Stepanin had followed him out. ‘Have some fricassee,’ he said, dishing up a fresh helping of the chicken.
‘I don’t want it,’ said Sheremetev.
‘It’s fine!’ said the cook, and he angrily shoved a forkful into his own mouth to demonstrate its safety.
‘You expect me to eat while you’ve poisoned a woman and she’s dying? I’m not hungry.’ Sheremetev rubbed at the back of his head where he had hit the bench. His fingers came away smeared with blood.
‘Eat!’
‘Vitya, you can’t kill her!’ cried Sheremetev.
‘Of course I can.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want her to go away.’
‘Very good way of making her,’ slurred a guard, wagging a finger. ‘Excellent plan.’
‘Not like this!’
‘Yes like this!’ snapped the cook. ‘Exactly like this!’
‘No!’
‘Yes!’
‘Well what if . . .’ Sheremetev’s mind raced. An idea sprang to his mind. ‘What if she agrees to go? What if she signs something saying she resigns?’
‘That’s fucking ridiculous!’ retorted Stepanin. ‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because . . . otherwise she’s going to die. What if she signs it and then we send her to the hospital and we say you realised you made a mistake with her food and accidentally poisoned her? Then she’s gone, just like you want. We have the paper. She’s resigned.’
Stepanin’s eyes narrowed. Sheremetev watched him anxiously. It occurred to him that he had got the idea from Oleg’s suggestion that he get Vladimir to sign a request to have Pasha released. He didn’t think it had been a very smart suggestion when Oleg suggested it, and in this situation, the version of the idea he had come up with was even more absurd, worse than something in a movie. On the other hand, the cook’s behaviour was so erratic that he might just be persuaded by it.
Stepanin shook his head. ‘No. She’d come back.’
‘She had Artyusha shot,’ said one of the guards. ‘She’s got to die!’
The other guards nodded.
‘Did Artyusha say that?’ said Sheremetev.
There was silence for a moment. ‘He’d want us to do it,’ said the guard, but something in his tone was less than certain.
Sheremetev knew nothing about gangsters apart from what he had seen in movies, and he had totally misjudged Artur Lukashvilli, but he had a feeling that a gang boss didn’t keep a bunch of men like this under control by letting them kill whoever they felt like killing. ‘What happened the last time you killed someone Artur didn’t tell you to kill?’
The question hung in the air.
‘Remember Tolya?’ murmured someone.
The guards glanced nervously at each other. A couple of them grimaced. ‘We should take her to hospital,’ one of them said.
Stepanin looked at them in dismay.
‘Come on, lads,’ said Lyosha. ‘Let’s go and get her! We’ll say it was all the cook’s idea.’
‘No!’ cried Stepanin. ‘No one gets her!’ He turned on Sheremetev. ‘She’s not going to hospital! Understand? I’ve told you before! I’ve got three hundred thousand dollars. To open my restaurant, I need five! Five! And I’ve only got three!’
The guards glanced at each other.
‘She is not . . . going . . . to hospital!’ shouted Stepanin, shaking Sheremetev by the shoulders.
Another guard appeared in the doorway. He went quickly to Lyosha and whispered into his ear.
Lyosha nodded. ‘Well,’ he said to Stepanin, ‘looks like it’s not a question any more.’
‘Has someone taken her already?’ asked one of the guards.
‘Idiot!’ said Lyosha, giving him a slap on the head. ‘She’s dead.’
There was silence.
‘Fuck!’ muttered one of the guards.
Sheremetev looked up at Stepanin, who was still standing over him. In his moment of triumph, the cook seemed to be frozen, bewildered.
‘Looks like you’ve got what you wanted,’ said Lyosha.
Still Stepanin didn’t speak.
‘Vitya,’ said Lyosha to the cook, ‘what was that you said before?’
‘What?’
‘You said something about three hundred thousand dollars.’
The cook’s face reddened. ‘No.’
Lyosha came closer.
‘No, that was just talk . . . just . . .’ Stepanin looked around. The other guards were coming nearer as well.
‘Don’t lie to me, Vitya,’ said Lyosha. ‘If you lie to me, you’re lying to Artyusha. And do you know what Artyusha does to people who lie to him?’
