’t get drawn into such things, even though I wasn’t planning on it anyway. We said goodbye to the widow and her son, expressing our condolences again, and went downstairs. The weather had deteriorated even further and reminded me of someone in a critical stage of fever. The death throes were about to begin. We got into the jeep and waited for the Tin Man and Scarecrow. Their black van with a yellow stripe was a more reliable means of starting the engine than the elbow grease of a young police inspector. It was worth waiting for. Evseyev wouldn’t miss us.

The orderlies didn’t waste much time at the spontaneous memorial service. Five minutes later they brought out the builder and loaded him in the corpse-mobile. The alcohol content in their blood had increased significantly, but the fellows weren’t in the least worried or ashamed about it. It wasn’t likely that the traffic police would stop their particular vehicle.

While we were preparing the tow rope, the tall one informed his partner that they had one more client to pick up in the neighborhood, and they wouldn’t go to the morgue just yet. They would pick them all up and deliver them wholesale. This would be easier and more economical. Apparently, their gasoline supply was intermittent, like ours.

On the way back I dreamed about the warm rec room, a cup of hot tea, and a game of backgammon with Farid. But I had to bury my dreams. That evil Evseyev, apparently frustrated in his attempts to construct the naked minor on the computer screen, was waiting at the door with another body for us. In the park a dead fellow with no signs of violent death was sitting on a bench, scaring the passersby. Probably a junkie. Probably OD’d. Onward, gentlemen—on with the inspection and the report. If anything looks suspicious, call the operative.

Thank god Mister Driver hadn’t stopped the engine, so I didn’t have to expend my valuable muscle power. I shouldn’t have to waste it on things like that anyway. There was not a single line in my job description that said that a police inspector is required to start up the official vehicle manually. Then again, I wasn’t going to get very far in my brown shoes.

There didn’t seem to be any foul play here, either. Nothing criminal anyway. The experienced Farid recognized the poor guy immediately. A local junkie with an unhappy personal life who had been shooting up for three years. The doctor confirmed it was an overdose. A dirty syringe was lying in the grass nearby. It was unlikely that someone had shot up his buddy. Not that sort of a guy. It was self-liquidation.

While I was sitting in our G-Wagen kozel drawing up the second inspection protocol of the day (which went a lot more smoothly than the first), a familiar black van with a yellow stripe pulled up. Long time no see!

“They’re sure prompt today,” Farid remarked. “Sometimes you wait for six hours, and the stiff just lies there on the ground getting soaked in the rain. Though it’s all the same to him at that point.”

The Tin Man managed to stay on his feet without any help, but the Scarecrow had to support himself with the stretcher. I wasn’t judging the guys. Theirs was a unique profession, unpleasant; you needed a way to reduce the tension or you wouldn’t make it. And it had been a hard day. One memorial service after another. That’s probably why they didn’t recognize us right away. Once they did, they started griping.

“They’re keeling over left and right! Dropping like flies. We didn’t even get a lunch break. What do you have for us now?”

We pointed to the body. Scarecrow dropped the stretcher in front of the bench, sat down beside the junkie, and lit up a cigarette. The seat was uncomfortable, and while his partner was tying on the tag, he leaned over to rest on the shoulder of his dead companion on the bench. He was zonked. Picking up the dead was nothing like beating the odds to get to the Emerald City.

When the tag had been fastened, the orderlies—cigarettes still hanging from their lips—loaded the junkie onto the stretcher and hauled it over to the van. We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz…Their movements were hardly light and agile, but they did manage to bundle the body into the back of the van, where it took its place among its brothers in misfortune.

“Back to the Corpse Motel, Valek?” Scarecrow asked his older partner, who apparently carried the weight in their symbiosis.

“Not yet. Palich will bust us. He’ll know we’re drunk and open his big mouth. By nine he’ll be outta there and we can go back. We can say the battery went dead. Jump in, we’ll go grab some dinner and call to find out if there are any more runs to make.”

“Whatever you say.”

Apparently, as supervisor of the morgue, Palich commanded the respect of the personnel.

When I handed Valek a copy of the death-scene report and the cover letter, I tried peering into the back of the van. There was nothing to see, though. The front seat was screened off from the back by a thick black cloth. It was just as well. What’s the point of knowing what’s in store for you? I hoped it was a long time before I’d find out.

Valek got behind the wheel, turned the ignition, and the van waddled slowly off down the narrow park road.

“I have a feeling that’s not the last time we’ll be seeing them today,” Driver said, his eyes following the van.

“Who knows? Today may be the thirteenth, but it’s not Friday. It’s Tuesday.”

“All the same, it’s the thirteenth.”

On the way back, we swung by the shopping center to pick up a drunk from the cop stationed there, at the request of Evseyev, who had called us on the walkie-talkie. The drunk turned out to be that same beggar as before. The breadwinning megaphone was fastened around his neck with a sturdy chain, so no one could take it from him. The beggar didn’t put up any resistance. It was all the same to him. Unlike ours, his shift was over.

I don’t know whether Evseyev ever finished the game of erotic Tetris, but Farid and I didn’t get to battle it out over backgammon that night. Reports rained down on us thick and fast. There were family dramas, complaints about noisy neighbors, drunken brawls with the use of sharp objects or cutting implements. There was even a runaway—or a crawlaway—of a six-foot-long boa constrictor, from the apartment of a rich eccentric. Naturally, we didn’t go after it; we sent the owner to EMERCOM.

I just kept on trucking, and, in contrast to my experienced partner, didn’t whine, driven by my sense of duty and the dream of moving away from my parents and into my own apartment. The whole time I was counting the hours to midnight, when the thirteenth would give way to a more auspicious date on the monthly calendar.

But the dark powers wouldn’t give up. They’re not called dark powers for nothing. They delivered their final blow just five minutes before the finish line. Evseyev, their trusty messenger, breezed into the rec room just when we were arranging the pieces on the board.

“Quit loafing, you two—we’ve got another stiff.”

“Aw, gimme a break! This day can go shove it!” Farid said. “Let us play at least one game!”

“Your game can wait. Doesn’t look like homicide… The wife came home and found her husband dead in front of the door. Looks like she’s been drinking. Maybe she even killed him herself. Go check it out. If there’s any sign of foul play, I’ll send the operative. Here’s the address.”

That was the third time today we were hearing about the operative.

The courtyard, rain, the jeep, hand crank… In a month I’d be ready for some kind of pull-starting engine contest.

The address was in the farthest reaches of our precinct, next to the railroad embankment, in one of the barracks built after World War II by German prisoners. Back then they were barracks, that is. Afterward they repaired them and slapped a bit of plaster on the walls, and offered it to the ex-cons returning from a hard-labor lumber camp who didn’t have a place to live. A homey little spot that had earned the name Blue-Light District because of its plentiful bashed-up inhabitants, with all manner of bruised faces and shiners. It wasn’t a favela in Rio, of course, but strangers were well advised not to set foot there. Locals either, as a matter of fact. It might be hard to find your way out with a shiner that all but blinds you.

We had already been to the district once today about a duel fought by the local “nobility.” We separated them when the gentlemen had just squared off to fight, having chosen their weapons (broken bottles, or “roses” as they call them). High society, in other words.

This time I grabbed a flashlight, just in case, since the electricity had been turned off in most of the barracks because of unpaid bills. I prepared myself mentally to come face-to-face with real crime.

The jeep kept a steady course, somehow coping with the absence of a real road. We reached the barracks without incident. Farid was chewing out his beloved Rubin soccer team for losing to Barcelona. “Isn’t it time for them to take a short vacation? The coach too. Fifteen days in the drying-up tank should do it. To get them moving again. Their bosses pay them big bucks, and they don’t even bring in a penny. I understand losing to Zenit— but to Barcelona?”

The buildings didn’t have any numbers on them, but Farid knew the area like the back of his hand. He could have found any address blindfolded.

“Which pad?” he asked.

“Number eight.”

“Third floor,” he said automatically, turning off the engine.

We got out of the warm vehicle. The three-story structure appeared black against a still-blacker sky. Fantastic. All we needed was some lightning, a flock of crows, a peal of thunder, and, in the background, an airplane plunging to earth, leaving a trail of smoke in its wake. It was a good thing I brought the flashlight. Candles or torches gleamed here and there in the dark windows. The age of nanotechnologies. Kupchino, St. Petersburg, Russia in the twenty-first century… At least the landline still worked, since someone had managed to call the police.

I entered the building first, lighting the way and scaring off the rats. I won’t go into any detail about the smells that assaulted us. I’ll just say that week-old garbage smelled like Dolce & Gabbana in comparison. On the first landing we were greeted by some petroglyphs, with the message Dead hedgehogs go north. The artwork of young junkies—I recognized the elevated style.

The middle-aged woman who had called the police met us at the door. Sitting on the floor. Leaning against the wall. With a half-empty bottle of vodka in her hand. I tried to get her to tell me what had happened. She tried to answer me, but her tongue wouldn’t obey her. She had been at the bottle for quite awhile already. Not to mention the stress of the situation. It’s a wonder she could dial the number at all.

While I was busy trying to bring the woman to her senses, Farid turned on his own flashlight and ventured into the apartment to take a look. He didn’t stay long. Thirty seconds later he was back, crossing himself. Farid the Muslim was crossing himself!

