Actually, while groping for his watch on the nightstand, he detected even stranger sounds. The blanket covering him didn’t rustle when he reached for his watch but suddenly squelched and then made a sloshing sound. Filya tried to lower his right foot off the bed to stand up and turn on the light, but his knee bumped into something hard, and the squelching and sloshing were repeated. Totally befuddled, he froze, trying to wake up, and then cautiously felt around, came across some plastic bottles, and realized he was sitting in a full bathtub. The water was icy.

  Filya spewed some ugly and booming curses when he remembered he really had filled the tub before he’d intended to collapse on the bed. He’d long been a devotee of this procedure, naively supposing he was battling dehydration. Spirits dried his flesh until it was like flammable peat, and drinking on high-altitude flights, he had recently learned, dehydrated his talented carcass twice as fast.

  The only thing he didn’t understand was why the light had gone out.

  Filya wiped his face with his wet hands, hoping to make out something in the pitch dark, but he had locked the door to the bathroom, because that’s what he always did in hotels, out of some vague fear, and the light in the bedroom was off. So there wasn’t any strip of light under the door whatsoever. He couldn’t even tell where the door was. Filya was racked by a far-from-faint trembling.

  At least I didn’t drown. The idea stirred in his mind, not that this thought was any consolation.

  Attempting to remember which side of the tub had the tile wall, he pushed himself up on his trembling arms, swayed to the right, and smashed his head so hard he collapsed back into the icy water. Moaning from pain, cold, and despair, he got furious, leapt to his feet, slipped immediately, and sat back down in fright to regain his balance. For some reason, with one hand he covered his male equipment, shriveled to child size. Then he reached to the left with the other and, not bumping into any obstacle, cautiously stepped over the side of the tub. The bottle left there last night tinkled underfoot. The cheap whiskey had hit him hard.

  Filippov froze, trying to figure out whether he’d broken the bottle or not, and then took a timid step. He tried to step on the tips of his toes, so as not to cut himself if the bottle had broken, but his legs were shaking so badly and the icy tile was so slippery that for stability he had to drop to his full foot. Otherwise, he risked crashing to the floor and banging himself on the toilet, for instance, or the sink, whose locations he really didn’t remember.

  First off, he had to find the switch, so he pressed his shoulder to the wall and moved along it, fumbling over the tile somewhere around head level. The wall turned out to be incredibly long, like the hole that curious Alice fell down in pursuit of the rabbit. Filippov slid along the wall for an eternity until he ran into a corner. No switch there. Or there was, but at a different height. Trying not to consider that possibility, he moved on.

  His feet were solid ice. The shoulder touching the wall was burning from some scrape. His head was crowded with thoughts about a nasty contagion covering the hotel tile, and the switch just wouldn’t come to hand. Suddenly, he remembered the towel rack and stopped, crossing his legs under himself apprehensively. The construction consisted of three impressive nickel-plated rods arbitrarily pointing in different directions and, consequently, his face could now run into one of those rods. Picturing himself with skewered eyes, Filya squatted slightly and then slowly moved on in a half squat. The switch turned out to be at stomach height. The reason for the placement was anyone’s guess.

  Filippov flipped the switch a few times, and the neon tube over his head hummed and blinked a warning and then lit up his gray, crooked little body in the cloudy mirror on the next wall. Filya was surprised at just how small the bathroom in fact was, and he himself, too, and he frowned disdainfully at the sight of the naked wretch in the mirror and shifted his gaze to the upset square bottle in which he saw the last smidgen of alcohol that hadn’t spilled.

  “Damn it, I’d already reached the point of Red Label,” he moaned.

