Babushka nodded stiffly, and gripped Ilya’s hand, and they sat like that, on the bench, for a long time. Then Babushka patted his arm, rose on her own, and together they walked across the square to the bus stop.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Papa Cam had heated the pool so that it was as hot as Babushka’s tea, and a layer of steam formed between the water and the October air that made it look like an enormous cauldron. Since he’d come to America, Ilya’s swimming had improved, and he and Molly and Marilee took turns diving, and Mama Jamie and Papa Cam ranked their scores as though they were in the Olympics. Sadie floated on the water’s surface, and every once in a while, Ilya used his dives as an excuse to swim underneath her, to twist like a seal and look at the way the water fanned her hair and blued her skin.
He had a biology quiz the next day, and so it wasn’t until he’d memorized the steps of photosynthesis that he got into bed and listened to the tape from Gabe’s house. He’d listened to it so many times that it was hard to actually pay attention, and his mind drifted to Sadie, as his mind did more and more recently. That afternoon she’d asked him if he’d want to stay for longer than a year. Her shirt was off—they were in the back of her car in the parking lot behind the defunct fireworks stand—and his hands ran down her ribs, her skin so smooth it made it hard to think, but even if he hadn’t been touching her, he would have nodded, would have said yes.
On the tape, Gabe was saying stained glass and personal effects, and Ilya was saying yes, and kissing her neck and then her chest, and he was slipping down one strap of her bra and then the other, and then Gabe said, Tapes. These tapes for learning English.
Ilya sat up. Only I didn’t think you’d need them, Gabe said, and he was right, of course. Ilya didn’t need them. Why would he need them here, in America? But Ilya had brought them anyway, had brought them though he knew them by heart, because when he’d found them in the Tower it had seemed like a message. When Gabe told Ilya that the nurse had asked him to give them to Ilya, Ilya thought that he’d understood the message: the tapes were Vladimir’s way of apologizing for stealing them in the first place, for everything, or else they were his way of saying good-bye. Vladimir had known that Ilya would want the tapes even in America—Vladimir, who had spent years of his life plucking the headphones off Ilya’s ears so that he could call him a loser or a brainiac or tell him that dinner was ready or ask him if he wanted to go find some cardboard and sled down the concrete ramps under the bridge.
Ilya rewound. Tapes, Gabe said. I didn’t want to be involved. Ilya could imagine the redheaded nurse thrusting them at Gabe, telling him to get them to Vladimir’s brother. Clearly she’d been doing Vladimir a favor—she’d taken the tapes from him instead of giving them straight to the police—but she hadn’t wanted to wait to give them to Ilya and Babushka, who came to the clinic almost daily. The only explanation that Ilya could think of was that she’d gotten scared, as though they were contraband, a pack of Marlboros or three stolen pounds of rye, something that, back in the day, would earn you ten years without the right of correspondence.
Ilya pressed stop. The other tapes were stacked on the dresser. The one on top was the one that Vladimir had left in the player, the first installment of Michael & Stephanie. Ilya’s hands were shaking so much that at first he couldn’t get the tape in, couldn’t get the player closed, and then he finally did, and he pushed play and Michael said, “Unit One: Hello, How Are You?” and Stephanie introduced herself, and Michael did the same, and Ilya forced himself to repeat back everything that they said, to pay attention to each syllable in just the way he had when he was six, sitting on the carpet reading the lips in Vladimir’s movies. Each side was an hour long. He started the third tape at midnight, and soon afterward, Sadie crept down the deck steps. Ilya hit pause and slid the door open.
“Hey,” he whispered.
She froze at the edge of the pool, then squinted down at him in the shadows below the deck.
“You almost gave me a heart attack,” she said, as she picked her way past the rusty bicycles toward him.
He told her what he was thinking, how he kept picturing the plastic bag sitting there in the Tower, how it had seemed alive, almost, the bright pink of it against all that concrete.
“I’ll listen with you,” she said.
“You’re not going to go?” he asked. He thought of her mother on the Bojangles’ parking stump a few days earlier, and wondered what shape she might be in.
