Equations of Life

18

At the bottom end of Edgware Road, she was still jogging effortlessly, while he was gagging with the effort of keeping up.

“Stop.” Petrovitch squatted and put his head down between his knees. Rain dripped from his nose.

She stood over him, hands on her hips. “I don’t think we’re being followed,” she said, scanning the crowded pavements. Umbrellas formed an uneven multicolored sea that flowed in every direction at once.

“Don’t… think?” he gasped, and breathed through his mouth. He was aware that his heart was struggling, but there were more pressing pains like the burning in his lungs and the stitch that was threatening to split him open from groin to neck.

“I need to call Father John and warn him,” said Sister Madeleine. She pulled out her phone from inside her robes and speed-dialed her priest. “Get some police round to the church.”

“Do whatever you want.” Petrovitch straightened up, clutching his sides. “I’m going to… yobany stos.” He felt a fresh wave of nausea well up and drag him down. He coughed bile into the gutter.

“Where am I? Marble Arch. Yes, I know I can’t go back. Our Lady of the Assumption? Warwick Street? Yes, I know it. Look, I’m going to have to call back. What? No, Petrovitch is throwing his guts up.” She paused. “Yes, that Petrovitch. Long story. No, Father.”

She saw Petrovitch trying to rise again, and she reached down her hand. Petrovitch clung to her arm and she pulled him to his feet.

“No, Father,” she said, her voice becoming tight. “No. It wasn’t his fault. Because it wasn’t. It was Paradise. Yes. Can we save the questions for later: he’s dying, and I’m drowning. What do you mean, is it raining? Of course it is.”

Petrovitch hung on tight as his vision grayed. “Chyort.”

“No. I’m not doing that. Father, he… will you shut up and listen? His heart’s packing in again and standing around on a street corner in plain sight of anyone who might want to kill us is not helping either. So I’m not asking your permission to get him somewhere safe; I’m telling you that’s what I’m doing and I’ll call you again when I’ve done it.” Her thumb stabbed down and the phone was thrust away again inside its secret pocket. “Where are we going?”

“Imperial college. But not by Park Lane. Goes too close to Green Park.”

“Bad?”

“Very. We’ll have to go through Hyde Park.”

She didn’t look certain. “I ought to just call an ambulance.”

“If they’re monitoring admissions, I’ll be dead in minutes.” He forced his legs to carry his weight. “You don’t have to come with me. It’s probably better that you don’t.”

“Shut up, Sam.”

There was nothing more to say. She marched him over the road. They passed the glistening shaven-headed man at Speakers Corner proclaiming a new machine jihad to the empty pavement, and slipped through the gates set in the wire fence that half-heartedly enclosed the park. Before them lay the warren of tents and shacks and shanties.

“Keep your eye on the Albert Hall. Too far left and you’ll end up in the Serpentine.”

She nodded grimly and looked up, fixing the dome against the buildings behind it. The rain had extinguished the open fires and damped down the miasma that hung over the refugee camp. It had even driven most of the inhabitants inside to seek whatever shelter they could scavenge.

It was loud, the drumming of the droplets on corrugated iron and stiff plastic; a roar that was deafening and disorientating.

“We could go round the long way,” she said.

“I won’t last the long way. Besides,” said Petrovitch, “neither the Oshicoras nor Paradise will follow us in. A priest and a nun should get a free pass.”

It was as if she was looking at him for the first time. “But you’re not a priest.”

“I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.” He plunged on into the narrow, twisting alleys, ready with a smile and a wave and a benediction, but determined never to stop. Hyde Park was where people went when they burned out of domik life. People went there to die. Petrovitch wasn’t going to be one of them.

Sister Madeleine followed, and he was glad for her at his back. If it hadn’t been for her, he would have tried the perimeter road. He hated Hyde Park: he could only look at so many hopeless faces before he felt rage overtake him. But who would he choose to grab and shout at? Too many, too many.

The house in the middle of the park had vanished, every part of it long ago scavenged for building materials: the rough paths still converged at that point though, nothing more than a memory.