I shone the flashlight directly in his face. It looked like it was made of stone. What had he seen in the apartment? Dismemberment?

“Alex,” he said in a hollow whisper. “There’s… in there…”

“What?”

“The builder.”

“What builder?”

“The one from earlier. The same one. I’m seeing things. For my sins. Allah is punishing me for my sins.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. What did he mean, the same one? What sins? Since when did Allah make sinners hallucinate? Pushing aside the babbling wreck of a driver, I boldly went into the apartment, where no policeman had gone before, and noticed that instead of a lock, the door was held shut by the sash of a housecoat tied to the doorknob.

The dead body was lying in the hallway, a few feet away from the entrance, facedown. He was wearing a khaki work jacket. I was already less nervous than I had been in the morning. I was getting used to things. Without feeling any squeamishness I lifted up the head of the already cold body by the hair and pointed the flashlight square in his face.

Then I crossed myself too. I did it without even thinking, and just about dropped the flashlight. It was the builder who had choked on the dumpling, the one I had written up so scrupulously in my morning report. There was no mistaking it. I examined his hand. The oilcloth tag was still hanging on the string.

I stood up, wiping the sweat from my forehead. Just take it easy, I told myself. Two people can’t share the same hallucination. Even if Allah really wants them to. Shining the flashlight in front of me, I walked on further. The two-bedroom apartment looked like the interior of a Berber’s desert tent. A minimum of furnishings, maximum of cockroaches, dirt, and empty bottles. The bathroom had no door, which theoretically wasn’t the end of the world. Not long ago I had been in the castle of some highborn nobleman. He had several bathrooms, all with glass doors. They say it’s fashionable. Good design. Especially good for the noble guests and girls in love with the nobleman. It’s a place for them to show off their fancy undies. There was probably design in this bathroom too.

I didn’t trip over any more dead bodies. I tried to find papers or IDs that would tell me who lived here, but I was unsuccessful. More than likely they didn’t even have any. I went back out to the landing. Farid was sitting next to the woman and staring dully into the darkness.

“Get up, buddy. Allah has forgiven you. For the time being. It really is our builder.”

Farid stirred. He said, “You’re sure?”

“Yup. He’s wearing the tag.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Stopped by for a visit. Wanted some beer to wash down the dumpling.”

I bent over the woman. She had conked out and was snoring loudly through her broad nostrils.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” Farid said.

“To be honest, my head’s gone into a tailspin. She said that it was her husband. But one guy can’t have two wives. This may not be the West, but it’s not the Orient. And even if he’s her husband, he couldn’t have come here on his own. He’s friggin’ dead.”

“I agree. Dead men don’t walk.”

“We’ll have to call the duty officer. Explain the whole thing. Have Evseyev call the morgue and get in touch with those blockhead orderlies.”

“Go ahead.”

“Let’s get her inside first.”

Farid got up off the floor. We grabbed the dame by the arms and dragged her into the first room, steering clear of the builder in the hallway. She seemed to weigh about two hundred pounds. Cursing, we hauled her up onto a three-legged couch. I found a red telephone dating back to the Comintern era in the other room, so I called Evseyev and explained the situation. As I had suspected, he was completely baffled. He told me to stop messing with his head and to return immediately to the department.

I would have been baffled too.

“What are we going to do?” Farid asked predictably.

“No idea. But I’m not writing up a report on him. I’ve already done it once.”

Farid lit up a cigarette. I bummed one off him and started to smoke too, even though I’m a health nut. We were silent for a while, thinking about the unusual circumstances we’d found ourselves in.

“We can’t leave him here,” Farid said, breaking the silence.

“Are you suggesting we take him to Evseyev? That’ll make him happy.”

“No, we’ll drop him at the morgue. It’s not far from here, next to the hospital.”

“What do you mean by ‘drop him’?”

“We’ll load him into the glass and take him there. He’s a tough guy, he won’t fall apart.”

I still hadn’t quite figured out all the police jargon, and I had no clue what “glass” could mean here. But I didn’t let on.

“Will he fit?”

“We packed eight in there once.”

“And what are we going to tell them at the morgue?” I pressed.

“That the body’s been registered, they’ve got the papers, so they should take him. If they don’t, we’ll just leave him on the doorstep.”

On one hand, the prospect of taking care of a stranger’s corpse didn’t inspire enthusiasm. On the other hand, I wanted to get to the bottom of this and find out how the poor builder had ended up in the Blue-Light District. Curiosity won out.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

The lady muttered something and turned her face to the wall. Farid glanced around the room, went over to the window, and jerked down a single curtain, stained and discolored. When we went back into the hallway, he asked me to lift up the body and then shoved the curtain under it.

“It should hold.”

We grasped the corners of the improvised stretcher and at the count of three elevated the body off the floor. The curtain started ripping, but didn’t split. Farid took the lead and stepped out onto the landing, the flashlight lodged under his armpit.

“I wonder,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, “how much they pay the orderlies for this little task.”

“Maybe they do it for love, not money,” Farid replied. “I’m so fed up with my relatives saying, Why do you bother being a cop? There’s no money, no respect in it. And I figure, how am I going to live as a civilian? I don’t even have a car. That’s how those orderlies figure too, probably. Money isn’t everything, you know. Watch out, here’s a step missing. Don’t trip.”

From somewhere on the second floor, a woman’s shrieking cackle rang out, and I almost let go of the curtain. Man, this really was like something out of a B-movie thriller. Dead hedgehogs go north.

I found out what the “glass” was when we emerged from the mildew and stench of the entryway into the fresh air. It was just the area in the back of the jeep for detainees. It was designed for two people. Or sometimes eight. Maybe even more. In any case, the builder would have plenty of room.

We placed him carefully in the rear of the vehicle, and Farid piled the curtain in next to him.

“We’ll have to treat the backseat with chlorine tomorrow,” he said, closing the glass. “Or we might catch something.”

He got behind the wheel and lit up a cigarette. The smoke deodorized the jeep better than any disinfectant could.

“In the old days, when I worked out in the country, I used to drive all the stiffs around in the glass,” Farid said with an air of nostalgia.

“Why was that?”

“It was a mess. There was just one morgue for the whole county. And the morgue-mobile only served the town. There was just one car for the rest of the county, and it was always broken. So I had to deliver the body myself, if it was more or less fresh. You can’t expect the relatives to bring the body to an autopsy. I remember once we were delivering this guy. Not a homicide. Heart attack. First, we had to swing by the department to get some papers stamped. I stepped out to drink some tea. And across from the department was the drying-out tank.”

Farid stepped on the gas, swerving to avoid a water-filled pothole.

“I don’t want the engine to die. The alternator is already on its last legs. Right, so what was I saying?… Their boss often borrowed drunks from ours. Just for the numbers. Our boss didn’t mind—it created more breathing space in the aquarium. On that day there wasn’t a single drunk, though. The boss at the drying-out tank begged ours, C’mon, just give me one, or I’ll never be able to leave here. Our boss was a real card. Sure, he said, take that one in the glass out there, they just brought him in. A minute later the sergeant comes out of the tank with his nightstick, opens the glass, and barks, Get out! The stiff doesn’t answer, naturally. The sergeant shouts again, Didn’t you hear what I said, you goon? I said get out! Silence. Then the sergeant bashed him over the head with his stick. Then gave him another one in the chest. The dead guy fell out of the jeep. The sergeant was about to pick him up, when he noticed that the sot wasn’t breathing anymore. He runs to the duty officer, his eyes popping out of his head, and shouts, Your drunk out there expired! The duty officer says, What do you mean, expired? You killed him with your stick! Everyone saw it. We’ll have to call the district attorney. The sergeant makes a break for the door and takes off running. They tried to catch him for two months, but he finally turned himself in. Was exhausted from hiding out in cellars and barns. They forgave him, saying it was only the first time. He’s never taken a nightstick into his hands since.”

We started driving up the overpass. Farid stepped on the gas once more so he could make it up the incline, but the wheels started spinning on the wet asphalt, and the engine conked out.

“Goddammit!” he barked, smashing his fist against the steering wheel. “The tires are bald. And I forgot to shift into four-wheel drive. Okay, out you go.”

He put the emergency brake on and passed me the hand crank. I sighed and climbed out into the rain. But the engine wouldn’t turn over—not on the third try; not even on the tenth. Either I was too tired, or the jeep was. Farid, cursing up a storm, climbed out too.

“The morgue is just a stone’s throw away. Just over the bridge there.”

“What do you suggest we do?”

“We could push it to the middle of the bridge. It’ll start when we coast downhill.”

“We’ll have to stop someone to help us. We can’t manage by ourselves.”

There were no cars in sight, what with the late hour and all. It was getting close to one in the morning. When my uniform was sopping wet and my shoes felt like I had fishbowls on my feet, a traffic cop driving a Lada drew up alongside our jalopy.

“What’s the problem, boys?” the round-faced lieutenant asked, rolling down his window.

“Won’t start. Will you help us push? Or pull us, maybe?”

The traffic cop reluctantly got out from behind the wheel and walked around our jeep. “Why are you knocking yourselves out? Put that prizefighter back there to work.”

“He can’t. He’s not feeling well,” Farid explained.