Sadie shook her head. “I’ll go tomorrow.”
They lay on his bed, and he pulled the headphones out of the jack, and Michael’s and Stephanie’s voices poured into the basement. He had never listened to them like this—out loud, with another person, in America—and he could sense how shabby they were, how stilted. It felt something like the time his mother had shown up at the school for a talent show, her hairnet forgotten on her head.
Michael and Stephanie were at the train station, buying tickets, checking the time, finding their seats. Sadie was quiet, listening.
“It’s old-fashioned, isn’t it?” he said. “No one says, ‘Is this seat taken?’”
“I like it. They sound like you,” Sadie said.
“I sound like them,” Ilya said.
On the B-side of the third tape, Michael and Stephanie went to the zoo. They fed peanuts to elephants and bread to ducks. Stephanie listed her favorite animals. Giraffe, tiger, lion, snake. She was talking about their habitats, about the savannah, when Ilya fell asleep.
He woke as the sun was coming up over the rim of the alligator wall. Sadie was asleep beside him.
“Did you figure it out?” she said as she woke.
“Not yet,” he said, and she snuck out the sliding doors and back into the house undetected.
That morning he feigned illness in order to keep listening to the tapes, and Mama Jamie was so concerned for his health that she brought him mug after mug of chicken soup, bowls of crackers, and bottles of a liquid called Powerade that looked like antifreeze but that she claimed would keep his electrolytes in balance. Halfway through the tapes, he told her that he needed fresh air, and he moved out onto the patio by the pool. He stationed himself on a beach chair, with the Delta headphones over each ear. The heat had relented, and above him the oak leaves shimmied in a breeze. Clouds chained the sky, and in the brilliance of the day, the idea that a message might be embedded in the tapes, that they might hold anything beyond Michael’s and Stephanie’s clear, vacant voices, seemed ludicrous. But there was planning and effort in the fact that Vladimir had asked the nurse to get the tapes to him, and Vladimir was not a planner, was not one to make an effort.
He was on the A-side of the seventh tape. There was only one tape left plus the tape he’d recorded over, and this was a thought that he was avoiding. What if he’d erased Vladimir’s message with Gabe’s story? It was too horrible an idea to entertain.
Michael was discussing the days of the week as a way of practicing the future tense. On Monday I will drive to the market. On Tuesday I will cook dinner. On Wednesday I will clean the house. On Thursday I will—
There was a thick silence. Before he noticed it, Ilya’s mind had completed the sentence. On Thursday I will get a haircut. He could picture the workbook image that accompanied this statement: Michael smiling while a barber pointed a pair of scissors at his neck. Then there was a muffled sound, a cough, and a faint Russian voice said, “Thank you,” and “Shut the door.”
Ilya sat up and pressed the headphones to his ears, trying to bring the voice closer.
“You want one?” the voice said.
There was no answer but a staccato thwacking.
“Light?” the voice said, then, “Don’t tell your mother.” A few seconds passed, and the voice said, “I’ll begin recording.”
“Da,” another voice said. It sounded like Vladimir, though the word coming from Vladimir was usually a lazy,
drawn-out thing, and in this case it was clipped, nervous.
There was a light click, and Ilya thought that that might be it, but the first voice came back, full of bravado, so loud and clear that Ilya dropped his hands from the headphones.
“This is Officer Dmitri Malikov, interviewing the suspect, Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov, at fifteen hundred hours, at the Berlozhniki Medical Clinic. Can you confirm your identity for the record?”
“Yes,” Vladimir said, and his voice was clearer now too. “It’s Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov.”
“And can you tell me how you knew Lana Vishnyeva?”
“We were friends. Friends since primary. And her best friend is my girlfriend.”
“Your girlfriend’s name for the record?”
“Aksinya Stepanova.”
“And where were you on the night of the twenty-third of January?”
There was a pause. “Which night is that?” Vladimir said.
A note of annoyance crept into Dmitri’s voice. “The night Lana was murdered.”
