Pravda (25 page)

"We don't know that."

"We don't know anything."

"We do." Henry could smell her cigarette.

"And if he does know that I exist, he does not
want
to know it." Arkady's voice became pure cynicism. "'Hello, Mr. Glover—I am the bastard you do not know, the bastard of your wife, the bastard of everything. Very nice to meet you, sir. Now, please, I want money. Immediately.'"

Arkady adjusted the buckle of his belt.

Henry forced himself forward and approached the window again. He wiped three fingers through the film of wood powder and grime to make a new square to see through. The sea was covered in something not quite fog, not exactly smog, just a nameless haze that would soon itself be smothered by night. Thirteen stories below, he could see the drunks and the vagrants hunkered around their afternoon fire. They were still burning the larger splinters of the piano. Black smoke rose.

On the day after their break-in, and after nearly six hours of passport verification and bureaucracy, Henry discovered that he had just over nine hundred pounds left in his English bank account. Shocked to his core (and frightened now), he had that same night given Grisha everything he owed. Grisha had taken the money with a cheery leer that all but celebrated culpability. And immediately advanced him more. Henry took the extra, paying for it there and then, peeling off the thinning notes.

Henry's new and panic-stricken plan was to buy passport and tickets for Arkady as soon as possible, to give everything he had left, to see his friend gone, and then ... to quit. He had therefore accepted enough heroin for another twenty-five days (longer if he rationed it), because he knew that he needed sufficient to see the Russian well on his way. Without a good stash, he was certain that he would enter the scoring trance, he'd be crazy again, and he would not be able to trust himself to stick to this plan. No chance. He absolutely required the security of having lots of the drug to help him get off the drug later. He must take the drug to quit the drug.

After he had left Grisha, Henry had gone straight back to Vasilevsky to wait for Arkady to return from Maria Glover's apartment. But Arkady had not come home. So the following day, the Friday,
Henry had spent a windy afternoon staking out the canal while the clouds raced overhead. But he had seen nobody come and nobody go.

On the Saturday he had at last tracked down Zoya and paid her for her Maria Glover "file"—an utter waste of time and money. Stuff on orphanages, pages and pages of notes, times and dates of searches, bribes dispensed, a list of children called Arkady at Veteranov, and almost nothing on Maria Glover's ersatz English family save for half a page in Zoya's bad Russian scribble confirming what Henry already knew from his own conversation with Maria Glover: names, no addresses.

Arkady eventually showed up on the Sunday but did not utter a single word. So Henry, biding his time, retreated to his room and counted out his remaining funds. The Zoya file and his angel both paid for, he had less than two hundred pounds left. He realized he would have to borrow to secure the passport and visa. But so be it, he thought. This is where his long flight had led him. In his right mind or not (he did not care), Arkady was his vocation, and it now no longer mattered how that vocation had begun, whether the vocation was real or imagined, or what purpose the vocation had beyond itself. If this duty hastened him to zero, all the better. He would meet himself there afterward, when Arkady was on his way. He would meet himself there and try his mettle in that clear and empty ring. So be it. But momentum was all. For both of them. Momentum. Keep going.

He left his peephole at the window and set off on his circling of the room again. The tight dance of love and guilt.

"In my experience," Henry said, "children often become very curious about their parents after they die. It is part of their grief. Shock, denial, anger, guilt, anxiety, depression. And curiosity. If not—"

"You have no experience. You are a narkoman."

The Englishman felt his blood freeze and a chill sweat seep into his palms. He could not look over and meet those eyes. He forced himself to keep moving along the wall. Never, not once, had Arkady called him a junkie. And he did not wish to know if this, at last, was it—the moment when Arkady's scorn finally turned on him. He'd rather not be sure. He'd rather circle the room until the end of time. Keep moving. He squeezed his resolution all the harder to his threadbare breast.

"Either way, we need to get you this passport. And we need to be doing that as soon as possible." His own voice was loathsome to him. "I am assuming you know the right people."

Arkady said nothing.

Henry could hear her trying to open the window. He wondered if she could understand English. He passed Arkady's bedroom door and came around in front of the sofa again. He had the sudden idea that he would shave his head. His hair was lank and ridiculous. Widow's peak, bald patch. Penance.

