St. Petersburg Noir

by Natalia Smirnova

  Zoyenka returned to her that night. She had been thoroughly abused, beaten, and she was missing some teeth. But she had the key.

  As she spirited Shurka out of the house under the Vantovy Bridge, she lisped slightly: “You can’t rithk Rybathkoye. I don’t have any money. Go to town on foot … or … there’th a boat in the th-thed. Ith really thkinny … it’ll cut right through!

  Zoyenka’s thoughts were confused. “Write me a letter when you get there,” she said. “My name’th Rybina, to Rybathkoye, general delivery. Or find me on v-Kontakte, I’ve got a page there.”

  Together they dragged the boat out of the shed, an old Pella. They even found oars. They waited for a barge, and Zoya went into the river up to her knees and gave her a push. Shurka sat in the boat until she was carried off, and then she started rowing. She was strong, little Shurka. The long barge’s sidelights lay on the water and trembled in it. The poplars’ crowns and Catherine’s stela were reflected in the river. Jaguar cans and other trash floated with the current.

  On the morning of the second day they made out something stirring in the load of coal. The captain sent Styopa to investigate.

  “What is it? Some kind of hide … A dog’s, looks like.”

  Styopa gave the hide a kick, and a grimy little towhead crawled out from under it.

  * * *

  Hi, my deer byuteeful Zoinka. Our barge arrived at the port in Vysotsk. It’s on the Finland gulf, not very far from Vyborg. You remember, I terned foreteen in August and got my passport. But I rote down I was sixteen. So now I have a rezidence permit, for the provins. Styopa sez he’ll marry me too, but I like him more than Kolyan. They lode cole and oil here, and I werk in the cafeteria. There’s the sea here, and pine trees, and even more ships than in Rybatskoye. I like it heer. Sending kisses and wishing you luck. So dos my Styopa.

  DRUNK HARBOR

  BY LENA ELTANG

  Drunk Harbor

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  The money ran out before I knew it, as if I hadn’t stolen anything. I kept it in a heavy, striped model lighthouse somebody I knew gave me—back in the old days, when decent people still came over. One morning I stuck my hand in the lighthouse hoping to pull out a few bills and came up with nothing but greasy dust and my old stash—a joint that had lost even the smell of pot.

  Last fall the lighthouse had been stuffed and the money’d been poking into the pointy roof with the mica window. They’d counted my cut honestly, in cash and stones, and I immediately started paying back my debts, even bought my ex-wife’s apartment, which I’d taken a mortgage on in ’07. I got myself a couple of suits and a belted cashmere coat, the kind I’d wanted for so long, light-colored, like Humphrey Bogart had in Casablanca; then I met this Latvian girl from the consulate and took her to the shore and rented a cottage for the summer so we could traipse around the Jurmala casino. I sent money to my creditors in small installments, but strictly and regularly, and so as not to raise any suspicions, I told my Latvian that I’d inherited money from a relative abroad and couldn’t spend it in Petersburg—I said I didn’t want to pay taxes to the Russian treasury. The Latvian’s name was Anta, which in the Incan language means copper, but she was a strawberry blonde, not a redhead, and blushed crimson at even the mildest swearing.

  But less than a year had passed and the money’d run out, the valuable stones dissolving in bills and interest-owed like a candy emerald in boiling water. I’d put the smaller stones in a fruit-drops box long before and left them with my wife along with the keys to her place; I’d stopped by when she was on duty. She was happy to work the nightshift because she was banging some surgeon from oncology, though it was up to me to support her. I had no desire to see my wife, who would have started harping on about other possibilities, which drives me nuts. I don’t have any other possibilities.

  Ever since I broke into the jewelry shop and killed the owner, who showed up out of nowhere, my possibilities have narrowed to the dark slit in the mailbox. My own mailbox, at 22 Lanskaya Street. I’d rented a room on Lanskaya before spring began, and the diamond tucked away for a rainy day lay there under a kitchen floorboard, in a piece of cork. Before I’d kept it in the model iron lighthouse I’d bought in Riga, then Anta zeroed in on my hiding place and I’d had to find somewhere else. Now that rainy day was near, and the time had come to sell off the ice, but my reliable fence wasn’t answering my calls and I was getting nervous.

