St. Petersburg Noir

by Julia Goumen

  “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 was 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.

  This dream chased me down another time, when I was out walking (morning, after a rainfall—the damned rain kept coming down) and I saw that the road teemed with worms and remembered that this had already happened once—a long time ago, when I was a kid (my left arm held tight in my mother’s warm hand), staring in wonder at the Worm Kingdom: you couldn’t take a step anywhere.

  Stepanych didn’t call; from time to time I began to doubt myself, my plan, fearing that basically this was all raving nonsense and that I had come tearing to Petersburg on business, that Stepanych had in fact called—until this nightmare finally ended: Yura came through with the documents. But I was worn out.

  ~ * ~

  III

  The last two days: all that remained was to create out of water the reptiles and so forth as set down in the Bible all the way up to man. In the morning I called Stepanych and said that I couldn’t take it anymore (it was the absolute truth: I couldn’t).

  “It doesn’t matter, Stepanych, nothing’s working out. I’ll tell them to prepare a press release and an appeal to the public prosecutor.”

  “Just a sec, Anton, hold on.” Stepanych moved to a quiet spot so he could talk. “Can you hear me? Anton, my dear boy, I can’t forbid you from doing anything,” he said softly and persuasively; in the background, loud and smug men’s voices were discussing something. “But I don’t advise it, my dear boy, I don’t advise it. First of all, because as I told you, a half an hour after your press release they’ll start throwing money around on the market. The company will lose millions. You’ll lose. And second, because we’re almost there, just a little bit longer and we’ll have them by the neck. Wait a little. The main thing here is control— and not to be afraid, don’t be afraid.”

  I briefly resisted, but let him talk me into waiting one more day.

  “Stay calm, my dear boy, and don’t let your nerves get the best of you: if Mohammed won’t go to the mountain, then the mountain can go fuck itself! “ He roared with laughter, evidently trying to reassure me.

  Strangely enough, I really was reassured after our conversation—so much so that when I was buying tickets, I kidded the blushing girl at the counter, although more than anything I wanted to turn around and see if somebody was listening behind my back. Just in case, I didn’t say anything out loud, wrote everything down on a piece of paper and handed it to the fair snub-nosed girl.

  Then I headed back home and slept, clutching my cell phone, and in the evening went to Toasted. The call found me on Labor Square, which was deserted (it’s always deserted—and there seems to be something particularly appropriate about that): the unfamiliar, ordinary voice asked if I was the one they were looking for, and then gave my name and patronymic, and so on, blah blah blah. Afterward, I immediately dialed Stepanych’s number.

  “There, you see, what did I say! What was the message?”

  “That perhaps I might be interested in their proposal.”

  “Where did they set up the meeting? Is that southwest? Now listen. They’ll probably try to get you into their car and take you to a dacha somewhere. You cannot get into a car under any circumstances. My guys will be there”—Stepanych relayed his plan the whole time I was walking to Toasted. According to him this was going to be a full-scale military operation, only without helicopters.

  “It seems overly complicated, Stepanych—you’re sure nothing’s going to go wrong?”

  “Patience, Cossack.” I’d suddenly become a Cossack.

  As I pushed the glass door open, I experienced a brief fit of nostalgia from the longing seeping through from the future: that perhaps I was in Toasted for the last time. And if there’s something I feel bad about in this whole story, it’s that there wasn’t a chance to properly say goodbye to Miss Piercing. I was thinking about this when I fell asleep. (On that last night I kissed Nadya-Isolde especially tenderly, and she responded, but the hand that had set out on the journey around her stomach was almost immediately deported back home; instead she hugged me and fell asleep.)

  I also needed to ask the siren to sing her little song. I had been whistling it nonstop for the past day—it had stuck in my head, but this last day proved to be a long one. Even though I got up late, Nadya had already vanished; all that remained was her makeup bag by the mirror. I straightened up the apartment, went out to buy some bread, had breakfast—it was almost evening when I grabbed my laptop and went to the bank’s website, the name of which was written down on the crumpled piece of paper. Andrei Petrovich was listed third under the heading Administration. For the last time, as I combed my fingers through my hair, I checked myself and my plan: everything was in order.

