The leaf-smell strengthened; so did the heat and the wet, till at the inmost heart of the banya the air seemed virtually unbreathable, a thick gruel of steam and shadows. Chekuskin came to the alert. Around the iron stove, Kolya’s chief cronies were lounging on tiered benches. Enormous in the midst of them, shining with sweat, bright-eyed, wholly naked, sat the thief-king himself, every part of him from his neck down engraved with artwork. But someone was sobbing in the corner, down in the dark where Chekuskin could make out nothing of them but knees and hair, not even their gender, only that they were young. Every time he had come before, he had been received with a kind of parody of courtliness, a slightly bored and slightly contemptuous approximation to a business manner, interrupted by laughter. But this time the mood was quite different. Kolya was swollen with good humour, as if the sobs were something he was eating, and fattening on. It was a hopeless sound: whatever had been done to the person in the corner, it had come as no surprise. And now Kolya had turned to Chekuskin as toward the next amusement the day had brought him. He might have been drunk or high; he was certainly excited. His grin let you see all his teeth. His gaze was an omnivore’s. There were cards in his hand, and in the hands of the cronies too, but while they had little piles of jewellery and damp bills in front of them, he had nothing at all except a folded razor.
‘Little man!’ he roared. ‘My little man! Hey, what d’you think, boys? Is my little man in the game? What’s he worth, would you say?’
Chekuskin’s mouth had dried. He had heard about the thieves’ marathon card sessions. They were famous. They had run on and on, it was said, through the Arctic night in the camps, and when the money ran out, the stakes only grew wilder, with the players pumped up on the pleasures of risk and betting fingers, ears, eyes, lives. Usually not their own. God knows how long Kolya had been on this particular jag. Chekuskin reached for all the swagger he could find. He did not look in the corner again. He gave his best grin back, though his teeth were the small regular grinders of some minor mammalian scavenger, a rat at best.
‘Worth this,’ he said, and tossed the bankroll through the steam. Kolya grabbed it from the air and brought it close to his face. He didn’t look at it though. He held it next to his ear, lifting his chin to give Chekuskin a beautiful view of the picture across his collarbones, where a blonde in tears was choking on the monster cock of a goatish commissar with a star of David on his forehead, and horns. Kolya palped the money once, twice, and stuck a red tongue out, testing the ambient molecules of wealth with his taste buds. Rumour had it that Kolya had, in fact, once pulled the walking-larder stunt on a political he persuaded to escape with him in the dawn of his greatness fifteen years ago, and dined at his leisure on intellectual during the long walk home. The cronies waited. Chekuskin waited. Then the bright eyes fixed upon him crinkled and seemed to dim a little. Kolya looked down. When he looked up again, self-interest and calculation, thank God, were back. Kolya put the bankroll carefully down in front of him on its end – opened the razor – shut the razor – balanced it on top of the cylinder of cash.
‘Nah,’ he said regretfully. ‘You’re all right. Well, Mis-ter Chekus-kin,’ drawing out the syllables, ‘was there anything you needed?’
‘Copper pipe,’ said Chekuskin, and he was pleased his voice was steady.
‘See Ali outside. He’ll sort you out. Anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Good. Fuck off, now, there’s a nice little man. Not you!’ added Kolya, as the boy with a broken nose made to follow. ‘C’mere, kid.’ Chekuskin didn’t look back.
Now they gave him a towel, and he rubbed at his sodden scalp and neck while he gave his order to the Tatar who handled Kolya’s trade in stolen building supplies. He had been telling the truth when he told Stepovoi that he was not a black marketeer; but just as his corporate business necessarily merged on one side into the ordinary world of individual favours, so it bordered on the other with the kingdom of the thieves, and now and again there needed to be traffic across that border. Sometimes there was just no other speedy way to find the small critical quantity of something a client needed to get a construction job finished, to get a facility up and going. Kolya’s men controlled the building sites and gathered together for onward sale all the stuff that walked away with the workers when the day ended, all the tools, all the paint, all the cement, all the wood, all the plumbing. The monthly payment to Kolya bought him shopping rights to the loot. Although, in truth, before it was payment it was tribute; it bought him permission to operate at all in Kolya’s city, and protection, should any other ‘boxing club’ be stupid enough to try and put the squeeze on him. What use they found for the money, he didn’t know. The thieves were literal people. Sometimes they even robbed banks. For sure the cash circulated between them, as a marker of status, and if you cared abouty the most immediate components of the good life, as opposed to housing and healthcare and foreign holidays and so on, there were certainly things you could buy with it to eat, and to drink, and to smoke, and to wear. He guessed that Kolya’s boys didn’t queue much.
