swung open the door. There was Tyrone’s camera. He was reaching for it when he heard
the scratch of metal on metal.
LaValle was at the door.
Tell me you love me, Leonid Danilovich.” Devra smiled up at him as he knelt over her.
“What happened, Devra? What happened?” was all he could say.
He’d extricated himself at last from the sculpture, and would have gone after Bourne-
but he’d heard the shots coming from Kirsch’s apartment, then the sound of running feet.
The living room was spattered with blood. He saw her lying on the floor, the Luger still
in her hand. Her shirt was dyed red.
“Leonid Danilovich.” She’d called his name when he appeared in her limited field of
vision. “I waited for you.”
She started to tell him what had happened, but blood bubbles formed at the corners of
her mouth and she started to gurgle horribly. Arkadin lifted her head off the floor, cradled it on his thighs. He pushed matted hair off her forehead and cheeks, leaving red streaks
like war paint.
She tried to continue, stopped. Her eyes went out of focus and he thought he’d lost her.
Then they cleared, her smile returned, and she said, “Do you love me, Leonid?”
He bent down and whispered her in ear. Was it I love you? There was so much static in
his head, he couldn’t hear himself. Did he love her, and, if he did, what would it mean?
Did it even matter? He’d promised to protect her and failed. He stared down into her
eyes, into her smile, but all he saw was his own past rising up to engulf him once again.
I need more money,” Yelena said one night as she lay entangled with him.
“What for? I give you enough as it is.”
“I hate it here, it’s like a prison, girls are crying all the time, they’re beaten, and then they disappear. I used to make friends just to pass the time, to have something to do
during the day, but now I don’t bother. What’s the point? They’re gone within a week.”
Arkadin had become aware of Kuzin’s seemingly insatiable need for more girls. “I
don’t see how any of this has to do with you needing more money.”
“If I can’t have friends,” Yelena said, “I want drugs.”
“I told you, no drugs,” Arkadin said as he rolled away from her and sat up.
“If you love me, you’ll get me out of here.”
“Love?” He turned to stare at her. “Who said anything about love?”
She started to cry. “I want to live with you, Leonid. I want to be with you always.”
Feeling something unknown close around his throat, Arkadin stood up, backed away.
“Jesus,” he said, gathering up his clothes, “where do you get such ideas?”
Leaving her to her pitiful weeping, he went out to procure more girls. Before he
reached the front door of the brothel Stas Kuzin intercepted him.
“Yelena’s wailing is disturbing the other girls,” he said in his hissing way. “It’s bad for business.”
“She wants to live with me,” Arkadin said. “Can you imagine?”
Kuzin laughed, the sound like nails screeching against a blackboard. “I’m wondering
what would be worse, the nagging wife wanting to know where you were all night or the
caterwauling brats making it impossible to sleep.”
They both laughed at the comment, and Arkadin thought nothing more about it. For the
next three days he worked steadily, methodically combing Nizhny Tagil for more girls to
restock the brothel. At the end of that time he slept for twenty hours, then went straight to Yelena’s room. He found another girl, one he’d recently hijacked off the streets, sleeping
in Yelena’s bed.
“Where’s Yelena?” he said, throwing off the covers.
She looked up at him, blinking like a bat in sunlight. “Who’s Yelena?” she said in a
voice husky with sleep.
Arkadin strode out of the room and into Stas Kuzin’s office. The big man sat behind a
gray metal desk, talking on the phone, but he beckoned Arkadin to take a seat while he
finished his call. Arkadin, preferring to stand, gripped the back of a wooden chair,
leaning forward over its ladder back.
At length, Kuzin put down the receiver, said, “What can I do for you, my friend?”
“Where’s Yelena?”
“Who?” Kuzin’s frown knit his brows together, making him look something like a
cyclops. “Oh, yes, the wailer.” He smiled. “There’s no chance of her bothering you
again.”
“What does that mean?”
“Why ask a question to which you already know the answer?” Kuzin’s phone rang and
he answered it. “Hold the fuck on,” he said into it. Then he looked up at his partner.
“Tonight we’ll go to dinner to celebrate your freedom, Leonid Danilovich. We’ll make a
real night of it, eh?”
Then he returned to his call.
Arkadin felt frozen in time, as if he was now doomed to relive this moment for the rest
of his life. Mute, he walked like an automaton out of the office, out of the brothel, out of the building he owned with Kuzin. Without even thinking, he got into his car, drove north
into the forest of dripping firs and weeping hemlocks. There was no sun in the sky, the
horizon was rimmed with smokestacks. The air was hazed with carbon and sulfur
particles, tinged a lurid orange-red, as if everything were on fire.
Arkadin pulled off the road and walked down the rutted track, following the route the
van had taken previously. Somewhere along the line he found that he was running as fast
as he could through the evergreens, the stench of decay and decomposition billowing up,
as if eager to meet him.
He brought himself up abruptly at the edge of the pit. In places, sacks of quicklime had
been shaken out in order to aid the decomposition; nevertheless it was impossible to
mistake the content. His eyes roved over the bodies until he found her. Yelena was lying
in a tangle where she’d landed after being kicked over the side. Several very large rats
were picking their way toward her.
Arkadin, staring into the mouth of hell, gave a little cry, the sound a puppy might make
if you mistakenly stepped on its paw. Scrambling down the side, he ignored the appalling
stench and, through watering eyes, dragged her up the slope, laid her out on the forest
floor, the bed of brown needles, soft as her own. Then he trudged back to the car, opened
the trunk, and took out a shovel.
He buried her half a mile away from the pit, in a small clearing that was private and
peaceful. He carried her over his shoulder the whole way, and by the time he was finished
he smelled like death. At that moment, crouched on his hamstrings, his face streaked with
sweat and dirt, he doubted whether he’d ever be able to scrub off the stench. If he knew a
prayer, he would have said it then, but he knew only obscenities, which he uttered with
the fervor of the righteous. But he wasn’t righteous; he was damned.
For a businessman there was a decision to be made. Arkadin was no businessman,
though, so from that day forward his fate was sealed. He returned to Nizhny Tagil with
his two Stechkin handguns fully loaded and extra rounds of ammunition in his breast
pockets. Entering the brothel, he shot the two ghouls dead as they stood at guard. Neither
had a chance to draw his weapon.
Stas Kuzin appeared in the doorway, gripping a Korovin TK pistol. “Leonid, what the
fuck?”
Arkadin shot him once in each knee. Kuzin went down, screaming. As he tried to raise
the Korovin, Arkadin trod heavily on his wrist. Kuzin grunted heavily. When he wouldn’t
let go of the pistol, Arkadin kicked him in the knee. The resulting bellow brought the last of the girls from their respective rooms.
“Get out of here.” Arkadin addressed the girls, though his gaze was fixed on Kuzin’s