Charlie lay sprawled on his back across the bed, arms and legs spread wide, still in his shirt, socks and underpants, his mouth open, snoring. Troy shook him gently. He did not stir. He shook him harder. His gut wobbled between the gaping shirt buttons and the elastic of his Y-fronts, but he did not wake. It seemed to Troy that he might well sleepoff a bellyful of cheapvvodka until lunchtime.
He went through Charlie’s pockets, pinched a few roubles to get him through the morning, put on the winter wardrobe – the sable hat, the fur coat – and stepped into the Moscow streets. The first time. The first breath of Russian air, the first sight. Last night did not count. Charlie got between him and Moscow. Vodka got between him and Moscow. Again the same question in his mind: ‘Is this it?’ Whatever he saw – splendour or squalor – ‘Is this it?’ was the only form response could take in his mind. After so long, after a generation and more: ‘Is this really it?’
He found a bookshop on a street corner less than quarter of a mile away and bought a map of the city. The address was imprinted in his memory. Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street, where Tolstoy used to live, out in the Khamovniki, the old industrial quarter. He could find no such street on the map. Then the obvious dawned on him and he quickly found Lyev Tolstoy Street. For all he knew it had been renamed some forty years or more. All the same, he’d know the house as soon as he saw it. Of that he was certain. The Moscow home of the Troitskys, abandoned by his father in 1905, passed to an uncle in the interim and confiscated by the state in 1922.
He knew as soon as he left the bookshop that she was following him. It confirmed what he had first thought, that he, not Charlie, was the object of suspicion. He would have liked a clear look at her, but the streets offered too few plate-glass windows in which to catch her reflection. He decided it did not matter. She was unlikely to lose him, and sooner or later, he’d have a chance to turn without simply stopping her on the street. He caught a tram out to the southwest. The spook ran and leapt onto the platform at the last minute. If she broke a leg doing it, this woman would not dare lose him.