Sheremetev stepped back. How many trays in the cupboard? He counted them. Twenty-five. And on each tray, fifteen velvet niches, and only a few of them here and there that didn’t contain a watch. Watches that were hardly ever even taken out of their hiding places. And was it true that Vladimir had never had to pay, that people had given them as gifts, watches, it seemed, that were so expensive that even a doctor couldn’t afford to buy them?
As Vladimir waited in the next room to be put to bed, Sheremetev gazed at the closed trays in the beautifully made cabinet, sitting one above the other in perfect precision. Tray above tray, watch beside watch.
And Pasha lay in jail for want of a bribe, while these watches, apparently so expensive, lay all but forgotten in their niches…
Suddenly he came to his senses. Nikolai, he said to himself: what on earth are you thinking?
10
THE CUT ON HIS face, together with Dr Rospov’s ministrations, had bruised Sheremetev’s cheek more than he had realised. The next morning, when he looked in the mirror, he saw the narrow black line of the laceration, festooned with suture knots like tiny blood-caked cactuses, across a swelling the colour of an aubergine.
Everyone who saw him seemed to take Sheremetev’s lacerated cheek as an invitation to pass comment, as if by his mere presence he was advertising a newfound desire to hear what they considered either their wisdom or their wit. ‘You need to take care of yourself, Nikolai Ilyich,’ said the maid in the corridor, using a tone one would normally reserve for a decrepit octogenarian. ‘Been on the booze again?’ offered the house attendant who brought up the breakfast tray for Vladimir, grinning from ear to ear. And Vladimir, the cause of the injury in the first place, took one look at him and said: ‘Learn to use your razor, whoever you are!’
‘Yes, Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ muttered Sheremetev, staying out of range of his finger.
After he had helped Vladimir with breakfast, Sheremetev left him in the sitting room while he went downstairs. He found half a dozen of the security guards in the staff dining room breakfasting noisily, including Lyosha and two of the others who had been at the lake the previous day. A chorus of chortles and jokes greeted him, many of them about the danger posed by that most deadly of weapons, the zipper.
‘Very funny!’ declared Sheremetev irritably, and he helped himself to bread and honey.
The jokes carried on for a few more minutes, then petered out.
Eventually the guards drifted away. Sheremetev sat alone, sipping coffee, thinking about Pasha and his black eye, now and then prodding tentatively at the tender swelling around the cut on his cheek. The fear and desperation he had heard in Oleg’s voice the previous night tormented him. He tried to imagine how he would feel if Vasya was in Pasha’s situation – except somehow it was impossible to imagine Vasya being in such a situation, and not only for the obvious reason that Vasya would never have written the kind of thing that Pasha had produced. If Vasya was in jail, he’d probably end up running the place. But Pasha… Oleg was right – who knew what would happen to him or if he would even survive it?
And Oleg was right about another thing – it was because of Karinka. The outrage that had built up in Pasha over the years, and which had exploded out of him in that blog, had started with Karinka’s death. Somehow, as Oleg said, he had found out what was going on, and he had never been the same.
Sheremetev feel a deep sense of responsibility, as if somehow he had had a part in putting Pasha in jail.
Stepanin poked his head out of the kitchen. He came out and got himself a bowl of kasha and a coffee.
‘That looks bad,’ he said, gesturing at Sheremetev’s face. ‘If you’re going to go out brawling, Kolya, take a gun.’
‘Very funny.’
Stepanin chuckled. ‘On the other hand, it can be hard to defend against a zipper.’
‘And an elbow,’ muttered Sheremetev.
‘The boss hit you with his elbow?’ Stepanin made a show of looking impressed. ‘Whatever you did, you must have really upset him.’
Sheremetev didn’t rise to the bait.
The cook grinned. He seemed more like his old self. The frown of anxiety that seemed to have become a constant feature of his expression since Barkovskaya commenced her assault on his chicken supply was absent. He drizzled honey on his kasha, took a spoonful, and ate it with a smug expression.
Sheremetev wondered what was going on.
Stepanin ate quickly, then slurped his coffee. He put the mug down with a thump and grinned again. ‘Do you think Vladimir Vladimirovich would fancy chicken Georgian style one of these days?’
Sheremetev looked at him in surprise. ‘Have you sorted things out with Barkovskaya?’
Stepanin got up, an enigmatic smile on his face.
‘So everything’s okay?’ asked Sheremetev, with a sudden sense of relief.
‘It will be.’
‘It will be?’ That didn’t sound good, nor the portentous tone in which the cook had said it. ‘What do you mean it will be?’
‘Who started this, Kolya? Was it me or was it Barkovskaya? Well? If you start a war, someone’s going to get hurt.’
‘Vitya, what are you talking—’
‘Just tell Vladimir Vladimirovich he’ll soon have Georgian chicken for lunch again.’
Sheremetev didn’t know how Stepanin was planning to get Barkovskaya to back down, but the cook’s dark intimations sucked away the relief he had felt and replaced it with a looming sense of foreboding. On top of his guilt and worry over Pasha, and the throbbing tenderness in his lacerated cheek, it made Sheremetev feel even more miserable. The situation with Pasha reminded him of the worst days with Karinka, when he could see her going downhill in front of his eyes, and for want of money, there was nothing he could do. He had said to Oleg that they would find a way to get Pasha out of jail, adopting the tone of an older, protective brother, but this wasn’t a schoolyard in which he could put his head down and charge to Oleg’s aid, and this wasn’t a fight with people he could beat – not that the Pinto twins had emerged victorious from that many scuffles, anyway, not with the boys who learned to sidestep him. He had uttered the words out of an instinctive desire to comfort his brother, but the words were hollow, and if they had given Oleg any hope, then it was false. He had nowhere near enough money to get Pasha out and no idea who else might provide it.
He remembered the thoughts he had had in front of Vladimir’s watch cabinet the previous night. But that was a fantasy, like a child dreaming of walking up to a hated teacher in front of the whole class and giving him a poke in the eye. Sheremetev knew himself too well. It wasn’t possible that he would actually do it.
THAT MORNING, WHEN HE took Vladimir for his walk, Sheremetev kept him away from the charnel pit. It was an unusually mild day for October and the smell was high. If Stepanin did find a way to finish the stand-off with Barkovskaya, at least they could fill in the hole and that would be the end of the stench. Sheremetev didn’t want to go towards Eleyekov’s garage either. He steered Vladimir in another direction.
Between the long plastic tunnels that covered this part of the estate, out of the breeze, the day felt almost warm. Vladimir was muttering something to someone with whom he was apparently holding a conversation. Sheremetev brooded as he walked alongside him, caught up in his sense of impotence about Pasha. Tomorrow was his day off and he had told Oleg that he would come to visit, although Sheremetev knew that he would have nothing new to say. He wanted to see his brother, of course, but going empty handed in Oleg’s hour of need made him dread it as well.