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"I've got nothing to say to you, Dad."

"Nothing intelligent, clearly."

She was crying and there was nothing she could do to hide it. "You are full of shit."

The doorbell was ringing.

"Your boyfriend? What's his name?"

She was determined to walk slowly, not run.

"I sincerely hope you have not left Cambridge on his account. Apart from being embarrassingly slow-witted and a terrible musician, he's queer. That's all."

A wearer of grievance, a bearer of grudge, shaven head slightly too large for torso, torso slightly too large for legs, and legs slightly too large for feet—this was the squat figure who trod the grimy corridor on the thirteenth floor of tower block number two, Kammennaya Street, Vasilevsky Island, St. Petersburg. Grigori, Gregory, Gregol—known variously here, known nefariously there, in Brindisi, London, Bucharest, but passing these past few years, on and off, in Russia, under the general name of Grisha. A man for whom all the million eddies and currents of human interaction had long ago been distilled down to a single granule of conviction: that the world owed him, so fuck it.

And tonight was just more grist to that rutted mill. Henry Whey-land had not paid what he was due. That was bad enough. (He swapped the angle grinder he was carrying from one hand to the other.) Worse, though, was that Grisha knew the delay was not the result of Henry's having a lack of rubles but the result of Henry's having a lack of respect. And if there was one thing that stuck in Grisha's gullet, it was lack of respect. Indeed, for Grisha, respect was everything. He would have retraced his steps and faced down a mongrel dog if he came to suspect that it might have sniggered as he passed. And anyway, he was acting on orders.

Now was that everything?

He put down the angle grinder and addressed his Slovak employee in Russian: "Gunt, what the fuck is that?"

Gunter heaved up the indicated power tool from the floor and brandished it like a mighty sword.

"Tyrannosaw," he said with a smirk.

Twenty minutes later, and a little to his own surprise, Grisha (groping unconsciously for his groin) found himself entering Arkady Alexandrovitch's bedroom with a degree of trepidation. Though he was 100 percent certain that at this very moment the Russian was with Henry, watching Zenit's Wednesday night game, still his mind seemed to be on tiptoes and his toes themselves a little ginger inside the stretched and swollen udders of his fat white Nikes. Yeah: something had him jumpy in here, no doubt about it.

He sighed.

It wasn't right.

He stopped just inside the threshold and eventually located his cigarettes in one of the front pockets of his twelve-compartment combat trousers. He raised the packet as if to swig from a bottle and let the first to slide out lodge between his sticky lips before shaking the rest back in. He then set about tracking down his Zippo, patting first one leg, then the other, up and down, forward and backward. Combat—a very compartmentalized business. Keep stuff separate, that's the thing about combat. Where the hell?

At last the zone just above the back of his left knee grudgingly relinquished the required tool. And so, relieved and taking considerable comfort in the procedure, he now lit up with stagy deliberation.

Better.

Much better.

How did he ever manage before cigarettes? Life must have been terrible. No wonder he'd started smoking at ten. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that was why his childhood was such a piece of shit. Should have started much earlier, should have started at two. He flipped the lighter shut.

Now then: what we got?

The room was more or less bare: a double mattress on the swept concrete floor, bed neatly made, thin cream blanket, white sheet folded over at the top. And that was just about it. No curtain or blind on the window (which, like those in the lounge, looked out on the Gulf of Finland), no mirror, no wardrobe, no desk, no chest, no chair, no posters or pictures, no pinups, nothing. For fuck's sake, these two lived like monks. He pivoted. There were five or six serious nails hammered into the wall behind him, on which a few items of clothing hung flat: two white shirts, a gray greatcoat, a pair of black trousers, a dinner jacket. Beneath these, two wooden boxes, both containing what looked like underclothes. A pair of shoes. Nothing else.

Grisha exhaled thoughtfully through flared nostrils—twin off-road exhausts under heavy acceleration—and approached the wide window, walking carefully by the side of the bed. It was upsetting, was what it was: the room had a scrubbed and dusted feel, as though someone had washed everything only an hour ago. Shifting blood, lifting DNA. He looked about him. There was no money in here. (Grisha could intuit money in a place, like a water diviner sensing that delicate underground tremble.) The windowsill yielded neither residue nor discoloration to the pink of his stubby finger. The floor was everywhere stripped and bare. And the pillow, which he now bent to touch, was freshly laundered. Grisha saw that Arkady would be able to look up through the window into the sky from his bed—very nice. Grisha was tempted to lie down himself and stretch out, think, smoke, have a piss.

