St. Petersburg Noir

by Natalia Smirnova

  “So should we talk tomorrow?” He stopped the car at the same gateway where I got in.

  I had already grabbed hold of the door handle, but I thought that I should say something, even if he didn’t believe me.

  “If you want my advice,” I said, “disappear as quickly as possible. Throw away your cell phone, change your clothes, abandon your car, and take a commuter train as far away as you can. It would be best if you didn’t even stop by your place.”

  “What??”

  What else did I need to explain to him? The door softly swooshed closed behind me; I was about to open my umbrella, but it turned out that the rain had stopped. He revved the Lexus, then the car jumped forward and hurtled away through the puddles.

  I turned around: in front of me, wrapped up in a greasy velour coat, stood a little old woman—and when she raised her head (it was bald, that head; wisps of hair hung here and there, but it appeared more like mold that had set in from dirt and damp), I would have cried out, if fear and loathing hadn’t left me dumbstruck, because she had tenacious and greedy eyes, one of which she winked at me, after twitching her nose as the Lexus drove away—and I almost let out a groan, in any case some sort of wailing sound began to arise from under my ribs, but the old woman had already passed me by and was scurrying away. Her hands were folded behind her back, and her raggedy empty bag swung back and forth.

  Cold, black waves of terror washed over me one after the other. To find myself in the emptiness and darkness of an apartment would have been like death. I needed a crowded, noisy place as much as I needed air to breathe—the terrible old woman’s eyes kept dancing in front of me. I flinched. All I could see was the predatory, damp darkness.

  The rhythm of my gait, the senseless snatch of conversation—“We’ll think about it”—made my heart begin to thump as if it had broken loose from a chain. It suddenly occurred to me that because of all the scrambling around I did today, I seemed to have forgotten to take my pills, and so I should take them—but the main thing was that maybe there wasn’t anything particularly terrible in that effing simple old woman from Kolomna. Nevertheless, the glass door of Toasted was lit up, and it would have been silly not to drop in.

  Turned out she sings. The evening was coming to an end—that’s probably why she was singing something dreamily melancholy. I managed to drain half a glass in the time that she kept repeating a hundred times: “When you die asleep your dreams will keep on going … When you die awake you just die …”

  Later, when she got down from the stage and took the seat next to me, to get the conversation going (and she turned out to be very, very pretty: an exquisite face with wide eyes, sculpted cheekbones, and determined, thickly painted lips) I asked her about the song. She turned toward me, took a sip from her glass, and said: “It’s a Buddhist song. About the right way to die.”

  I think that I’m only now beginning to understand what she had in mind; but then I simply didn’t pay any attention—I was much more taken with the movement of Nadya’s lips. She asked me what I did, I said that I was a private investigator (and jokes about a hat, cigar, and the femme fatale), I asked her how old she was (“You look sixteen, but when you sing—it’s like you’re thirty-five”), then we walked around (it was clearing up in the city, and it started to look like an antique silver damask; I was forced to admit that I hadn’t been in the city for more than a decade, so I didn’t know where you could go now to get a decent bite to eat), she kept asking me about London, and I kept trying to make her talk: I wanted to hear her voice again and again, all night long—finally we ended up on Repin Street and decided it was stupid for her to try to find a taxi and take her God knows how far.

  I’d like to meet the man who wouldn’t have mentally undressed her if he found himself in my shoes. But when we were heading up and I tried to kiss her, she slipped away and said that she wasn’t going to sleep with me. I sighed and made a farting noise with my lips (we were drunk), but no means no, all those schoolboy games—an hour on the T-shirt, an hour on the bra, an hour on the pants, an hour on the panties, and an hour and a half to persuade her to spread her legs, and then to be too fed up to want anything besides giving her a smack on the head—no, no, that’s not for me; I poured myself a cognac, showed Nadya where the bathroom was, and went to bed. As I was falling dead asleep, I remembered that I still hadn’t taken my pills.