  I knew that one day I’d find a subpoena there and I’d have to clear out of town; I thought about this every morning, waking up in my room with the mold drips on the north wall and the mirror broken out in a greenish mercury rash. There might not even be a subpoena, two guys from the slaughterhouse could just come, handcuff me, force my head down like a stallion at the veterinary, and shove me into a barred van.

  * * *

  The day they came for me I was walking home and I just had a bad feeling; damp clouds were gathering over the roofs, and the January sun had rolled way up where it shone dully, like a czarist coin. I was walking from Kamenny Island, where I’d been to see this scam artist who’d been doing passports since the ’90s and now lived behind a solid fence not far from the Kleinmichel dacha. I wanted to offer him my last stone—the purest, pear-cut—in exchange for a clean passport with a Schengen visa and twenty thousand cash. Not finding the owner at home, I gave his guard a note and started on my way back, thinking how I could’ve been living in a place like that, with a fountain and brass herons, if I hadn’t frittered away last year’s loot. A sparse snow was falling from the sky, like down from an old lady’s feather bed. It got into my eyes and mouth and even seemed warm to the touch.

  Right by my building I slipped on an iced-over manhole and barely kept my feet, almost dropping the paper bag with two bottles of sauvignon I’d bought for the Latvian—I don’t drink wine myself, diligent Jah not taking kindly to rivals. After the thaw the frosts had struck, and the ice in the untidy city turned into black rolled-out paths for sullen pedestrians to plod along, arms out to the sides like tightrope walkers. I didn’t notice the Toyota by the front door right away; it was so dirty it blended in with the sooty yellow façade. Sitting behind the wheel was some dummy in a knit cap who’d cracked the window to tap his ashes in the snow. I might not have recognized him if it hadn’t been for the familiar sleeve poking out the window, and it’s true, he was a dummy if he went on a job dressed in fiery-red nylon. There was no point trying to figure out who my guests were—police or former accomplices. The nastiness would be different in kind but identically leaden.

  I decided to wait it out at my neighbor the conductor’s place, hoping she’d be on a run. Once I’d crashed at her place for a few days, and since then I knew where she hid the extra key. Things had taken a bad turn. No matter who these people were, they could move into my attic and sit around drinking tea, waiting for the moment the apartment owner’s patience ran out. Picturing the Latvian sitting on a kitchen stool with tied hands, I could feel my throat smarting, like from cheap tobacco. If it’s cops, then Anta’s sitting on the stool, but if it’s my old friends, she’s lying down with her skirt pulled over her head. I pictured her legs in blue stockings, like the two blades of a split Ottoman saber, and my throat dried up.

  Last winter, when I put some of my loot in the mailbox, I did it not in a fit of generosity but as a reliable investment; whatever fell into my wife’s hands could only be wrested away along with her hands. That meant I was free of her letters, phone calls, and fits of insanity for a few years. Now she’d think twice before coming to look for me; she’d slip her take under her shirt and make herself scarce. I locked the mailbox with the key that had been lying in my coat pocket for six months, tossed the key through the slot, thought a second, and threw the apartment key in after it. Now I had one home, one woman, and one stolen crystal of carbon that I planned to sell so I could leave town. The home was someone else’s, the woman was a slut, and there was a wet job hanging over the stone—so if you thought
about it, I didn’t have all that much. I had to get away as fast as possible. Some guy I didn’t know who wore a red quilted jacket had shown up more than once and hung around the courtyard trying to look nonchalant. At one time I’d thought he was visiting my neighbor the conductor, who sold a little grass on the side, but when I stopped by and asked her a couple of questions it turned out the guy wasn’t one of her clients, he was some stray wise guy. Or a cop.

  * * *

  I turned into the courtyard, opened the boiler room door, went down the steel stairs quietly, nodded to Timur, the stoker, who was sitting there in a scorched quilted vest, and went out through the janitor’s door on the other side of the building. The conductor’s apartment was on the third floor. Climbing the stairs I peered at the gray Toyota, which was already sprinkled with crumbly snow, so it must have been there at least two hours. No one answered the bell, so I stood a little while on the landing, waiting, and then went to the railing by the elevator, twisted off the cap of a cast-iron snake, and stuck my hand in deep, all the way to the tail. The key was lying there, right where it was supposed to be.