They hurried on. They were deep in the park, surrounded on all sides. Petrovitch’s face was set in a rictus grin, but the sister was in tears as they vaulted over yet another half-rotted corpse. He took hold of her wrist.

“Come on, babochka. You can’t afford to care.”

“But…”

“They chose this.” He turned left and headed for the Black Bridge, dragging her behind him. “There are no guards to this prison. And if you’re at all sensitive, don’t look over the sides of the bridge. Straight down the middle, eyes front.”

“How… how do you know these things?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t show me in a good light, does it?”

They arrived at the bridge. He didn’t follow his own advice: there were things in the dark water, little bloated islands that not even the seagulls dared touch. The wind had accumulated a small drift of them on the far bank, beached and slick where the rain beat down on them and cleaned the filth of the lake away.

When the Neva thawed in spring, there were always bodies washing under the St. Petersburg bridges along with the gray lumps of ice. But there was an effort to collect them, identify them, cut holes in the frozen ground and bury them.

That this—this squalor—was permitted, burned in his soul.

Not far now. The bridge carried a road, and the spaces between the rude dwellings roughly followed the remains of the tarmacked surface.

Someone had died, that night or that morning. They lay face down, features obscured by long graying hair. Their bones stuck out against their pale skin, each knuckle-joint a knot. They would have weighed no more than a child.

The rain beat at the body lying across their path, trying to dissolve it away.

She lost it. She shook him off hard enough to hurt him and crouched down beside the cold, stiff figure. She wept uncontrollably.

Petrovitch looked on, gazed at the short distance they had left to go. He could see the start of Exhibition Road on the other side of the gate.

“Whoever it is, is beyond help. Unless you can raise the dead.”

The way she moved her shoulders showed him his opinion wasn’t at all welcome. She reached forward, hesitated, then turned the body over so that the sightless eyes were filling with rain.

It had been a woman, her age impossible to guess, her cause of death likewise. There were so many things she could have died of. A broken heart for one. Sister Madeleine pushed the eyelids down, first one, then the other. She sat hunched on her heels, dejected, defeated.

“We have to go, babochka.” He dared to put his hand on her curved back, and she let it rest there for a while, before shrugging him off and rising to her full height.

“I… I just needed to know,” she said. She glanced down, stifled a sob, and walked deliberately around the body.

And for once, Petrovitch knew better than to ask. He cast a glance behind them. Hyde Park was perfectly still. No one but them was moving.

As soon as they were outside of the gate, the real world struck them with full force. There were people on the pavements and traffic on the roads, and the stench of death was replaced by the familiar tang of sweat and oil.

Petrovitch looked up and saw a strange fear in the nun’s eyes. “Stay with me, Sister. Only half a block more, I promise.” He took her hand again—properly her hand this time, not her wrist—and joined the queue to cross the road.

The light went green for them, and they got swept along Exhibition Road. Horns sounded behind them, and Petrovitch twisted round to see the reason: the lights all showed red and the junction had seized.

“What? What is it?”

“I’ll tell you later. Unless you want to see some really weird shit, we need to get off the street right now.” He pushed her in front of him and through the automatic doors to the university.

The first thought he had was that his pass card had probably been destroyed when his jacket had caught fire. His second thought was that untying the bundle in his hand and seeing if it was true or not wasn’t going to be a good idea, since he’d have to sort through three different handguns and some night-vision goggles as well.

And there was the small matter that he was dressed like a Roman Catholic priest.

“Pizdets,” he said. “Wait here. I’m going to try and get a temporary card.”

He gathered up his bluster and took it to the reception desk, where he had his retina rescanned and his photograph taken, and a pass issued in his name.

He called Sister Madeleine over and explained for the third time that no, he really wasn’t a priest, but yes, she really was a nun, and that she was his guest. The receptionist made her sign in, and clearly didn’t believe a word of it.

As they walked away toward the lifts, a man with a mop and bucket appeared to clear the floor of the lake they’d brought in with them.

He had to show his card twice more: once to get into his building, the next as they got off the lift on the fourth floor.

“At least Pif took me seriously.”

“Who?”

