Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov Page A

dogs – her own was at that moment cheerfully noisy in the passage.
    Told of Misha, she listened with interest and was upset at Sonya’s now being without her friend.
    Lighting suddenly on the envelope of money, her gaze hardened.
    “I would take nothing from her … But Mummy needs medicine. She’s got cancer.”
    Time, Viktor judged, to be going. In the passage, he found Bosik chewing one of his shoes.
    “Drop!” said Kseniya, darting forward, rescuing the shoe and returning it to Viktor.
    “I’m terribly sorry.”
    Viktor went his way, deeply depressed and with a decidedly uncomfortable left shoe.
    In the lighted Lexus the driver was reading a book. Viktor got into the back seat, and they accelerated away along a deserted streetwith lights at amber.
    “Could be trouble,” said the driver over his shoulder, referring to two jeeps on their tail, and as Viktor turned to look, one overtook and cut in, forcing the Lexus to slow to a halt, while the other closed up behind – a manoeuvre his driver could have avoided, having the better car.
    The door was opened by a thickset tough in a blue tracksuit.
    “We’ll deliver,” he told the driver. “Don’t worry, and tell the boss lady not to.”
    He turned to Viktor.
    “Out you get.”
    There was nothing for it but to obey.

32
    Viktor opened his eyes on inky blackness, tried to get up, but was physically incapable. In an attempt to distinguish dream from nightmare reality, he opened his mouth, said “Ah!” But between his making the sound and actually hearing it, there was an appreciable time lag. He had another go. With the same result, except that the sound now took over a minute returning. Something pricked his hand. He raised his head in an effort to see what. So there was hope. He could now move his head. It only remained to decide where he was and what had happened.
    A pillow. He was in bed. Suddenly he remembered – two men in blue tracksuits, one in a sweater. While the men in tracksuits restrained him, the third had injected a vein on the inside of his elbow. It still hurt. Worse, it was stabbingly painful, as if the vein wasobstructed by something. And echoing and re-echoing in his head, as if from far, far away through an infinity of intervening walls, the same questions. “Did you actually see him dead? Where did you get that credit card? What are you doing here? Did you actually see him dead?”
    The inky blackness thinned. Walls … A tiny room … A window beyond which it was night. A door opened creating a rectangle of brighter light. He raised his hand to shield his eyes, and felt again the pain of the injection.
    “How are we?” asked a familiar voice, and lowering his hand, he saw almond-eyed Marina in a wine-red housecoat. Her nails will be wine-red, he thought, but they weren’t, they were their natural colour.
    “How did I get here?” Again it took a surprising time for the words to become audible.
    She pulled a chair up to his bed.
    “They brought you back.”
    “What happened?”
    “At a guess I’d say you got pulled in for questioning. What’s that in your hand?”
    She prised open his fingers, looked at the paper they had been clutching, and laughed.
    “It’s the counterfoil for the meal we had. Someone thought Stanislav was back and raised the alarm. So you see the danger of forging dead men’s signatures.”
    Her cold indifference to her late husband was in contrast to Kseniya’s reaction.
    “How was she?” Marina asked, as if divining his thoughts.
    “Tearful.”
    “For long?”
    “No.”
    “She took the money?”
    “Not willingly. She knew it wasn’t from Stanislav. He would not have given her money, she said.”
    “Little fool! How about a drink?”
    “I’d like a cognac.”
    She brought cognac and glasses.
    With an effort he raised himself into a sitting position and drank.
    “So you knew all about her.”
    “How could I not, with him sending his driver out to her with food. Somewhere beyond the