in surprise, his eyes looked at Arkadin with incomprehension, just before they rolled up in his head and he sank to the blood-soaked ground. Arkadin turned and walked toward the ramp to the street, but he felt as if he had been injected with a paralytic. His legs were stiff, barely responding to commands from a brain that seemed increasingly encased in sludge. He felt cold and unfocused. He tried to catch his breath, couldn't, and fell over.
All around him, it seemed, fires burned, the city was on fire, the night sky was the color of blood, pulsing to the beat of his laboring heart. He saw the eyes of those he'd killed, red as the eyes of rats, crowding in on him. I don't want to share the darkness with you, he thought as he felt himself about to plunge into unconsciousness.
And perhaps it was this thought alone that caused him to pause, to take deep breaths, and then, in that moment of repose or weakness, to improbably accept water from those crowding around him, who, he saw now, weren't the familiar dead, but the unfamiliar living. Filthy, ragged, and without hope they might be, but they recognized an underdog when they saw one, and this brought out their innate altruism. Instead of picking him clean like a flock of vultures, they had taken him into their hearts. Isn't it the downtrodden, the ones who can least afford to give up anything, who are more willing to share what they have than the millionaires inhabiting the gated towers on the other side of the city? This was Arkadin's thought as he took their gift of water, in return giving them a wad of rupees from his pocket. Not long after, he felt strong enough to call the local hospital. Then he ripped off an arm of his shirt and wrapped it around his leg to stanch the bleeding in his thigh. There was a pack of boys, runaways or children whose parents had been killed in one of the many sectarian skirmishes that from time to time swept through the neighborhoods, a whirlwind of hate and blood. They watched him as if he were the hero of a video game, as if he were not quite real. They were afraid of him, but they were also drawn like moths to a flame. He motioned to them and they surged forward as if each one were a leg of some giant insect. They had the Russian's motorcycle in their midst, and he saw that they had it surrounded, that they were protecting it.
"I won't take the bike away from you, it's yours," he said in Hindi. "Help me out to the street."
By then the sound of a siren had become a wail, and with the lost boys supporting him he limped out of the pit into the arms of the medical team, who bundled him into the back of the ambulance, where they laid him down, one of them taking his pulse, checking his heart, while the other began to assess the wound.
Ten minutes later he was being wheeled into the emergency room on a collapsible gurney, then transferred facedown to one of the ER's beds. The arctic air woke him as if from a high fever. He watched the comings and goings in the ER as he was given an injection of local anesthetic, then a surgeon washed his hands in the disinfectant gel from a dispenser affixed to a column, snapped on gloves, and began the process of cleaning, disinfecting, and suturing the wound.
The procedure allowed Arkadin time to reflect on the raid. He knew that it was Dimitri Ilyinovich Maslov who had ordered the assault. Maslov was the head of the Kazanskaya, the Moscow mafia, known colloquially as the grupperovka. Maslov was his onetime employer, from whom Arkadin had taken the illegal arms business. This business was critical to Maslov because the Kremlin was coming down hard on the grupperovka, slowly yet inexorably stripping the families of the power base they had built up since glasnost. But over the years Dimitri Maslov had proved himself different from the heads of the other grupperovka, who were all either losing power or already in prison. Maslov prospered, even in these difficult times, because he still had the political muscle to defy the authorities or at least keep them at bay. He was a dangerous man and an even more dangerous enemy.
Yes, Arkadin thought now, as the surgeon cut the