Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

The next few minutes were rather nerve-racking, while I waited for security to arrive, and shuddered at the furious blows on the door, counting to myself and trying not to hurry. The Sikh was pounding as hard as he could, but I managed to hold him back without too much trouble - he wasn’t a large man.

The phone rang after exactly twenty seconds. Naturally, the Sikh didn’t answer it. When the blows stopped after a minute or two, I knew there were other people in the room. They were just in time - the door was already coming off its hinges. I heard the sound of furniture being overturned, the tinkle of broken glass and a garbled shout that sounded liked ‘kali ma!’ It was the Sikh shouting. Then there was silence, broken only by the distant honking of car horns.

‘That’s fucked it,’ said a man’s voice. ‘He’s a goner.’

‘Lucky he didn’t take us with him,’ said another voice.

‘True enough,’ the first voice replied.

It was better to let them know I was there myself than wait for them to find me. I called out in a plaintive voice:

‘Help!’

The door opened.

There were two hulks standing in the doorway of the bathroom - dark glasses, suits, flesh-coloured wires dangling from their ears . . . A regular cult of Agent Smith, I thought. And, incidentally, that would make a great religion for security men - after all, the Roman legionaries worshipped Mithras, didn’t they?

One of the security men began muttering to himself - the only words I could make out were ‘three nineteen’ and ‘call’. He was-n’t talking to me.

As far as I’m aware, their microphones are hidden behind the lapels of their jackets, and that’s why it often seems like they’re talking to themselves. Sometimes it looks very funny. I once saw one of these goons searching a woman’s toilet - opening the doors of the cabins and chanting: ‘There’s no one here . . . There’s no one here at all . . . The window’s blocked off by a party wall . . .’ If I hadn’t known what he was doing, I might have thought he was pining over some failed lovers’ assignation and pouring out his grief in iambic pentameters.

‘Did you pull the cord?’ the second security man asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but where’s . . .’

The security man nodded towards an open window. The glass was broken.

‘Over there.’

‘You mean . . .’ I said, making big round eyes, ‘he’s . . .’

‘Yeah,’ said the guard. ‘Came at us like a lunatic the moment he saw us. Was he doing drugs?’

‘What drugs? I’ve been working here for a year now. Everybody knows me, I’ve never had any problems.’

‘Well, now you do. What did he want from you?’

‘I didn’t really understand,’ I said. ‘He wanted me to give him something called a fisting. I said I didn’t know how, and then he started . . . Well, anyway, I hid in the bathroom and pulled the alarm. And you saw everything else.’

‘We sure did. Got any ID on you?’

I shook my head. Give your passport to these guys and you’ll never see it again.

‘Maybe I could go? Before the fuzz gets here?’

‘What do you mean, go? Are you crazy? You’re the main witness, ’ the security man said. ‘You’ll have to testify about what you were doing here.’

That definitely wasn’t part of my plans. I evaluated the situation. While there were only two of them there, I still had a chance of avoiding any hassle. But it was getting slimmer every second - I knew the room would soon be packed with people.

‘Can I go to the toilet?’

The security man nodded, and I went back into the bathroom. I had to act quickly, so I didn’t hesitate for a second. I dropped my pants and freed my tail, bent over and opened the door. I did it very abruptly, and the guards immediately turned to look at me.

I believe a man reveals what he’s really like in that second when he’s already seen a fox’s tail but not yet fallen under its hypnotic influence. A client usually has enough time to express his response to what he’s seen. And that’s enough to tell you who you’re dealing with.

All the crude, narrow-minded losers screw their faces up into grimaces of sullen disbelief. But the faces of people who have the potential for inner growth express something like delighted surprise.

One of the security men wrinkled up his forehead and frowned. The other gaped in amazement (I could see his eyes even through his dark glasses) and opened his mouth like a little child who’s just seen the birdie the photographer promised him. It looked really sweet.

Of course, I couldn’t completely remove my imprint from their memories - to do that to someone, you have to shoot them in the head with a pistol. All I could do was change the context of the memory - I planted the suggestion in their minds that they’d met me in the corridor on their way to the suite. Then I made them go into the bathroom. As soon as the door closed behind them, I picked Stephen Hawking’s book up off the floor, dropped it in my handbag, pulled up my trousers and skipped out into the corridor.

There was another security man standing on the stairs. When he saw me, he gestured for me to go over to him, and when I reached him, he ran his hand over my buttocks, forcing me to squeeze my tail in between them as tightly as I could. In any other situation the least he would have got for that was a bruise pinch. But right then it still wasn’t clear how everything was going to work out, so I just slapped him on the hand. He wagged his finger at me, and then this gesture flowed smoothly into a different one, as his index finger and thumb connected and started rubbing against each other.

I understood. Girls like me usually hand over a hundred dollars on the way out, but under the present circumstances of force majeure , it was being suggested that payment should be made on the spot. I took a portrait of Benjamin Franklin out of my purse and the guard grabbed it with the same finger and thumb that had just been rubbing against each other. There was a certain kind of beauty in the economy of movement - from threat to reminder to acceptance. As the Japanese swordsman Minamoto Musashi said: ‘You can tell a master from his stance.’

I walked down the stairs decorated with fleurs-de-lys and made it out into the street without any further adventures. A crowd, including several militiamen, had already gathered to the left of the exit - that was clearly where the unfortunate Sikh was lying. I walked in the opposite direction and a few steps later I was already round the corner. Now all I had to do was stop a taxi. One pulled over almost immediately.

‘Bitsevsky Park,’ I said. ‘The equestrian complex.’

‘Three hundred and fifty,’ the driver answered.

Today was his lucky day. I jumped into the back, sat down and slammed the door, and the taxi carried me away from the disaster that had seemed inevitable only five minutes earlier.

I had nothing to reproach myself for, but my mood had been spoilt. Apart from the fact that an entirely innocent man had died, I’d lost my job at the National - it wouldn’t be wise to show my face in there for the foreseeable future. That meant I’d have to look for other ways to earn a living. And starting from the very next day - my funds were running low, and the hundred dollars I’d given the security guard had thrown my budget into deficit.

An acquaintance of mine used to say that the evil in our lives can only be overcome by money. It’s an interesting observation, although not entirely flawless from a metaphysical point of view: what we should really talk about is not victory over evil, but the opportunity to buy it off temporarily. But without money evil is triumphant in just a couple of days, that’s proven fact.