Outside the night was coming on for real, and the snow had finally begun, spiralling down in slow goosefeather clumps; but the smoothing hummocks of the unfinished city were still wide and white and calm after the little inferno of the banya, and he floundered over them with relief. Through the flurries, he saw the shape of a car pulled over by the main road and was glad the taxi had waited. He got closer; his heart sank. Not the taxi. The Moskvitch that was waiting with its lights off, snow-spatter caking the word on its side, the embers of two lit cigarettes coming and going in the front seat, was a squad car.
The front window wound down with a judder as he approached.
‘Lieutenant,’ said Chekuskin, more reckless in tone than he would have been if not for Kolya. ‘What a treat.’
‘Button your mouth, you little cunt,’ said the policeman. ‘Get in. We’re giving you a lift.’
The car was not in good shape. The muffler banged and the gears stridulated as it lurched off the snowbank and away. Also, someone had been sick in the back and the mess had been incompletely cleaned up. Chekuskin pulled the tails of his overcoat up and sat as far as he could from it.
‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Not what you’re used to, right? Not your usual, uh, travelling carriage. You see,’ he said to the cop driving, ‘Chekuskin here is used to the good life. He likes to have things nice. He lives in a hotel and he drinks fucking champagne. And he eats fucking caviar, am I right? And he makes more in one fucking afternoon than you or I will see in a month. And do you know why that is, son? Tell the boy why that is, Chekuskin.’
‘I’m –’
‘Shut the fuck up. The reason is, that Chekuskin here is an honest-to-goodness parasite. A louse. Just like in the papers! A real one! A soft-handed, profiteering, piece-of-shit parasite who thinks he’s too good to do a day’s work.’
The driver grunted. It was time to stop this: the lieutenant’s voice had the dangerous sound of someone working themselves up.
‘You do remember,’ said Chekuskin, ‘that I have an understanding with your captain?’
‘Oh, you do. I know that. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he? Everyone’s a friend of Chekuskin’s,’ the lieutenant told the driver. ‘You can’t turn round in this city without bumping into a friend of Chekuskin’s. Look under a rock and what do you see wriggling there? Some friends of –’
‘Where are you taking me?’ said Chekuskin, urgently. They had just turned the wrong way at the junction, and were heading east out of the city on the Tyumen road. The red oval glow of the sunset swung into place in the rear window, obscured by moving veils of snowfall, sinking down behind the city’s spike-forest of pylons and cranes and gantries. The wipers laboured ineffectually on the windscreen. There was nothing ahead on the highway but snow and dark.
‘For a little ride,’ said the liutenant. The driver grunted. ‘Where was I?’ said the lieutenant. ‘Oh yeah. Che
kuskin’s friends. Now, Chekuskin does favours for all his friends. So what do you think he does for the captain? I will tell you. Our good old parasite here, wriggle wriggle, is also, what do you know, a snitch. You should see his file. He’s been helping us out for twenty-eight whole years. And not just us, either. The security boys up the street, too. Very laudable. Very civic-minded. Of course, some people might call that ratting out your friends. Some people might say that meant you couldn’t trust Chekuskin any further than you could throw him. But Chekuskin knows which side his bread is buttered. He gives us a titbit here and a titbit there, enough to keep us happy; but he looks after himself first of all, doesn’t he. Doesn’t he, Mr Chekuskin? He rats out everyone just enough to get along.’
‘I have an arrangement –’ said Chekuskin.