  II

  Next morning I found her lying next to me in bed (“Sorry, there weren’t any sheets anywhere, and you were already asleep …”)—but how could I help myself from making a pass at Isolde in the morning, and what kind of Tristan am I with a hangover? She plunged deeper into sleep, I went to the kitchen to squeeze some juice, and I had almost a full glass when the phone started ringing and I remembered that I was supposed to meet Yura. I walked over to the window, moved the curtain aside, and saw that he was circling the column as he explained that he had already been waiting five minutes. I told him to calm down and sit on the bench for another ten minutes, finished squeezing the juice, put a glass by Isolde’s bedside and my spare set of keys next to the glass—you see, I like sentimental gestures.

  I wasn’t trying to be clever when I told Stepanych that I didn’t want to go to Piter—it’s terrifying and dangerous, though to some degree there was a plus-side as well: Yura. Yura was wearing a suit now, and it looked like an expensive one (he didn’t sit down, but waited for me standing), but there was a time when he wore ripped jeans—it was his style, to get out of his father’s car wearing ripped jeans. (The ripped jeans weren’t the style, they were simply ripped jeans.) I was waiting for the wonder of recognition—the same whimper and joy with which my heart greeted the Rumyantsev Garden with its gloomy, forgotten column and empty summer stage, and the littered backyards of the academy, and the view of the shipyards: a flock of steel-blue birds which had alighted on some carrion—but no, Yura was simply a benevolent operator, and it’s frightening to share memories with people like that. I gave him the photographs and envelope. As we were getting ready to part, I told him “Thank you,” and he said, “I haven’t done anything yet,” but I thought that there was something to be grateful for—the fact that he didn’t stop to see if it was all there. Yura left; I was still sitting on the bench, smoking. A cold wind was blowing, the sky was clear, like porcelain. Given the chance, I would have burst into tears at the impossibility of dissolving without a trace in the icy, still transparency of Petersburg.

  Stepanych called me precisely at that moment.

  “Listen, Stepanych, you told me yourself to sit on my ass quietly and not show myself. To let you know if they start following me. And now you ask me what I’m doing? I’m sitting quietly on my butt.”

  He burst out laughing. “You’re a chip off the old block. He’d lie there with his legs raised for several months too, and then he’d move like a whirlwind, you couldn’t keep up with him.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Excuse me. I liked your dad a lot … Well, if something comes up, call me.”

  I hadn’t been gone for long—I went out to buy some oranges and a fresh baguette—but when I returned my bed was made and the glass had been washed. It was disgustingly quiet in the apartment, and to keep from hearing this silence (it’s funny, but Stepanych was absolutely right: the main thing for me now was to wait for the call from the guy in the Lexus—I didn’t doubt for a moment that he would shrug off my warnings), I went to bed. On the pillow next to me lay several of her hairs, I gave them a good sniff and it seemed that maybe, just maybe, the pillow really did still carry the sweet secret of Isolde’s scent.

  I hung out at Toasted every night (even Miss Piercing stopped turning her nose up at me), so it’s quite possible that certain events got shuffled around in my memory, either on that same day, or altogether: that night I woke up with the sense that I wasn’t completely awake and made my way to the club as though I were in some sort of milky fog (while I was sleeping, the wind pounded the rain, and once again it was drizzli
ng), and what’s more, while I was walking I even glanced a few times at my palms, to make certain that I wasn’t walking in my sleep—somebody had told me that you can’t look at your own palms in a dream. It was probably that night, just after I’d taken a seat at the bar and stuck my finger in the bottle, when her voice announced from the stage that among us there was a private detective and that she was dedicating her performance to him—and after that she sang for an entire hour “Sway,” “Put the Blame on Mame,” “Amado mio,” and for some reason “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas.” I was intimately familiar with all of them—down to the last note. That evening or some time later she sang “the Buddhist song about the right way to die” again—I’m not sure when. In any case, it was definitely one of those evenings, because I wouldn’t have remembered it from hearing it the first time.