The other guards surrounded him now.
‘Silence costs,’ said Lyosha. ‘For poisoning someone, it can cost a lot. Hundreds of thousands, Vitya.’
‘That wasn’t what we agreed!’ cried Stepanin. ‘We both wanted to get rid of her!’
‘But you did it, Vitya. We . . . who’s to say we even knew?’
Stepanin looked frantically around. ‘What about him?’ he shouted suddenly, pointing at Sheremetev.
‘Him?’ Lyosha laughed. ‘What does he have? Three hundred thousand kopecks? Besides, he didn’t poison anybody.’
Stepanin stared at him, ashen-faced.
‘You,’ said Lyosha to Sheremetev, ‘I don’t have to warn you what will happen if you say anything to anyone.’
Sheremetev shook his head. ‘No,’ he murmured. ‘You don’t.’
‘Go.’
Sheremetev stood. He threw a last glance at Stepanin, whom he had once thought of as a friend. The cook, surrounded by Artur’s drunken men, looked back at him, eyes full of a desperate regret, but for what – for killing Barkovskaya, or letting slip in front of Artur’s men the amount of money that he had – Sheremetev didn’t know.
He left the dining room, stinking from putrefying kitchen juices. The guard in the entrance hall silently watched him. The journey up the stairs was unreal. Barkovskaya was dead. Dead! It was inconceivable. He stopped. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe it was some kind of an act that they had put on as a joke and soon Stepanin was going to come up and boom at him with a big grin: ‘What fuckery!’
No, that wasn’t going to happen. She was dead, really dead, and they were going to throw her in with the chickens. He was scared to look out a window in case he saw them carrying her to the pit.
What more could happen? The day had started full of hope. Today, he had thought, he would get the money to get Pasha out of jail. And it had ended with nothing. No money, no hope – nothing. He had been abused, degraded, pummelled, discarded. First by thieves, then by murderers. Sheremetev was filled with a fierce, impotent rage. He felt like flinging out his arms and crying to the heavens: What else can you do to me? What? Do it now, while you have the chance, because soon there’ll be nothing left of me!
He leaned his head against the wood panelling of the upstairs corridor, feeling as if he couldn’t take another step, sobbing silent tears.
A noise came out of the monitor in his pocket. Vladimir was awake, shouting about something.
Even after all this, after everything that had happened, the nurse’s instinct in Sheremetev stirred. He took a deep breath. He waited a moment longer, then went to Vladimir’s room and cautiously opened the door.
Inside, Vladimir sniffed. What a stench! The Chechen was coming. He must be close now, very close.
Vladimir knelt on the bed, turning his head watchfully from one side of the room to the other.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ said Sheremetev, hoping that it wasn’t too late to settle him without an injection. ‘Please, lie down.’
Vladimir’s gaze focused on him.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ urged Sheremetev, coming closer, ‘lie down again now. Please. Everything’s okay.’
The smell grew stronger. Stronger than ever. This was it! The Chechen was here to finish it once and for all, a fight to the death.
‘Vladimir Vl
adimirovich . . .’
There it was! The head!
Vladimir leapt. Ouchi Gari! Then quick as a flash – Tsukkomi Jime!
Sheremetev’s skull thudded against the floor and Vladimir crashed down on top of him. ‘Stop!’ cried Sheremetev hoarsely. Vladimir’s strength was like that of a man thirty years younger. ‘You’re choking . . .’
‘Ah, you fucking Chechen! See!’ Vladimir let go of his neck and leapt up, then pranced around triumphantly in his pyjamas.
‘Vladimir Vladimiro —’
Two quick blows to Sheremetev’s face silenced him. Vladimir went off dancing around the room, singing an obscene army song about Chechen women.
Sheremetev climbed warily to his feet. Vladimir stopped, eyeing his adversary once more. He started slowly to approach him, arms tensed, knees flexed, preparing to unleash another assault.
Sheremetev threw a quick glance at the phone on the other side of the room, considering his chances of being able to get there to call the security guards – provided any of them weren’t too drunk to respond. But even if he got there, he couldn’t imagine he would have the time to make the call before Vladimir was on top of him.