“Well, who’s feeling good right now? Hey, buddy!” The lieutenant tapped on the glass. “The officers are out here bustin’ their asses in the rain, and you’re in there chillin’. You scared of a little work?”

“Let him be,” Farid said dismissively. “It’s like trying to squeeze water from a stone.”

“Well, make him get out, at least. It’s extra weight. Listen, buster, move your butt.”

“Don’t,” I said, stopping the lieutenant, who was reaching out to open the door. “He’s a wild one. He’ll get away, and we’ll have to chase him all over again.”

We finally got the jeep started up, but we had to cut the engine again at the morgue. Farid and I went up to the back entrance and rang the bell. While we were waiting for someone to come, I read a soggy printout that hung on the left side of the door:

Wholesale? Buy three coffins, get one free? Are you friggin’ kidding me? They might as well say, All incoming are free.

Footsteps sounded from inside, and a light went on in the peephole.

“Who’s there?”

“The police. We brought a client,” Farid said, pointing to his cap.

The lock and bolt jangled and the door opened. A whiff of something both foul and sweet-smelling escaped outside and enveloped us. An elderly man with a handgun was standing in the doorway. He looked like the night watchman. When he had convinced himself of our good intentions, he tucked the handgun back into his belt.

“Live ammo?” Farid asked.

“Tear gas,” said the watchman. The smell of beer suggested that the pensioner wasn’t just catching some z’s on the job. “Who did you say you brought?”

“A client,” I answered. “Where should we unload him?”

“No, no, boys,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re closed. You’ll have to register the person at eight a.m., please, those are the rules. Palich will be here, and you can hand the body over to him. Go on now.”

He didn’t seem in the least surprised that we weren’t transporting the corpse in the official morgue-mobile. Apparently corpses arrived in all kinds of things.

“Look, mister, he’s already registered,” Farid protested. He didn’t seem to relish the prospect of driving the builder around in the jeep until eight in the morning. “We already handed him over to your fellows at eight this morning. Here, look at the tag on his hand!”

“How come you have him then?”

“Found him on the road. I don’t know, maybe he fell out or something. Long story short, Pops, this ain’t no grocery store you’ve got here. Don’t give me that eight-to-nine business. Show us where to unload him.”

The watchman stared mistrustfully at our wet faces and asked us to show him the body. We did. When he had to admit we were telling the truth, he shrugged and nodded.

“All right, bring him in. I guess they really did lose him. Drunken morons.”

Then we repeated the trick with the curtain, as a result of which the long-suffering builder was moved to yet another resting place.

“Take him into the freezer,” the old fellow ordered us when we had entered the kingdom of the dead. “It’s this way.”

Thank God we didn’t have to go far, or else I might have gotten a hernia or a ruptured navel. The watchman flung open wide doors and turned on a switch.

“Go ahead. Put him in that empty spot.”

We were struck by a wave of cold. Here it was—the penultimate stop on the road to eternity. The grave would be the terminal station. To be honest, if I had ended up here in the morning, my nervous system would probably have given out. But now my nervous system had adapted somewhat, insulating me from any deep psychological perturbation. I had never been in a place like this. The watchman wasn’t fazed in the least. For me, however, the tables and shelves overflowing with the dead made a strong impression. Especially considering the fact that the appearance of many of them was far from aesthetically pleasing, and some of them had died in far from natural circumstances. There was one, for example, whose leg was no longer even attached to its body. It immediately reminded me of that little Hollywood gem I had seen on the box not long before, Resident Evil. People just like this guy suddenly up and came to life again. Not only that, they started forcing themselves on ordinary citizens, striving to get their fill of fresh meat.

The fluorescent lamps in the freezer cast an unnatural light, turning the dried blood on some of the bodies a bright red. Memories to last a lifetime. At a moment like this the only thing I could do to cope was to repeat Farid’s mantra to myself: They won’t bite. Really, what did I have to worry about? They were simply dead people. Dead for good. They can’t harm the living. They just lie there. And there they stay. When you see them in some thriller or an action film, no one rushes to turn off the TV. Farid there—he didn’t show a trace of emotion. But it set my teeth on edge. It could have just been the cold, though. My feet were already completely numb.

Some of the corpses were fully clothed. They had most likely been brought in not long before and still hadn’t been worked over. Farid found an empty space on the farthest table. With his free hand he nudged aside an old woman who was already lying there, then heaved the legs of the builder onto it. After that he helped me with the rest of him. He didn’t pick up the curtain.

“Done,” he said.

Turning around, he bumped into a stretcher that was leaning against some of the shelves. It clattered down onto a bucket with a mop.

What happened next made my feet and my blood burn hotter than any sauna or any amount of vodka ever could. If I had been a heart patient, the whole incident would have ended with yet another death certificate. For starters, I experienced a tremendous burst of adrenaline. A maiden parachute jump must be pure pleasure compared to what I felt. And I’m pretty sure I lost every last one of my marbles, at least temporarily. The next thing I did was cross myself multiple times, without even thinking about it, for the second time that day. Farid did too, by the way… As did the watchman, whose face was the color of an aging bruise from a billy club. So this is what you’re like, Ms. Schizophrenia. Well, hello there.

One of the corpses that had been lying peacefully on the table nearest the door suddenly stirred, and then uttered a hoarse expletive. After this it sat up on the table, steadying itself on its neighbor—the junkie we had picked up earlier in the park. I couldn’t make out the face of the resurrected one, but I had no burning desire to do so, either.

After crossing myself once more, I froze. My right hand moved automatically to my holster, though I knew from watching those zombie movies that you can’t kill them. Farid staggered into the farthest dark corner of the freezer and waited, muttering something about Allah. Now the fiend will look around and notice us, raise his stiff arms up in front of him, groan, and start moving toward us for fresh blood, I thought. And then we’ll turn into zombies too, and go back to Evseyev. Boy, will he be happy. Why am I even thinking about that? What’s the point in thinking at all?

I raised my gun, because I didn’t know what else to do at such a tragic moment in my life. What would you have done if you were in my place? Picture this: a corpse has come back to life in the city morgue. Hello, I’m back!

The dead man dangled his legs over the edge of the table and turned toward me… My finger rested on the trigger.

An avalanche of life-affirming curses coming from the watchman saved me from a fatal mistake. I won’t quote him here. I’ll just say that at that moment they worked better than any magic spell of Harry Potter. I realized that the watchman no longer feared for life and limb. Literally or figuratively. He recognized the corpse.

A second later I recognized him too. Or, rather, I recognized his canvas jacket. And when he raised his red calf-eyes to me, I knew it was him. Scarecrow. One of the orderlies. The junior partner.

“Dudes, what are you doing here?”

I put my gun away without answering. Farid seemed to come to life again too.

The watchman just kept up the barrage of curses. “How did you get in here, you son of a bitch?” He dragged the orderly off the table and shoved him up against a cooling pipe. “Are you trying to get me sent up, you miserable pig?”

“Where’s Lenka?”

“Who the hell is Lenka?” the watchman roared.

“My wife. Is she here too?”

“We’re all going to end up here someday,” Farid said prophetically, shaking the blood off his jacket, which had rubbed up against some gangster with a shotgun wound.

The watchman dragged the orderly out of the freezer into the warm corridor. We were right behind them, in case someone else decided to come back to life.

The watchman sat the zombie-wannabe down on a wooden bench in the hallway and subjected him to an emergency purification ritual, threatening him with the gas pistol. We didn’t interfere. Judging by the turns of phrase, Mister Watchman had clocked in a few hours in a KGB basement.

“Why are you going off on me?” the orderly said in his own defense. “Just give me a beer. Our shift was over, and I asked Valek to drop me off at home. Ask him yourself… Hey, guys, where have I seen you before?”

The former KGB officer didn’t give us time to answer. “I’m the one asking the questions around here! How did you end up in the freezer, you enemy of the people?”

“How should I know?” Scarecrow coughed loudly, putting his hand to his heart.

“What do you remember? Tell me now or I’ll lock you up in the freezer again!”

“Wait a second. Let me think. So, we picked up the lady from Kupchino to bring her over here… I got into the back of the van. Thought I’d lie down for a while to take a snooze. I was dead beat, hadn’t eaten anything all day. Valek said he’d wake me up when we got here, and then take me home. He had to drive the van to the garage… But where is he now?”

I turned to Watchman. “Did you see them unload the van?”

“No. I only get here at eleven.”

“Is there someone who helps them carry in the bodies? From the van to the freezer?”

“No, there’s not enough help here. They do it themselves. That’s what they’re paid for. And they don’t have to carry the corpses far when they go through the back. Before he had a partner, Valek did it all by himself. He slung the corpse over his shoulder—and into the freezer he went. He’s a strong fellow, for someone who drinks.”

Suddenly it all made sense to me. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. Tin Man tried to wake up his partner, but it was the wrong guy. He kept poking and tugging at someone wearing the same kind of jacket—the builder. In the end, he couldn’t wake him up, and he unloaded the van himself; but he unloaded it after he dropped off his partner at home. Understandably, he didn’t even wake up. He was dead to the world. But no big deal, Tin Man just slung him over his shoulder and took him up to the apartment. The door wasn’t locked; it was held shut by only a sash. He opened it and dumped Scarecrow (who was actually the builder) in the hallway, propping him up against the wall. Then he said goodbye and left. The wife was too drunk to realize the corpse wasn’t her husband. She called the police and had her private memorial service right away.

