She went back out to his sitting-room, and stood in the sunny window, rested her head against the glass and stared out at the misty Obvodni Canal below her. To the south were the working-class neighbourhoods – long identical rows of wooden houses. In the distance to the west was the cluster of smokestacks from the Putilov works. She could see the shining threads of the rails at the Tsarskoye Selo Station.
She could get enough money to leave, she thought. She could go away. Maybe the sad man would lend her the money. Italy, she thought. Somewhere warm. Somewhere where there were flowers in March instead of chunks of ice floating down the river. She could dance there in Rome, or act, or become a governess, teach Russian. Or she’d meet someone who made her laugh, someone who was a real gentleman.
‘All right, why don’t you sit down and talk to me for a while.’ She whirled at the sound of his voice. He came in and took a pad and pencil off the desk, moved to the sofa and waited for her.
‘Let’s start with the basics. Your name?’
‘What are you, police?’
‘Kind of a policeman. I wanted to talk to you about the girl that fell out the window that night.’
She looked at him for a long moment while she went cold inside. ‘Aliyeva, Vera Evgeniya,’ she said angrily. ‘I don’t want to talk about any of that, there’s nothing to talk about anyway.’
‘Look, you’re going to talk to me one way or the other, let’s be clear about that from the start, eh? Now, what did you see?’
‘No, I’m not. Go to hell –’ She started to walk out, but he grabbed her wrist and spun her back into the kitchen. She hit her elbow on the counter and it hurt.
‘Calm down. Do what I tell you or I’ll telephone my friends and they’ll pull your yellow card and you’ll be waiting in jail until they throw you on a riverboat back to wherever you came from, understand?’ He was standing there, close. Blocking her off in the corner of the kitchen. ‘I can do whatever I want with you,’ he said; his voice was low, almost a whisper. ‘For now you’re mine and you’re going to cooperate and give me an answer for everything I ask. The quicker you get that through your head, the easier we’ll get along. Now…tell me about how she died.’
‘I don’t want to talk about that…’
‘You were screaming in the street about it.’
‘I hate you people.’ She had started to cry now, all of it his fault, and she flung a glass at him – it glanced off his elbow and spun across the floor.
‘I heard you. You were screaming about murder,’ he said. ‘What did you see? Did you see anyone you recognized? Did you know Rasputin was there? Did you see him?’
‘No…no.’ She almost laughed.
‘Were you acquainted with the girl?’ he said quietly.
‘I had met her before. There are always girls around…Katya was one of them.’ She took a deep breath and wiped her eyes.
‘Do you know who did it?’ He was looking at her fixedly. He wasn’t going to stop with his questions. It was as if she had run into a wall, an immovable, logical wall that was too high to climb, to wide to go around. He kept staring, a serious priest demanding a confession. She didn’t have to tell him everything. Just enough to get rid of him. Give him something to make him happy, then he’d leave her alone. Like all men.
‘There were two of them,’ she said finally in a voice like a bedtime story. ‘A little one – shorter, younger, and with a pointed nose like a mouse, and the old one…the one who did it.’
‘Good, Vera. Go and get some more tea if you want,’ he said.
‘I don’t want your tea, I want to leave.’
‘Tell me what happened. If I like the sound of it, maybe you can go.’
‘I don’t know anything. I suppose it was some kind of party, some kind of special party. It was a celebration of something, an anniversary? Some kind of party in the old man’s honour. Both of them were wearing funny little hats. They had a room all to themselves for a while. We weren’t allowed to watch that part. No girls allowed, I guess they were shy.’
‘How many?’
‘Maybe a dozen at a big party at the beginning. Then they came and went – I don’t know. Then we were supposed to come in and entertain them. Some of them weren’t so bad. Some of them were nice. They’re afraid at first. They want to talk to you, some of them. Sometimes one of them might think they’ve fallen in love with you.’ She turned her face from the window, let her gaze fall on Ryzhkov for a long moment. Was he a fool, too? No reason to think otherwise. Being a policeman didn’t give him some special immunity. She’d never met a man who wasn’t a fool one way or another.
‘Then what?’ He held out a cigarette for her. A reward? After a moment she gave in and took it.
‘After they’d all gone off to the other rooms then it was time for us to go with the short one and his guest of honour.’
‘The old one?’
She nodded. ‘They had wanted a show, so Larissa and I were doing our act and in the middle of it they brought Katya in. You could see the old one perk right up then. A little while later they took her with them.’ She suddenly shifted in the seat, rocked forwards. ‘I don’t know his name or why he was so important, who he was…’
‘Just tell me what happened. Now you were in another room?’
‘There’s a hallway, and I heard the screaming when Larissa and I were going to the men in the next room. We had been drinking, of course. Champagne, champagne and more champagne…And I could hear this argument. Two men yelling at each other at the end of the hall, and Larissa stopped and looked at me and I thought that…maybe if I went in there, maybe I could say that I just made a mistake. I don’t know, I was thinking that maybe just having some other girl, an older girl, come in there would be a way of making him stop but…’
Vera was staring at the nothingness in front of her. He let her gather herself, take her time.
‘The first thing…The first thing I saw was the short one, he was carrying her in his arms. The old man was screaming at him, promising that he would do anything. He was on his knees, this angry old man. So old, so fat, with his white whiskers, and little thin white legs that could hardly hold him up. They must have given him something, a powder or an injection, something to make him strong. He was enraged, like a bull. Red, sweating, talking nonsense. The small man was laughing at him. When he saw us he told us to leave, and ran into a different room. Then…some others from the party came into the hallway and tried to get us to leave, and that was when I heard the glass breaking.’
‘All right, Vera.’
‘You can tell, sometimes. The ones like that, they’re different. If you look close, you can see it. I should have seen it.’ She gave a sudden bitter laugh. ‘They were treating him like a fucking god. He was someone’s special friend. And she was so little, and he wanted to…It makes it better supposedly, everybody always wants to make it better.’
‘Who else did you see?’
She shook her head. ‘No one. The others came and took the old man away, kicked us out.’
‘Could you recognize these men? I need to get names for all of them. Will you help me?’ He half-expected her to break down again, but she didn’t. She just fell silent for a long minute, the cigarette burned down so much now that he reached out and prised it from her fingers. ‘The police are saying it was suicide, did you know?’ he said. ‘They say she wanted to fly.’
‘I don’t want to hear any bullshit. You really think she killed herself because she was a whore? She’d been doing what she did for years! She didn’t suddenly realize she was in a degrading, disgusting profession, and just because she