“Which is why I came here,” Sokolov said. “I won’t be much trouble. Just need to take a shower. Get a bite to eat. Pull myself together. Then I’ll be on my way.”
“You need money?” Igor asked suspiciously.
“Not really.”
Igor softened. “Because I can lend you some if you need it.”
“As I said, I just need to collect myself for a few minutes. I’ll count my money and perhaps take you up on that offer.”
“The shower is that way,” said Igor, pointing with his eyes.
THE HOUSE’S FLOOR was spongy and uneven—being consumed from beneath, Sokolov guessed, by some combination of insects and rot. The frame of the bathroom door had sagged into a parallelogram, the flimsy hollow-core door was still a rectangle; he bashed it shut with his shoulder and then used the hook-and-eye lock that had been added onto it when the lockset had stopped working. This seemed to be ground zero for the mildewy scent that pervaded the entire bungalow. Sokolov turned on the shower, then jerked the curtain across its front so water wouldn’t splash out onto the floor. He took a seat, fully clothed, on the toilet, which was located behind the door, and got out his Makarov and chambered a round. That Igor would kick the door down and Vlad fire blindly into the shower stall was unlikely. But neither was it out of the question; and if it happened, Sokolov would be quite disappointed in himself if he had failed to be ready for it.
He checked his watch and made himself comfortable for fifteen minutes, during which time he thought about Olivia and Zula, Csongor and Yuxia and Peter.
Since Zula was the only one he’d seen escaping the building, he had been assuming that Csongor and Peter were dead and that Yuxia was in the custody of the Public Security Bureau. These facts were unfortunate, but there was nothing he could do about them.
Of Zula’s situation, he could only speculate. He had scanned some newspapers in the bookstore downtown where he had purchased the map. He’d seen no reference to Abdallah Jones. Then he had moved on to some weekly newsmagazines, where he hoped he might see some stories summarizing events of the last week or two. Nothing.
In several places he had noted posters bearing Zula’s face, sometimes alone, sometimes paired with Peter’s. They were stapled to telephone poles and bus stop bulletin boards, looking a bit yellow and starting to be encroached upon by advertisements for lost dogs and maid services.
A Google search would have told him much more. But he had seen—more to the point, not seen—enough in the newspapers to suspect that Jones was still lying low somewhere and that Zula, if alive, was still with him.
As for Olivia, he hoped and trusted that she had found her way safely home and was well on her way to forgetting about him. He had been reassured, back on Kinmen, to see a kind of intelligent guardedness on her face. I can’t believe I’m fucking this guy. He’d have been worried, on the other hand, if she had thrown hopeful or adoring looks at him. Now that they had been apart for a while, her rational mind would have seized the controls from whatever part of her brain found a man like Sokolov attractive and wrenched her back onto a safe and reasonable course.
He was not entirely happy about this. Under other circumstances, perhaps, it would have been worth pursuing. Sad that it was impossible. Not as sad as many other things in this world.
The bungalow’s walls were thin, and beneath the hiss of the shower he could hear Igor’s voice as a kind of indistinct throbbing, difficult to make out except when he pronounced distinct words like “Da, da!” During the intervals when Igor was silent, Sokolov heard nothing from Vlad. Apparently Igor was talking to someone on the phone. This was not surprising, and, as a matter of fact, Sokolov was pretending to take this shower precisely to give Igor an opportunity to make a next move: try to kill him, or else call people in his network and begin spreading the news.
He turned off the shower, turned on the faucet, pulled a disposable razor out of his bag, and shaved using a sliver of soap that had been left on the edge of the sink. He kept the Makarov handy. But if they’d been going to do it, they’d have done it while they thought he was in the shower.
While he was shaving, he heard Igor place another phone call, this one in English. Igor seemed to be ordering a pizza from Domino’s.
This did not seem to be the act of a man who was about to murder his guest, so on one level Sokolov relaxed a little bit. It did raise new questions, though. Why was Igor now showing hospitality? Any man in his right mind would want Sokolov out of the house pronto. Had he been ordered, by someone on the telephone, to stall Sokolov? Keep him in the house until someone else could be sent out to deal with him?
Anyway, he rinsed his face, splashed water into his stubbled scalp to make it look as if he’d actually showered, pulled his stuff together, wrenched the door open, and stepped back out into the bungalow’s living room. Vlad was playing a video game on a tricked-out PC that was connected to a large flat-screen monitor. Igor was watching and supplying commentary, but tore his attention away to greet Sokolov. “Please, make yourself comfortable,” he said, rolling forward as if he intended to rise to his feet. He had a beer in his hand. “Would you like a beer? I’ll get one for you.”
“No thanks, not now.”
“I ordered pizza. It should be here in forty minutes. I thought you might be hungry.”
“Thanks, that sounds delicious. It’s been forever since I had pizza.” These words came out of his mouth somewhat mechanically; his mind was going too fast to make genuine conversation.
“Noodles and rice for two weeks, eh?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“On the freighter—Chink food only, I’ll bet.”
Sokolov shook his head. “The crew was Filipino; they eat different stuff. It was fine. Just no pizza, that’s all.”