about the brothers who had jumped to their deaths off the top of Ilya’s building, about how many prisoners hadn’t been properly buried. They talked about how the snow had covered the crosses completely. They said the road was built on death and that ancient anger doesn’t die. A spirit had killed Yulia, they said. A guard or a prisoner, depending on who was talking and whether their ancestors had been guards or prisoners.
Ilya read everything about Yulia that he could find. A later article reported that she’d been stabbed, that her cheeks had been slashed. The Berlozhniki police finally managed to get in touch with her husband—he’d been out on an ice ship for months and knew nothing of her death. All he could offer was that Yulia was a partier and had gotten into some stuff that he didn’t approve of. After that, there were no leads and no new details released.
A week later a teenager was attacked by a bear outside of Syktyvkar, and there was an outbreak of listeria from some baloney sold at the Minutka, and the mayor began his reelection campaign. Posters of him were hung from all the light posts on the square, and he rode in circles around the kommunalkas, shouting into a loudspeaker about how Berlozhniki’s time had come, about how Berlozhniki’s youth needed to stay and procreate, and Yulia was pretty much forgotten.
“That girl?” someone might say. “The one who wasn’t from here? Who knows what trouble she got herself into.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On Ilya’s third day at Leffie High, a sexting ring run by a student who posted under the alias Madame Grandedoix was discovered, and the school’s collective attention shifted from Ilya to the Madame and didn’t look back. Ilya’s days settled into a pattern. He spent mornings and evenings online, compiling a list from the White Pages of all the Gabe Thompsons in America and checking the Vecherniye Berlozhniki site for news about Vladimir. He looked for news of other murders too, though he knew that the police would find a way of distancing any new murder from the ones for which Vladimir had been arrested just as they had initially insisted that the three murders were unrelated.
Days were devoted to school, and fortunately school in Leffie did not require much more from him than attendance. His science and math classes were remedial; home economics and gym were ridiculous. The English teacher was young and starry-eyed and obsessed with Chekhov, and he seemed willing to forgive any and all mistakes that Ilya made. Principal Gibbons had been right: American History was the hardest class. They were beginning the year with the Revolution, which was the driest revolution Ilya had ever heard of, mostly because it was discussed in such self-congratulatory terms, as though Americans had invented the concept of democracy. The Boston Tea Party. The Continental Congress. Dozens of noblemen in pastel coats and tights. Ilya did not care. Plus Mr. Shilling spoke in a soft drone, like his voice couldn’t possibly project through the thicket of his beard, let alone inspire interest. It didn’t help that Sadie was in the class. It was impossible to concentrate with her there, her skin lit by the projector’s glow, J.T. constantly whispering in her ear.
Each afternoon, while Sadie was at track practice, Ilya trekked through a patch of woods that neighbored Leffie High to Bojangles’, used his snack money from the Masons to buy a chicken-and-biscuit meal, and brought it back to the front office. He shared it with Miss Janet and then did his homework while she updated her online dating profiles.
The drives home with Sadie were the high point of his day. In the mornings, she was sleepy-eyed and slow to talk. She clutched a thermos of coffee between her thighs, scanned the radio with one hand, and rarely gave the road her full attention. But in the afternoons she seemed more relaxed, expansive. In the afternoons, she asked him questions—not about Russia, not about spies, or the KGB, or Putin, or vodka, which were the kinds of questions he got daily—these were simple questions about him.
“What do you like to do? For fun, I mean?” she asked one afternoon that first week, when they were driving home in a drizzle. The windshield wipers flicked across the glass, and the car had the damp, stuffy smell that his winter coat used to get when he left it on the radiator to dry.
Ilya thought of Michael and Stephanie. He knew