  The window in the bedroom was closed. Tugging on it, Filippov confirmed that the terrific cold that was turning his breath to visible steam had not come in due to his drunken desire to air the room before going to bed. The radiators were barely warm to the touch. His whole body quaking and now back to whining from the cold, he tried to find his underwear but quickly gave up on that plan. After a brief battle he was able to pull the pants and boots he’d abandoned at the threshold over his still-wet legs and feet. He wanted to run out into the hall as quickly as possible, because, according to his feverish calculations, the hall should have retained at least some warmth. At least, as far as he remembered, it didn’t have a single window onto the street. Not bothering with his tiny shirt buttons, he threw the hotel blanket—covered in large and what looked like dirty checks—over his shoulders and dashed for the door. Skipping past the open door to the bathroom, he braked. The disgusting blended swill left in the resting bottle might come in very, very handy. Filya went back for the whiskey and, now holding the bottle, finally exited the room.

  The half-dark hall receding into the distance, with two rows of doors as alike as the numbers in a theater checkroom, was empty. Either the hotel was now defunct and the guests’ stiffened corpses had frozen to the hospitable mattresses, or else cold like this was a completely ordinary thing here and everyone was used to it and each person had at the ready a fine bearskin in their room that they could calmly wrap up in and not rush through the hall in wet pants and a crude checked blanket. Filippov twitched first to the left, but after trotting twenty meters or so and not finding the front desk around the corner, he went back and, like a proud trotter, ran to the right. What specifically he was hoping for from the hotel staff, Filya still didn’t know, but running down the red carpet—even on wooden legs—did warm him up a little, and at the opposite end of the deserted hall he stopped for a second to take a swig. The sight of the red carpet receding into the half-dark infinity cheered him up, but he quickly drove out the images close to his heart.

  “Velkum houm,” Filippov muttered in English after taking a big and greedy swallow from the bottle.

  At that moment, the blended swill—there’d been absolutely nothing else to buy in the local stores—seemed a perfectly tolerable beverage. His throat, covered with goose bumps from the cold, even inside, gratefully accepted the amber moisture. Glassy tears came readily to his puffy eyes, and Filya froze, like an exhibit at Madame Tussauds, riveted by what was happening to himself, to the cold, to his lips stung and burning from the spirits, to the low-grade whiskey slipping into him with difficulty, to his stomach, which it hadn’t yet reached, and to the taciturn hotel, which didn’t give a flying fuck about the cold. Why should it? The whiskey surprised his stomach more than it did Filya himself, who had drunk worse things.

  He straightened up and stood stock-still for another second, shaping his lips into a ring and checking whether his breath was turning to steam. His burning lips cracked at this effort, and Filya felt a stinging in the corners of his mouth again.

  “Damn it,” he growled, unable to keep himself from licking his wound.

  The young woman at the reception desk was sound asleep, her head resting on her arms. Her long ponytail shone in the light of the neon lamp as if someone had coated it with grease. Filippov had never encountered in anyone else hair as black and thick as Yakut girls had. It wasn’t just thick; it was fat. Each of the hairs had its own separate thickness, and together they were not just a hairdo but an independent, powerfully vibrant organism. In ages long past, these women’s menfolk could have simply spun this hair into string for their bows, seines for catching fish, harnesses for reindeer, or ropes to save the brave hunter so consumed by the hunt that he’d fallen into a bear pit. Filippov had to curb himself from touching this thick treasure, glossy as tar.

  The big clock on the wall said half past five. Due to the long flight, continuous drinking, and tremendous jet lag, Filippov had lost all track of time. Whether it was morning now or evening, he just couldn’t tell. More than likely, of course, the young woman was sound asleep after pulling the night shift, although she could have all kinds of reasons for taking a nap in the evening, too. Filippov knew a couple of famous actors who shared dressing rooms with restless youths on purpose so that they wouldn’t sleep through the evening rehearsal. There were rumors that once, at contract time, one of them had demanded they add a clause about the right to a paid postprandial nap.

