Pravda (49 page)

"I owe you for four nights," he said. "And I want to stay two more, please. I am going off to the bank now—I need my passport for identity. Is it okay?"

She looked at him suspiciously. "You'll get soaked to the skin in your shirt. It's raining like the end of the world out there."

He blew smoke toward the nicotine-stained ceiling. "I will run."

She tutted. "Where's your coat?"

"I left it upstairs. Locked in the room. It's not good for the rain."

"What's your name?" She bent down, disappearing from view, and he heard her opening up the safe.

He leaned over the counter. "Arkady Kolokov."

She reappeared. "Okay. I need your room key until you come back."

He handed her the key.

She handed him his passport.

Once outside, he walked right, out of sight of the desk, and then slipped down the alley. He ground the unwanted cigarette beneath his boot and unpacked his coat, leaning against the side of the building. The sleet hacked down relentlessly.

He carried his pack in his hands in case he was challenged as he came out. But the weather had emptied the street. So he walked swiftly away from the hostel without looking back. Right, then left. He walked fifty yards farther with his pack still in front until he reached the twenty-four-hour shop, where he ducked beneath the awning. Ignoring the supplications of yet more bullshit homeless people, he fished out a black garbage bag that he had stolen from the cupboard by the toilet. Then he retrieved his cap from one of the side pockets and slung the pack onto his shoulders, loosening the straps to accommodate the bulk of his coat. He made a hole in the bag, took off his cap a moment, and pulled the thing over his head. Then he put his cap back on and set off, his feet warm in his boots.

It was only just four. Partly because of the necessity of pretending that he was going to the bank, he had given himself three and a half hours, plenty of time. His idea was to walk along the canal, which he had come to know quite well since that first night, when he had lost himself in the Paddington basin. The route would be quieter and it was direct to Camden. He could stop along the way without needing to spend any money. From Camden, it looked straightforward to Kentish Town.

At first it was easy, but soon the water disappeared into a tunnel where there was no path, and for a while he wandered around trying to find where the canal reemerged. He asked a passerby, but she knew nothing. (Nobody in London seemed to know where they were, or where anything was, or where anything might be.) When finally he saw the water again, brown and turbid in the rain, he could not get down to the bank, so he was forced to walk on the road above until the fence was low enough to vault.

The towpath was deserted and he slowed a little, more confident.
He listened to the sounds of his boots and his breathing. His previous anxiety—that he had not actually stolen anything that night when Oleg had left the hole in her window—had ceased to bother him entirely; it seemed irrelevant now that he was actually here in London and so close. His plan was to be sure to find out where the brother was. Find out if Gabriel Glover was ignoring his e-mails and calls or if his silence was something to do with all the bullshit that had been going on last Sunday. Either way, he wanted to see Gabriel too. Make sure that there was no chance at all of anything from brother as well as from sister. Make sure there was nothing offered, nothing to hope for. Nothing.

Once he knew how to get hold of the brother, then ... then he would simply tell the sister the truth. There was no longer any reason to piss around with the strategies that he and Henry had talked about—ways of getting to know them while making up further bullshit about Maria Glover and her fucking piano. There was no time and no point. If the sister did not want to know, if she was hostile, then fuck it. He would go and find the brother. And if he did not want to know either, then fine. His choice would be made. His new life would start. Good. Fuck the piano. Fuck the conservatory. Fuck Mother Russia. He was staying here and he was going to make money like everybody else. It would be bullshit at first, but he would get through that phase quick enough. Hundreds of Russians were doing the same. Brothers, sisters. Yes, he was down to it.

He passed a mooring. There were no lights on any of the boats. His cap was sodden but his feet were still dry. He passed some fine buildings, pale-colored and elegant, and he was reminded of Petersburg. He saw pretty gardens on the opposite bank. He passed beneath a bridge that dripped and echoed away into the narrowing darkness wherein he could not see. He passed what seemed to him to be giant nets that loomed crazily against the wet heavens. All the while the sleet continued to come down, bending this way and that in the wind, slapping against the plastic of his makeshift cloak. The path ahead was slick and shiny. He kept on, breathing steadily, the water streaming down his face.

