Ida smiled.
“And then he started giving out the pamphlets. He handed them to anyone who walked past.” Ilya thought of all the stoves stoked by those pamphlets, all those angels and prophets burning. He thought of the windows in Babushka’s bedroom, papered with Gabe’s saints. “He’d preach all day about angels and a mine where they dug up dreams, and everyone was patient with him, but no one paid any attention. No one wanted to be converted, and maybe that was why he started to drink. He would sit on this one bench and drink vodka, and then samogon, which is cheaper—it’s homemade, sort of—and can be stronger. And he got angry, and he said the same things he’d always said—‘It’s not too late to find God,’ or ‘Give me a minute to show you the way’—but it started to feel like he was cursing us. He was sober less and less and more and more crazy, and then last winter this new drug came.”
“What’s it made of?” Ida said. “Is it heroin? Crack?”
Ilya shook his head. “It’s like heroin,” he said. “But it’s not the real thing. It’s made of cheap stuff. Stuff they could get when the trains stopped running.”
Ida closed her eyes at this.
“He’ll be OK here,” Ilya said. He didn’t know if that was true. He thought of Vladimir in the bed at the hospital saying that he would kill for a hit. His eyes had been fervent with the belief, and Ilya wondered how long it took the want to leave you, or whether it ever did.
“I hope so,” Ida said. She slid forward on the chair so that her feet were flat on the ground and hesitated there for a moment. “I’ll wake him,” she said, and she disappeared down a dim, narrow hall.
On the wall above Ilya was a picture of Gabe as a little boy, kneeling on a grassy field, a soccer ball propped on his knee. He had a cowlick at his hairline and the wide-set eyes and freckles of a cartoon character. There was a picture of Frank and Ida in front of a lake, looking impossibly young and happy. Below it was another picture of Gabe, in a white collared shirt and a plaid tie that Ilya remembered him wearing daily. His arm was around another boy in a matching tie, this one dark-haired with an enormous, squinty-eyed smile. They were seventeen or eighteen, necks chafed from shaving and from their stiff collars, and behind them was the Hermitage, robin’s egg blue, the Russian flag flapping above its golden cupolas. There were footsteps again, and Ilya looked up, expecting Gabe, but Ida had come back alone.
“He says no,” she said. “He says he didn’t tell anyone to visit him.”
There was a silence. More than a silence, it was a feeling of listening, like Gabe was listening in his room down the hall, and Frank, somewhere out in the yard, was listening, and inside the duffel the tape player was listening, the silence spooling across the ribbon, writing over Michael and Stephanie, erasing all of their beautiful, English words.
“Please,” he said. It had been the first word that Maria Mikhailovna taught him. He opened his duffel. The tape player cast a weak red light on the canvas, and he dug beneath it for the pamphlets. “Show him these,” he said, thrusting them at Ida.
Ida fingered a sharp edge where Babushka had cut. She looked at the pamphlets in the way you look at something you love that has betrayed you, and he could see that she had lost her faith over this, over her lost son. “Fine,” she said.
This time Ilya followed her down the hallway, and when they reached a door at its end, she put a hand up to stop him and disappeared behind it.
“He brought these,” Ilya heard her say, without emotion, and Ilya could hear nothing from Gabe. He put his hand on the knob. Ida had not locked it. He could twist it, push it open, have a moment to see Gabe’s face—but then the door opened of its own accord.
Gabe was sitting on a couch. His hair had been shaved, and he’d gained weight. Fat wreathed his face, his features gathered in the middle like a herd huddling for protection. He was in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt and his foot was swaddled in an enormous bandage. The room was hazy, the blinds pulled, the light like a video with poor resolution. A TV was on, but muted, its colors dancing on the shiny skin at Gabe’s temples. The pamphlets were in his hands. He’d grasped the top one between his thumb and forefinger as though he were still by his bench in Berlozhniki, ready to hand it to the next passerby.
“Here he is,” Ida said, and Ilya did not know which of them she was talking to.
“I’m from Berlozhniki,” Ilya said. “Ilya.”
Gabe nodded.
“You’re OK?” Ida said, and Gabe nodded again, and she turned and disappeared back down the hallway.
Ilya wanted to make her stay. He wanted to know exactly where J.T.’s truck was and how long it would take him to run to it. Sunlight pulsed at the edges of the blinds. He’d gotten disoriented inside the house and wasn’t sure whether the truck was outside one of Gabe’s windows or in a different direction entirely. He catalogued his talismans: Sadie’s phone was in his back pocket, Timofey’s knife was in the front pouch of his sweatshirt, and he’d worn both of the saint medals that Babushka had given him although he believed in neither of them and neither was specific to this occasion, to confronting a murderer.
“You kept them,” Gabe said. The Path to Salvation was on top. That was the one he was holding. “Did you read them?”
He should have, if only to know Gabe better, but he shook his head, and Gabe laughed, this short, shallow sound.
“No,” Ilya said. “They were my grandmother’s. She cut out the pictures.” His English felt thick and slow, was suddenly something he was conscious of again, like his fear had tripped some crucial neural circuit.
“At least she didn’t burn them like everyone else,” Gabe said. He set the pamphlets next to him on the couch and said, “Why are you here?”
Ilya had meant to ease into the subject of Lana’s murder, to try to catch Gabe off guard, but the directness of Gabe’s question had caught him off guard, and so he said, “I’m a friend of Lana’s.”
When he said Lana’s name, Gabe stiffened. He hunched forward, his back coming off the cushions, and there, in that one movement, Ilya saw what he’d come for. Gabe knew Lana, and he knew something about her death. His eyes settled on Ilya’s face, reading it, wondering at Ilya’s intent. Ilya had not noticed his eyes at first, but they were blue and bright even in the dimness of the room, bright enough that it seemed to Ilya that they could read his intent, that Gabe understood that Ilya was working up the nerve to ask if he had killed Lana, was trying to force himself to say that word “kill,” was wondering why Maria Mikhailovna had taught him it, how she had divined that it would be necessary and made him conjugate it just as she had thousands of other, more innocent words.
“Lana,” Gabe said. He slumped back against the couch, and there, in the defeat of that one movement, Ilya saw that he hadn’t killed her, that Gabe had never killed a soul.
“You knew her?” Ilya said. He had the pictures in his duffel. He could prove that Gabe had known her, but he didn’t need them, because Gabe was nodding.
“Yeah,” he said. “We went out together a couple times. To the Tower. To Dolls once. Sometimes we hooked up.”
“What happened?” Ilya said, and Gabe didn’t seem surprised at the question. He seemed relieved by it, in just the way that Ilya felt relieved to hear Gabe talk about the Tower, like by saying the things that came to them in nightmares they might rob them of their power.
“We would meet in the polyana. To hook up,” he said. It was the word they’d used for the grove of trees where Lana’s body had been found. A local word, one that Lana must have taught him. “Or to get drunk. Or high, if we had anything. It wasn’t a regular thing. Not like she was my girlfriend.” Gabe laughed suddenly, and then just as suddenly he stopped. “We could understand like ten words the other one was saying. I wouldn’t even know how to say ‘girlfriend,’ but I liked her. At least I think I did.” He rubbed a hand across the top of his head, then let it drop in his lap. “I was supposed to meet her there the night she got killed, but I didn’t want to go ’til I scored. She wouldn’t have wanted me there ’til I scored.” He said this like there was a clear logic to it, and there was, Ilya guessed. The same addict logic that Vladimir had used when he’d stolen their stuff and sold it at the pawnshop, when he’d asked Lana to sleep with Ilya in exchange for the krokodil. “And there was this guy at the Tower who usually hooked me up. Either him or your brother.”