“Pif. Doctor Epiphany Ekanobi to most. She’s very smart, but she doesn’t tend to believe half of what I tell her.”

“I would have thought that would make her extra smart.”

“Yeah. But she’s guarding something and she needed to know just how important it is.” He stopped outside a door whose only distinguishing feature was a plastic plaque engraved with the numbers four-one-oh. “This is me. Us.”

He kicked the door open with his usual lack of grace and came face to face with Chain’s police special.

In an instant, Sister Madeleine had her own Vatican-approved hand-cannon out.

“Perestan bit dabayobom, Chain. Put it away.”

Chain looked over Petrovitch’s shoulder at Sister Madeleine’s drawn weapon. “After you, Sister.”

Neither of them wanted to be the first to move. Petrovitch shook his head and walked around the policeman. “Pif.”

“Hey, Sam. Detective Inspector Chain has been wondering where you were. And,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “why are you dressed as a priest?”

“Because,” he started, then thought better of it. “It’ll keep.” Then he turned his ire on detective and nun. “Will you two knock it off? Get in here and close the yebani door, Sister.”

“Sister?” Pif turned to see Sister Madeleine squelch uncertainly into the room. “I’m not sure if that explains everything or nothing.”

“Really, I’m not in the mood. I’ve already had a perfectly good jacket ruined by the vnebrachnyjj Paradise militia, and I’m soaked through for the second time today.”

“How’s the heart?”

“It’s not great. If I catch a cold, it’s going to kill me.” Petrovitch dropped the bundle of cloth on the floor and spread it out wide. He laid the guns—his own Beretta, an ageing Israeli Jericho and a newer Norinco knock-off—out in a fan and put the night-vision goggles next to them to dry off. He held up his jacket.

The back had completely burned through. It was a circle of material with a ragged hole. He went through the pockets, retrieved his student card, a credit chip and a single bullet for the Beretta. Then he threw the remains of the jacket at the wall, where it stuck for a moment before sliding down onto the floor.

Chain holstered his gun and looked over Petrovitch’s growing collection.

“You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

“And you know what I’ll say in reply. Where were you? Where were you when the lights went out and they were coming at us in the dark? Where were you when I picked up this little peesa and shot a man in the face from no more distance than you are from me?”

“I was saving forty people from being driven into the river. What’s your point?”

“That. Precisely. You can’t protect me. When the Metrozone is safe enough that I don’t have to worry about three—count them, three—different gangs trying to send me to hell, I’ll hand over every offensive weapon I own. Do you think I like carrying them around? Do you think I enjoy blowing someone’s brains out in a church? We’ve got to this point because you lost control of the city, and you lost it long ago.” Petrovitch picked up the little Beretta, ejected the magazine into the palm of his hand and inserted the single cartridge. He slammed it back in. “Anything you can say to make it better? Anything at all?”

“I suppose not.”

“Then pl’uvat na t’eb’a! What are you good for?”

Chain rubbed at his chin. “You called me, remember? Something about the Oshicoras?”

Petrovitch forced a half-smile onto his face. “Yeah. So I did. Pif, give him the files. No, wait. Don’t.”

Pif looked from Petrovitch to Chain. “Which is it going to be?”

Petrovitch got awkwardly to his feet. “I haven’t eaten a hot meal since yesterday morning. Detective Inspector Chain is going to buy us all lunch. Then we’ll talk about the death of Oshicora senior.”

Chain blinked.

“Have you got time for some lunch, Sister?” Petrovitch picked up the Jericho and slipped it into Pif’s bag.

“You walked me through Hyde Park. I don’t even know if I’m hungry.”

“Then come for the warmth. Hot sweet tea, or whatever it is you British drink. At least let me do for you what you did for me. Get you dry before you go back out.”

She was torn. “I need to phone Father John.”

“Do it after lunch,” suggested Petrovitch.

“Sam, I’ve broken my vow of obedience once today. I can’t go on like this.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

She bit at her lip, and for once looked like the teenager she still was.

“Looks like I’m paying,” said Chain. “Come on, Sister. You can tell me all about it on the way.”