“Are you saying he killed them? The girls? I was with him the night Lana died. I’m sure of it—if it was the night before the boards. There has to be another explanation.” Her voice was incredulous, defensive, but not scared, not yet. She didn’t know what came next, and he hated her for that in the same way that he hated Lana in that picture in the Tower, the assumption in Lana’s pursed lips, her angry eyes, that life would continue as it always had.
“I have the tape,” he said. “I could send it to the TV stations.”
“To the—” She made this small, choking sound. She understood now. Now she was scared.
Once, when Ilya was eleven or twelve, Babushka had called Maria Mikhailovna a saint. His mother usually resisted Babushka’s effusions, especially those of a religious nature, but in this case, she’d agreed, and agreement between them was like a warm, cloudless day in Berlozhniki—rare—and Ilya had soaked it up, thinking, She isn’t just a saint, she’s mine. My saint.
He said, “If anything happens to Vladimir, it’ll be on every news channel, in every paper in America. Tell him that.”
She was quiet for a long moment, and Ilya felt, suddenly, the distance between them: the thousands of miles of line slicing the sky and sea. Then she said, softly, “But you haven’t done that yet?”
“No,” he said. “I wanted to give you a chance—to give him a chance—to get Vladimir out.”
“Then I guess I should thank you for that,” she said, and she hung up, and he felt like he might vomit.
It was nighttime in Berlozhniki, and he could see her standing at that enormous window. She was tiny against the inky darkness pressing at that one, perfect pane. He could see her, banging a fist against the glass. It didn’t break. It wouldn’t break no matter how hard she hit it. The night Ilya had come for dinner, Dmitri had told him that the window was reinforced, bulletproof, that nothing could shatter it, not ever.
* * *
—
Ilya found Sadie up at the track. Practice was over, or at least she was the only one still there, crouched in the blocks on the far straightaway. She didn’t see him at first. Her eyes were on the spot where the track started to curve. She hit a button on her watch. Raz, dva, tri, he counted, and she started to run.
He’d only ever known Sadie to move with a nonchalance that was almost lazy—even when they were together in the back of her car—but as he watched her now, the laziness fell away and the nonchalance too, and there was a naked urgency there. Pure want, he thought, or maybe pure fear, and he wondered if Lana had had a chance to run the night she’d been killed and whether her eyes had looked like Sadie’s did, like they wanted to leave her body behind.
She slowed when she saw him and lifted a hand.
“Is it good or bad?” she said. She put her hands on her hips and hung her head for a second to catch her breath.
“Both,” Ilya said. And as they walked around the track, he told her about the confession, and that he’d called Maria Mikhailovna.
“And what will she do?” Sadie said when he’d finished.
“She’ll get him out,” he said.
Sadie shook her head. “What if you’d never listened to them?”
“I know,” Ilya said. He’d imagined the tapes still sitting in their plastic bag in the Tower; he’d imagined them stolen in transit, just as the batteries had been; he’d imagined the redheaded nurse dropping them into a trash can; or Gabe searching the bag for drugs and, finding none, leaving it in the snow by his bench; and with each way Vladimir’s plan could have gone wrong, his stomach seized.
Sadie squeezed his hand. “What’s the bad? You said it was both.”
He told her about the boards.
“You never took them at all?” she said.
He shook his head. Vladimir, in his bravado, had thought that if he could just get Ilya to America, the how would not matter. A technicality, Vladimir would say, because he did not understand the rigidity of American morals. In Russia, you paid the nurse for the chance to see your brother; in Russia, a bribe was how you got your foot in the door, the starting point of negotiations. But not here. What had Principal Gibbons said to Ilya on that first day of school? Hook or crook, with a nasty emphasis on the crook.
“Will they send me back? If they find out?” he said. He’d asked her the same question that first night, and he felt, suddenly, the weight of all the lies he’d told the Masons, and he wanted to be rid of them.
Sadie was quiet for a second, and then she said, “Do you want to stay? I mean, if Vladimir gets out, would you still want to stay?”
