Moscow Noir, page 6
Awhile later, Vasily called his father- and mother-in-law and told them that there was a finger with red nail polish sticking out of the faucet. His father-in-law responded that if Vasily had put Tamara’s fingers into a pipe, as he claimed, and this turned out to be part of the plumbing for the new building, then in the month since the building had been finished the finger would have dissolved, or swelled up, and it certainly couldn’t have traveled all the way through the water filter, and in any case what does the water system in the new building have to do with their building, which was built long ago? That’s what the father-in-law said to him, to calm him down, but this just made Vasily more anxious. Naturally, when the wife’s parents came over, they found nothing. Vasily said he was afraid to go into the bathroom; that the finger had probably disappeared down the drain.
And as proof, he showed his parents-in-law a flake of red nail polish that he’d found on the floor. But this didn’t prove anything, the parents said: so he found some red nail polish, big deal, many women had probably visited their home. And so Vasily still lives by himself, like an outcast, and still finds strands of hair and other evidence of his crime, and collects it all, as he gradually builds the case against himself.
WAIT
BY ANDREI KHUSNUTDINOV
Babushkinskaya
Translated by Marian Schwartz
He still had the deluxe paid for at the Izmailovo Delta, but he’d decided not to show his face there anymore and in fact to forget all about hotels for the next week or two. They were sure to have searched the registration databases. He circled around on the subway for an hour or so and got out at Babushkinskaya. At the kiosks by the underground crossing, people offered rooms for anyone who needed a cheap place to stay by the day, no papers required. Another half an hour later, armed with an address, he skirted snowbound Rayevsky Cemetery to a twelve-story apartment house on Olonetsky Lane. It was a dank December night. The low sky was blanketed with a floury haze, and it was snowing lightly.
He was met at the lobby door by an old woman who looked like she’d stepped out of a prewar photograph. Wearing a patched pea coat, big felt boots that forced her stance so wide that he was reminded of a hockey goalkeeper, and a fluffy scarf tied at her nape, she took his money and counted it, then asked for his passport. Confidently turning the book back to the right page, she ordered him to stand in the light. Not betraying any irritation, he moved toward the lit window and removed his cap. The old woman studied his face in the picture long and hard. There was obviously something she didn’t like about it. She sniffed her fleshy nose, squinted farsightedly, and bit her lower lip. Feeling his ears and crown starting to freeze, Veltsev put his cap back on, fished in his pockets for cigarettes, and watched the old woman examining his visas, not his photograph. He was about to ask her if she was out of her mind, when the old woman forestalled him by returning his passport and motioning for him to follow her into the building.
The lobby walls bore traces of a recent fire. The new doors of the first-floor apartments presented a striking contrast to all the other surfaces, which were either coated in smoke or peeling. With something that looked like a pass key used by a train conductor, the old woman opened a door right off the lobby and looked around before letting Veltsev move ahead of her. He walked in. At one time a fire had had the run of her front hall too. You could tell from the new layer of linoleum on the floor, the new wallpaper, the new paint on the ceiling, and the obvious, albeit blurred line where everything fresh and new jutted into the apartment.
“This is the deal. Don’t shit on the floor or piss in the bath. Or smoke in bed,” the old woman half-whispered from the door in parting. “Relax. Telephone’s in the kitchen. If you need anything, I’m Baba Agafia.” Before Veltsev knew what was happening she’d closed the door. The key turned twice in the lock.
He took a step back and, remembering something he wanted to ask, fumbled blindly at the door. There was no handle on the inside—just a loose bolt. In the keyhole he could see a trihedral rod, exactly like the ones in passenger train locks. Veltsev went into the kitchen to call to the old woman through the window, but when he jerked back the curtain he went limp. The grated window, silently ablaze with holiday lights, looked out on the backyard and cemetery wall, which was ringed by garages. Judging from the floor plan, the window of the sole bedroom opened in the same direction. There was no real need to check this, yet Veltsev squeezed between the rug-covered bed and the bureau and peeked behind the brocade curtain. It wasn’t that the view thus revealed astounded him—a big photograph of a tropical waterfall had been pasted onto a piece of plywood blocking the view—but this would probably have been the last thing he’d have expected to see behind the curtain.
