9
The next day at breakfast, someone rang the doorbell. Everyone thought it was Vovka coming back from a bender, but when Mitya went to answer, he saw Zhenya, dressed for school.
“My mama sent me. Your cousin is in KPZ, the holding cell in the militsia station. Your papa should go to work it out and get him.”
Mitya immediately thought that what he had suspected had happened. Vovka was, indeed, Valerka’s murderer, and he had finally been apprehended. But why would they be letting him out, then? Perhaps it was only for the time before the trial. Mitya was not familiar with any of the intricacies of law enforcement.
He was so happy, though, that he did not ask Zhenya any questions. He told her he’d see her later at school and went back to the kitchen to pass the message to his family. They had more questions about the situation. Yelena Viktorovna and Dmitriy Fyodorovich rushed to talk to Zhenya’s parents. Dmitriy Fyodorovich slapped Mitya on the back of his head before leaving. “Useless,” he groaned.
Once they were left alone, Alyssa Vitalyevna took out a bottle of Armenian cognac from her secret stash and added a splash to her and Mitya’s tea: she felt like celebrating. “What do you think he did?” she asked, beaming at Mitya.
Mitya relayed his version to her. Alyssa Vitalyevna listened with interest. But once Mitya was done, she raised her brows skeptically.
“I don’t believe that he had anything to do with killing Valerka. He has ‘fallen from the oak,’ as the saying goes, that’s for sure, but Valerka went missing during the days Vovka spent at Sveta’s, remember? I noticed because I always took Vovka’s cigarette butts to Valerka, but on those days I had nothing to give and wanted to give him some rubles for a fresh pack. But he wasn’t there,” Alyssa Vitalyevna said. Mitya nodded: it was around the time Dmitriy Fyodorovich managed to persuade Vovka to go and visit his mother again, this time for a whole week. He returned even more jittery and swore he would never go again.
Alyssa Vitalyevna got the calendar she kept in her wallet, and they counted the days. It turned out that Vovka did have an alibi, and Valerka had gone missing right in the middle of his stay at Sveta’s.
“And I would assume that he lied about visiting her, but that darn woman kept calling me at work and asking me to give her son some magic drug to cure him of drinking. As if I’m a witch. I told her: code him. Like Cleopatra’s friend’s husband. He used to chase her with an ax across the apartment, and once shit all over the room. But now that she’s coded him, he is mellow and sweet.”
“What is coding, Babushka?” Mitya asked.
“Oh, it’s this fantastic way of making sure a person doesn’t drink anymore. They do a spell or something, say a special code, and then whenever the coded person drinks any vodka, they fall violently ill and can even die.”
Mitya was fascinated with the idea. A way to make Vovka stop drinking! Stop doing horrible things.
“So Khristofor Khristoforovich can do it?”
“Doctors refuse to do it. Too bad, because half of them are drunks, and the other half are coded themselves. But there are special places. If she only wanted to take him. But Sveta wants this to resolve on its own, without her having to spend her precious time on that. As if there’s anything so important that she’s doing these days.”
“Do you think Vovka could become a better person if he were coded?”
“I don’t know. His soul seems to be rotting from within. As they say, ‘A stubborn ass will only get fixed by the cudgel.’ Besides, I believe our billy goat will not be affected by any medicinal means that work for normal people. He’s too damn special.”
Well, Mitya thought, in that case, Vovka could have some vodka and die from the effects of coding. It seemed a pretty foolproof way to get rid of him. At least, the evil version of him or maybe both of them: whatever worked first.
Alyssa Vitalyevna took another sugar cube out of the bowl and crunched on it. She looked at her grandson and could almost see the wheels turning inside his blond head, he was thinking so hard. She had noticed in the past few months that he had started to look better, too, the spitting image of Yelena at that age, a tender beauty. His hair was longer than a boy’s should be. She liked it, mainly because she knew that her son-in-law didn’t approve.
