Michael Honig - The Senility of Vladimir P.

As Sheremetev looked on, the doctor opened his bag and put the watches in, one after the other. He stopped only when it came to the seventh watch on the table, lying a little apart from the others, the old Poljot that Belkin had thrown away. ‘Rubbish,’ he muttered, and he left it where it was. Then he closed the latch over the other watches in his bag with a snap.

The doctor turned back to him. ‘I don’t think we need an autopsy. The case is clear.’

‘I agree,’ said Sheremetev.

‘You held him off in self defence. He had the same dose of drugs he’d had a hundred times.’

‘Yes,’ said Sheremetev.

Rospov smiled. ‘Good. I’ll write the death certificate. A man of his age with dementia – sooner or later his heart’s going to give up.’

The doctor picked up his bag and headed for the door. ‘Take me to the housekeeper, please. You were going to introduce me last time, remember? I should inform her that Vladimir Vladimirovich has passed on and that I will be letting the appropriate authorities know.’

‘Ah, the housekeeper, Dr Rospov…’ Sheremetev tried to think of a plausible excuse for her absence. But after all the lies he had told, it seemed that this was one lie too far. His mind went blank.

‘What, Nikolai Ilyich?’ demanded the doctor, turning the door handle.

‘Well, she…’

He stopped as Rospov pulled back the door. The corridor outside the suite was full of people. Word had spread in the dacha that the doctor had arrived for the boss, and somehow everyone sensed the worst. For the last fifteen minutes, they had been coming up the stairs and waiting for that door to open

But the doctor wasn’t taken aback. ‘I have bad news!’ announced Rospov, who relished the opportunity to be the centre of attention provided by births, deaths and major injury. ‘I have just been to see Vladimir Vladimirovich. The great man, Russia’s great leader, is dead.’

The inhabitants of the dacha stared back at him, stunned. They couldn’t care less how great a leader – or how terrible – Vladimir had been. Their concerns were entirely more selfish.

‘He died of natural causes. No foul play is suspected! I am going to inform the authorities. In the meantime, Nikolai Ilyich will stay with the deceased to ensure that nothing is disturbed.’

Sheremetev gazed at his fellow denizens of the dacha. Maids, gardeners, security guards, all had come to find out if they would continue to feast on the living corpse of the ex-president or if the party had come to an end – and now they knew.

He recognised four or five of the guards who had been in the dining room last night when Barkovskaya was dying. Near them stood Eleyekov with a frown on his face, wondering, no doubt, what would happen to his highly tuned vehicles. Stepanin was there along with his potwashers, unshaven, heavy bags under his eyes, misery etched into his features. He didn’t look as if he had had much sleep the previous night. Their eyes met for an instant before the cook looked away. What fuckery, thought Sheremetev. Eh, Vitya? You beat Barkovskaya, and now Artyusha’s boys will clean you out of every kopeck you’ve saved.

And there was Goroviev, gazing at him knowingly, with even a faint hint of a smile. It occurred to Sheremetev that the gardener wouldn’t grieve for the loss of his illicit income, no matter how large it had been. Things live, things grow, things die. That was what Goroviev had said to him. That was the truth of life. He was the only one, thought Sheremetev, who knew how to live in the Russia that Vladimir had created. To hate quietly, and to take. He was the only one who had got it right.

‘Now, I must ask you all to disperse,’ said Rospov solemnly. He had forgotten about being introduced to the housekeeper. Besides, there was hardly any need to tell her personally what had happened, now that everyone knew, and in any case, this would probably be his last visit here. ‘I’m sure you’ll have the opportunity to pay your respects at a later time. Please. Clear the way.’

Slowly at first, then more quickly, people began to move along the corridor and down the stairs.

‘Nikolai Ilyich,’ said the doctor, ushering Sheremetev back into Vladimir’s suite. ‘Please.’

HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW long he had been sitting there. Could have been two minutes. Could have been two hours.

He had locked the door behind him and then he had sat, in a chair that stood a few metres from the bed, lost in his thoughts. Eventually he got up. He raised the sheet that covered Vladimir’s corpse. The face on the pillow was familiar and yet strange, as a face always is in death, features one knows but that are somehow different, lax, lacking something that had been there in life, as if a facsimile of the real thing.

He let the sheet drop. Now there was no dilemma for him. He could leave the dacha. He wouldn’t have to imagine Vladimir with that look of confusion and fear in his eyes, unable to be comforted.

Sheremetev felt at his cheek. The wound was open. He shook his head, smiling helplessly at the predictability of it. Rospov had left without tending to him. Once he got the watches in his bag, all he wanted to do was get out of there.

The watches, Pasha’s last hope. How much would they have been worth? It didn’t matter, he thought hopelessly. That wasn’t a question any more. He felt as if he had been thinking about stealing watches forever – now he would never have to wonder about the worth of a watch again.

But Pasha? What was going to happen? Unless the prosecutor was prepared to drop his price by ninety percent and release him in exchange for the money Sheremetev had under his bed, there was no way out for him.

He had traded his freedom for Pasha’s, the autopsy for the watches. Or had he? Even in the depths of his self-revulsion, Sheremetev knew that once the doctor had noticed those watches, he would never have been able to keep them. Even if he had said to the doctor, yes, do an autopsy, Rospov’s greed for them was so transparent, that he would have found a way to get hold of them.

An autopsy would have revealed a huge dose of tranquilliser in Vladimir’s blood, enough to fell an elephant, and perhaps a haemorrhage around the brain or the spleen. The tranquilliser by itself would have been enough to convict him, if not of murder, surely of manslaughter or some other charge.

Maybe Vladimir would have approved, to trade justice for a few trinkets. He had often done the equivalent, Sheremetev suspected, although on an incomparably larger scale. What a liar he had been, what a criminal. Now, Sheremetev could at least say that openly to himself. He was no longer Vladimir’s nurse, and the ex-president was no longer his patient. There was no need for him to hold his thoughts in check. It served him right, Sheremetev thought, for justice to be cheated for the sake of a handful of watches. Die as you lived, Vladimir Vladimirovich. At least have the decency to do that.

Did he mean to kill him? What was it really, murder or manslaughter? Sheremetev tried to remember what was going through his mind in those last terrifying moments, tried to relive the chaotic stream of events. As he got up, with his hand on Vladimir’s face, did he really need to thump his head against the floor? As he ran to his room, as he locked himself in, panicked, hands trembling, heart thumping, feeling the vibrations of Vladimir pounding on the door behind him, could he really not calculate the dose of the tranquilliser that he had administered so many times before, could he really not steady himself sufficiently to draw up less than the whole vial – the whole vial – into the syringe?

But he had been scared, genuinely scared, thinking that any second Vladimir might come smashing through the door. Maybe that was the explanation. Or maybe he wanted Vladimir to die. Or maybe he didn’t care, which was almost as bad.