In the morning the park was wet, though it had not rained.
The boards around the ticket booth had darkened, the posters hung heavy as laundry after a bad wash, and thin puddles that Ilya did not remember from the night before gleamed on the paths. Varya walked ahead in silence. Maya held the bag containing Gleb Savin's phone and would not look at the Room of Fear, as though afraid it might look first.
Gleb had been taken away during the night.
He had not shouted or demanded his phone back or sworn at the adults. That was worse. He had sat in the back of the police car with Maya's jacket on his knees and flinched every time a coin, a bunch of keys or a spoon against a glass clinked somewhere in town. Before they left, he had asked only one thing:
"If I stopped the stream, does that count?"
Ilya had found no answer.
The book had.
Gleb Savin. Living bearer. Released.
But below it remained the line that had made Varya step back from Ilya during the night.
Ilya Lazarev. The grandson must not know.
"Know what?" asked Maya.
No one answered. All three of them were already looking at the old till drawer.
Nina Pakhomova's key lay on the table between the daytime till and the night ledger. Small and dark, with a tag on which Semyon Ilyich's handwriting had been almost erased by time. Yesterday the key had opened someone else's shortfall. Today it lay silent, but Ilya could hear in it the same thing he heard in a bad recording: the splice point.
"Grandad had a drawer," he said.
Varya turned to him.
"You never said."
"I didn't know it existed."
It was almost true. Ilya remembered the bottom cupboard beneath the till. He remembered his grandfather putting a flask in there, an old blowtorch, a bundle of tickets, a cloth for the glass. But there should have been nothing behind the back of the cupboard. Only plywood, cobwebs and the pavilion wall.
Varya crouched down, ran her fingers along the gap and immediately found what Ilya would never have noticed: a slender brass catch, the paint around it worn away to bare metal.
"Not a hiding place," she said. "Too neat. Someone was meant to open this often."
The key slid in without resistance.
The lock made no sound. No click, no creak. The back of the cupboard simply gave way inwards, and from the darkness came the smell not of mould but of dry paper, heart tablets and old tobacco.
Maya raised the phone to turn on its torch.
"Don't film this," said Varya.
Maya lowered her hand.
There was no money inside.
That was what struck Ilya first. He did not know himself what he had expected. Bundles of notes, a gold watch, other people's passports, something plainly sordid that would let him hate his grandfather without effort. But the drawer held envelopes tied with thread. Each bore not a name but a brief note:
Travel.
Medicine.
Funeral.
Until spring.
Change surname.
Varya took out the first envelope.
It contained train tickets to Kirov, two photographs of children and a note: "Do not return until Kuzin dies. Tamara will meet them at the station. Do not spend the money on the husband's debts."
The second contained prescriptions, medical certificates and a receipt for a boy's operation. His entry in the night ledger read: "ticket seller's son. Not entered."
Nina Pakhomova had been standing by the door all this time. Ilya had not seen her arrive. The old woman did not come in, but merely held on to the doorframe.
"He never told me," she said.
"About what?" asked Maya.
"That it wasn't a relative who got my son out. I thought my husband's sister had found the money. But it was him."
Ilya wanted to feel relieved.
He could not.
The envelopes had been arranged too neatly. They held too many lives saved without explanation, without the rescuer's name, without any right to say afterwards: but I tried.
And something else was becoming all too clear.
If his grandfather had saved some of them, he knew which ones he had failed to reach in time.
Varya said nothing. She opened one envelope after another until she came to an unmarked grey folder. Inside were copies of IOUs. Every one of them was made out to Semyon Ilyich Lazarev. The sums varied, as did the dates. But in the right-hand corner the same mark appeared again and again: a small tally box, four strokes with a fifth drawn across them.
Maya breathed out:
"The commission's stamp had the same mark."
Ilya picked up one of the IOUs. The paper was as thin as a hospital form. In his grandfather's handwriting it said:
Received. For the Sinitsyn family's journey. No means of repayment.
Another hand had added below:
Settle through silence.
Varya looked up.
"Silence about what?"
Ilya had already seen the next folder.
It lay right at the bottom. Thick, with a charred edge. It bore only one word:
Gordeev.
Varya did not reach for it.
Instead, she stepped back.
"Open it," she said.
Ilya opened it.
The folder held no body, no confession, no elegant answer. Only a copy of the work order for repairs to the switch room, Andrei Gordeev's old tag, just like the one Varya had taken from the bottom of the pond, and an IOU.
Semyon Ilyich Lazarev had received money on the night Andrei Gordeev disappeared.
It was a large sum. So large that at first Ilya thought he had misread the number of zeroes.
Varya did not cry.
That frightened him more.
"What did he do with it?" she asked.
Ilya began to search. He turned the folder over, took out the sheet tucked inside and spread out the receipts. There were train tickets for another family, a burial certificate for an unidentified drowned man, three prescriptions in someone else's name, a payment for a room in a hostel.
It all added up.
And that was exactly why it excused nothing.
"He saved someone that same night," said Ilya.
Varya looked at him as though he had just repeated someone else's bad instructions.
"And my father?"
There was no answer.
At the back of the drawer lay one last note. It had been folded in four and wound with thread, as though his grandfather had wanted it to be found last, when there would be no way to take back the knowledge.
Ilya unfolded the paper.
Semyon Ilyich's handwriting was steady and old-fashioned, but it did not tremble.
For my grandson, if he has reached this drawer.
Do not trust me more than the paper.
I took money from those who counted people as an expense. Not for myself. But the hand that took it is still dirty. Not all dirt washes off because you later bought a child a ticket.
If you learn everything, the Room will issue you a ticket.
Do not go in alone.
Ilya finished reading and understood that for the first time in his life, his grandfather had told him the truth without a trick.
A white ticket slowly emerged from the till.
There was no date on it.
Only one line:
The grandson has been warned.
Open in the reader