Liza Alexandrova-Zorina - The Little Man

«Did your father have an argument with Antonov that night?»

Vasilisa nodded.

«Where did the gun come from?»

«Coffin gave it to him.»

«So why did your father kill Coffin and not Antonov?» Vasilisa shrugged her shoulders and exchanged a look with hermother.

«Why would he kill Antonov? For wanting to give me a lift?»

«Why would he kill Coffin?» asked Lapin unsure whether Mrs Savage was pretending or whether she really didn't know what her daughter had been doing in the Councillor's car.

«Perhaps when your father saw you in Antonov's car he didn't see it like that?» Lapin asked, choosing his words as carefully as he would pick his way through a minefield, annoyed for the umpteenth time that he couldn't go straight to the point and ask a direct question.

«Did you see your father shoot Coffin?» he asked without waiting for an answer.

«Yes,» Vasilisa replied. «He shot him with the gun Coffin gave him.»

«And why did Coffin give him the gun?»

«So that Dad would shoot him…»

Lapin raised his eyebrows.

«That's what he said?» Shoot me «And your father did.»

Lapin was trying to imagine Coffin giving a passer-by a gun and that passer-by pressing the trigger like a coldblooded killer and he couldn't believe a word of it. There was something not right about this story.

«Can you imagine him strangling Antonov?» Lapin asked at which Mrs Savage got up, indicating that the conversation was over.

A woman's face is like a book. The face of a young girl reveals her foolish dreams. The face of a young woman is marked by thoughts that make her lips curl, tilt up the end of her nose or leave shadows under her eyes. The face of a mature woman contains her life story and she has to hide it under a thick layer of powder and lipstick as red as blood. As he struggled to put on his coat, Lapin studied Mrs Savage. He understood that marriage without love is like plain porridge and sleeping with someone else's husband adds a pinch of salt. But you can only eat one at a time.

As he went downstairs, Lapin cast a distracted eye over the smattering of confessions on the walls and went over the three killings in his mind, trying to imagine them all being carried out by Savage. It seemed so ludicrous that he gave a wry grin. «Truth is what you believe in,» Lapin muttered to himself. «And you believe what you want to believe,» he nodded, agreeing with himself.

When he went outside, he looked up and saw mother and daughter jump away from the window. The old lady on the bench looked like a crow, grey hair tumbling from a black headscarf, her nose long as a bird's beak.

«Who would have thought it…?» he began still at a distance, nodding up at Savage's window.

«Don't believe what people say. People are wicked. They gossip!» the old woman said, poking Lapin. «He wouldn't do any harm. He was like a mouse. He always asked after my health.» She shook her head: «There's no-one to talk to now.»

As he half listened to her chatter, Lapin was thinking about Shorty who, like Savage, seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth since Coffin died. In the old gang, Shorty, when he still had his legs and his own name, had a reputation for being reckless, a dare-devil, afraid of neither God nor man nor indeed the prosecutor, but after the explosion in the restaurant he had become the gang's jester. Hatred nestled in his heart like a cat. It could be seen in the lines around his mouth and Coffin would hear the cripple's teeth chatter in his sleep as he dreamt of getting even but the gangster enjoyed testing his own nerves so he kept him close like a time bomb. Gradually, however, Shorty got used to his fate and the gang leader got so used to him that he even seemed to believe the cripple would bring him luck. Now, though, Shorty had vanished as if Coffin had taken him with him, reluctant to give up his mascot. Had Lapin discovered how Saam buried Shorty he would have been astonished at his own insight.

Savage's sense of danger had dulled his hunger. When he was keeping watch on Antonov he had survived on mushrooms and two gone-to-seed potatoes. Back in the forest, however, he realized how deadly tired he really was. His hands and feet were as heavy as lead and Savage moved with difficulty as if there were an unseen wall in front of him. His head was spinning. Everything swam before his eyes and when he fell flat on his face, he lay there for what seemed like an eternity, too weak to move. Shivers wracked his aching body and he wept, praying for a speedy death. Savage felt as if someone was performing an autopsy, running a scalpel from his neck to the bottom of his stomach causing a sharp, intense pain and then with an almighty tear he was opened up and left to lie, eviscerated, like a tattered old mattress. In his delirium, he felt as if the wind was wandering through his intestines, chilling him through, while pine needles worked their way inside and pricked his stomach. The trees bent over Savage like doctors over an operating table and he was gripped by hunger-induced terror: it seemed as though the branches were reaching towards him to rip him to pieces and their dark hollows appeared as snarling mouths about to swallow him up. Suffering and tormented, Savage sank into a state of semi-sleep, semi-delirium, one minute feverish, the next shivering with cold. He lay unconscious for several days.

When he did come round, he couldn't remember where he was or why. Running his hands over his unfamiliar, wizened body that refused to do what it was told, he tried to stand up but to no avail. He had only enough strength to turn onto his side and stare at a pale patch of lichen that for some reason made him think of the fruit in meringue his mother used to make and he smacked his lips at the recollection. Other types of moss were coming up through the lichen like alien species. Predatory heads hung on slender stalks and their hollow tubes opened wide mouths. Savage thought that the jungle on some remote planet would look like this and he wanted to lose himself in the moss, escaping from the now repellent pines and birches that were all he ever encountered in the inhospitable Polar taiga. He could no longer tell whether he was roaming an alien planet in his imagination or whether he had shrunk to the size of a crowberry, darkening on its bush, and was lying amid mosses and lichens that towered above him. Reaching for the berries with a numb hand, he picked them, crushed them and licked them off his palm. They had no taste but they did quench his thirst and so Savage picked more, driving away the crazy thoughts and terrors that sent shivers down his spine.

By evening, Savage was feeling better and, guided by the television tower that could be seen above the trees, he trudged away from the town towards the dachas where he hoped to find something to eat. Plodding through the forest, he went in circles, losing the path. He was seeing double which made the television tower appear sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left. In the end he was completely lost and found himself on the outskirts of town.

Two teenagers were hiding behind the garages. One of them, a strap round his arm, was clumsily trying to find a vein. A couple of months earlier, Savage would have gone past with his head down but now, picking up a stone, he headed for the boys.

«Hey, you. Lose the syringe!» he yelled and the boys, seeing a tattered tramp threatening them with a stone fled. «If I see you again, I'll kill you-ou-ou!» His cry floated above the garages.

Savage remembered a teenager who used to spend the night in the entrance hall to his block of flats. At the time, Savage was on leave, spending it as he had for many years in front of the television, counting the days till he went back to work.

As usual, he woke up at the crack of dawn before the alarm went off but he had nowhere to go and was lolling in bed, listening to the sounds from outside. In the hubbub that reached him from the courtyard, he could pick out the shrill notes of his wife demanding that somebody call the police. When he looked out of the window, he could see his assembled neighbours.