Pravda (37 page)

Arkady opened the far door and leaned in.

"Okay?"

"Yes. We'll be a few rubles short." Henry looked across. He felt the need to explain, to apologize. "Sorry—I meant to walk. I hurt my hand, I—"

"Doesn't matter." Arkady got into the car, his knees squashed against the front seat, and gave the address in Russian—up by the Black River.

The driver nodded, eyes briefly in the rearview, crunched the brittle engine into first gear, and began to turn around, yanking at the wheel as though it were the door to a breached compartment on a submarine.

"I will tell Leary," Arkady said. "The bastard will enjoy it anyway ... Shows him how he has everything—every ruble. That we have nothing left. Not even to pay for a fucking ride back."

Henry's lips worked. He felt nauseous again, unable to acknowledge anything. Maybe it was the engine fumes being pumped in by the car's cheap little heater. He unfastened the coat, reached inside, and handed his friend the plastic wallet.

"This is everything."

"I can go alone," Arkady said.

"No."

They had stopped at the end of the street, the driver waiting for a gap in the careering traffic.

"You do not have to come."

They both knew that he was hoping for an extra hit.

"I am coming."

Arkady met his eye. "Okay."

Henry wound the window down—stiff and awkward on the ratchet—and turned his head to breathe the icy air. Under the cover of snow, the darkness was slipping in.

The driver was young and in a hurry to earn his money. The car slewed. The wipers squeaked and the heater scraped. Henry watched the lights of the other cars coloring the snow. Of course it had turned out that Kostya's contact was Grisha, which meant Leary. Bitter wasn't the word for it. (There were far better words in Russian.) And yet it was to Vsevolod Learichenko—Uncle Seva, as Grisha called him—that the two were now driving. Arkady knew of nobody else. Petersburg was not such a big city. Moscow, London, New York, Los Angeles, even Paris, there might have been alternatives. Fake-passport purchase was still easy enough with money and contacts, Henry understood, but not half as easy as the newspapers pretended. The biggest danger was of being scammed by amateurs. Paradoxically, you were safest going with the gangs. Or you risked being arrested at the airport, your money already spent, your forgers long disappeared. They could have gambled and gone to Moscow, but they were in a hurry, and there was something perversely persuasive, Arkady reasoned, in trusting Leary: since he had already reduced them to nothing, he would not therefore risk cheating them further. Leary would assume, rightly or wrongly, that Arkady (a native of the city, unlike Leary himself, and friends with fringe citizens enough) would seek some kind of violent recompense if further torture were inflicted. An unnecessary irritation that Leary would not wish for. Far better to have Arkady well served. Far better to have Henry on his staff. Far better to keep out of petty troubles. So Arkady had calculated Leary would calculate. And Henry had been in neither mood nor condition to argue.

The car slithered to a stop. Henry sucked at his injured hand, then clutched at his leg, which was twitching again, threatening cramp. The snow was thicker than ever as the two climbed out. Arkady went to the driver's window to hand over the rubles for the ride. Henry eased his way around the back of the car, little scoops of snow wedging themselves through the hole in his shoe. Arkady was pointing at a low covered passageway wide enough for a single cart.

The center of Leary's operation—or one center of it, at least—appeared to be a filthy, soot-blackened brick building six stories high, constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century on the outskirts but stranded now amid a squalid swath of scum and shortage that
stretched like a tide mark around the edges of the city. Henry shuffled over and stopped beneath the shelter. He had taken off his hat in the car, and he looked like some bewildered creature of the gulag—shaven-headed, gaunt jaw chewing on nothing, kneading at his hat with both hands. Arkady came over at a run and ducked within.

The passageway was heaped with putrescent rubbish—cans, split plastic bags, rancid food, old clothes—a rotten mouth that swallowed them whole. They groped their way forward until ahead of them they saw a curtain of snow, pale strands of saffron lit by a weak lamp beyond. They passed through, into yet another minicourtyard.

And this time hell wasn't down but up. They climbed the communal stairs in the darkness as far as an innocuous door on the second floor. Here they stood still with their hands where they could be seen through the spy hole and waited for the unlocking process to begin. When the door finally opened, it was Grisha—face like a cheese grater, fingers like bratwurst—who motioned them inside.

