7

Fall came, and so did fifth grade. Moscow was engrossed in the celebration of its 850th anniversary. It was a big deal for Mayor Luzhkov, everyone said, and he plunged into the beautification of the city, bald, round head first. There would be events, concerts, parades, and even though everything around seemed linked to the festivities, Mitya couldn’t care less about any of it.

It was getting colder, yet Valerka still somehow made do. Mitya was used to seeing Valerka every day, and he felt as if they had established a family sort of routine. But one day in October, when Mitya came to the playground to talk to Valerka, he wasn’t there. The crows were there, some of them keeping low, some hiding in the naked trees. Mitya took out the bread that he had brought that day and put it out on top of the fence. He retreated, to watch the crows from a distance. But they didn’t touch the bread, and only the pigeons and sparrows pecked at it. Previously they had been afraid to show up and start a turf war. But now the crows were not moving, so there was nothing to be scared of. The crows uttered a sad, long croak in a weird unison.

They never asked when Valerka was going to return. It was like that between them. But he would return. He always came back.

A week passed, and Valerka didn’t come back. His meager possessions were still lying in the building’s communal hallway. Mitya checked the other places he could have been: the queue by the liquor store, the entrance to McDonald’s, where he sometimes begged. Valerka was nowhere to be found.

“Babushka, do you know where Valerka has gone?” Mitya asked Alyssa Vitalyevna once as she sat next to him and watched A Próxima Vítima, a Brazilian telenovela of crime and passion.

“Oh, they say a bunch of drunk youngsters beat him to death by Tsoi’s Wall,” Babushka replied. Tsoi’s Wall was part of a building covered in graffiti farther up the Old Arbat, a fan monument to the memory of rock singer Viktor Tsoi. Mitya passed it often but never stopped to look. The people who hung out around it were usually fans, hippies who sang Tsoi’s songs and worshipped the enclosure densely covered with unremarkable graffiti. But Mitya knew that there could be some dangerous elements there too.

Mitya froze. Valerka, his friend, was dead. It had always seemed to Mitya that there should be some complexity about death. But here the person he was used to seeing in the playground every day did not exist on earth anymore. And there was nothing to mark the occasion, not even a poof.

“Do you know who killed him?” Mitya finally asked. He was wondering if maybe it was Vovka or some of his drinking buddies. He wouldn’t be surprised if the only friend he had in his life had disappeared through Vovka’s interference. “Is the militsia looking for them?”

“Who knows, Mitya?” Babushka shrugged. “He’s a bomzh. No one will ever try to solve this.”

She was anxious to get back to her show, where a strong, beautiful middle-aged woman and a dark, handsome man shared a passionate romance. Alyssa Vitalyevna couldn’t help drawing parallels with the story of herself and Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis.

Mitya tried to imagine Valerka being beaten. Maybe even stabbed: there were a lot of stabbings in the criminal news. When he thought about the knife entering the flesh, he thought about the market, where the knives chopped meat, where the smell of fresh and stale blood mingled with the briny aroma of the pickles. Of course, he knew that the murder wouldn’t actually smell like the meat rows, but the smell permeated him whenever he considered that Valerka had been stabbed to death.

He tried to rid himself of these thoughts, hoping, against what he knew, that Valerka was still alive. In a week, the last reminders of Valerka disappeared from the hallway. Mitya preferred to think that Valerka himself had come back to take them. He might have. Some other homeless man could have been the one beaten to death near Tsoi’s Wall. There were plenty of them on the Old Arbat. But Mitya also realized that Valerka’s possessions could have been taken by the other homeless, or disposed of by the groundskeeper or one of the residents. They were Valerka’s life possessions, sure, but common trash to anyone else. And he couldn’t go basing a theory on these things.

Mitya had to know the truth. He hated this feeling, as if he wanted to jump ahead but his body was holding him back.

He asked Babushka again in a few days, but she had no updates.

“Who told you that he was beaten to death?” Mitya asked.

“The cashier at the Dieta store,” she replied. “She said she’d heard a rumor, and then I heard that he was dead from Petya the militsioner.”

Uncle Petya was the father of Zhenya, the strange girl who’d showed her slit to Mitya in kindergarten.

Mitya asked his mother about Valerka, too, and she repeated what Alyssa Vitalyevna had told him, almost word for word. It turned out that they were together in the elevator when Uncle Petya told them. He liked to inform women of accidents that happened in the neighborhood: sometimes out of concern for their safety, sometimes out of a morbid desire to make them uncomfortable.

Mitya himself had always felt uncomfortable around Uncle Petya. He was a short man with a large, protruding stomach who often made jokes that Mitya did not understand.