“Aksinya wasn’t with me,” Vladimir said.
“OK,” Dmitri said. “Who was with you? Lana?”
“Yes. Lana,” Vladimir said.
“And,” Dmitri said. The annoyance had ceded to encouragement.
“I killed her,” Vladimir said.
There it was. He’d said it. And just as Ilya was beginning to wonder if that was the message, if this was Vladimir’s way of saying that he’d done it, no matter what Ilya believed, Dmitri asked, “How?”
“With a knife,” Vladimir said. “I stabbed her.”
“You mean you cut her throat? It was Yulia Podtochina and Olga Nadiova that you stabbed.”
“Oh,” Vladimir said. “OK. I cut her throat.”
“Where did you get the knife?”
“A store,” Vladimir said.
“You don’t remember which one?” There was a pause, and then Dmitri said, “I need you to make a verbal answer.”
“No,” Vladimir said.
“And what did you do with it after you stabbed Lana?”
There was another pause. Dmitri cleared his throat. It was a tic of his, Ilya remembered, from that dinner at the Malikovs’ apartment.
“I threw it off the Bolshoi Bridge, into the river.”
“Walk me through the whole night,” Dmitri said. “When did you meet up with Lana?”
Vladimir began to talk again, but Ilya was picturing him up on the Bolshoi Bridge. It had been the thick of winter when Lana was murdered, and the river was frozen solid. Nothing could be thrown into it.
The whole confession was like that—Vladimir making missteps and Dmitri correcting those he caught. Vladimir got the location of Olga Nadiova’s murder wrong. He described a struggle with Lana, though the newspaper had reported no signs of a struggle after her autopsy. He guessed wildly at the number of times he’d stabbed Yulia Podtochina, and Dmitri said quietly, “Try again,” and then, “Again.”
By the end of the confession, Vladimir’s voice had gone hoarse and thick.
“Why did you do it?” Dmitri said.
“I don’t know,” Vladimir said.
“Because of the drugs?” Dmitri said.
“Because I felt like it,” Vladimir said. This had been a refrain of his for much of their adolescence. “Why did you break the window?” their mother would ask. Because I felt like it. “Why would you say that to her?” Because I felt like it. “Why did you steal the cigarettes?” Because I felt like it, and his mother would say, “How nice it must be to always act the way you feel.”
“OK,” Dmitri said. “Enough.”
There was a click, and Ilya waited a second for Michael and Stephanie to resume, but that was the end of Dmitri’s recording, not Vladimir’s.
“So the deal,” Vladimir said. “This confession and Ilya gets to go, and not just for a year. I want him to stay there. A permanent exchange.”
“Yes,” Dmitri said. “That’s the deal.”
“And the murders?” Vladimir said. “What if there are more murders?”
“I’ll make sure there are not,” Dmitri said. “Maybe prison will be good for you. At least you won’t lose any other limbs.”
“Can I have a minute—for a cigarette?” The recording was threaded through with static, but still Ilya could hear a new clarity, or force, in Vladimir’s voice here, as though this question were the only thing he’d said that mattered.
Dmitri didn’t seem to notice. He scoffed and said, “Take five if you like.”
His footsteps faded, and the muffled sound returned—the microphone against bedsheets. There were footsteps again, and then a woman’s voice said, “Hurry up,” and Ilya understood why the question had mattered. The tape clicked. For a moment there was silence, pure silence, the kind you’d hear in outer space, between worlds. Then Stephanie’s voice replied to something Michael had said, and Ilya could picture Vladimir, stuffing the tape player back into the pink plastic bag and handing it to the nurse, whose courage hadn’t yet deserted her, and she’d hidden it somewhere—in a wastebasket, or a food cart, or a bundle of dirty bedding—while Dmitri took Vladimir away in handcuffs.
Ilya remembered standing in the square with Vladimir after the Tower, after he’d admitted to skipping the boards. His cheek stinging from Vladimir’s slap. Snow melting fast on him like anger was heat. Vladimir had said he’d take care of things, and Ilya hadn’t believed him, hadn’t thought him capable. But this was Vladimir taking care of things. It was idiotic, terrible. It was amazing. It was Vladimir.
