Pravda (33 page)

"You fucked your finger."

"Yes."

"Bitch motherfucker bullshit."

"I know."

"What you going to do?"

"It's okay. I can play most things with my cock." Kostya laughed out loud. Gennady too, from where he was hovering behind the bar.

Arkady said, "We have money. We need a passport. How much?" The humor in Kostya's face disappeared like water into volcanic ash.

"Good. I thought it might be about the shit." He waved about his head, indicating his surroundings, his customers, his life. "And that would have made me sad. Where you going?" Kostya looked at Henry.

"Not him, me," Arkady said. "London."

"Do you have a passport already?"

"No." Arkady shook his head. "Not an external one."

"Okay. Well, you're better off with a false identity anyway. Otherwise they can always check who you are. Better to be safe—be nice and rich so you are good to go." He shook his head. "But it's difficult these days, Arkasha. They have bar codes now. Computers are fucking everything up for everyone. It has to be right or you get yourself in a lot of shit. Only the..."He plucked at his T-shirt, separating it from his skin. "Only the networks get in and out easy."

"Fuck." Arkady ran his hand back and forth across the beginnings of his beard, keeping the bandaged finger extended out of the way. "Maybe it's a stupid idea anyway."

Henry cut in, speaking in Russian. "But can you do it?"

Kostya turned to face him.

Henry felt Arkady's eyes on him too. Searing. Henry's right hand was tapping rapidly over the knuckles of his left.

"We can pay now," Henry said. "If you can do it."

Kostya continued to scrutinize Henry for a long moment. Henry knew that the Kyrgyzstani would already have him down for a user, but he was counting on the fact that money counted. He knew that much about Russia.

Kostya turned his heavy head slowly away and addressed Arkady. "The honest truth is that I cannot do it myself anymore and be sure. Not with the computers and not to Britain. If it was for someone we did not give a shit about, to some butt-fuck country, then yes, maybe. But it's you. So ... I myself cannot do it." He raised his finger and thumb to his red nose. "But if you are serious, then I know people who can do it—properly, I mean. But of course you have to pay their price—expensive."

"How long will it take?" Henry interjected again. He wanted this done and no escaping from it; then he wanted to leave, to fly home to his ruined bedroom. His flesh was itching and crawling and cold.

"A few weeks." Kostya only half turned this time. "My contact is coming here today—I can ask him to start immediately. Do you have the photographs with you?"

"Yes. How much?" Now Henry had him.

"Four hundred dollars today. Four hundred when you collect. Identity. Passport. Visa. Safe."

"Okay." Henry reached inside his pocket.

Arkady hissed, "Not in here. Sorry, Kostya. Can we go somewhere..."

"Yes. Come." He pushed back his chair. "You
are
serious."

"We are serious," Henry echoed.

The fat man was singing again.

Once outside, Henry went ahead, desperate to return to his room and walking as fast as he could. A little way through the larger courtyard, the sound of the gulls began again. He glanced up. A short, squat figure in a hood was coming toward him, walking squarely on the plastic-bag path.

Henry stepped aside, ankle-deep in the filth.

Grisha grinned. "Hello, cunt," he said.

It was the November weekend of the twins' sixteenth birthday. The family was gathered at the Highgate house. Nicholas was back from his latest business venture in Edinburgh (an art magazine that he was setting up, editing, publishing, sort of). Masha had taken a few days off and resynced herself to the daytime hours. Most exciting of all, Grandpa Max was over from Moscow—partly for the occasion, partly for some meeting with a select cabal (chaired by the lady herself) about perestroika and the implications thereof.

Unusually, Max was also staying the night in the master bedroom, which was always kept ready for him in case he so wished, but which he rarely occupied, more often preferring residency in one of the old London hotels. He was traveling with his secretary, Zhanna, a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman with the carefully tended comportment of a wronged princess and a limitless silence to match—a silence that seemed to harbor disapproval until directly examined, at which point it was always found to be entirely neutral and somehow pristine.

"Probably Armenian or Azerbaijani," Nicholas had conjectured, in answer to Gabriel's question.

"No more than thirty-five," Masha had added, in answer to nothing that anyone else had heard.