  ~ * ~

  I told the secretary that I was from the FSB’s Department of Personal Security. And I told Andrei Petrovich that I wanted to talk with him regarding a document from a large company’s administrative file. And that it was possible that someone had more interesting and more realistic proposals than those that had already been made.

  “In an hour? I’ve got a meeting in an hour, how ab
out tomorrow?”

  “Reschedule your meeting, Andrei Petrovich, or you’ll end up in a ridiculous position. Like the financial analyst.”

  Andrei Petrovich had no choice but to agree. But he didn’t drive up in a Lexus, he had a Bentley. He stepped out—from the driver’s seat, of course—and, naturally, he didn’t see anybody: some people simply don’t see bright blue jackets with hoods, even when the jacket pockets are sticking out like they have a Clock 19 in there. He put on his coat, walked over to the parapet, clasped his hands together behind his back, and pointed his sharp-nosed head in the direction of the arch—out of old habit some scum are still moved by beauty, even while they’re thinking about investments. At that moment her shadow escaped from the car’s whale-like maw: she was looking straight at me, smiling reassuringly, and, growing cold with loathing that I could possibly have something in common with that dead monster, I suddenly understood that this was probably how my mother would have looked had she managed to grow old before dying, but the most terrifying thing of all was that the old woman did not walk away, until now it had only been in my dreams that she didn’t walk away; squinting at me, she slowly raised her hand, at first it seemed that her hand was simply shaped like a pistol, but I suddenly realized that she was indeed holding a pistol, and now I wanted more than anything for her to shoot it, and I even mentally whispered to her, Pull the trigger, pull—and Andrei Petrovich carefully lay down on the slippery, grassy dung.

  I put the Glock back into my pocket and glanced around: the half-dark embankment (the streetlights weren’t on yet) was empty; the old woman once again merged with the shadows. Up to this point I had been acting solely according to my own precise reckoning, but now I experienced a surge of inspiration: I took the suitcase from the passenger seat—it was packed tight and heavy, it looked decadent, like all expensive leather—and I found the key (because it was locked) in the pocket of the lawyer’s jacket, opened it up, and after crossing the parapet, I shook the contents out into the Moika (the second phone I no longer needed ended up there with a splash as well). And even empty the suitcase was still very heavy, as if the leather had preserved the memory of its crocodile—I just barely dragged it to the apartment, and only there, in the silence, did I call Stepanych (the phone was blinking with eight missed calls).

  Stepanych was a bundle of nerves, but I cheered him up.

  “Anton? I’m beside myself, I don’t think they were looking out for the guy.”

  “Everything’s fine, Stepanych, the guy was looking out for himself.”

  “What happened?”

  I kept my silence.

  “Okay, so it’s not a conversation for the phone.”

  “Stepanych, I have the suitcase.”

  “What? The suitcase?” Seemed that I managed to surprise him. “How?”

  “It’s not a conversation for the phone. I got lucky.”

  Stepanych remained silent for several moments, then asked me to wait a bit—I could hear him talking on another phone about the next flight.

  “Now then, Anton, I’m getting on a plane, I’ll be there soon, we’ll talk it over.” A pause. “You know what? Your father and I were partners . . .”

  “I know, Stepanych.”

  “In a word, you surprised me.”

  I couldn’t just sit there in the apartment. Or go to Toasted either—not only because I shouldn’t drink; the main thing was that either I would have to come back with Nadya (and thereby introduce a factor of unpredictability, which I didn’t need at all), or I would have to hint to her that she shouldn’t come today—and she would be sure to think that I’d paid for a girl. I had prepared everything—the suitcase was in the corner, the jacket on the bed—and I went out. It was raining buckets again, and on the embankment I took cover in a trolley—the whistling submarine was almost empty, so I took a seat by the window and observed, absolutely fascinated, how to my right over the abyss of the Neva hovered the specter of the fortress, and then the sparkling garland of palaces plunged and surfaced, and already across the river—from the broad bay of the square a trolley was dragged along into the narrow mouth of Nevsky Prospect. I still had three hours to kill: I took a seat in the aquarium-like café and opened my laptop.