They were led to a large front room, which, save for an incongruously yellow bicycle helmet hanging from a nail by the blinded window, was entirely bare.

"Wait there."

Grisha went back out into the corridor and began to relock the main apartment door.

There was nowhere to sit, so they stood. Henry's nose was streaming, his body sodden with sweat inside the greatcoat, despite the cold. He was praying that the cramps would not come back. Time snagged like a forgotten rag flapping on a barbed-wire fence.

An hour later—or it might have been five minutes or three days—Grisha reappeared.

"Let's go."

"Where?" Arkady asked. They were speaking in Russian. "This way."

"How long is this going to take?"

"You have to go somewhere?"

"I have to take my dog to fuck your mother again. She already paid for it."

Grisha turned and answered him with a grin like a scar.

Through his ache, Henry wondered vaguely what was going to happen. But Grisha carried on walking. Henry thought that maybe they were going out into the communal hall again, but instead they
continued down the corridor, past a series of shut doors on the right, and entered a room at the opposite end of the apartment, this one furnished haphazardly, as if uncertain whether a lounge, an office, or a doctor's waiting room.

"Wait here."

Grisha disappeared, and they heard a moment's conversation in Russian as he opened another door and then nothing again.

Arkady looked around with mixed scorn and tense wariness. "Now he has let you see this place, you know that he will kill you if he thinks you fuck with him." He addressed Henry directly in English. "I am serious. This is not a child's thing. People die in this world all the time. Nobody cares."

"I know people die. I am not going to fuck with him and I am not going to work for him."

Arkady fixed the Englishman with his candid, sunken eyes, his gaze seeming to come from a long way within. "I hope. But you are far from your place in the world now."

Henry could neither answer nor stand any longer, and so he lowered himself into the disheveled armchair against the far wall and closed his eyes. How in the name of God had he come to this? At least he had stopped caring about anything—even Arkady. All he wanted. The only thing in the world he wanted. And he wanted it with every cell of his body. Was his fix. Maybe this was the point where the virgin tapped the shoulder of her son, busy in the office of his heaven, and made her intercession on Henry's behalf? He hoped so. Do it, woman—do it now.

Arkady took the upright chair on the far side of the desk, which sat more or less in the middle of the room.

And then they waited some more.

Eventually Leary came through the door, quiet, almost stealthy, like a media mogul who enjoyed understating his power. He had an over-bite, a receding lower jaw, and the beginnings of a double chin, so that his face appeared to slope away smoothly from the overhang of his front teeth. His hair was longish, curly, and black; he had protruding dark eyes, suntanned skin, and a slight but habitual hunch that created the impression that he was always addressing people from below, looking up with bulbous solicitation from between the curtains of his hair, though he was tall enough to meet most on the level. He was carrying a neat blue plastic wallet, and he sat down almost cheerily in his leather swivel seat behind the desk, opposite
Arkady. He might have been a helpful if unsavory high-street travel agent. Grisha followed a moment later, cigarette burning, and heavily stationed himself on the ragged sofa just behind.

Arkady continued to stare at the ceiling, his head back on the lip of his uncomfortable plastic chair, legs stretched out directly into Leary's foot space. In his deeper armchair behind, Henry was likewise ignoring the arrival, though for very different reasons: he was sitting back but gripping the frayed armrests, his knuckles all but popping from their sockets, his face as white as dough, a cold sweat shining on his forehead. His pupils seemed to be widening visibly, twin black holes gorging on nerve and cell. He was shivering spasmodically, and every few seconds he leaned forward, pressing his head toward his knees against the cramp. Then he'd straighten up, stretch his jaw, yawning, before clamping his mouth shut again, lips working.

Leary's eyes slid over Henry for a moment, and then he began carefully to take out the contents of the wallet and check them through. When this task was completed to his satisfaction, he glanced up with studied casualness.

"Grisha, get me something for this fuckup." His Russian was heavily accented but from where exactly was impossible to tell. "Before he shits himself on our lovely furniture."

Henry was rubbing his hands together as if to start a fire then and there between his palms.

"Leave him alone." Arkady leveled his gaze and faced Leary. His voice was the flatter Russian of a pure Petersburger. "He's coming off. Leave him."

Leary frowned and then smiled his selachian smile. "I am
giving
it to him. I am not asking for money."

Grisha remained unsure, an indeterminate menace, about to get up, about to continue sitting down.