  Unlike Filippov, Sleeping Beauty was dressed appropriately for the conditions. The one-size-fits-all Chinese down parka in khaki with an enormous hood, like a space-suit helmet, a scarf wound around her neck several times, and beaded mittens, which her head was lying on, ensured her fresh body a healthy sleep, whereas hungover Filya, in his little blanket over his damp shirt, was quaking like a stray mutt on a nasty winter’s night. Looking at the young woman breathing evenly in her fairy-tale sleep, he even thought he could feel her emit warmth herself. Reaching out to make sure, Filippov realized with amazement that he’d not been mistaken. Waves of warmth were coming from the black-haired receptionist.

  Filya stood over her for a few minutes, reaching out with one and then the other hand, still unable to lower the blanket he was clutching at his throat. He couldn’t care less about the nature of this miracle. The main thing was that it had happened. He warmed himself in this woman’s rays as if at a stove, trying not to wake her, with no concern whatsoever for the mechanics of local miracles. Not even a shadow of amazement stirred in his mind. What was important was to warm up a little. Actually, when he’d stopped shaking like a jackhammer, he remembered various shamanistic things, but when he leaned a little lower over the young woman he saw something plugged into a large surge protector next to her chair: a heater.

  Electrolux. Filya read the handsome gray letters on the snowy white panel with just his lips, as if afraid of startling her.

  Green numbers glowed softly on the small display.

  “Twenty-five degrees,” he whispered quite involuntarily, like a man bewitched.

  Walking around the counter from the other side, Filippov squatted beside the heater, gave it a second or two’s thought, and then carefully pulled the plug. The heater seemed hot to the touch, so Filya took off his blanket and wrapped it around the Swedish miracle. He had to leave quickly but quietly. Filippov rose onto tiptoe, took one step, and another, and then, like the careless Albrecht trying to flee Giselle’s dead and angry friends, hurried away from this cemetery of iced-over hopes. He ran to the turn like a fleet-footed deer, stopped, and leaned against the wall. His heart was pounding madly right next to the heater. Filya was jubilant as he entered his own corridor.

  The empty bottle of Red Label was right where he’d left it a few minutes before.

  “Freeze here, you beast,” Filippov whispered maliciously, casting a glance at the empty vessel and pressing to his belly the warm, blanket-wrapped heater. “No one needs you anymore. I hope you die!”

  Disdainfully skirting the bottle, he headed toward his own room, but the farther he went down the hall, the less confident his step became. The endless row of doors on the left-hand side discouraged him more and more. Finally, he stopped. When he’d left his room, he hadn’t given a thought to how he would find it upon his return. At his moment of flight, it simply hadn’t occurred to him to remember the number on the gray door. Moreover, now he even doubted his room was on the left side.

  “It could just as easily be on the right,” Filippov muttered, turning around toward the deserted, orphaned bottle and trying to figure out how he’d been moving in relation to its present position when he was looking for the reception desk. “I stopped right here and took a drink.”

  He went back to the bottle and set the heater on the floor. His ditched girlfriend was close to the right-hand wall, which meant that Filya was probably keeping to that side while he was moving. That meant his room was probably on the right, too. He would hardly have crossed the hall when he’d exited his room.

  “But what if I was on autopilot?” Suddenly, he had his doubts. “Keeping to the right is a habit . . . No, it’s not a hundred percent. Damn it.”

  He turned his head, listening to his intuition, but his intuition was totally silent. It liked both sides of the hall. Deciding his heart would tell him when he was facing the door to his room, Filippov moved slowly down the carpet. The cold had already made its claim on him again, but Filya didn’t take the blanket off the heater. He was busy counting steps. He didn’t think there should be more than fifteen of them from the bottle to his door. At the sixteenth step he stopped and looked at the door to his left. Not a peep from his heart. Then he shifted his gaze to the right. Total silence.

  “Damn it. I did run in the other direction,” he said, recalling the dash from his room toward the cluttered stairwell.

  Considering that run, it made no sense to calculate the distance from the bottle. His reference points were thoroughly confused. Filya returned to the heater, and experiencing wrenching twinges of conscience, he picked up the bottle off the floor in hopes there was at least something left for him. The vengeful creature wouldn’t give up a drop.