“Where do you live?” I asked Scarecrow, just to make sure. “In number eight?”

“Yep… How did you know?”

“We stopped by today. Your wife invited us in.”

There was still one thing I didn’t understand. Wouldn’t Valek have noticed that the body of his partner was pretty cold and stiff when he dropped him off? But then it depended on how many “memorial services” they’d had that day, and there seemed to have been plenty.

Farid seemed to have figured it all out too. But there was something else bothering him.

“How does Valek drive the van in that condition?”

“Oh, that’s no problem at all,” said the watchman. “Valek can be falling-down drunk when he tries to walk, but as soon as he gets behind the wheel he sobers up fast. Experience.”

Evseyev’s hoarse voice could now be heard barking out of the jalopy. Duty officer demanded we contact him.

“Let’s go, we’ve done our part,” Farid said, motioning to me.

“Dudes, can you give me a lift?” Scarecrow asked, his eyes still closed. “If I go on foot I won’t get there until morning. My wife must be worried.”

“Nah, she took a sedative,” Farid said by way of comfort. “And don’t forget your curtain in the freezer.”

When he was showing us out, Watchman nodded to Scarecrow, still standing in the corridor, and said softly, “Valek doesn’t have any luck with partners. They’re all saboteurs. Do you know what the last one did? He took the van at night, covered the yellow stripe over with black electrician’s tape, and made money picking up people at the train station. Turned it into a jitney. They fired him. People like that should be summarily executed… That would get the country back on its feet.”

I couldn’t get to sleep that night. If you spend the whole day picking mushrooms, you’ll start seeing enormous milk mushrooms and orange caps as soon as you go to bed. If you sit in one place with a fishing rod for five hours, you’ll have visions of a float bobbing up and down. That’s just how the brain works. I had hardly closed my eyes when I started seeing gloomy corpses. Of course, I jumped up from the makeshift bed (chairs pushed together) and looked around the room in terror. I couldn’t see anyone except for the peacefully sleeping Farid, so I tried once again to fall asleep.

At around six in the morning the indefatigable Evseyev came into our room. He still hadn’t won his computer game.

“Alex, you’ve got to make a run over to number eight again. To that orderly from the morgue. The paramedics called about some nonsense going on over there. His wife jumped out the window. From the third floor. She fractured almost every bone in her body, but she’s still alive. He came home drunk half an hour ago, apparently, wrapped up in a curtain. She saw him and started shouting, Get thee gone, Satan! Then out the window she went. I don’t like the looks of it. I’m afraid he might have chucked her out himself, and he’s trying to pin the blame on Satan. Swing by the place, in any case, and see what you can find out. If it’s something serious, I’ll call the operative…”

THE SIXTH OF JUNE by Sergei Nosov Moskovsky Prospect ^{Translated by Polly Gannon}

I was told to forget about this place. Not to come here, ever. But here I am.

A lot has changed, there’s plenty I don’t recognize. It could have changed still more, on an even grander—planetary!— scale, if I had kicked opened the bolt on the door and burst into the bathroom back then.

I hope I don’t have to explain for the ten thousandth time why I wanted to shoot Boris Yeltsin.

Enough is enough.

Since I got out, I haven’t been to Moskovsky Prospect even once. Tekhnologichesky Institute metro stop was where I disembarked, and then my feet took me where they wanted to go. Everything is close to here. To the Fontanka River it’s six minutes if you walk fast. The Obukhovsky Bridge. Tamara and I lived not in the corner building, but right next to it—number 18 on Moskovsky Prospect. Hey, check this out! A restaurant called The Lair. There didn’t used to be any lairs here. There used to be a grocery store, where Tamara worked behind a counter. I went into The Lair to take a look at their menu. Bear meat is their specialty. Oh well.

If this is a lair, it would be fair to call the room in the apartment above The Lair, where Tamara and I used to live, The Nest. And if things had worked out differently, there would be a museum now in our nest above the lair. The Museum of the Sixth of June. But a museum was really the last thing on my mind.

I walk into the courtyard. There, with the help of a hoist that raises a worker up to the height of the third floor, a poplar tree is being dismantled in stages. The worker amputates the thick branches with a chainsaw, piece by piece, cut by cut. I used to view that tree with great respect. It was tall. It grew faster than the others, because it didn’t get enough sunlight in the courtyard. I used to sit under this poplar in ‘96 and ‘97, smoking on the rusty swings. (Today the playground is filled up with wooden blocks.)

This is where I met Yemelianych. He crouched down one day on the edge of the sandbox and, opening up a small vial, downed an infusion of hawthorn berry. I wanted to be alone, and got ready to leave, but he asked me about my political convictions. We got to talking. We shared a lot of the same ideas. About Yeltsin, as was to be expected (everyone talked about him in those days), and about how he should be killed. I said that not only did I dream of doing it, I was ready to do it for real. He said he was ready to do it too. He said that he had been the commander of a platoon of intelligence agents in a certain African country, the name of which he didn’t have the right to say out loud. But soon he would, and then everyone would know. I didn’t believe him at first. Yet there were details. Lots of details. It was impossible not to believe him.

I told him I had a Makarov (two years ago I had bought it in the empty lot behind Yefimov Street). Many people had firearms back then—those of us who had them hardly tried to hide it. (Well, Tamara didn’t know. I hid the Makarov under the sink behind the pipes.) Yemelianych said that I’d have to go to Moscow. That was where all the important events happened. There were more opportunities there. I said my windows looked out on Moskovsky Prospect, and official government delegations often passed along that route. It was significant that the year before I had seen the presidential cortege from my window. Yeltsin was visiting St. Petersburg, since it was getting close to election time. We’ll wait. We should wait until he comes back.

But, Yemelianych said, you can’t shoot him from the window. They have armored cars.

I knew that. I said that was not what I was going to do.

You have to do it another way, said Yemelianych.

So that’s how I got to know him.

And now the poplar will be gone.

Yemelianych was wrong when he said that I got together with Tamara solely because of the view onto Moskovsky Prospect. That’s what he thought at first. That’s what the investigator thought too. Ridiculous. First of all, I knew myself that it made no sense to shoot out of the window. Or even to leave the house and run to the corner, where the government corteges slowed down to turn onto the Fontanka Embankment. It made no sense to shoot at an armored car. I’m not a complete idiot. I’m not nuts. Although, I must admit, I do let my imagination run away with me sometimes. Sometimes, I have to say, I would see myself running over to the car that had slowed down at the corner, aiming at the glass, shooting, and my bullet hits just the right weak spot, and all the bulletproof glass… and all the bulletproof glass… and all the bulletproof glass…

But that’s just first of all.

Second of all: I loved Tamara. It was just by chance that her windows faced Moskovsky Prospect.

By the way, I didn’t rat on Yemelianych. I took all the blame. I’m not supposed to think about Tamara.

I won’t.

I met her… well, what difference does it make to you?

Before that I lived in Vsevolozhsk, outside St. Petersburg. When I moved into Tamara’s place on Moskovsky Prospect, I sold my apartment in Vsevolozhsk and invested the money in a financial pyramid scheme. There were tons of pyramid schemes back then.

I loved Tamara not for her beauty—of which, to be honest, there was none—and not even because when we had sex she called loudly for help, shouting out the names of her former lovers. I don’t know myself why I loved her. She gave me love in return. She had an excellent memory. Tamara and I often played Scrabble. Tamara always beat me. Seriously, I never tried to lose on purpose. I told her lots of times that she should be working in a bookstore on Nevsky Prospect, where they sell dictionaries and the latest novels, not at the fish counter in a grocery store. People don’t read much nowadays. Back then everyone read a whole lot.

Like I said, my legs took me here all by themselves. Sooner or later, I would have come here anyway, however much they told me not to think about it.

It’s just that in those two years that I was living with Tamara, the poplar grew. Poplars grow fast, even the ones that look like they’re fully grown. And when you see something slowly changing before your very eyes in the space of a year, or a year and a half, or two, you figure that you’re changing too, along with it. So it was changing, and so was I. And everything around us changed, and definitely not for the better. Except for that tree, which just continued to grow. Long story short, I didn’t understand that I had anything in common with that tree. I only realized it just now, when I saw the worker cutting it down. And just by chance I had to stop by this address at the very moment they were cutting down the tree! And all those memories started up in me right then. The ones I’m not supposed to think about.

Her wages were miserable. Mine too. (I used to occasionally fix TVs—old Soviet models with tubes. People still had them, but by the sixth of June, 1997, people didn’t even want them fixed anymore.) Anyway, we lived together.

Once I asked Tamara (when we were playing Scrabble) if she would take part in an assassination attempt on Yeltsin.

“In Moscow?” she said.

“No, when he visits St. Petersburg.”

“Oh, when is that ever going to happen?” she said. Then she asked me how I was going to do it.

