Pig: A Thriller

by Babiuk, Darvin

  Hanging from a colossal rear-view mirror that suddenly materialised in front of Snow were a pair of fuzzy hanging dice, Einstein’s dice.

  "No dice," said Snow, and the elves giggled more, as if Snow’s refusal to accept them were somehow made up for by his use of the unintentional pun. Magically, the rear-view mirror transformed into a giant version of the clock in Snow’s porta-cabin, except instead of hours and minutes the numbers of the face were document numbers and the hands were pointing to a particular one.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the space collapsed in on itself, the periscope retracted, Snow feeling energy coursing through the base of his spine, an orgasm within his pineal gland and he was gently deposited back in his lumpy cot in his stark porta-cabin, no worse for wear. Snow’s twenty minutes were up. He could not deposit forty cents more the next three minutes. Time is funny like that; it insists saying who’s in charge.

  Dreams are – after all -- the perfect crime. They involve no witnesses and no recording of their meaning, save that which you yourself give them. And then they are gone, leaving no record of themselves behind.

  'The Aeon is a child at play with coloured balls'. -- Heraclitus

  Snow did not bother to wait until morning. He got his elbows up like Gordie Howe and chalked them the way Minnesota Fats used to doctor his pool cue and went straight to the Document Control room. He went to the right filing cabinet and looked up the document identified on the clock in his dream. It was gone. When the Archives clerk showed up a few hours later, Snow was waiting for her. He passed her the proper form requesting a copy of the document. Within minutes, he had it and spent a few minutes back at Document Control going over the form. Minutes only, because shortly after he put up a sign on the door stating the office was closed for the day. Back in his room, Snow put on his Personal Protection Equipment and dug out his security pass to get past the gate to the Operations side of the Noyabrsk oil production facility.

  “Why?” Snow asked. After his trip into the bowels of the oil producing facility, he’d changed into his clothes again and gone off to Magda’s Deficit Exchange Club in town.

  “Why what?” Magda was gutting a fish, taking a long thin-bladed knife and filleting the flesh from the backbone and skin. Carefully, she separated the meat from the guts and skin, setting aside the roe in a separate pile for her top-end customers. As she talked, she ran a fingernail along the spine to clear the blood. “I love my period,” she said, the blood reminding her of her menses, which had just started. “It's like once a month my body becomes a self-cleaning oven.

  “Why would Pig steal documents that showed log results for the company pipeline? The only thing that runs through there is oil And how could you steal that? It goes in one end and out the other. There’s no way to siphon anything off.”

  “Why? Why is the sky blue?”

  “Because it defracts –“

  “No, that’s how. You told me you want to know why.” Magda had divided up the entrails into two bags, one which she set down for her own cat and the other which she handed over to Snow for Schrödinger. Scrotum. Whatever his name was now.

  “According to Pig --” Snow started again.

  “I don't think that ‘According to Pig,’ is ever going to acquire the authority of, say, ‘According to Dostoevsky,’ or ‘According to Lenin.’

  “Never have sex with someone you don't want to be,” Magda continued, her mind still on the sex business. “Because in that moment, when the magic happens, when the two-backed beast rises, you become one. Even after it's over, after you’ve smoked your cigarettes and said the right things to each other, you retain the sensation of being the other person. Some of their atoms are now yours and some of yours are in them.”

  One of the things Snow liked best about Magda – besides her honesty – was her complete lack of piercing or body art. Oddly, for someone who’d been in the camps, her skin was unstained from visible tattoos. Magda viewed tattoos as spilled ink, which, like all liquids, sought its lowest level, to be absorbed mostly by mobsters or motorcycle freaks.

