Виктор Пелевин - Babylon

Khanin was out of sorts. With his forehead propped in the palm of his hand, he was tracing some kind of cabbalistic symbols in the ashtray with a cigarette-butt. Tatarsky sat on the edge of the chair at the other side of the desk, pressing the folder to his chest and stuttering his rambling excuses.

‘I’ve written it, of course. As best I could, that is. But I think I’ve made a balls of it, and it’s not something you should give to Wee Vova. The problem is, the theme is so… It turns out it’s not such a simple theme at all… Maybe I can think up a slogan, or add something to the brand essence of the Russian idea, or expand somehow on what Sasha Blo writes, but I’m still not ready to write a concept. I’m not just being modest, I’m just being objective. In general…’

‘Forget it,’ Khanin interrupted.

‘Why, what’s happened?’

‘Wee Vova’s been taken out.’

‘How?’ Tatarsky slumped back on his chair.

‘Dead easy,’ said Khanin. ‘Yesterday he had a shoot-out with the Chechens. Right beside your house it was, as it happens. He arrived on two sets of wheels with his fighters, everything fair and up front. He thought it would all be done right. But those bastards dug a trench on the hill opposite during the night, and as soon as he turned up they blasted him with a pair of "bumble-bee" flame-throwers. They’re fearsome fucking things: produce a volumetric explosion with a temperature of two thousand degrees. Wee’s car was armour-plated, but armour’s only good against normal people, not these abortions…’

Khanin gestured in disgust.

‘Wee never stood a chance,’ he added quietly. ‘And they picked off the rest of his fighters, the ones who survived the explosion, with a machine-gun when they jumped out of the cars. I don’t know how you can do business with people like that. That’s if they are people. We-ell.’

Instead of a sense of grief befitting the moment, to his shame Tatarsky felt a relief bordering on euphoria.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘now I understand. I saw one of those cars today. Last time he was in a different one, so I didn’t even think about anything being wrong. They’ve blown another guy away, I thought - every day someone or other gets it… But now I see - it all fits in. But what does it mean for us, in a practical sense?’

‘Leave,’ said Khanin. ‘Indefinite leave. There’s one hell of a big question to be answered. Hamlet’s question. I already had two calls since the morning.’

‘The police?’

‘Yeah. And then from the Caucasian Friendly Society. The bastards could smell a trader had been cut free. Like sharks. Straight for the scent of blood. So the question of the moment is very specific. Our swarthy wops can offer real protection, but all the filth want to do is line their pockets. You’d have to lick their boots till they shone to get them to a shoot-out. But either of them could blow you away. And especially the filth, as it happens. They came on to me real heavy today… "We know you’ve got diamonds," they said. What kind of diamonds have I got? Tell me that. What diamonds have I got?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tatarsky replied, remembering the photograph of the diamond necklace with the promise of eternity that he’d seen in the toilet at Khanin’s place.

‘OK. Don’t you bother your head about it. Just carry on living, loving, working… Oh, and by the way, there’s someone waiting for you in the next room.’

Morkovin looked just as he had the last time they’d met, only now there were more grey hairs in his parting, and his eyes were sadder and wiser. He was wearing a severe dark suit and a striped tie with a matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. When he saw Tatarsky, he got up from the table with a broad smile and opened his arms to embrace him.

‘Oho!’ he said, slapping Tatarsky on the back, ‘what a face, Babe. Been on the sauce long?’

‘I’m just pulling out of a deep one,’ Tatarsky answered guiltily. ‘They gave me this job to do here; there was just no other way.’

‘Is that what you were talking about on the phone?’

‘When?’

‘Don’t remember, huh? I thought not. You were in a real state - said you were writing a concept for God and the ancient serpent was giving you a real tough time about it… Asked me to find you a new job, said you were real world-weary…’

‘That’s enough,’ said Tatarsky, raising an open palm towards him. ‘No need to pile it on. I’m up to my ears in shit as it is.’

‘So you do need a job, then?’

‘And how! We’ve got the filth clutching at one leg and the Chechens grabbing at the other. Everybody’s being given leave.’

‘Let’s go then. It just so happens I’ve got some beer in the car.’

Morkovin had arrived in a tiny blue BMW like a torpedo on wheels. Tatarsky felt strange sitting in it - his body assumed a semi-recumbent position, his knees were raised to his chest and the bottom of the car itself hurtled along so low over the road-surface his stomach muscles involuntarily contracted every time it bounced over another hole in the road.

‘Aren’t you afraid of riding in a car like this?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘What if somewhat leaves a crowbar sticking out of a manhole? Or there’s one of those iron bars sticking up out of the road…’

Morkovin chuckled. ‘I know what you’re trying to say.’ he said. ‘But I’ve been used to that feeling at work for so long now…’

The car braked at a crossroads. A red jeep with six powerful headlamps on its roof halted to the right of them. Tatarsky stole a glance at the driver, a man with a low forehead and massive eye-ridges, with almost every inch of his skin sprouting thick wool. One of his hands was stroking the steering wheel and the other held a plastic bottle of Pepsi. Tatarsky suddenly realised Morkovin’s car was way cooler, and he had one of his very rare experiences of the anal wow-factor at work. The feeling, it must be confessed, was enthralling. Sticking his elbow out of the window, he took a swig of beer and looked at the driver of the jeep pretty much the same way as the sailors on the bow of an aircraft carrier look down on a pygmy paddling over his raft to trade in rotten bananas. The driver caught Tatarsky’s glance and for a while they stared each other in the eye. Tatarsky could sense the man in the jeep took this long exchange of glances as an invitation to fight -when Morkovin’s car eventually moved off there was fury bubbling in the shallow depths of his eyes. Tatarsky realised he’d seen this face somewhere before. ‘Probably a film actor,’ he thought.

Morkovin moved out into a free lane and started going faster.

‘Listen, where are we going?’ Tatarsky asked.

‘Our organisation.’

‘What organisation’s that?’

‘You’ll see. I don’t want to spoil the impression.’

A few minutes later the car braked to a halt at some gates in a set of tall railings. The railings looked impressive: the bars were like Cyclopean cast-iron spears with gilded tips. Morkovin showed a policeman in a little hut some card or other and the gates slowly swung open. Behind them was a huge Stalinist-style building from the forties, looking like something between a stepped Mexican pyramid and a squat skyscraper constructed with the low Soviet sky in mind. The upper part of the facade was covered in moulded decorations - lowered banners, swords, stars and some kind of lances with jagged edges; it was all redolent of ancient wars and the forgotten smell of gunpowder and glory. Screwing up his eyes, Tatarsky read the moulded inscription up under the very roof: ‘To the heroes’ eternal glory!’

‘Eternal glory’s a bit over the top for them,’ he thought gloomily. ‘They’d be happy enough with a pension.’