Six forty-five and the Internet café on Kentish Town High Street was half empty. She seemed to be spending her life at these places, but she did not want to go back and disturb Susan and her family. She had said that she would be out until late. And she wanted to let them have their dinner uninterrupted. The last two flats she had seen had been a total waste of time. She'd canceled the third, and now she had three quarters of an hour.

There were a few tourists tapping vigorously at the cheap keyboards, Australians mostly, and a circle of Lebanese huddled around a screen in the corner, but most of the seats were unoccupied. She was facing the wall near the entrance, one empty booth in from the front window. A cheap neon sign advertised unspecific "exchange" to the world beyond, and the back of the flashing light caused the frame of her screen to glow red-gray thirty times a minute.

Outside, the lashing continued, but more sporadically now. If she looked up and turned her head to the left, she could see directly onto the high street. Minicabs, vans, and rented limousines arguing one inch at a time up and down, up and down, up and down. The sleet like thin liquid wires in the headlights.

She must have been sitting in something like a trance, staring at the screen, when she first became aware of someone behind her. A steady, unmoving presence Not someone hovering, as if hoping to interrupt with a quick question, but someone in the business of waiting, steadily—waiting for her to look up, look around, turn her attention toward him. Which she purposely did not do for a minute or two, having learned a long time ago that the best way to handle unwanted men in public is to ignore them completely. She deleted part of the question she had typed: "Did you ever meet her mother, Russian granny?" And then deleted the whole paragraph.

Her second thought was one of irritation. She wanted to reread what she had written alone. But the presence was still there, refusing to go away, a force field behind her chair. Her irritation began to escalate ... She didn't want some bloody random bloke ... For Christ's sake. With anger jackknifing her brow, she swung away from her screen to meet the face, a curse on her lips.

The man standing a just-polite distant behind her was tall, thin, and trying to smile. He had messy, longish blond-brown hair swept to one side off his forehead, and he was wearing an ill-fitting older man's suit jacket with faded blue jeans and what looked like hiking boots. But it was neither frame nor clothes nor boots that stopped her mouth: it was his face. Hollow cheeks, head raised a fraction in defiance despite the effort at a smile; close-shaved; nose, lips, and brow as even as an icon's, and a sunken pair of deepest turquoise eyes. It struck her for a second as the face of some ancient human tribe from an unknown pinnacle of civilization long ago. Not handsome—indeed, the sort of face that made "handsome" sound silly—but striking, enduring, prototypical in the way of those faces on ancient vases or the ones cut in stone. And the eyes ... the eyes stopped her dead. All of this before she recognized him—then a flood of confusion as she realized who he was, bafflement that she had not seen these features for what they were on the street when loading Adam's car. Followed, just as suddenly (as he held out his massive hand), by the thought that he looked nervous and tense.

"Hello. I saw you in the window. I was going to the station where we arrange to meet. I am sorry for the surprise."

She recovered herself. Evidently it was just writing to her father that was heightening everything. She noticed now that the jacket he was wearing was the upper half of the suit he had been sporting on Gabriel's doorstep.

"Hi. No, not at all. I just didn't recognize ... How are you? What time is it?"

"I am early. It will not be half past seven for forty minutes."

"Sorry. No, I didn't mean that." She didn't. She realized that it was quite normal for a Russian to stop in if he saw an acquaintance; only Londoners crossed the street and pretended not to have seen each other so as to arrive at an appointment separately.
"Hang on, I've just got to save this and shut down and then we are gone."

"Of course. But please, there is no problem if you need to finish. I can wait."

"I'm finished." She turned back to her screen, saved her mail as a draft, and began to log out.

"How much is this café?" he asked. "How much to use the Internet?"