Hello ... There was something that looked like a book in the bed, slipped in between the sheets.

Filth?

Curious, comforted, Grisha dropped to his haunches, picked it up, and flipped through.

No ... it was music. Fucking music. No words, no pictures, no tits, no pussy. Just notes. Not even a rogue arse. Grisha's expression grew distant, thoughts developing slowly but steadily, like graffiti declaring itself letter by letter on a waste-ground wall. Wait ... Yes, that was it. The answer he had been looking for. How to fuck everything even faster. No need for any further consideration. Leary would love it. Grisha grinned grotesquely. He replaced the music, stood up, flicked his ash carefully into his cupped palm, and left the room.

And so to the main business.

Grisha next entered Henry's room, smashing the door hard against the wardrobe inside as he opened it. Much smaller in here, and darker too. Almost messy by comparison. Now then—where? A single mattress, likewise on the floor. A small window. The freestanding wardrobe. A high shelf heavy with books running down either side of the room. A chest of drawers. A school desk and a chair covered in clothes. Two boxes of needles stacked with the hospital
insignia on the side. A black garbage bag under the desk. Where would a skinny little shit-stabber keep his money?

Grisha surveyed the ceiling, hoping for giveaways. No breaks or cracks or panels. Nothing. The floor was the same flat Soviet-crap concrete as Arkady's, save for a rug. He bent and flipped it: nothing. The stunted baseboards were all intact. He dragged the wardrobe out from the wall. Nothing obvious back there. He turned to face the room again. Surely not under the ... He upended the mattress. Nothing. Ripping off the sheet, he checked all the way around. No slits. No pouches. Nothing.

All right then, so be it, let's do this properly. Grisha ground his cigarette into the twisted rug and unsheathed his prized Uzbek knife.

For the next fifteen minutes, he devoted himself to a thoroughly efficient and concentrated search in which everything, absolutely everything, was tipped out, tipped over, upended, yanked, emptied, slit, spilled, split, dumped. And all things passed beneath Grisha's eyes—gravel-gray piggy little nugget-sifters—and many through his greasy palms, but nothing for more than the second it took to ascertain their status as harborers of money or otherwise.

He worked with surprising energy and the absorbed gibbonlike strength that his odd dimensions gave him. Truth be fucking told, it wasn't often these days that he got the chance to go back to basics, and he had to admit that he rather enjoyed it ... Enjoyed it too much, maybe, because, as he now realized, he hadn't been thinking. Grisha grimaced. That was the problem: you got carried away; you forgot yourself. Good job Gunter was on guard and not here to witness this minifailure. He drew breath.

Time for another snout.

He lit up, sucked in, and sat down, resting heavily on the corner of the overturned desk. With Henry it was all very straightforward: find the money, find the man; take the money, destroy the man. And no amount of ancillary damage would really matter two bitch's shits to Henry once he discovered the money was gone. Leary's work was easily done. Grisha could chainsaw the walls in half if he felt like it. Henry wouldn't notice. Because money was what guaranteed Henry's supply and protecting supply was all the poor bastard was capable of caring about. (And also, since he, Grisha, was Henry's supplier, finding the money was all that was necessary to bring him in.) But where?

The fucking books!

A moment of genius.

Butt-
fucker.

Obvious, yes, but that's genius for you—a mixture of the obvious and the inspired. Grisha rubbed his cupped palm back and forth across the stubble of his razed number-two scalp. He could not be sure where exactly these moments of brilliance came from—there was some unknowable black magic going on deep in the sightless coal mines of his interior, and every so often news of a diamond would come smoking up some unexpected shaft or other and he would be as amazed as the next man.

Almost ruefully, he stood on Henry's creaking wooden chair—a compact titan towering above the shredded landfill—and began working his way quickly along the shelf, picking up each book and dangling it by the spine, pages hanging as he shook them back and forth, hurling the rejects at the wall when he was satisfied.

It was the Bible that first gave up the booty. Twenty-dollar notes flapped out and fluttered to the floor. He stepped down and began carefully to gather the scattered bills, smoothing them as he did so.

