By now his heart was hammering and his armpits were wet. A bum in someone else's house clutching bags of someone else's things. A thief, what else? He didn't fear the Russian Mafia. He feared the neighbors, and their righteous and remorseless dogs. Someone would see him. Someone would shout. The police would come and Piney would be hurt and handcuffed before he could explain.
He breathed deep, tried without success to stretch his cramping ribs. He pressed the shopping bags against his chest then reasoned he would look less guilty if he held them by the handles.
He moved back through the living room and toward the door. With the lonesome pictures looking on, he opened it a crack. The dusk had deepened and the street lamps had grown more acid bright, they threw hard-edged shadows of fences and palms, lined the porch with dark bars that stretched out from the newels of the railing. Somewhere a television was blaring; somewhere a big dog barked.
Piney held his breath, stepped outside, and locked the door behind him as quietly as he could. He pocketed the dreadful key; it was cold against his leg.
Planks creaked underfoot as he crept along the porch. His bike still leaned against the fence; he looked longingly toward it, his means of escape from the blame of locks and back into the safety of the unowned streets. A cat slunk out from underneath a car. He kept the shopping bags below the level of the shrubbery.
He reached the stairs. There were three of them, painted lumpy gray. A shadow slashed across them, and then there was a swath of naked light. Piney yearned to jump the steps and run but that would look suspicious. He moved deliberately, his eyes straight forward. His right foot was in midair, descending toward the concrete walkway, when a crouched dark form sprang up from the bushes and rammed him with a shoulder.
Piney grunted as his chest compressed and his body warped into a boomerang shape. His fingers opened up and Suki's things went flying, bras and blouses and lipsticks skittering across the yard or catching on low branches, hanging there like laundry. Piney crumpled then tumbled to the ground ahead of his attacker, and in the damp and wormy dirt at the edge of the shrubs, he did what he had long ago learned to do when someone was about to beat on him. He curled up like a baby, his bent arms cradling his face and skull, his guts and groin tucked in as far as the geography of his skinny frame allowed. He lay there and waited for the fists and feet or the knife or gun butt to start punishing his back and sides.
Gennady Petrovich Markov lay back on his feather pillows, pulled his satin sheet up snug beneath his sagging chin, and tried to quell the feeling that his bed was tipping over. If he sought balance by opening his eyes to gaze at some fixed point, he saw sickening undulations along the creases where the walls and ceiling met. If he closed his eyes to stop the rocking, he saw the murdered Lazslo. Vapors of rancid vodka were seeping from his pores and souring the room. He belched and tasted juices like the stink of the morgue.
Silently, he started once again to weep. In his drunkenness, his grief became not just a feeling but an object with weight and a geography. He pictured it as a sort of dark dense hub with many avenues leading out from it, like roads from the center of a city. His fevered mind sought to name these avenues, so that he might pick one to travel on. But all the roads save one stayed dim and featureless. The only pathway he could name was vengeance.
Ivan Fyodorovich had had his nephew killed. Of that he was nearly certain. Lazslo's vitality had made him dangerous. His transgression was that he had taken some joy in life, had had warm blood and thick semen in his tubing. The police, in their lazy embrace of the obvious, might see his murder as a side effect of robbery; and that was just as well. A Russian slain by Russians. What had the American authorities to do with that?
But if it was an affair among Russians alone, what role was left for him, Gennady Markov? He blinked wetly and considered. His life had been one dereliction after another. Dereliction of party, of country. Betrayal of the early promise of his own career in science, of the wisdom of equations, their capsules of insight as spare and beautiful as proverbs. He had always been a shirker and a coward. He knew that about himself, more or less accepted it, and went about his business; self-respect was not required for good digestion. But his handsome, avid nephew had been the only person he loved. To let his murder go unrevenged—even for a man like him, that might be one dereliction too many.
So what would he do? Ivan Fyodorovich, who despised him as only an old friend could, believed he would recant his rash words of that afternoon, and apologize.
Well, maybe he would. Apologize and reclaim his old buffoonish mildness and bide his time. He had less to care about now; Cherkassky had been kind enough to point that out. He could afford to wait. He didn't have a plan, but he had certain knowledge that his superior did not have, certain technical skills that might earn him the last word.