  When Stepanych walked into the café cheerful and guarded— the last time I’d seen him was ten years ago, but he was the same: gray hair buzzed short, fleshy face, shoulders like dumbbells, no eyelashes, wispy eyebrows, a smile as if to say that we’re off to the whorehouse now, and a repulsively familiar handshake— I had collected four dozen addresses in the form of a letter. I pressed send and went outside with Stepanych. The rain had already stopped: I would have gladly taken a stroll, but Stepanych didn’t go anywhere on foot—large emergency lights flashed by the doors of the Lexus with its tinted windows.

  “So tell me, where are we going? And why not your father’s place?” Stepanych seemed like he wanted to pat me on the back.

  “I can’t go there,” I said, turning away. “I rented an apartment. On Line 1.”

  “We heard. Mikhail Viktorovich?” Mikhail Viktorovich looked like a trained bear: from under the hair on his hands you could see the blue of his tattoos. “The boss said that it was Line 1?”

  “That’s right, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Yes,” and now this was directed at me, “I understand you: alone, after something like that... You know, when it happened, I couldn’t believe it. Your old man suffered depression, now and again, but it never got so bad that he ... He took on too much, you understand? But still, money can’t buy happiness, you agree?”

  I said that I agreed. Nothing was reflected in the tinted windows. A wave of disgust and terror began to envelope me: thank God, it wasn’t far to go—we were practically the last ones to make it across the bridge and a minute later we were turning on to Syezdovskaya Street. I showed him where to park.

  The whole time we were walking through the courtyard and climbing the stairs, I averted my gaze from the shadows and corners, so as not to see the old woman. Stepanych’s joking became more and more forced.

  “You’re just like Lenin in Razliv.” I was already opening the door. “Guess only a communal apartment could beat this.” His voice filled the brightly lit room.

  There wasn’t time to think whether I had turned off the lights or not—I stepped into the room, pointed at the suitcase in the corner, and walked to the blue patch of the jacket on the bed. I was on autopilot, acting according to my plan, which I had run through a thousand times in my head, but everything was swimming before my eyes and my hands became weak: the makeup bag wasn’t by the mirror and the jacket wasn’t in the same position as I had left it.

  “Did you already open it?”

  “What? I’ll give you the key right now.”

  The key was in the pocket, but the Glock was gone. I tossed Stepanych the key, sat down on the bed, and, while he was fiddling with the lock, I listened to my heart beating so hard it seemed like it was hitting the bottom of my chest. My mouth was dry, sounds seemed to be coming to me from underwater, blinding light penetrated everything. Stepanych’s hulking figure appeared to take up half the room, he opened the suitcase, wheezing and swearing: from out of the suitcase a dead, bloodstained head with a sharp nose was looking at us, I felt sick, Stepanych took out a pistol from his jacket and aimed it at me, his mug was red, like a piece of raw meat, his eyes narrowed and had become predatory, he asked me what the fuck kind of game I was playing.

  I forced myself to unstick my lips. “You know, Stepanych, when I realized it was you? I suspected you as soon as you offered to help, but I understood for sure when I put out that feeler here, and you called two days later to see whether I had told anybody. You couldn’t just sit tight. Well, and of course you thought that I was just a little fool”—I understood that he was listening, and if that was the case, then I needed to keep talking. “Everything worked out quite easily for you: you intimidate me, you show me a ‘90s’style shoot-out, evil Andrei Petrovich would hardly
seize the company, and then good Uncle Stepanych would hint that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to sell everything off cheap, because after all we needed to hold onto the business to be a Stepanych, and Uncle Stepanych legally takes over the business of his old friend for a ridiculous price, and I don’t know anything about prices, so it’s the right thing to do. The funniest thing is that you were right about everything. Only I started feeling disgusted. How much would you have offered me, Stepanych? Would it have been enough to buy a Lexus? All the fall guys here ride around in a Lexus.”

  “You psychotic little mongrel.”

  “I don’t need all this crap, Stepanych, and my father didn’t need it either, only he didn’t understand that. But it would have made me sick to give it to the likes of you.”

  “Where are the documents, you son of a bitch?” Stepanych yelled.