Babylon (22 page)

   Khanin gestured in disgust.

   ‘Wee never stood a chance,’ he added quietly. ‘And they picked off the rest of his fighters, the ones who survived the explosion, with a machine-gun when they jumped out of the cars. I don’t know how you can do business with people like that. That’s if they are people. We-ell.’

   Instead of a sense of grief befitting the moment, to his shame Tatarsky felt a relief bordering on euphoria.

   ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘now I understand. I saw one of those cars today. Last time he was in a different one, so I didn’t even think about anything being wrong. They’ve blown another guy away, I thought - every day someone or other gets it… But now I see - it all fits in. But what does it mean for us, in a practical sense?’

   ‘Leave,’ said Khanin. ‘Indefinite leave. There’s one hell of a big question to be answered. Hamlet’s question. I already had two calls since the morning.’

   ‘The police?’

   ‘Yeah. And then from the Caucasian Friendly Society. The bastards could smell a trader had been cut free. Like sharks. Straight for the scent of blood. So the question of the moment is very specific. Our swarthy wops can offer real protection, but all the filth want to do is line their pockets. You’d have to lick their boots till they shone to get them to a shoot-out. But either of them could blow you away. And especially the filth, as it happens. They came on to me real heavy today… "We know you’ve got diamonds," they said. What kind of diamonds have I got? Tell me that. What diamonds have I got?’

   ‘I don’t know,’ Tatarsky replied, remembering the photograph of the diamond necklace with the promise of eternity that he’d seen in the toilet at Khanin’s place.

   ‘OK. Don’t you bother your head about it. Just carry on living, loving, working… Oh, and by the way, there’s someone waiting for you in the next room.’

   Morkovin looked just as he had the last time they’d met, only now there were more grey hairs in his parting, and his eyes were sadder and wiser. He was wearing a severe dark suit and a striped tie with a matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. When he saw Tatarsky, he got up from the table with a broad smile and opened his arms to embrace him.

   ‘Oho!’ he said, slapping Tatarsky on the back, ‘what a face, Babe. Been on the sauce long?’

   ‘I’m just pulling out of a deep one,’ Tatarsky answered guiltily. ‘They gave me this job to do here; there was just no other way.’

   ‘Is that what you were talking about on the phone?’

   ‘When?’

   ‘Don’t remember, huh? I thought not. You were in a real state - said you were writing a concept for God and the ancient serpent was giving you a real tough time about it… Asked me to find you a new job, said you were real world-weary…’

   ‘That’s enough,’ said Tatarsky, raising an open palm towards him. ‘No need to pile it on. I’m up to my ears in shit as it is.’

   ‘So you do need a job, then?’

   ‘And how! We’ve got the filth clutching at one leg and the Chechens grabbing at the other. Everybody’s being given leave.’

   ‘Let’s go then. It just so happens I’ve got some beer in the car.’

   Morkovin had arrived in a tiny blue BMW like a torpedo on wheels. Tatarsky felt strange sitting in it - his body assumed a semi-recumbent position, his knees were raised to his chest and the bottom of the car itself hurtled along so low over the road-surface his stomach muscles involuntarily contracted every time it bounced over another hole in the road.

   ‘Aren’t you afraid of riding in a car like this?’ Tatarsky asked. ‘What if somewhat leaves a crowbar sticking out of a manhole? Or there’s one of those iron bars sticking up out of the road…’

   Morkovin chuckled. ‘I know what you’re trying to say.’ he said. ‘But I’ve been used to that feeling at work for so long now…’

   The car braked at a crossroads. A red jeep with six powerful headlamps on its roof halted to the right of them. Tatarsky stole a glance at the driver, a man with a low forehead and massive eye-ridges, with almost every inch of his skin sprouting thick wool. One of his hands was stroking the steering wheel and the other held a plastic bottle of Pepsi. Tatarsky suddenly realised Morkovin’s car was way cooler, and he had one of his very rare experiences of the anal wow-factor at work. The feeling, it must be confessed, was enthralling. Sticking his elbow out of the window, he took a swig of beer and looked at the driver of the jeep pretty much the same way as the sailors on the bow of an aircraft carrier look down on a pygmy paddling over his raft to trade in rotten bananas. The driver caught Tatarsky’s glance and for a while they stared each other in the eye. Tatarsky could sense the man in the jeep took this long exchange of glances as an invitation to fight -when Morkovin’s car eventually moved off there was fury bubbling in the shallow depths of his eyes. Tatarsky realised he’d seen this face somewhere before. ‘Probably a film actor,’ he thought.

