“My brother,” Ilya said, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice. He had not planned to tell Gabe that he was Vladimir’s brother. Vladimir had been accused of the murders, and whether Gabe was guilty or innocent, Ilya’s relationship to him was bound to put Gabe on edge.
“Vladimir, right? He talked about you all the time, about how you were coming here,” Gabe said. “You look a little like him.”
Ilya nodded, ignoring the vision of Vladimir flooding his mind: Vladimir, in the thick of a drug deal, bragging to an American about how his brother was moving to America, about how he’d come home and run the whole machine. “Sergey’s the other one that would sell to you?” he said.
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “He seemed to be the boss, or at least a little more sober. Sometimes he’d give me some. To be nice, I guess. Or maybe to keep me hooked.”
“Did you find them that night? At the Tower? Did you find Vladimir?”
Gabe nodded. “Yeah, around midnight, I think. So I got high. Got drunk. I hadn’t forgotten about Lana, but it wasn’t serious like that. She’d stood me up a few times. So it was almost morning when I made it over there. Four or five a.m. It was so dark that it was hard to tell.” He paused. His story had seemed smooth up until now, like something he’d gone over in his mind enough times that it didn’t hurt him to say it aloud, even the parts he was ashamed of, but as he went on, his voice tightened, gained this quality that made Ilya think of the way ice shrieked before it shattered. “I knew right away that she was dead, even before I saw her neck. It wasn’t that she wasn’t moving—” He paused, grappling with something ineffable, some quality in the dead that was instantly recognizable to the living, and Ilya thought of the snowplow driver and how he’d known that Yulia was dead the moment he’d seen her leg. Ilya nodded, not because he understood, but because he needed Gabe to go on. “I could tell she was dead, and I didn’t know what to do but pray. I’d never talked to her about God or whether she believed. I knew better than to bring it up, with her or anyone else at the Tower. By then it was like there were two of me: the one who had faith and the one who’d lost it, or I guess that’s what I liked to think, but of course it was just the one me. Drunk off my ass and praying for her because I didn’t know what else to do. There was blood all around her. The snow was so bloody, and I remember that I was careful to stay in the white snow. I didn’t want her blood on me. And then at a certain point I got so cold that I started to feel warm, hot, even, like I could stay there forever, and I thought it might be a message, like God was telling me that I was doing the right thing, but another part of me knew that I’d die if I stayed. So I left her there. And as I was walking away, it hit me: she’d chosen the grove, she’d convinced whoever killed her to go there, because she’d thought there was a chance that I might come in time. That I might save her. And when I realized that, I couldn’t leave her. I turned around, and just as I did, a car passed me on the lumber road, and a minute later, somebody got out of it and walked into the grove.”
He must have seen the excitement on Ilya’s face because he shook his head. “All I could see was a flashlight. Moving around in the trees. For a couple of minutes. Maybe five. And at first I was relieved, not scared, because she wasn’t alone anymore, and because I wanted her to be found. So the whole next day I’m waiting to hear something, and there’s nothing. And the next day and the next. Whoever it was had seen her—she wasn’t hidden, there was no way to miss her, not with a flashlight—but still he wasn’t saying a word, and so I knew that I couldn’t either. I was scared then, for those weeks. Things got bad then.”
“You don’t have any idea who it was? What about the car? What did it look like?”
Gabe shrugged. “It was dark, and I was out of my mind.”
That was it, Ilya thought. A flashlight bobbing through the trees, an impossible lead, and maybe Gabe could feel the force of Ilya’s disappointment, because he said, “Believe me, I wish I knew who it was too.”
“But you don’t think it’s my brother?”
“No,” Gabe said. “I don’t think it’s your brother.”
And it didn’t matter for Vladimir what Gabe thought, but still it was a relief to Ilya that this would be on the tape, that he would be able to listen to Gabe saying it again and again.
“How’d you get back here?” Ilya asked. “I heard it was the police?”
Gabe nodded. “I went on a bender one night. The last thing I remember is walking home from the Tower—like I had a million times before—and then I wake up in the back of this SUV. At first I thought I was gonna get killed. I kept thinking of the car passing me and the flashlight in the woods, and I’m sure that whoever it was had seen me and thought that I’d seen him. But the guy tells me that he’s a cop and that he’s taking me to the airport. He’d packed my bag, gave me withdrawal meds and everything. When we got to the airport, he kissed me on the forehead and told me, ‘Don’t ever come back,’ and he handed me over to some thug who looked like a bodyguard, and he told the bodyguard to get me home ’cause the last thing he needed was a dead American on his hands.”
“The policeman was a short guy? With glasses?” Ilya asked, though he knew the answer. He could see Dmitri in all of it, especially that kiss on the forehead.
Gabe nodded. “He saved me.”
“Lucky you,” Ilya said, his voice catching on the hypocrisy of it. Here they were, the saved ones, and the air in the room seemed suddenly unbearable—sharp and sour, and he had the sense that there was some message gathering in the shadowed corners, in the dark slit of the closet door, the way clouds mass into a storm. He didn’t want to look at Gabe anymore, didn’t want to see him sitting there on the couch, hollow-eyed but saved, looking like a teenager home sick from school. Ilya turned. There was a desk behind him, and it was covered in the same tiny detritus as the kitchen table. Miniature buses. Miniature telephone poles. Tiny slabs of wood. A red car the size of a button. It was a Lada. The license plate precisely inked with the Russian flag.
“What is all this?” Ilya said.
Gabe pointed to a coffee table on the other side of the room, and even in the dimness Ilya recognized what Gabe had built. There were the kommunalkas, the curve of them like teeth scattered along a jaw. There was Ilya’s building, the closest to the road, with a dozen paper-thin balconies and dental-floss laundry lines. There was School #17, and the wooden church, with a sloppy little cupola, and the Minutka, and the square, with its empty pedestal. Maria Mikhailovna’s building was all shining glass, the police station a slab of concrete, the clinic crowned with its tiny red cross. Gabe had covered the town with snow—that sparkly white powder on the kitchen table—so that cars were half buried and the benches on the square lost their legs and looked like driftwood in a sea of white. The Tower was a tiny gray box, innocent at this size, edging a field of snow ridged like the roof of a mouth. Tiny toothpick crosses speckled the snow. Ilya’s breath caught in his throat when he recognized the polyana, a scattering of birch trees, but the snow was clean and white there too, no trace of Lana’s blood. On the model’s edge Gabe had begun to build the refinery with a few centimeters of screening for the chainlink fence and silver-painted straws for the pipes.