  “Sex for money, that’s different. It’s just business. Or biology. There’s no magic happening so you don’t have to worry about becoming the other person. I sent all my girls to the gynaecologist this week, you know. To get their tests done. Check all their fluids and make sure they’re clean. You know, it’s interesting, how one girl is popular with one guy but not the other. I think a pussy is like a musical instrument, with stops that play different notes. Did you get more Coffee Crisps in? The girls like them. ‘The world does what it pleases, whether we understand it or not.’” Magda quoted suddenly.

  “The Buddha?” asked Snow.

  “Shit. Hell if I know. I heard it from one of the girls. Could have come from anywhere by the time I got it. You heard the story about the wheelbarrows, right?” Magda asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. “Every day for years and years the same gentleman came through the customs post pushing a wheelbarrow in the morning and returning again every night. Every morning and every night, the agent diligently searched through it but could never find anything. Finally, when he was about to retire, the customs agent asked the guy, ‘We've become friends. I've searched your wheelbarrow every day for many years. I know you’re smuggling something but I can’t find what. Don’t let me go into retirement never knowing. What are you smuggling?’ ‘Wheelbarrows,’ answered the other man. ‘I am smuggling wheelbarrows.’”

  “He’s not smuggling oil,” Snow said. “How could he be? It goes in one end and out the other. There’s no way to siphon anything off. The input and the output are both measured.”

  “How can a heart so small contain so much evil?” Magda wondered aloud. “Some people choose evil because they don’t know any better; they don’t know the difference between goodness and wickedness. But Pig, he knows. And yet he chooses evil.”

  But Snow wasn’t listening. An idea had come to him flopping and gasping like a fish. A whopper. They’d mount this one, put it over the fireplace and tell stories about it over the bar. He smelled something resembling a rotting carp and wasn’t going to be able to rest until he cleansed the idea from his system. Still in his protective gear, he went back to the pipeline, did what he had to do, and came back to Magda’s place.

  A winter’s day. Deep and dark and depressing. It was barely three in the afternoon, but already the sky was starting to darken. Waiting to cross the six-lane road filtering traffic past the security gate of the Noyabrsk oil facilities to the Administration Offices, living areas, contractor work space or the pumping, refining and processing areas, where only those with special access passes were allowed to enter in order to prevent theft, sabotage or terrorism. Gazing from the stoplights regulating traffic through the spokes of the transportation system to the dismal scene before him. Car exhaust kept from dissipating by a low pressure temperature inversion. Clunky wipers clogged by ice, fighting to clear ice from the windshield. Sundogs reflecting low on the horizon. Billows of steam issuing from any live part of the refinery warmer than the cold winter air. Ice crystals sparkling in the air. The windows on the security hut in the centre of the traffic lanes frosted over. Snow half obscuring the swaying traffic lights. The hairs in his nostrils freezing, then snapping off like icicles when he rubbed his nose. Vehicles covered in salt and windshields half obscured with frost or dirt. A taste of poorly-combusted hydrocarbons biting through the smog. A stuck car spinning its wheels futilely in an ice rut.

  Too busy thinking over what he’d found in the pipeline area, Snow crossed illegally against the red, not noticing a huge Aurok bearing down on him. Russian drivers granted pedestrians the same rights as the Soviet courts had to homosexual Gypsy Jews. Thinking his day had just brightened up, expecting Snow to scramble out of the way, the driver kept barrelling ahead, hoping to see the pedestrian scramble out of the way of the behemoth truck. Instead, Snow stopped dead in the middle of the road. Rather than slowing, the truck may have actually sped up and a
ltered its course slightly to hit Snow head on instead of at an angle, all the while screaming on the air horn for Snow to clear off the road. Three stories high and carrying a four hundred ton load, he didn’t lose too many games of chicken.

  He lost this one. Snow stood placidly staring at the truck bearing down on him until it was the driver who blinked and stomped on the air brakes, managing to bring the huge rig to a skidding stop centimetres from Snow’s chest. He climbed down the fourteen steps out of the cab to the road and started screaming and jabbing his finger at Snow’s chest.

