Reamde

Both ends of that spectrum were on display during Sokolov’s hour-long journey from Golden Gardens to the home of Igor. He waited for a bus near a marina crowded with yachts. The bus took him to a sleek modern downtown, where he did a bit of shopping and then boarded a light rail train headed in the direction of the airport. During that journey, the view out its windows became steadily more like a photo spread from a Soviet propaganda article. The railway line had been threaded through the poorest neighborhoods. The urban part was a complex and densely packed mixture of black people and pan-global immigration; it wasn’t pretty, but at least it was striving. Then there was a light-industrial buffer zone that separated it from a sort of white ghetto in the suburbs. The train ran high above this on towering reinforced-concrete pylons, and he looked almost straight down into the backyards of tiny, rotting bungalows strewn with detritus.

He climbed out at the last station before the airport and then walked for a mile and a half, wending his way into a neighborhood full of houses like that. He had not acquired a phone yet, but he had been able to purchase a street map at a bookstore downtown, and he had Igor’s address written down in a little book that had been with him through all his adventures.

Igor’s house stood at the end of a cul-de-sac, backed up against a freeway embankment held together by a felt of blackberries and ivy. This mat of vegetation had covered and killed several trees and was making a bid to take over a shed in the back. But the house that Igor shared with his friend Vlad was actually tidier than many on this street: the two vehicles parked in its driveway both appeared to be in working order, and neither of them had turned green with moss. They did not store junk on their front porch, and they had taken sensible precautions, covering the front windows with expanded steel mesh and beefing up the locks on the front door.

Igor’s fear caused Sokolov nothing more than mild irritation at first, since its sole effect was to slow everything down. But he could hardly blame the man for being cautious. Sokolov took his hands out of his pockets and held them out wide, palms up. “A couple of hours,” he insisted, “and then I will be gone. Forever.”

HIS CHOICE TO come to this place was debatable, to say the least. He had been thinking about it all through the sea voyage.

He had to go somewhere and do something. His only real means of making a living was doing what he did: security consultant. The fact that he was fluent only in Russian and that he carried a Russian passport placed certain limits on where he could ply that trade. He could make his way back to Russia and retreat into the woods and spend the rest of his life chopping wood and hunting deer, but he had grown rather accustomed to living in big cities and being paid a decent amount of money and, for lack of a better word, being respected for who he was and what he did. Most of his clients had been nothing like Ivanov, and, after this, he would never work for such a person again. But the regrettable incidents of the last few weeks would need to be explained to the owners of the obshchak from which Ivanov had stolen the money, and to the families of the men who had been slain by Abdallah Jones. And Sokolov was actually confident that it all could be explained. For the owners of the obshchak were, at bottom, reasonable people. Courtesy went a long way with them. In what had happened to Wallace and Ivanov, they would perceive a kind of poetry and a kind of justice. Ivanov had, in effect, obtained just the fate he had wanted, in that he had died while trying to get the money back. The story worked perfectly well as a cautionary tale: look what happens to those who steal money with which they have been entrusted. It would all work out just fine if Sokolov could merely relate the story to the people Ivanov had betrayed.

Not that Sokolov had any certainty of being forgiven. There were no guarantees. But this way he had a decent chance. Whereas if he sneaked around and tried to avoid them, they would surely take note of his lack of courtesy and approach him in a more suspicious frame of mind.

That much he had decided during the first half of his voyage across the Pacific. The question, then, was how to go about making contact with the people in question. Simply calling them from a pay telephone on the beach would be indiscreet and would suggest a kind of desperation.