A Matter of Death and Life Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Andrey Kurkov

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Marital troubles?

  Sick of life?

  Suicide the answer?

  Why not get yourself a contract killer?

  Nothing easier, provided you communicate only by phone and box number. You give him your photograph, specify when and where to find you, then sit back and prepare to die.

  Murdered, you will be of greater interest than ever you were in life. More to him than met the eye will be the judgment. A mysterious killing lives long in the popular memory.

  Our hero meticulously plans his own demise, except for one detail: what if he suddenly decides he wants to live? This darkly funny tale is Kurkov on top form.

  About the Author

  Andrey Kurkov was born in St Petersburg in 1961. Having graduated from the Kiev Foreign Languages Institute, he worked for some time as a journalist, did his military service as a prison warder in Odessa, then became a film cameraman, writer of screenplays and author of critically acclaimed and popular novels, including the cult bestseller Death and the Penguin.

  Also by Andrey Kurkov

  Death and the Penguin

  The Case of the General’s Thumb

  Penguin Lost

  The President’s Last Love

  The Good Angel of Death

  1

  IF I HAD smoked, it might have been easier. Then each unfathomable matrimonial sulk could have been followed by a cigarette or two, smoke and nicotine becoming for a while more a distraction than the sense and savour of life – like incense burnt for its own sake – and maybe even helping me discern some glimmer of joy in continued existence. But not having smoked since a boy, to start, aged 30, would have been not only stupid but puerile.

  The threat of rain had come to nothing, and it was getting dark. My wife had locked herself in the bathroom as, when actually taking a bath, was her wont. I, prompted by our protracted estrangement, sometimes did the same. At night, we undressed in the dark, and taking a bath by day, were careful not to be seen naked. Naked, one was easily hurt. As she would have agreed. But I, too, was easily hurt, and more often than not, by her. It was not something we talked of any more, though we had once made the effort.

  There was a feel of autumn and departing warmth. Time to be sealing windows and balcony doors. Nature herself prompting thoughts of renewing or bolstering one’s comfort, physical and mental. But with us September was of no account. Apart from the occasional remark, we didn’t speak. Our coffee, our fried eggs, we made independently of each other.

  High time to call a halt. In our one-room flat there was nowhere to get away to.

  I never looked from our seventh-floor window without re-experiencing the joy of high-diving, though with no urge to take the plunge. Suicide was not for me. Beyond the bounds of my own daily round, I had a great liking for life. In a state of mild trepidation, I sometimes walked Kreshchatik Street at night studying the faces of the girls waiting for clients on benches or by the fountain near the Friendship Cinema, displaying, in semi-darkness and city street lighting, all the promise of a lurid book jacket. And no great step though it was from imagining myself client, pimp or friend to any of them, it was still a far cry from actually playing the part. Lacking the necessary will, freedom or cash, I got instead a film-like foretaste of life in America, encouraging the hope that similarly sweet images might flicker about me, here in Kiev, take over, and oust past life for the wholly temporary, wholly tedious thing it was in every respect.

  2

  AS A STUDENT at the Languages Institute, I’d enjoyed making friends with foreigners, and acquiring, with their speech, a different concept of life. They were as unlike us as mushrooms are to hedgehogs, inwardly as well as outwardly. For them childhood and the games thereof were different. A simple one, popular on and off with generations of children innocent of Soviet rule, I’d been told, was that of establishing a chain of connection between, say, you and the Queen or Prime Minister of England. The principle was ridiculously simple: you knowing him, who knew her, who knew him, until someone personally acquainted with the great Him or Her was arrived at. I gave Brezhnev and Shcherbitsky a try, but no chain developed. Then, thanks no doubt to my general state of desperation, I saw suddenly how to work it here – using killers as links. No shortage of them, and some not all that particular about concealing their activities. Ten or so years back, I’d known at least two – normal, sociable, even helpful types, who had served their sentences. True, the killer was different in those days, had more of an air of romance about him. Now, any kind of relationship is for sale, some have made a lucrative profession of murder, giving us the “contract killer”. A term extending the American tradition of image enhancement, whereby “street sweeper” becomes “municipal sanitation operative”, the intention being to confer greater self-confidence, greater self-respect. With us, the contract killer was indeed an “operative”, a highly skilled murderer working exclusively to order, while at “rat catcher” level, the old-style, romantic, social murderer born of drink or jealousy, remained the common creature he always was. The one who got caught and banged up, while the contract version stayed free as a bird.