When his parents came home from the precinct, Mitya was in the WC, thinking. He realized that he was so caught up in all the drama that he had forgotten to leave for school. At least he had his backpack with him, so he could sneak out through the back staircase, which led to the street from the kitchen. He heard his parents go into the kitchen to talk with Alyssa Vitalyevna. Mitya froze inside and began listening in, while he stared at the shapes formed by the cracks in the wall tiles. What had happened was that Vovka had gotten so drunk and rowdy the previous night, he’d gone outside and, while wielding a hammer, broken the windows in three cars parked near their building.
“I’m telling them that he couldn’t have done it,” Dmitriy Fyodorovich said. “He can’t do anything properly with his left arm, but the militsionery are happy to have a perp.”
“They want to make us pay the damages,” Yelena Viktorovna chimed in.
“Did you all talk to Petya?” Alyssa Vitalyevna asked.
“He is at home sick, and Lyuba did not let us see him.”
“Okay, I’m going to have to make a few phone calls,” Alyssa Vitalyevna said with resolve, and Mitya heard her storm past the WC door, followed by his parents.
“Maybe we should leave him to marinate? Surely jail will do the boy some good,” Dmitriy Fyodorovich said to Yelena Viktorovna.
“That’s what you said about the army. Now look at him. You want him to come back without his head?”
When he couldn’t hear them anymore, Mitya slipped out of the WC and went out through the dark staircase in the kitchen.
Later that day, after school, Mitya waited for Zhenya so they could walk back home together. She didn’t seem to mind. Mitya wasn’t sure how to start the conversation, so he blurted out the thing that concerned him most.
“Do you think militsionery will ever solve who killed Valerka?”
“You have no experience with militsia. They don’t—how do I put it mildly?—play by the rules. Take yesterday, for example. It was my father and Vovka, together, in the streets. After you left, Papa got drunker. I saw him leave; I heard him sing those idiotic Tanya Bulanova songs in the courtyard below. And today he is hungover and sick, and my mother was chastising him for damaging those cars. But he’s a militsioner. Vovka isn’t, so he’s going to pay for all the fun they had together, alone. The same goes for Valerka’s murder. If there is not enough incentive to solve, it will remain unsolved.”
“Maybe I should go tell them what I know?” Mitya asked.
“Which is what?”
“Nothing.”
“Exactly. Mitya, you can try to solve this on your own, have your fun playing detective, but don’t get involved with the militsia. They’re often laughable, but if you anger them, they can be scary. I’ve been around them all my life, can’t count how many times they’ve gotten drunk, tried to throw me up in the sky as if I were a toddler, and dropped me. But the things I sometimes hear from my parents speaking . . .” Zhenya looked at him meaningfully. “They think I’m an idiot and I don’t understand, but I do. And it’s all unpleasant. So let your parents bail your cousin out and don’t get involved.”
Zhenya’s brows were knit and her eyes icy and severe. Mitya nodded: if she was so serious about this, he had no other choice but to agree. They had reached McDonald’s by the end of the conversation, and he left her behind. He went down the Old Arbat, past the pastel buildings, past the archway that led to his building, past the post office. He passed the wall covered with tiles hand-painted by children: an initiative of an American artist to promote peace and love between the two countries.
A fleet of shaved men in floaty persimmon clothes and warm jackets passed Mitya. They were chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” and beating handheld drums. Mitya admired them, their clothes especially: womanly, but also genderless, like all religious garb. He had wanted to go over to them and ask them about their song, or their clothes, or both. But whenever he was with Yelena Viktorovna, she pulled him away from them, and when he was alone, he was too shy. Now he had the resolve but did not want to spend it on the wrong situation. So Mitya moved toward the brooding giant of a gray building with the store called Samotsvety on the ground floor. Gems, the least appropriate name for the dreary site. He turned to the right in front of it and reached Tsoi’s Wall, an unsightly one-story windowless structure covered with graffiti. Mitya had never been this close to it. He saw a few people next to the wall and decided to move closer and observe them from a short distance, keeping them in his peripheral vision. It would be a way to quench his interest while also mentally preparing to speak to someone.
