Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

There turned out to be three cops. There was no shower-room in the station, and I had to prepare myself for battle in a toilet with a cracked toilet-bowl that reminded me vividly of the Cheka’s place in Odessa during the revolutionary years (they used to hold people’s heads down over a toilet bowl like that when they executed them - to avoid getting blood on the floor). My fears, of course, proved entirely unfounded - all the militiamen sank into a trance just as soon as I raised my tail. I could have gone back to the equestrian complex, but an interesting idea occurred to me.

Early that morning I’d been thinking about Rome and remembering Suetonius, and clearly that was the reason for my sudden flash of ingenuity. I remembered a story about Tiberius’s orgies in Capri: it mentioned the so called ‘spintrii’, who inflamed the ageing emperor’s sensuality by conjoining themselves three at a time in front of him. This story fired my imagination - in my own mind I even translated ‘Splinter Cell’ (the title of an innocent computer game about Tom Clancy) as meaning ‘The Sect of the Splintrii’. Now that I found myself in the company of three moral outsiders, I couldn’t resist trying an experiment. And I managed it perfectly! Or rather, they did. Though I must say, I failed to understand what Tiberius found so arousing in this crude spectacle - to my mind it looked more like an illustration of the first noble truth of Buddhism: life is dukha - suffering and pain. But I already knew that, without a triad of copulating militiamen.

In the station I discovered four thousand dollars, which could-n’t have come at a better time. And as well as that, I came across a scholarly large-format volume on criminal tattoos, with photographs, which I enjoyed leafing through. The tendency that this genre had followed in its evolution matched the development of world culture perfectly: religious consciousness was reclaiming the positions it had lost in the twentieth century. Naturally, the manifestations of this consciousness were not always recognizable at first sight. For instance, I didn’t immediately realize that the words ‘SWAT SWAT SWAT’ tattooed under a blue cross that looked more like a German military award than a crucifixion were not meant to be the name of the Los Angeles Police Department’s special assault force, but the Russian phrase ‘ Svyat, Svyat, Svyat ’ (meaning ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’) written in Latin letters.

The photograph that made the biggest impression on me was a man’s back with a diptych depicting heaven and earth. Heaven was located between his shoulder-blades — the sun was shining and there were angels who looked like postal pigeons flying about. The earth level looked like the official crest of Moscow, with the dragon-killer mounted on his steed, except that instead of a lance, there was a bundle of different-coloured rays emerging from the horseman’s hand, and there were lots of little dragons - spiteful little ones, crooked squashed ones and some who looked quite nice, all crawling along an alleyway planted with trees. The whole scene was entitled ‘Saint George driving the lesbians off Tverskoi Boulevard’.

Flicking through several pages with the traditional Stalins, Hitlers, snakes, spiders and sharks (under one of them it said ‘deep is my motherland’, instead of ‘broad is my motherland’ as in the old patriotic song), I came across the religious theme again: someone’s back decorated with a panoramic view of hell with sinners in torment. I was especially impressed by Bill Gates being devoured by worms and Bin Laden blazing on a bonfire in a frivolous white T-shirt with the emblem:

The final page showed a pale, dystrophic shoulder with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, in which the cap of the mushroom had been replaced by the NIKE streak with the word NUKE in it - evidently a memory of the future.

With the groaning and panting of the spintrii in the background, all this seemed particularly dismal. Where was humanity going? Who was leading it? What was going to happen on earth in fifty years? A hundred years? My springtime mood was spoiled, despite the good haul I’d made. But at least my conscience was clear. I didn’t consider that I was stealing anything - I’d just taken payment for my services. The fuzz had got their sex, I’d got my money - and I’d never concealed the fact that my prices were high.

On the way home I thought about tattoos. I like them, but I almost never have any done. On foxes they don’t last more than twenty years. And apart from that, they often blur in the weirdest way. It’s something to do with the rather different nature of our physical being. In the whole of the last century, I only had one tattoo - two lines that the poet W. H. Auden burned into my heart for ever, and the one-eyed tattooist Slava Kosoi inscribed temporarily on my shoulder:

I am a sex machine.

And I’m super bad.

Below the words there was a large blue tear, which for some reason my clients used to take for either an onion or an enema syringe - as if the inhabitants of the shabby Soviet paradise really didn’t know what it was to be sad.

That tattoo caused me a whole heap of problems - during the struggle against the Soviet Teddy boys - the ‘ stilyagi ’ - I used to get stopped all the time by the fuzz and the public order squads, who wanted to know what that inscription was in the language of the supposed enemy. I had to work a few Saturday freebees a lot tougher than this one. In short, they put me right off the idea of wearing sleeveless dresses. I still avoid them, even today, although the tattoo faded away ages ago, and the supposed enemy crept up unnoticed and became a supposed ally just as soon as the dust had settled a bit.

When I got home I switched on the TV and tuned in to the BBC World Service. First I watched their review of the Internet, presented by a guy who looked like an immoral version of Bill Clinton, and then the news began. I could tell from the presenter’s dynamic expression that they had a good catch.

‘Today in London an attempt was made on the life of the Chechen essayist in exile, Aslan Udoev. A terrorist suicide bomber from a militant Shiite organization tried to blow him up. Aslan Udoev himself escaped with a minor concussion, but two of his bodyguards were killed at the scene.’

The camera showed the cramped office of a police official who carefully measured out his words into the black gun-barrel of a microphone:

‘We know that the assailant attempted to get close to Aslan Udoev when he was feeding the squirrels in St James’s Park. When Udoev’s guards spotted the terrorist, he detonated his bomb . . .’

A correspondent appeared on the screen - he was standing on a lawn, with the wind ruffling his yellow hair.

‘According to other sources, the device went off prematurely, before the suicide bomber had reached his target. The explosion took place at precisely twelve noon GMT. However, the police have so far declined to make any comment. Witnesses to the event said that before the explosion, instead of the usual “Allah u Akbar”, the suicide bomber shouted “Same Shiite, Different Fight!” But on this point the testimony of witnesses varies slightly, possibly because of the terrorist’s strong Arab accent. It was reported earlier that “Same Shiite, Different Fight” was the name of a Shiite terrorist organization which has stated that its goal is to open a second front of the jihad in Europe. In its ideology this group is close to the Mahdi Army of the radical cleric Mokhtad Al-Sadr.’

The camera showed the police official squeezed into his narrow little space once again. The correspondent’s voice asked: