Эдвард Докс - Pravda ['Self Help' in the UK]

“You fucked your finger.”

“Yes.”

“Bitch motherfucker bullshit.”

“I know.”

“What you going to do?”

“It’s okay. I can play most things with my cock.” Kostya laughed out loud. Gennady too, from where he was hovering behind the bar.

Arkady said, “We have money. We need a passport. How much?” The humor in Kostya’s face disappeared like water into volcanic ash.

“Good. I thought it might be about the shit.” He waved about his head, indicating his surroundings, his customers, his life. “And that would have made me sad. Where you going?” Kostya looked at Henry.

“Not him, me,” Arkady said. “London.”

“Do you have a passport already?”

“No.” Arkady shook his head. “Not an external one.”

“Okay. Well, you’re better off with a false identity anyway. Otherwise they can always check who you are. Better to be safe—be nice and rich so you are good to go.” He shook his head. “But it’s difficult these days, Arkasha. They have bar codes now. Computers are fucking everything up for everyone. It has to be right or you get yourself in a lot of shit. Only the…” He plucked at his T-shirt, separating it from his skin. “Only the networks get in and out easy.”

“Fuck.” Arkady ran his hand back and forth across the beginnings of his beard, keeping the bandaged finger extended out of the way. “Maybe it’s a stupid idea anyway.”

Henry cut in, speaking in Russian. “But can you do it?”

Kostya turned to face him.

Henry felt Arkady’s eyes on him too. Searing. Henry’s right hand was tapping rapidly over the knuckles of his left.

“We can pay now,” Henry said. “If you can do it.”

Kostya continued to scrutinize Henry for a long moment. Henry knew that the Kyrgyzstani would already have him down for a user, but he was counting on the fact that money counted. He knew that much about Russia.

Kostya turned his heavy head slowly away and addressed Arkady. “The honest truth is that I cannot do it myself anymore and be sure. Not with the computers and not to Britain. If it was for someone we did not give a shit about, to some butt-fuck country, then yes, maybe. But it’s you. So… I myself cannot do it.” He raised his finger and thumb to his red nose. “But if you are serious, then I know people who can do it—properly, I mean. But of course you have to pay their price—expensive.”

“How long will it take?” Henry interjected again. He wanted this done and no escaping from it; then he wanted to leave, to fly home to his ruined bedroom. His flesh was itching and crawling and cold.

“A few weeks.” Kostya only half turned this time. “My contact is coming here today—I can ask him to start immediately. Do you have the photographs with you?”

“Yes. How much?” Now Henry had him.

“Four hundred dollars today. Four hundred when you collect. Identity. Passport. Visa. Safe.”

“Okay.” Henry reached inside his pocket.

Arkady hissed, “Not in here. Sorry, Kostya. Can we go somewhere…”

“Yes. Come.” He pushed back his chair. “You are serious.”

“We are serious,” Henry echoed.

The fat man was singing again.

Once outside, Henry went ahead, desperate to return to his room and walking as fast as he could. A little way through the larger courtyard, the sound of the gulls began again. He glanced up. A short, squat figure in a hood was coming toward him, walking squarely on the plastic-bag path.

Henry stepped aside, ankle-deep in the filth.

Grisha grinned. “Hello, cunt,” he said.

It was the November weekend of the twins’ sixteenth birthday. The family was gathered at the Highgate house. Nicholas was back from his latest business venture in Edinburgh (an art magazine that he was setting up, editing, publishing, sort of). Masha had taken a few days off and resynced herself to the daytime hours. Most exciting of all, Grandpa Max was over from Moscow—partly for the occasion, partly for some meeting with a select cabal (chaired by the lady herself) about perestroika and the implications thereof.

Unusually, Max was also staying the night in the master bedroom, which was always kept ready for him in case he so wished, but which he rarely occupied, more often preferring residency in one of the old London hotels. He was traveling with his secretary, Zhanna, a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman with the carefully tended comportment of a wronged princess and a limitless silence to match—a silence that seemed to harbor disapproval until directly examined, at which point it was always found to be entirely neutral and somehow pristine.

“Probably Armenian or Azerbaijani,” Nicholas had conjectured, in answer to Gabriel’s question.

“No more than thirty-five,” Masha had added, in answer to nothing that anyone else had heard.

Zhanna was in the spare room. They never discovered if she spoke English, as Max addressed her only in Russian.

The twins’ main party was, of course, elsewhere—guest-listed later that night in a place called K-Rad, a filthily cool nightclub near South Kensington, famous most of all for the queues outside. But five of the twins’ closest friends had also been invited over for a birthday lunch that Masha had spent three days assembling: some delicious blini topped with mushrooms, cheese, and herbs unknown, followed by kulebyaka, a salmon pie with more mushrooms, spinach, rice, kasha, all topped with smetana and fresh tomato sauce—a challenge that only Gabriel, his friend Pete, and Grandpa Max himself had really engaged with in any meaningful way. Nicholas had left his untouched, pushed back his chair, and started smoking almost immediately. Isabella had refused more than a single slice, her plate deliberately full of lettuce and spinach from the salad bowl to frustrate her mother’s vigilant generosity. Susan, Isabella’s best friend, was allergic to fish and so was having another course of blini—a route through the meal of which Zhanna (cutting the kulebyaka with much concentration into smaller and smaller pieces) was quietly jealous.

In the way of sixteenth-birthday gatherings, the entire day had been excruciating, and then absolutely fine (fun, almost), and then excruciating again, the whole party sweeping slowly from exhilaration to tension and back again in the manner of an emotional sine curve. On the up, Gabriel and Isabella were both excited by the occasion, the general busyness of the house, and, in particular, their collusion (and that of their five friends) in the knowledge that the hideously out-of-touch parents had no idea where they were really going for the night or what they were really going to be doing there. (Weed outside. Cocktails inside. Cigarettes throughout.) On the down, both twins were in a state of residual agitation, if not rebellion, as a result of the various confrontations of the week just past, during which they were met with an ongoing and bilateral refusal of permission to allow them to stay out until the club shut at four. They were to be back by one-thirty, latest, no negotiation. The reason given by both Nicholas and Masha—in rare accord—was that it was not often they saw their Grandpa Max, and if they stayed out, they would not be seen out of bed this side of Sunday lunch and there would be no chance of a family walk in the morning.

In addition to these two amplitudes of euphoria and seething, they were both suffering, despite themselves, from the generic difficulties attendant on turning sixteen: adult, not adult; precocious, trying, but supersensitive to precocity and trying; cringing with embarrassment at everything, knowing everything; knowing nothing, knowing that there was nothing more embarrassing than cringing itself, still cringing.