Death and the Penguin (23 page)

A smell of kebabs was in the air. Although it was a working day, the market area of Hydropark was fairly crowded. Most of the pavement tables were taken by people at a loose end. Finding one that was free, he ordered coffee and cognac, and still wearing his dark glasses, looked around.

No sign of Nina and Sonya, but against that he spotted another familiar face, a man of about 40 he had seen at several big funerals. He was sitting at a table outside the adjacent café with a tall elegant woman in a rather short belted blue frock. They were both drinking beer and chatting quietly.

Viktor watched for a few minutes, then took another look around.

The waitress brought his coffee and cognac and asked to be paid. When she had gone, he sipped his cognac and coffee, and forgot about Sonya and Nina for a while.

In four days’ time he had to send off Misha. He wondered where the transplant heart had come from.

After sitting for half an hour, he went and strolled as far as the boat station, then back to the Metro and over into the second half of Hydropark, which also had its scattered groups of summer cafés. Here there were fewer people. He went as far as the bridge over the creek, beyond which there was nothing but beaches and sports grounds, then turned back. At a café still some distance from the Metro station, he sat down, ordered a Pepsi and again surveyed the scene.

They must be somewhere there, he told himself, taking in the faces, sizes and shapes of those sitting at dozens of tables.

His attention was caught by a little girl playing on the grass beside a path with wooden seats at set distances from each other, perhaps 150 metres away. On the seat nearest her, two figures were sitting, of whom he could see only the backs of their heads.

Leaving his Pepsi, he set off along the grass strip between two paths. Twenty or thirty metres from the little girl, he was no longer in any doubt – it was Sonya, either looking for something in the grass or studying it.

He stopped, and returning to the café, followed a path to the toilet from where he would be able to see who was sitting on the seat.

Outside the toilet he stopped and looked back, lifting his sunglasses to get a clearer view.

Nina sat quietly chatting with Baggy Football Jersey. Or more exactly, he was doing all the talking while she listened, nodding occasionally.

So as not to make himself conspicuous, he went into the
toilet, and when he came out set off back to the café.

He stole a glance in their direction as he went. Now she was talking and Baggy Football Jersey was listening.

Suddenly he felt a fool. It was not just that shadowing was deprived of its interest, but that suddenly the whole impetus of events seemed horribly banal. The fellow was obviously smitten, and making a pass at her. But seeing her always with a little girl and thinking her married, he was trying to get things straight and estimate his chances. To which end, pretending to be an old friend of her husband’s was a sound tactic.

So what? he thought, climbing the steps to the Metro platform. Best of luck, Fat Man!

He returned to the flat well before Nina and Sonya.

“Had a good walk?” he asked.

“Lovely,” said Nina, putting on the kettle. “Such weather! And you’ve been sitting indoors!”

“Still, the day after tomorrow we’re going into the country. I’ll get my air then.”

“Day after tomorrow?”

“To view the dacha.”

“Of course!” She waved a hand. “I’d forgotten. Like some tea?”

“I would. – See any old friends of mine today?”

“The same one again,” she answered evenly with a shrug of her shoulders. “Kolya … Kept on about himself. How he’d wanted to be a writer even as a child, then had devoted himself to journalism … How his marriage had gone wrong.”

“But no more questions about me?”

“No, but he was very insistent I should give him a photo of you. So he could see how you’d changed over the years. Promised us Italian ice-creams in return.”

“Is he off his head?” he said, more to himself than to Nina. “What does he want my photo for?”

Again she shrugged.

“Did you arrange to meet?” he asked, giving her a searching look.

“No, but I did say I might go to Hydropark tomorrow.”

“Right,” he said coldly. “I’ll give you a photo.”

Nina looked up in surprise.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in an injured voice. “Am I supposed to avoid old friends of yours?”

He went out of the kitchen, saying nothing, and made his way past Sonya playing on the living room floor with her plastic Barbie house. Shutting the bedroom door behind him, he pulled out an old portfolio from the cupboard of the bedside table and shook a bundle of photographs onto the carpet. Sorting through them, he put aside one showing him with Nika, a previous girlfriend. Replacing the rest, he took some scissors and trimmed away Nika. Standing in front of the mirror, he compared himself with the photo. Something had changed, but it was an elusive, inexplicable something. The photo had been taken four years before, in Kreshchatik Street, by a street photographer.

