“Yes, but what would you know, Martin?” the grocer said pa-tronizingly.
They had taken tea in the light, airy space of the café, but the Caviar Bar was a darker, more sophisticated place, with its stained glass and copper, Russian Style Moderne. “We call it Art Nou-veau,” he said to Irina.
“Da?” she replied, as if it were the most fascinating thing any-one had ever said to her.
Even now, a year later, he could see the red and black pearls of caviar glistening on their little glass dishes of crushed ice. He didn’t eat any, the idea of fish was bad enough, but the thought of fish eggs was repellent. Irina didn’t seem to notice, she ate all of it. They drank champagne, Russian and cheap, but surprisingly good. She had ordered it without asking him and then clinked his glass and said, “We have good time, Marty.” She had changed for the evening, her hair was pinned up and her boots had been ex-changed for shoes, but her dress was high necked and modest. He wanted to ask her why she was selling souvenirs from an outdoor stall-had she fallen on hard times or was it a vocation-but he couldn’t communicate something so complex.
He had spent the intervening hours between the Idiot and the Grand Hotel thinking about this upcoming encounter. He had imagined them chatting happily, her English magically improved and his few words of uneasy Russian transformed into fluency. He should have been with everyone else on an outing to the ballet at the Mariinsky Theater but had claimed a “bit of a tummy bug” when the grocer had come calling for him. The man went away disgruntled, an upset stomach not a valid excuse, apparently, to a man dancing with death.
Martin had worried that Irina might have misinterpreted this whole scenario, that she would want payment, but the fact that she had footed the bill in the café seemed to imply that she wasn’t selling herself. Perhaps she wanted to find a husband. He wouldn’t mind, not really. No one would look at her in the St. James Center the way they would a Thai bride. You wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at her that she’d been purchased. (Or would you?) “Yes, Irina Canning, my wife. Oh, she’s Russian, you know.We met in St. Petersburg and fell in love.A very romantic city.” She would learn English, he would learn Russian. They would have small half-Russian children, “Sasha and Anastasia.” He would provide her with what she wanted-financial security, a lovely home, children brought up in the affluent West, health care for an aging mother, an education for a younger sibling, and so on, and in return she would give him the illusion of love. Profit and loss, goods and services, that was what it was all about, after all. Business. At some point they had stopped drinking champagne and started drinking vodka. The vodka was so cold it gave him neuralgia across his scalp.
Martin realized he was quite drunk. He wasn’t a drinker, one glass of good wine in the evening was his limit, and he didn’t have either the head or the stomach for cheap champagne combined with 80 percent proof Russian vodka. Time began to lurch for-ward in a series of snapshots, one minute he was rifling through his wallet looking for enough rubles to pay the bill, and the next he was in the front seat of a taxi being driven at a reckless and frightening speed. He wondered if he had been kidnapped. He heard Irina murmur something in Russian to the taxi driver. Martin tried to fasten his seat belt, but the taxi driver growled nyet at him and then said something to Irina that made her laugh. “Not necessary,” he said, as if Martin had insulted his driving skills. Martin laughed as well, he had given over control of his life to a crazy Russian taxi driver and a Russian would-be bride. He ex-perienced an unexpected feeling of buoyancy, something was going to happen, something was going to change.
In a drawer in the bedside table at the Four Clans, he found a glossy plastic card with the menus and phone numbers for local takeaways. His stomach rumbled, and a jet of acid caught him in the throat. He could phone for a pizza, but he knew that when it arrived it would look as unappetizing as it did in the photograph in the menu, and anyway he didn’t have enough money to cover it. “Just nipping out for a bite to eat,” he said to the receptionist. He knew there was no reason for him to account to her for his movements, but Martin couldn’t shake off the oppressive sense of being in custody at the Four Clans. He had hardly any money to his name, he supposed he could get chips or maybe a bowl of soup somewhere cheap.
“Good for you,” the receptionist said indifferently. She had a smear of what looked like blood on her chin, but Martin thought it was more likely to be tomato ketchup.
He ended up in an Internet café where the prices were cheap. It looked like an old-fashioned corner shop, except that it was painted black, and written in some kind of Day-Glo purple on the outside was the name E-COFFEE. Inside it smelled of old coffee grounds and artificial vanilla. Martin ordered a tomato soup that tasted of stale dried oregano but came within his meager budget.
Surrounded by the computers of the Internet café, he realized again how acutely he missed the constant companionship of his laptop. He had mentioned its disappearance to Inspector Suther-land, who hadn’t shown much interest beyond taking down a note of the details. Martin could see that it must be quite low on his list of priorities. “An awful lot of things seemed to have happened to you in the last twenty-four hours, Mr. Canning,” he said. “Still,” he added cheerfully, “just think, one day, when this is all over, you’ll be able to write about it.”
For a brief moment Martin thought about logging on to the Internet, he vaguely wondered if his death had made any difference to his position on Amazon (it could go either way, he supposed). He decided, however, against looking at Amazon or Googling his own name (or Richard’s). He really didn’t want to find evidence of his own death disseminated all over the Web.
When he had paid for the soup with the change from his pock-ets, he was left with sixty-one pence to his name. He was only a ten-minute walk from his office-he made a determined effort to get rid of the quotation marks-and thought he might take a stroll along there and check it out, perhaps tomorrow he could escape the Four Clans, buy a blow-up air bed, and bivouac on the lami-nate flooring of the office. Martin couldn’t imagine ever moving back into his own house-even when the police were finished with it, how would he ever rid the memory of Richard Mott’s murder from his (ironically named) living room? And how would he ever get the room cleaned up, anyway? He couldn’t imagine the women of Favors in their nice pink overalls scrubbing bits of Richard Mott’s brain matter off the carpets and walls.
The office had a toilet and a tiny kitchen with a kettle and mi-crowave. Everything he needed, really. In the office he could live his life simply and without ornament, like the monk he had never been.
They had gone camping quite a lot when he was young-with the Scouts (Christopher fitting in with jovial fakery, Martin getting by) and several times with their parents, when their mother took on the role of Harry’s obedient corporal, endlessly boiling kettles on the rickety Primus stove while Harry himself instructed his pint-size troops in the blacker survival arts (breaking a rabbit’s neck, tickling a trout, wrestling an eel). Survival, it seemed, wasn’t possible without killing something else.
Nina Riley was a great one for camping, of course. She had learned to love the outdoor life in Switzerland during the war and frequently loaded up provisions in the boot of her Bristol and took to the hills of her Highland home. She had a pair of stout walking boots, an army-style tent, and an old-fashioned canvas ruck-sack with leather straps in which she carried her thermos and thick sandwiches of beef and mustard. She boiled up water from peat-brown burns to make tea. She caught fish-trout in the rivers or mackerel from a sea loch-then she fried her fresh-caught fish for breakfast before setting off for a daylong hike, during the course of which she might well come across something suspicious and have to spy on it. “Looks jolly suspicious to me, Bertie. I think our friend’s a bit of a blackguard.” Bertie himself never got to speak much. The television producer had suggested to Martin that Nina and Bertie should “have some sexual tension going on. They’re both a bit bland, you know?” Martin wondered if he was going mad, if this was what it felt like.