Moscow Noir Page 5

  “That will take six months,” he begged. “That’s your problem,” they said.

  He then transferred as much of his money as he could access to an anonymous account in a faraway bank. That money would not be enough for a whole lifetime, and would not be enough to leave something for his children, but it would be enough for half a lifetime. And that, if you think about it, is not such a short time. He deposited the rest of his fortune on an anonymous credit card, bought two false passports and plane tickets, paid a visit to the friend who ran the private clinic to get a note for the guard, and drove off to get her. By the Baku movie theater, where he’d had his first car dealership, there was a traffic jam unlike any he had ever seen in that neighborhood.

  Distraught that he had not visited her in three days, and so must have decided to leave her, she decided to commit suicide that night. She had stolen the key to the attic long before, and now crawled to the edge of the roof from which she would throw herself headfirst into the dark green treetops. To fall right through them and end up lying lifeless on the neat gravel walkway. She concentrated, took a deep breath, and sucked in her stomach, calculating the angle of her leap. She mustered all her strength, then fell asleep from the exertion.

  At that moment he was standing at the railroad crossing by Grazhdanskaya station, looking at his watch and waiting for a long freight train to pass. It must have had few hundred cars in it.

  She stood, eyes closed, on the very edge of the roof, and slept. And she dreamed that she had changed her mind and returned to her room, that she lay down to sleep with a childlike smile on her lips, and that she would live. In fact, she stepped off the roof and out onto the long branch of a tall tree leading to the middle of the park; and she began to walk on it, not opening her eyes, like a tightrope walker. She had never walked on a tightrope before; she had a terrible sense of balance.

  He hurried to the clinic, woke up the guard to show him the note, entered the grounds, looked up at her window, and discovered her walking high up above him. Her arms were flapping like the wings of a bird in slow motion. Her white nightgown was fluttering in the sultry night air. Inside his pocket, his beeper, which he had forgotten to turn off, sounded. It was his partners, who had discovered discrepancies in his accounts, as well as his disappearance, and were trying bring him to his senses. The beeper startled her. She opened her eyes, her foot slipped, and she fell down right into his outstretched arms.

  There was an explosion on their airplane as it was landing. First, purple smoke filled the plane’s interior for about three minutes; these were the most frightening minutes of their lives. Then there was an explosion that knocked them both unconscious.

  The burning plane gave off such unbearable heat that he came to very quickly. She was lying next to him, her neck at a strange angle, a little bird that had been executed. He turned her onto her back and she immediately opened her eyes.

  He patted his pockets and pulled out his wallet. The credit card had snapped in half. The electronic notebook where he had saved the number of the bank account was smashed to pieces. The suitcase that contained a written copy of the number had burned, along with the rest of the luggage.

  He no longer had any way of getting to his money. It was doomed to move around through the accounts of a distant bank, enriching the bank’s owners, just as the gold of Jews murdered during the war underpinned the might of Swiss banks many years later. He told her this, and she nodded.

  “I am Jewish,” she said. “That’s great,” he said, then added, “We have to get out of here. If I’m seen on TV, they’ll find me and kill me.” They got up onto their feet and took off. All around them, dying people moaned. A woman mumbled in a foreign language, but more blood than words came out of her mouth. There were body parts strewn about. The head of a dog traveling in a special pet carrier in the next row over had been torn off, but was still trying to yap. It seemed that they were the only ones who had survived. It was a mile to the woods where they could take cover.

  The remains of the plane and its passengers were scattered far and wide over the surrounding area. Halfway toward the woods that would shelter them, they came upon the body of a large man in a Versace suit. He had seen this man on the airplane, flying first class. The man’s face had been pounded into mush. His suit had not suffered, and looked as though it was draped on a dummy. “Look,” he said.

  “Look,” she said. The lining of the expensive coat was ripped, and a black cellophane package had fallen out of it. She squatted down and took a pinch of the gray powder into the palm of her hand. From out of nowhere, a bright emerald bug landed in her palm and sank into the soft powder. “Is this—?” he asked. “Yes,” she answered, “no doubt about it.” It was heroin.

  It was an offer to begin again, in the very same way. And it was just in the nick of time, since they had turned up in a foreign country without any money or livelihood, and with documents they couldn’t use again; since their bodies would be missing at the sight of the crash, they would be put on a watch list. Money, they needed money. She was still sitting on her haunches, and her face turned sharply pink, and then black, as though she’d already had her fix.

  She tossed the powder away and rolled up the sleeve of the Versace jacket. “A Rolex,” she said. The Rolex was still ticking—a fat gold watchband, and a watch face encrusted with large diamonds.

  What do you know, a watch. This time he’ll start with a watch.

  IN THE NEW DEVELOPMENT

  by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  Prazhskaya

  Translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers

  This all happened in a Moscow suburb, in a new development. An engineer who worked at one of the ministries had long been on bad terms with his wife. They had a two-room apartment, with rugs, fine china, a color television, and all of it was in her name, and she would get everything if they divorced. The husband wasn’t from Moscow originally, he was from the impoverished provinces, and he’d come to his wife with the clothes he was wearing and nothing more. They’d been at school together, started seeing each other, then she got pregnant and he had no choice but to marry her—he was even threatened with expulsion from school, which was the sort of thing that could happen at the time.

