The Senility of Vladimir P (29 page)

‘Now, I must ask you all to disperse,' said Rospov solemnly. He had forgotten about being introduced to the housekeeper. Besides, there was hardly any need to tell her personally what had happened, now that everyone knew, and in any case, this would probably be his last visit here. ‘I'm sure you'll have the opportunity to pay your respects at a later time. Please. Clear the way.'

Slowly at first, then more quickly, people began to move along the corridor and down the stairs.

‘Nikolai Ilyich,' said the doctor, ushering Sheremetev back into Vladimir's suite. ‘Please.'

He didn't know how
long he had been sitting there. Could have been two minutes. Could have been two hours.

He had locked the door behind him and then he had sat, in a chair that stood a few metres from the bed, lost in his thoughts. Eventually he got up. He raised the sheet that covered Vladimir's corpse. The face on the pillow was familiar and yet strange, as a face always is in death, features one knows but that are somehow different, lax, lacking something that had been there in life, as if a facsimile of the real thing.

He let the sheet drop. Now there was no dilemma for him. He could leave the dacha. He wouldn't have to imagine Vladimir with that look of confusion and fear in his eyes, unable to be comforted.

Sheremetev felt at his cheek. The wound was open. He shook his head, smiling helplessly at the predictability of it. Rospov had left without tending to him. Once he got the watches in his bag, all he wanted to do was get out of there.

The watches, Pasha's last hope. How much would they have been worth? It didn't matter, he thought hopelessly. That wasn't a question any more. He felt as if he had been thinking about stealing watches forever – now he would never have to wonder about the worth of a watch again.

But Pasha? What was going to happen? Unless the prosecutor was prepared to drop his price by ninety percent and release him in exchange for the money Sheremetev had under his bed, there was no way out for him.

He had traded his freedom for Pasha's, the autopsy for the watches. Or had he? Even in the depths of his self-revulsion, Sheremetev knew that once the doctor had noticed those watches, he would never have been able to keep them. Even if he had said to the doctor, yes, do an autopsy, Rospov's greed for them was so transparent, that he would have found a way to get hold of them.

An autopsy would have revealed a huge dose of tranquilliser in Vladimir's blood, enough to fell an elephant, and perhaps a haemorrhage around the brain or the spleen. The tranquilliser by itself would have been enough to convict him, if not of murder, surely of manslaughter or some other charge.

Maybe Vladimir would have approved, to trade justice for a few trinkets. He had often done the equivalent, Sheremetev suspected, although on an incomparably larger scale. What a liar he had been, what a criminal. Now, Sheremetev could at least say that openly to himself. He was no longer Vladimir's nurse, and the ex-president was no longer his patient. There was no need for him to hold his thoughts in check. It served him right, Sheremetev thought, for justice to be cheated for the sake of a handful of watches. Die as you lived, Vladimir Vladimirovich. At least have the decency to do that.

Did he mean to kill him? What was it really, murder or manslaughter? Sheremetev tried to remember what was going through his mind in those last terrifying moments, tried to relive the chaotic stream of events. As he got up, with his hand on Vladimir's face, did he really need to thump his head against the floor? As he ran to his room, as he locked himself in, panicked, hands trembling, heart thumping, feeling the vibrations of Vladimir pounding on the door behind him, could he really not calculate the dose of the tranquilliser that he had administered so many times before, could he really not steady himself sufficiently to draw up less than the whole vial – the
whole
vial – into the syringe?

But he had been scared, genuinely scared, thinking that any second Vladimir might come smashing through the door. Maybe that was the explanation. Or maybe he wanted Vladimir to die. Or maybe he didn't care, which was almost as bad.

But if he had wanted to kill him – why? What difference would it make? Vladimir had had his time and had done what he had done – his death neither ameliorated nor undid it. And if it was revenge on behalf of Karinka and Pasha and . . . on behalf of Vasya, yes, even Vasya, and Barkovskaya, who was dead, and Stepanin, who had murdered his dream along with her, and the whole of Russia that seemed somehow to have become a reflection of the small, corrupt and brutal mind of the man who had been Vladimir Vladimirovich . . . then what kind of revenge was it when the victim had no knowledge that it was being exacted? A wasted revenge. A pointless one.

Who was the Chechen? All these years that he had looked after Vladimir, he had never managed to find out. He remembered the bloodcurdling scream Vladimir had emitted in the last seconds as the tranquilliser took effect and his head fell forward. Thinking of it sent a shiver down his spine. Whatever hallucination the ex-president was seeing at that moment, whoever he deludedly thought he was fighting, Sheremetev hoped that as part of that delusion he believed he was being punished for one of his many crimes, that he felt the terror and doom and desolation of being beyond all rescue, even if only for a split second in his life.

Sheremetev shook his head, disgusted at the way he was thinking, that he had become so corrupted, so degraded, that he wanted some kind of revenge to have been enacted on a senile old man. And yet at the same time he knew that it was only because of the things that had been done by Vladimir himself that his thoughts had been debased.

He sighed, gazing at the outline of the corpse under the sheet. Yes, there was a sense of relief in him that the old man was dead, that his dilemma about leaving the dacha was gone. Maybe he had killed him because that was the only way he could free himself from him. Maybe it was as simple as that.

Or maybe it was that, and everything else. As simple, and as complicated.

Sheremetev looked at the watch the doctor had left behind on the bedside table. The old Soviet Poljot, like so many Sheremetev had seen before. When he was a boy, that was all anyone had, and you could wait for months to get one. Now, it was worth nothing.

He should call Vera and tell her that she wouldn't need to come back today, or any other day. Soon he and everyone else would leave the dacha. With Vladimir dead, the reason for this miserable little band of fraudsters and cheats to be gathered here was gone. For a moment, Sheremetev toyed with the idea of keeping the Poljot as a memento, but that seemed incongruous. It was of purely sentimental value. Wasn't that the opposite of what Vladimir had yearned for? The Russia of his desire was a place where the only worth of anything was its worth in money, and those who spoke the truth of it were silenced.

It was Vladimir who had won. He had built the Russia he wanted and crushed out everything else. Sentiment had no place here.

Sheremetev raised the Poljot. ‘To you, Vladimir Vladimirovich,' he said solemnly, holding it out towards the corpse. ‘Look what you did to us.'

He dropped the watch on the floor and crunched it underfoot.

Michael Honig is a former doctor and the author of one previous novel,
Goldblatt's Descent
(Atlantic Books, 2013). He lives in London with his wife and son.

Goldblatt's Descent

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Michael Honig, 2016

The moral right of Michael Honig to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 807 3

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