The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
each had always tried to hold any advantage possible over the other. Not to
use, of course, just to have. Constant infinitesimal readjustments of hierarchy
allowed them to personalize their professional relations and professionalize
their personal relations. Voskresenyov wondered what Lubin was
planning to do with this information. He stared at the pouchy, slack face
beneath brittle and graying hair, the trembling and liver-spotted hand, and
concluded: absolutely nothing. Checkmate and tip the king over: Lubin was
giving up. And nothing can be done with a man who wants nothing.
“No, no money for me,” Lubin continued in a near mutter, looking down
as though speaking for himself. “Just some quiet away from all of this. My
wife and I, we are both country people, from around Tver. Forty years in this
city, this shit. No money for me.”
As they walked, they came upon a little park at the intersection of five
streets, with a copse of denuded birch trees whose branches splayed like
skeletal hands of warning too high for anyone to see. At the center of the
empty park was a fountain—really just a stagnant concrete pool of greenscummed
water visible beneath a thin lattice of ice—surrounded by a bunch
of bushes, and as they approached the fountain, they walked from crisp sunlight
into the thicket’s shadow. The bushes hid them from the street; Voskresenyov
grabbed Lubin and kissed him fully on his open and surprised
mouth. He felt Lubin shoving against him with his weak and spindly hands,
and Voskresenyov reached into his pocket for his spring-loaded knife, flicked
open the blade, sliced deeply into the nests of arteries on either side of
Lubin’s groin, and shoved him through the ice and into the fountain.
Voskresenyov threw the knife in afterward, checked his shoes, trousers,
and topcoat for bloodstains (there were none), and continued on to the
Lubyanka to buy the rest of his past.
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