  For years, in imagination and fantasy, I had been seeking some way out of my dead-end situation in life. And here, on a plate, it was – out of the dead end and of life itself. Too fond of life ever to take my own, I was made for the role of victim. A perfect model of the unfair working of fate: clever man contract-murdered in his prime! How concerned all those who knew me would be, realizing that the me they had drunk wine and coffee with was someone they had never really known – a man caught up in business involving violent showdowns, contract killings. I imagined Criminal Investigation bombarding every one of them with questions. “Had he any enemies?” “What was the nature of his employment?” “Who would have benefited from his death?” and so on. It only remained to find an inexpensive contract killer and the money to pay him, and the ideal murder I had planned would go down as one more unsolved mystery. The idea of an effective end to my senseless life was alluring. One engaging feature of mysterious killings is how often they get referred to in the press and in books, along with names and details, affording a fair chance of survival in the popular memory.

  3

  AUTUMN, IN THE end, was late, tints of red and gold having perhaps proved beyond the means of a nature as bankrupt as the country. True, it was colder and evenings were rainy, but with no vivid turning of leaves. People, on the other hand, were visibly losing their colour, as I, when I looked in the mirror, was mine. Friends telephoned to say how bad they felt. My own ills I kept to myself, as also my own precious plan
of escape from the dead end of life.

  My wife began to come home later than usual, sometimes after midnight. She undressed in the dark and lay on her side of the divan under her own blanket. These nocturnal homecomings woke and annoyed me, and when not woken I was the more annoyed. She was totally lacking in warmth, something I found infuriating in a woman, particularly when she was in bed beside me.

  On Wednesday evening I decided to stay on in town. I had a little money and a fairly clear notion what to spend it on: drink. Only not alone. With one other at least, though better a holy threesome, if all close friends. A boozy night with chance companions was not appealing. At a little before seven I took the metro to Contract Square, where through the windows of a boutique I had twice seen Dima Samorodin, who had been at school with me. We had lost touch with each other since school, and when I had spotted him through the window he had been busy with customers. He would be pleased for me to drop in. We had got on well together, and no bond was more cementing than that of a shared past, whether of school or prison.

  Nor was I mistaken. The moment I entered the shop, he hailed me, and while serving, plied me with questions about former classmates. Who I had seen lately? When? Doing what? In response to which, my few chance encounters on public transport sounded tame.

  “Give me half an hour,” he said. “And when the boss has collected the takings, I’ll shut up shop, and we’ll have a session.”

  Rather than wait in the shop, I took a turn around Podol.

  The glaring neon of silly café and restaurant names forced withdrawal to the comparative gloom of a bench beneath the monument to Grigory Skovoroda, first Ukrainian Buddhist. On other benches couples were kissing, profiting, as I was not, from the lack of light. Yet why? – being young, agreeable, far from fat? Because no woman was likely to come and ask me to kiss her. Five years back I’d have been doing all the asking to kiss.

  When I returned to the boutique, the customers had gone.

  “All’s well,” said Dima. “The boss has been, we can shut up shop.”

  Drawing the display window curtains and closing the heavy metal door, he cut us off from the world, leaving us as if in a spaceship – and a Western one to judge from the stock of bottles, tins, and the like.

  “What shall we drink?” asked Dima, seating me at a small white plastic table and going over to the shelves.

  I was reminded of the old “What’s the People’s is mine”.

  “Don’t be shy – drinks on me,” said Dima. “Two bottles a day I’m allowed. Anything over that I pay for at a discount.”

  “In that case, whisky.”

  We drank it as others do vodka, in a gulp from small crystal tumblers taken from the shelf for the purpose.

  “Zhenka Dolgy, when I last saw him three years ago, was working as a butcher in a food store near the opera. Chemeris has moved to Volgograd. Grown terribly bald recently.”

  “I did see Galya Kolesnichenko once,” I threw in. “Here, in Podol.”

  Having finished the whisky, we gave gin a go.

  “Normally drunk with tonic,” said Dima opening the bottle. “Which we’re just out of. Still, it’s all right on its own. Remember Melnichuk, Class B?”

  “I do.”

  “Got a death sentence two years ago, but it was commuted to 15 years.”

  “What for?”

  “Taking $5000 protection money off a foreign goods dealer, then chucking a grenade through his window for good measure, killing mum-in-law and the baby.”

  “Nasty.”

  We went on to talk of today’s crimes and horrors, regaling ourselves with tins of Cyprus olives and Kamchatka crab. Dima’s round face grew flushed, his eyes burned bright, and I don’t imagine that I myself was a picture of sobriety. Meanwhile we had got onto incomes, the word “pay” having fallen into disuse. Dima made $300 a month plus a bonus in kind, usually consumed with friends – material achievements such as I could not match.

  “But my boss, who has five boutiques like this in Podol, plus a currency exchange kiosk, pulls in $5000–$6000 a month,” Dima said. “Don’t envy him though.

  “What would a contract killer make? Any idea?”

  “You don’t read the Militia Gazette. Anything between $5000 and $10,000, depending on how important the target.”

  “And for a target of no importance?”

  “Would there be a market for one?”