Looking around, he sat down on the bed and wiggled his ass. The innards responded with the muffled crack of a spring. The room was saturated with tobacco smoke. A little toy man hung on the cord of the cheapo chandelier, which had three different-colored shades.
Unbuttoning his coat and wearily propping his elbows on his legs, he stared vacantly at the floor. In principle, it probably wasn’t such a bad thing that he was locked in. He hadn’t been able to take the loneliness in the first hours and days after completing his other contracts, and after resting up, he’d probably have headed out to find himself some excitement. Especially since yesterday’s bloodbath on Tverskaya hadn’t even been a contract but—no getting around it—an act of extreme violence by him, Arkasha Veltsev, his own idea, his own justice, and his own insanity: six corpses, two of whom were—if you don’t get bogged down in details about how the scene of the crime was a nightclub closed to mere mortals—“innocent bystanders.”
“This is a mouse trap. And I’m the cheese.”
Mechanically, Veltsev reached for the gun in his underarm holster and turned to face the voice. In a partition behind the door, her legs gathered up into a shabby armchair, sat a girl of eighteen or twenty wearing a flowered Uzbek robe and a skullcap tilted over one ear. Her thickly painted mouth and eyebrows made her look older. She was trying to hide her smile, tickled she’d been able to hide her presence so simply all this time, and she rolled an unlit cigarette in her fingers. Veltsev dropped his arm and straightened his coat hem.
“Who are you?”
Lighting up, the girl released a stream of smoke upward.
“Lana,” she answered in a tone that said she was surprised someone might not know. “I’m telling you—a free offer.”
Veltsev pulled off his cap and scratched his head. “That’s why the old woman locked the door. I didn’t say that—”
“Remember the tale of Buratino?” the girl interrupted him. “The one with the cauldron? The cauldron’s over there. Freedom’s here.”
“What cauldron’s that?”
“What do you picture when you feel like a vacation?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true. You picture something.” Squinting dreamily, Lana pushed her skullcap forward and threw her head back with a jutting chin. “Palm trees. The ocean. Cocktails down the hatch. Slut city. Happy now?” She nodded at the window. “We’re not doing so well with sluts, of course. It’s potluck, as they say. But freedom—up the wazoo. What’s your name?”
“Listen,” Veltsev sighed, “I just needed a place to crash.”
“Ah-hah,” Lana answered vaguely. “Just crashing.” Tapping her ash into the saucer under her chair, she played with the cigarette as if she were finishing telling herself something.
“A place to sleep,” Veltsev corrected himself.
“Yesterday”—she smiled—“this old guy, you know what he asked me to do?”
“What?”
“Piss on his privates.”
“And?”
“And nothing. I sprayed his balls and that was it. To each his own, as they say.”
Veltsev glanced at his watch. “What else do they ask for?”
Lana scratched her sweet knee, which was poking out from under her robe, with her elbow. “Marriage!” She aimed her cigarette at him. “Haven’t you heard that prostitutes make the most faithful wives?”
Veltsev lay down. The little man hanging from the chandelier bobbed in front of his face.
“I heard something else.”
“What?”
“That wives are faithful prostitutes.”
Lana burst out laughing. “Are you married or something?”
“No.”
“A virgin?”
He ran the back of his head over the brush-stiff pile of rug. “Listen, lay off.”
Lana lowered her voice: “But I am.”
“What?”
“Well, a virgin.”
Veltsev sighed. “Naturally.”
“No, honestly!” The chair creaked under Lana. “Don’t believe me? Last month I got sewn back up. I got engaged to an Uzbek, a cotton trader, while he was waiting for the train with his shipment. He fell in love, he said, over the moon. He promised me a car. Only according to our custom, he says, you have to get the bed bloody the first night. To be blunt, he gave me a hundred bucks for plastic surgery.”
“So you mean you want to get back at it?” Veltsev picked at the rug with his finger.
“No, why?” Lana seemed genuinely surprised.
“What do you mean, why?” Veltsev didn’t understand.
Lana didn’t say anything.
“Sorry.”
“Basically, my Sharfik didn’t wait around for his train. My nice new fiancé got iced. They fished him out over there, from the Yauza, past the cemetery.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.” She took a long drag. “Everyone’s got their own craziness. Sharfik wanted to move his loot here because he got into some shit. But that’s like jumping from a train after flies. Can you imagine? You throw away everything you have—every last thing—and get out at the first stop.”