  Occasionally she would come down from the stage and sit with me, but we didn’t drink as much as we had that first night—not that night, or later on. All the more so as that night I ended up getting my call, I went outside to talk (the guy was mumbling with exaggerated bravado; I understood at once that everything had come together, and without even thinking I set up another meeting in the Rumyantsev Garden), and after that I never went back to the club; as I was saying goodbye to the “financial analyst,” I noticed the bald old woman on the other side of the street.

  At first I automatically took several steps in her direction, but then I lost sight of her for a moment. When she appeared again, I began to catch up with her—I needed to get a look at her face, but I felt a bit awkward: maybe it wasn’t the woman. I walked for a fairly long time; the opportunity to get a casual look didn’t present itself—she wasn’t hiding her face, it simply didn’t work out. In the end, she disappeared, she suddenly dove into a gate or a door; after taking a look around, I heaved a deep sigh as I straightened myself: I could just make out the archway of New Holland in the violet darkness.

  As I was crossing back across the bridge (maybe I had sobered up, or maybe it was on account of the old woman—in any case, I was in a real shitty mood) it occurred to me that New Holland and the Rumyantsev Garden could be (or to be more exact: had always been) the heads of two screws with which my Petersburg had been joined to nonexistence, to the Neva. New Holland—empty, overgrown, almost in ruins, with its cyclopean triumphal arch—it might be that it was the only thing left of imperial, Rome-like Petersburg, and it would only take a greedy bat with his shitty investments to get to it to build some disgusting Hamburger Bahnhof for the whole city, with a gnashing sound, to become set loose from this swamp and, listing to one side, take on water, and float out into the open sea.

  Later Nadya laughed, as if to say, Do you always give a girl the keys to your apartment right away instead of giving her your telephone number? I said I only did it when the girl knew the right way to die, but the compliment seemed to fall flat. That was the next day, when I photographed her. After the meeting in the Rumyantsev Garden, which I observed from the kitchen window, I understood that I needed photographs of her. A black BMW with tinted windows pulled up, the pale financial analyst got out from the backseat. At first he walked around the column, then he started to phone (the phone on my table blinked silently). After twenty-five minutes he glanced in the direction of the car, nodded, and slowly walked back, but just a few steps away from the vehicle he jumped up and took off running in the direction of Repin Street. The car doors slammed shut twice, the guy made an angry gesture with his fist, and as he flew down the street, he came crashing down headfirst on the curb. The Beemer pushed off with a quiet swoosh.

  I photographed Nadya first in the club—on the stage, at the bar, and she came out dark on a dark background, the thing wasn’t cooperating (I hadn’t bothered to read the instructions)—and then later in my apartment; there I managed to get her unawares in the bathroom flooded with halogen light on the background of ceramic tiles as white as teeth—just the thing. She slammed the door shut with a crash, and I chose the shot in which she had just turned around and hadn’t had time to open her mouth—and I dialed Yura’s number. First I dictated the license plate number of the Beemer, and then I asked how the document was coming.

  “It’ll be taken care of tomorrow, why?”

  “I need another one.”

  “What the fuck! Do you want to be Sovereign of the Seas as well?

  “My dear boy, don’t worry, I know the price. The premium for fucking with your head is an extra 50 percent. Well?”

  Yura heaved a sigh and said that he would try. “Exactly the same kind?”

  “No, it’s for a girl.”

  “I should have known, people don’t change,” Yura burst out laughing.

  The noise from the water in the bathroom had stopped, so I quickly finished what I had to say to Yura and threw the phone down. Nadya was beautiful, like a newly born Venus, and she even let me kiss her, but when I tried to slide my palm under her bathrobe, she pulled away and said that she didn’t sleep with cheeky private detectives.

  “So who do you sleep with?” What else was there to say?

  “Only with those who know the right way to die,” she said, and then stuck her tongue out at me.

  I had completely forgotten about my pills—I’d remembered several times, but reluctantly: I was enjoying this sensation of self-control and concentration, and I needed to keep feeling like that: it was a winning combination, but only if I played my cards right. Moreover, I just wasn’t up to taking them; in the evening I fell asleep on the same bed as Nadya (but alas not under the same sheet), and in the morning I woke up next to her—that’s just how things turned out.

