Field of Mars (11 page)

‘All right, I will.'

‘They're coming to get . . .
us
. . .'

‘If we don't get them first,' he said.

‘Yes. That's right. So, yes, brother. Them first. I will help you,' Kostya said and put a hand on his shoulder. The weight of his arm felt like a log. ‘I'll help you right now. And you will too, won't you Dima?'

Dudenko looked up from the floor and blinked his eyes. Without his glasses he was blind. ‘What?' he asked, not having been listening. ‘What? Whatever it is, yes,' he said. And then he laughed.

Exhausted, drained, and dizzy from the heat of the baths, they dressed, paid their bill, and climbed out into the yellow dawn. Stood like dimwitted beasts on the embankment, blinking and looking around for a cab. ‘I think it's time to go home,' Hokhodiev said.

‘Yes . . .' Ryzhkov muttered, suddenly bone-tired, staggering out on to the cobbles in the direction of the Obvodni.

‘Goodnight,' he said to his friends, to the shining waters in the canal, to the impassive façades with their metalled roofs. Goodnight to the gleaming spire of the Admiralty, goodnight to the morning sun.

Only a few groggy hours later, supposedly the
start
of a new week, Izachik slipped another thin envelope across his desk. ‘Here are more of the papers you requested, sir . . .'

Inside Ryzhkov found a one-page carbon-copied list of the owners of the Apollo Bindery at 34 Peplovskaya. According to the police, the Apollo Bindery had long since gone out of business; the building itself was owned by a private property trust, and on the date of the girl's defenestration the lessee had been a Monsieur T.N. Hynninen, a Finnish speculator who lived in Helsingfors. Nothing new.

Ryzhkov turned over the single page but there was nothing else. He looked more closely at the list— investors in the numbered property consortium, twenty-four partners, all of them anonymous, sheltered behind numbered titles.

He slipped the thin sheet of nearly transparent onion-skin paper back into the envelope and filed it together with the police statement and Bondarenko's cause-of-death report. Tried not to look at the little human diagram with the wounds inked on it as he put all of it in his bottom drawer. Now, he thought, all that was left of Lvova, Ekatarina was resting undisturbed inside a green Okhrana folder, like everything else that was wrong with the world.

Another
little tail-twister
vanished? What did it matter? Some marks, some bloodstains that had spread in strange patterns, some loose ends, some details that didn't fit . . . What did he think he could do about it? Dig her up? Call in a few dozen of Petersburg's richest and most prominent men for some discussions about exactly what they had been doing and to whom?

He rubbed his hand across his forehead. He was tired, trying to do too much, too fast. He was hot, feverish perhaps. Coming down with something.

The girl was dead and someone in the Okhrana was protecting the killer, or had at least taken steps to ensure that Bondarenko would sanitize his statement. Things like that didn't just happen by coincidence, there had to be a reason for it. Rasputin?

What if he had done it? The girl had been thrown out of an upstairs window at the corner of the lane. It could have only been reached by a hallway, via a staircase. Did the building have a lift? And if Rasputin had done it, how would he have made it back downstairs to the table so quickly? Perhaps he should get inside the building . . . run up and down the stairs with a stopwatch in hand. Certainly he should pursue the case—what if Rasputin had done it and someone was attempting to blackmail him?

Was such a thing plausible? Rasputin was untouchable, wasn't he? And the girl wasn't going to come back just because he got soft and went on some idiot's crusade. Never trust someone with an axe to grind, never trust a priest. Never trust anyone with ideals . . . with illusions, he told himself over and over again. Actually chanting the words under his breath ‘. . . Realism . . . realism . . . realism . . .'

But maybe Rasputin had done it after all . . .

Murder
, he heard a woman scream.

NINE

‘Go to sleep,' Larissa had said. ‘It was just an accident, Vera . . . go to sleep now,' she'd said.

And she had. Even though it was a lie; it hadn't been an accident. No. Not an accident at all.

‘Go to sleep, Vera . . . it wasn't your fault, it's over now.'

