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 fiance 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