  The truth is, he already had a girlfriend. She was a year ahead of him, they were planning to get married and leave the city together, but the way the situation developed, if he refused to marry the pregnant girl his real girlfriend wouldn’t even receive her diploma—the pregnant girl’s father had put all sorts of pressure on the university, it turned out. So the student-engineer was forced to marry, and not just on paper, not just by signing some forms at city hall, but the whole nine yards. That is to say, for the sake of his beloved’s diploma (and she didn’t resist, by the way, though she shed hot tears and threatened to jump out the window when he was saying goodbye on his way out of the dormitory to the marriage registrar’s; the pregnant girl’s father was picking him up in his luxury car, a Volga), he was forced to go and live in that hateful house and remain in effect under surveillance, for two years, until he graduated. In that time his beloved was sent to work in the Caucasus, married a successful Dagestani, and gave birth to a daughter, who was an epileptic, or so they thought: she regularly turned blue and couldn’t breathe, so that the doctors told the mother she shouldn’t stop breast-feeding, and she didn’t, until the girl was practically old enough to go to school. The girl would eat some cereal and then point to her mother’s breast.

  Vasily learned all this later, after college, when he ran into one of his old classmates at a bar. The classmate worked in the chemical industry and had traveled to Dagestan, where he learned everything about their old classmate and her baby girl. It turned out by then that the apparent epilepsy was actually a form of appendicitis. Once they cut out the appendix the girl’s suffering ended. Vasily by this time had forgotten all about his former girlfriend, and one thing he really didn’t want to hear about was children: his own wife had had a miscarriage
in her sixth month. She lay in the hospital and their little baby was placed in an incubator, where for a month it lived, if it can be called that; the thing was half a pound, a packet of cottage cheese—it died and they weren’t even allowed to bury it, it didn’t even have a name, they were forced to leave the body at the institute.

  Their torture lasted the entire month. His wife’s milk came, she went to the hospital four times a day to get her breasts pumped, but they didn’t necessarily give it to their little packet of cottage cheese; there were other babies, even better connected, and one of them survived despite being born at five and a half months. His wife couldn’t keep an eye on everyone, she wasn’t even allowed into the incubator room, she wasn’t even allowed to look at their little baby, even when it died, and after that she moaned and shook with tears day and night. The father-in-law also tried, gave gifts to the nurses, but they still couldn’t obtain the little corpse. The father-in-law didn’t know that he should bribe the boiler-room lady, she would have gladly avoided doing the dirty deed for a half-liter of vodka—she wasn’t paid extra for getting rid of corpses, about which she, half-drunk, once raised a stink in the payroll department.

  In short, Vasily lived in this family of strangers, alone, his wife aggravated him terribly with all her crying, and he felt sorry for himself too, a child would have been just the thing, there would have been at least one person close to him in this world. But he kept quiet about his wish for a child, that’s just how he was. His wife practically burst out of her skin to get pregnant again but Vasily was very careful, he guarded his sperm like the apple of his eye.

  Shortly after the wedding, the wife’s parents bought an apartment for their daughter and registered it in her name. Should anything happen, Vasily would get nothing—the property was an officially notarized loan to the wife from her parents, and that was that. The wife’s parents had covered all the bases; the only thing they didn’t understand was that they couldn’t keep winding the coil, one day it would spring back with all the pressure they’d put on it.

  Finally Vasily’s wife got pregnant—in the end her desire for a baby, to wipe out the memory of their little packet of cottage cheese, was just too strong, and in cases like that, no matter how hard you try, the woman will think of something. She’ll get you drunk, or drug you, or do it with someone else. And sometimes the husband himself loses control. In short, they had a daughter (that other one, the first, would have been a son); they called her Alyonoshka, their little sunshine, and she grew up before him, all black hair and brown eyes, his very own daughter entirely, because her mother, Tamara, was as white as a moth. Vasily loved his little girl. Even on the night of the murder, on a snowy New Year’s Eve, when his wife was almost dead and the girl started crying, he came to her and sang her back to sleep, then returned to the bathroom and finished the hammering, smashed all the bones in her face and cut off her fingers so no one could identify her.

  It should be said that Vasily had a big plastic bag at the ready, the kind used for storing furs, but how he got rid of all the blood, no one knows. Maybe he placed Tamara under a cold shower, but somehow or other there was no trace of blood. He wrapped her in a tablecloth—he later explained all this to the police—then stuffed her in the bag and threw it off the balcony into the blizzard (the snowstorm lasted all night). Vasily put his wife’s fingers in his overcoat—he’d somehow managed to remove them without making a lot of noise, apparently he just cut them right off. He took his daughter’s sled, tiptoed quietly downstairs, loaded the body on the sled, and took it over to the construction site next door, where because of the holiday no one was working. He hid the body in the snow at the site, down in the foundation pit, and stuck the fingers into a pipe, then began waiting for spring, to see if he’d be arrested.