Vladimir hadn’t known that Maria Mikhailovna had taken the boards for Ilya, and he hadn’t had anything to barter with except for his terrible reputation, so he’d become Dmitri’s fall guy. But did that mean that Dmitri had done it? How else could he ensure that there were no more murders? Or would he just make sure that any more murders weren’t connected to the original three? Surely if Dmitri had been killing the girls, Vladimir would have hinted at that in the tapes?
Ilya didn’t know. He could see Dmitri Malikov over dinner, with a snifter of vodka in hand, talking about the Tower, about the people who went there like they were an infestation. Ilya thought of Maria Mikhailovna. Her thick braids. Her glasses. The way that she looked at him sometimes as though he were a work of art that she was grateful to have framed. And then he thought of Vladimir. He imagined Vladimir strutting out of the prison gates like he owned the whole world. If he got out, his smugness would be intolerable. “They should make a movie of me,” he’d say. “A whole fucking series. I’m like the love child of Jason Bourne and Jackie Chan.” Ilya could feel a smile on his face. The big, hurting kind, like the one he’d had in that picture in the Tower.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Ilya called Maria Mikhailovna from the phone in the kitchen. The house was empty except for Durashka, who was staring out the sliding glass door at a bird perched on the deck railing. Somehow Maria Mikhailovna must have known that it was him, because when she picked up, she said his name instead of “Hello.”
“Zdravstvuyte,” he said.
“Why are you talking to me in Russian? I want to hear your English! All those Americanisms! They haven’t corrupted your grammar, have they?” The excitement in her voice was almost enough to make him hang up, but the tape was in his hand. He had the sense that if he let it out of his grasp it might disappear, and it was sickening to him how light and small it felt, given how much it contained: the ridiculous confession, the months Vladimir had spent in prison and all the miseries that must have entailed.
She said his name again, cautiously this time, as though she could sense his anger fortifying. Then she switched to Russian and said, “Are you all right? What is it? Are they mean to you, the family? Tell me.” Ilya thought of Mama Jamie and the way her face relaxed when she prayed, of the way she held Molly sometimes
and stroked the hair back from her forehead, of the notes she left in his lunch bag, each one signed with a string of Xs and Os.
“Nyet,” he managed.
She said, “Is it Vladimir? Is he OK?”
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“I’m alone,” she said, her voice lifting at the end like it was a question.
“I know Vladimir came to see you before the boards—I know he wanted to come here—but did he ever come after the boards?”
“Yes,” she said quickly, as though she were relieved at the ease of the question. “Once.”
“He wanted to help me, right?”
“Yes,” she said again. “Why?”
“What did you tell him? Did you tell him that you’d taken the boards?”
“No. I just said that he needed to keep his mouth shut. I wasn’t about to tell him, not after he’d taken you to the Tower—”
“And did you tell Dmitri that he’d come to see you?”
Ilya had never interrupted her before, and he could hear the sting of it in her voice when she said, “Of course I did. Dmitri was worried that someone would find out. Fetisov or the mayor or who knows who. Has someone found out?” she said. “Is that what’s wrong? Someone there?”
He was quiet for a moment. He could understand, now, how Dmitri had threatened Vladimir, what he had used. It had been Ilya, here, in America.
“Ilya,” she said, “please tell me.”
But Vladimir had not known how much Dmitri loved Maria Mikhailovna; Dmitri never would have kept Ilya from coming to America because that was what she wanted. That December night in their apartment, Ilya remembered thinking that the Malikovs’ love had been palpable, strong enough to change the quality of the light, the air. And then, after Dmitri had chased Vladimir with his car, he had asked Ilya not to tell her. He had said that she was too good for this world. He was right, and Ilya knew that if there was anyone who could hold Dmitri accountable, it was her.
He told her. About the tape that Vladimir had made and about how Gabe had found Lana and about how Dmitri had driven Gabe to the airport and told him never to come back.
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