Rover looked at the whitewashed concrete floor of the rectangular cell, measuring eleven square meters, and clenched his teeth, the large central incisors of his lower jaw, which were made of gold. He had reached the difficult part of the confession. The only sound in the cell was the scratching of his nails on the tattoo of the Virgin Mary on his forearm. The boy sitting cross-legged on the bed opposite him had not uttered a word since Rover entered the cell. He simply nodded affirmatively and wore the satisfied smile of Buddha, while his gaze was fixed on some indistinct point on the man's forehead opposite him. They called him Sonny and said that by the age of ten he had already killed two people, that his father was a corrupt policeman, and that he had supernatural abilities. It was hard to say if he had heard anything all this time: his green eyes and most of his face were hidden behind long dirty hair. But it didn’t matter. All Rover wanted was forgiveness, his blessing, so that the next day he could pass through the gates of the maximum-security prison with the feeling that he had been redeemed.
Not that he was a religious man. But a little faith doesn’t hurt when one decides to change things and give oneself a chance to take the right path. For now, Rover took a deep breath. “I think she was Belarusian. Isn’t Minsk there? In Belarus, right?” he said, abruptly raising his gaze, but the boy did not answer him. “Nestor had given her the nickname Minsk,” said Rover. “He told me I had to shoot her.” The advantage of confessing to someone with a burned-out brain was that the listener didn’t remember names or events afterward; it was as if he was talking to himself. Perhaps that’s why the prisoners preferred the boy over a priest or psychologist.
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