Vera, Larissa, and another girl had slept on the stage in the back room that first night after the . . . accident. Passing out from too much konyak and exhausted from fending everyone off. When they woke up the other girl was gone.

The owner was called Izov. He had got angry when he realized they were too distraught to provide him with any fun. Well, they certainly didn't have to give anything away, but he had made his understanding clear. There was going to have to be some kind of payment. He left them with a last warning that it was a cabaret, not a flophouse, no matter how many people were sleeping on the floor. Not long after that he came back and fed them, grousing about the expense. Vera drank her kvass and decided that probably it was only Larissa's smile and her smoky laugh that got them breakfast.

The club was really two shops joined into one. At one point it had been a dressmaker's, and after that, judging from the long glass counter and the greasy floors in the back room, it had served as a butcher's shop. Izov had broken through the walls and converted the bottom floor into a bistro which he named
Komet
after the famous shooting star. The ‘restaurant' was outfitted with tables and chairs, the other had a stage at one end enabling Izov to extract a little more money from his customers by providing ‘entertainment' to go along with the ‘food'.

Izov went out for a while and the piano-player, the one they called the Professor, came over and served the customers. He talked continuously while he ladled out the soup and took their kopeks, asking her all sorts of questions about her background. Later that evening they tried to rope her into a rehearsal. Mostly it was loud argument, shouting, and strange musical clashings. She'd fallen asleep when the ‘director', Khulchaev, a tall boy with a sharp dark beard and a smirk, woke her up to make them all tea. As if she were his servant.

She hadn't even got on her feet and he started straight in, ‘Hey, these are the whores, right?' loudly enough for the whole room to hear him. He liked to do things loudly, she saw.

She turned away, but he reached out and pulled her around. ‘Hey, don't run off, I'm going to use you,' he said to her quietly.

‘Anyway,' Larissa piped, ‘We're not, we're dancers.' All the men laughed. Vera tried to scratch him in the face and he let her go quickly.

‘No . . .' Vera heard the Professor say behind them. ‘No, Dmitri, I think they have the correct temperament for dancers.' All of them laughing.

And hiding in the lavatory and breaking down into long silent sobs, that she hid even from Larissa. ‘Don't worry,' Larissa saying as she paced outside the stall. ‘Don't worry, he just wants to fuck you and can't get it up. Don't worry . . .'

When she finally came out of there, with no alternative to having to walk all the way around the stage to get out, Khulchaev started in on her again.

‘Here!' he whistled at her, ‘Here, we really do need a dancer. Hey, Dancer, come on here—' She just kept going. They could all go fuck themselves. ‘Well, I guess she's a whore after all then,' he said as she was halfway through the door.

And even when she whirled and walked back into the room and slapped him, they all laughed.

But by the end of the week she was on stage.

And by the end of the month, sitting before the mirror, listening to Larissa and Gloriana warming up in the hallway, observing herself in the reflection, she knew she was never going to sell it again. All that was gone now. She had turned a corner in her life on to an entirely new boulevard.

Her face was powdered white like a Japanese mask. She'd even smoothed her eyebrows with soap and covered them with greasepaint so that she looked like a marble bust of herself. Her terrible hair had been chopped off in angled bangs, which was just fine, she'd hated it anyway. Now, no one would recognize her. In only one week, she'd transformed completely and forever. She was a new human, an adventure unwrit. An innocent girl in a mirror.

And then the Professor poked his head around the door and said it was time to go on.

She moved through the performance playing the part of a kind of Aztec war god crossed with an Oriental nightmare. Her costume was painted with garish colours and bizarre geometric polka dots. It wasn't real dancing, of course. All she had to do was gesture and turn and watch the fabric move about her in the lights. There was a chorus of voices that chanted between the ringing bells:

‘Omicron . . . Epsilon . . . Pi . . . Sigma . . .'