“Here,” he said, returning to the kitchen and handing Nina the trimmed snapshot.

She looked at him questioningly.

“Take it. For next time he asks,” he added, trying to put a little warmth into his voice. “And say hello from me!”

Nina looked at it with interest, and took it to the corridor where her handbag hung on a hook.

The next morning, as soon as Nina and Sonya had gone, Viktor fetched down the black shopping bag from the top of the wardrobe and took out the still gift-wrapped automatic. The cold, heavy metal seemed to sear his skin. Closing his hand around the grooved butt, he took aim at himself in the wardrobe mirror.

Suddenly he remembered how Misha would sometimes stand before this big mirror gazing fixedly at his reflection. Why? Was it out of loneliness? The impossibility of finding himself a mate?

He lowered his arm, feeling a disagreeable sensation in his palm, as if from the chemical reaction of two incompatible elements. Dropping the gun to the carpet, he inspected his hand. The palm was surprisingly white, as though deprived of blood by the coldness and weight of the metal.

With a sigh he stooped, picked up the gun, and thrust it into a pocket of his jeans. Another look in the mirror showed the protruding black butt and the clear outline of the weapon.

Opening the wardrobe, he found an old blue anorak with a hood, put it on and took another look in the mirror. Fine! Except that the sun on the carpet suggested the garment to be unsuited to a promise of summer warmth.

Zipping up his anorak, he left the flat.

Again Hydropark was crowded.

It’s Saturday, he thought, sitting at a table of one of the pavement cafés.

Looking around, he was comforted to see others not dressed for the weather. Garden variety idiots. They couldn’t all be concealing weapons! One man was wearing something like a
nylon fur jacket. He was, it was true, much older than Viktor, and age may have been part of the trouble.

“Coffee and a cognac,” he told the waiter standing stiffly to attention before him.

The little table-and-kiosk-filled square outside the Metro was suddenly thrown into shadow. Viktor was glad of the cloud. The weather was adapting itself to his dress.

Waiting for his coffee and cognac, he took a closer look around. No sign of Nina and Sonya, but knowing them to be somewhere about, he wasn’t worried.

A quarter of an hour later he walked along between the tennis courts to the ruins of the Okhotnik Restaurant and back. After which he went under the bridge to the other side of Hydropark, to walk past the seats where Nina and the unaccountably nosy Kolya had sat the day before.

So what? he thought, still looking. He would very soon know why Kolya was interested in him and his photograph.

As the path became a track, Viktor turned back and made for the little bridge over the channel. He stopped in the middle and leant over the balustrade. Overhanging the channel somewhat gloomily on his right, was the
Mlyn
Restaurant. People were seated at tables on the spacious balcony, but those he sought were not among them. Parked below was a long silvery
Lincoln
, just like the late Misha-non-penguin’s.

The sun reappeared, turning a black-and-white scene into colour. The waters danced and played, shot through with an emerald sparkle. The white concrete of the balustrade, now yellow, was not only rough to the touch, but warm from a kind of inner glow.

Heading back towards the open-air cafés he stopped dead,
having spotted Nina and Sonya. They were alone. In front of Sonya was a tall glass containing three different-coloured balls of ice-cream. Nina was drinking coffee.

Where, he wondered, looking around, was nosy Fat Man?

Selecting a table some distance away from them, he ordered coffee.

They were chatting, and every now and then Nina turned and looked in the direction of the Metro exit.

Some 15 minutes passed. Viktor finished his coffee and sat on, lost in untimely memories.

When he looked again they were a threesome. Fat Man had arrived, and the waitress was bringing coffee.

Viktor watched. Sonya sat saying nothing, while Nina talked to Fat Man. He was smiling broadly, his moon-face growing still rounder. From a pocket of his white summer jacket he produced a bar of chocolate, which he offered to Nina. She set about unwrapping it. It was, Viktor could see, stuck to the silver paper, having melted. Nina licked some of it off and passed the silver wrapping to Fat Man.