He ran the painful ulcer on the tip of his tongue along the jagged range of his molars, considering. Then, with a feeling of almost embarrassing mental communion with his prey, he clambered back up and began work on the opposite shelf.

Right.

Again!

No doubt about it: he really was on a roll. The vegetarian cookbook yielded another minisquall. But it was the dense immensity of the English dictionary that really delivered the goods. And this time the notes fell heavier, having long been pressed together.

So there was an additional degree of sway in Grisha's shoulder-dipping walk as he made his way down the short internal corridor toward the front door. Three thousand two hundred dollars all told—Henry Wheyland's only future.

With an atypical flourish, Grisha put down his ergonomic backpack (containing the money), stuck his mighty head through the man-sized hole in the thin wall that separated the interior of the flat from the dim communal hall beyond, and greeted his colleague in Russian again.

"All right, Gunt?"

Gunter was sitting on the floor to the right of the hole, away from the pile of dust and debris, with his back to the undamaged and still thrice-locked front door, keeping watch by playing a shooting game
on his cell phone. He held up his hand to indicate that a critical moment in the action was upon him. Then he hit Pause and turned his head, which, like that of his employee for the evening, was shaven, scarred, and substantial, though Gunter could at least claim the requisite physical frame to go with it.

"Yeah," Gunter said. "All right."

The bulb at the end of the corridor by the stairs was blinking on and off.

"Anything?" Grisha asked.

Gunter nodded across the hall in the direction of the opposite apartment. "Piglet dick and his fat whale opened up to see what was going on."

"And?"

"Shit theirselves." Gunter smirked, indicating the range of power tools that lay around him. "You got everything you want?"

"Yeah," Grisha grunted. "One more job, though." The halogen light in the hall of the flat gave him an odd sort of halo, as if he had just broken out of heaven.

"What?"

"Gimme." Grisha pointed at the masonry chainsaw with diamond-tipped chain and hydraulic power pack (pure diesel—for reinforced concrete and serious brickwork) and then backed away from the hole so Gunter could swing the heavy tool through.

And thus armed he made his way back.

The bulb in the main room blew as he reentered, and everything was cast into the uncertain near-darkness of the residual light pollution. But Grisha did not pause, pulling at the ripcord of the engine even as he walked, power pack slung casually over one brutal shoulder.

There was a moment, though, just before the engine caught—a moment when the pale moon rode out above the low clouds over the sea beyond and bathed the keys in the ivory light of one last benediction. A moment when the piano seemed to inhabit its shape as never before, gathering luster to its grain as if some innocent pausing for one last prayer before she sweeps her hair from her neck and inclines her head for the axe. Then all was noise: the whine and whir of chain blades cleaving unresisting wood, the scream of a sundered soundboard, the crunch and snap of collapse, dust, debris, splinters, shards, then the crazed twang of severed notes passing away on the instant into so much dead, tangled, voiceless wire.

Wednesday evening. And in all his life, Gabriel would never again await the arrival of another human being with such anxiety. He was tired in a way he had never believed possible. Coming out of the lifts, past two armed security men, he had thought about sitting at the bar, but as he had approached (and then stood staring at a free stool), he had been forced into the audience of two suits, not even drunk yet, talking loose and loud about
their
plans for tackling Chechnya, talking in the abstract, inhumanly, as if, like everything else in the world, death and destruction were best dealt with in the manner of a forthright marketing campaign, nothing that a few PowerPoints couldn't handle. And he had seen the eyes of the Russian barmen as they turned away to mix the drinks.

So now he was sitting alone, as far away as possible, in the far corner of the Grand Hotel Europe's belle époque lobby bar, beneath walls of burnished gold and an unreachable empyrean of mirrors, bolt upright in the capacious desolation of his lounge chair. He dreaded having someone drop into one of the three adjacent seats. He dreaded having to interact with the waitress to order a drink. He dreaded how much his drink might cost. He dreaded the impossibility of the night ahead, the desertion of sleep. All he could think to do was to smoke. Listening to the poor pianist summon spirit for his nightly schmaltz was out of the question; reading the endless masturbation in the international business papers was out of the question too. Eating was out—the expense aside, his appetite had
completely disappeared. (Indeed, the very thought of food made him feel sick, as if it were some kind of insult or transgression against the ever-ravenous dead.) The television—the television was
utterly
out of the question...