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

Gunter heaved up the indicated power tool from the floor and brandished it like a mighty sword.

“Tyrannosaw,” he said with a smirk.

Twenty minutes later, and a little to his own surprise, Grisha (groping unconsciously for his groin) found himself entering Arkady Alexandrovitch’s bedroom with a degree of trepidation. Though he was 100 percent certain that at this very moment the Russian was with Henry, watching Zenit’s Wednesday night game, still his mind seemed to be on tiptoes and his toes themselves a little ginger inside the stretched and swollen udders of his fat white Nikes. Yeah: something had him jumpy in here, no doubt about it.

He sighed.

It wasn’t right.

He stopped just inside the threshold and eventually located his cigarettes in one of the front pockets of his twelve-compartment combat trousers. He raised the packet as if to swig from a bottle and let the first to slide out lodge between his sticky lips before shaking the rest back in. He then set about tracking down his Zippo, patting first one leg, then the other, up and down, forward and backward. Combat—a very compartmentalized business. Keep stuff separate, that’s the thing about combat. Where the hell?

At last the zone just above the back of his left knee grudgingly relinquished the required tool. And so, relieved and taking considerable comfort in the procedure, he now lit up with stagy deliberation.

Better.

Much better.

How did he ever manage before cigarettes? Life must have been terrible. No wonder he’d started smoking at ten. In fact, come to think of it, maybe that was why his childhood was such a piece of shit. Should have started much earlier, should have started at two. He flipped the lighter shut.

Now then: what we got?

The room was more or less bare: a double mattress on the swept concrete floor, bed neatly made, thin cream blanket, white sheet folded over at the top. And that was just about it. No curtain or blind on the window (which, like those in the lounge, looked out on the Gulf of Finland), no mirror, no wardrobe, no desk, no chest, no chair, no posters or pictures, no pinups, nothing. For fuck’s sake, these two lived like monks. He pivoted. There were five or six serious nails hammered into the wall behind him, on which a few items of clothing hung flat: two white shirts, a gray greatcoat, a pair of black trousers, a dinner jacket. Beneath these, two wooden boxes, both containing what looked like underclothes. A pair of shoes. Nothing else.

Grisha exhaled thoughtfully through flared nostrils—twin off-road exhausts under heavy acceleration—and approached the wide window, walking carefully by the side of the bed. It was upsetting, was what it was: the room had a scrubbed and dusted feel, as though someone had washed everything only an hour ago. Shifting blood, lifting DNA. He looked about him. There was no money in here. (Grisha could intuit money in a place, like a water diviner sensing that delicate underground tremble.) The windowsill yielded neither residue nor discoloration to the pink of his stubby finger. The floor was everywhere stripped and bare. And the pillow, which he now bent to touch, was freshly laundered. Grisha saw that Arkady would be able to look up through the window into the sky from his bed—very nice. Grisha was tempted to lie down himself and stretch out, think, smoke, have a piss.

Hello… There was something that looked like a book in the bed, slipped in between the sheets.

Filth?

Curious, comforted, Grisha dropped to his haunches, picked it up, and flipped through.

No… it was music. Fucking music. No words, no pictures, no tits, no pussy. Just notes. Not even a rogue arse. Grisha’s expression grew distant, thoughts developing slowly but steadily, like graffiti declaring itself letter by letter on a waste-ground wall. Wait… Yes, that was it. The answer he had been looking for. How to fuck everything even faster. No need for any further consideration. Leary would love it. Grisha grinned grotesquely. He replaced the music, stood up, flicked his ash carefully into his cupped palm, and left the room.

And so to the main business.

Grisha next entered Henry’s room, smashing the door hard against the wardrobe inside as he opened it. Much smaller in here, and darker too. Almost messy by comparison. Now then—where? A single mattress, likewise on the floor. A small window. The freestanding wardrobe. A high shelf heavy with books running down either side of the room. A chest of drawers. A school desk and a chair covered in clothes. Two boxes of needles stacked with the hospital insignia on the side. A black garbage bag under the desk. Where would a skinny little shit-stabber keep his money?

Grisha surveyed the ceiling, hoping for giveaways. No breaks or cracks or panels. Nothing. The floor was the same flat Soviet-crap concrete as Arkady’s, save for a rug. He bent and flipped it: nothing. The stunted baseboards were all intact. He dragged the wardrobe out from the wall. Nothing obvious back there. He turned to face the room again. Surely not under the… He upended the mattress. Nothing. Ripping off the sheet, he checked all the way around. No slits. No pouches. Nothing.

All right then, so be it, let’s do this properly. Grisha ground his cigarette into the twisted rug and unsheathed his prized Uzbek knife.

For the next fifteen minutes, he devoted himself to a thoroughly efficient and concentrated search in which everything, absolutely everything, was tipped out, tipped over, upended, yanked, emptied, slit, spilled, split, dumped. And all things passed beneath Grisha’s eyes—gravel-gray piggy little nugget-sifters—and many through his greasy palms, but nothing for more than the second it took to ascertain their status as harborers of money or otherwise.

He worked with surprising energy and the absorbed gibbonlike strength that his odd dimensions gave him. Truth be fucking told, it wasn’t often these days that he got the chance to go back to basics, and he had to admit that he rather enjoyed it… Enjoyed it too much, maybe, because, as he now realized, he hadn’t been thinking. Grisha grimaced. That was the problem: you got carried away; you forgot yourself. Good job Gunter was on guard and not here to witness this minifailure. He drew breath.

Time for another snout.

He lit up, sucked in, and sat down, resting heavily on the corner of the overturned desk. With Henry it was all very straightforward: find the money, find the man; take the money, destroy the man. And no amount of ancillary damage would really matter two bitch’s shits to Henry once he discovered the money was gone. Leary’s work was easily done. Grisha could chainsaw the walls in half if he felt like it. Henry wouldn’t notice. Because money was what guaranteed Henry’s supply and protecting supply was all the poor bastard was capable of caring about. (And also, since he, Grisha, was Henry’s supplier, finding the money was all that was necessary to bring him in.) But where?

The fucking books!

A moment of genius.

Butt- fucker.

Obvious, yes, but that’s genius for you—a mixture of the obvious and the inspired. Grisha rubbed his cupped palm back and forth across the stubble of his razed number-two scalp. He could not be sure where exactly these moments of brilliance came from—there was some unknowable black magic going on deep in the sightless coal mines of his interior, and every so often news of a diamond would come smoking up some unexpected shaft or other and he would be as amazed as the next man.

Almost ruefully, he stood on Henry’s creaking wooden chair—a compact titan towering above the shredded landfill—and began working his way quickly along the shelf, picking up each book and dangling it by the spine, pages hanging as he shook them back and forth, hurling the rejects at the wall when he was satisfied.