‘Yeah, yeah. With the captain. But you don’t have an arrangement with me. And the thing is, I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking about you, and all your friends; and I said to myself, now, if those were real friends, you’d be a very well-protected man, you’d be the last person anyone would want to fuck with, because think how upset all those powerful friends of yours would be, if anything happened to you. Then I said to myself, pull yourself together, here. This is a parasite and a snitch we’re talking about. And everyone who ever deals with him has got to know it, has got to have a little bit of a feeling of what a weasel he is. Real friends, they’d die for you. Your friends – well, I doubt they care whether you live or die, do they, really. They’d be, what, mildly pissed off if they didn’t get their next favour from you. And that’d be about it. Where are we?’ he asked the driver. ‘About Kilometre 8?’
‘Just gone,’ said the driver.
‘This’ll do.’
The Moskvitch slewed, clanking, to the side of the highway. A single pair of blue-white truck headlights was in sight in the distance. Otherwise, all was quiet.
‘So I thought to myself,’ said the lieutenant, ‘I could do some clean-up. I could wipe away just a little bit of the shit that clings to this shitty world. Nothing to stop me.’
This has got be a bluff, thought Chekuskin. This has got to be theatre. It’s just a shakedown. But the lieutenant got out of the car, ripped the back door open and dragged Chekuskin out by his collar. Vodka-breath came off him, close to, and he moved like someone who was very drunk. He took toppling strides away from the road, with Chekuskin pulling along behind, hooked onto one big fist. His toes dug two white runnels. Snow descended million-fold. The driver followed more cautiously. The lieutenant puffed and blew.
On the far side of a row of fir trees, the lieutenant stopped. He pulled Chekuskin to his feet, then on up, hoisted by the fist under his chin, till his short legs in their nondescript trousers dangled in mid-air and he was looking down into the policeman’s red, bristling face, into bloodshot eyes blinking convulsively as flakes spangled them again and again.
‘What do you want?’ squeaked Chekuskin.
The lieutenant hit him; punched him in the gut with his free hand. It hurt amazingly much.
‘Piece-of-shit life,’ said the lieutenant meditatively, as if taking inventory. ‘Piece-of-shit flat. Piece-of-shit job. Piece-of-shit car.’
‘Tell me what you want!’
‘… piece-of-shit car.’
‘I can get you a new car!’
‘You can, can you?’
‘Yes!’
The lieutenant pulled him close, nose to nose. The two bloodshot eyes swam together, and it took Chekuskin a moment to realise that the cyclopean shuttering he was seeing a centimetre away was, in fact, a wink.
‘Much obliged,’ whispered the lieutenant, and dropped Chekuskin into a snowdrift.
It seemed better not to get up. He lay there, gasping and leaking tears, with his coat rucked over him and the scald of the snow on his neck, till he was sure the theatre was finished. It was. The footsteps moved away from him, crunch and sough, crunch and sough; a burst of laughter ended in door slams; the Moskvitch hacked into life; the engine-note rose, and receded. Then he rolled over onto his face. That way up, gravity squeezed the soft sac of his abused stomach: he threw his lunch up in three watery gushes, and it sank away through the fresh fluff on the surface of the drift. When he rose onto all fours, his weight pushed his hands down to the hard old crust beneath, as rough and granular as a cold coral reef. It took a backwards scrabble and twist to get him out. He wobbled to his knees, spat, wiped his mouth with snow; stayed there with his hands over his face in the dark, as if he were praying, though he was not, nor devising a revenge, nor making a plan, nor doing anything but attend to his breath blowing shakily in and out through his palms. The breath still moving. The world’s air still feeding the life in him, whatever he deserved. No black bundle under the pines, leaking dark blood, soon covered over with the new fall and dropping away, dropping deep, into the geologic layers of winter, into the cold, into the past, into the dark. No. Instead, a little more of this moving wind, a little more breathing; a little more jinking and weaving and dodging, in the bright world.
But it was not bright out now. It was full dark, and damn near as thick with snow as in a blizzard, albeit the fall was all a slow vertical tumble rather than a horizontal blow. He was disappearing just kneeling here. The lieutenant had only meant to give him a scare, but he might have killed him anyway, by accident, if Chekuskin didn’t stir himself and get to shelter. Dizzily, he stood, and waded back to the highway, beating at the litter of perfect mathematical beauty which had dropped from the sky to his hair and his shoulders and his arms.