The paint was densely layered, and the writings were all different. The most distinct was a rough portrait of Viktor Tsoi, which made the slender half-Korean man look like a plump middle-aged woman with jaw paralysis. Mitya recognized a bunch of quotes from songs by Tsoi and his band, Kino, Cinema, written all over the wall: bits and pieces of the youth hymns that Vovka sometimes listened to. Mitya liked hearing them, too, only he never wanted to admit that he admired the same music as his cousin. “Death is worth living, and love is worth waiting for.” “Our heart works like a new motor, we’re fourteen, and we know all we should. We’ll be doing whatever we feel like before you ruin the world.” “And we know it was always like that, and that fate strongly prefers those who follow different laws and those who die young just because.”
There were markings made by people who had visited: “Arthur Lesha Edik,” “Polina, Izhevsk City,” “Law school with you.” A few of them had phone numbers and addresses attached, which first seemed like a significant clue to Mitya, but then he realized that there were too many, and he wouldn’t be able to follow through on all of them. The majority of the messages on the wall, though, were repetitions of the same phrase: “Tsoi is alive.” It had been transcribed by hundreds of hands over and over again with mantric resolve all over the surface of the building, as if it could resurrect the singer, who had died in a car crash at twenty-eight. It was affecting, but quite repetitive, and Mitya quickly realized that nothing on the wall could help him.
This meant that he now had no other option but to strike up a conversation with one of the people sitting on the dirty pavement next to the wall. Mitya stepped back from the wall and turned to face the people sitting there: there were three. He didn’t want to talk to random people, but justice for Valerka beckoned him. So Mitya gulped down his hesitance and then started talking.
“Did you know a man named Valerka?” Mitya heard himself ask.
The three people all looked his way. They were two young men and a woman, about Vovka’s age, all smoking cigarettes. One of the men was blond and wearing a black leather jacket and had a guitar lying on his lap. He looked exactly as Mitya had pictured someone hanging out by Tsoi’s Wall would look, but he was also oddly clean, well shaved, and neat. The other man and the woman had darker hair and were dressed in simpler clothes, much like his parents would wear, but looked decent enough too. Cleaner than Vovka. Why had he considered Tsoi’s Wall a scary place? These people seemed normal enough.
“What do you need, maloy?” the man with the guitar asked. Mitya realized that they did not understand what he wanted.
“There is this man, Valerka, he was homeless and he used to come here sometimes. I wonder if you know him?”
“Chuvak, there are hundreds of people coming here every day. Is he a Kinoman?” asked the other man.
Mitya pondered for a second whether Valerka did in fact like the cinema but then realized that it must be the name for people who liked the band.
“I don’t know, really,” he said. He could feel the truth surfacing, the truth that he didn’t know anything about Valerka, and that looking for traces of him would prove to be incredibly difficult.
“What are you asking, Gleb?” the woman said. “If he comes here, he’s most likely a Kinoman. Everyone here is a Kinoman, me, Sasha. Except for you, of course. But how does that narrow it down?”
Mitya noticed that she had freckles on her nose, ginger curly hair, and a metal stud in one of her nostrils. Mitya had seen things like that on TV; they usually signified someone so cool that they left home to start a life on the streets. He wondered if the woman was living on the streets. She looked nice.
“What is your name, maltchik?” she asked. “So that when he comes looking for you next, we know what to say.”
The woman smiled and small dimples appeared on her cheeks. The men exchanged glances and snickered. Mitya was annoyed by them: they clearly did not understand what was at stake. He had to explain.
“My name is Mitya, but he will not come for me, because he is dead.”
The smiles faded abruptly.
“Mitya, I’m sorry,” the woman said. “What happened to your friend? Do you need help?”
“Yes, I need help. Somebody killed Valerka, and it was here, but the militsia don’t want to do anything about it.”
“Why would he be killed here?” Sasha asked. “People come here to sing and drink, not murder each other.”
“My neighbor from the militsia told me it was here,” Mitya said.
“So he used to hang out here? Sasha, Marina, do you remember anyone like that?” Gleb asked.
“I vaguely remember someone like that,” Sasha responded. “There was a homeless guy, barely talked to anyone, and stank a kilometer away. Sometimes he brought beer and shared with people.”
