Field of Mars (34 page)

She was making, what? Nearly four hundred roubles each month just for dancing. Not the top, but not bad. Let's see, what were her choices, what were the roads she hadn't taken? She could have got a job on the looms at the silk works and after six months and fucking the boss a few dozen times she could have worked her way up to ten roubles a month. What else? Well, let's suppose God had come down and given her the skills necessary to be a metalworker, ignoring the fact that there were no women metalworkers, but let's just pretend she could work lathes and drill holes and make things square; then she would be making maybe twelve roubles a day. That was the top and she'd done better than that already. And now she was fucking princes and ambassadors, so that was a plus wasn't it?

She had to stop. There was a knot of people gathered at the intersection of Sadovaya and the Nevsky and she saw the first white-clothed mourners passing by. It was the funeral of a child, a little white casket carried in the white open hearse, the horses draped in white blankets. In the sunlight it was dazzling, an expensive funeral for a valuable child. All the faces sombre as they trudged along towards the Nicholas Station for a last long train ride back to the graveyard at the family's estate.

She thought maybe she would go ahead and die. Maybe she'd go on in this direction, turn and take a walk through the gardens and then just one last time along the embankment. Maybe she'd walk out on the bridge and just see. It was all up to her, she was free to do whatever she wanted.

She was smiling to herself as the cortège passed by. A gendarme blew a whistle, and they all broke up and crossed the street behind the mourners, the world suddenly back to normal again. Goodbye, Child, she said, saying it under her breath, almost cheerfully.

And she was still smiling when she walked right into a man who had stepped out of a little doorway, without looking. Well, she hadn't been looking either.

There was one of those moments where they each decided to avoid each other by stepping aside, and both went the same direction and the man reached out to steady her and then she looked up and saw that it was Pyotr she'd run into.

‘Oh . . .' was all she could manage.

‘Hello,' he said, automatically reaching for his hat. His expression was cold. Would he ever able to trust her again? Well, it didn't really matter. She brushed past him, but he grabbed her by the arm, hard. For a moment she thought he was going to hit her.

‘So, you really like me now, yeah?' Reaching for a handkerchief to wipe everything away.

‘I got the transcripts of your interviews. I read everything. I know what you did. I know why you did it.' He trailed off. Shrugged. Still he wouldn't be able to erase the ghost of the dead
vertika
that had come between them. How could you erase something like that? Ghosts were insubstantial, less than memories. Funny how that made them harder to get rid of.

‘Just like a good investigator. Maybe you'll get a promotion.' He looked terrible, like he'd been sleeping in alleys. His clothes were neat enough, but he hadn't shaved and his eyes were rimmed with red.

‘How are you?' she asked. Polite. Maybe she'd be polite right up until the last moment. They could cut that into her headstone . . . ‘she was a very polite whore'.

‘I came by the Komet, but they said you were gone.' ‘I wasn't gone, I was helping to save the world, remember? I did just fine, thank you not at all, and I'm going to start back working at the Alexandra.' His eyebrows went up. Surprised that she'd recovered so quickly? ‘It's a good job and it's running for a few more weeks unless Sasha decides to hold it over. You needn't bother seeing it. It's a stupid show, lots of feathers. Stupid, frivolous. Insubstantial. Parasitic . . .' she said, tailing off. She looked at the doorway he'd come out of. There was a brass plate screwed into the yellow masonry that said
Volga Metals Assurance Company
.

‘So, you've been busy too?' she said and for some reason reached up to trace her finger along the letters of the word
Volga
.

‘Yes. I was just going to get something to eat. What about you?' It was his only joke, making fun of the way she ate.

‘No,' she said and gave him the hardest look she could dredge up. His beard had grown all grey around the chin. ‘No, I never want to eat again . . . I hate food. I hate all food. What is this place?' she said, and pushed the door open.

