Collateral

The building had no elevator. Six floors of Soviet concrete, the stairwell smelling of boiled cabbage and something chemical — bleach, maybe, or the slow dissolution of pipe adhesive behind the walls. Roman took the stairs at an even pace. Dmitri followed two steps behind, breathing harder than the climb warranted.

Flat 6D. The door was wooden, painted brown sometime in the previous decade. A strip of weather seal hung loose along the bottom edge. Roman knocked once.

Shuffling inside. The scrape of a chain. The door opened four inches and Mikhail Antonov looked out through the gap with the expression of a man who had been expecting this visit for weeks and had done nothing to prepare for it.

"Mikhail Pavlovich."

"Roman." Antonov's voice was thin. He was thinner. The last time Roman had seen him, three months ago, at a card game in Kolya's back room, he'd been a solid man. Fleshy. Now the skin under his jaw hung slack. His eyes had that excavated quality, the hollowed look of someone who had stopped sleeping and started instead to lie in bed conducting arithmetic.

"Open the door."

Antonov opened the door.

The flat was a one-bedroom. Roman stepped inside and catalogued it the way he catalogued every space he entered: exits first, then value. One window in the main room, facing the courtyard. A second in the kitchen, partially blocked by a refrigerator that had been pulled away from the wall for some reason and never pushed back. The furniture was pressboard. IKEA or its Russian equivalent. A leather couch that had cost money once, maybe four years ago, before the leather started cracking along the seat creases. A television mounted on the wall. Samsung, 55-inch, two generations old. Worth eight thousand rubles if someone wanted to carry it down six flights of stairs.

No one would want to carry it down six flights of stairs.

"Sit," Antonov said, gesturing at the couch.

Roman did not sit. He stood in the center of the room with his hands at his sides while Dmitri positioned himself by the door. The overhead light was a single bulb behind a frosted glass shade. It gave the room the color of weak tea.

"You know the number," Roman said.

"I know the number."

"Say it."

Antonov's throat moved. "Four million two hundred thousand."

"Four million two hundred thousand rubles. Due eleven days ago." Roman let the silence hold. He had learned early that silence was more efficient than threat. Threat required energy and invited negotiation. Silence invited confession. "You didn't call. You didn't send a message through Kolya. You didn't show up at the club. Eleven days."

"I was going to —"

"You weren't."

Antonov sat down on the couch. He hadn't been invited to sit in his own flat, but his legs had made the decision for him. His hands were on his knees. The knuckles were dry and cracked. Roman noted this the way he noted the weather seal on the door — as information, as data contributing to an assessment that was already largely complete.

Mikhail Antonov had nothing.

Roman walked to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator. Half a block of cheese in plastic wrap. A jar of pickled tomatoes. Two bottles of Baltika. A carton of milk with tomorrow's expiration date. He closed the refrigerator and opened the cabinet above the stove. Rice. Buckwheat. A tin of sardines.

He returned to the main room.

"The car," Roman said.

"A 2019 Kia. It's — the transmission has problems. Maybe two hundred thousand at auction. Maybe less."

"The flat."

"I rent."

Roman looked at him.

"I rent," Antonov said again, as if repetition might alter the arithmetic.

"Savings."

"There's a Sberbank account. Forty thousand. Forty-one, maybe."

Forty-one thousand rubles. Roman did the math without effort. The Kia at two hundred. Call it two-fifty if Dmitri found the right buyer. The television, the leather couch, the contents of the flat down to the dishes — another thirty, forty thousand at best. Three hundred forty thousand rubles against a debt of four million two.

Eight percent. The man could liquidate his entire life and cover eight percent.