   Morkovin moved out into a free lane and started going faster.

   ‘Listen, where are we going?’ Tatarsky asked.

   ‘Our organisation.’

   ‘What organisation’s that?’

   ‘You’ll see. I don’t want to spoil the impression.’

   A few minutes later the car braked to a halt at some gates in a set of tall railings. The railings looked impressive: the bars were like Cyclopean cast-iron spears with gilded tips. Morkovin showed a policeman in a little hut some card or other and the gates slowly swung open. Behind them was a huge Stalinist-style building from the forties, looking like something between a stepped Mexican pyramid and a squat skyscraper constructed with the low Soviet sky in mind. The upper part of the facade was covered in moulded decorations - lowered banners, swords, stars and some kind of lances with jagged edges; it was all redolent of ancient wars and the forgotten smell of gunpowder and glory. Screwing up his eyes, Tatarsky read the moulded inscription up under the very roof: ‘To the heroes’ eternal glory!’

   ‘Eternal glory’s a bit over the top for them,’ he thought gloomily. ‘They’d be happy enough with a pension.’

   Tatarsky had often walked past this building; a very, very long time ago someone had told him it was a secret institute where they developed new types of weapons. It seemed as though that must have been somewhere near the truth, because hanging by the gates like some hoary greeting from antiquity was a board bearing the crest of the Soviet Union and an inscription in gold: ‘The Institute of Apiculture’. Underneath it Tatarsky just had time to make out an inconspicuous plaque bearing the words ‘Interbank Committee for Information Technology’.

   The parking lot was packed with cars and Morkovin barely managed to squeeze in between an immense white Lincoln and a silver Mazda racer.

   ‘I want to introduce you to my bosses,’ Morkovin said as he locked the car. ‘Just act natural. But don’t go saying too much.’

   ‘What exactly does "too much" mean? Who says what’s too much?’

   Morkovin cast him a sideways glance: ‘What you just said is a good example. It’s definitely too much.’

   After walking across the yard they went into a side entrance and found themselves in a marble hallway with an unnaturally high ceiling where several security men in black uniforms were sitting. They looked far more serious than the ordinary cops, and not just because of the Czech Scorpion automatics hanging at their shoulders. The cops just weren’t in the same league - for Tatarsky their blue uniform, which once used to radiate the oppressive power of the state from every button and badge, had long ago become an object of disdainful incomprehension - such a totally empty symbol only emphasised the absurdity of these people constantly stopping cars on the roads and demanding money. But the bodyguards’ black uniform was a real mind-blower: the designer (Morkovin said it was Yudashkin) had brilliantly combined the aesthetic of the SS
Sonderkomande,
motifs from anti-utopian films about the totalitarian society of the future and nostalgic gay fashion themes from the Freddie Mercury period. The padded shoulders, the deep decollage on the chest and the Rabelaisian codpiece blended together in a heady cocktail that made you want to steer clear of anybody wearing such a uniform. The message was crystal clear even to a total cretin.

   In the lift Morkovin took out a small key, inserted it into a hole on the control panel and pressed the top button.

   ‘And another thing,’ he said, turning to face the mirror and smoothing down his hair: ‘don’t worry about looking stupid. In fact, be careful not to seem too smart.’

   ‘Why?’

   ‘Because if you do, a certain question will arise: if you’re so smart, how come you’re looking for a job instead of hiring people yourself?’

   ‘Logical,’ said Tatarsky.

   ‘And pile on the cynicism.’

   ‘That’s easy enough.’

   The doors of the lift opened to reveal a corridor carpeted in a grey runner with yellow stars. Tatarsky remembered from a photograph that the sidewalk on some boulevard in Los Angeles looked like that. The corridor ended in a black door with no nameplate, with a small TV camera set above it. Morkovin walked to the middle of the corridor, took his phone out of his pocket and entered a number. Two or three minutes passed in silence. Morkovin waited patiently. Finally someone at the other end of the line answered.

   ‘Cheers,’ said Morkovin. ‘It’s me. Yes, I’ve brought him. Here he is.’

