My heart was pounding. And my head was pounding. From fear. He’s not coordinated. He smokes grass from morning till night. He won’t manage. He’ll lose his footing. He won’t grab hold of me.
I pushed him hard in the back with two hands—forward.
He didn’t manage to keep his footing. He didn’t grab hold of me. Nothing was “like it is in the movies.”
He flew down, like a deer, with a shout.
Smashed to smithereens.
No fucking good smoking weed from morning till night.
* * *
I didn’t care what happened to me afterward.
They didn’t keep me for very long.
The investigator was young and handsome.
The medical expert was young and lazy.
They could have done some special tests and come to the conclusion that he wasn’t responsible, that somebody had pushed him from behind. But they could also choose not to do any tests.
And not come to any conclusion. And that was clearly more expedient.
Seems I’m a born actress.
I wept naturally and said that he was my friend and what a terrible thing it was! And they found absolutely no motive whatsoever for my doing it.
The prematurely deceased guy was a Russian citizen, he didn’t even have a European passport, just three different “places of residence.”
So why go to a lot of trouble?
Misha left behind seven children from five wives. The youngest son was already fifteen.
Of course, I’d like to be able to tell all this to Lyokha Saksofon. My comrade-in-arms in the group Anyuta and the Angels. He’s the main angel. And even more of an archangel with a heavy golden trumpet.
Lyokha Saksofon probably couldn’t have pictured me as a murderer. I was a heroine to him. Just putting together my group Anyuta and the Angels, and somehow managing to feed myself and four musicians—that meant a lot in our closed and stagnant city. Everybody was pushing and shoving here on our little square—there wasn’t much money, or much fame. And you needed to somehow elbow your way in and squeeze out the others.
Lyokha could never do that. The only thing in life he knew how to do was to blow into his pipe, into the archangel’s gilded trumpet.
And I became legendary for surviving the ’90s with two small children, and how when I was left a widow I sang in gangsters’ hangouts and clubs.
Once I was shot at by the owner of some casino who was high on cocaine, and he was hauled away by six guys …
* * *
Well then, even if Misha had performed a completely different monologue, one about his love for Piter, I still wouldn’t have spared him. I had sentenced him to death, and had led him to his personal place of execution. Onto the stage set of his personal death …
Because the Man from the Past always has some story like that … about the Past. From which it becomes clear that he is not long for this world. That he’s already lost.
* * *
Everybody mixes up who’s the father of my children. Because there were two fathers: my first daughter was with Tabachnik, and the second one was with Kit.
But since Kit practically raised the first one from birth, she was also considered Kit’s girl.
Kit always had a hell of a lot of work. At the Maly Opera he was on staff as a modeler. And there he only needed to make Tabachnik one official model a season for the current production.
But all the rest of the models were made to order—for Tabachnik, if they were going to other theaters, and for the rest of the merry band. Later there were also military models, which in the late ’80s brought in orders from collectors, when the theater business became superquiet as the result of the usual revolution.
Kit of course was a drunkard. The most natural drunkard.
The classic Russian master drunkard. His heart belonged to the tavern.
He spent most of his time in the Maly Opera studio, which according to the theater’s inventory, both movable and immovable property, was the “modeling” studio. But he divided the rest of his time among three restaurants of the All-Russian Theater Society. One was upstairs—formal—one was in the basement, and the third was simply a little café-buffet. He didn’t like the Hotel Europe. Not because our corsairs went there, but because his clients went there, particularly during those final years. Refined, elegant collectors who ordered one-of-a-kind models of famous battles. With all kinds of little soldiers and machinery. And all this was on a scale of one-to-twenty. And sometimes even smaller. And they paid a lot by the standards of those days.
For some reason this made him nervous.
He would probably have become an alcoholic, but he didn’t have the chance.
And perhaps I would have left him; on the whole I was reckless.
But I didn’t have the chance to leave him.
They often started fighting when they got drunk. And one day he got killed in a fight.
Foolishly, accidentally. They punctured his spleen.
Bang! … and the boy’s gone. And this was before all the big guns came to Petersburg.
That’s what I thought for twenty whole years.
And would have gone on thinking.
Were it not for that conversation with Misha.
* * *
When it happened, among our group only he, Bakaleishchikov, was married, to the Finn, and he was already, like, living there, and would rush back and forth.
And it was so obvious that he had set this all up.
This superorder, for a super-knock-off, for superbucks.
And he surrendered Kit. Nobody else could have done it.
And to surrender meant to …
It was very much accepted among the corsairs.
In general, to surrender your own is accepted in any criminal milieu, going back to the real John Silver.
The wind howls, the sea rages
We, the corsairs, will never surrender …
What a fucking lie, what a big fucking lie … We’ll surrender, and how!
* * *
And so I thought up this complicated punishment to be executed from that roof.
I decided that God would be the arbiter. That it was almost a bit of a duel.