  He called the police to report that his wife had gone missing. Of course no one believed him. His father- and mother-in-law told the police all about his life with their daughter, and his coworkers informed them that Vasily was having an affair with an awful witch who kept him on a short leash and squeezed him for money but refused to marry him, because if he left his wife he’d be back in his single suit of clothes and he was thirty-two years old. Even the car that his father-in-law had arranged for him was registered as a loan to his wife. They’d surrounded him from all sides; nothing in the world belonged to him.

  But now at least, after his wife’s death, he’d have four months of peace until the snow melted—and it was also possible that her body had been buried deep beneath the cement of the new building. Not long after the murder he’d strolled over to the construction site to see if he could find his burial plot, and he couldn’t; there were building materials everywhere, and everything was covered in snow.

  The wife’s parents took their granddaughter to live with them, while Vasily was questioned on multiple occasions by a female police investigator. He kept insisting that he and his wife had gotten along poorly, that they’d had a bad fight on New Year’s Eve, that she had dressed and gone to her parents’, but that he had forbidden her from waking up their little girl.

  At long last the snow melted. Nothing happened; the body of his wife was not found.

  But one day in early June, Vasily showed up at the police station to tell the investigator that he’d murdered his wife. The investigator demanded that he prove it, at which point he led her and a team of investigators to the construction site, where workers had almost finished erecting the new buildling. The investigators couldn’t find the body, however, and there was no proof of the murder: no one had seen a body or a bag flying from the window on that busy New Year’s Eve, nor had they seen a sled, nor anything else Vasily described. He was not taken into custody. People did start saying that his conscience was getting the best of him, which is why he’d confessed, and why he’d abandoned his awful mistress—that is to say, he had changed.

  Awhile later, Vasily called his father- and mother-in-law and told them that there was a finger with red nail polish sticking out of the faucet. His father-in-law responded that if Vasily had put Tamara’s fingers into a pipe, as he claimed, and this turned out to be part of the plumbing for the new building, then in the month since the building had been finished the finger would have dissolved, or swelled up, and it certainly couldn’t have traveled all the way through the water filter, and in any case what does the water system in the new building have to do with their building, which was built long ago? That’s what the father-in-law said to him, to calm him down, but this just made Vasily more anxious. Naturally, when the wife’s parents came over, they found nothing. Vasily said he was afraid to go into the bathroom; that the finger had probably disappeared down the drain.

  And as proof, he showed his parents-in-law a flake of red nail polish that he’d found on the floor. But this didn’t prove anything, the parents said: so he found some red nail polish, big deal, many women had probably visited their home. And so Vasily still lives by himself, like an outcast, and still finds strands of hair and other evidence of his crime, and collects it all, as he gradually builds the case against himself.

  WAIT

  by Andrei Khusnutdinov

  Babushkinskaya

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  He still had the deluxe paid for at the Izmailovo Delta, but he’d decided not to show his face there anymore and in fact to forget all about hotels for the next week or two. They were sure to have searched the registration databases. He circled around on the subway for an hour or so and got out at Babushkinskaya. At the kiosks by the underground crossing, people offered rooms for anyone who needed a cheap place to stay by the day, no papers required. Another half an hour later, armed with an address, he skirted snowbound Rayevsky Cemetery to a twelve-story apartment house on Olonetsky Lane. It was a dank December night. The low sky was blanketed with a floury haze, and it was snowing lightly.

  He was met at the lobby door by an old woman who looked like she’d stepped out of a prewar photograph. Wearing a patched pea coat, big felt
boots that forced her stance so wide that he was reminded of a hockey goalkeeper, and a fluffy scarf tied at her nape, she took his money and counted it, then asked for his passport. Confidently turning the book back to the right page, she ordered him to stand in the light. Not betraying any irritation, he moved toward the lit window and removed his cap. The old woman studied his face in the picture long and hard. There was obviously something she didn’t like about it. She sniffed her fleshy nose, squinted farsightedly, and bit her lower lip. Feeling his ears and crown starting to freeze, Veltsev put his cap back on, fished in his pockets for cigarettes, and watched the old woman examining his visas, not his photograph. He was about to ask her if she was out of her mind, when the old woman forestalled him by returning his passport and motioning for him to follow her into the building.

  The lobby walls bore traces of a recent fire. The new doors of the first-floor apartments presented a striking contrast to all the other surfaces, which were either coated in smoke or peeling. With something that looked like a pass key used by a train conductor, the old woman opened a door right off the lobby and looked around before letting Veltsev move ahead of her. He walked in. At one time a fire had had the run of her front hall too. You could tell from the new layer of linoleum on the floor, the new wallpaper, the new paint on the ceiling, and the obvious, albeit blurred line where everything fresh and new jutted into the apartment.

  “This is the deal. Don’t shit on the floor or piss in the bath. Or smoke in bed,” the old woman half-whispered from the door in parting. “Relax. Telephone’s in the kitchen. If you need anything, I’m Baba Agafia.” Before Veltsev knew what was happening she’d closed the door. The key turned twice in the lock.