He could sense, under the question, her fear of being left. He could feel how hard it had been for her to ask it lightly, to keep her own want out of it.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I want to stay.”
She smiled at him. “OK,” she said, “then we find a way for you to stay.”
The next day, Ilya heard nothing from Maria Mikhailovna or Dmitri. He checked his email between classes and then, when that became unbearable, he skipped his classes altogether and sat at the computer in the library refreshing his email over and over.
“Time’s up, Ilya,” the librarian said, and Ilya swiveled in his chair to find the room empty, the lights dimmed. The last bus was pulling out of the parking lot, and the librarian was giving him a look of concern.
He nodded, hit refresh one more time, and watched his inbox blink, then reload, still empty. He walked to the Bojangles’ more out of habit than hunger. At the register, Sharice failed to greet him.
“Has that woman been back?” he said. “The one who fell.” He gestured toward the soda machine.
“You think that was bad,” Sharice said. “She slept in that booth half the day yesterday. I swear she comes here just to haunt me.”
“She seems worse?”
Sharice nodded, then gave Ilya a long look and said, “What are you creeping on her for? You are the last thing she needs.”
“I’m not creeping,” Ilya said.
“Sure,” Sharice said. “You want more chicken or not?”
That night Ilya could not sleep. Midnight came, then one a.m., then two. He was hoping that Sadie might go to see her mother, that he could walk with her, get his mind off everything, but by three a.m. it was late enough that he knew she wouldn’t go.
He pulled on his sneakers and slid open the door and hiked down the hill to Route 21. He broke into a run. At first to warm himself—it was finally cold at night here—and then because the motion felt good, made him optimistic. With each step he took, the refinery bobbed on the horizon. He could feel his lungs, the wet curves of them drying with each inhale. He wondered how long it had been since Vladimir had been outside. He wondered if there was a window in Vladimir’s cell. He tried to send patience through the air to Vladimir like it was a wish. Sweat stung his eyes. He was close now. The air was cut with chemicals, so burnt and acrid that he couldn’t breathe deeply. Vladimir and Sergey used to say that you’d get superpowers if you breathed the refinery air, like Superman did from living on Krypton. Lap it up, they’d tell him. Stop holding your nose. That had been when they were young enough and the refinery was new enough that they noticed the smell.
The lights were on in the trailer, and from the sidewalk Ilya could see Sadie’s mom sleeping on the couch. She looked peaceful enough, but still he wanted to know that she was breathing. He couldn’t get what Sharice had said about her haunting the Bojangles’ out of his head. There was a bush in front of the window, dry with neglect, and even when he pressed himself into its bristles, he couldn’t see the rise and fall of her chest.
Over her head, one corner of the poster of the woman in the white dress had come unstuck. Trash covered the coffee table—an empty tissue box, a jug of juice, a couple of cans, a wadded T-shirt. The pink pipe was nestled among them, and next to it was a syringe.
Ilya’
s sweat turned cold, and his skin tightened. She was completely still on the couch. Too still, he thought. He reached down, grasped one of the bush’s branches, and broke it off. He rapped it against the window. Once, twice, three times. Nothing.
No, he thought, imagining Vladimir’s bone, all that blood. No.
He crouched and groped on the ground until he found a rock, half embedded in the hard-packed dirt of her yard. Before he could think better of it, he took a step back and threw the rock. It hit the trailer’s plastic siding, and the noise of it was enormous. Across the street a motion light flashed on. A dog barked. And on the couch, Sadie’s mom sat up and yelled, “What the fucking fuck?”
By the time she got to the window, he was running again, back down Route 21, wondering why he hadn’t just knocked on her door.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ilya sat on the steps of the Berlozhniki police station, watching the square wake up. Kirill yanked up the metal grate to the Internet Kebab, grunting each time the grate snagged in its rusted tracks. Anatoly opened the Minutka, and a man selling pirozhki from a cart steered it through the slush, calling out the day’s choices: “Cabbage! Egg! Beef! Cabbage! Egg! Beef!” Every once in a while, he added “Jam!” to the list, but with less conviction, like it was his least favorite filling. At eight, a few secretaries in high-heeled boots picked their way from the bus stop to the station. They teetered up the stairs, toting purses and thermoses, and did not look at him.
