He leaned his head against the wood panelling of the upstairs corridor, feeling as if he couldn’t take another step, sobbing silent tears.
A noise came out of the monitor in his pocket. Vladimir was awake, shouting about something.
Even after all this, after everything that had happened, the nurse’s instinct in Sheremetev stirred. He took a deep breath. He waited a moment longer, then went to Vladimir’s room and cautiously opened the door.
Inside, Vladimir sniffed. What a stench! The Chechen was coming. He must be close now, very close.
Vladimir knelt on the bed, turning his head watchfully from one side of the room to the other.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ said Sheremetev, hoping that it wasn’t too late to settle him without an injection. ‘Please, lie down.’
Vladimir’s gaze focused on him.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich,’ urged Sheremetev, coming closer, ‘lie down again now. Please. Everything’s okay.’
The smell grew stronger. Stronger than ever. This was it! The Chechen was here to finish it once and for all, a fight to the death.
‘Vladimir Vladimirovich…’
There it was! The head!
Vladimir leapt. Ouchi Gari! Then quick as a flash –Tsukkomi Jime!
Sheremetev’s skull thudded against the floor and Vladimir crashed down on top of him. ‘Stop!’ cried Sheremetev hoarsely. Vladimir’s strength was like that of a man thirty years younger. ‘You’re choking…’
‘Ah, you fucking Chechen! See!’ Vladimir let go of his neck and leapt up, then pranced around triumphantly in his pyjamas.
‘Vladimir Vladimiro—’
Two quick blows to Sheremetev’s face silenced him. Vladimir went off dancing around the room, singing an obscene army song about Chechen women.
Sheremetev climbed warily to his feet. Vladimir stopped, eyeing his adversary once more. He started slowly to approach him, arms tensed, knees flexed, preparing to unleash another assault.
Sheremetev threw a quick glance at the phone on the other side of the room, considering his chances of being able to get there to call the security guards – provided any of them weren’t too drunk to respond. But even if he got there, he couldn’t imagine he would have the time to make the call before Vladimir was on top of him.
Vladimir had taken another couple of steps closer. ‘You fucking Chechen. That was just the appetiser. Now, I’m going to kill you. Once and for all. This is it. Come on. Scared, you boy-fucker?’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re dead.’
Sheremetev breathed heavily. Pasha had said that Vladimir had carried out a genocide of the Chechens. Now, even in his senility, he still wanted to kill them.
He watched Vladimir stepping softly towards him. Why was he looking after this man? Why had he ever looked after him? Twice tonight the back of his head had been smashed. The laceration in his cheek, he realised, was bleeding again. His windpipe was bruised and tender. He was covered in stinking kitchen juice. And why? For what?
Every man, no matter how gentle or humane, has his breaking point. After all that he had been through that day, as Vladimir padded intently towards him, Nikolai Ilyich Sheremetev reached his. The anger that had been building up in him that night – that had been building up in him since the news of Pasha’s arrest – finally erupted. Everything was the fault of this man who was creeping inexorably closer to him. His nephew was in prison and his son was a gangster and jewellers were thieves and policemen were kidnappers and security men were extortionists and drivers and housekeepers and gardeners and cooks were embezzlers and fraudsters and cheats and murderers and it was all because of this man, because this was his country, because this was what he had made of it for everybody else, as he had himself proclaimed, this place where nothing counted but money and if you had it you could have everything and if you didn’t they left your wife to die.
‘Come on, you fucking Chechen!’ Vladimir started running at him. ‘Come on! Scared? You’re—’
Sheremetev let out a yell and for the first time in forty years, put his head down and charged. Two seconds later he connected with Vladimir’s belly and sent him flying. The back of Vladimir’s head hit the floor with a crack and Sheremetev tumbled down on top of him.
Vladimir saw the Chechen’s face leering over him, the black tongue coming at him to cover him with the slime of death. He punched at it.
Sheremetev punched back, all restraint gone. ‘You destroyed everything! You killed my wife! You corrupted my son! You turned me into a thief and an accomplice to murder!’
‘You’re all thieves and murderers, you fucking Chechens!’ cried Vladimir gleefully, punching harder.
The old man’s punches were well aimed. Sheremetev tried to shield himself from the blows. Another one came, and another, tearing out the sutures and opening the cut in his cheek and smashing across his nose. He pulled back and struggled to get up, pushing down with his hand on Vladimir’s face and slamming the old man’s head back onto the floor as he rose – and again, and again – as he got to his feet.
‘You’re not getting away, you fucking Chechen!’ yelled Vladimir, rising behind him.
Sheremetev ran. Vladimir chased him. The old man threw himself at Sheremetev’s legs and dragged him back. Sheremetev kicked like a mule and stumbled free. He ran to his room and slammed the door. Feverishly, he scrabbled for his keys and unlocked the cupboard containing the tranquilliser.
There was a thumping on the door. ‘I’m coming for you, you Checken prick!’
He leaned back against it, not trusting that the lock would hold, juggling needle and syringe in trembling fingers. He could feel Vladimir’s thumping coming through the wood. He had the vial of tranquilliser and plunged the needle through the rubber stopper. What was the dose? How much? Thump! He sucked the whole lot into the syringe.
He opened the door.
Vladimir punched him in the face.
He fell back, needle in hand, Vladimir on top of him and still swinging his fists. He turned his head this way and that, trying to evade the blows as he felt for Vladimir’s buttock with one hand and readied the syringe with the other. He stabbed. ‘Ahhh!’ A searing pain shot through his other hand. He pulled the needle out of it. Vladimir hit him across the nose. He stabbed with the needle again. This time it went into the old man’s buttock, all the way to the hilt. He pressed down hard on the plunger and drove the drug in.
Vladimir was still punching. Sheremetev dropped the syringe and put his hands up to protect himself.
Vladimir landed a good blow on the rotting, grinning face. Then another. ‘You fucking Chechen!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘I’ve got you now. Die! Die!’ But suddenly he felt dizzy, and his arms were like lead, and he felt his head falling, and the Chechen’s empty sockets and black tongue were coming closer and a terrible fear took hold of Vladimir as he knew that suddenly he couldn’t lift himself away and in another instant the slime of death would be smeared across him. ‘No!’ he screamed. ‘You fucking…’
In the split second that remained to him before he lost consciousness, Vladimir felt the slime of death wiping itself across his cheek and he knew that now – just as that earless Chechen prisoner had prophesied to him decades earlier in the moments before a squad of Russian soldiers riddled his face with bullets – he was lost.
His head dropped.
Sheremetev lay with Vladimir on top of him, the old man’s leg twitching occasionally, one side of Vladimir’s face buried in the putrefying liquid that soaked Sheremetev’s shirt.
After a moment he pushed Vladimir off. The ex-president lay on his back, breathing slowly and deeply in loud, ragged snores. Sheremetev dragged him by the shoulders back to his suite and left him on the floor of his bedroom while he went to get a moistened towel. He wiped the brown kitchen juice off Vladimir’s face. There were some grazes from the punches Sheremetev had thrown, and he cleaned and dried them. Some of Vladimir’s knuckles were grazed, and he cleaned them as well.