Алексей Никитин - Y.T.

‘Sure, Steve,’ I agreed.

He who takes a girl to dine also takes her to dance. Yesterday Kurochkin took me to dine, today Malkin. At this rate they’d soon be passing me from hand to hand.

But Malkin wasn’t interested only in me. He was also interested in Kurochkin. That recent phone call was preying on his mind.

‘Alex, have you known Mr. Kurochkin for long?’ We’d just sat at a table in the small room behind his office.

‘We were on the same course at university.’

‘No kidding!’ Malkin brightened. ‘I bet you’ve heard me say before that I went to school with Bill Hume.’

Cautiously I said, ‘Yes, I’ve heard something about that.’

‘What a great guy—a real American. I’ll tell you about him some time. I’ll be sure and do that. Anyway, I guess that means you and Mr. Kurochkin are…’ Malkin surprised me once again. I didn’t think he was capable of abandoning his Hume as easily as that. ‘I guess that means he knows you’re working for our company?’

‘Of course he does,’ I said.

‘Well?’ Malkin took my elbow as if in confidence. ‘Do you ever talk to him about it?’

I shrugged. ‘Kurochkin has his own sources. Why would he start talking to me?’

‘Oh no, that’s not what I meant.’ Malkin lifted his hands. ‘Not at all. Although… well, that, too. And you’re an interesting person to talk to, Alex. I’ve noticed that before, oh yes.’ He waved his hand in front of my face and started laughing.

I don’t like it when people talk with their hands, and I really can’t stand it when they take me by the arm, pull at my jacket or try to give me a slap on the back. It’s one thing if they just don’t know what to do with their hands, but these days everyone’s got a superficial grasp of NLP—neuro-linguistic programming. People don’t convince you these days, they P-R-O-G-R-A-M you. They drop anchor. It’s become easy to deal with them. Their behavior is predictable and their reactions stereotypical. It’s all incredibly boring and unpleasant.

‘Kurochkin often meets with your compatriots.’

‘Oh yes, he’s got a really good reputation. In Washington they consider him a big friend of America…’ Now Malkin obviously thought he’d blabbed more than he should. He laughed loudly and gave me an entirely inappropriate thump on the shoulder. And how would he know what they thought of Kurochkin in Washington anyway? He was just puffing himself up.

‘Really?’ I enquired with polite surprise.

‘Yes. But let’s talk business, Alex. There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Whatever your relationship with your friend, you might find a conversation about your career even more interesting, right? After all, you’ve been working for us for almost five years now.’

‘Has it really been that long?’ I asked in surprise.

‘It sure has. You do a good job—I’ve always had my eye on you—but I can’t shake the feeling we’re not making full use of your potential. You’ve got more to give the company. Isn’t that right?’

I noticed long ago that Malkin loved to ask slippery little questions you couldn’t give a good answer to. If I had more to give, then why wasn’t I giving it? If I didn’t, then what good was I? NLP is odious—I was supposed to feel guilty before him and the company. In a case like this there’s no need to reply. You’re better off blurting out something meaningless and inoffensive. Let him think I was an idiot if that’s what he wanted.

‘I really rate the company’s interests, Steve. That’s something that really matters to me.’

I thrust out my lower lip and nodded like Malkin himself. Among our own people I couldn’t have got away with it—they would see right through me. The Americans had fattened us on a diet of political correctness that our innermost beings rejected. But they themselves wolfed it down, no problem—the words crackled and crunched pleasantly behind their ears.

‘You’ll have an opportunity to give it some more thought. We’re about to carry out a little perestroika of our own. You’ll see some new departments appearing. We’d like you to take charge of one of them—the Department of Microstrategic Planning.’

‘How interesting. What are we going to do?’

‘Well, yes, of course, that’s what I’m about to tell you,’ said Steve.

And he told me how you can see a lot from Memphis, Tennessee, but not everything. Which is why the leadership, first and foremost the wise Bill Hume (a real American—I’ll tell you about him some time), had decided to delegate some functions to subsidiary companies. Malkin spent a good ten minutes describing the structural changes that needed to be carried out and then repeated that they were offering me a department. I could see he didn’t know much yet himself.

Suddenly I had a mad idea. ‘That’s great, Steve,’ I said. ‘Of course, I’ll accept. It’s a great honor for me.’ It was the right thing to say. Poor Malkin didn’t know what was coming. He stuck out his lower lip contentedly and gave me a thumbs up. ‘But before I take on such a responsible position I’d like to take some leave.’

‘Leave?’

‘Yes, Steve. Two weeks, beginning tomorrow. I really need some time off right now.’

In the end, Malkin gave me the two weeks, although he had to think about it long and hard. He was probably pondering the enigmatic and incomprehensible Slav soul. When you offer someone a promotion, he should root around with his nose to the ground, straining his blood vessels, groaning and sweating and showing his bosses that they’d been right to choose him and not someone else. But what did he have here? A request for leave? A mad people.

It was a long time since Sinevusov and I had enjoyed a tête-à-tête at the same table. That this wasn’t the table covered with papers and bureaucratic penholders in his one-time office on Volodymyr Street but an ordinary and hastily cleared little table in a watering hole in the Podolsk neighborhood, set with two beers and pistachios in a chipped dull-blue saucer, but nothing seemed to have changed. Nor had the two problems before us that we were going to have to solve together. He was Sinevusov, I was Davidov, and once again we were divided by a table and the questions left unanswered twenty years before.

In Rabelais Sinevusov hadn’t spoken. He had listened to Kurochkin, kept his silence and eaten.

‘Why did you have to drag him into this?’ I asked Yurka once we’d returned to the car. ‘If you’ve contacted him, you may as well contact the others. The general, your Ryskalov, and the rest.’

‘You’re right,’ Kurochkin agreed unexpectedly. ‘But where can I find them?’

‘Wherever you found Sinevusov.’

Kurochkin shook his head.

‘Ryskalov was killed in a car crash in 1993; that’s a fact. Their chief retired in the late 1980s and kicked the bucket soon after. Of the remaining three agents, two were transferred before the collapse, one to Murmansk, the other to Kyrgyzstan. They’re both pensioners now. I checked. The fifth got the sack. He tried running a gang and for a while he handled two markets in the city and controlled a chain of filling stations, but it didn’t last long. He was screwed by his own men. A tough business.’

‘No joke,’ I said. ‘You were quick pulling your information together.’

‘With these guys it’s easy. They come from the system. It’s harder with other people.’

‘What about Sinevusov?’

‘What do you mean? You’ve just seen him.’

‘What’s he doing?’

‘I don’t know.’ Kurochkin shrugged. ‘Why don’t you ask him.’

‘You mean you don’t know?’ I didn’t believe him.

‘He’s not doing anything in particular. He’s retired, too, you know. What else do you want? Twenty years have gone by.’