‘Vera, I—' There was a little note of panic in his voice. The front room of the offices was cramped, closed-in with glass shelves and packing crates piled up in the aisles between the display cases. Inside the cases were little piles of what looked like different coloured dirt. Crystals and strangely contorted rock fragments; minerals displayed with Latin labels. A little yellow pile of sulphur, four different varieties of coal, a series of beakers of petroleum. On another wall were long strands of different fibres, flax, hemp, twists of cotton rope. A young man looked up from the counter, smiled when he saw Pyotr come in behind her.

‘Ahh . . . Pyotr Mikhalovich!' he said nervously.

‘Do you distribute paintbrushes here? Or brushes of any kind?' she called out enthusiastically. The young clerk was frowning now. Smiling but frowning all at the same time, trying to remember what business they were in.

‘I think we could order some for you, mademoiselle,' he said. A second polite person in the universe! She turned to look at Ryzhkov who was standing beside one of the cabinets waiting for her to finish having her little fit.

‘Is this where you work?' she asked him. He shook his head for a second, tried to make up his mind whether or not to say something, and then only shrugged. The other man jumped in to save him.

‘We're always glad to see Monsieur Ryzhkov, but I am afraid we are just closing now, so unless it is very important—' The man looked around for something to do that would demonstrate that he was actually closing his shop in the middle of the day. When he reached over to roll down the top of his desk she caught sight of the pistol stuck in the side of his belt.

‘No, that's fine. I was just going.' Her brightest smile. ‘Goodbye, sir, I'm so sorry we couldn't be of service,' the young man called.

‘It's all right,' Pyotr said to him as they went out. She'd started walking again. To hell with him, she decided. Men and guns. All that pretending. She was sick of pretending.

He was following along behind her as she trudged towards the river. Maybe he was going off to drown himself too. Yes! It could be a pact. People would talk, all their friends would wonder, and worry, and spin fantastic dramas about the two lovers fished up somewhere out in the Gulf. His police friends would be amazed, surprised. Who was the mystery woman? A dancer you say? What was Pyotr Mikhalovich doing with someone like that? She had no idea what they'd say, maybe he didn't have any friends.

‘Where are you going?' She heard him just behind her.

‘Out . . .'

She broke through the edge of the gardens . . . it had been too quick, she hadn't even noticed the people walking, hadn't even seen the colours of the leaves. Now that was all gone and she'd never have another chance.

Ahead of her was the embankment and the wide river, running high. Plenty of water out there. Boats were going up and down carrying things back and forth, endlessly. People, wood, exotic foods, fish, coal, cloth. Every damn thing you wanted and every damn thing you didn't, and never, never what you needed. Never that. Each time, each voyage someone made some money, and each time somebody else lost. Kushner laughing at the parasites and those who loved them. She was crying. Why was she always crying? He had come up beside her and was saying things, more soft talk, and she turned away so he wouldn't see she was crying. He was apologizing, and trying to get her to talk, asking her why, and she didn't know why. She was the last person who would know why. Maybe they could ask Kushner, he knew everything.

Was he pretending? That it was a coincidence, an accident? He'd been waiting for her in that doorway, she thought. Somehow events had synchronized and the two of them had been brought together. More of Boris Fauré's spy games. She certainly hadn't planned it. Now she was laughing and he was holding out a handkerchief. That was even funnier. She had to look at it for a moment before she remembered what it was. Oh, yes.

Clean yourself up Vera, be presentable again. Someone might see you, someone might see you coming apart right here on a perfect spring day.

‘I don't mind if you follow me,' she said to him. ‘It's a dangerous world after all.'

‘It's very dangerous,' he said. She blew her nose and then handed him back the handkerchief and he took it so gingerly that she laughed. Oh, he was still the only man who ever talked any sense to her, even if he was older and infatuated. Not all that handsome . . . certainly not rich. And a liar. And married. Well, the list went on and on, didn't it.

