“...At the window on a roughly hewn table lay slices of bread pecked by a magpie and coarsely chopped pieces of sausage. Nearby stood a half-liter bottle... And on the dirty floor, holding a knife in his hand and staring at the ceiling with glazed eyes, lay a man... a brown blood stain was caked on the left side of his chest...” In M. Chernenko’s new story “Payment for Lies,” the reader will again meet the district prosecutor Anton Biryukov.