‘No.’ Kirov walked away.
‘Faggot,’ said the soldier. ‘Bloody queer!’ he shouted. He stuck his head out of the window. ‘Faggot! Brown nose! Faggot!’
And Ostrowsky noticed nothing.
He reached the bottle shop, its window glimmering a dull blue. It was empty of customers, which in the ordinary way would mean that it was empty of stock, but Ostrowsky still went in. The assistant, without waiting, dipped below the counter and produced a bottle in a newspaper wrapper. Ostrowsky paid no money but took the package and left the shop. The assistant closed the door and began to shut up behind him, leaving Kirov to wonder what the deal was. Jewellery for vodka? Not likely: you couldn’t easily divide jewellery into the small portions that form the currency of everyday life. Not that it mattered. He couldn’t chase Ostrowsky into the crannies of his existence: how he paid for his washing machine to be fixed; how he came by those theatre tickets that people were killing to get. Diamonds and drugs and Scherbatsky with his Chinese watch. It was enough mystery. Ostrowsky was walking towards him, staring intently at his own feet.
Kirov stepped forward. He blundered heavily into Ostrowsky’s right-hand side. The bottle went flying from the other man’s grasp and shattered on the pavement. Ostrowsky froze, then mutely turned his head and examined the shards of glass and the pool of spilt liquor.
‘I’m sorry — my fault,’ Kirov volunteered, and his eyes examined the other man and saw only his absence.
‘My only bottle,’ Ostrowsky answered listlessly.
‘I know what you mean. Hard to get.’ These days sympathy about the liquor shortage was the entrée to casual conversation with strangers, so much so that rumour had it the CIA Moscow Station had abandoned its dreary history of passwords to do with cigarettes and matches. ‘Damned Lemonade Joe!’ Kirov added with a probably unnecessary touch of realism.
‘Lemonade Joe,’ Ostrowsky agreed reflexively.
‘A drink?’ Kirov’s voice had arrested the other man’s eyes and he was now looking at him with disconcerting nakedness. As Bogdanov had said, it was easy: the jeweller was in such a state of moral shock that he had no business being on his feet. ‘I’ve got a bottle,’ Kirov added.
‘Have you?’
‘Let’s share it.’
‘Why?’
‘I broke yours. Remember? It’s only fair.’
‘What’s fair? Life?’
‘No, not life,’ Kirov conceded. God, spare me the philosophy. Ostrowsky looked as if he would make a point of it. And the words would be the same as they always were because suffering was too common for novelty and people were too ordinary for eloquence. Don’t tell me about suffering or the sympathy I feel for you now will turn into boredom. ‘Let’s have that drink. It’ll keep out the cold.’ Kirov looked along the street. ‘Do you know anywhere we could go? Where do you usually go?’
‘I know a place…’
‘Pyotr Andreevitch.’
‘…Pyotr Andreevitch. A good place.’ With this statement Ostrowsky set off unsteadily and after a few metres took a corner to the right. Kirov followed.
They reached a complex of apartment houses with walkways and underpasses striped with cold shadows black on grey; spaces that rustled with urban night-time.
‘In here?’ Kirov asked as they stood at the mouth of a dark subway. Ostrowsky shrugged his shoulders: why not? Kirov examined the path which stretched to an invisible end from which came the sound of breaking glass as evocative of place as a native chant, suggesting, as the dark corners of the city sometimes did, another Moscow, forbidding and ill-defined in its shifting cloak of snow.
‘It’s kids,’ said Ostrowsky. ‘It’s the kids that break the glass.’ He said this indifferently so that you could be persuaded that he had immunity in the way that idiot-saints and drunks sometimes had even though the street gangs that operated in some areas of town rolled drunks like Ostrowsky for a few roubles and the hell of it. ‘Just kids,’ Ostrowsky repeated and sat down, resting his back against the concrete wall. Kirov sat next to him and passed the bottle across, and they remained like this for maybe five minutes, guru and acolyte as it seemed to Kirov, remembering a time in Washington when one of Yatsin’s legmen took an embarrassing interest in Hinduism and wanted to shave his head and wear orange — was it possible that times like that existed? The bottle went from hand to hand, Ostrowsky drinking and Kirov brushing his lips against the bottle neck while his eyes studied the water stains trailing down the concrete along the paths made by the wooden shuttering, and then the jeweller started to sing in a tearful light tenor.
‘I’ve spoken to Viktor Gusev,’ Kirov said as the echoes of the song died away in the underpass. Ostrowsky, listening to his own echoes as if to a departing train, nodded and then said, ‘What’s that, Pyotr Andreevitch?’
‘Viktor — I’ve spoken to him.’
‘Ah,’ crooned Ostrowsky soulfully. ‘Bastard.’
‘Bastard,’ Kirov agreed. He tried to read the other man’s anger, but Ostrowsky was somewhere on the other side of anger, stranded in a flat emotional landscape. ‘He shouldn’t have done it — sold you those drugs for your daughter.’
‘No, he shouldn’t have.’
‘Or sold his stolen diamonds to you. Trouble, that’s what comes from buying from Viktor.’
‘I didn’t buy diamonds from him.’
‘Oh?’
‘No. Have another drink.’
‘You first.’
‘Drink, dammit!’ cried Ostrowsky. Then: ‘He was a bastard, Petya! He killed my little girl!’ He slumped forward, his head buried in his hands. Kirov put an arm around him. Ostrowsky turned his face and Kirov nursed it against his coat — there, there — until he could steady the other man and sit him upright to see the tears coursing down his cheeks either side of the button nose. And even then it seemed to him that Ostrowsky’s grief was a dull, worn-out thing.
‘I have news for you,’ Kirov said comfortingly. ‘Viktor is dead.’
They began again. In this second phase Ostrowsky was calm and coherent. Kirov had remarked this form of transition before and had no explanation except that it was in some way related to emotional exhaustion. Sometimes it worried him to be able to watch and predict these phenomena of behaviour and yet to have no understanding.
‘Viktor had a source of stolen diamonds. He was selling them to you.’
Ostrowsky shook his head.
‘What then? How did it work?’
‘I was selling them to Viktor. He was doing the buying.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Ostrowsky shrugged indifferently. ‘It’s true, all the same.’
‘Why?’ Kirov was thinking back to the time when he and Bogdanov had tried to answer the same question. Why should Gusev have exchanged usable cash in certificate roubles and hard currency for a commodity as inflexible as diamonds? How could he spend or dispose of diamonds? Viktor might well smile his secret smile.
‘Maybe they were for his girlfriend,’ Ostrowsky answered, leaving Kirov to work that one out, and without prompting he began to explain how the business had been transacted. They had a rendezvous point in the Park of Economic Achievement. Viktor would have lunch over the road at the Kosmos with his cronies and his flashy girlfriend Nadia something-or-other, and then come to the Metallurgy Pavilion where they made the exchange. How did he pay? From thick wads of small-denomination bills, the sweepings of the illegal trade in tourist currency, on the last occasion a suitcase full.
‘Why didn’t you eat with him?’
Ostrowsky smiled and stared dreamily at the darkness. In retrospect he regretted not taking up Viktor’s invitations; after all you only live once and what is life without a bit of high living, even with some risk attached? But then the prudent jeweller in the romantic soul of Ostrowsky had reminded him that the purpose of this activity was not for himself. Ostrowsky had refused. He didn’t want to get too close to Viktor and the high-rolling Georgian Mafia he was tied into. Once was enough. He had accepted once? Yes, once.