“Until he got killed.” Mitya was glad to have finally gotten the strangers’ attention.
“What horror,” gasped Marina. “And why do you care for this homeless man, Mitya? Was he, tipa, your father or something? It’s sad, but maybe better this way, if he was homeless?”
“He wasn’t my father, he was my friend.” Mitya couldn’t get why it was so hard to understand the basics of the situation and move on to the essential things. Like who killed Valerka.
Marina looked like she wanted to ask another question, but then she waved her hand, stubbed her cigarette out, and shrugged. “Go ahead, Mitya, ask us questions, we will try to help.”
“Who do you think killed him?” Mitya asked.
“Hey, easy. How would we know? We’re music-loving people, I live right in this building over here, and these two haven’t been hanging out here for long,” Sasha said.
“He’s not asking you if you killed him, though, right?” Gleb looked back at Mitya. “It’s a dangerous place here, especially at night. Your friend would be an idiot if he came here after dark.”
“Why is it dangerous?” Mitya wondered.
“Because there are all kinds of terrible people here. Druggies, drinkers, thieves. Werewolves,” Sasha said, and Mitya could see Gleb stick his nose into the sleeve of his jacket and convulse with restrained laughter. Marina slapped Sasha’s arm.
“Please tell me about the dangerous people who come here,” Mitya said. He thought that if he stuck to the point and was straightforward, he could get the info he wanted and start investigating.
“Are you crazy?” Marina said. “I didn’t realize it was such a criminal den here. But we don’t want to get you killed next, stupid, so no one will tell you what dangerous people to seek out.”
“I’m not gonna get killed.” Mitya was sure of it. They’d have to find the needle first. “And I know dangerous people too. Does Vovka come here by any chance? Army veteran with a missing arm?”
“Where are you hanging out with these freaks, patsan?” Sasha asked. “You look like you’re from an intelligentsia family. Why all the homeless people and one-armed men?”
“Vovka is my cousin,” Mitya said.
“Anyway, we don’t know any one-armed Vovka. We weren’t here; we didn’t see the body,” Sasha said and started plucking at the strings on his guitar. “There is a bunch of kids who come here sometimes, though. A bit older than you. They sniff glue and steal things, they’re homeless and they’re up to no good. But all the others are Kinomen, or hippies, or other neformals.”
“Do you know if these kids knew Valerka?”
“You think we keep track of everyone who comes here?” Sasha said, annoyed, laying his guitar aside.
“Huh, I saw them hanging out by my metro station too, recently. Rebyata, let’s help Mitya out. We should learn to be better friends to each other from him. Look how determined he is. Do your parents know you’re out and about?” Marina asked.
Mitya wondered whether he wanted to lie or tell the truth. Marina’s freckled face was so round and open that he couldn’t bring himself to start on a lie with her, but at the same time, he knew that no one would want to get involved with a child who was missing from home.
“As if your parents know you’re out and about,” Gleb said, touching Marina’s jacket lightly. She stuck her tongue out at him.
“Can’t argue with that. So, Mitya, would you like to come ride the metro with us and see if we can find those kids? It’s the Konkovo stop.” Marina stood up from the ground and came up to Mitya. She took his hand into hers firmly, and he felt her skinny palm with chapped skin. Mitya wasn’t sure how far Konkovo was from home, but he felt like going would be the right decision. The needle would make sure everything went smoothly.
“Wait, but we were supposed to go have a beer at my place.” Sasha jumped up after her. “Come on, it’s right over there, in that building, and there’s only fifteen more minutes to go.”
“I’m tired of waiting for your mother to leave the apartment. We’ll see you tomorrow, Sasha. Maybe you can give us a ride in your papa’s car? Let’s go, Gleb.”
Sasha’s self-assured look faded from his face. He tried saying something, but Marina turned away from him and was already leading Mitya toward the Old Arbat. Gleb quickly shook Sasha’s hand and ran after her, and as soon as they turned the corner, he put his arms around her. She leaned into his arm but did not loosen her grip on Mitya’s hand. They walked to the subway in silence.