Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

He stood up straight and walked another few yards, eyes tracking from one lighted window to the next. He suspected himself of maudlin self-indulgence. But the truth was, he had not thought it would affect him. Or not like this. His own tedious egotism, he knew, was causing the forefront of his mind to think about her death as a prelude to his own. But deeper than that, behind the facile and the obvious, there was something else, something intangible but real and hitherto unperceived: a hollowness he had not known the shape of before; a hollowness where his conscience should have been, perhaps. And somehow this emptiness, though composed of nothing, had prickled and tremored through the day like some forgotten disease. Slight but certain. Hardly anything. Nothing.

He turned back to the river and now—as a nameless night barge came stealing by, floodlights fore, freight unknown—now her face came back to him, not as he had last seen her but young: black, black hair, those wide turquoise eyes full of tenacity and temerity, the easy disparagement of her cheekbones, the thin cracked lips, the high-bridged nose, the proportions of her frame, taut, wiry, flat-chested (the better to wear her impenetrable breastplate in battle, he had realized)—she struck him in this moment’s vision as if she were some princess of the tundra come south for obscure reprisals.

He looked up. Two lovers were walking toward him, the young man with his arm strong around the woman, seeking the Seine’s blessing and a quiet place to kiss. They stopped a little way along, his hand on the contour of her body. Ah… now this he did understand. The sweet mercy of lust. The day’s anxiety was but a passing mood after all. And what was conscience but mood wearing a uniform?

Barbara was busy amid the flurry and congestion of the ticket desk but she waved him through over the heads of the people in the queue. He was a regular at Fish, though less and less these days, and she had once been his student. He passed inside, inching like a stick insect along the bare wall of the congested corridor, excusing himself in Russian as he entered the cavernous main room, treading gingerly around stretched-out legs and vulnerable hands spread on the floor, squeezing between chairs, picking his way toward the miniature wooden table that was reserved (as promised by Sergei, the manager) in the center of the second row, directly beneath the low vertex of the brickwork arch above his head. Here the acoustics were as good as the room allowed.

He sat down, shut his eyes a moment, then opened the complimentary mineral water provided, which of course was neither complimentary nor mineral—Sergei’s “table tax” and the back-room tap giving the lie to both claims. But there was no chance of attaining the body-soaked bar, all the way at the far end of the room. So he took a deep gulp.

Now that he was alone, his mind scrambled to reach a clear understanding of what the news meant—for Arkady, but also for himself. The source was depressingly reliable: Grisha, messenger (dealer) for and associate (henchman) of the even more indeterminately extracted Leary—full name Learichenko—the syndicate-sanctioned regional controller of all matters poppy in Petersburg and the man who usually knew most things most often most quickly. Yes, Maria Glover was definitely dead. No doubt about it. Presumably, therefore, Grisha (and so Leary) thought that he, Henry, was also living off Maria Glover and that her death was the blow that would send him into their arms.

It was Grisha who had twice asked Henry to push among the ever-growing but ultra-cautious expatriate community. Henry knew the reasons why well enough: the money from many of the Russian addicts was desperately difficult to come by, constant work to extract and easily dried up (into corpses), while the better clients—the seriously wealthy Russians—were more than likely connected and went over Leary’s head via Moscow or direct; so what Leary wanted most of all was Eurotrash, wealthy expatriates who would trust only a Western dealer.

But of course Grisha and Leary were wrong in their suppositions about Maria Glover’s support. Henry had in fact been using his own money—what was left of the fifty thousand pounds he had made selling his damp little house. (Not much now, not much. He picked at the label of his water with his fingernails.) And yet… and yet they were also right. Because what mattered most to Henry was what mattered most to Arkady. And as far as the Russian was concerned, Henry realized, the whole edifice had collapsed this last hour (with the cold and unforgiving instantaneousness of death) into a sudden rubble of questions. Had she left a will? Was Arkady provided for? Arkady had just started his second year. This term’s tuition would probably have been paid already. They’d know soon enough if not. Certainly, without her funding, the corrupt members on the committee (in the papers again for embezzlement this very week) would refuse Arkady his place for the remaining year and a half, regardless of his teacher’s petitions. If he were not given some kind of a legacy, then Arkady would be out. No final concert. No launch. No expectation and no concomitant resource or opportunity. No graduation of any sort. More or less back where he started. Good. Brilliant, even. But amateur.

Unless—Henry’s mind began to move forward again—the wider family might be persuaded to help. (How many more people was Sergei going to cram in here?) Henry cursed himself. He couldn’t remember what anyone in Maria Glover’s family was called. Idiotic of him. He should have developed the acquaintance. She had seemed open enough—willing. But—damn, damn, damn—he could not now be sure if she had mentioned a single person by name, let alone where they lived or what they did. Where were her “new” children? Was her husband dead? She had never said one way or the other. Would any of them know anything at all about Arkady? He very much doubted it. God, he had been a fool; but then, you don’t expect people to die—no matter how often it happens, you just don’t expect it.

Sitting there at his tiny table (label now shredded, cheap glue sticky on his fingers), Henry could think of only one thing to try: call Zoya as soon as possible, during the intermission. Make inquiries. Discover what she knew. A shameful thought slipped nimbly through the door after the others: that Arkady might never get out of the flat after all. Henry cringed involuntarily, glanced around, almost as if to see whether his mind might have been somehow overheard, and then began to survey the room more thoroughly to distract himself.

Over by the entrance, a clutter of students were having their hands stamped with the indecipherable fluorescent insignia of the club. Sergei himself—a startlingly faithful doppelg&adie;nger of Mussolini if ever there was one—came bustling through the door again and started remonstrating with them (all jowls and chops and slather) to move farther inside, though clearly there was nowhere farther inside for them to move to, since along both brick walls, all the way back to the buried bar, people were standing three deep. It was now quarter past ten and Fish was as full as he had ever seen it. Fifteen minutes to go. Clearly the word was abroad: people were not here to see the support acts.

The lugubrious hum and chunter of a hundred Russian conversations reverberated off the curve of the shallow-arched ceiling, making individual exchanges impossible to catch or follow. Henry saw that additional chairs were being sneaked between the tables, blocking the way, so that latecomers could cram in with their friends. He assessed the crowd. Most were younger—the students and those whose dress indicated that they would be going on afterward to other clubs. But by no means all. Fish could seldom have had such a mixed clientele. The real surprise was the number of older people. A group of weathered old-timers sat immediately to his left—aficionados, judging by their modest glasses of beer and heavy brown suit jackets worn over sweaters despite the heat, men who must have tiptoed through the dark decades listening to their heroes with the volume down. Even more unusually, right at the front there was a table drinking champagne—unheard of in Fish—the women with their dedicated approximations of the latest Hollywood hair, bedizened in designer jeans and jewelry, and the forty- or fifty-year-old men in Armani or Gucci; either business or the government, Henry thought. Institutional mafia. His mouth felt dry. He took the last gulp of water. The students were laying down newspaper: they had decided simply to sit on the floor right in front of the stage; he watched as one filled his glass covertly from a flask while another, a young woman, demonstrated with her arms what she obviously felt was the ostentatious posture adopted by some pianist or other—music students, then, from the conservatory.