“That’s it,” one said. “That was the whole date. And then he expected a fuck.” The others laughed, and the sound was suctioned off by the door shutting behind them. Eventually the policemen trickled in, but not Dmitri.
As the sun inched up to the tops of the birch trees, a babushka poked her head out the station door and said, “You should wait inside. You’ll freeze. Come, come.”
She held an arm out and bent it as though Ilya’s shoulders were already wrapped in it, but he shook his head. He wanted to talk to Dmitri alone, knew that Dmitri would be more apt to listen without an audience, and, besides, the idea of going into the station and announcing that he was Vladimir Alexandrovich Morozov’s brother was too terrifying, too shaming, even though he knew that his mother came to the station every day to plead Vladimir’s innocence and that she did it without shame.
The babushka sensed his degradation and did not like it. Her arm dropped and her face tightened. “Wait on the bench then.” She pointed across the street to Gabe’s bench, which was flanked by overflowing trash cans. “You’re in the way.”
So Ilya waited on the bench, and after another hour the babushka came out with a bucket of salt and began to scatter it on the station steps. The policemen left for lunch at the Kebab or Tepek, and each time they came down the steps the babushka skittered away from them. One policeman coughed, then spat, and his spit landed on the babushka’s shoe, and she made no move to wipe it off until he was out of sight. Occasionally she looked up at Ilya and glared, as though his presence in her periphery were a burden even heavier than the bucket of salt.
It was well past noon, and still Dmitri had not arrived. Ilya began to wonder if Dmitri even came to the station at all. He patrolled the refinery, Ilya knew, and he knew that the refinery paid him on the side to keep the private road clear, to make sure that the miles and miles of fence were secure, that the pipeline was safely buried under its coat of snow. And Ilya was about to stand, to stretch his legs and begin to walk north past the Malikovs’ apartment and then out of town, toward the Tower and the refinery, when he saw Dmitri round the corner of Ulitsa Lenina. He was in his valenki and pogony like all the other policemen, and they made him look anonymous and sharp. Ilya stood, and forced himself to think of the night when he’d eaten at the Malikovs’, when Dmitri had said that Maria Mikhailovna loved him like family and that that meant that he, Dmitri, loved Ilya like family. He thought of this, and not of what had happened next—of Vladimir and Sergey running in his headlights—as he ran across the street.
“Dmitri Ivanovich,” he said, when he was near enough that no one but Dmitri would hear him.
Ilya was not expecting Dmitri to be happy to see him—there was a chance that someone might recognize Ilya, might know that he was Vladimir’s brother, and Dmitri could be tainted by association—but Dmitri smiled and made room for Ilya to walk beside him. “Berlozhniki’s pride!” he said. “How long have you got left here?”
Ilya’s chest cinched. “Berlozhniki’s Pride” was what the papers had called Olga Nadiova in her heyday, when she had braids and could do a perfect double axel with her eyes closed. “A few months,” he said.
“Good, good,” Dmitri said, and then he stopped walking, and Ilya stopped too. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about your brother. Sorry that I had to be involved at all. And I don’t believe what they’re saying—that he was evil—all this shit. He was on drugs, and the drugs made him crazy. In a way, prison might save him. But I’m sorry—I know it’s hard for you.”
This was kind. Kinder, at least, than what any other policeman would say to him. Kinder than the things that had been spat at him and his mother in the kommunalkas. The mean things always made his mind turn to metal, made his spine straighten, but at this kindness tears banked up behind his eyes, and before he could cry, he said, “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Dmitri Ivanovich. I was with Vladimir the night Lana died. I went to the Tower with him, and I was there, with him, the whole time.” This wasn’t exactly true, but he figured it was a lie worth telling. “He was with me and Aksinya. Aksinya Stepanova. We were together the whole time. She will tell you—”
“Your brother confessed, Ilya. He knew things he could only know if he’d done it. If he was guilty.”