“And?” Veltsev propped himself up on one elbow.
“And, well, that’s it, all done.” Lana crushed her cigarette butt in the saucer, lowered her legs from the chair, went out into the front hall, and came back with a photograph, which she tossed down next to him on the bed.
In the crumpled glossy snapshot Veltsev saw a smiling Southern face with a unibrow. The photo had been taken with a flash, close-up, practically point-blank. The face had come out fuzzy, overlit; but above and behind him the little man hanging from the chandelier was etched down to the last detail. On the back of the photo, carefully, like a monogram, a capital III had been written with a felt-tip pen. Veltsev spun the photo in his fingers, tossed it aside, sat down on the edge of the bed, and ran his fist across his forehead.
“What’s up with you?” Lana asked.
Slowly, not quite realizing what he was doing, he got out his wallet, opened it, and looked at its velvety layered insides.
“What’s up with you?” Lana repeated, coming closer.
Veltsev put his wallet away and stared at the floor again. The photograph had reminded him of something important that he’d lost sight of and burned the pit of his stomach, but nothing more specific, so that the next instant he couldn’t even say what exactly had made itself felt—a thing, a memory, a presentiment … ?
Lana picked up the photo, blew on it, and stuck it in the glass of the sideboard.
“Want some tea?” she asked, standing in the door. “Or maybe …”
Veltsev lay down again. “You do your thing there for now.
Turn off the light. I have to … just …”
“Crash, I know,” Lana finished for him, slapped the light switch, and shut herself up in the kitchen.
Collapsing on one elbow, Veltsev lit up and stretched out again. He held the cigarette in an outstretched hand, so the ashes would fall on the floor, and with the other fiddled with his lighter. Soon, he heard an amused muffled voice from the kitchen; Lana was talking on the phone. Veltsev tried to remember the girl’s clumsily made-up face, but instead he envisioned her sweet knee poking out from her robe.
A long time ago, about three years before, he’d come across an article on the Internet which tried to prove that a man’s disposition toward murder and women had their source in the same neurosis—which one exactly, Veltsev never did figure out, though he read the article twice. He was grateful to the author not for his murky verbiage but for the fact that a connection between his inclination for murder and his attraction to women had at least been given some kind of acknowledgment. That is, what he had previously considered something unique to him and had thought of as shameful, like a wet dream, had instantly stopped being either unique or unseemly. After his first contract, he languished a full day, sleepless, and then confessed at the Rozhdestvensky monastery. This act had no consequences for his soul’s salvation, but it had plenty of material results. On the way back from the monastery Veltsev fell asleep at the wheel and rolled his car. His first wife was a medical student who happened to be starting her residency that day at the Sklif. More in the dorm than the Sklif ER, she got Veltsev back on his feet. The next morning it was as if he’d woken up in a new world, and just one week later—with a light heart and even, really, a sense of selfless beneficence—he shot the drunk from Tula who’d been pestering her. He and Oksana got on like a house on fire for two and a half years, and Veltsev called what he brought home as his supposed pay as a personnel inspector for a private security agency their “family income.” Sex (not with any woman, of course, but with the one he considered his) was better than any confession at washing away his sins. When he was with his woman, he was restored body and soul, and he saw every embrace as the birth of a wonderful new life, a hundred times better than his own and a thousand times better than the ones he took away. For this reason he thought Bonnie and Clyde farfetched. Sexual attraction could not be any great help for heroes in a fight, unless they were homosexuals. And the only justification for a film like Natural Born Killers was that toward the end the bloodthirsty characters turned into loving parents, reborn in their children. He imagined himself and Oksana as loving parents just like that—until the Lord God started bothering her with telephone calls (on the basis of her rich ER practice probably). God always called in Veltsev’s presence. He talked a lot, didn’t answer questions, and before hanging up started wheezing into the receiver. “It’s awful,” his wife admitted guiltily. “I can hear perfectly but can’t make heads or tails of it.” In the six months that passed between the first call and that memorable (for Veltsev) night when the Lord decided to speak through Oksana and she was carted off with seizures to the Kanatchikovaya psych ward, she was able to get the full gist of only two divine revelations: “Everything will be jaga-jaga” and “Boys bloody in the eyes.”