  “Dalbaiyob,” the trucker swore, shaking his fist at him. “You’re fucking crazy. I could have killed you.”

  Unfazed, Snow shrugged in agreement and calmly finished crossing the road. He hadn’t even blinked, hadn’t even registered a sign of fear. The trucker was right. Either way, he didn’t much give a shit.

  The incident did not go unobserved or unreported. Despite the fogged windows on the security hut in the middle of the traffic island, Pig’s bank of CCTV cameras were working perfectly.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” Magda asked.

  “You gave me the idea,” Snow said. He’d brought her back a small container of oil drawn from the camp’s pipeline.

  “I told you to get me some Coffee Crisps, not this. You can’t even cook with this kind of oil.” The fish she’d filleted earlier was baking now, with lemon pepper and dill. Later, when it was done, she’d add sour cream to top it off. Magda’s navel -- fuzzy or not, she didn’t check – had already extended itself to make room.

  “With the wheelbarrows and hiding things in plain sight. That, and getting your girls’ body fluids analyzed. So I went back to the pipeline. ‘What would you hide in plain sight in one?’ I asked myself. So I went to get some, open it up, see if maybe something was hidden inside, getting pushed along with the oil. There’s only one place you can go to do that.”

  “The pig launcher,” Magda said. She was referring to a funnel-shaped Y section in the pipeline where it could be opened up for access. “Why do they call it that anyway?”

  “From the squealing sound it makes going up and down the line. Or it could be an acronym for ‘Pipeline Inspection Gauge.’ You know, the electronic device that goes up and down the pipeline inspecting it for damage and cleaning it from the inside. Sometimes, they use them as plugs to separate one kind of oil from another inside the pipeline, stop the different products from getting mixed together.”

  “Shut up. Who fucking cares? Tell me what you found.”

  “Nothing. I thought they might have wrapped up some contraband and used the pressure of the oil in the line to push it down to someone waiting downstream. But nothing like that. That’s not what I found. What was strange was how close together the pigs were in the line. Usually, you’d use them to separate off thousands of barrels of different product from each other. But these were only gallons apart. There was no reason for it. Why separate a couple feet of oil off from the rest. There’s not supposed to be different products there, just one whole batch of sweet crude; the same content, the same provider, the same recipient. But something had to be different or why separate it off?”

  “Why?” Magda asked.

  “I don’t know,” Snow admitted. “But we can find out.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, ‘we.’ Come on. You were the one pushing me to get off my cot and do something. Stop being a slug, the slow-moving elephant. Spread your wings and fly; like the eagle.”

  “Yeah, well eagles may fly, but elephants don’t get sucked into jet intake of jet engines,” Magda demurred.

  “You’re the one who was pushing me to help Kolya. This could be linked to his attack. They were afraid of what he’d find in the documents.”

  “I wasn’t saying I wouldn’t help. I was asking how?”

  “You know people in the Lab. You use them to make sure your girls are healthy. Have them analyze this oil sample. Something’s not right about it.”

  “Maybe. Guess it doesn’t hurt to see. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going back to Document Control. To check the manifest. See what’s on record for being pushed down that pipeline.”

  “You look better,” Magda said, touching Snow on the arm as he went to go out the door. “I’m glad to see it. There’s a Buddhist saying: ‘After the cloudy pool of water settles, it becomes clear.’ I think things are settling with you, becoming clear.”

  “I hear the foreigner was messing around near the pipeline recently, the Canadian. The security cameras caught him. He’s got no business being around there except sticking his nose in our business. If that’s true, I think it may be time we put him out of business. Foreigner or not.”

  Bykov, the low-grade siloviki Pig was working with in this sorry business, was back.

  “Have you replaced Musil?” he asked. “You claimed you had four people lining up to do his job.”

  “Like I told, they were lining up,” said Pig. “We got one of the guys already working in the Lab, Arkady, to take his role. It’s perfect. We limit the exposure by having the same guy in both locations.”

