Butterfly Skin (15 page)

I’m afraid of pain and I don’t understand Ksyusha. Oleg once bit the lobe of my ear too hard and the arousal instantly disappeared. There was a time when I used to watch videos that were fifth-level derivatives of
Emmanuelle
, German soft porn, the interminable adventures of Swedish girls in every corner of the world: what happens on the screen can’t really be true – at least, not in the world I live in. But now I stand in front of the mirror in my own bathroom – a thirty-five-year-old woman, IT manager and successful professional, and I think: my friend likes to be tied up, beaten and humiliated, and I realize that if they knew about Ksyusha, even the five, six or seven Swedish girls from the island of Patmos would be embarrassed.

THE FOUR OF YOU ARE SITTING IN THE COFFEE INN
– your lover Ksenia, Ksenia’s friend Olga and Ksenia’s school friend Marina. You got together today to celebrate the opening of your new site. You managed to get it done in time for the New Year after all; now you can relax over the holidays. You’ll come back after the Russian Christmas and finish the job properly, meanwhile the site can hang there in test mode, there are only half as many people on the web during this period anyway.

You’ve been writing and talking to each other on ICQ for two weeks, but this is the first time you’ve seen Ksenia’s two friends. Olga looks as if she’s over thirty, but you’ve never been able to tell women’s ages very accurately. She lights up a cigarette in a long holder, and you notice a bracelet of dark stones on her wrist. Marina looks younger than Ksenia, maybe that’s because she’s not wearing any makeup at all, there are no clasps in her light-colored hair and it swirls round her head every time she moves. Marina is wearing jeans and a sweater, she smiles at you amiably, but then seems to forget that you’re there. She doesn’t work anywhere, but she can always be reached on ICQ; she has her office at home, and the computer stands on a bar stool in the middle of the room, like a cybernetic altar. You don’t know that yet, and you probably never will, unless Marina invites you to visit her, or Ksenia tells you about it. Marina calls her friend “Ksenia,” but Olga calls her “Ksyusha.” You don’t think your intimacy as lovers will ever get that far.

You yourself didn’t expect the site to be so good. Detailed accounts of all eleven known murders, commentaries by criminal investigators on all of them. The cases grouped according to various factors (several different classifications to choose from). A map of Moscow showing where the bodies were found. The precise date and time when each body was found. The approximate time of each murder and when each girl went missing. One long interview with the deputy head of the Moscow General Prosecutor’s Office and two in even greater detail – with employees of the procurator’s office and the criminal investigation office, who both declined to give their names. A section titled “A Brief History of Murder in Moscow” with detailed analysis of the cases of Ionosian-Mosgas, Vedekhin the Satyr, Golovkin the Boa, Oleg Kuznetsov and Sergei Ryakhovsky from Balashikha. And also including excerpts from Nikolai Modestov’s book
Psychotic Killers: Blind Death
, a detailed account of the biggest serial killer cases in Russia.

Alexei is especially proud of the “Theory” section, which was suggested to him quite unexpectedly by Oxana, who dug up several articles of sociological analysis in her archives from the old college days. There was a long analysis of the case of Gilles de Rais, the famous child killer, Marshal of France and companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc, who was burned in 1440, and also an article by Pierre Klossowski about the Marquis de Sade, which, to be quite honest, you haven’t actually read yet.

Olga, who has some experience in putting together community-oriented sites, suggested that instead of just one forum they should make several: “Discussing the cases,” “Theory and History,” “Why does it happen” and “Evidence.” The last forum was intended for those who suspected that they might have seen or met the killer. “Most likely it will be nothing but rubbish,” Olga sighed, “but if there is even the slightest chance, we have to take it. And anyone who was afraid to state his suspicions publicly could write in using a special form.”

You look at Olga and think: aha, so she’s the one Ksenia uses as her model for a businesswoman. If things go on like this, in ten years’ time Ksenia will have a car parked at the curb too, and she’ll have that strange glint in her eyes that you’ve seen so many times in the eyes of successful single women over the age of thirty. Many people take it for frigidity, but you know it’s the congealed salt of tears that were never cried, buried deep behind the pupil, from where they can’t be lured out by the paroxysms of love or the warmth of a man’s embrace. Except maybe if he went up to her, stroked her unnaturally light hair and said: “Don’t worry, everything will be all right, you know it will” – but it would be really strange to act that way with a woman he hardly even knew.

