“Not on this floor. Our instruments don’t like them.”
“Where, then?”
“Outside.” She caught him eyeing the Emergency Only door. “Don’t even imagine it.”
Sick of gazing at the floor, Arkady returned to the brochures on the table. They were glossy foldouts that offered apartments, manicures, intimate restaurants, the chance to meet foreign men. One said, ‘Sarkisian Carpets. A fine Persian, Turkish, Oriental carpet is a beautiful investment! Dragon carpets, especially, only gain in value. In the auction houses of Paris and London dragon carpets are valued at $100,000 and more!” In the accompanying photo a well dressed man with white hair pointed to a red dragon skulking in the intricate design of a carpet. Arkady inked in the man’s hair with a pen and the family resemblance to Prosecutor Sarkisian was complete.
Victor and Platonov arrived from Moscow with cardboard cups of tea.
“Your doctor called me. I called Platonov.”
Platonov said, “You and Zhenya didn’t think your friends were going to desert you, did you?”
“Do you have a relationship with Elena Ilyichnina?” Arkady asked Victor.
“Sort of. We sat up together when you were in the hospital. We shared the vigil.”
“You were drunk.”
“A detail. Drink your tea.”
The tea looked weak and felt cold. Arkady took a sip and almost spat up.
“A touch of ethanol.” Victor shrugged. “There’s tea and there’s tea.”
“It’s vile.”
“You’re welcome.” He offered Arkady a pistol and an extra clip.
Arkady declined. “I don’t think Elena Ilyichnina called you so we could have a gunfight in her hospital.”
“We would be famous. We would be terrorists on the evening news.”
Zhenya and Platonov played blindfold chess, exactly what the boy needed to keep his mind occupied. A catalogue for women’s lingerie had Victor totally absorbed.
Arkady nodded off and in a dream went for cigarettes. He found a machine in the basement next to the cafeteria, which was closed, and an exhibit of schoolchildren’s art. There were a good many princesses and figure skaters, ice hockey players and Black Berets.
He got confused on the way back, missed a turn and took the wrong elevator to a different part of the hospital. Now he was hotter, sweatier and it was the middle of the day. He heard the drone of outboard engines, dipping oars, the plop of fish, the lassitude of an aluminum boat adrift. Midges hatched from the water, dragonflies feasted on the midges, swallows snatched dragonflies on the wing and horseflies fed on Platonov. He wore an Afrika Korps-style cap to protect his neck and every five minutes went into a spasm of swatting that rocked the boat.
“Bloodsuckers! This is probably why the creature stays in its murky depths.”
Platonov dropped the oars back in the water and managed a stroke. He did the rowing because placing his bulk at the bow or stern made the boat unsteady. Zhenya sat up front in a T-shirt and shorts searching through a box of fireworks. He had attained a light tan and even filled out a little. A camera hung on a strap around his neck.
“We only have one more bomb,” Zhenya said.
“How are we with sandwiches?” Platonov asked.
Arkady looked in the hamper. “We have plenty. Some of them are a little wet.”
“There’s no such thing,” Platonov said, “as a sandwich that is only a little wet.”
Zhenya scanned the water through the camera. “Did you know that some dead bodies don’t sink or float, they just hang in the water?”
“Sounds delightful.” Platonov dipped his cap in the water and set it back on his head, luxuriating in the cool runoff.
“Tell me the plan again,” Arkady said.
Zhenya said, “We set off a bomb, really a big firecracker. The monster is curious, comes over and I take its picture.”
“Good plan.”
“It will be on the cover of every scientific review,” Platonov said.
A dragonfly began to flash around the boat, make figure eights and loops so close to Platonov that he lost his balance. As the boat jerked, he and Zhenya stayed in. Arkady plunged into the water and sank. He was comfortable under the surface, drifting in the shadow of the boat when a larger shadow crossed his line of vision. A sturgeon hundreds of year old, with barnacles and armored ribs, swam by trailing a white veil from its jaws. The giant fish was a metallic gray and each eye was as large as a platter. Arkady followed the veil down to the dark bottom of the lake, where he found Eva trapped by a massive rock he could not budge. Arkady looked up at the boat and saw Zhenya throw something in the water. The bomb! A huge bubble erupted, creating a shock wave that littered the surface of the lake with fish and, below, dislodged the boulder. Arkady took Eva’s hand and they rose effortlessly until Victor shook him awake.
“She’s coming out.”
Eva emerged from the OR a deflated version of herself, drenched with sweat, anaesthetized and deaf to the rattle of the drip stand rolling at her side. Then the doors of the Recovery Unit closed behind her.
“Doctor Kazka had a difficult time,” Elena Ilyichnina said. She herself looked all in, with shadows under her eyes and the indentation of a surgical mask running like a seam across her face. “The blade moved in an arc after penetration, so we had a number of sites to attend to. One lung was scraped and the diaphragm was perforated. However, there was no damage to the heart. Usually, I would insist on admitting her here for observation, but I understand your special need to return to Moscow and have organized an ambulance. You can make a financial arrangement with the driver.”
“But she’s out of danger,” Arkady said.
“Not as long as she’s with you,” Elena Ilyichnina observed, regarding the purple side of his face. “You’re taking good care of my delicate handiwork? Being careful when you cross the street?”
“I try.”
“You know, we are supposed to report any violent crimes to the militia. I’d like to report a man who had a miracle and threw it away,” Elena Ilyichnina said and marched through the door to Recovery, leaving Arkady with the sense that his head was on a pole.
Victor said “Our ‘special need?’ Our need is to get out of this piss pot of a town. Towns like this, you could be anywhere. Russia has towns like Tver all over, like a thousand ugly daughters. It doesn’t matter how big they are, they’re the same. Same dreary buildings, same empty squares, even the same statues, because we no longer notice how ugly they are. What do you think, gentlemen?”
“I think you’ve had enough tea,” Arkady said.
“We have to get Zhenya somewhere safe.” Platonov was suddenly a mother hen.
Arkady said, “Go to the ambulance bay. Work out something with the driver.”
“You’re not coming?” Victor said.
Arkady watched the last of the nurses leave the scrub room. “Give me five minutes.”
Arkady went out the emergency door to the fifth floor deck and climbed a metal stairway to the roof.
He found himself on a shadowy island surrounded by a faint wash of floodlights and populated by ventilation ducts hooded with snow. The spiral bonnets of a vent spun like a dervish. Fans hummed. A duct with a vane shifted nervously with the wind. High ground, perfect for cell phones.
He called Moscow.
The eleventh ring was answered with “Who the devil is this?”
“Prosecutor Zurin, this is Renko.”
“Christ.”
