“That bit is easy. It’s not a common dress.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his plump hand. “There’s that one store in Kyiv that stocks it. My wife was bending my ear about it, she wanted me to give it to her for New Year, kept showing it to me on the internet.”

“So, Oleg Nikolayevich, did you buy it?”

“What?”

“The dress.”

“God no. You had to go to Kyiv in person to collect it. But they didn’t have the right size. My wife is petite, like you.”

“So do you hit on all petite women?”

He frowned. At that moment, Vika appeared at the door. She winked at him and turned to Maria, her expression blurry from drinking.

“Maria Alexandrovna, there’s some man looking for you.”

“What man? Where?”

“At the entrance.”

Maria’s heart fluttered, but she quickly gathered her wits.

“Thank you, Oleg Nikolayevich. Do tell me later what size your wife wears.”

She walked briskly, squeezing through the dancers, but when she saw Andrei’s towering, broad-shouldered figure, she slowed down.

Andrei took a few steps forward and extended a large bouquet of red roses as though it were a rifle.

“Rat-tat-tat. Direct hit to the heart.”

Maria silently took him by the arm and led him into the restaurant.

Chapter 16

I got a new roommate a couple of days ago. A friendly, old, unshaven drunk recovering from a stroke. He probably felt like he’d found a kindred spirit. His wife brings him chocolates. He goes down to the wooden smoking pavilion by the exit and trades them for cigarettes.

In the evenings, he tells me all about his collection of coins and postage stamps. I tell him about my dreams of the grey city and about you. He listens, placing his tin bucket of a heart under the stream of swill that the lonely insane heave at each other. In his silence, there is a whispering hope that tomorrow, or perhaps in a week, or in a month, we will recover and again savour life. Hope cannot be overcome. Hope feeds on fear, and fear always lives within. In the face of the terrible premonition now gripping me, hope grows stronger and lives where no other feeling can survive. The day after tomorrow I will kill him. To get your attention. And then I’ll catch the train and come to your place. That’s my plan for the coming days.