  “To hell with you,” Filippov growled. “Terrific.”

  Once again, the cold was seeping into his bones. The heater had cooled off completely, so Filya pulled off the blanket. But there weren’t any electrical outlets in the hall. The only thing left to do was return the stolen treasure to its place, plug it in, and sit quietly by its side until morning, like an old Indian in a blanket, whom everyone had abandoned. Without a drop of liquor.

  However, recalling the young woman sleeping at her desk, Filippov paused for a second. Then he ran at an inaudible trot back to the front desk. The blanket stayed there like that, lying on the floor.

  Before he could run the few meters to the desk, he stopped to calm his breathing. Waking Sleeping Beauty would be a total disaster. He tiptoed toward her, leaned over her giant hood, and fell silent, trying to shiver with the least possible amplitude. On the desk, under her crossed arms, on which rested her disproportionately large, black-haired head, lay the room list with the guests’ names. Filya had remembered that page a minute before. Creeping out from under her left beaded mitten were the poorly printed letters lippov and then the number 237.

  “How could I forget a number like that?” he muttered, hastily collecting his stuff in the corridor.

  This time the empty bottle was among them.

  He was holding the heater, bottle, and blanket when he walked up to his room door, pushed it with his foot, and realized he didn’t have the key.

  Filya exhaled a small cloudlet of steam, and for five or six seconds it hung there like a frozen computer. There was no one to reboot him here in the hall. Quickly, though, his gaze was once again intelligent, since he remembered that he’d had the key under his arm as he ran out of the room. His hands had been busy with the bottle and blanket. And his pants pockets were too narrow to hold the plastic key chain, which was the size of a kiddie shovel.

  “So what became of it?”

  In the hall, as far as the eye could see, the key wasn’t lying either on or next to the carpet. That left just one place.

  Filya ran to the reception desk for a third time.

  As he approached Sleeping Beauty, he noticed that her head was turned the other way, and the pacific expression on her face had been replaced by a censorious one. Perhaps she had sensed that the heater had gone missing, her sleep had ceased to be untroubled, and she was just on the verge of asking herself whose fault it was.

  Filya dropped to all fours, so that in the event of alarm, her eyes wouldn’t fall on him right away. He started to investigate the space around the desk, but the key was nowhere to be found. When he’d crawled practically under the sleeping receptionist, she started squirming in her chair, evidently trying to surface from a disturbing, swiftly cooling dream. Filippov froze with hand and knee raised, but the young woman didn’t wake up. The key wasn’t under her desk, either. Actually, as Filya admitted to himself, it couldn’t have been. But where won’t you look when you’ve lost something important?

  His losses did not end at this, however. Far from it. Upon his return to his room, his teeth chattering again from the cold, he discovered on the threshold the blanket and whiskey bottle he’d left but not the stolen heater. Someone had stolen it again.

  “What kind of people are they,” Filya moaned, dropping to the floor next to his door. “They have no shame, damn it, no conscience.”

  At that moment, he had the sense that someone was standing on the other side of the door. He didn’t catch anything specific, but it was as if someone had sighed. Or was trying to hold back laughter. Or a large bird had spread its wings.

  Filya stopped his teeth from chattering and his droning due to the cold to listen to the hotel’s nocturnal silence. The bird in his room fell still as well. Convulsively grabbing the doorknob, Filippov rose to his feet, straightened up, and stared into the peephole. He now had the definite feeling he was being looked right back at. The only reason chills didn’t run down his spine was that they’d already been there for quite some time.

  The next moment, whoever was looking at him from his room moved away from the door, and Filippov distinctly saw light fall across the peephole.

  “Open up!” He banged on the door. “Do you hear me? Open up and fast!”

  The light disappeared in the peephole again, and a moment later he heard an unfamiliar voice.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Knock, knock,” Filippov muttered. “Open the fuck up.”