   Morkovin turned and beckoned Tatarsky towards him from where he’d been standing timidly by the doors of the lift. Tatarsky walked up to him and raised his eyes dog-like to the camera lens. The person talking to Morkovin must have said something funny, because Morkovin suddenly giggled and shook Tatarsky by the shoulder. ‘That’s OK,’ he said, ‘we’ll soon take off the rough edges.’ A lock clicked open and Morkovin pushed Tatarsky forward. The door immediately closed behind them. They were in an entrance-hall where an antique bronze mirror with a handle hung on the wall below a golden Venetian carnival mask of astounding beauty. ‘I’ve seen them before somewhere,’ Tatarsky thought, ‘a mask and a mirror. Or have I? My mind’s been on the blink all day today…’ Below the mask there was a desk and sitting behind the desk was a secretary of cold avian beauty.

   ‘Hello, Alla,’ said Morkovin.

   The secretary flapped her hand at him and pressed a button on her desk. There was the sound of a discreet buzzer and the tall sound-proofed door at the other end of the hall opened.

   For a moment Tatarsky thought the spacious office with blinds drawn over the windows was empty. At least there was no on sitting at the immense desk with the gleaming metal supports. Above the desk, at the spot where a portrait of the leader would have hung in Soviet times, there was a picture in a heavy round frame. The coloured rectangle set at the centre of a white field was hard to make out from the door, but Tatarsky recognised it from its colours - he had one just like it on his baseball shirt. It was a standard label with the American flag and the words: ‘Made in the USA. One size fits all’. Mounted on another wall was an uncompromising installation consisting of a line of fifteen tin cans with a portrait of Andy Warhol on a typical salt-pork label.

   Tatarsky lowered his gaze. The floor was covered with a genuine Persian carpet with an incredibly beautiful design that looked like the patterns he’d seen some time in his childhood in an ancient edition of
The Thousand and One Nights.
Following the lines of the design, Tatarsky’s eyes slid along a capricious spiral to the centre of the carpet, where they encountered the occupant of the office.

   He was a man still young, a stocky, overweight individual with the remnants of a head of red hair combed backwards and a rather pleasant face, and he was lying on the carpet in a totally relaxed posture. He was hard to spot because the hue of his clothes blended almost perfectly into the carpet. He was wearing a ‘pleb’s orgasm’ jacket - neither business uniform nor pyjamas, but something quite excessively camivalesque, the kind of outfit in which particularly calculating businessmen attire themselves when they want to make their partners feel things are going so well for them they don’t have to bother about business at all. A bright-coloured retro tie with a lecherous monkey perched on a palm tree spilled out of his jacket and ran across the carpet like a startling pink tongue.

   However, it wasn’t the young man’s outfit that astonished Tatarsky, but something else: he knew his face. In fact he knew it very well, although he’d never met him. He’d seen that face in a hundred short television news reports and advertising clips, usually playing some secondary part; but who the man was he had no idea. The last time it had happened was the evening before, when Tatarsky had been distractedly watching TV as he tried to think about the Russian idea. The office’s owner had appeared in an advertisement for some tablets or other - he was dressed in a white doctor’s coat and a cap with a red cross, and a blonde beard and moustache had been glued on to his broad face, making him appear like a good-natured young Trotsky. Sitting in a kitchen surrounded by a family in the grip of an incomprehensible euphoria, he had said in a didactic tone: ‘All these adverts can easily leave you feeling all at sea. And often they’re not even honest. It’s not so bad if you make a mistake buying a saucepan or a washing powder, but when it comes to medicines, you’re taking risks with your health. So who will you believe - the heartless advertising or your own family doctor? Of course! The answer’s obvious! Nobody but your own family doctor, who recommends that you take Sunrise pills!’

   ‘So that’s it,’ thought Tatarsky, ‘he’s our family doctor.’

   In the meantime the family doctor had raised one hand in a gesture of greeting, and Tatarsky noticed he was holding a short plastic straw.

   ‘Join the club,’ he said in a dull voice.

   ‘We’re old members,’ Morkovin replied.

   Morkovin’s response was evidently the usual one in this place, because the owner of the office nodded his head indulgently.

   Morkovin took two straws from the table, handed one to Tatarsky and then lay down on the carpet. Tatarsky followed his example. Once seated on the carpet he looked inquiringly at the owner of the office, who smiled sweetly in reply. Tatarsky noticed he had a watch on his wrist with a bracelet made of unusual links of different sizes. The winding knob was decorated with a small diamond, and there were three diamond spirals set round the face of the watch. Tatarsky recalled an editorial about expensive watches he’d read in some radical youth magazine and he gulped respectfully. The owner of the office noticed his gaze and looked at his watch.