I consider it to be a duel, because it’s a miracle that he turned out to be so uncoordinated. He didn’t grab onto me at the last moment and drag me with him.
Although he did grab me and drag me with him. Because now I am a murderer and betrayer just like him. The evil in the world has increased because of me …
But all the same, Kit won’t come back. And Misha of course had no idea that Kit was such an important person to me. Misha thought that he was still the main man in my life. And Kit was considered a loser, at least according to the standards of the corsairs … And for the artists he was a loser too, poorly educated, merely a craftsman …
Not one of them understood that Kit was my Phantom of the Opera. Once and forever.
* * *
And it doesn’t make any sense to tell this story to Lyokha Saksofon.
He never knew Kit or Misha Bakaleishchikov.
He’s twenty-five, and he’s being tormented by Kira. Or is it Lera … ?
We sat on the bench, looking at Pushkin.
Little birds and fliers for our group Anyuta and the Angels were flying all around.
The Man from the Past was dead.
The Woman with the Past was rolling a joint.
Don’t bogart that joint, my friend
That one’s burned to the end,
Roll another one
Just like the other one …
Author’s Note: Sanya Yezhov wrote the song “This, My Friend, Is My District and My City.”
PART III
CHASING GHOSTS
THE NUTCRACKER
BY ANTON CHIZH
Haymarket Square
Translated by Walt Tanner
The White Night, a night without darkness, fanned out into early morning. Leaden clouds, pregnant with June r
ain, hung over St. Petersburg like a thick shroud, threatening to break into a deluge. Roofs and houses, empty streets, and lone passersby all merged in a gray gloom. The wind had abated, but the chill air seemed to ooze through to the bone. Indistinct rustlings floated in the air, like the pitter-patter of claws on tin. A grubby burgundy house loomed over Griboyedov Canal in the fog. The stucco was coming off in chunks, and the jointed sections of the rain pipes met in rusty rings. The building was in dire need of repair. Despite that, someone had hung up a sign that read, Hotel Dostoevsky. Although the grim classic of Russian literature had no connection to the building, tourists seemed to like the name. But other than its name, nothing else distinguished this hotel from any one of the dozen or so such lodgings in the Haymarket Square area.
A black car marked with a taxicab checkerboard shot out onto the canal embankment, darting past randomly parked cars until it came to a screeching halt under the letter D. The cab driver demanded one hundred dollars. He was politely reminded that the fare agreed upon beforehand was half that amount. But the driver remained adamant until he got the green bill he wanted. He refused to help carry in the luggage, saying that wasn’t his job. The cab took off into the fog, raising a cloud of grit in its wake. A young woman with a backpack and large suitcase was left standing on the sidewalk with a twelve-year-old girl, who perched exhaustedly on the luggage, ready to sleep standing up.
The woman glanced around. The embankment, the closest intersections, a partial view of Haymarket Square—she examined them all carefully, as though checking them against a mental map. Rousing the sleepy child, she shouldered her backpack, grabbed the suitcase, and mounted the small flight of stairs to the hotel with a light step.
In the dark lobby she woke the receptionist, a moonlighting student who was dozing on the keyboard of the laptop in front of him. He yawned without bothering to express any stock pleasantries. Scratching his T-shirt, with a picture on it of mice drinking beer, he said there were no vacancies. The woman gave him her reservation code. The receptionist tapped his nail on the keyboard and, yawning again, asked for her ID. He copied the Russian surname from the American passport, refused to take American Express, accepted Visa, and tossing a key, as ancient as the building itself, onto the counter, promptly lost all interest in the guests. Taking the luggage in one hand, and her exhausted companion in the other, the woman went up to her floor.
The reservation website had promised a charming place in the very heart of St. Petersburg, “where every stone is saturated with history.” The other virtues it extolled included comfort, coziness, reasonable prices, and a lovely view.
The door opened into a tiny narrow room, permeated by the smell of dirty socks. The windows, which looked out onto a dull courtyard and a garbage heap, were haphazardly covered with tattered tulle curtains. Pushed up against the wall were two beds, each covered with a gray blanket. The bedsheets, laundered to a dirty yellow, lay folded in a pile on the windowsill. Hanging from just one hinge, the door of the wardrobe gave out a plaintive squeak. A note had been taped above the hot water faucet that read, Off until September. The room, however, did not strike the requisite horror in the guests. The child dragged herself over to the bed, where she collapsed without undressing. This was the very hotel the woman wanted.
She sat down on the edge of the mattress. She had hardly noticed the twelve-hour flight from Chicago, or the terrible bout of turbulence over the Baltic Sea. Now she had to be sure of herself, for there would be no turning back. She had to see it through all the way, or she would never be able to forgive herself for the rest of her life.
She took off her wristwatch and gave herself exactly 120 seconds of restful quiet to take control of the nervous tension that was building within her. She breathed deeply, just like she’d been taught, to clear all thoughts from her head.