  The keys stayed with her once again—I left before light, before dawn, in order to catch Yura, and she and I didn’t meet until evening at Toasted. Coming back from Yura’s, I got lost in the Kolomna streets which are as straight as pipes—I deliberately decided to return on foot: at first it was amusing, I didn’t ask directions on purpose, the streets and the river twisted around, came together (I probably hadn’t sobered up completely). The Pryazhka flowed into the Moika, the Moika pretended to be the Kryukov, the Kryukov ran off to one side, it seemed like several hours had passed, I was deeply agitated, cursing under my breath—when I finally dragged myself to the apartment, Nadya was already gone, and I collapsed on the bed, putting the phone down nearby. On the pillow lay her hairs, just like the day before yesterday.

  I had night sweats, tossed and turned from one side of the bed to the other, and only at Toasted that night—Miss Piercing kept giving me a hard time, and among other things claimed I’m lying when I say that I’m a private detective, private detectives don’t just sit around drinking in bars all day long; on the contrary, Nadia retorted, that was all they did, and she sang a bit of “As Time Goes By,” but I nevertheless had to answer the question about what I was investigating (the loss of a document from a leading company’s managerial file, I duly reported to the ensuing serving of her giggles)—did I remember that earlier in the day I had been wrenched from sleep by Stepanych’s phone call and he’d told me to be ready for anything, and kept stressing that his guys, who were sitting there waiting like a fire brigade, would be on the move as soon as the alarm was sounded.

  “We can’t get by without the guys?”

  “Maybe in your Berlins and Londons you can get by without the guys, but here you snooze you lose, or as the Germans say, In die grossen Familien nicht with the beak klats-klats! (I at once recalled how as I child all those generals with whom my father had business would make me feel sick with their stupid jokes.)

  Miss Piercing kept pestering me, and I didn’t understand why, until—it seems it wasn’t that night—I asked her almost out of nowhere whether she was into women, and it turned out that I hit it on the nail. After Stepanych’s call (or to be more precise, after I remembered it in the club) I saw with the clarity of an advertising photo of a resort flooded with sunshine that the main thing for me was not to come unhinged.

  An additional complication wa
s that I had become restless, I couldn’t sit still, I was rushing up and down streets, checking whether I was being followed (I covered my tracks: I’d walk through courtyards, transfer from one trolley to another, go around in circles), or I’d try a bit of shadowing myself—from time to time it seemed like I glimpsed that ill-fated old woman. I was tormented by the certainty of what was taking place and at the same time by the suspicions aimed at me, and this vile murk was cut through here and there by moments of fruitless illumination: so, I understood that by sending me away, the old man, of course, wanted to protect me from the necessity of thinking about the company (he evidently took it as his and only his personal hell), although he talked about a PhD, but even he had hardly formulated for himself the main thing—that he wanted to get me out of the cold trap of Petersburg, even at the cost of being obliged to remain in it forever; after all, the old man had taken the position that the only way for him to leave Petersburg was a bullet fired from the barrel at a speed of 350 meters a second.

  It was easier at Toasted. Miss Piercing and I engaged in banter, I’d point out some girl—“She’s pretty, isn’t she?”—and she’d wave me away (and when she got really wrecked, she’d become candid: “Beauty is in the movement of the soul, and they all have cellulite instead of a soul”—while trying not to look at Nadya), while Nadya and I got drunk, then went for a stroll, and off to my place.

  I slept with Nadya the sleep of the dead (she unfailingly and good-heartedly declined my ritual solicitations), and in the afternoon the vile old woman was catching up to me in my dreams—in the worst of these I was riding with her in the backseat of a car and was afraid to turn toward her because I didn’t want to give myself away, but I couldn’t help it and started to steal furtive glances at her: she remained indifferent, didn’t budge, and from her nostril appeared the squirming end of a transparent brown worm brought out by the rain, it slowly knocked against her lip, first here, then there, gathering together and unfurling the rings of its segments—it was precisely from that dream that Yura’s call jolted me awake, and, still writhing from terror, I scribbled on a scrap of paper the name of the bank where the BMW was registered.