No traffic at all was visible on the Tyumen road. He tottered across to the other side and set off walking, his city shoes slipping where the sludge in the wheel-tracks had refrozen. He tried to calculate. Kilometre 8, or thereabouts, so only three or four kilometres to the edge of the construction zone, and only four or five kilometres to buildings that were warm and inhabited. But he was feeling quite strange. He ached from the blow. It seemed to have spread out from where it had landed, and to be suffusing itself into his whole upper body. Also, with nothing in his guts he was remarkably cold. It took effort just to keep following the roadway. He could feel the flakes whispering down onto his bare head, though he couldn’t see them in the black ahead, except as a flickering of the darkness itself, a pulsed flutter like the static on a television screen. Where was his hat? In the back seat of the police car, he realised, along with the briefcaseThat was all right: there was nothing left in it anyhow, the notebook was safe in his pocket. He thought he probably wouldn’t go and ask for them back. The idea made him giggle. He tottered on, and on. Nothing shone through the fluttering static ahead to tell him the city was there; no streetlamps, no red warning lights on cranes. Very gradually though, he saw, the static was brightening, rising from black on black, to grey on grey, to cream on cream, to a busy variegated gold, as if someone were adjusting a knob on the television. The volume was increasing too, all the way from the whisper up to a roar. The phenomenon was so interesting that he forgot to walk. He swayed and contemplated it, till the giant MAZ truck right behind him sounded its horn and made him jump.
‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ said the driver, with his head out of the side window. Then, incredulously, ‘Mr Chekuskin?’
He let solicitous hands help him up the step into the cab, settle him in blissful warmth in the corner of the big front seat. The driver’s face swam up, young, moustached, curious.
‘Man, you look really rough,’ he said.
The card index spat out a card.
‘Hello, Vassily,’ croaked Chekuskin. Vassily drove quarry materials, sometimes sold petrol from his tank to Kolya’s lot. Vassily was a serious Spartak fan. He should talk football – but the glowing comfort of the cab undid him, the flush of heat in his face made it necessary that his eyes be shut, and he slipped into instant, irresistible sleep. Vassily shrugged, and put the MAZ in gear.
*
‘Mr Chekuskin? Mr Chekuskin?’
‘What �
��’
‘Where can I drop you?
The truck was grinding along one of the city avenues, streetlamps jerking past. Things looked suddenly different in the cab, and not just because sodium light was shining in, shuffling its dull orange fingers across the plastic of the seat and the metal of the dash. Ordinariness had resumed; the world had gone ordinary again. For a confused instant, he could remember the cab as a place like a rich little jewel box, blazing with fierce beads of colour, but already the memory was elusive, in the face of the magazine pictures of Spartak’s 1964 team line-up pasted to the dashboard; already it was shrivelling, it had dwindled, it had skittered to nothing like a drop of water on a hotplate. He wished he could say the same for the memory of the scene with the lieutenant, but only a thin skin of indifference had formed over it during his brief sleep. He wanted very much to duck straight back into oblivion and let that skin thicken, so that he shouldn’t feel, anywhere nearby, what he had felt as he dangled. He could go home – he didn’t live in a hotel – and he could climb into bed, and the widow lady he rented from, as round and comfortable as a pouter pigeon, might climb in with him, as she had been known to do from time to time. He could –
‘Mister?’
Chekuskin looked at his watch. Improbably, it was only five past six. He wavered. The bed called. It pulled at him like gravity. He felt unready for anything else. But he was alive, and living creatures work. He could certainly use a drink.
‘The station, please,’ he said, and the rest of the way he made himself make conversation, trying to warm up the instrument again.
‘What on earth were you doing out there?’ asked Vassily.
‘Long story,’ said Chekuskin.
‘Bit of a mishap, eh?’
‘Something like that.’
Vassily was still puzzled, but he had the egocentricity of youth, and when he found he wasn’t going to get a tale out of Chekuskin, he let him change the subject happily enough to his, Vassily’s, own life and opinions.
Red Plenty Page 30