"He's coming off," Arkady repeated. "Just leave him."

Leary sighed. "He won't get through it."

"He will."

"How long has it been?"

"A day and a half." Arkady eyed the passport and papers that Leary was returning to the file. "Is this everything I need?"

"Yes."

Arkady held out his hand.

"Of course." Leary handed the file across the desk. "Okay, yes. He might get through the withdrawal—most of them manage it
once or twice. Even the scum. But he won't make it through the months afterward." Leary's expression was all amused weariness. "I am sure you know this. You must have seen it a hundred times. They can get off, but they can't stay off. It's not even the drug. It's the addiction itself—they can't replace the addiction. Addiction is ... is part of them. It's the conversation they want to have with themselves. It's who they've learned to be. And when it goes, they do not know what to fill the emptiness with."

"Is this the visa?" Arkady indicated a page of the passport.

"That is your visa." Leary nodded.

Arkady examined it closely.

"Even when they quit five or ten times, they always come back. It's a cycle. And you know it. So don't be stupid and don't be cruel. Look at the poor guy. He might as well save himself the pain ... because he will be back in three days, a week, a month, six months." Leary addressed Henry directly in English. "Henry? Henry? You want something?"

Henry was facedown again—head in hands, hands back and forth across shaven scalp. He nodded repeatedly. Then straightened abruptly. His face could not have spoken of need more eloquently. His lips peeled back from his yellow teeth. "Yes." He gave a series of shallow nods. "Yes. Fuck. Give it to me."

Arkady passed Henry's money across the table. "Here is the money," he said in Russian.

Leary was distracted. He began to count—climbed as far as ten thousand rubles and then stopped.

Henry was patting.

"Grisha, please." Leary had likewise returned to Russian. "Before he starts shitting himself. The best. And some to take away."

"I said leave him." Arkady eyes were as level as his voice.

Grisha stiffened. Leary looked up, his own eyes seeming to bulge and swim while Arkady's remained still, sunken. There was a moment when a different future might have begun. But perhaps Leary did not want any bodies in his office. More than this, perhaps there was something about Arkady that made Leary want to outwit him rather than injure him, as if physical pain were what the other expected and would not therefore hurt him.

"Arkasha," Leary said, in the manner of someone explaining the rules of the house, "I don't want to start some bullshit with you. I have nothing against you, and it is a waste of my time. What is the point? But Henry needs what I have."

Grisha sat down.

Leary's voice hardened. "And please remember, I don't make him take the shit. I don't make anyone take it. He takes it because he wants to take it. They all have a choice. And if it weren't me, it would be someone else giving it to him. And you know—you
know
—that it will never stop." Leary lowered his head but kept his eyes on Arkady. "If the governments were not such gutless suckers of rat cock, they would hand it out to these people. They would have their taxes. All that money they have been missing would suddenly appear. Chechnya, Afghanistan, Bolivia, Indonesia ... all the shit holes fixed. The world's big problem—gone."

Leary licked finger and thumb and paused as if waiting for Arkady to speak.

But Arkady said nothing.

So Leary's eyes went over to Henry again (who had his head back now, mouth gaping) before swiveling once more onto Arkady. He continued his count, saying the numbers out loud. Then he softened his voice. "At least mine is pure and safe. He takes more of mine, he will be okay. He comes off now, he goes back on tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. When you have gone. His body is not used to it. It's fucking chaos for him. He buys some cheap shit from Kostya or worse. He overdoses. That's how it happens. We've both seen it a thousand times." He shrugged, his hands poised to finish their count. "Or ... Or he works for me. He sells to the million young wankers who are coming ... Prague, Riga, Tallinn, they're moving east. The Europeans are returning. They'll do away with the visa here soon enough and the place will be crawling with fresh young whores and used old bank notes." Leary indicated the Englishman with a small thumb. "And Henry will be fine. Safe—from the police, from me, from himself. He takes what he needs. I put him in a decent apartment. Buy him some clothes. Then, when the day comes, when he really wants to stop, he stops. Because that's the only way it ever happens. He stops because he wants to stop for real. Not because of some bullshit. Not because his boyfriend won't fill his dirty hole for him. You know that I am right." He counted the remaining stacks quickly. But laid the last note down slowly. "You're short. But I let you off."