A. D. Miller - Snowdrops

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Andrew Miller

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Andrew
Snowdrops / A.D. Miller. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. BritishRussia (Federation)Fiction. 2. City and town lifeRussia (Federation)MoscowFiction 3. CrimeRussia (Federation)MoscowFiction. 4. HedonismFiction. 5. Moscow (Russia)Fiction. 6. Noir fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR6113.I556S66 2011
823.92dc22 2010010310

eISBN: 978-0-385-53345-4

Jacket design by Emily Mahon
Jacket photograph smur/iStock Exclusive/Getty Images

v3.1

For Arkady, Becky, Guy, Mark,
and especially Emma

Snowdrop. 1. An early-flowering bulbous plant, having a white pendent flower.. Moscow slang. A corpse that lies buried or hidden in the winter snows, emerging only in the thaw

I smelled it before I saw it.

There was a crowd of people standing around on the pavement and in the road, most of them policemen, some talking on mobile phones, some smoking, some looking, some looking away. From the way I came, they were blocking my view, and at first I thought that with all the uniforms it must be a traffic accident or maybe an immigration bust. Then I caught the smell. It was a smell like the kind you come home to if you forget to put your rubbish out before you go on holidayripe but acidic, strong enough to block out the normal summer aromas of beer and revolution. It was the smell that had given it away.

From about ten metres away, I saw the foot. Just one, as if its owner was stepping very slowly out of a limousine. I can still see the foot now. It was wearing a cheap black slip-on shoe, and above the shoe there was a stretch of grey sock, then a glimpse of greenish flesh.

The cold had kept it fresh, they told me. They didnt know how long it had been there. Maybe all winter, one of the policemen speculated. Theyd used a hammer, he said, or possibly a brick. Not a good job, he said. He asked me if I wanted to see the rest of it. I said no, thank you. Id already seen and learned more than I needed to during that last winter.

Youre always saying that I never talk about my time in Moscow or about why I left. Youre right, Ive always made excuses, and soon youll understand why. But youve gone on asking me, and for some reason lately I keep thinking about itI cant stop myself. Perhaps its because were only three months away from the big day, and that somehow seems a sort of reckoning. I feel like I need to tell someone about Russia, even if it hurts. Also that probably you should know, since were going to make these promises to each other, and maybe even keep them. I think you have a right to know all of it. I thought it would be easier if I wrote it down. You wont have to make an effort to put a brave face on things, and I wont have to watch you.

So here is what Ive written. You wanted to know how it ended. Well, that was almost the end, that afternoon with the foot. But the end really began the year before, in September, in the Metro.

When I told Steve Walsh about the foot, by the way, he said, Snowdrop. Your friend is a snowdrop. Thats what the Russians call them, he told methe bodies that float up into the light in the thaw. Drunks, most of them, and homeless people who just give up and lie down into the whiteness, and murder victims hidden in the drifts by their killers.

Snowdrops: the badness that is already there, always there and very close, but which you somehow manage not to see. The sins the winter hides, sometimes forever.

I can at least be sure of her name. It was Maria Kovalenko, Masha to her friends. She was standing on the station platform at Ploshchad Revolyutsii, Revolution Square, when I first caught sight of her. I could see her face for about five seconds before she took out a little makeup mirror and held it in front of her. With her other hand she put on a pair of sunglasses that I remember thinking she might have just bought from a kiosk in an underpass somewhere. She was leaning against a pillar, up at the end of the platform where the civilian statues areathletes, engineers, bosomy female farmhands, and mothers holding muscular babies. I looked at her for longer than I should have.

Theres a moment at Ploshchad Revolyutsii, a visual effect that happens when youre transferring to the green line from that platform with the statues. You find yourself crossing the Metro tracks on a little elevated walkway, and on one side you can see a flotilla of disc-shaped chandeliers, stretching along the platform and away into the darkness that the trains come out of. On the other side you see other people making the same journey, only on a parallel walkway, close but separate. When I looked to the right that day I saw the girl with the sunglasses heading the same way.

I got on the train for the one-stop ride to Pushkinskaya. I stood beneath the yellow panelling and the ancient strip lighting that made me feel, every time I took the Metro, as if I was an extra in some paranoid Donald Sutherland film from the seventies. At Pushkinskaya I went up the escalator with its phallic lamps, held open the heavy glass Metro doors for the person behind me like I always used to, and made my way into the maze of low-slung underground passages beneath Pushkin Square. Then she screamed.

She was about five metres behind me, and as well as screaming she was wrestling against a thin man with a ponytail who was trying to steal her handbag (an ostentatiously fake Burberry). She was screaming for help, and the friend who had appeared alongside herKatya, it turned outwas just screaming. To begin with, I only watched, but the man drew back his fist like he was about to punch her, and I heard someone shouting from behind me as if they were going to do something about it. I stepped forward and pulled the thin man back by his collar.

He gave up on the bag and swung his elbows at me, but they didnt reach. I let go and he lost his balance and fell. It was all over quickly and I didnt get a good enough look at him. He was young, maybe four inches shorter than me, and seemed embarrassed. He stabbed out a foot, catching me painlessly on the shin, and scrambled up to his feet and ran away down the underpass and up the stairs at the far end that led to Tverskayathe Oxford Street of Moscow, only with lawless parking, which slopes down from Pushkin Square to Red Square. There were two policemen near the bottom of the steps, but they were too busy smoking and looking for immigrants to harass to pay the mugger any attention.

Spasibo, said Masha. (Thank you.) She took off the sunglasses.

She was wearing tight, tight jeans tucked into knee-high brown leather boots, and a white blouse with one more button undone than there needed to be. Over the blouse she had one of those funny Brezhnev-era autumn coats that Russian women without much money often wear. If you look at them closely they seem to be made out of carpet or beach towel with a cat-fur collar, but from a distance they make the girl in the coat look like the honey trap in a Cold War thriller. She had a straight bony nose, pale skin, and long tawny hair. With a bit more luck she might have been sitting beneath the gold-leaf ceiling in some hyperpriced restaurant called the Ducal Palace or the Hunting Lodge, eating black caviar and smiling indulgently at a nickel magnate or well-connected oil trader. Perhaps thats where she is now, though somehow I doubt it.