Arkady pushed his palm against the cold wall of the interrogation room, turning white into blood red – his blood. He stumbled to his feet, cigarette still dangling from the corner of his mouth. The room was silent now. Silent except for the man yelling in the back of his head. YOU KILLED HER RENKO! YOU LET HER DIE. He let his forehead slip in the skin-cradle between index and thumb, and rubbed slowly.

YOU LET HER DIE. One drag, and out. Getting beaten to a pulp by a man you had only seen once in your life, at 7:30 AM on a rainy Moscow morning was only second to downing American vodka at the first dinner party with your in-laws, Arkady thought. Talking about mortgage rates, grinning until your face went numb. But that was a long ago and now he felt numb all over, inside and out, and for all the wrong reasons.

Footsteps down the hallway were still going crazy; the gum of dirty boots angling the floor in impossible positions, trying every goniometric combination to stand their ground. HE LET HER DIE! HE LET HER DIE! The rustle of old cloth, neatly-ironed cloth, worn-out jackets, uniforms, one single patched-up sweater, elbows and knees and shoulders and somebody's neck maybe, locking in a shower of hisses and hushes, "Cut it out, Comrade!", "Take him away, take him away!"

He nearly burned what was left of his split lip with the stump of that Belomor. In his mind, he repeated the word like a mantra. Let, let, let. He hated it. Letting time pass, possibly letting that last breath leave her body, wasting time, a waste of life. Well, lives. Comrade, this wasn't my first time, Arkady almost whispered to himself, a bitter smile stretching on his underslept face. Her. Yes, but which one? He moved closer to the window.

A boy of 9 years old, he had let his mother drown, even helped her. He had collected stones around the dacha for afternoons on end, his father too tired to notice his scratched knees, his dirty nails, her dried cheeks, when he came home in the evening. An early start, but he hadn't bettered his technique – he didn't need that. A natural talent for disaster.

A man of 33, he came back to Irina's hospital bed just to find it empty. The space of a cigarette down the street, a medical mishap, an allergic reaction to an antibiotic he knew about – he could have told them. He should have been there. Instinctive pictures of the woman he loved on the coroner's death-bed made something behind his navel itch and twitch.

But this time was different, Arkady concluded. He replayed the motions, the blurred goodbyes, running in the dark, a door getting shut in his face, losing consciousness. He had no idea where he went wrong, he couldn't remember. And he had no innocence now, he had no love he could give, risk, lose.

"Are you okay in here?" A nervous knock on the door, a rugged face peeking into the room. Bogdan looked exhausted as he shut the door behind his back with the light, backward movement of his worn-out dress shoe's tip. Arkady noticed that he was now standing right in the middle of the window frame, facing the glass, the rain, facing the busy, almost neurotic street down below. Forehead leaning on the pane, his right arm framing the top of his head.

"You look pretty fucked up, Comrade." And he was, both of them, not much to his great enjoyment. Nonetheless, Arkady kind of appreciated the subtle humor, thin as Lake Baikal's ice. He almost smiled in his head. That was typical Bogdan Huseynov, the 40-something disillusioned Detective Lieutenant who had taken him under his wing after the Irina accident. When Arkady almost thought of moving for good somewhere in the Siberian steppe, wasting away his nights sleeping in the car, motor running; and while nobody else's telephone calls could extract a mere "Yes" or "No" from his mouth, were they painful, rotten teeth, Bogdan kept knocking on Arkady's apartment's door until the "gloomy bastard" – as he called him – resolved himself to come back to the Department and sign up for a little job.

"You know, this is starting to wear you out. I talked Sokolov into getting you involved just so you could get you back on track, you know, sparkle up your daily life a bit," he gestured with his hand "not to fucking ruin you", Bogdan kept going, as Arkady still fixed his eyes on the road, no words. "Come on now, Arkady. This is no good." Arkady slowly turned, his head starting to really throb.

He looked at Bogdan, "Everything is under control, Bodya. I'll be fine." A flash of genuine concern seemed to cross the Lieutenant's dark eyes for a second there, or perhaps just light shifting from cloud to cloud, rain still falling down. He felt them inspecting something that must have gone really wrong around his right temple and eye, maybe black and blue in a couple of hours too. Arkady stood still as Bogdan's arm reached out and pulled the stump from his lips in a slow, smooth movement. He didn't even flinch when the man kept talking, his caring gesture just mere punctuation in some "get your shit together" type of conversation.

"This is gonna make things at least two thousand times more complicated. How much does Yuri Stepanovich know? And more importantly, Arkasha, how much do you know?"

"About him? I know that he has no idea. About pretty much anything. Also, he has a heavy jab. Likes to fight dirty, won't think twice about slamming your head into the wall while you're facing it. He doesn't have much lateral view though, and he really lacks intuition."

"Apparently he knows enough to come and find you here. And by the way, stop doing that" Bogdan gestured at the papers and documents scattered across the metal table, hand pausing imperceptibly in the general direction of one of the two chairs, knocked over, "working here, not even in your office, that is."

"I haven't had an office for more than ten months now."

"I'm working on that. Didn't exactly help that you cleaned up your room and left without notice last time. No letter, not a piece of paper. Not even a fuck-you-morons."

"My wife died."

Bodgan squeezed the bridge of his nose between index and thumb, "For Christ's sake, Arkady, go home. Get some sleep."

"I have to find this woman, Bodya. I can't let this one go, not just yet."

"I thought you knew where she was. I thought you said everything was under control. You must have some idea." Bogdan shook his head as Arkady moved his lips to articulate a diversion, and calmly put one palm up. "Don't even do that, I don't want to know. I'll know when I need to know and you need to do what you know. Also you know what you need to do. Oh, fuck it. Just keep it to yourself, Arkasha."

Bogdan concluded his statement (turned monologue by Arkady's absolute outer indifference) by nodding a single nod, his eyes narrowing, a lazy attempt to focus on the next step, possibly Arkady's next fall and multiple bone fracture. Arkady started patting his dress jacket for a new cigarette as Bogdan moved for the door and then turned back to him again, hand on handle, "By the way pal, your gun is on the floor", he arched his chin briefly to one corner of the room, "Call me if you need me. Whistle if you need to get rescued."