With each crash Vera would tremble and react to a different invisible point in space. It was easy enough, and she had been told to ‘put her energy into it', so she did. After her ‘dance' she was summoned by one of the Goddesses of the Seven Winds. Her ornate feathered head-dress was taken from her and a mathematical symbol was branded across her forehead—an 8 laid over on its side. Finally, when the last of the Aztec gods was destroyed by a hurricane of ribbons, there was applause, and for a moment Vera was disoriented—sweating through the make-up, all out of breath—a little lost before she came back into her new self. Applause! She bowed, smiling, with the mark of infinity across her brow.

Afterwards there was food, and she found herself crowding to the table and stuffing herself with cakes and caviar. A man came and stood beside her, saying something over the din about how much he had enjoyed her performance. She nodded and kept on eating, and a few minutes later he was there again, the only well-dressed patron in the room, holding out a rhumki he had bought for her.

‘Thank you!' she shouted and then tossed the drink back quickly, and headed away from him before he could get started on selling himself.

In the corner Dmitri Khulchaev was shouting at the man from
New Art
, a young writer with bright blond curls he'd waxed down in ringlets all around his forehead in a style that he must have thought was attractive. The atmosphere in the club was intense, as if the performance had just been a fuse for the party to come afterwards.

She was alive now after the drinks. Thrilled by the performance, but relieved that it was over, she floated through the crowd, smiling at all the audience who'd stayed behind, embracing all her new friends. She had no old ones, not any more. She saw the Professor across the room, drunk and laughing himself into a coughing fit, and on impulse she went over and kissed him.

‘You!' he nearly coughed in her face. ‘You are very . . . very . . . You!' And then quickly she kissed him again and laughed, bouncing away before she gave him a heart attack.

Khulchaev caught her by the arm, pressed himself right up against her, held a bottle of champagne to her lips and made her drink until she nearly choked. And then he was kissing her—a quick hard insertion of his tongue—and gone almost as quickly. And she stood there, reeling in the smoky room.

At some point she realized that she was drunk, really drunk. Too drunk, and she developed a plan, a very detailed plan to make her way to the back door and into the alley and vomit somewhere where no one could see her. It was a good plan, and she began to put it into motion. Putting one foot in front of another and heading for the back.

Then she found herself on her hands and knees in the alley, coughing and wiping her face on her sleeve, slipping as she struggled to her feet, bracing herself against the masonry wall while she caught her breath. There was a hissing sound as Tika, the cat, ran beneath her feet and she looked wildly around and nearly fell into the wet mud.

It was cool out in the alley and the air was refreshing, penetrating her bones, and driving the poison out. She would never drink again, never, never, never she told herself, and she tried to feel her way along towards the door.

She didn't see the man at first, and then she stopped, because she thought he was urinating and she'd surprised him, but he held the door for her and she recognized him as the same man as before. The one who'd bought her the drink, the one with the sad eyes.

The torrent of noise crashed out of the doorway, the roar of artists arguing and debating minutiae that no one would ever understand. There was a screamed announcement about the next performance, some wild idea Khulchaev had cooked up—a mock trial of all the oppressors; for the enslavement of artists and smothering of new ideas, for the strangulation of imagination and the censorship of newspapers, the necrophilia of history, the vampirism of peasant culture . . . A trial against the Crime of Blindness. With each item in the indictment they were screaming, laughing, cheering.

The man with the sad eyes was still holding the door open for her, why? Waiting for her to make up her mind? Pretending to be a gentleman? She let her eyes slide over to him. His face seemed to float lazily in front of her. She tried to focus.

‘I saw you before,' he said quietly.

‘Oh? That's right . . .' Like all the rest, she thought. Did he expect her to thank him for the cheap drink that had started the whole thing off? She leaned against the frame of the doorway and tried to make her feet work.

‘No, I've seen you, before tonight, I mean . . .' His voice had a tone of urgency; soon he'd be whining about his wife not understanding him. Maybe he had been a customer back in her old life, someone who'd paid his money and fallen in love. Another fool. Trying to get away she managed to take one step into the corridor. Inside they were all singing now, one of the songs in the show . . .

 

So what! It doesn't matter,

So what! I just don't care, So what . . .