"You do know people who can get us a fake passport?"

Still the Russian said nothing.

"We should have the documents they need ready—the photos and everything. For the passport. We'll get the visa separately ... when we know if it's Britain or France. Now, the good news is that they didn't get all my—"

"
Grisha
did not get all your money."

"We don't know that it was Grisha. Okay, he's ... he's a dealer. But he's not a ... not a psychopath." Arkady swore in Russian.

Henry rushed on. "I have around a thousand pounds sterling left in another bank account," he lied. "And we can use this to buy the passport."

"Whatever you have, you need."

"Please, Arkasha. Let me finish." Henry drew shallow breath, coming past the window again. "I am not sure how much the passport will cost, but I assume this is enough. And I am not
giving
you the money. You can pay me back in a few years, when you are taking your huge concert fees. Or maybe right away—when you come back from meeting them! If it goes well. Who knows? Regardless. It doesn't matter. The point is that you have to go now. And I can help you."

"You need your money for your shit."

Henry came to a halt at the top of his circuit. He said the words quietly, addressing the back of the Russian's head. "I am stopping."

Arkady laughed out loud.

"I am stopping."

"You are never stopping. Nobody ever stops."

Henry passed the bedroom door once more and stood at the foot of the sofa, meeting the other's eyes for a second before taking off again along the far wall. He spoke quickly now, his bony arms jerking as if he might sheer off from his desperate orbit at any moment.

"Arkady, listen to me—I don't want to have any money left. And I don't want to have
anything.
I... I have a bet with myself. If I have nothing left and I can't buy any more, then I will give up. Pull myself together. Yes, okay, yes ... I will buy enough food and water to last until you are back. I will spend what I need to get that. Water—some food. And we will fix the hole. But that's all. After that, I don't want the money in the bank because I don't want to burn it all—and that's what
will
happen. I will burn it on the shit. Every penny. So this..."He indicated the room with a throw of his arm. "This is a blessing in disguise. Not the piano. But I mean all my money gone. Everything taken. Because I would only have spent it on shit ... shit, shit, and more shit. And it would have gone on and on—until I ran out of money, anyway. So all that has happened is that I have the opportunity to stop sooner. To stop when you go to find your family. And I don't
want
to have any more secret money in the bank. I don't want it there. I don't want it, because I tell you: I will go and I will spend it on shit. So you
have
to take my money. I want you to take it. I need you to take it. It's a loan. That's all. A loan until I am off. And then you can give it back to me."

Arkady was watching Henry closely.

"Do you understand, Arkasha?"

At last the Russian sat up. "You say this now because you know there is so much more hidden in your room. But when the time comes, when you have no more, you will do anything. The money or the no-money is not the difference. When the time comes, you will do anything—you will sell your body, you will kill if you have to."

"If it makes no difference, then take it. If the money is not the difference, then take it. Please. Let me try."

She came out of the bedroom barefoot, wearing nothing but one of Arkady's T-shirts. Henry tried to nod a greeting, but her expression reflected only a sudden aversion back at him. He walked quickly past the sofa and entered the wreckage of his room.

The faster he used, the faster he ran out, the faster he would get to zero.

There comes a time in every man's life when the fucking around just has to stop. Operating (as ever) in the murky, muddy, potholed, all-sides-fired-upon, no man's land of modern secular ethics (which might, of course, be no ethics at all), Gabriel could not be certain whether it was his mother's death, his life stage, or the quasi-religious ache of some ancient human gene that had brought him abruptly to this realization. But once beheld, this flinty truth, he realized, could no longer be avoided. And he knew for certain that he must now make some decisions about his life—ideally, good ones, though he recognized with stolid candor (as he faced down an unnecessarily confrontational lunchtime sandwich) that any decisions at all would likely be greeted with much emotional bunting as a sign of progress.

The telephone interrupted his thoughts.

"Hi, Gabriel. Francine."

"Hello, Francine. I was about to call you. How are you?"

"Fine, fine, fine."

He detected more than the usual vinegar in the various acid ratios of her voice.