Vladimir had taken another couple of steps closer. ‘You fucking Chechen. That was just the appetiser. Now, I’m going to kill you. Once and for all. This is it. Come on. Scared, you boy-fucker?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re dead.’
Sheremetev breathed heavily. Pasha had said that Vladimir had carried out a genocide of the Chechens. Now, even in his senility, he still wanted to kill them.
He watched Vladimir stepping softly towards him. Why was he looking after this man? Why had he ever looked after him? Twice tonight the back of his head had been smashed. The laceration in his cheek, he realised, was bleeding again. His windpipe was bruised and tender. He was covered in stinking kitchen juice. And why? For what?
Every man, no matter how gentle or humane, has his breaking point. After all that he had been through that day, as Vladimir padded intently towards him, Nikolai Ilyich Sheremetev reached his. The anger that had been building up in him that night – that had been building up in him since the news of Pasha’s arrest – finally erupted. Everything was the fault of this man who was creeping inexorably closer to him. His nephew was in prison and his son was a gangster and jewellers were thieves and policemen were kidnappers and security men were extortionists and drivers and housekeepers and gardeners and cooks were embezzlers and fraudsters and cheats and murderers and it was all because of this man, because this was his country, because this was what he had made of it for everybody else, as he had himself proclaimed, this place where nothing counted but money and if you had it you could have everything and if you didn’t they left your wife to die.
‘Come on, you fucking Chechen!’ Vladimir started running at him. ‘Come on! Scared? You’re —’
Sheremetev let out a yell and for the first time in forty years, put his head down and charged. Two seconds later he connected with Vladimir’s belly and sent him flying. The back of Vladimir’s head hit the floor with a crack and Sheremetev tumbled down on top of him.
Vladimir saw the Chechen’s face leering over him, the black tongue coming at him to cover him with the slime of death. He punched at it.
Sheremetev punched back, all restraint gone. ‘You destroyed everything! You killed my wife! You corrupted my son! You turned me into a thief and an accomplice to murder!’
‘You’re all thieves and murderers, you fucking Chechens!’ cried Vladimir gleefully, punching harder.
The old man’s punches were well aimed. Sheremetev tried to shield himself from the blows. Another one came, and another, tearing out the sutures and opening the cut in his cheek and smashing across his nose. He pulled back and struggled to get up, pushing down with his hand on Vladimir’s face and slamming the old man’s head back onto the floor as he rose – and again, and again – as he got to his feet.
‘You’re not getting away, you fucking Chechen!’ yelled Vladimir, rising behind him.
Sheremetev ran. Vladimir chased him. The old man threw himself at Sheremetev’s legs and dragged him back. Sheremetev kicked like a mule and stumbled free. He ran to his room and slammed the door. Feverishly, he scrabbled for his keys and unlocked the cupboard containing the tranquilliser.
There was a thumping on the door. ‘I’m coming for you, you Checken prick!’
He leaned back against it, not trusting that the lock would hold, juggling needle and syringe in trembling fingers. He could feel Vladimir’s thumping coming through the wood. He had the vial of tranquilliser and plunged the needle through the rubber stopper. What was the dose? How much? Thump! He sucked the whole lot into the syringe.
He opened the door.
Vladimir punched him in the face.
He fell back, needle in hand, Vladimir on top of him and still swinging his fists. He turned his head this way and that, trying to evade the blows as he felt for Vladimir’s buttock with one hand and readied the syringe with the other. He stabbed. ‘Ahhh!’ A searing pain shot through his other hand. He pulled the needle out of it. Vladimir hit him across the nose. He stabbed with the needle again. This time it went into the old man’s buttock, all the way to the hilt. He pressed down hard on the plunger and drove the drug in.
Vladimir was still punching. Sheremetev dropped the syringe and put his hands up to protect himself.
Vladimir landed a good blow on the rotting, grinning face. Then another. ‘You fucking Chechen!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘I’ve got you now. Die! Die!’ But suddenly he felt dizzy, and his arms were like lead, and he felt his head falling, and the Chechen’s empty sockets and black tongue were coming closer and a terrible fear took hold of Vladimir as he knew that suddenly he couldn’t lift himself away and in another instant the slime of death would be smeared across him. ‘No!’ he screamed. ‘You fucking . . .’