“Like this,” I said. The big black cars speed down Moskovsky Prospect. Before they turn onto Fontanka, they generally slow down (because they have to). Tamara runs out in front of the car, falls to her knees, and raises her hands up to the sky. The presidential limousine stops, Yeltsin, curious about what’s going on, gets out and asks who she is. And there I am with the handgun. Bang, bang, bang, bang…

Tamara said that, luckily, I didn’t have a gun. Of course she was wrong, because, luckily or not, the Makarov was still under the sink behind the pipes in the bathroom. And there were twenty bullets too, in a plastic bag. But Tamara didn’t know a thing about it. She was convinced that no one would stop, anyway, if she threw herself in front of the cortege. And if the presidential limousine stopped, Yeltsin wouldn’t get out. That’s what I thought too: Yeltsin won’t get out.

I just wanted to test Tamara, to know whether she was with me or not.

Then he asked me, shining a light in my face: did I love Tamara? For some reason, not only the head but the entire bunch of investigators wanted to know the answer to this question. Yeah, I loved her. Otherwise I would never have held out for two years on that noisy, stinky Moskovsky Prospect, even if I had only one passion—to kill Yeltsin.

In fact, I had two passions—my love for Tamara and my hatred for Yeltsin.

Two uncontrollable passions. Love for Tamara and hatred for Yeltsin.

And if I didn’t love her, would she really have called me “honey,” and “loverboy,” and “snookums”?

A lot of people wanted to kill Yeltsin back then. And a lot of them did. In their heads. 1997. The year before that there had been elections. Please, no historical digressions. I’ve had it up to here with those already. Is there anyone who doesn’t know how they counted the votes?

I used to chat with a lot of people in the buildings surrounding our courtyard at 18 Moskovsky Prospect, and every single person denied they voted for Yeltsin in ‘96. And that’s just in one courtyard. What if you take the entire country? I didn’t vote. Why vote when you didn’t have to?

They did an operation on him, an American doctor remade the heart vessels.

Oh, I’m supposed to forget about this.

I forgot.

I’ll shut up.

I’m okay now.

So…

So I lived with Tamara.

The papers had recently discussed the possibility of his death on the operation table.

I remember how in one paper, I forget which one, they warned me and others like me against making a life strategy based on expecting him to die.

But I don’t want to go into the motives of my decision.

As for Tamara…

Haymarket Square is a stone’s throw away—at the end of Moskovsky Prospect. They had chased away most of the black-market dealers by then. But you could always sniff out a grapevine that led you straight to a dealer, depending on what kind of dealer you were looking for. In this case—someone selling the thing that goes bang!

That’s the kind of dealer I found in the vacant lot where Yefimov Street runs into Haymarket Square.

Anyway, it wasn’t that Yemelianych supported me in everything— but we were always together. He drank too much, though, and really rotten stuff. He bought it at the kiosks by the Vitebsky train station.

One day he said that he had a whole organization behind him. And that they wanted to take me in.

In our organization, he was one step higher than me, and so he knew others—from our organization, that is. I only knew Yemelianych. He lived in the building next to mine, in number 16. His windows faced the street crossing, and if Yeltsin showed up, he could take better aim. But we didn’t plan to shoot at the car. Why shoot at it when it was armored? That’s nonsense. That’s both suicide and undermining the whole idea. But I said that already, didn’t I?

But here’s what I haven’t talked about yet: we had another idea.

June of 1997 rolled around. On the fifth of June, Yemelianych told me that Yeltsin was coming to Petersburg the next day. I already knew. Everyone who had even the slightest interest in politics already knew.

The president wanted to celebrate the 198th birthday of Pushkin in Petersburg.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. Our national poet.

I was anticipating the assassination attempt.

Yemelianych told me that the leaders of our organization were laying down a plan. Tomorrow evening, the sixth of June, the president would go to the Mariinsky Theater, formerly the Kirov Opera and Ballet. Someone would take me backstage be-forehand. Yeltsin would be sitting in the front row. After that, it would be like when they killed Stolypin.

The only difference would be that I would come out onstage.

The weapon I would use I had bought myself, with my own money, not the money of the organization that Yemelianych was more involved in than me.

But I wasn’t thinking about any career ladder.

And what about Tamara? She was already sick of the name Yeltsin. She asked me not to talk about him. Let me tell you something, though: she was afraid that my hatred for him would crowd out my love for her. And she was sort of right. She was right to be afraid. I remember my hatred for him more than my love for her. But I loved her, all right… Boy, how I loved Tamara!

I have a good memory too.

Gosha, Arthur, Grigorian, Ulidov, some Vanyusha, Kuropatkin, and seven more…

First names, last names, nicknames. I didn’t hide anything.

I didn’t name Yemelianych, and I didn’t betray the organization.

Yemelianych wasn’t Tamara’s lover.

Them? I betrayed all of them. Why did she have to yell out their names like that?

In the beginning the investigators thought she was an accomplice. They were interested in the network of relationships.

Let them try to figure it out themselves if they want.

It’s not my business. It’s their job.

In the little park opposite, I met someone from the building next door. Yemelianych pointed him out to me, said they were neighbors.

Yemelianych’s neighbor was a writer. With a beard, in a Sherlock Holmes cap. He was often there sitting on the bench.

I think he was crazy. When I asked him whether he could kill Yeltsin, he answered that he and Yeltsin lived in two different worlds.

I asked him: who are you with, the masters of culture? He didn’t understand the question.

No, I remembered. I remembered how at the end of Gorbachev’s perestroika a large group of writers went to Yeltsin in the Kremlin to show the president their support. And there wasn’t a single one among them who would even pitch a glass ashtray at the man! Forty people—that’s a lot! And no one probably even checked them for weapons. Anyone could have brought one in. So now I ask: Valeriy Georgievich, why didn’t you bring a handgun and shoot Yeltsin? No answer. And I ask: Vladimir Konstantinovich, why didn’t you bring a handgun and shoot Yeltsin? No answer. And I ask the others—there were forty of them!—no answer. No answer! No answer from any of them!

And this one, the one with the beard in the park, tells me he wasn’t invited.

And if you had been, would you have shot Yeltsin?

Who gets to be invited? What did you have to write to be invited, so you could shoot Yeltsin?

What do you write, and who needs it, if everything keeps going along just as it is, predetermined by the powers that be?

Sometimes I wanted to become a writer myself. Yeltsin must have needed supporters, and he must have invited new ones to the Kremlin, and I would be one of them—with a handgun in my pants under my belt—and do you think I wouldn’t reach for it at the sound of “Dear Fellow Russians,” and that I wouldn’t do it?

Oh, for that I would write! I would write anything just to be invited!

As for the handgun: I kept it in the bathroom, behind the pipes under the sink.

Tamara didn’t know.

Though I told her a million times that he deserved a bullet in his stomach, and she sort of agreed.

Yemelianych I didn’t betray, and I didn’t betray the organization that was behind him.

The investigation went another route.

Gosha, Arthur, Grigorian, Udilov, some Vanyusha, Kuropatkin, and seven more…

I added the writer with the beard too.

It was the morning of the sixth of June. I was still at home. In my mind I was getting ready for the evening’s exploit. But I didn’t think about fame and glory.

At nine o’clock I was supposed to get a call. Nine, nine fifteen, he didn’t call. Why didn’t Yemelianych call?

At nine thirty I called him.

He didn’t pick up for a long time. Finally he did. I heard a familiar voice, but I realized that Yemelianych was drunk as a skunk. I couldn’t believe my ears. How could this be? Yeltsin was already landing! What is your problem? How could you do this? Relax. Chill. Everything has changed. What do you mean, changed? Why? There’s not going to be a performance, says Yemelianych. The Golden Cockerel is dead. The opera, I mean. (Or the ballet?)

I screamed something about betrayal.

Cool it, Yemelianych said, get ahold of yourself. There will still be another chance. Just not today.

I was stir crazy the whole morning.

The grocery store underneath us was closed for fumigation. They had been spraying for cockroaches since opening that day, and the salesgirls were dismissed early. Tamara came home smelling of chemicals.

On Moskovsky Prospect, I forgot to say, there’s a lot of traffic. It’s always noisy. In the two years I shared the place with Tamara I learned to live with it.

I was in the room. I remember (although I’m not supposed to remember) that I busied myself watering the plants. Cacti, to be exact. Tamara was taking a shower. Then suddenly it went quiet outside our windows. Though there was still sound coming from the bathroom—the shower. But outside it was quiet. The traffic had stopped.

That could only mean one thing. They were clearing the road for Yeltsin. He had flown in already, and would soon be at our crossing. I knew he was flying in. Of course I knew. According to our original plan, I was supposed to take him out at the opera (or was it a ballet?).

But now the ballet was canceled. (Or was it the opera?)

The Golden Cockerel, Yemelianych said.

Anyway, I’m at the window. All is quiet on Moskovsky. Cops are posted on the far side of the road. No traffic at all. They’re waiting. And here comes a cop’s Mercedes (or bigger than a Mercedes?) to make sure everything’s ready for the president’s cortege to roll on through. They always check everything beforehand.

All the same I had to get the gun and head outside. A voice inside commanded me. And another voice inside said: Don’t grab the gun, just go outside and take a look, the gun won’t work, you know that.

All the same I decided to take the handgun. But Tamara was in the shower.

Tamara bolted the door when she took a shower. She had started to do that in April. She thought that if the shower made a noise it would turn me on—like I’d be out of control. It wasn’t like that. Well, not the way she imagined, anyway.

