The apartment smelled of stagnant water and rotten stalks. I went on into the bedroom, found a vase of withered roses there, and threw them into the trash can. The roses were long so I had to bend them in half, and a stray thorn poked me in the palm; I saw a drop of blood, and I suddenly remembered how a year before I’d stood in a strange room watching the blood turn black in the small, beady holes on a dead man’s face.
I hadn’t planned to kill the jeweler. I’m a burglar, not a killer. I’d been told the shop would be clean, no one in the apartment above—the owners had gone to their dacha in Pargolovo—and the security system was connected to the local station, Chinese junk, a plastic box with ten buttons. The shop entrance was protected by a corrugated iron curtain, but as often happens, the owner had arranged for one more entrance, from his apartment on the second floor, and one was simpler—a steel door, two rods, and a hole in the floor. The alarm didn’t take me long, and I’d noticed the camera’s dim crimson pupil back on the street when I unlocked the door. It was easily taken off its hook and showed me the wire to the server.
If I were a jeweler buying stolen goods, I’d install a German system with a satellite signal, but the dirty jeweler was a ballsy old man—he even kept his safe in view, under the counter, so he wouldn’t have to go so far. I searched for that safe for half an hour—took pictures off the wall and books off the shelves in the living room, poked my head under the bed, sneezed after getting a noseful of soft gray dust, and felt like a movie gendarme tossing a female student’s room in search of a hectograph and subversive proclamations.
The safe was way under the counter, and I opened it in no time after playing with the last key. There weren’t that many options. The fence who’d cased the job was sure of the first nine numbers, only he hadn’t been able to get a good look at the tenth. I opened the little door and raked up two velvet sacks, a clear one with pale yellow stones, a long box with the necklace promised to the fence, and a fat stack of cash. I got on my knees and was starting to distribute the loot in my pockets when I heard heavy asthmatic breathing, like the creak of a floorboard, and turned around. The old man was standing right behind me holding something shiny high over his head. Whatever it was looked heavy, the size of a bucket, and I glimpsed a chesty shepherdess in a glade with high pointy grass. He was planning to hit me with it but didn’t get the chance.
I remembered his face, even though I only ever saw him for less than a minute—spongy cheeks, folds on his shaved skull, the dim eyes of a deepwater fish, round from surprise. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The stones were of an old-fashioned cut, and they hadn’t been in that safe two days. I grabbed his arm and tried to take the bucket away, but the old man yelled and sank his surprisingly strong teeth into my wrist. That made me see red and I pushed him down on the floor as hard as I could; the shepherdess broke off and stayed in my hand, but the silver glade with the sheep fell on the old man’s face, right on his wide-open, yelling mouth. Silence fell so unexpectedly that I didn’t realize right away that the owner had choked on his own blood, and for a few moments I tried to stop up his mouth with my jacket sleeve.
The old man’s eyes were open and gazing past me at the ceiling, which was thickly overgrown with plaster molding, and I spotted one more camera eye hiding in the leaves. There was no point worrying about the camera because I’d turned off the server, removed the disk, and put it in my pocket. The shop owner, however, was a problem. There was nowhere to take him out, and nothing to take him out in—the old man was a big guy and he would only fit in a trash bag in pieces. I left him lying on the floor with the silver glade jutting out of his smashed mouth, the price tag white on the velvet glade: 299,999. I stuck the shepherdess into my jacket pocket, closed the safe, examined my footprints on the granite floor, grabbed the mop from the storeroom, splashed water on the floor from a pitcher, and gave the dirt a good smearing.
I got out through the apartment over the store, the same way I’d gotten in, went down the back stairs, which for some reason smelled like apples, stopped on the first floor, turned my jacket inside out, pulled my cap down over my eyes, and walked quickly down the street. There wasn’t a soul on the avenue, four in the morning is a dead time, the leaden Petersburg dusk, even the ice underfoot seemed soft and gray.
By the fish store on the corner I came upon a sleepy janitor who asked me for a cigarette. I swayed, grabbing his sleeve, put a whole pack into his hand, and complained about whores in a purposely Eastern accent. That accent and my three-day beard stuck in his mind, so that the sole witness would say he’d seen a tipsy Caucasian walking away from a local girl that morning.
That was late last fall; in the winter I sold my cut to someone I trusted, managed to pay off my debts, bought Gulia the apartment, and spent the rest, and now the day had come when my money was gone and the lighthouse was empty.
Rouser? Rover? Roarer?
I stood on shore trying to read the boat’s name, but in the dusk all I could make out were the first two letters: R and O. Fine, who cares, this was obviously the tub the lush at the station had told me about.
“Going toward Drunk Harbor, turn at the old Lenvodkhoz wharf,” he’d said. “You head down the shore from the datsan, and as soon as you pass the Elagin Bridge turn toward the water, and there it is, it’s got bushes around it and you can barely see the boat, but it’s there.”
The bushes were young and prickly and looked like barberry. I tore my coat sleeve while I was pushing through them in search of a ramp or a gangway, but I couldn’t find anything. The boat was twenty paces from shore, locked in the filthy gray ice, and there were no footprints or boards leading to it. There were long puddles on the surface of the ice, and it was spongy, like bread crust. The hull of the boat wasn’t all that old, but it had rusted through from stem to stern, and the bottom had had concrete poured on it, the former owner probably hoping to take care of a leak. At one time the pilot house had been painted white with three red doors, but all that was left of the white paint now was flakes that resembled shredded eucalyptus bark, and the door latches had been sliced off. I rolled my pants up to my knees, took off my boots, tied them by the laces, hung them around my neck, and started out over the snow barefoot, it being harder to dry footwear than feet—and not only that, these were my only boots and there was no knowing when I would come by another pair.
When I left the conductor’s apartment I already knew I wasn’t going to get in my place. I had almost no money with me, and actually there wasn’t much left at home either. I could forget about picking up the stone. Whoever paid me that visit had left in their scratched-up Toyota, but they could easily have left an ambush in the building, or just planted a bug so they could come back the moment I opened the door. They’d dawdled a long time—I’d sat on the windowsill for two hours until I finally saw my Latvian coming out the front door with two guys. The one on the left hoisted the iron lighthouse on his shoulder like an antiaircraft gunner carrying a rocket launcher. Anta had clearly spilled the beans and now they wanted to smash my hiding place to smithereens. You’re going to have to sweat, archangels.
It didn’t look like they were dragging Anta by force. I couldn’t get a good look at her face, but her walk was easy, and she got in the car smoothly, showing her leg in a high boot. If these were cops they’d let her go quickly, as a foreigner, and they probably wouldn’t bother recording her information. If they weren’t, they’d taken her in addition to the diamond, which they were hoping to find in the lighthouse. Then she’d be back a little later. I left my cell on the table, stuffed my pockets with bread and cheese from the conductor’s refrigerator, took a flat bottle of brandy, and rifled through her dresser but didn’t find anything unusual. Though I did snag a baggie of grass, which I found in a wool sock, didn’t write a note, slammed the door, and tossed the key back in the snake’s tail.