She flicked off the ashes, looked around for a place to throw out the butt, and threw it in the sink. “What’s it all for?” she asked. “That’s what I don’t understand! We aren’t the worst people in town…”
Noonan thought that she was going to cry, but she didn’t—she opened the fridge, took out the vodka and the juice, and took a second glass off the shelf.
“All the same, you shouldn’t despair,” said Noonan. “There’s nothing in the world that can’t be fixed. And believe me, Guta, I have connections. Everything I can do, I will…”
Right now, he himself believed in what he was saying, and he was already going through names, clinics, and cities in his mind, and it even seemed to him that he had heard something somewhere about a case like this, and everything turned out OK, he just needed to figure out where it happened and who the doctor was. But then he remembered why he came here and remembered General Lemchen, and he recalled why he had befriended Guta, and he no longer wanted to think about anything at all—so he made himself comfortable, relaxed, and waited for his drink.
At this point, he heard shuffling footsteps and tapping in the hall and the Vulture Burbridge’s repulsive—especially under the circumstances—nasal voice. “Hey, Red! Your old lady, I see, has a visitor—there’s his hat. If I were you, I wouldn’t let that slide.”
And Redrick’s voice: “Take your prostheses, Vulture. And bite your tongue. Here’s the door, don’t forget to leave, it’s time for my supper.”
And Burbridge: “Jesus, I can’t even make a joke!”
And Redrick: “You and I are done joking. Period. Go on, go on, don’t hold things up!”
The lock clicked open, and the voices became fainter—apparently, they had both gone out onto the landing. Burbridge said something in an undertone, and Redrick answered, “That’s it, that’s it, we’re done!” Then Burbridge grumbled something again, and Redrick replied in a harsh tone, “I said that’s it!” The door banged, he heard quick footsteps in the hallway, and Redrick Schuhart appeared in the kitchen doorway. Noonan rose to greet him, and they firmly shook hands.
“I figured it must be you,” said Redrick, looking Noonan over with quick green eyes. “Ooh, you’ve gotten fat, fatso! Growing your ass in bars… Aha! I see you guys have been enjoying yourselves! Guta, old lady, make me one, too, I gotta catch up.”
“We haven’t even started yet,” said Noonan. “We were just going to. As if we could hope to get ahead of you!”
Redrick gave a sharp laugh and punched Noonan in the shoulder. “We’ll see who’s catching up and who’s getting ahead. Man, I’ve been dry for two years, in order to catch up I’d have to guzzle a vat… Let’s go, let’s go, why are we sitting in the kitchen! Guta, bring us supper.”
He dived into the fridge and stood up again, holding two bottles in each hand, with various labels.
“We’ll have a party!” he announced. “In honor of our best friend, Richard Noonan, who doesn’t abandon those in need! Though there’s nothing in it for him. Ah, Gutalin isn’t here, too bad.”
“Give him a call,” suggested Noonan.
Redrick shook his flaming red head. “They haven’t laid phone lines to where he is yet. All right, let’s go, let’s go…”
He entered the living room first and banged the bottles down on the table.
“We’re having a party, Dad!” he told the motionless old man. “This is Richard Noonan, our friend! Dick, this is my dad, Schuhart the elder.”
Richard Noonan, having mentally gathered himself into an impenetrable lump, stretched his mouth to his ears, shook his hand in the air, and said to the corpse, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Schuhart! How are you? You know, Red, we’ve already met,” he told Schuhart the younger, who was digging through the bar. “We saw each other once, only in passing, however…”
“Have a seat,” said Redrick, nodding at a chair across from the old man. “And if you talk to him, speak louder—he can’t hear a damn thing.” He put down the glasses, quickly opened the bottles, and told Noonan, “Go ahead and pour. Give Dad a little, just a nip.”