  I shrugged. “A husband might want his wife’s lover removed.”

  For a moment Dima said nothing, then he, too, shrugged. “Kids’ stuff,” he said. “No bodyguards, so on the cheap side. Say $500. But no pro would touch it. Certainly none of the ones I know.”

  With a sigh I replenished our glasses. There was still a refill each left in the bottle.

  Alcohol might be coursing in my veins, but my mind was as clear as day.

  “So yours has a lover, has she?” asked Dima out of the blue.

  “My nod was more automatic than confirmatory, the odds being in favour of her having one.

  “I know a chap, bit of a pro,” Dima began, lowering his voice. “I could have a word. Decent bloke. Asks nothing up front from people he knows. Got the money, have you?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “I can provide. Serious stuff, seeing it’s family. Like me to have a word?”

  “If you would.”

  4

  TWO EVENINGS LATER I looked up Dima at the boutique. There were no customers. The afternoon’s drizzle and intermittent rain had clearly sent them scurrying home. He was sitting behind his counter, as in a brightly lit aquarium, reading a book.

  “Hello! What’s that you’re reading?” I asked, entering through the open door.

  “James Hadley Chase. Only thing for this weather. How’s tricks? Care for a drink?”

  I nodded.

  Producing an already open bottle of lemon vodka from under the counter, and crystal tumblers, he poured and we drank. For vodka it was smooth, as if concerned to conceal its strength.

  “Women’s stuff!” declared Dima, seeing my expression. “Hang on while I shut up shop, and then we can talk.”

  “All OK,” he said, resuming his seat behind the counter. “Having just become a father, he’s not looking for anything too demanding at the moment, so this lover of yours is just the thing.”

  “How much does he want?”

  “He said $700, but I knocked him down on that. Told him you would do the preparatory work.”

  “Involving what?”

  “Target gen. When and where to find him. Maybe a photograph.”

  The photograph gave pause for thought. So far I had been thinking in the abstract of this so far unseen lover. Whereas it was me we were talking about, by God! When and where to find me! Calming down and ascribing my slow-wittedness to the weather and the women’s stuff we were drinking, I switched my mind back to the matter in hand.

  “So what do you think?” Dima asked.

  “Fine. I’ll get a photograph. How much have you settled for?”

  “Ultimately I got him down to $450. So you owe me a bottle.”

  “When do I meet him?”

  “You don’t. He’ll ring tomorrow evening about passing him what’s needed.”

  Business concluded, conversation flagged, but we sat on, swapping jokes between glasses, for another half hour.

  My wife was not back by the time I got home. Making tea, I saw that it was after midnight. Not many windows were still lit in the block opposite. It was wet, the asphalt beneath each street lamp shiny yellow. To cool off, I opened the kitchen window, and poking my head out, gazed down at the deserted street. Five minutes later a clapped-out, foreign-made red car drew up below, from which emerged my wife and a man. For a moment I was afraid they were both coming up to the flat, but after kissing under the light, only she entered the building, and he drove off. I stared at the empty street. So that was him, the target, whose photograph I was supposed to supply. And maybe his was the one I should su
pply – not very original, just common jealousy, for which, given the mutual loss of affection between myself and my wife, there was no need. No, let him live. Let them both live, and enjoy themselves. My contract killing would, I imagined, have some, as yet unforeseeable, effect even on them. A key grated in the lock.

  “Not asleep?” she asked without interest but with a hint of surprise.

  “Just drinking tea and window gazing.”

  Making no reply, she swept on into the bedroom.

  I waited for her to turn out the light, then followed.

  5

  THE NEXT EVENING Dima’s friend rang, saying he was Kostya, giving me two days to have the photograph and target info. ready, and promising to ring what next.

  Next morning I fetched out the shoe box of some long-ditched Jugoslav footware, containing, in random chronological order, photographs of myself at all stages from traditionally naked to in company with tearaway teenage set. Since when, either I had clearly ceased to be sought after, or my friends had tired of photography. I put aside two close-ups: one of me, with a bottle of fortified white wine, in the park at Pushcha-Voditsa, the other picnicking by a camp fire somewhere at Svyatoshino. Checking the photographs against my present self in the mirror, I decided that neither looked anything like me. Somewhere were eight passport-sized photos which I had had taken three years ago in the vain hope of having driving lessons and obtaining a licence.

  After a cup of instant coffee, I stuffed the photographs back in the box, and betook myself to the nearest photographer, an old man who kept finding fault with the angle of my chin.

  “What’s the point in being photographed, if you don’t want to look your best?” he exploded at my muttered protest.

  When at last he had done clicking the camera on its tripod, he told me to collect the prints in three days’ time.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but it must be tomorrow.”

  “Must?”

  “Yes, must.”

  “Come after lunch then, with a ‘thank you’.” Not money, that’s no use to anyone.”