“I know, but I was with him. It doesn’t make any sense. He loved Lana. And the other two—he didn’t even know them.”
“Love can be like that. It can have two sides.” Dmitri put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re smart, right? This is what Maria is always telling me. That you have a gift. And that it is a gift to teach you, to see how a mind is supposed to work. Sometimes I’m jealous when she talks like that. Me, I’m a dolt. My mind is all rusty gears. Nothing’s a gift.”
It was true that Maria Mikhailovna said this about Ilya. She’d been saying it for four years, and it had always embarrassed him, made him feel like a fraud or an alien. “Maybe I’m not as smart as she thinks I am.”
“There are different kinds of smart,” he said. “And I’m sure that Maria’s not wrong about you. But it is not smart, it is idiotism, to tell someone—even me—that you were at the Tower with a girl the night she was killed. Do you understand that? Do you know how quickly people could believe that it was you and your brother—or even the three of you? Aksinya too. That you all worked together?”
He was right. Ilya could see that, and he understood that he’d been naive to think himself above whatever trouble Vladimir had fallen into. A new sort of panic hit him with force. Not only had he been with Lana the night she’d died, he’d kissed her. He pictured himself holding her, leaving bits of skin and hair and who knew what other traces of himself.
“He’s your brother. You love him,” Dmitri said, and his voice was soft and level. “I know that, and I’m sorry, but there’s not an alibi in the world that can help him. Not after he’s admitted to it all.” Dmitri sounded sorry, truly sorry, and his apology felt like a dead end, as final as a prison cell. Then Dmitri reached out and put his palms on Ilya’s cheeks. He leaned in and kissed Ilya on the forehead. “Soon you’ll be gone. Soon you’ll start over,” he said. Ilya looked over the epaulets on his shoulder. The babushka was staring at him. Then she turned and climbed the stairs back into the station, the empty bucket banging at her hip.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Two days after Ilya called Maria Mikhailovna, the news of Dmitri’s suicide broke in the Vecherniye Berlozhniki. He had driven his car off the Bolshoi Bridge and
straight into the Pechora, the same river into which Vladimir had claimed to have thrown the knife. It was a mild day for October, the paper said, so a number of people were out picnicking at the tables that lined the river’s banks and had witnessed the crash. One man, who’d narrowly avoided being hit by Dmitri’s car, said he’d never seen a vehicle move so fast. Another man said it had been flying. And the car must have been, at least for a moment, because it sailed almost entirely over the river before crashing in the muddy shallows and bursting into flames.
Suicides were not so uncommon in Berlozhniki, nor were violent deaths. After suggesting that the refinery pay city taxes, the former mayor had been stabbed in broad daylight in front of the statue of Iron Felix. His wife shot herself the next day. But Dmitri’s death had been spectacular.
“It was like a meteor strike,” one woman said, to describe the impact. There had been enough petrol in the tank that for a full minute it seemed as though the river itself were in flames. And perhaps because of the fire, it took a while for the reports to shift from one casualty to two.
For a sickening hour, Ilya feared that the second casualty was Maria Mikhailovna. He imagined Dmitri taking her down in the elevator, down into that cavernous garage, where her footsteps would sound so small, but another article soon took over the paper’s home page announcing that the passenger had been Fyodor Fetisov, one of Russia’s richest men, the majority owner of Gazneft.
Dmitri had been driving Fetisov from the airstrip on Berlozhniki’s south side to the refinery—the newspaper explained that Fetisov made occasional visits to Berlozhniki and that Malikov was his driver—when Malikov lost control of the car, or, as bystanders claimed, drove it intentionally off the Bolshoi Bridge.
Ilya had noticed that Russia did not feature in the American news nearly as much as America featured in the Russian news, but evidently it was a drama-free day in America, because Fetisov’s death made the American news almost instantly.
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