  The apartment smelled of stagnant water and rotten stalks. I went on into the bedroom, found a vase of withered roses there, and threw them into the trash can. The roses were long so I had to bend them in half, and a stray thorn poked me in the palm; I saw a drop of blood, and I suddenly remembered how a year before I’d stood in a strange room watching the blood turn black in the small, beady holes on a dead man’s face.

  I hadn’t planned to kill the jeweler. I’m a burglar, not a killer. I’d been told the shop would be clean, no one in the apartment above—the owners had gone to their dacha in Pargolovo—and the security system was connected to the local station, Chinese junk, a plastic box with ten buttons. The shop entrance was protected by a corrugated iron curtain, but as often happens, the owner had arranged for one more entrance, from his apartment on the second floor, and one was simpler—a steel door, two rods, and a hole in the floor. The alarm didn’t take me long, and I’d noticed the camera’s dim crimson pupil back on the street when I unlocked the door. It was easily taken off its hook and showed me the wire to the server.

  If I were a jeweler buying stolen goods, I’d install a German system with a satellite signal, but the dirty jeweler was a ballsy old man—he even kept his safe in view, under the counter, so he wouldn’t have to go so far. I searched for that safe for half an hour—took pictures off the wall and books off the shelves in the living room, poked my head under the bed, sneezed after getting a noseful of soft gray dust, and felt like a movie gendarme tossing a female student’s room in search of a hectograph and subversive proclamations.

  The safe was way under the counter, and I opened it in no time after playing with the last key. There weren’t that many options. The fence who’d cased the job was sure of the first nine numbers, only he hadn’t been able to get a good look at the tenth. I opened the little door and raked up two velvet sacks, a clear one with pale yellow stones, a long box with the necklace promised to the fence, and a fat stack of cash. I got on my knees and was starting to distribute the loot in my pockets when I heard heavy asthmatic breathing, like the creak of a floorboard, and turned around. The old man was standing right behind me holding something shiny high over his head. Whatever it was looked heavy, the size of a bucket, and I glimpsed a chesty shepherdess in a glade with high pointy grass. He was planning to hit me with it but didn’t get the chance.

  I remembered his face, even though I only ever saw him for less than a minute—spongy cheeks, folds on his shaved skull, the dim eyes of a deepwater fish, round from surprise. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The stones were of an old-fashioned cut, and they hadn’t been in that safe two days. I grabbed his arm and tried to take the bucket away, but the old man yelled and sank his surprisingly strong teeth into my wrist. That made me see red and I pushed him down on the floor as hard as I could; the shepherdess broke off and stayed in my hand, but the silver glade with the sheep fell on the old man’s face, right on his wide-open, yelling mouth. Silence fell so unexpectedly that I didn’t realize right away that the owner had choked on his own blood, and for a few moments I tried to stop up his mouth with my jacket sleeve.

  The old man’s eyes were open and gazing past me at the ceiling, which was thickly overgrown with plaster molding, and I spotted one more camera eye hiding in the leaves. There was no point worrying about the camera because I’d turned off the server, removed the disk, and put it in my pocket. The shop owner, however, was a problem. There was nowhere to take him out, and nothing to take him out in—the old man was a big guy and he would only fit in a trash bag in pieces. I left him lying on the floor with the silver glade jutting out of his smashed mouth, the price tag white on the velvet glade: 299,999. I stuck the shepherdess into my jacket pocket, closed the safe, examined my footprints on the granite floor, grabbed the mop from the storeroom, splashed water on the floor from a pitcher, and gave the dirt a good smearing.

  I got out through the apartment over the store, the same way I’d gotten in, went down the back stairs, which for some reason smelled like apples, stopped on the first floor, turned my jacket inside out, pulled my cap down over my eyes, and walked quickly down the street. There wasn’t a soul on the avenue, four in the morning is a dead time, the leaden Petersburg dusk, even the ice underfoot seemed soft and gray.