Disgusted, Viktor turned away, feeling a stab of pain in his neck from the effort of keeping watch. After massaging it a bit he looked back.

Fat Man seemed to be inviting them somewhere. He had got up and was standing at the plastic table, talking, gesticulating gently.

Nina and Sonya also got to their feet, and the trio started in Viktor’s direction.

He tensed, momentarily at a loss how to conceal himself, as he sat leaning over the table, his back to the pavement where they were about to pass.

Pushing back his chair suddenly, he bent down and pretended to re-tie a shoelace.

“Do you like the circus?” asked a sugary male voice directly behind him.

“Yes, I do,” said Sonya, and Viktor bent still lower.

“We’ve been twice already,” Nina was saying, her voice growing fainter. “Once we saw the tigers, the second time …”

He gave them another 30 seconds before looking the way they had gone and straightening up.

They were making for the bridge over the channel, but just short of it, they turned right.

Viktor set off in hot pursuit and arrived at the bridge just in time to see them enter the
Mlyn
restaurant.

He went up onto the bridge, and this time stood looking the opposite way towards Vladimir Hill. After about ten minutes he turned, and there they were, on the restaurant balcony, Fat Man in conversation with the waiter, Nina with Sonya.

He didn’t see the hand-over of the photograph, but the bottle of champagne on their balcony table infuriated him even more than their sharing melted chocolate. His fury could not have been greater if he
had
actually seen the photograph pass into Fat Man’s hands. Unlike the champagne and the chocolate, that was something he had anticipated.

The sun continued to shine, and Viktor was hot in his anorak, the discomfort of this only adding to his fury. He was now leaning over the balustrade, watching Sonya again. She was eating ice-cream while Nina and Fat Man did the same between sips of champagne.

When they emerged an hour later, Viktor set off behind them, staying well back. At the Metro entrance under the bridge they
stopped, and he stopped too, keeping his distance.

Fat Man was taking his leave in rather modest fashion, without so much as a peck on the cheek for Nina. Viktor watched the ceremony with a malicious sense of irony, until Fat Man disappeared into the Metro, and Nina and Sonya made for the other side of Hydropark.

Viktor set off quickly after Fat Man, and spotting him on the platform, dodged behind a pillar.

They boarded a city train, entering the carriage by adjacent doors, and now he got a good look at Fat Man, standing sideways on to him reading one of the dozens of adverts stuck to the inside of the windows.

It was the first time he had seen him close to. He was wearing wide mouse-coloured canvas trousers and a white summer jacket over a dark-orange football jersey.

His appearance said nothing – he could have been anybody or nobody, so total was the lack of detail suggestive of either character or employment.

At Central Station he alighted. So did Viktor, and suddenly finding himself close behind Fat Man, he dropped back until the latter set foot on the escalator; then, with other passengers between them, Viktor did the same, keeping him in sight.

They crossed the platform of Central Station and came out by way of the underpass at the top of Uritsky Street. In company with Fat Man, Viktor waited for a tram, and travelled two stops, getting off when he did.

Fat Man looked once in his direction, but that was all. Either he didn’t know Viktor by sight, or he wasn’t particularly observant.

The street was fairly deserted and Viktor hung back at the tram stop. He watched Fat Man walk up a path beside a car
park towards a multi-storey building somewhat removed from the road.

Viktor followed slowly along the same path, and seeing Fat Man heading for the entrance to the building, he halted and waited for him to go in.

In a flash he, too, was at the entrance, standing at the open door, listening, and noticing out of the corner of his eye the familiar blue Moskvich estate parked outside.

The entrance hall was empty and silent but for the hum of a lift. The service lift door was open, but above the closed door of the passenger lift a succession of tiny bulbs was lighting its unhurried upward progress. At last the hum ceased, and the bulb by 13 went out.

Entering the service lift, Viktor pressed the button for Floor 13.

Emerging on Floor 13, he was confronted by a graffiti-scrawled wall and abandoned cardboard boxes.