  “You got a lab guy doing the job on the pipeline? Is he qualified? Does he know what he’s doing?”

  “Yeah, he knows what he’s doing. You think I don’t know what I’m doing? All he has to do is take the product from the lab and send it down the pipeline using the pig.”

  “How much longer? We almost done? We can’t keep hiding the paper trail on this forever. People keep dying and someone’s going to notice. Even in Noyabrsk.”

  “A couple more shipments from the Lab and we’re done. We sent the batches down as soon as they’re mixed. Won’t be long now.”

  “So what do we do about the Canadian? I say we scare him off. Send some muscle with a message. Let him know how easy an accident can happen around all this machinery.”

  “It’s a mistake. I’m telling you. I know him. It won’t work.”

  “Won’t work, my ass. He’s Canadian, isn’t he?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Their national animal is the beaver, noted for its industrious habits and co-operative spirit. In medieval bestiaries it was known for biting its testicles off and offering them to its attacker. I’m sure if you present our position correctly, that’s exactly what the Canadian will do, offer us his balls." Bykov smiled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “A mounted Canadian. Just what I’ve always wanted.”

  “What does the police have to do with this?”

  “What?”

  “A mounted Canadian. The RCMP. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

  “You misheard me. I said a mounted Canadian, not the mounted police. I’m gonna mount him, stiff him and put him up over the fireplace.”

  “I tell you, he’s a tough fucker. We won’t be able to scare him off.” Telling Pig to do or not do something he wasn’t inclined to was like the weatherman telling a thunderstorm not to come to town.

  “Snowball tough? I hear he can barely manage to climb out of bed in the morning. I’ll bet the only shot he’s seen fired in anger has been at a hockey at a hockey game.”

  “He was a rodeo rider. You go climb on a two-thousand-pound bull while its testicles are being crushed with a leather cinch and tell me how tough you have to be. If he wanted, he could have played hockey professionally in North America. You ever seen one of them get hit with a puck in the face and just go the bench and pull the teeth out himself so he can keep playing?”

  “The problem is he’s not afraid to die?” Bykov asked.

  “No, the problem is he’s afraid he won’t die.”

  “We’ve gone too far to back out now,” warned Bykov.

  “I’ve got an idea. Like you said, people keep on dying and someone’s going to notice.”

  “What?”

  “Anyone can commit a murder. It takes an artist to commit a suicide.”

  “What the hell does that mea
n?”

  "Say the magic word and you’ll find out."

  "Gelding."

  "Close enough.”

  “It’s atomic number is fifty five, but this is an isotope of the original element.” Magda was pissed. Snow had never seen her this angry before. Never seen her this anything.

  “What is?”

  “It looks like talcum powder and glows luminescent blue. It has a half life of thirty point zero zero seven years and emits both beta and gamma radiation. Only concrete, steel or lead can block gamma radiation. A safe dosage is one millisievert per year for non-nuclear workers. It’s used in medical devices and measuring gauges, like oil well logging. It’s also used to maintain atomic clocks. Even the non-radioactive form is highly poisonous.

  “What? What is?”

  “It’s the most reactive metal there is. In nature, it’s always combined with some other element. So once an area is contaminated, it gets attached to roofing material, concrete, even soil. It’s impossible to clean effectively. There was an accident in Goiana, Brazil from discarded medical waste. A hundred thousand people had to be screened. It took six months to clean up. It interacts disturbingly well with muscle tissue because it’s so similar to potassium, which muscles need to flex. That’s why there’s been so many sick people through the infirmary lately. There was another incident in 2006 in a junkyard in Tennessee. The United States. Two hundred thousand curies were leaking from a single cask. No one knows how it got there. It’d probably been leaking for fifty years.

  “Tell me. What?”

  “Cesium 137.”

  Snow looked at her blankly and shook his head.

  “The oil. It’s in the oil sample you gave me to have analyzed.”