"Yes."

"It's four pounds for the first hour and then one pound for every half-hour after that."

"It's expensive."

"Yes."

"People must be millionaires in London."

"I know." The computer dropped offline. She swiveled in her chair and stood up. Now she noticed his coat and his backpack on the floor behind him.

He said, "How much is the subway to here?"

"The tube? It depends where you are traveling from."

"Harrow Road."

"There's no station there—you have to use Warwick Avenue, or Westbourne Grove is better. Three quid, something like that. Too much." They stood in line to pay. "How did you get here?"

"I walked."

She had forgotten how seriously poor the vast majority of Russians were. Even those on student visas were way below Western student poor. But the real Russians, the sixty-dollars-a-month Russians, simply couldn't survive a single day in London without immediate work. And thereafter they continued to be staggered by how much Londoners casually spent and the stuff they chose to spend it on. Isabella retuned her sensitivity. She realized too that she had suddenly developed butterflies. Too many reasons to be anxious, perhaps.

It was becoming colder—the sleet thickening, the ragged wind snatching at the door. She had not been to the Petrel for five, maybe six years, since before she moved to New York. As she remembered, the pub used to have a full-sized old-fashioned pool table and regulars talking football and what-happened-to-Frank. It had been an unpretentious, unpremeditated pub: dog, London Pride, and piano. So she was surprised, and then not surprised, as she went in, to see
that it had used the intervening years to convert itself into a faux-authentic, faux-gourmet place. She realized she was torturing herself again. Or maybe it was simply because she was seeing the place through his eyes. She turned. He was standing just inside the door, tall in his coat, carrying his backpack in front of him a little awkwardly, taking the measure of the place. She felt a prickle of shame, shame that she had bought him here; and embarrassment too, that he might think she liked this sort of phoniness. As ever, she overcompensated and went back toward him too quickly, eager to cut down the distance between them.

"Christ, it's busy," she said. "They've changed everything since I was here last. Do you want to stick that over there? We can grab that little table by the window." It occurred to her that he must be about her own age. "I'll get them. What do you want to drink?"

He didn't smile or soften. "Just water."

She absorbed her first real impression of his personality—cold, distant, unyielding. She nearly asked him still or sparkling, but checked herself in time.

"Water—are you sure? Not a glass of wine or something?"

"Or tea. Tea. If there is tea here."

"There will be ... I'll ask."

She set off to the bar determined to procure tea, telling herself to relax. She could feel curiosity writhing in her blood alongside the overexcitement. (How did this man know her mother? What when how why who?) What was the matter with her? She told herself to calm down. Half of her childhood friends had been Russian. Even now there were twenty people she would love to see the next time she was there ... An awful thought occurred to her as she eased her way past a group of men arguing about ski resorts: maybe now that her mother was dead, she wouldn't be going back to St. Petersburg anymore; maybe there was no reason to; maybe now that her mother was dead, her connection with Russia itself was dead, severed. She had not considered this until now. She pushed forward and reached the counter. Tea. She wondered whether he was a teetotaler or merely too proud to ask for a drink when he knew he could not buy her one in return. Tea—tea would do it. How did this man know her mother? What when how why who? Something that mattered. Something that counted. In all of this.

"So how long are you in London?"

"I do not know. It depends."

"Are you working here?"

"No."

"Is this your first visit?" She knew already that it was.

"Yes," he said. "Do you have your brother's new address? I must write it down."

"Yes, of course."

He pulled a small exercise book from his jacket pocket. She told him the number on Grafton Terrace and watched him write it down in English. She was used to this curtness. Not with the boys in the trendy Petersburg bars, but with the men she had met with Yana in the crumbling table-football-one-beer-and-one-vodka bars away from the center, away from the tourists. Their definitiveness wasn't rudeness; rather, they simply didn't do small talk. There was talent, there was beauty, and there was power; either you had one of the three or you talked about one of the three or, by and large, you shut up.