Zhanna was in the spare room. They never discovered if she spoke English, as Max addressed her only in Russian.

The twins' main party was, of course, elsewhere—guest-listed later that night in a place called K-Rad, a filthily cool nightclub near South Kensington, famous most of all for the queues outside. But
five of the twins' closest friends had also been invited over for a birthday lunch that Masha had spent three days assembling: some delicious blini topped with mushrooms, cheese, and herbs unknown, followed by
kulebyaka,
a salmon pie with more mushrooms, spinach, rice, kasha, all topped with smetana and fresh tomato sauce—a challenge that only Gabriel, his friend Pete, and Grandpa Max himself had really engaged with in any meaningful way. Nicholas had left his untouched, pushed back his chair, and started smoking almost immediately. Isabella had refused more than a single slice, her plate deliberately full of lettuce and spinach from the salad bowl to frustrate her mother's vigilant generosity. Susan, Isabella's best friend, was allergic to fish and so was having another course of blini—a route through the meal of which Zhanna (cutting the
kulebyaka
with much concentration into smaller and smaller pieces) was quietly jealous.

In the way of sixteenth-birthday gatherings, the entire day had been excruciating, and then absolutely fine (fun, almost), and then excruciating again, the whole party sweeping slowly from exhilaration to tension and back again in the manner of an emotional sine curve. On the up, Gabriel and Isabella were both excited by the occasion, the general busyness of the house, and, in particular, their collusion (and that of their five friends) in the knowledge that the hideously out-of-touch parents had no idea where they were really going for the night or what they were really going to be doing there. (Weed outside. Cocktails inside. Cigarettes throughout.) On the down, both twins were in a state of residual agitation, if not rebellion, as a result of the various confrontations of the week just past, during which they were met with an ongoing and bilateral refusal of permission to allow them to stay out until the club shut at four. They were to be back by one-thirty, latest, no negotiation. The reason given by both Nicholas and Masha—in rare accord—was that it was not often they saw their Grandpa Max, and if they stayed out, they would not be seen out of bed this side of Sunday lunch and there would be no chance of a family walk in the morning.

In addition to these two amplitudes of euphoria and seething, they were both suffering, despite themselves, from the generic difficulties attendant on turning sixteen: adult, not adult; precocious, trying, but supersensitive to precocity and trying; cringing with embarrassment at everything, knowing everything; knowing nothing, knowing that there was nothing more embarrassing than cringing itself, still cringing.

Thus the day so far.

Now they were all gathered in the lounge at the front of the house. Max, Nicholas, Masha, Zhanna (all smoking or between cigarettes), Gabriel, Isabella, and Samantha, the last of the lunchtime five to leave, since she was not going to be coming to the club and would not therefore be seeing them later.

Max sat in the deepest chair with his back to the windows, the smoke of his cigar so thick that Isabella was aware that she could really see him clearly only now and then, when the many house drafts conspired. Masha was handing out cake, though with napkins rather than plates, which somehow infuriated Zhanna, which in turn might have been the reason for Masha's refusal to make the trip back to the kitchen for crockery. Zhanna was beside Max but on an upright chair, dressed in strict secretarial two-piece, twenty-dernier pantyhose, shoulder pads, serious heels, and wearing eyeliner and big hair as if she might be called upon at any moment to represent the very distillation of fashion. Gabriel too found the lack of plates unreasonably annoying, but more on behalf of Samantha, toward whom he had adopted a self-consciously chivalrous air throughout the last hour. Like most of their friends, Samantha was seventeen, a year older. (To Masha's eternal satisfaction, both Gabriel and Isabella had been moved up a year at infant school.) And she was waiting for her boyfriend, Steve (eighteen, soft-top MG), to pick her up. Steve was late. He was a dental technician and (for reasons undisclosed) dental technicians seldom ran on time on Saturdays. But it was somehow clear—to the Glovers, at least—that the next phase of the day, whatever that was, could not begin until Steve had been and gone.

It was perhaps for this reason, and as if to apply the broom a little harder, that Nicholas now brought the conversation to Samantha directly.

"So when is the baby due? Have you thought about a name?"

