Ilya remembered the slingshots, the smooth birch handles, the cradles made of strips of tire rubber that smelled singed. They were strong enough to shoot a rock from their balcony all the way across the courtyard. “I kept waiting for you to say something about the truck. I wanted to know if he’d be proud of me for saving you or if I’d get in trouble for letting you in the road in the first place, but you didn’t say a word, and he slept it off. We ate the candy, and the next time you had to piss I made you do it in a bottle. Then he woke up and drove us home. Like he’d forgotten all about Leshukonskoye. Like he’d never meant to get there in the first place.”
“That’s what you remember?” Ilya said, because aside from the slingshots the memory didn’t seem to hold much that was good.
“It’s the farthest from home I’ve ever been,” Vladimir said. “Halfway to fucking Leshukonskoye.” His eyes were drooping, and next to him, the girls’ faces had gone pale, like faces under ice.
“But you could remember it anyway,” Ilya said, and he could feel himself getting shrill.
“I know, but it’s more than remembering. It’s like it’s all happening at once. Like I’m there and like I’m holding it at the same time. And then there are the times that aren’t so good.”
“What happens those times?”
Vladimir smiled at Ilya, a melting sort of smile. “This time’s going to be good. Look—” He held his hand out to Ilya and opened his fist as though there were something in it that might explain, but his palm was empty.
They were just taking naps. That’s what Ilya told himself over and over. When he couldn’t convince himself of that, he told himself that they were all having the good high, the remembering kind. And it seemed as though they were. Aksinya laughed twice, said her sister’s name, and then called for someone named Yuri. Once Vladimir started to hum, but Ilya did not know the tune. He watched them for a while, and then he began to look for his tapes. They were in the pink plastic bag in the corner, stuffed underneath a camouflage sweatshirt of Vladimir’s. Ilya counted them. All ten were there. He read each of their titles and ran his finger down their spines. The tape player was in the bag too, and this was a mystery to Ilya. Vladimir could have sold the player in an instant—the pawnshop was filled with more worthless items, with the flotsam of the Soviet years—but he hadn’t. There was a glimmer of decency in this, a tiny promise of restraint, and so Ilya put the tapes and the player back into the bag.
It took Aksinya and Lana an hour to come to, longer for Vladimir, and Ilya gathered that, chivalry aside, Vladimir had given himself a little extra. They were quiet when they woke, with sour faces. They drank more of the vodka, and ate Maria Mikhailovna’s pelmeni, which had congealed into a cold lump.
The boards were the next day, in twelve hours. Ilya hadn’t forgotten, but still he took the bottle whenever they handed it to him, and when Lana said, “Let’s go dance,” he agreed. As they walked down the corridor, he nudged Vladimir with his elbow.
“Was it the good high?” he asked.
Vladimir smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I saw you there.”
People had flooded the mess hall while Vladimir and the girls were high. It was so full that as Ilya moved through it he felt his feet leave the ground, like he was suspended in that crush of bodies. It smelled of yeast and smoke, and more than once, Ilya was jabbed with the burning tip of someone’s cigarette. Lana was a good dancer, better than Aksinya, who could never quite lose her stiffness, and Ilya just copied Vladimir. He shuffled his feet, tried to roll his shoulders to the beat. He bummed a cigarette, and then another. He smoked his way through a Michael Jackson song and then some skinhead music from St. Petersburg and U2 and a Eurodance song that Vladimir rolled his eyes at and that Sergei flat out refused to move to.
“If you’re not going to dance, take a fucking photo,” Aksinya said. She jammed her phone in his hand, and Sergey pressed back against the crowd to get an angle on them.
Ilya put his arm around Lana, and tried to think why he had not let her unbutton his pants. The phone was flashing at them, over and over.
“Not your best angle, Aksinya,” Sergey said.
The girls held out their fists and flicked Sergey off. Lana kissed his cheek, just as Gabe Thompson shouldered through the crowd. His face was shadowed by a black baseball cap. He bumped into Sergey, and Sergey said, “Watch yourself,” and for a second Gabe’s eyes seemed to take in Ilya with Lana’s lips against his cheek.
“You’ve got competition, Ilyusha,” Vladimir said, as Gabe disappeared into the crowd.
Sergey flipped the phone shut, and the song ended.
“Thank you Jesus,” he said, and the bass started up again, these deep plunging notes. A rap song, Ilya thought, and Vladimir must have recognized it because he started to cheer, and then they were all dancing.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was strange watching Sadie look at the picture from the Tower: at his brother, Lana, and Aksinya. At him.
“You look different,” Sadie said. “Happier.”
He did look carefree, but he hadn’t been. He had been worried about Vladimir for months by then.
“And that’s Vladimir?” She pointed at him, and Ilya nodded. He expected her to examine him, to lean in and see if the truth was written on the planes of his face, and Ilya wouldn’t have blamed her—that was what he wanted to do with Gabe Thompson—but she just said, “You have the same eyes.”
She pointed again, at Gabe this time.
“That’s him,” Ilya said.
She hunched close to the screen and zoomed in on the picture just as Ilya had a few weeks earlier. Gabe’s cheeks bloated and his eyes fattened, the hat and that bear looming over them.
Outside, there was a splash, then a shriek. Marilee and Molly were swimming with Papa Cam, and Mama Jamie was sitting on a beach chair, her laptop propped on her thighs, organizing a Halloween costume drive for needy children. Sadie had told them that she and Ilya were working on a joint history report on the Founding Fathers.
Ilya clicked over to the photo of Lana on the bed in Gabe’s hat.
“It’s the same, right?” he said, and she nodded.
“Maybe the bear’s a mascot,” she said. She traced its outline on the screen. It was jagged with pixels.
“What’s a mascot?” Ilya said.
“Like a symbol for a team or a club or whatever, and if we knew what team, it might tell us where he’s from. Leffie High’s mascot is the Gators. Louisiana State’s the tiger,” she said, “so somebody from New York’s probably not going to be wearing a hat with the LSU tiger on it.”
“Of course,” he said, thinking of Vladimir’s Severstal jersey with the eagle diving across one arm. He felt this tiny lift in his chest, a loosening of his lungs. If they could narrow down his list to a state or even a region, then there was a chance of finding Gabe before the arraignment. And even if Vladimir did plead guilty, maybe it wouldn’t matter if Ilya could prove that Gabe had actually committed the murders.
Sadie opened a new browser window and searched for “mascot” and “bear,” her fingers flying across the keys. That turned up hundreds of people prancing around in bear suits, so they narrowed the search to “NFL mascot” and “bear,” and then “MLB mascot” and “bear.” They searched hockey teams, basketball teams, college teams, high school teams, debate teams, and they found lots of bear mascots, but none were like the one on Gabe’s hat: fangs bared, tongue splayed, and a rabid roll to the eyes.
“I guess it could be anything—an emblem, a character, a logo for some company,” she said. “Have you tried Facebook or Myspace?”