Lydia Fitzpatrick - Lights All Night Long

This time Ilya followed her down the hallway, and when they reached a door at its end, she put a hand up to stop him and disappeared behind it.

“He brought these,” Ilya heard her say, without emotion, and Ilya could hear nothing from Gabe. He put his hand on the knob. Ida had not locked it. He could twist it, push it open, have a moment to see Gabe’s face—but then the door opened of its own accord.

Gabe was sitting on a couch. His hair had been shaved, and he’d gained weight. Fat wreathed his face, his features gathered in the middle like a herd huddling for protection. He was in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt and his foot was swaddled in an enormous bandage. The room was hazy, the blinds pulled, the light like a video with poor resolution. A TV was on, but muted, its colors dancing on the shiny skin at Gabe’s temples. The pamphlets were in his hands. He’d grasped the top one between his thumb and forefinger as though he were still by his bench in Berlozhniki, ready to hand it to the next passerby.

“Here he is,” Ida said, and Ilya did not know which of them she was talking to.

“I’m from Berlozhniki,” Ilya said. “Ilya.”

Gabe nodded.

“You’re OK?” Ida said, and Gabe nodded again, and she turned and disappeared back down the hallway.

Ilya wanted to make her stay. He wanted to know exactly where J.T.’s truck was and how long it would take him to run to it. Sunlight pulsed at the edges of the blinds. He’d gotten disoriented inside the house and wasn’t sure whether the truck was outside one of Gabe’s windows or in a different direction entirely. He catalogued his talismans: Sadie’s phone was in his back pocket, Timofey’s knife was in the front pouch of his sweatshirt, and he’d worn both of the saint medals that Babushka had given him although he believed in neither of them and neither was specific to this occasion, to confronting a murderer.

“You kept them,” Gabe said. The Path to Salvation was on top. That was the one he was holding. “Did you read them?”

He should have, if only to know Gabe better, but he shook his head, and Gabe laughed, this short, shallow sound.

“No,” Ilya said. “They were my grandmother’s. She cut out the pictures.” His English felt thick and slow, was suddenly something he was conscious of again, like his fear had tripped some crucial neural circuit.

“At least she didn’t burn them like everyone else,” Gabe said. He set the pamphlets next to him on the couch and said, “Why are you here?”

Ilya had meant to ease into the subject of Lana’s murder, to try to catch Gabe off guard, but the directness of Gabe’s question had caught him off guard, and so he said, “I’m a friend of Lana’s.”

When he said Lana’s name, Gabe stiffened. He hunched forward, his back coming off the cushions, and there, in that one movement, Ilya saw what he’d come for. Gabe knew Lana, and he knew something about her death. His eyes settled on Ilya’s face, reading it, wondering at Ilya’s intent. Ilya had not noticed his eyes at first, but they were blue and bright even in the dimness of the room, bright enough that it seemed to Ilya that they could read his intent, that Gabe understood that Ilya was working up the nerve to ask if he had killed Lana, was trying to force himself to say that word “kill,” was wondering why Maria Mikhailovna had taught him it, how she had divined that it would be necessary and made him conjugate it just as she had thousands of other, more innocent words.

“Lana,” Gabe said. He slumped back against the couch, and there, in the defeat of that one movement, Ilya saw that he hadn’t killed her, that Gabe had never killed a soul.

“You knew her?” Ilya said. He had the pictures in his duffel. He could prove that Gabe had known her, but he didn’t need them, because Gabe was nodding.

“Yeah,” he said. “We went out together a couple times. To the Tower. To Dolls once. Sometimes we hooked up.”

“What happened?” Ilya said, and Gabe didn’t seem surprised at the question. He seemed relieved by it, in just the way that Ilya felt relieved to hear Gabe talk about the Tower, like by saying the things that came to them in nightmares they might rob them of their power.

“We would meet in the polyana. To hook up,” he said. It was the word they’d used for the grove of trees where Lana’s body had been found. A local word, one that Lana must have taught him. “Or to get drunk. Or high, if we had anything. It wasn’t a regular thing. Not like she was my girlfriend.” Gabe laughed suddenly, and then just as suddenly he stopped. “We could understand like ten words the other one was saying. I wouldn’t even know how to say ‘girlfriend,’ but I liked her. At least I think I did.” He rubbed a hand across the top of his head, then let it drop in his lap. “I was supposed to meet her there the night she got killed, but I didn’t want to go ’til I scored. She wouldn’t have wanted me there ’til I scored.” He said this like there was a clear logic to it, and there was, Ilya guessed. The same addict logic that Vladimir had used when he’d stolen their stuff and sold it at the pawnshop, when he’d asked Lana to sleep with Ilya in exchange for the krokodil. “And there was this guy at the Tower who usually hooked me up. Either him or your brother.”

“My brother,” Ilya said, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice. He had not planned to tell Gabe that he was Vladimir’s brother. Vladimir had been accused of the murders, and whether Gabe was guilty or innocent, Ilya’s relationship to him was bound to put Gabe on edge.

“Vladimir, right? He talked about you all the time, about how you were coming here,” Gabe said. “You look a little like him.”

Ilya nodded, ignoring the vision of Vladimir flooding his mind: Vladimir, in the thick of a drug deal, bragging to an American about how his brother was moving to America, about how he’d come home and run the whole machine. “Sergey’s the other one that would sell to you?” he said.

“Yeah,” Gabe said. “He seemed to be the boss, or at least a little more sober. Sometimes he’d give me some. To be nice, I guess. Or maybe to keep me hooked.”

“Did you find them that night? At the Tower? Did you find Vladimir?”

Gabe nodded. “Yeah, around midnight, I think. So I got high. Got drunk. I hadn’t forgotten about Lana, but it wasn’t serious like that. She’d stood me up a few times. So it was almost morning when I made it over there. Four or five a.m. It was so dark that it was hard to tell.” He paused. His story had seemed smooth up until now, like something he’d gone over in his mind enough times that it didn’t hurt him to say it aloud, even the parts he was ashamed of, but as he went on, his voice tightened, gained this quality that made Ilya think of the way ice shrieked before it shattered. “I knew right away that she was dead, even before I saw her neck. It wasn’t that she wasn’t moving—” He paused, grappling with something ineffable, some quality in the dead that was instantly recognizable to the living, and Ilya thought of the snowplow driver and how he’d known that Yulia was dead the moment he’d seen her leg. Ilya nodded, not because he understood, but because he needed Gabe to go on. “I could tell she was dead, and I didn’t know what to do but pray. I’d never talked to her about God or whether she believed. I knew better than to bring it up, with her or anyone else at the Tower. By then it was like there were two of me: the one who had faith and the one who’d lost it, or I guess that’s what I liked to think, but of course it was just the one me. Drunk off my ass and praying for her because I didn’t know what else to do. There was blood all around her. The snow was so bloody, and I remember that I was careful to stay in the white snow. I didn’t want her blood on me. And then at a certain point I got so cold that I started to feel warm, hot, even, like I could stay there forever, and I thought it might be a message, like God was telling me that I was doing the right thing, but another part of me knew that I’d die if I stayed. So I left her there. And as I was walking away, it hit me: she’d chosen the grove, she’d convinced whoever killed her to go there, because she’d thought there was a chance that I might come in time. That I might save her. And when I realized that, I couldn’t leave her. I turned around, and just as I did, a car passed me on the lumber road, and a minute later, somebody got out of it and walked into the grove.”