Mitya had spent enough time seated next to his mama and babushka, doing his homework as they watched A Próxima Vítima to know that crimes were solved through painstaking investigation. A young woman in the telenovela was trying to find out who killed a bunch of people, including her relatives. She asked questions and revealed other people’s secrets, and seemed to be closing in on the perpetrator. The only obstacle holding her back was the abundance of love triangles and illegitimate children that she discovered along the way.

Mitya decided that he, too, could be like that woman. Why couldn’t he? Valerka had been his only friend. Valerka had accepted Mitya as Devchonka, and never asked any questions. For that kindness, Mitya owed him. He had to find Valerka and help him out of trouble—or, in the worst-case scenario, solve his murder.

That night in bed Mitya thought about the ways he could solve the mystery, the people he could see, the questions he could ask. It was much better than debating whether Valerka had indeed been killed, or if he was alive, rumination that had exhausted him the previous evenings. Everything around him was calm, Vovka, thankfully, absent. Mitya wondered if Vovka could be involved. Then Mitya could get rid of Vovka for good. The exciting possibility lulled Mitya to sleep, for a short while, until Vovka came home.

Now that it had been established that knowing Uncle Petya was Mitya’s key to finding Valerka, he committed to rekindling his friendship with Zhenya. Mitya had considered this earlier—after all, they had their shared history. He hadn’t done it; each time shyness had overcome him. But under the new circumstances, it could no longer be an excuse.

Mitya had not talked with Zhenya since he stopped going to kindergarten. He saw her often, in the elevator or the store on the corner, and said hello. Zhenya went to the same school as Mitya did, but since she had started middle school the previous year and he was still in elementary, they had been in different buildings for the past year. Now Mitya had joined her. From being the oldest children in the elementary school, Mitya and his classmates had gone to looking like preschoolers next to the big-breasted ninth graders and eleventh graders with facial hair. It did not bother Mitya. He preferred it, actually: there were now girls in makeup whom he could watch and copy, and boys who sometimes looked at him admiringly as he walked down the corridor. Some referred to him as “the maloletka” if they needed him to move or something, mistaking him for a girl, and it made Mitya happy.

Like Mitya, Zhenya was a loner. He noticed that, more often than not, she sat on a bench by herself and scribbled something in a notepad. Perhaps she was doing her homework, Mitya thought. What else could she be doing? Because he had a disappearance to investigate and, likely, a murder to solve, Mitya could not postpone approaching Zhenya any longer. So when he saw that class 6D was done with lessons for that day, and everyone was heading home, he followed Zhenya. The walk from school to home normally took about fifteen minutes, but Zhenya sauntered, which made it harder for indecisive Mitya to keep behind her.

He still had not approached her when they reached the yellow mansion of McDonald’s near the Smolenskaya station on the navy line. Mitya thought that Zhenya would pass the yellow mansion and turn left on the Old Arbat, toward their building, but instead, she turned toward the restaurant and went in. Mitya came forward to the tall glass window to see her inside. Instead of proceeding to the register like the other customers, Zhenya stopped next to the entrance by the trash receptacle: a large box that came up to her neck. Zhenya looked around her while taking off her oversized men’s jacket. She put it on the floor. Then she quickly pried open the door on the side of the garbage bin and started taking things out, speedily but methodically, putting some objects, like open cups, back in, and keeping only the things she considered useful. Mitya stared at her, fascinated, while other passersby kept on walking. Once there was a decent pile of half-eaten food and half-empty packaging on top of her jacket, Zhenya closed the garbage bin’s door, wrapped her loot in the coat, left the restaurant, and started walking up the Old Arbat, holding her cargo in front of her chest. Now she was walking fast, at a pace that Mitya had not expected from her: he could barely keep up.

Once they reached the archway that led into their building’s courtyard, it was difficult for Mitya to keep his distance, so he stayed in the shadows until Zhenya disappeared into the hallway. He then walked into the hall too but noticed that he couldn’t hear the elevator. Zhenya lived on the sixth floor, and it was doubtful that she would walk all the way up with her load. She also wouldn’t have been able to reach her apartment quickly enough for the elevator to stop the whirr. Mitya went to check the staircase, but once he stepped onto the first step, he heard sounds coming from beneath.

Below the stairwell was the common basement, to which Mitya had never been. He began descending into the darkness. Though the building’s garbage chute had been out of order for a long time, and no one was supposed to throw garbage down there, the first smell he detected was of household waste, sweet rot, and fermentation. The second one was unfamiliar, salty, and somehow indecent, with a hint of urine. Then Mitya smelled the greasy deliciousness of the McDonald’s food, a smell he recognized from his only visit there, and from passing by the restaurant.