See, we had this one nearly inexplicable episode a couple of months before.

Since then she had started to lock me out.

But I was talking about something. What does the bathroom have to do with it?

Oh, yeah, so I remembered about the hiding place, and ran to the bathroom and banged on the door. I shouted, Open up!

Again? Tamara yelled (pretending to be mad). Get lost! Calm down!

Open up, Tamara! There’s not a second to lose!

Get lost! I won’t open up!

But she didn’t know I had a gun hidden behind the pipes.

What if she had known?

What did she know, anyway? What was she thinking? She didn’t know a thing about me. She didn’t know I wanted to kill Yeltsin. And that the hiding place was in the bathroom.

And if I was really so turned on by the sound of the shower, wouldn’t I have broken down the door? After that time in April I had a lot of opportunities to break into the bathroom when she was in the shower, but I never smashed the bolt. Plus, she was provoking me (I realized it later on) on purpose.

Anyway.

I would have smashed the bolt, if a voice inside me hadn’t stopped me—a second one, not the first. Calm down, it said. Go outside and act all cool and casual. The gun won’t be of any use to you. The plan has changed. Go outside and take a look. Just hang out there. Until he passes by.

I ran outside in my bedroom slippers, so as not to waste another second.

I ran out of the building but slowed down to a normal pace in the courtyard. I walked out onto the sidewalk. Yeltsin hadn’t passed by yet. There were people strolling down the sidewalk. Just as they always did. A few people stopped and looked into the distance. Far away, behind the Obvodny Canal, the Triumphal Gate was visible, a memorial to the war with Napoleon.

Usually, when government dignitaries were passing through, they closed the streets at least ten minutes beforehand, so there was still time.

From the Fontanka Embankment side, they had blocked off traffic. There were cars waiting there. I couldn’t see them from where I was, though.

It was strange to gaze across the empty street. The emptiness was alarming, somehow. There wasn’t a single parked car. They had towed them all away.

Another police car whizzed by. It turned from Moskovsky to the Fontanka—to the left, that is. There was plenty of room there.

It was no secret that Yeltsin would drive along that route. It was the only route.

I peered up at the roof of the Railroad Engineering Institute. Were there snipers anywhere?

There didn’t seem to be.

My situation was this: On my right hand over the Fontanka River was the Obukhovsky Bridge. Across the street was a park, a traffic light, and a cop’s sentry box. A historical site—a tall milestone in the shape of a marble obelisk—in the eighteenth century the city boundary followed along the Fontanka here.

I remember every second of the events that followed. Here they come—they are getting closer, driving down Moskovsky. The presidential limo wasn’t first in the cortege, but the first car had already reached me, and then slowed down—there was a left turn coming up ahead. I’m looking, of course, at the president’s car. And others are looking too, not just me; other bystanders and people just walking by. And I’m looking and thinking, Is that really him in the car? Or is it just a decoy? A decoy in a real armored car? And then I see his hand. It’s definitely his, waving slightly in mute greeting—behind glass, in the backseat—and who’s he waving to, if not me? Sure it’s me! That was when he was right in front of me.

Putting on the brakes. Slowing down. (There’s a turn up ahead.)

Then something completely improbable happens. Someone’s shadow intercepts him. I couldn’t figure out who it was at first, a woman or a man. And when I saw that it was a woman, I thought, Could it be my Tamara? Did Tamara pick up my hint?

My heart started pounding, thinking about Tamara.

But how could it be Tamara, when she was in the shower? Of course it wasn’t her!

Then something even stranger happened—the car stopped. And others behind it. The whole cortege. And then the strangest thing of all: he got out.

The door opened, and he got out!

It was the sixth of June, 1997.

He stood about ten paces from me, and that woman was standing there too—about fifteen paces away!

Pretty unbelievable, but that’s how it was. He got out of the car and went up to her!

And all his minions started to get out of their cars and go up to the woman in solidarity with him.

The mayor! He got out too!

And Chubais!

What, you don’t know Chubais? I’m not supposed to think about him. But how can I forget him? How can I forget?

And bystanders who just happened to be there, they started to go up closer to him too, and I went with them… Without thinking about it, along with them, step by step—closer and closer—to him!

It was like the way it used to be, before!

In the old days, when he—it happened a few times, actually— mingled with the people! At a factory, in the market, on the street, somewhere else…

He mingled boldly with the people.

I heard—we all heard—their conversation.

A woman of about forty. She stopped the presidential cortege. You’re not going to believe this, but she talked about conditions in the libraries.

She said: There are big problems with the libraries, I’m a teacher, I teach Russian literature and language, and I know very well how matters stand, Boris Nikolaevich. And what’s more, Boris Nikolaevich, librarians and teachers, not to mention doctors in the polyclinics, have very low wages.

And he answered her: That’s not right, we have to fix this.

And his assistant said: We’ll definitely fix the problem, Boris Nikolaevich.

And I thought: Where’s my gun?

I didn’t have my gun with me!

And suddenly she tells him who she is: My name is Galina Aleksandrovna, I live on 9-11 Maklina Street in a room that I share with my grown boy… The building is in terrible shape, I live in a communal apartment…

And he tells her: We’ll give you a new home.

And the assistant tells her: We’ll take care of everything.

And this was all happening right in front of me! I was there! And I didn’t have my gun!

Other people also started to ask him things, but they were more vague and confused. He wasn’t interested in them.

I wanted to ask him something too: Boris Nikolaevich, is it true you’re going to the ballet tonight? (Or the opera?) I still hadn’t lost hope. But just then a broad back blocked me off from the president.

But even if I had asked, they wouldn’t have told me a thing.

The investigator, by the way, was kind enough to show me a newspaper: Yeltsin, it turned out, laid a wreath at the Pushkin monument on that day.

Then the president put his heavy body back in the car. And all his minions and assistants ran to get into their cars. And the whole cortege started to move, and turned from Moskovsky onto Fontanka.

The teacher stood there and watched them drive off. Journalists from the president’s press corps surrounded her. A lieutenant-colonel asked us to clear the road.

Soon the traffic was moving again on Moskovsky.

And I snapped out of it.

I stood under the traffic light in my slippers and thought that fate would never give me another chance like that. Why hadn’t I broken down the bathroom door? But could I really have guessed that something like that would happen, and that he would get out of his armored car?

I could have! I could have foreseen it!

Coulda shoulda woulda.

I saw myself shooting the president. I saw him fall. I saw the expressions of shock on the faces of the bystanders who couldn’t believe they were freed from the tyrant.

I could even have saved myself. That wasn’t my aim, but I could have dropped the gun and run into a back alley to escape.

I could just see myself running into the courtyard at number 18 and crossing it. The ones who were smart and alert would race after me, then think, What kind of an idiot is this? There’s a dead end there…

Me, an idiot? No, you’re the idiots! How about the passage on the left? There’s a pretty wide opening between the blind wall and the corner of a five-story building. So I run past the poplar that they hadn’t cut down yet, and I head left, and now I’m already in an oblong courtyard that doesn’t have a single entrance into the building, not counting the doors to the former dry cleaners…

How’s about that, eh? There are two ways out of here— through the courtyard at 110 Fontanka, or through the courtyard at 108 Fontanka, past the concrete ruins of an ancient outdoor bathroom. Better through 108. No one is expecting me on Fontanka! Or I could race up the stairs to the roof, it’s amazing to walk on the roofs here! You can make your way all the way to the Tekhnologichesky Institute metro stop climbing from roof to roof. Or I could scramble up a blind brick wall, that’s an idea, onto the sloping roof of a structure they added on to the veteran’s hospital… Through the hospital grounds I could get to the passage leading to the Vvedensky Canal real fast. Or over the fence—to Zagorodny Prospect, from the other side of the block.

I could easily get away.

Or I could stay. I could give myself up. I could say: Russia, you’re saved!

Oh, they’d erect a monument to me! Right there in the park across from Tamara’s building. Right next to the marble mile-stone, nineteenth century, by the architect Rinaldi.

Only I don’t need a monument. And I don’t need a memorial plaque on Tamara’s apartment building.

You don’t know how much I loved Tamara!

You can’t imagine how much I hated Yeltsin!

And I missed my chance. I wandered through the city, over to Haymarket, then along Gorokhovaya Street. When I was crossing the wooden Gorstkin Bridge, I wanted to drown myself in the filthy waters of the Fontanka. Wooden posts poked out of the water every which way (they guard against the spring ice floes); I looked at them and wondered how I could go on in this life.

I should have drowned myself! It would have been much better.

I don’t remember where else I went, I don’t remember what I was thinking exactly. I don’t even remember whether I stopped into that lowlife pub on Zagorodny. The investigation proved I was sober. But I felt like I was out of my mind.

One thing I know for sure: I’ll never forgive myself.

It doesn’t get dark at night in June in this city, but I felt like it was dark, or maybe it was just my eyes that made everything that way. I remember that I came home. I remember that Tamara was watching TV. I didn’t want her to hear the shot, I wanted to shoot myself in the courtyard. I went into the bathroom, took the gun, loaded it. I hid it under the belt of my pants. I stared at myself in the mirror.

My face looked horrible. When I shoot myself it will look still worse.