"Not really, Nicholas. I mean, I have had some thoughts, but I dunno if it's a boy or a girl yet. Got a feeling it's a boy."

For what felt like the thousandth time that day, the twins flinched mentally—they knew their father hated their friends' calling him by his Christian name. And yet they loved Samantha all the more for doing so.

"Must be exciting." Nicholas seemed curiously untroubled, though—polite, interested even. "We are biased, of course. We like
the Russian names. How about ... how about Tatiana if it's a girl, Eugene if it's a boy?"

Masha got up and began rather noisily to pour the tea from the samovar on the side.

"I was thinking more like Dominic or Stephen ... or maybe Alison. Dunno." Samantha smoothed her stomach, enjoying the attention. "It's going to be a surprise."

"Wonderful." Nicholas sighed. "A little tiresome, isn't it, though? That it's always one or the other—boy or girl, girl or boy. You'd think just once we'd come up with something new. Shame, really. Pregnancy is never
that
surprising in the end."

"Nobody takes milk, do they?" Masha addressed the room by addressing the wall loudly.

"Yes, Mum, I still do. As I always have. Since I was two," Gabriel answered. He turned to his friend. "Sam?"

"Erm ... Not sure if I've got time, Gabe. Steve will be here any minute."

"Have some and just leave it if he comes," Gabriel said quietly, before directing his voice to where his mother stood waiting quizzically for the outcome of his consultation. "One for Samantha too, please, Mum. With milk."

"Okay." Without saying or doing anything at all, Masha somehow transmitted to the room her disapproval of milk-takers (a class of person quite beyond hope) and began to hand out those cups already poured to Max, Zhanna, Isabella, and Nicholas, the worthy ones.

"I think it's refreshing, anyway—having children young." Nicholas reached up for his and sipped immediately. He took some strange pride in being able to drink his tea at boiling point. "Good for you."

"Samantha doesn't need your approval, Dad." This from Gabriel.

Masha left the room, presumably to fetch some milk.

"Oh God, no. Lucky thing too. Because I don't approve of anything, Gabriel, as you know." Nicholas winked at Samantha.

Gabriel shook his head in adolescent disbelief.

On the sofa, Isabella was torn between wishing that her brother would stop behaving so painfully and wishing that her father would shut up. And all of a sudden she was dying for a cigarette. Ideally, one of the thin Russian ones that her grandfather smoked when he wasn't on cigars. Perversely, the more the birthday normalized (and
normalized all the people in the room), the more she wanted to escape, to feel and to
be
exotic. Indeed, from within the prism of her sixteen-year-old sensibility, it seemed to her a waste that her grandfather should be forced to witness such domestic tedium. She imagined that Zhanna felt the same and found herself empathizing with the secretary's scornful silence. Presents, parochial friends, cars, new computer, clothes, tea, cake, this dumb conversation, sixteen itself. She was embarrassed on Grandpa's behalf. And this new embarrassment lay uneasily, like a wriggling blanket, over all the other embarrassments she was feeling. A cigarette would help. It was strange, though: Grandpa Max could sit so still that he almost disappeared.

"I'm sure yours will be a fine child whatever you name it." This at last was Max himself, his voice deep, like sand in hot wax from the years of smoking. "You are young and you are fit. That's the main thing."

Zhanna pursed.

Masha reentered the room just in time to see her do so.

"It's Sikhism tea," said Nicholas as Masha came over with the last two cups, "scientifically proven to help in nine out of ten pregnancies. We all drink it religiously—just in case."

Gabriel reached up to take charge of Samantha's cup.

Masha did not sit down but returned to the samovar and began to cut secondary slices of the cake.

And Isabella was now certain that her mother was drawing out her tasks to avoid any serious interaction. But whether something in particular was causing this newfound domestication, she could not determine. Certainly it was unlike her mother not to come into the heart of the conversation, especially when her father was rehearsing his prejudices or behaving like an idiot. Perhaps it was Grandpa's presence. Perhaps it was the subject matter. Whatever, her mother's evasion aroused her curiosity. And so, believing her initiative to be a further example of mature social skill, she spoke up.

"Mum, nobody wants any more cake. Leave it. Come and sit down. You've done enough."