They discuss banners and argue over whether they can use photographs of the victims.

“I think they’ll be clickable,” says Ksenia, “so what’s the problem?”

“The other sites might refuse to put them up,” Olga objects, “something like that happened a year ago, during the theater siege. But maybe I’m confusing things.”

“What have the other sites got to do with it,” you unexpectedly find yourself saying, “they have families. Have a heart, girls.”

Everybody falls silent for a minute, and then Ksenia says:

“All right, then we’ll use banners with parts of the map of Moscow: say, the name of a subway station and an arrow with the words ‘Psycho kills here.’”

“I’ll have that done for the morning,” says Marina, smiling and shaking her light hair.

You always used to think it was best not to sleep with your colleagues – after all, apart from the female journalists there are the female designers, page makers and photographers. Probably you were wrong, it’s actually really nice to know, as you part this evening in the hallway, that you’ll see each other again in the office, where once again Ksenia will be clad in the benevolent armor of a businesswoman, the armor that slowly peels away under your kisses and embraces and shatters completely with that ear-splitting final shriek. Perhaps for the first time in your life you’re content with yourself both as a man and a professional and Ksenia is the witness to both your triumphs.

It seems that this evening, as you raise a glass to the start of your project, you don’t feel like a successful failure any longer.

THEY PLAYED SNOWBALLS, LIKE LITTLE CHILDREN
, slid down icy slides, first on their feet, and then on their backsides, on a piece of cardboard: so much for Ksyusha’s sheepskin coat, so much for Olya’s fur. In a cheap eatery they drank vodka out of little plastic glasses and gave the brush off to two teenagers who took them for two girls their own age at first, and then for mother and daughter. They showed their Moscow residency registrations to a flaxen-haired police lieutenant, and he handed back their passports with the words, “Carry on enjoying yourselves, girls.”

They still had three days left to relax and enjoy themselves. The two grown-up girls, one, let us say, a journalist and the other an IT manager, but both successful professionals, only five minutes away from stardom, the creators of the most popular site of the year just beginning, have made themselves hoarse singing karaoke in the Yakitoria and now they are soothing their throats with hot saké.

“I think this is the best New Year holiday of my entire life,” says Olya, who has almost managed to forget that Oleg wasn’t able to get to her place either on December 31 or on January 1, and she wasn’t even expecting him after that, because on the morning of the 2nd he and his family had jetted off to Thailand, and so this was the third day Olya and Ksyusha had been doing the rounds of Moscow’s clubs, restaurants and snack bars, chasing after each other and falling backward into the rare snowdrifts with their arms and legs held out, leaving an imprint like a five-pointed star or a snowflake.

“It definitely is for me,” answers Ksyusha, who has either really got drunk for the third day running, or is simply so happy that the mere memory of this happiness should be enough to last her for the rest of her life. The year ended splendidly, they launched the site, she consigned Sasha to oblivion, released her erotic stress, and now she was moving into the New Year young and free, a girl ready for any changes up ahead.

On December 31 Alexei had phoned to wish her a happy New Year; she was a bit surprised, she didn’t know whether to put this down to zeal from a subordinate, a confirmation of friendship or an attempt to suggest to her that good things come in threes and their two evenings together should be continued in the New Year. We can sort that out in the New Year, thought Ksyusha and simply put Alexei out of her mind. It was good with him, but he wasn’t her type. He ought to be better at the boogie-woogie than at sex, but she’d get round to that later.

“I’ve remembered a great joke,” says Olya, pouring out the remains of the saké, “about a teacher in an elementary school. After the holidays she walks into the classroom and starts dictating a math problem: two young, interesting, cultured girls bought six bottles of beer in a shop for thirty kopecks (
I don’t actually remember for how much, it’s an old joke, but that’s not important
), a bottle of vodka for four rubles twelve kopecks, ‘Seawave’ processed cheese for, let’s say, fourteen kopecks and a bottle of cheap sweet ‘Crimea’ wine… oh my God, why did we drink that wine!?”

Ksyusha laughs, finishes her saké and walks toward the door.

“Your place or mine?” asks Ksyusha.

“Mine,” Olya declares. “It’s closer.”

“But I’ve got a New Year tree,” Ksyusha parries.