  By the fish store on the corner I came upon a sleepy janitor who asked me for a cigarette. I swayed, grabbing his sleeve, put a whole pack into his hand, and complained about whores in a purposely Eastern accent. That accent and my three-day beard stuck in his mind, so that the sole witness would say he’d seen a tipsy Caucasian walking away from a local girl that morning.

  That was late last fall; in the winter I sold my cut to someone I trusted, managed to pay off my debts, bought Gulia the apartment, and spent the rest, and now the day had come when my money was gone and the lighthouse was empty.

  * * *

  Rouser? Rover? Roarer?

  I stood on shore trying to read the boat’s name, but in the dusk all I could make out were the first two letters: R and o. Fine, who cares, this was obviously the tub the lush at the station had told me about.

  “Going toward Drunk Harbor, turn at the old Lenvodkhoz wharf,” he’d said. “You head down the shore from the datsan, and as soon as you pass the Elagin Bridge turn toward the water, and there it is, it’s got bushes around it and you can barely see the boat, but it’s there.”

  The bushes were young and prickly and looked like barberry. I tore my coat sleeve while I was pushing through them in search of a ramp or a gangway, but I couldn’t find anything. The boat was twenty paces from shore, locked in the filthy gray ice, and there were no footprints or boards leading to it. There were long puddles on the surface of the ice, and it was spongy, like bread crust. The hull of the boat wasn’t all that old, but it had rusted through from stem to stern, and the bottom had had concrete poured on it, the former owner probably hoping to take care of a leak. At one time the pilot house had been painted white with three red doors, but all that was left of the white paint now was flakes that resembled shredded eucalyptus bark, and the door latches had been sliced off. I rolled my pants up to my knees, took off my boots, tied them by the laces, hung them around my neck, and started out over the snow barefoot, it being harder to dry footwear than feet—and not only that, these were my only boots and there was no knowing when I would come by another pair.

  When I left the conductor’s apartment I already knew I wasn’t going to get in my place. I had almost no money with me, and actually there wasn’t much left at home either. I could forget about picking up the stone. Whoever paid me that visit had left in their scratched-up Toyota, but they could easily have left an ambush in the building, or just planted a bug so they could come back the moment I opened the door. They’d dawdled a long time—I’d sat on the windowsill for two hours until I finally saw my Latvian coming out the front door with two guys. The one
on the left hoisted the iron lighthouse on his shoulder like an antiaircraft gunner carrying a rocket launcher. Anta had clearly spilled the beans and now they wanted to smash my hiding place to smithereens. You’re going to have to sweat, archangels.

  It didn’t look like they were dragging Anta by force. I couldn’t get a good look at her face, but her walk was easy, and she got in the car smoothly, showing her leg in a high boot. If these were cops they’d let her go quickly, as a foreigner, and they probably wouldn’t bother recording her information. If they weren’t, they’d taken her in addition to the diamond, which they were hoping to find in the lighthouse. Then she’d be back a little later. I left my cell on the table, stuffed my pockets with bread and cheese from the conductor’s refrigerator, took a flat bottle of brandy, and rifled through her dresser but didn’t find anything unusual. Though I did snag a baggie of grass, which I found in a wool sock, didn’t write a note, slammed the door, and tossed the key back in the snake’s tail.

  By seven or so I was on Primorsky, and forty minutes after that on shore, a kilometer from Drunk Harbor. The wind was at my back the whole way, and I counted that a good sign.

  “Boat’s nobody’s,” the homeless guy told me. “Don’t wet your pants, I spent all fall there until it got chilly, and if no one was using it for sailing then, now I’m sure no one’ll come. Sometimes the locals throw some work my way, loading and unloading, but I can tell you’re a strong fellow, you won’t break. Best not to argue with the locals—if they ask, help, and you’ll have a quieter time of it. In November I dragged a stove onto the boat, plenty of firewood in the forest, only it smoked something awful. I went to the datsan for chow, Buddha Balzhievich’s the abbot, they started feeding people there—only kasha, of course—but at least you don’t have to go scrounging in town.”