DRUNK HARBOR
by Lena Eltang
Drunk Harbor
Translated by Marian Schwartz
T he money ran out before I knew it, as if I hadn’t stolen anything. I kept it in a heavy, striped model lighthouse somebody I knew gave me—back in the old days, when decent people still came over. One morning I stuck my hand in the lighthouse hoping to pull out a few bills and came up with nothing but greasy dust and my old stash—a joint that had lost even the smell of pot.
Last fall the lighthouse had been stuffed and the money’d been poking into the pointy roof with the mica window. They’d counted my cut honestly, in cash and stones, and I immediately started paying back my debts, even bought my ex-wife’s apartment, which I’d taken a mortgage on in ‘07.1 got myself a couple of suits and a belted cashmere coat, the kind I’d wanted for so long, light-colored, like Humphrey Bogart had in Casablanca; then I met this Latvian girl from the consulate and took her to the shore and rented a cottage for the summer so we could traipse around the Jurmala casino. I sent money to my creditors in small installments, but strictly and regularly, and so as not to raise any suspicions, I told my Latvian that I’d inherited money from a relative abroad and couldn’t spend it in Petersburg—I said I didn’t want to pay taxes to the Russian treasury. The Latvian’s name was Anta, which in the Incan language means copper, but she was a strawberry blonde, not a redhead, and blushed crimson at even the mildest swearing.
But less than a year had passed and the money’d run out, the valuable stones dissolving in bills and interest-owed like a candy emerald in boiling water. I’d put the smaller stones in a fruit-drops box long before and left them with my wife along with the keys to her place; I’d stopped by when she was on duty. She was happy to work the nightshift because she was banging some surgeon from oncology, though it was up to me to support her. I had no desire to see my wife, who would have started harping on about other possibilities, which drives me nuts. I don’t have any other possibilities.
Ever since I broke into the jewelry shop and killed the owner, who showed up out of nowhere, my possibilities have narrowed to the dark slit in the mailbox. My own mailbox, at 22 Lanskaya Street. I’d rented a room on Lanskaya before spring began, and the diamond tucked away for a rainy day lay there under a kitchen floorboard, in a piece of cork. Before I’d kept it in the model iron lighthouse I’d bought in Riga, then Anta zeroed in on my hiding place and I’d had to find somewhere else. Now that rainy day was near, and the time had come to sell off the ice, but my reliable fence wasn’t answering my calls and I was getting nervous.
I knew that one day I’d find a subpoena there and I’d have to clear out of town; I thought about this every morning, waking up in my room with the mold drips on the north wall and the mirror broken out in a greenish mercury rash. There might not even be a subpoena, two guys from the slaughterhouse could just come, handcuff me, force my head down like a stallion at the veterinary, and shove me into a barred van.
The day they came for me I was walking home and I just had a bad feeling; damp clouds were gathering over the roofs, and the January sun had rolled way up where it shone dully, like a czarist coin. I was walking from Kamenny Island, where I’d been to see this scam artist who’d been doing passports since the ‘90s and now lived behind a solid fence not far from the Kleinmichel dacha. I wanted to offer him my last stone—the purest, pear-cut— in exchange for a clean passport with a Schengen visa and twenty thousand cash. Not finding the owner at home, I gave his guard a note and started on my way back, thinking how I could’ve been living in a place like that, with a fountain and brass herons, if I hadn’t frittered away last year’s loot. A sparse snow was falling from the sky, like down from an old lady’s feather bed. It got into my eyes and mouth and even seemed warm to the touch.
Right by my building I slipped on an iced-over manhole and barely kept my feet, almost dropping the paper bag with two bottles of sauvignon I’d bought for the Latvian—I don’t drink wine myself, diligent Jah not taking kindly to rivals. After the thaw the frosts had struck, and the ice in the untidy city turned into black rolled-out paths for sullen pedestrians to plod along, arms out to the sides like tightrope walkers. I didn’t notice the Toyota by the front door right away; it was so dirty it blended in with the sooty yellow facade. Sitting behind the wheel was some dummy in a knit cap who’d cracked the window to tap his ashes in the snow. I might not have recognized him if it hadn’t been for the familiar sleeve poking out the window, and it’s true, he was a dummy if he went on a job dressed in fiery-red nylon. There was no point trying to figure out who my guests were—police or former accomplices. The nastiness would be different in kind but identically leaden.
I decided to wait it out at my neighbor the conductor’s place, hoping she’d be on a run. Once I’d crashed at her place for a few days, and since then I knew where she hid the extra key. Things had taken a bad turn. No matter who these people were, they could move into my attic and sit around drinking tea, waiting for the moment the apartment owner’s patience ran out. Picturing the Latvian sitting on a kitchen stool with tied hands, I could feel my throat smarting, like from cheap tobacco. If it’s cops, then Anta’s sitting on the stool, but if it’s my old friends, she’s lying down with her skirt pulled over her head. I pictured her legs in blue stockings, like the two blades of a split Ottoman saber, and my throat dried up.
Last winter, when I put some of my loot in the mailbox, I did it not in a fit of generosity but as a reliable investment; whatever fell into my wife’s hands could only be wrested away along with her hands. That meant I was free of her letters, phone calls, and fits of insanity for a few years. Now she’d think twice before coming to look for me; she’d slip her take under her shirt and make herself scarce. I locked the mailbox with the key that had been lying in my coat pocket for six months, tossed the key through the slot, thought a second, and threw the apartment key in after it. Now I had one home, one woman, and one stolen crystal of carbon that I planned to sell so I could leave town. The home was someone else’s, the woman was a slut, and there was a wet job hanging over the stone—so if you thought about it, I didn’t have all that much. I had to get away as fast as possible. Some guy I didn’t know who wore a red quilted jacket had shown up more than once and hung around the courtyard trying to look nonchalant. At one time I’d thought he was visiting my neighbor the conductor, who sold a little grass on the side, but when I stopped by and asked her a couple of questions it turned out the guy wasn’t one of her clients, he was some stray wise guy. Or a cop.
I turned into the courtyard, opened the boiler room door, went down the steel stairs quietly, nodded to Timur, the stoker, who was sitting there in a scorched quilted vest, and went out through the janitor’s door on the other side of the building. The conductor’s apartment was on the third floor. Climbing the stairs I peered at the gray Toyota, which was already sprinkled with crumbly snow, so it must have been there at least two hours. No one answered the bell, so I stood a little while on the landing, waiting, and then went to the railing by the elevator, twisted off the cap of a cast-iron snake, and stuck my hand in deep, all the way to the tail. The key was lying there, right where it was supposed to be.