The transvestite brought in two glasses of wine from the next room. And Maxim realized that he wouldn’t drink it even at gunpoint.
He took the glass.
“What’s wrong?”
“I want to watch you drink. You’re so beautiful, I’m sure you drink beautifully too. My cock is ready for action just watching you.”
The transvestite laughed, and took two sips. His Adam’s apple went up and down two times and then stilled. It wasn’t that big. But it was obviously a man’s.
Maxim set his glass down.
“Why don’t we start off with the usual question,” he said, his fingers locking around the transvestite’s throat. Not too tight, but probing. “Who are you working for? Tell me quietly.”
In all likelihood, at that very moment Nikita was glued to his own transmitter, which connected to an opponent’s webcam and mic, and it was extremely important that he not hear a thing. Each player had a transmitter that allowed him to hook up to his opponent’s channels and receive picture and sound from their webcams, broadcast nonstop. The pictures helped players track each other down if they recognized their opponent’s location.
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do. Now listen carefully: this is your one chance to stay alive. Tell me the truth. Everything, and in great detail. Who hired you and why? And what do they want from me?”
The transvestite shrank back. And spilled the beans. About how they sometimes sent people to him who he didn’t know. And he “served” them, the same way he had served Maxim. Then he would put clonidine into their wine. And when his client fell asleep, he would call a certain Artyom, who would finish them off while they were still knocked out. Then, at night, the body would be taken away by two bald guys in a jeep. The transvestite knew nothing more. The answer why seemed pretty clear, but who was behind this? That was the question.
Another question was how had Nikita turned into such a cunt? The traitor! But Maxim tried not to think about that.
“You don’t kill?”
“No,” answered the transvestite, blanching.
“So you guys have a division of labor and everything. You got one son of a bitch working as a decoy, another giving sexual favors, and the third does the killing. Four and five get rid of the body. You guys are a goddamn hockey team!”
“Please don’t kill me,” whispered the transvestite.
“Did you tell me the truth?”
“Yeah, honest. In the beginning I didn’t know what was going on. I just wanted to make a little dough. But then, after that first time, I couldn’t refuse. They’d get me too.”
“All right, you can live. Call him.”
“Who?”
“The killer, Artyom.”
When the door opened, Artyom got a blow on the head with the handle of a gun. As he was collapsing, Maxim saw that it was Nikita.
What a fucking world, Maxim thought. What a goddamn fucking world.
He even spat on the floor. Rather, he spat on Nikita’s stained jacket, which was his uniform.
“All right, holy man, start talking,” said Maxim when Nikita came to.
Nikita was quiet.
“Do you realize you’re not getting out of here alive, you Judas?”
Nikita nodded.
“Did you kill Arkady?”
Nikita nodded his head again, staring at the floor.
“Talk.”
“I had to.”
“What, does your five-year-old daughter have leukemia?” asked Maxim, recalling the thirty-year-old whose neck he’d broken, snapped just like a chicken’s.
“No, I owe big money. They took my wife. Gave me three months to pay.”
“How much?”
“Five hundred grand.”
“Holy shit!” Maxim roared. “What are you doing? I have the money. I have a million! I could have—”
“How was I supposed to know that? It’s like everybody just kind of up and left. Life fuckin’ pulled us apart in all different directions.”
“Okay. I give you my word that I’ll get your wife out of there. Now talk.”
So Nikita started talking again. He told Maxim how the program manager had decided to play under the table. Of course, he kept that secret from the organizers, who paid the prize money. Player number four was supposed to get ten million. No risks on his part, because the manager had put together an unofficial team. That was where Nikita was working. The unofficial team had two functions: guarding number four, and not letting opponents get near him. Also, they got rid of “extra” players using any means possible, including what they had tried on Maxim. The payoff for the mongrel team was supposed to come from the prize money that number four would receive. Nikita agreed. How much the others were getting he didn’t know; naturally, the manager would be taking the largest cut.
When Nikita finished, Maxim handed him a gun with one shot in it.
“Don’t worry about your wife, I’ll get her out. But don’t try any funny stuff, cause you know my response time was always better than yours. Do I make myself clear?”
Nikita nodded and moved into the far room.
Time slowed down to almost a standstill. It got as thick as ketchup that doesn’t want to come out of the bottle in the freezing cold.
Outside, a baby started crying.
Water rumbled in the pipes.
Then it got quiet.
Then a shot rang out.
“That’s it,” said Maxim. “Get dressed.”
The transvestite, chalk-white with fear, started.
“No!”
“Idiot. You’re going with me. You’ll be a witness.”
“Why?!”
“You’re not on trial, darling. But I have to explain to the investors why I crushed all those snakes and cut the manager’s balls off before I killed him.”
Maxim crossed the streetcar tracks and jumped the low barrier dividing the fetid boulevard from the street stinking of exhaust fumes. He strode toward the house with columns, digging the heels of his massive lace-up boots into the road. The manager had twenty minutes left to live. His moronic bodyguards, with earphone wires sticking out from underneath their jacket collars, had even less time.
The transvestite hurried along, sticking close by, in a tight English skirt, his face crumpled in fear. From an outsider’s perspective, it might have looked like a stately middle-aged man walking an exotic, purebred dog.
A bum sitting on a park bench took a sip from the bottle of extra strong Ohota he had just found—miraculously, almost full. What a wonderful evening, he thought to himself.
DECAMERON
by Igor Zotov
Silver Pine Forest
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Facewise, Ryabets resembles a skulclass="underline" gaunt, with a deep-set, chalk-white gaze and lips slightly parted—a permanent grin of large yellowed teeth. At school they called him Skull behind his back but didn’t dare to his face, so they gave him a nickname from his last name: Ryaba.
Now that he’s on the wrong side of fifty, the skull resemblance applies to his whole frame: shriveled and bony.
At breakfast Ryabets is reading the Moskovskii Komsomolets police blotter. While he’s tapping around the butt end of his egg with a spoon, while he’s peeling off the shell, he skims through the second-grade girl lost in the taiga outside Krasnoyarsk—takes a bite of buttered bread and chews—the drunk officer who shot a soldier—takes a sip of ersatz coffee—the…
Under “Private Prison with Torture Chamber in Silver Pine Forest,” it says that the cops picked up a naked vagrant wearing handcuffs, right there on the street in broad daylight, with a cracked skull and evidence of beatings to his body. The vagrant called himself Andryukha and managed to say he’d been tortured in a cellar with “electricity and tongs.” He whispered the address, 43 Second Line, then fell silent. They didn’t get Andryukha to No. 67 Hospital in time. He died in a traffic jam without regaining consciousness. The cops went to the address but the jailers were gone and the trail was cold. But the prison was remarkable: three cells with a stun gun, tongs, a rack, a Spanish boot, and all kinds of other things. The two corpses were also Silver Pine Forest vagrants. An investigation is under way.