His second marriage, the marriage of Veltsev and Dasha, who did not love him, lasted longer, strangely enough, nearly four years, but fell apart overnight—flew apart in sprays of blood yesterday, at dawn, when, tipped off by an anonymous text message, Veltsev shot the traitor, her lover and his “employer,” Mityai, both of Mityai’s gorillas, Repa and Jack, and the couple sitting on the far side of the screen behind their table. Veltsev had had a bad feeling about this in the fall when he came back from a business trip to St. Petersburg. Dasha, previously willful and hot-tempered, had suddenly softened and become compliant and pleasant. The change in her behavior could have been considered a good sign had it not been simultaneously a sign of infidelity, which destroyed the only thing that tied Veltsev to his wife—the all-renewing and all-forgiving quality of their intimacy. It was amazing, but up until yesterday’s disaster he had laid the blame for the fact that he had ceased to perceive Dasha as his woman not on her but on himself, and had even contemplated, cravenly, divorce. More than twenty-four hours had passed since the slaughter at the club, and he still couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d started to breathe an empty air that was ripping him up inside, like a deepwater fish tossed on shore.
“Don’t hide. I can see you,” he sighed, crushing out his butt on the windowsill. “Come on out.”
The kitchen door, which had been opened just a crack so she could peek through, was flung open, and Lana walked right up to Veltsev. She wasn’t wearing the skullcap anymore and the clown makeup had been wiped clean, and in the thick shadow between the freely swinging sides of her untied robe he saw white, not of her clinging panties but her naked body. Slipping his hand under the robe, Veltsev felt her warm skin, which his touch covered in goose bumps. Lana leaned into him.
“Have you decided to tempt me?” Veltsev asked.
“I misled you,” she said.
“About what?”
“I … well, I’m not, I didn’t have plastic surgery.”
“So?”
Her belly tensed under his fingers. “You won’t laugh?”
Veltsev coughed thoughtfully. “Wait … You, that is, you mean you really are a virgin?”
Lana covered his hand with hers.
“Would you like to check?”
He didn’t say anything but neither did he take his hand away. Lana froze and stared at him, as if waiting for him to blink. Veltsev held her gaze, but the second the girl touched his zipper, he grabbed her wrist. Lana’s arm was so thin and frail he figured he was hurting her, though she didn’t think to stop him, let alone take offense. So, with one hand, she opened his fly, jerked his pants down over his hips, pulled down his underpants, took his prick, and stroked it, spellbound. For a minute, maybe more, they didn’t move, coalesced in a silent scene. Lana studied and fingered his quickly swelling manhood, and Veltsev, not thinking anything, kept holding her arm. Then she climbed on the bed and kneeled so that she was squeezing him between her thighs. The movements of her fingers, up until now cautious and even fearful, became brusquer by increments. Carried away, she began entertaining herself with the sensitivity of his flesh, as if it were a toy, and didn’t seem to notice when she scratched the tip with her nail. Gasping from pain, Veltsev crushed her small breast. “Now you …” she said, and let him go. Squeezing the burning spot with one hand, Veltsev caressed Lana with the other—just to distract her. “Not like that,” she sighed with annoyance. She hopped down and went to the sideboard and started digging around. Taking advantage of the break, Veltsev took his gun out of his holster, put it into his coat pocket, and slipped out of his heavy shirt. Lana came back with a jar of a fragrant ointment and mounted him again. With the cordiality of a hostess, generously, she rubbed it on his prick, as if it were a sandwich, guided it between her legs, and peered at Veltsev. He lingered a moment and didn’t press hard. Lana shrugged off her robe and tossed it aside. Seeing she was hurt and scared, Veltsev kept pressing—not leaning into her but pulling her toward him by the hips—softly, slowly, with the feeling that something awful was about to happen. But it didn’t, and Lana made no sound. It took a moment for Veltsev to realize he was completely inside her. Lana lifted and dropped back down, tilting her pelvis, either bracing herself or getting used to the pain, after which she renewed her cautious vertical movements. She came three times with convulsive shudders; each time Veltsev thought that was the end of it, but then Lana would start moving again.