I decided not to say goodbye to her. And then she came out of the kitchen, where she was watching TV, and that’s when she said it to me.

She said it to me.

She said: Where were you? You missed it all. Do you know what happened? You won’t believe it, it’s all over the news! Guess what happened today right under our window! A teacher stopped Yeltsin’s car! She lives in a single room with her grown-up son, and Yeltsin promised to give her a new home!

I froze.

You all keep giving Yeltsin hell, Tamara said, and he promised to give her a new home.

Fool! Fool! Fool! I shouted.

And I shot her five times.

I didn’t try to hide anything, and during the first interrogation I admitted that I wanted to kill Yeltsin.

They took me away somewhere. I was questioned by high-ranking officials. I told them about the gun, about the pipes in the bathroom. I named all the names, because they thought that I killed an accomplice. Gosha, Arthur, Grigorian, Ulidov, some Vanyusha, Kuropatkin, and seven more… plus the writer guy with the beard.

Only Yemelianych I didn’t give away. And the organization behind him.

At first they didn’t believe me that I acted alone, and then they stopped believing anything at all.

Weird. They could have believed me. Back then they were uncovering assassination plots right and left. The security service reported it. Even before me, I remember, they uncovered a gang from the Caucasus. They took them right from the train in Sochi before they could get to Moscow. One potential killer hid in some attic in Moscow, he had a knife with him—he confessed during the investigation. I don’t know what ever happened to him. They wrote about it in the papers. It was on the radio.

But about me there was nothing. Not a word.

Everyone heard about the teacher, Galina Aleksandrovna, who lived on Maklina Street and stopped Yeltsin’s car on Moskovsky Prospect. But about me, nothing. Not a word.

I still don’t know for which African country Yemelianych fulfilled his international duty.

Professor G.Y. Mokhnaty, MD, respected me. He treated me well. But it wasn’t easy, I kept thinking about a lot of things.

He recommended that I just forget about those years.

I live in Vsevolozhsk with my disabled father, whose second wife died. I have a father. He’s an invalid.

Sometimes we play Scrabble. My father can hardly walk, but his memory is as good as mine.

This is the first visit I’ve made to St. Petersburg in a long time. I’m not supposed to be here. They recommended that I not come here anymore.

I regret that everything happened like it did. I didn’t want to kill her. It’s all my fault.

But how can I explain to anyone how much I really loved Tamara? If you’ve loved someone even a little bit you’ll understand. She had so many good qualities. I didn’t want to. But it was her too. She shouldn’t have. Why did she? To say something like that with all her good qualities! You can’t be such a complete fool. You can’t. Fool! A complete fool! Fool, fool, I tell you!

WAKE UP, YOU’RE A DEAD MAN NOW by Vadim Levental New Holland ^{Translated by Ronald Meyer}

THE WITCHING HOUR by Alexander Kudriavtsev Dostoevsky Museum ^{Translated by Marian Schwartz}

They sussed him out immediately.

The slutty mermaid by the bar gave him a lurid smile. The dark, bony vamp “accidentally” brushed her bare shoulder against him when she passed. Two underage Barbies drilled their gaze into him. The bitches could smell the aroma of large round numbers at a distance. Whoever said money had no scent?

He nonchalantly loosened the neck of his Dolce & Gabbana and looked around.

No, this was all wrong. Your typical club lemmings who inhabit the institutions of the night and sleep it off by day in their office cubicles. What a drag.

Although… his gaze latched onto a figure dancing madly in the crashing, colorful gloom. The tall bitch was swinging her mane and slithering to the music like liquid flame. He examined her round ass, narrow waist, and high breasts with approval. When she emerged from the crowd, he walked up and asked for a light.

“Have a light!” She grinned, holding out a lock of her tousled hair. A rough voice, as if she had cigarette smoke in her throat.

He smiled. “I’m afraid of burning myself.”

Her ruffled, bright red hair really did remind him of a bonfire.

“My name is Anatoly.”

“Zlata.” She offered a curtsey.

“You’ll have a drink with me,” he said assertively, and he ordered two daiquiris from the bartender. “I love this swill,” Anatoly added to get the conversation going.

Zlata squinted her eyes, which held a hint of green, and sloshed her glass with a chuckle.

Up and down.

Puffy lips and fat straw.

Up and down.

Anatoly swallowed and nearly choked.

“Did you know that daiquiris are the preferred drink of Havana whores?” she shouted over the club’s din, but the hammers in Anatoly’s ears were drumming too loud.

“What?”

She repeated herself. Her hot mouth was now next to his ear. He tried to feel up her bare knee, but she flicked the impertinent hand away.

Anatoly stared blankly at his glass of yellow liquid. She bubbled with laughter; in the chic ultraviolet, her teeth were blue pearls.

He felt like hitting her in the face till she bled. She was laughing at him. Him! This close to becoming a deputy in the city parliament! A year away from becoming the second capital’s deputy governor! Yeah, he could always make a call for a girl.

They’d come. The best were from the massage parlors. Black, white, yellow. Thin, fat, pregnant, whatever. And for free. Hadn’t he once provided them with protection? Just let them whine… But that was low-hanging fruit. It didn’t hang any lower… It was interesting to toy with them, track them down, a trap here, a trap there, bring them to bay, attack… Now that was a hunt. The cleverer the beast, the sweeter the victory.

Caveman was sweating and grinning. She looked at his large head, meaty ears and cheeks, and red neck—Nozdrev’s spitting image. They were all alike there at the feeding trough: the Russian power breed. An oily little smile and a dash of money grease in his voice.

“This little skirt of yours… I adore minis,” he said, making eye contact.

“And I don’t,” she replied. “You know when women’s dresses started getting shorter? After World War I. After all that lead decimated the supply of men, there was competition for the ones left over. Miniskirts were invented after World War II. There’s a man’s death in every millimeter of bared female leg.”

“Gothic,” Anatoly attempted to recall the young people’s slang.

“No. But I know where it really is gothic.” She held out a shiny key.

“What’s this?”

“Have you heard, the Dostoevsky Museum opened an offsite exhibit?”

“A museum?” Anatoly felt himself tuning out.

“An offsite exhibit from the torture chamber”—she smiled broadly—”like at the Peter and Paul Fortress, only more naturalistic. I lead tours there, and the guard is my good friend. Sometimes I get the keys from him for the night. When I really want to let my feelings go”—Zlata shot a glance at him and gazed down—”and my body.”

The bitch was a little twisted. All the better. They say redheads are hurricanes in bed. We’ll just see about that today… He thought it over briefly and beamed the best smile in his collection.

“I have an idea!” he said, a little too enthusiastically.

“I’m listening.”

“I’m inviting you to dinner. Dinner in a torture chamber. Sound good?” He snuck a glance at himself in the mirror and was satisfied. “You provide the key. I’ll take care of the rest…”

She hesitated a moment before answering.

“What are you blushing about?” he cackled.

“Fact: redheads blush very easily.”

Anatoly had a hard time restraining the urge to lunge and throw her down right on the table, sweep the glasses aside with a crash, and… Settle down… What’s that the Arabs say? Anticipation whets the appetite.

She finally nodded. “Okay.”

A gold-toothed Tajik in a rusty Lada 6 picked them up and drove them down Petersburg’s deserted night roads. Anatoly couldn’t take his eyes off her, while Zlata gazed out the window at the under-lit hulks of the old buildings flashing by and smiled at something.

“Charming little spot!” he said when the metal lock clanged behind him. Swaying, he walked through the narrow slit of a door. “What stinks?”

“Ethyl alcohol. The very impressionable start feeling bad and they have to be brought out of their Turgenevan faint. A little alcohol-soaked cotton wool under their nose—and they’re good.”

The museum lobby greeted them with an enormous plaster executioner with a beard. An ax gleamed in the hands of the red-smocked man. Anatoly playfully touched the steel with his finger. Dull.

Zlata flipped the switch in the first hall. A thin yellow light bathed the predatory exhibits, which had frozen piranha-like behind the display glass. Anatoly thought some of them may even have stirred impatiently. He felt a chill, ran his palm across his forehead, and burst out laughing.

“Hello!” Anatoly amiably flicked the nose of a mannequin nicely set on a spike and spotted with stage blood. It didn’t answer, and Anatoly laughed even louder. His head was spinning pleasantly from the adventure and the daiquiris.

“Where’s our food?” She walked over to a prep table where a broad hatchet had been wedged in a corner. “I propose we raise our glasses.”

“You really are something!” Anatoly gave her a slap on her rear and immediately received a jab in the chest in return.

“Remember your manners, boy.”

“Of course, of course!”

He raised his hands in jest and pulled out a flask he’d bought at the bar.

“Are we going to have a tour?” Anatoly winked, splashing them fresh drinks.

“All night long,” Zlata responded.

“It’s beautiful,” Anatoly clumsily changed tactics.

The young woman frowned. Zlata was getting noticeably drunk. It’s time, Anatoly thought, as he always did in these instances. I’ll lay her out right on this table, next to the shiny hatchet, and I’ll watch the nervy bitch squirm naked in the broad blade, bellowing with pleasure…

He had trouble pulling off the Hugo that crackled under his arms and tried to free the Versace over his tightly belted belly.

“Easy now, wild man.” She grinned. “Take your seat in the audience. Have you ever seen a striptease in a torture chamber?”

