Виктор Пелевин: Babylon

‘Where do you get that kind of information?’ Tatarsky asked.

‘His secretary.’ said Sergei. ‘So anyway, we have to get to him with the scenario now, before he has time to sober up. When he sobers up, he gets greedy. We’re meeting tomorrow at one in his office.’

The next day Morkovin arrived at Tatarsky’s place early. He brought with him a large, bright-yellow plastic bag containing a maroon jacket made of material that looked like the fabric they use for Russian army greatcoats. The intricate crest gleaming on the breast pocket was reminiscent of the emblem on a packet of Marlboro cigarettes. Morkovin said it was a ‘club jacket’. Tatarsky didn’t understand what he meant, but he did as he was told and put it on. Then Morkovin took a foppish notebook in a leather cover out of the bag, together with an incredibly thick ballpoint pen with the word ‘Zoom’ on it and a pager - at that time they’d only just appeared in Moscow.

‘You have to hang this thing on your belt,’ he said. ‘You’re meeting the client at one, and at twenty past one I’ll give you a call on the pager. When it beeps, take it off your belt and look at it like it’s something important. All the time the client’s talking, keep making notes in the notebook.’

‘What’s it all for?’ Tatarsky asked.

‘It’s obvious enough, isn’t it? The client’s paying big money for a sheet of paper and a few drops of black ink out of a printer. He has to be absolutely certain plenty of others have paid money for the same thing before him.’

‘Seems to me,’ said Tatarsky, ‘all these jackets and pagers are just the thing to raise doubts in his mind.’

‘Don’t go complicating things,’ said Morkovin with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Life’s simpler and stupider than that. And then there’s this…’

He took a slim case out of his pocket, opened it and held it out to Tatarsky. It contained a heavy watch that was almost beautiful in a repulsive kind of way, made of gold and steel.

‘It’s a Rolex Oyster. Careful, you’ll chip off the gold plate; it’s a fake. I only take it out on business. When you’re talking with the client, flash it around a bit, you know. It helps.’

Tatarsky felt inspired by all this support. At half past twelve he emerged from the metro. The guys from Draft Podium were waiting for him not far from the entrance. They’d arrived in a long black Mercedes. Tatarsky had already learned enough about business to know the car had been hired for about two hours. Sergei was unshaven as ever, but now there was something sullenly stylish about his stubble - probably due to the dark jacket with the incredibly narrow lapels and the bow tie. Sitting beside him was Lena, who looked after contracts and kept the books. She was wearing a simple black dress (no jewellery and no make-up) and in her hand she was holding an attache case with a golden lock. When Tatarsky climbed into the car, the three of them exchanged glances and Sergei spoke to the chauffeur.

‘Drive on.’

Lena was nervous. All the way there she kept giggling as she told them about some guy called Azadovsky - apparently her friend’s lover. This Azadovsky inspired her with an admiration that bordered on rapture: he’d arrived in Moscow from Ukraine and moved in with her friend, got himself registered in her flat, then invited his sister and her two children up from Dnepropetrovsk. He’d registered them in the flat and immediately, without the slightest pause, swapped the flat for a different one through the courts and dispatched Lena’s sister to a room in a shared apartment.

‘He’s a man who’ll really go far!’ Lena kept repeating.

She was especially impressed by the fact that, once the operation had been completed, the sister and her children were immediately banished back to Dnepropetrovsk; there was so much detail in the way the tale was told that by the end of the journey Tatarsky began to feel as though he’d lived half his life in the flat with Azadovsky and his nearest and dearest; but then, Tatarsky was just as nervous as Lena.

The client (Tatarsky never did find out what his name was) looked remarkably like the image that had taken shape in Tatarsky’s mind following the previous day’s conversation. He was a short, thickset little man with a cunning face, from which the grimace of a hangover was only just beginning to fade - evidently he’d taken his first drink of the day not long before the meeting.

Following a brief exchange of pleasantries (Lena did most of the talking; Sergei sat in the corner with his legs crossed, smoking) Tatarsky was introduced as the writer. He sat down facing the client, clanging the Rolex against the edge of the desk as he did so, and opened up his notebook. It immediately became clear that the client had nothing in particular to say. Without the assistance of a powerful hallucinogen it was hard to feel inspired by the details of his business - he droned on most of the time about some kind of oven-trays with a special non-stick coating. Tatarsky listened with his face half-turned away, nodding and doodling meaningless flourishes in his notebook. He surveyed the room out of the corner of his eye - there was nothing interesting to be seen there, either, if you didn’t count the misty-blue reindeer-fur hat, obviously very expensive, that was lying on the upper shelf in an empty cupboard with glass doors.

As promised, after a few minutes the pager on his belt rang. Tatarsky unhooked the little black plastic box from his belt. The message on the display said: ‘Welcome to route 666.’

‘Some joker, eh?’ thought Tatarsky.

‘Is it from Video International?’ Sergei asked from the comer.

‘No,’ Tatarsky replied, following his lead. ‘Those blockheads don’t bother me any more, thank God. It’s Slava Zaitsev’s design studio. It’s all off for today.’

‘Why’s that?’ Sergei asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘Surely he doesn’t think we’re that desperate for his business…’

‘Let’s talk about that later,’ said Tatarsky.

Meanwhile the client was scowling thoughtfully at his reindeer-fur hat in the glass-fronted cupboard. Tatarsky looked at his hands. They were locked together, and his thumbs were circling around each other as though he was winding in some invisible thread. This was the moment of truth.

‘Aren’t you afraid that it could all just come to a full stop?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘You know what kind of times these are. What if everything suddenly collapses?’

The client frowned and looked in puzzlement, first at Tatarsky and then at his companions. His thumbs stopped circling each other.

‘I am afraid,’ he answered, looking up. ‘Who isn’t? You ask some odd questions.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

Five minutes later the conversation was over. Sergei took a sheet of the client’s headed notepaper with his logo - it was a stylised bun framed in an oval above the letters ‘LCC’. They agreed to meet again in a week’s time; Sergei promised the scenario for the video would be ready by then.

‘Have you totally lost your marbles, or what?’ Sergei asked Tatarsky, when they came out on to the street. ‘Nobody asks questions like that.’

The Mercedes took all three of them to the nearest metro station.

When he got home, Tatarsky wrote the scenario in a few hours. It was a long time since he’d felt so inspired. The scenario didn’t have any specific storyline. It consisted of a sequence of historical reminiscences and metaphors. The Tower of Babel rose and fell, the Nile flooded, Rome burned, ferocious Huns galloped in no particular direction across the steppes - and in the background the hands of an immense, transparent clock spun round.

‘One generation passeth away and another generation cometh,’ said a dull and demonic voice-over (Tatarsky actually wrote that in the scenario), ‘but the Earth abideth for ever.’ But eventually even the earth with its ruins of empires and civilisations sank from sight into a lead-coloured ocean; only a single rock remained projecting above its raging surface, its form somehow echoing the form of the Tower of Babel that the scenario began with. The camera zoomed in on the cliff, and there carved in stone was a bun and the letters ‘LCC’, and beneath them a motto that Tatarsky had found in a book called Inspired Latin Sayings: