It was enough. It was hope. Arkady was going to London.
The red door remained shut. Henry dared not suggest they press the buzzer again, and Arkady seemed content to wait. The bulb hissed periodically. Three minutes must have passed before, with a shock, Henry realized that Arkady was standing in the middle of the passageway because a camera was set up high in the lintel. He wondered who might be looking at them and what they were looking for. He noticed afresh that his friend was growing more ragged. That greatcoat, those tattered jeans, those boots, the frayed collar on that favorite shirt, fake Armani. When the time came, Henry knew, he would not have the courage to suggest that Arkady clean himself up: cut his hair, shave, find a new shirt at least. And yet it was his duty to do so. To improve Arkady’s chances. Simply, there was nobody else to say these things. No other person who could see beyond the struggle of their own circumstances as to what goodness or salvation the wider world might yet bestow if only they could keep on believing. He must say something. What did it matter if Arkady came to despise him, as long as he made the best possible impression when he found his family? The danger was that on the streets of London, Arkady would simply look insane or worse—frightening. Besides everything else, the Russian had his right index finger wrapped and bound in a fat bandage, which he had recently taken to wearing all the time, even though he had not been near the conservatory this week or last, as far as Henry knew. And the injury looked gruesome. Violent. Henry understood—up to a point—that Arkady had to live his lies religiously once asserted, had to actually believe in them himself, had to perform them. (There was something especially Russian in this, he thought.) But all the same, Henry hoped that the grimy bandage would come off as soon as they had the passport.
Without warning, the door started to move. There was a whirring, as though the hinges were motorized. The corridor within was better illuminated; a series of doors—some shut, some half open—led off, right and left. They passed a filthy toilet, a bedroom of sorts with the floor covered in mattresses, a decrepit shower with its head dangling loose, and, last of all, on the left, a big kitchen—gas rings, saucepans. Ten more paces beneath weak multicolored light and they emerged into the wide cavernous low-lit room—the spider’s den: Club Voltage.
The place was almost empty and there was no music, but then, it was only eleven in the morning. They were in a vast cellar. Like the passageways, the walls were all bare brick; a glowing row of yellow, orange, and red light bulbs set in two plastic bulb racks was wedged up by a series of nails hammered irregularly into the mortar behind the makeshift bar, the cables looping down like ossified tapeworms. There were no drinks on display save sample cans or bottles of the range available—one Russian beer, one Polish beer, vodka, vodka, vodka, cheap, cheaper, cheapest—standing strangely spaced across the solitary shelf. Aside from a few other bulb racks and one or two random strip lights, the decoration was limited to a series of poster portraits that had been lacquered like fliers for forthcoming gigs to the bricks of the far wall—poster portraits of famous Soviet athletes in various attitudes of exertion, muscular repose, or medal-winning triumph. In English, across the face of each, someone had sprayed the words “Drugs are for winners” with scarlet paint. High up, behind the bar, there was a second series, these much smaller, pages cut from magazines rather than posters: presumably the bartender’s true love, some model never quite dressed.
Sitting just inside the door to the right on the threadbare sofa and chairs were four or five youngsters—couples, friends, strangers, it was hard to be sure—all as thin as coat hangers, their faces oddly blue beneath the fizzing of one of the strip lights. One girl sat forward, her banknotes ready, clutched thick and tight in her scrawny fist.
Someone came through the door behind them, sped past at an incongruous jog, and circled back behind the bar. Arkady moved forward and spoke in Russian.
“Hello, Genna.”
“Piano.” Offering a raised fist (held sideways for Arkady to knock with his own), Gennady, the teenage tender, greeted Arkady from behind the makeshift bar with a grin.
He could be no more than fourteen years old, Henry thought. Eyes like flattened lead shot, flared nostrils, skin like congealed lava.
Arkady declined the fist, enveloping it in the mighty palm of his left hand instead.
“How you doing, Genna? Still running. Next Olympics is your Olympics, I just know it.”
“If I can get the invisible drugs that the pussy-boy Americans use, then I’ll be the fastest man on the planet.” Gennady sucked in a sharp breath. “Whoa, shit, you bust your finger.”
“Yeah—stupid. Should have known. Never try to fuck two fat girls at the same time. Some shit is just too dangerous.”
Gennady’s laugh caused him to screw up his face.
Arkady raised an introductory thumb. “Henry.”
Gennady paused, self-consciously rehearsing the look that he had laboriously formulated from the hundred films that informed his every expression, then raised his fist again.
Henry had no choice. Embarrassed, he raised his own bony knuckles, his long sleeves hanging lankly from his scrawny bones.
“We will take two vodkas. And you can pour them,” Arkady said.
“Sure.”
All customers had to order a drink—one of the rules. This was a bar, after all. Some just paid the money and Gennady knew not to bother opening the bottle. Henry rubbed his hands together, agitated. He was suddenly anxious that Arkady was actually going to drink. He’d never seen the Russian have so much as a sip of beer. And yet he dared not speak. So he pretended to stare into space instead, careful not to glance up at Tatiana. He sensed that Gennady would die rather than allow anyone even to touch these posters. But he felt stupid and panicky watching the teenager pour the vodka, so he turned away to face the room, hoping to appear casual.
The main wooden tables were all empty save for one over in the corner beneath a barred and blacked-out window, where two men sat: the one with a hollow face, a decorator by the look of his paint-streaked overalls, who seemed straight enough; the other a fat man with a black beard, dressed (without irony) in sports shoes and track-suit, who was slouching sideways on the bench, his head nodding back and forth. This was the cheapest shit you could buy in Petersburg; God knows what they mixed it with, but it was supposed to be safer than the street. They sold clean needles too. And people came back. The place was busy nights, Arkady had said, passing itself off as a normal club. Part of Henry, the sickest part, was actually grateful to Arkady for the inadvertent introduction. If he needed to, he could now return alone.
Henry paid. And Arkady picked up the drinks.
“So, Genna, when your uncle is free, tell him I am here to speak with him.”
Gennady made two guns with his fingers and thumbs. “I’ll tell him.”
They sat down at the table nearest the bar, the Russian leaning back with his arms stretched out in front as if he were about to play, the Englishman with his shoulders folded, hunched in, sharp as vultures’ wings.
Gennady passed them again at speed.
Arkady swilled his vodka around, looked at it a moment as if another—maybe better—life was therein contained, then sloshed it out onto the sawdust floor.
Voice low, Henry asked, “Has this guy done a passport for you before?”
“I have never left Russia.”
Henry felt himself recoil involuntarily. Idiot. Keeping his sallow face blank but suffering cringes within, he cast his glance away as if to reassess the room.