"Hang on ... I'm in the car." There was the sound of an ill-timed and aggressive gear change. "You know, I'm not being funny, but I really don't think that the ... the
Indians
know how to drive."

He twisted the proofs around so he could read them. No, she was not being funny. Francine O'Brien was never being funny.

"Gabriel, I wanted to say that I personally am really looking forward to 'Toxic Parents.' And that—get this—Randy himself is taking an interest in this one. His assistant called last night from Los Angeles. Have you met her? Caroline.
Lovely
girl. She's had surgery, of course, and I think it's affecting her skin, but she's got such a great smile in her voice. Do you know if they've shut the M40?"

"Haven't heard anything here, Francine. Are you off to somewhere exciting?" His eye fled to a quarter-page advertisement for one of Randy K. Norris's herbal "rescue remedies." "Fight Stress," it screamed. But surely, he thought, that's exactly what stress wanted—a fight.

"I've got this half-day of brand-new treatments. Sumatran Indulgence Therapy. It's that seventies singer's ex-wife—God, you know who I mean, she's in all the mags at the moment—it's her new place."

"Can't think who you mean, offhand." Gabriel knew exactly whom Francine was referring to. He'd spoken to the woman in question on the phone. Yet another avaricious, harrowingly insecure, narcissistic little claw-wielder who had recently about-faced into a guru of well-being and life balance. How did any of these people expect to be taken seriously? At least Francine let the toxins flow.

"Davina Trench That's her But anyway, they're trialing in bloody Maidenhead. I mean—hello?—who ever wants to go to Maidenhead? It might as well be in..."

"Indonesia."

"Wherever."

"Be great when you arrive, though. You can really relax and pamper yourself." He hated the word "pamper" almost as much as he hated the word "indulgence," which in turn was almost as much as he loathed the word "treatment," with its wretchedly inane pretension toward medicine. Even more dispiriting was that this kind of idiotic vocabulary had become his daily vernacular; most of the people he dealt with these days could not even imagine him employing such words sarcastically, never mind noticing any nuance in his voice. No more than they could imagine the seven solid years of round-the-clock blood-and-agony life-and-death slog that it
actually
took to become a doctor. "Are they just an indulgence outfit, or do they do other stuff too?"

"Yoga."

"Expensive?"

"Very."

"Well, three-sixty inner calm is priceless, I suppose."

"Oh, you
cow
— that fat cow just cut me off." There was the
sound of a horn. "This is a freebie. Said I might do a write-up for them."

And he hated the word "freebie." And the thought of Francine never doing any of the write-ups for all the million "freebies" she accepted, and the thought of how excruciating it would be to have to run one of her pieces if ever she did.

"Anyway," Francine said, "I just wanted to be sure that you are taking the feedback on board from the last issue. I know both of our teams agreed to move on—"

And "feedback." And especially "team"; he never ever wanted to be on anyone's team for anything, ever. But it was his own fault: clearly the rest of humanity was on a journey to some other place he did not understand.

"This is going to be a top-level-watched issue, Gabriel, and I need to be sure that the lessons we learned from 'Depress Your Depression' are going to be implemented for 'Toxic Parents.'"

The engine note was climbing. "Francine, I'm looking at the proofs right now and I can tell you that all the design concerns have been dealt with. This is a much more readable edition. I think my
team
just got a little bit too ... too creative—and maybe we left some of the readers behind. So, yes, we have made sure to ... well, to row back with this one."

"Great. Good. Excellent. Okay, we'll speak again Friday. Have to dash."

The line went dead. And with it, another fraction of his soul.

Without ever for a single minute intending to, Gabriel Glover worked for Roland Sheekey Ltd., a medium-sized contract publishing outfit operating in the nether regions of the Paddington sump, responsible for some thirty-five titles, ranging from in-flight and supermarket tie-in magazines to trade press via corporate brochures and cat-club newsletters—each unnecessary in its own way. But to all intents and purposes his immediate boss was Randy K. Norris, or rather the Randy K. Norris Organization. Gabriel was the editor of
Self-Help!,
a monthly spinoff from the embarrassingly successful series of Randy K. Norris self-help books, "translated into sixty languages and the first step on the road to recovery for millions."