Her name was Kate. Ekaterina Ivanovna by birth, but for as long as she could remember, she was just Kate. She’d wanted it that way. She came to the United States at the age of one with her parents, who were trying to save the family from the debris of the collapsing Soviet Union. She had grown up like an ordinary American girl. The language was the only thing she’d held on to. At home they spoke Russian to her and forced her read the classics. Kate had always considered this a whim of her folks: knowing a difficult Slavic language in the modern world was totally useless. Unexpectedly, however, that language had now come in handy. Otherwise, she might not have dared.
Time up. Kate opened the suitcase, trying not to wake Annie. She dressed in a pair of jeans and comfy sneakers, put on a thick T-shirt and a sports jacket over it. She felt the left sleeve, as though there were something inside it, put on a baseball cap, and turned into an ordinary girl in the crowd, just one among thousands. That was the best camouflage for this city, they had explained to her. She left the room and locked the door, turning the key as far as it would go, but didn’t drop it off at the desk.
A humpbacked bridge led over Griboyedov Canal to Haymarket Square. Kate walked slowly, looking around. Returning to the city of her birth did not stir any emotions in her. She was neither touched nor excited. All of her senses were poised for another vital task: Kate was getting a feel for these real streets, which she had examined before on Google Earth.
The square was empty. The occasional car cut across the paved area, paying no heed to traffic lights. Kate stopped on the corner of the square and closed her eyes so that nothing would distract her. She waited for the signal; it was the thread that had led her this far. The secret voice made her wait, but did finally answer. Weak, barely audible, but clear. That was a good sign after so many long weeks of waiting.
She opened her eyes.
Kate recalled reading Dostoevsky with distaste. It was on this square that the killer Raskolnikov fell to his knees, begging forgiveness from the people. He wouldn’t have been able to do that anymore: all the open space had been turned into a parking lot. The view was stunningly unreal. A mall in the far corner of Haymarket Square towered like an iceberg of mercurial glass. The red ruins of brick walls were visible just behind it. A Roman mansion with columns from a neoclassical epoch abutted the square at the other end. Nearer to her was a multistory monstrosity from the beginning of the last century. A building with a corner tower, recalling the boulevards of Paris, stood opposite. Round-roofed trade pavilions huddled underneath it, just as they had a century before when the market bustled and carts of hay stood all around. It seemed as though holes had been ripped in the fabric of time on the square, connecting various eras and centuries.
Both power and enmity lurked there. That was what Kate sensed, anyway. There was something about it—what exactly, she couldn’t say. It was as though some unknown force was hiding behind every corner and observing her, an uninvited visitor. She shivered, as from the morning chill.
By then it was seven a.m., and still the square was almost empty. Just an old man dressed in rags, with a pushcart stuffed with grimy bundles of paper. A shadow darted past his feet; Kate didn’t realize what it was at first. She wasn’t afraid of mice or hamsters, but it was shocking to see a live rat in the center of a European city. The little gray creature pressed itself to the stoop of a meat shop, then, sniffing the air, it casually went on its way.
Moving around the sprawling square in a circle, Kate overcame her fear of the unfamiliar space. On her way back to Griboyedov Canal she dialed the secret number. For a long time there was no answer. Then, finally, the ringing cut off. Someone coughed on the other end of the line and a husky male voice said, “What do you want?” Kate said the code word. There was a hacking cough at the other end again that went on for some time, followed by the gulping noises of a throat swallowing something with difficulty. The line fell silent. Then the same voice, but in a completely different tone, started arranging their rendezvous. No unnecessary questions. They would recognize each other.
Strolling around, Kate arrived at the venue ahead of time. In an all-night café, she sat at the far table. There were
four customers there besides her, tending their mugs. Instead of the aroma of fresh coffee and cream, the place was permeated by a mix of chemical scents used to mask the smell of decay. Rousing techno-pop was piped through the loudspeakers. The waiter, with a hairy wart on his lip, took a long time writing down her order but returned almost immediately with a large coffee and glass of water. Kate did not so much as sip the murky water: she was keeping her eyes on the door. Nevertheless, she missed his arrival. He had been at the café for a long time, observing her and making his assessments. He stood up swiftly and seated himself at her table.
Porphyry looked exactly as he’d been described to her: a week-old stubble, rheumy red eyes, and the persistent fumes of a heavy drinker. Even in the summer, he wore a fur jacket with a greasy shirt sticking out from underneath it. He was a tramp, a lowly nobody. Yet he was the one her Facebook friends had recommended. They said that this unpleasant person reminiscent of a polecat could take care of any problem in the city. He could deal with any kind of trouble. Even something as serious as Kate’s situation.
“Who told you about me?” he asked, swallowing a mouthful of her coffee.
“You helped some friends of mine.” Kate recalled a few names.
St. Petersburg Noir Page 20