‘You know who I am, Pyotr,' she said quietly. They were standing close together and that was fine she thought because the wind had come up and he was blocking it. He was looking at her with those sad eyes. A little smile that was trying to escape. ‘And I know who you are. I know what you do, why you exist. You're the one who is watching and watching, and using people up. And you say you want the truth, but all you get is lies, and you're always using people up . . . right?'

Very gently, very quietly and softly, like a child trying to pick up a butterfly, he kissed her.

She closed her eyes and his kiss seemed to last . . . for hours.

‘I love you,' he said, and she watched his mouth make the words. Saying it levelly, as cold as saying two kopeks.

He bought them a cab ride across the city to her apartment, newly spacious since Larissa had moved out, made tea, and took it to her in the stuffy little bedroom where she drank half a cup and then fell asleep. When she woke up she found that he had gone out and got cartons of food from a Chinaman's kiosk in the Apraxin market, brought it back, and contrived to keep it warm until she came around.

Then she realized that she was hungry and that his joke was true, and she finished the lion's share of the strange food, and then sat back, warm and feeling something that might be happiness, but was more like the wonder that one feels at having survived, to have escaped, to have turned a corner and somehow beaten the odds. And then, not long after that, she walked around the table and pulled his face into her breasts, and then lifted his chin and, hungry all over again, she was kissing him.

He tried to say that he'd better go, but she wouldn't let him, closed his mouth with more kisses. ‘No, stay and talk.' She was still kissing him, ‘Talk to me, tell me your life story . . .' And before long they were first in the doorway and then in the bed.

And he did, somewhere in the night, tell her his story. A story she thought should be painted in the colours of a Moscow winter. In tones of grey, with cinders and soft dark shadows. Not that it was sad, just that it was empty. A saga of the Ryzhkovs—a military family, a mother dying too early. A father who was a natural engineer who understood nothing of the mechanics of the human heart or the architecture of his children, an uncle who was a monster when he drank, an aunt who watched but didn't see.

He told it all staring at the ceiling, in a voice as bleak as his childhood must have been. An orderly story, a story with no chaos or broken rules. Just an endless logical equation that resulted in a policeman who'd looked too deeply into the mists and thought he'd seen something; seen the way things should be, seen how to make them all turn out greater than zero.

‘I was young then,' he said, shaking his head on the pillow. He meant ‘young—like you are', but he hadn't said it. But now he sounded like he'd been wounded too many times, his young dreams battered beyond repair, as if the game he was playing had been lost long, long ago.

And still dwelling on how much older he was. As if it was important somehow, as if there was this vast gulf of experience that made it impossible for him to be honest with her. Like he was afraid she'd wake up and realize one day.

‘You can never know. Maybe you made something turn out right and you just didn't notice,' she said very softly, a hand cruising across his chest.

Just as the city was waking they made love again. He was tired and she had her way with him. She didn't want him to work to impress her with his strength or his virility or his technique; she didn't want him to do anything or be anything but Pyotr Ryzhkov, the man who'd reached out and become an island for her . . .

She ground herself into him, giddy now with her own power; laughing as she devoured him, bit into him, swallowed him—and they became one mad ecstatic creature filling her little bedroom with their cries.

She could wait until later, sometime in winter when everything was exactly right. She could kill herself any time at all. After all, she was free.

There was no rush.

THIRTY-ONE

Most of the time the two teams of inspectors still maintained their professional separation, proving that there was a greater distance from the political police to justice than might be supposed. If anyone from either side talked to each other it was at the very bottom—only Jekes and Muta had become something like friends during their long waits.

On this occasion Hokhodiev was reading the
Gazette
while he lounged against an malachite column that supported the balustrade at the top of the first floor of the Imperial Biological Museum. Dima Dudenko had fiddled the lock on one of the doors and was smoking out on the balcony. Sitting in the window opposite Dziga slowly carved a slow spiral of peel from an apple. It was a warm day and he had opened his jacket to reveal the silver revolver that he holstered under his arm. Like the man it was little.

‘You can hit things with that?' Hokhodiev pointed at the pistol.