Anatoly jokingly folded his sweaty palms into a submissive stack on his chest.

“Oh no.” She wagged her finger at him and undid the top three buttons of his checked shirt. “That’s not how to get me off.”

“Then how?” Anatoly took a deep breath.

She pulled him by his tie toward the wooden beams.

“This hand here, this one here… your head like this… Fine…”

He was on his knees with his hands poking through the rough openings in the timber walls and his head held by the neck a lit-tie higher. His wrists were firmly gripped by thick leather straps.

“Begin!” Anatoly commanded.

She bit her lip and slowly freed her taut white breasts from her shirt. Her small pink nipples stared at Anatoly, making him moan in anticipation.

“See?” she said with a quick intake of breath, moving nearer.

“Yes…”

“Look closer,” she whispered in his ear. “This is the last time you’re ever going to see these tits. Or any others.”

Her knee crunched into the man’s jaw and his drunk vanished. A completely sober Anatoly understood. The torture chamber’s walls started closing in like a frightened sphincter, and the bloody tattooed mannequin opened its eyes, raised its head, and laughed a plastic chuckle. Anatoly spat out a tooth and shouted, and she immediately slapped tape across his smeared mouth.

Zlata glanced at the platinum face on his left wrist.

“It’s midnight, the witching hour! It’s time!” she proclaimed. She tore off his shirt and deftly lowered his trousers and boxers, turning his hairy butt toward the dim museum lamp. She examined her victim critically.

“Honored ladies and gentlemen!” she announced to the mannequins frozen in eternal convulsions at the back of the hall. “Witches and warlocks! Brothers and sisters! Before you is a fellow seeker of justice in the lynching court of Anatoly Nikolaevich Kvadrat. A leader in making campaign faces for his deputy portfolio, a model family man, yesterday’s athlete, today’s bard, blah blah blah. My God, how tedious! Much more interesting is his unofficial dossier and the way it stinks…” She gave a loud laugh. “We will accompany this with color illustrations. Especially since our ward, as his last wish, expressed an interest in a brief excursion into the history of executions and torture.”

The witch walked up to the display glass, which was crowded with exhibits that from a distance resembled a surgeon’s time-darkened instruments.

“Am I right, Tolya, that you left the Young Communist Workers to join the Democrats? An old dog doesn’t give up its bone easily, huh? You wouldn’t surrender your power just like that… Did the budget cut you out? Honestly, did it? I know it did…” She was concentrating on smearing a black marker across a small steel object that was quite frightening to Anatoly at the present moment.

“And so, the time has come to become acquainted with the first item in our exhibit.” She walked slowly toward the naked man. He made a muffled sound and shook his head.

“The brand! The prototype of the prison tattoo!” she exclaimed, and energetically pressed into Anatoly’s sweat-shiny forehead something resembling a large razor with a studded plate on one end. He screamed under the tape and his legs started squirming again.

“Exactly the same principle. Studs with alcohol-based paint are driven under the convict’s skin. The most widespread brand in Russia was a word.” She took a compact mirror from her bag and brought it up to her victim’s pale face.

He read the inscription in the drops of blood emerging on his forehead: THIEF.

He bellowed and jerked but soon tired and coughed muffledly. His bugged-out eyes followed her every movement.

“Scared, Tolenka? Desperate? Don’t be. You don’t know what that is. Despair is when you’re young and healthy and you don’t want to live. Because you work ten jobs and can’t buy a friggin’ corner to lay your head down. And do you know what it is to be the lowest trash? The lowest educated trash with honest, educated parents who are also the lowest trash? You don’t know, bitch. Guys like you don’t know, but now you’re caught and you’re going to answer and pay for everyone’s sins, and more than likely this will be the sole beautiful act in your whole fat, pointless life…

“The knout!” She took a leather lash off the wall. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and quoted in a sing-song, “For his first pilfering the guilty man was sentenced to punishment by the knout and loss of his left ear… Pilfering is stealing, and this is how it was punished under canon law in the seventeenth century. Now this is going to hurt a little…”

She flicked the knout and a frisson of terror passed through Anatoly’s body. He squealed and jerked. The straps held him tight.

After the tenth lash she threw the knout in the corner and did a few exercises, trying not to breathe hard. She was flushed and under her tousled hair her eyes shone with dilated pupils.

“Ivan the Terrible came up with a curious method of punishment for those who had absconded with the state treasury,” Zlata said. “As a man of power with a Swiss bank account, Tolya, this should interest you. The czar hung the embezzler of state funds upside down, brought in his relatives, and made them watch the paterfamilias be sawed in half with an ordinary rope. It took a long time, a very long time.”

She burst out laughing again, sweeping a few fiery locks off her damp forehead.

“One other item in our exhibit has a simple, boring name, the ‘pear’”—Zlata moved on to the next display case—”but sometimes an executioner could make silent heroes quiver at the mere mention of it. Pay attention. There were pears to be introduced into the mouth and the rectum, and there were vaginal pears. As we know, what makes man different from an animal is his abstract thinking and his ability to create.”

She came up close to Anatoly, playing with a device that resembled a metal beetle whose belly was decorated with a large screw.

“Upon being introduced into a person’s natural orifice, the pear opens up with the help of the screw mechanism. Just like an iron flower opening its daisy petals. The internal organs pop like balloons. And you know who the first people who used the anal pear were? Lovers of small boys…”

She raised her voice, again addressing the silent mannequins: “And who would have thought, honored gentlemen, that this model family man, the father of two children, by the way, and this close to becoming a legislator… It’s shameful, Tolik, how painstakingly you’ve hidden from the electorate your love for little-boy ass…”

He closed his eyes. Somehow this witch knows everything about me. Everything… She’s insane, truly off her rocker, and that means she’s capable… of anything. But what exactly? What did I ever do to her? What?…

A deadly anguish turned his arms and legs to cotton. Anatoly shuddered a few times on the floor and fell quiet. The pear lay there beside him.

“Adultery is a mortal sin,” the witch sang out, “but death by pear sometimes comes too quickly. Therefore, we’ll leave the fruit for dessert.”

She busied herself with something at another display, then walked up to Anatoly and disdainfully touched his small, shriveled member with the tip of her shoe. A blade resembling a table knife gleamed dully in her hand.

“Spousal betrayal, Tolya, was punished mercilessly, regardless of the defendant’s regalia. I also heard that before you were in state service you used to traffic in young girls, right? So you see, the same fate awaited procurers. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Plain old castration. Point of fact: as autopsies of eunuchs’ corpses have shown, the castrate’s cock was small and underdeveloped. The hair on his body was sparse and absent altogether from his limbs and anus. There was almost no hair in the armpits or on the genitalia.” Suddenly, she winked. “But if they got to you younger, castration might help preserve your luxurious head of hair. The hair on eunuchs’ heads grows beautifully. But now, alas, it’s too late.”

The knife clattered next to the metal pear. Anatoly whimpered, slowly shaking his head.

“I’m tired,” she confided, resting her hand on his big head, “but you and I will be done soon. How would you like to conclude our graphic tour, after the practical part is over, with our trial of the pear and a couple of other things? The stake? The noose? The ax? Forgive me, the axes here are props, so we have at our disposal only two options. Although, wait… I’ve got an idea of how we can combine it all! We’ll start with impaling. Look what I have here! Every bit as good as a spike.”

The candidate for deputy looked with horror at the fat black dildo in her fingers. Zlata took her time pulling out a tube of lubricant and squeezed a generous stream on the plastic.

“You now have a real chance of finding out what Havana whores experience in their thankless work… Don’t squirm, please. You’re making it hard for me… There we go . .

A muffled squeal ripped from under the bloodied tape.

“Hello, Stas? The deed is done. Where we agreed… Yeah, he’s lying there half-dead. Awaiting his promised death… Yes. Gather those hacks of yours, the TV guys, and any other gawkers you can find, and hurry over to the scene of the crime. You’ve got the duplicate key and the cash as agreed?”

She turned off her cell phone and pulled out the battery and SIM card. She locked the museum door, turned her face into the cold night wind, and dove into the dark alleys.

The order had been fulfilled: one down. He was a candidate— and now he was fucked. Not a bad performance. That monster was going to be sinning on the down-low now. It had been worked out so precisely. True, it was too bad about the bribed museum guard. On the other hand, why sell yourself out for a case of vodka? That’s cheap… And now he was going to be looking for you. A wild goose chase. Hah! I’m hard to track down; I never repeat myself. Never. Remember that, my fine friends. Past and future candidates…

She came out on a small square by the favorite church of Rodion Raskolnikov’s father. She stopped, looking at the cupolas’ black kernels hovering above the earth. Their crosses scratched the night’s low clouds, but you couldn’t hear them sliding across the dark sky. She shut her eyes and listened closely, just like when she was a child and someone seemed to be walking around up there, in the sky. All you have to do is squint and be perfectly still—and you’ll hear steps …

It was quiet in the sky. She chuckled and opened her eyes. She had to get out of town and be quick about it. She could milk the cash she’d made for a good six months—until the next election. Somewhere in the Far East. Or Kostroma. Oh, fuck it.

The fact is, everyone makes a living as best he can.

Your work should bring you satisfaction.