Noonan poured in a leisurely fashion. The old man was sitting in the same position, staring at the wall. And he showed no reaction at all when Noonan pushed the glass toward him. Noonan had already adjusted to the new situation. This was a game, a terrible and pitiful game. The game was Redrick’s, and he was playing along, the same way that his whole life he had played along with the games of others—games that were terrible and pitiful and shameful and wild, and far more dangerous than this one. Redrick raised his glass and said, “Well, shall we begin?” and Noonan glanced at the old man in a completely natural manner, and Redrick impatiently clinked his glass against Noonan’s and said, “Let’s go, let’s go, don’t worry about him, he won’t let it get away,” so Noonan gave a completely natural nod, and they had a drink.
Redrick grunted and, eyes shining, went on in that same excited, slightly artificial tone: “That’s it, man! No more jail for me. If you only knew, my friend, how good it is to be home! I’ve got money, I have my eye on a nice little cottage, with a garden, no worse than the Vulture’s. You know, I was planning to emigrate, I’d already decided that in jail. Why in the world am I staying in this lousy town? Let them all go to hell, I think. I get back—hello, they’ve banned emigration! What, did we all become contagious in the last two years?”
He talked and talked while Noonan nodded, sipped his whiskey, interjected sympathetic curses and rhetorical questions, then started grilling him about the cottage—what is it like, how much does it cost—and he and Redrick argued. Noonan was proving that the cottage was expensive and inconveniently located, he took out his notebook and flipped through it, naming addresses of abandoned cottages that could be bought for a song, and the repairs wouldn’t cost much at all, especially if they applied to emigrate, got denied by the authorities, and demanded compensation.
“I see you’ve even gotten into real estate,” said Redrick.
“I do a little bit of everything,” answered Noonan and winked.
“I know, I know, I’ve heard about your brothel business!”
Noonan opened his eyes wide, put a finger to his lips, and nodded in the direction of the kitchen.
“Don’t worry, everybody knows about that,” said Redrick. “Money doesn’t stink. I’ve finally really understood that… But picking Hamfist to be your manager—I almost peed myself laughing when I heard! Setting a wolf to guard the sheep, you know… He’s a nut, I’ve known him since childhood!”
Here the old man, moving slowly and woodenly, like a giant doll, lifted his hand from his knee and dropped it on the table by his glass with a wooden bang. The hand was dark, with a bluish tint, and the clenched fingers made it look like a chicken foot. Redrick fell silent and looked at him. Something trembled in his face, and Noonan was amazed to see the most genuine, the most sincere love and affection expressed on that savage freckled mug.
“Drink up, Daddy, drink up,” said Redrick tenderly. “A little is all right, please have a bit… Don’t worry,” he told Noonan in an undertone, winking conspiratorially. “He’ll get to that glass, you can be sure of that.”
Looking at him, Noonan remembered what had happened when Boyd’s lab assistants showed up here to pick up this corpse. There were two lab assistants, both strong young guys, athletes and all that, and there was a doctor from the city hospital, accompanied by two orderlies—coarse brawny men used to lugging stretchers and pacifying the violent. One of the lab assistants described how “that redhead,” who at first didn’t seem to understand what was going on, let them into the apartment and allowed them to examine his father—and they might have just taken him away like that, since it looked like Redrick had gotten the idea that Dad was being taken to the hospital for preventive measures. But when the knucklehead orderlies—who in the process of the preliminary negotiations had hung around the kitchen and gawked at Guta washing windows—were summoned, they carried the old man like a log: dragging him, dropping him on the floor. Redrick became enraged, at which point the knucklehead doctor stepped forward and volunteered a detailed explanation of what was going on. Redrick listened to him for a minute or two, then suddenly, without any warning at all, exploded like a hydrogen bomb. The lab assistant telling the story didn’t even remember how he ended up outside. The redheaded devil kicked all five of them down the stairs, not letting a single one of them leave unaided, on his own two legs. Every one of them, according to the lab assistant, flew out the front door as if shot from a cannon. Two of them stayed unconscious on the pavement, and Redrick chased the remaining three for four blocks down the street, after which he came back to the Institute’s corpse-mobile and broke all of its windows—the driver was no longer in the vehicle; he had fled in the other direction.