The room was mean, barely furnished with a bed, a hard-backed chair, and a dresser with three legs and a pile of books propping up the fourth corner. A circular threadbare carpet covered the center of the room. It was stained, pocked with cigarette burns. What appeared to be a closet was the toilet. The shower and sink were down the hall.
Arkadin went to the window. He’d asked for a room in front, knowing it would be noisier, but would afford him a bird’s-eye view of anyone coming. The street was deserted, not a car in sight. Sevastopol glowed in a slow, cold pulse.
“Time,” he said, turning back into the room, “to get some things straight.”
“Now? Can’t this wait?” Devra was lying crosswise on the bed, her feet still on the floor. “I’m dead on my feet.”
Arkadin considered a moment. It was deep into the night. He was exhausted but not yet ready for sleep. He kicked off his shoes, lay down on the bed. Devra had to sit up to make room for him, but instead of lying down parallel to him, she resumed her position, head on his belly. She closed her eyes.
“I want to come with you,” she said softly, almost as if in sleep.
He was instantly alert. “Why?” he said. “Why would you want to come with me?”
She said nothing in reply; she was asleep.
For a time, he lay listening to her steady breathing. He didn’t know what to do with her, but she was all he had left of this end of Pyotr’s network. He spent some time digesting what she had told him about Shumenko, Filya, and Pyotr, looking for holes. It seemed improbable to him that Pyotr could be so undisciplined, but then again he’d been betrayed by his girlfriend of the moment, who worked for Icoupov. That spoke of a man out of control, whose habits could indeed filter down to his subordinates. He had no idea if Pyotr had daddy issues, but given who his daddy was it certainly wasn’t out of the question.
This girl was strange. On the surface she was so much like other young girls he’d come across: hard-edged, cynical, desperate, and despairing. But this one was different. He could see beneath her armor plating to the little lost girl she once had been and perhaps still was. He put his hand on the side of her neck, felt the slow pulse of her life. He could be wrong, of course. It could all be a performance put on for his benefit. But for the life of him he’d couldn’t figure out what her angle might be.
And there was something else about her, connected to her fragility, her deliberate vulnerability. She needed something, he thought, as, in the end, we all did, even those who fooled themselves into thinking they didn’t. He knew what he needed; it was simply that he chose not to think about it. She needed a father, that was clear enough. He couldn’t help suspecting there was something about her he was missing, something she hadn’t told him but wanted him to find. The answer was already inside him, dancing like a firefly. But every time he reached out to capture it, it just danced farther away. The feeling was maddening, as if he’d had sex with a woman without reaching an orgasm.
And then she stirred, and in stirring said his name. It was like a bolt of lightning illuminating the room. He was back on the rainy rooftop, with Mole-man standing over him, listening to the conversation between him and Devra.
“He was your responsibility,” Mole-man said, referring to Filya.
Arkadin’s heart beat faster. Your responsibility. Why would Mole-man say that if Filya was the courier in Sevastopol? As if of their own accord, his fingertips stroked the velvet flesh of Devra’s neck. The crafty little bitch! Filya was a soldier, a guard. She was the courier in Sevastopol. She’d handed the document off to the next link. She knew where he had to go next.
Holding her tightly, Arkadin at last let go of the night, the room, the present. On a tide of elation, he drifted into sleep, into the blood-soaked clutches of his past.
Arkadin would have killed himself, this was certain, had it not been for the intervention of Semion Icoupov. Arkadin’s best and only friend, Mischa Tarkanian, concerned for his life, had appealed to the man he worked for. Arkadin remembered with an eerie clarity the day Icoupov had come to see him. He had walked in, and Arkadin, half crazed with a will to die, had put a Makarov PM to his head-the same gun he was going to use to blow his own brains out.
Icoupov, to his credit, didn’t make a move. He stood in the ruins of Arkadin’s Moscow apartment, not looking at Arkadin at all. Arkadin, in the grip of his sulfurous past, was unable to make sense of anything. Much later, he understood. In the same way you didn’t look a bear in the eye, lest he charge you, Icoupov had kept his gaze focused on other things-the broken picture frames, the smashed crystal, the overturned chairs, the ashes of the fetishistic fire Arkadin had lit to burn his clothes.
“Mischa tells me you’re having a difficult time.”
“Mischa should keep his mouth shut.”
Icoupov spread his hands. “Someone has to save your life.”
“What d’you know about it?” Arkadin said harshly.
“Actually, I know nothing about what’s happened to you,” Icoupov said.
Arkadin, digging the muzzle of the Makarov into Icoupov’s temple, stepped closer. “Then shut the fuck up.”
“What I am concerned about is the here and now.” Icoupov didn’t blink an eye; he didn’t move a muscle, either. “For fuck’s sake, son, look at you. If you won’t pull back from the brink for yourself, do it for Mischa, who loves you better than any brother would.”
Arkadin let out a ragged breath, as if he were expelling a dollop of poison. He took the Makarov from Icoupov’s head.
Icoupov held out his hand. When Arkadin hesitated, he said with great gentleness, “This isn’t Nizhny Tagil. There is no one here worth hurting, Leonid Danilovich.”
Arkadin gave a curt nod, let go of the gun. Icoupov called out, handed it to one of two very large men who came down the hallway from the far end where they had been stationed, not making a sound. Arkadin tensed, angry at himself for not sensing them. Clearly, they were bodyguards. In his current condition, they could have taken Arkadin anytime. He looked at Icoupov, who nodded, and an unspoken connection sprang up between them.
“There is only one path for you now,” Icoupov said.
Icoupov moved to sit on the sofa in Arkadin’s trashed apartment, then gestured, and the bodyguard who had taken possession of Arkadin’s Makarov held it out to him.
“Here, now, you will have witnesses to your last spasm of nihilism. If you wish it.”
Arkadin for once in his life ignored the gun, stared implacably at Icoupov.
“No?” Icoupov shrugged. “Do you know what I think, Leonid Danilovich? I think it gives you a measure of comfort to believe that your life has no meaning. Most times you revel in this belief; it’s what fuels you. But there are times, like now, when it takes you by the throat and shakes you till your teeth rattle in your skull.” He was dressed in dark slacks, an oyster-gray shirt, a long black leather coat that made him look somewhat sinister, like a German SS-Stьrmbannfьhrer. “But I believe to the contrary that you are searching for the meaning of your life.” His dark skin shone like polished bronze. He gave the appearance of a man who knew what he was doing, someone, above all, not to be trifled with.
“What path?” Arkadin said dully, taking a seat on the sofa.
Icoupov gestured with both hands, encompassing the self-inflicted whirlwind that had torn apart the rooms. “The past for you is dead, Leonid Danilovich, do you not agree?”
“God has punished me. God has abandoned me,” Arkadin said, regurgitating by rote a lament of his mother’s.
Icoupov smiled a perfectly innocent smile, one that could not possibly be misinterpreted. He had an uncanny ability to engage others one-on-one. “And what God is that?”