The bungalow’s walls were thin, and beneath the hiss of the shower he could hear Igor’s voice as a kind of indistinct throbbing, difficult to make out except when he pronounced distinct words like " Da, da! " During the intervals when Igor was silent, Sokolov heard nothing from Vlad. Apparently Igor was talking to someone on the phone. This was not surprising, and, as a matter of fact, Sokolov was pretending to take this shower precisely to give Igor an opportunity to make a next move: try to kill him, or else call people in his network and begin spreading the news.