Two young interesting girls, successful professionals only five minutes away from stardom, stop a car in holiday-time Moscow. They pile into the back seat and both try to explain the way, interrupting each other. The driver, with bristly gray hair and blue eyes that have faded to white, turns down the old Soviet songs on the radio and says:

“Don’t worry, girls, I’ve been behind the wheel for thirty years. Just tell me the address and I’ll get there.”

They drive through the Moscow streets, there are festive lights strung across facades without any walls behind them, and the gaping windows of the gutted buildings are full of the black night air.

“Just look at what Luzhkov’s doing, will you?” says the driver. “Have you heard, there’s a plan to knock down all of Tverskaya Street? Can you imagine it, girls? Thirty years I’ve been in Moscow, and I don’t recognize the city. It’s like after the war, honest it is.”

“Never mind,” says drunken Olya, “they’ll put up new buildings, better than the old ones. Moscow’s like that… it can take anything.”

Olya’s from Peter, she has a special attitude to the capital city, but the driver doesn’t know that, he turns the radio down again and carries on abusing Luzhkov. He smells of sweat, but there’s not a whiff of stale alcohol and that surprises Ksyusha, who is still regretting that they don’t sell saké to take out at the Yakitoria. Absorbed in these important thoughts, she misses the moment when the driver moves on to discussing the war in Chechnya.

“My father and his friends came back from the Second World War, so I knew them, they were good-hearted people. But they come back from Chechnya mean.”

“The men are like the war they fight,” Ksyusha snarls, already wondering how she can ask the garrulous driver to shut up. Really, why do conversations about politics have to come as a free supplement with every journey across Moscow?

“And they say there’s a psycho on the loose in the city,” the driver continues, “so you take care now, girls. Of course, he won’t bother two of you, but just as a matter of principle.”

“I know,” replies Ksyusha, immediately interested, “but where did you hear about it?”

“They were just talking about it on the radio, I picked up Moscow Echo by mistake, they said there was everything about him in the computer, like, on the web: who he kills, how, when he kills again.”

The two young interesting girls, successful professionals, only five minutes away from stardom, start hugging each other and laughing loudly on the back seat, and the blue-eyed driver scratches his stubbly gray hair, mutters something to himself and turns the radio back up.

* * *

“It’s a success, Olya, it’s a success!” Ksyusha shouts, skipping up and down in front of the computer. She hasn’t taken off her sheepskin coat yet, the snowflakes are turning into little puddles on the parquet floor, and the corner of the kilim by the bed is already getting wet. Olya comes back out of the kitchen, where she was putting the kettle on, her short light-tinted hair stuck to her forehead, a fluffy sweater with a high neck, flared jeans with a flowery pattern stretched tight round her thighs. Yes, you couldn’t turn up for negotiations in the bank dressed like that. My God, how good it feels to forget about the dress code for a week! She glances over Ksyusha’s shoulder and says in a satisfied voice:

“Fifth place, congratulations!”

In her time she has worked on projects that climbed into the top ten on Rambler, and not in the subject listings either. She’s thirty-five years old, and for five of those years she has worked in the Russian internet, she’s not easily surprised. It’s much more fun to slither down icy slides and play snowballs like little children, drink vodka from little plastic glasses and saké from little ceramic jiggers.

“Attagirls, good for us,” says Ksyusha, skipping up and down and shrugging her sheepskin coat off straight onto the floor. “We did it! Yes!”

She slaps her little hand with the bitten fingernails against Olya’s well-groomed hand and the phone immediately rings, as if the clap has woken it up.

“Oh, shit,” says Ksyusha, reaching for the phone. “Hello, it’s me, Happy New Year, who’s there?”

She hears her mother’s voice and a wave of fright sweeps over her – what’s happened? Mom never phones for no reason. Is everybody all right? What’s wrong? What a hoot, they actually mentioned my name? This is a big deal, Mom, supermegabig. What do you mean, why? Because it’s my job. Because I’m the editor of the online newspaper Evening.ru, a journalist, even a bit of an IT manager, Mom, but in any case, a successful professional, and this is my new project. What do you mean, you took a look at it, and it’s nothing but filth? What do you expect to find on a web page about a psycho who’s killed eleven girls between the ages of fifteen and thirty-eight in just the last eight months? No, Mom, I can’t close down the project, no, I won’t withdraw my name from it.