In the split second that remained to him before he lost consciousness, Vladimir felt the slime of death wiping itself across his cheek and he knew that now – just as that earless Chechen prisoner had prophesied to him decades earlier in the moments before a squad of Russian soldiers riddled his face with bullets – he was lost.
His head dropped.
Sheremetev lay with Vladimir on top of him, the old man’s leg twitching occasionally, one side of Vladimir’s face buried in the putrefying liquid that soaked Sheremetev’s shirt.
After a moment he pushed Vladimir off. The ex-president lay on his back, breathing slowly and deeply in loud, ragged snores. Sheremetev dragged him by the shoulders back to his suite and left him on the floor of his bedroom while he went to get a moistened towel. He wiped the brown kitchen juice off Vladimir’s face. There were some grazes from the punches Sheremetev had thrown, and he cleaned and dried them. Some of Vladimir’s knuckles were grazed, and he cleaned them as well.
He dragged Vladimir onto the bed and laid him down, placing his head on the pillow and then straightening his pyjamas. Finally he covered him up.
Sheremetev stood back, gazing down at the old man. He was unutterably ashamed of himself. He had acted in self defence – but he had gone much further than that. He had attacked him as well. Whatever Vladimir had once been, he was an old, senile man. The person who was responsible for the things he had done had already departed. Sheremetev had vented his rage on an empty shell.
‘Goodnight, Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ he murmured in despair. ‘Let’s hope things seem better in the morning.’
Sheremetev locked the door, as he had taken to doing after the night Vladimir went wandering, and went back to his room. He took a look at himself in a mirror. His cheek was gaping and ragged and elsewhere on his face were grazes and bruises left by Vladimir’s punches. His throat, where Vladimir had gouged him with his thumbs, was streaked with a pair of red weals. He felt at the back of his head and his fingers came away sticky with blood.
He took off his filthy clothes. The stench of the kitchen juice was on his skin. Exhausted and demora
lised as he was, he had a shower, to wash off the juice, the day, everything.
He lay in bed and thought about nothing, because there was too much to think about, all of it inconceivable. He slept, but fitfully, waking frequently to some recollection of the day which seemed to be more of a nightmare than any dream he had ever had, feeling lost and confused and miserable. Finally, in the early hours, he fell into a deep sleep and didn’t wake until after eight.
There was no sound from the baby monitor other than its usual low static. Normally, Vladimir would have been awake by now, yelling for attention, but after such a disturbed night, and with the extra tranquilliser Sheremetev had given him, he must have still been deeply asleep. Sheremetev lay in bed, not wanting to get up, not wanting to reenter the world of madness that awaited him in the dacha. Was it even real? Could it be? Where was Barkovskaya’s body? Had they really thrown it into the pit with the chickens? Were they all going to walk around pretending that nothing had happened and no one knew anything as it lay rotting in the pit?
He thought of what had happened with the watches. And of Vasya. He had lost his son, he knew that now. There was no hiding from it any longer. In a different way perhaps, he was also going to lose a nephew. What was he going to say to Oleg? There would be no three hundred thousand dollars. He had thirty-two and a half thousand from the thief in the pinafore dress, and that would have to be enough.
But what about the watches Belkin had left behind? Suddenly he remembered them. How many were there? Five or six, excluding the old Poljot he had added as a joke. Put them together, they might be worth something, maybe even enough to persuade the prosecutor to let Pasha out. He sat up to check that the thirty-two and a half thousand from the other watches was still under the mattress. Pain shot through his head. He got out of bed tentatively, testing the extent of his injuries.
He’d take the watches, he thought. Leave the old Poljot for Vladimir. What did he care? After the crimes that had been committed in this place, that would be nothing.
And then he would leave. Take the watches and go. The dacha and everyone in it revolted him.
Only don’t look at me with that look, Vladimir Vladimirovich, he thought. Don’t let me see the confusion and fear in your eyes.
The Senility of Vladimir P Page 28