Lights All Night Long - Lydia Fitzpatrick Page 0,96

he believed in neither of them and neither was specific to this occasion, to confronting a murderer.

“You kept them,” Gabe said. The Path to Salvation was on top. That was the one he was holding. “Did you read them?”

He should have, if only to know Gabe better, but he shook his head, and Gabe laughed, this short, shallow sound.

“No,” Ilya said. “They were my grandmother’s. She cut out the pictures.” His English felt thick and slow, was suddenly something he was conscious of again, like his fear had tripped some crucial neural circuit.

“At least she didn’t burn them like everyone else,” Gabe said. He set the pamphlets next to him on the couch and said, “Why are you here?”

Ilya had meant to ease into the subject of Lana’s murder, to try to catch Gabe off guard, but the directness of Gabe’s question had caught him off guard, and so he said, “I’m a friend of Lana’s.”

When he said Lana’s name, Gabe stiffened. He hunched forward, his back coming off the cushions, and there, in that one movement, Ilya saw what he’d come for. Gabe knew Lana, and he knew something about her death. His eyes settled on Ilya’s face, reading it, wondering at Ilya’s intent. Ilya had not noticed his eyes at first, but they were blue and bright even in the dimness of the room, bright enough that it seemed to Ilya that they could read his intent, that Gabe understood that Ilya was working up the nerve to ask if he had killed Lana, was trying to force himself to say that word “kill,” was wondering why Maria Mikhailovna had taught him it, how she had divined that it would be necessary and made him conjugate it just as she had thousands of other, more innocent words.

“Lana,” Gabe said. He slumped back against the couch, and there, in the defeat of that one movement, Ilya saw that he hadn’t killed her, that Gabe had never killed a soul.

“You knew her?” Ilya said. He had the pictures in his duffel. He could prove that Gabe had known her, but he didn’t need them, because Gabe was nodding.

“Yeah,” he said. “We went out together a couple times. To the Tower. To Dolls once. Sometimes we hooked up.”

“What happened?” Ilya said, and Gabe didn’t seem surprised at the question. He seemed relieved by it, in just the way that Ilya felt relieved to hear Gabe talk about the Tower, like by saying the things that came to them in nightmares they might rob them of their power.

“We would meet in the polyana. To hook up,” he said. It was the word they’d used for the grove of trees where Lana’s body had been found. A local word, one that Lana must have taught him. “Or to get drunk. Or high, if we had anything. It wasn’t a regular thing. Not like she was my girlfriend.” Gabe laughed suddenly, and then just as suddenly he stopped. “We could understand like ten words the other one was saying. I wouldn’t even know how to say ‘girlfriend,’ but I liked her. At least I think I did.” He rubbed a hand across the top of his head, then let it drop in his lap. “I was supposed to meet her there the night she got killed, but I didn’t want to go ’til I scored. She wouldn’t have wanted me there ’til I scored.” He said this like there was a clear logic to it, and there was, Ilya guessed. The same addict logic that Vladimir had used when he’d stolen their stuff and sold it at the pawnshop, when he’d asked Lana to sleep with Ilya in exchange for the krokodil. “And there was this guy at the Tower who usually hooked me up. Either him or your brother.”

“My brother,” Ilya said, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice. He had not planned to tell Gabe that he was Vladimir’s brother. Vladimir had been accused of the murders, and whether Gabe was guilty or innocent, Ilya’s relationship to him was bound to put Gabe on edge.

“Vladimir, right? He talked about you all the time, about how you were coming here,” Gabe said. “You look a little like him.”

Ilya nodded, ignoring the vision of Vladimir flooding his mind: Vladimir, in the thick of a drug deal, bragging to an American about how his brother was moving to America, about how he’d come home and run the whole machine. “Sergey’s the other one