Once Mitya made it down to the door, he saw that it was open by a few fingers. The smells emanated from within, along with a dim light. Mitya pushed the door and found himself inside a small, dirty room illuminated by a single light bulb. Pipes ran through the room’s floor and walls, with brooms, buckets, plastic bottle crates, and other sorts of things scattered all over. There were two people inside. Zhenya sat on one of the pipes. Her jacket was lying on the ground in front of her, filled with the loot from the McDonald’s trash can. Another girl, smaller than Zhenya, sat in front of her with her back to the door. They dug through the loot, unwrapping half-eaten burgers, taking out the remainders of fries from waxy white packets and red cardboard ones, and discarding the dirty napkins and empty wrappers to one side. What they managed to salvage they put to the other side in neat rows: fry to fry, bun piece to bun piece, ketchup packet to ketchup packet. There was half a milkshake in a paper cup in the corner.

There was no space at all for Mitya to remain unnoticed in the small room. Despite the dim light, Zhenya immediately saw and recognized him. The smaller girl turned to follow Zhenya’s gaze, and Mitya recognized her as the daughter of the surrounding buildings’ caretaker. The basement room must have been where he kept his cleaning equipment, and his daughter had access to the key.

“Please don’t tell my papa,” the girl squealed instead of hello, her eyes wet.

“He won’t, don’t fret,” Zhenya reassured her. She seemed unfazed by Mitya’s arrival, and he started wondering if she had seen him following her. Zhenya nodded to Mitya. “You can join us if you’d like. But I’m not sure if we have enough for all three of us and the little ones.”

As she said that, Mitya noticed that something was moving inside the bucket that stood next to the spread. He came closer and peeked in. There were seven mini rats inside. They didn’t look like newborns. Mitya knew it was typical for many species of mammals to be blind and bald after birth, and these had fur. But they were still pretty new, smaller than the rats he had seen lurking around the dumpsters in other courtyards, with miniature human hands in the front and pristine coats of gray, white, and brown fur.

“Their mother went somewhere, and they were blind and forgotten. We feed them so they can grow strong.”

“And then, Zhenya says, my father will poison them with rat poison.” The little girl wrinkled her face and her eyes dampened further.

“He might,” Zhenya said nonchalantly. She was used to taking the truth of this world unflinchingly and wanted to teach her small friend to do the same.

Mitya was surprised at how calm Zhenya seemed to be about everything, from eating garbage to raising rats for slaughter.

“Do you think Valerka might be staying here now?” he asked the girls.

“You mean the man from the stairs? He is dead!” The little girl’s eyes glistened.

“Are you sure, though?” Mitya was looking at Zhenya, who seemed to be the mouthpiece of reason in this room.

“My father said so,” Zhenya said. “Why do you care?”

“We were friends, and I wanted to help him. Does your father know anything else?”

“I don’t know; I didn’t ask him.”

“Can you ask?” Mitya uttered unexpectedly, astounded by his own daring.

“He won’t tell me anything unless he is drunk.” Zhenya shrugged as she continued going through the leftovers.

“Does your father get drunk often?”

“Mine does,” the little girl pitched in.

“I know. My cousin drinks with your dad.”

“Not anymore,” the little girl said. “My parents said that he is bad and they don’t want to associate with him anymore.”

Mitya thought that he had never agreed with anything so wholeheartedly.

“My father loves to drink, but my mother does not allow him to do it that much,” Zhenya answered. “But I could try to make him, if you want. Why should I?”

“Valerka was kind, and he also liked animals.” Mitya pointed to the bucket of rats. “I want to know what happened to him so I can maybe avenge his death. Get rid of the bad people.”

His words didn’t make sense to Mitya himself, as he said them out loud, but the little girl nodded in agreement, and Zhenya raised her eyes from a wrapper that said “Big Mac.”

“Like Sailor Moon. I like that.”

“Yeah, like Sailor Moon.”

“If you can get some vodka, we can try,” Zhenya said, as she placed the last packet of ketchup in the row. “Or Dasha here can help you. Give her money, she’ll buy it. She always buys for her parents, and everyone at the store knows her.”

Dasha grinned at the recognition. She felt useful.

“Now, let’s eat.”

Mitya feared it would be impolite not to partake in the feast. Still, he felt queasy, looking at the pieces of sandwiches with the teeth marks of strangers. He took some of the fries and nibbled on them, squeezing lines of ketchup from a packet on a new napkin. The fries were cold and a bit stale, but still tasty. The girls ate with less discretion, taking alternating sips from the milkshake cup. They threw the smallest and most misshapen pieces of hamburger into the bucket, where the rats rushed to their lunch with glee.

“You shouldn’t touch them, though,” Mitya said, when the jacket’s lining was empty, except for the greasy stains that covered it. “They could have the plague.” He had read about it on the internet in the library recently.

“My mama calls me the plague,” Zhenya said as she put her jacket back on. “You know the saying? ‘A disease doesn’t stick to disease.’”