But Stary was the strongest, the alpha male; and she was afraid of him.
Stary owned millions, and sometimes killed people (although not by his own hand, of course). Stary had gotten the nickname back in kindergarden, because his last name was Starkovsky. He was five years older than me. He was only forty when he died.
And today was the day he died.
Our bus is driving from one train station to the next. By the end of the night it will have been to each one in the city. At each stop the men in masks drag in more half-dead bums, until the bus is totally full, until the smell becomes completely unbearable, until we come full circle and end up back at Kursk. This is a mission of mercy. This is the route of suffering.
At Three Stations Square there was a whole line of frozen beggars. They all wanted to get a place on the bus, but the merciful took only those who couldn’t stand up. Only those who were lying in the dirty snow outside the line.
That seems pretty dumb to me. Why pick up only the weakest? If you’re going to try to rescue someone, it makes more sense to save the ones who can stand up. They’re stronger. They have a better chance of survival.
Hey, guys! Save the strongest! You can’t save the fallen ones anyway.
She kissed me for the first time at the Merciful Monsters Charity Ball.
She wasn’t wearing a costume. (Stary didn’t want his woman looking grotesque.) She was simply wrapped in expensive furs, her red hair down and a fox mask over her face. A simple one like the kind for kids. She was the most beautiful of all—not because everyone else came wearing fangs and bloody or half-decomposed faces, but just objectively. Because she was.
But I had other things on my mind. Her beauty paled in comparison with that of my new bank card.
On that night (as always) Foxy stuck close to Stary, and I (for the first time) tried to remain as far away from him as possible.
On that night Foxy was just a vague red spot, a red spot that was no longer important and that would remain part of the past.
On that night I ignored Foxy. I was busy thinking about my bank card, about its golden sheen, about the fifty grand on it. Everything turned out to be so much simpler than I’d expected. Destitute Russia, the fund that we had started, got good press, and the Merciful Monsters Charity Ball was covered in all the media. Stary was on TV and radio, and the announcers never forgot to announce the charity’s bank account number, or else it appeared at the bottom of the screen. Stary’s face appeared on huge billboards all over the city. Hey, there’s one of them now—by the Belorusskay train station, over by the exit to the bridge!
I designed the ad myself. It’s too bad the reeking losers in the bus are sleeping. It’s too bad they don’t see how well I had everything planned! In the picture, Stary has one arm around a neatly dressed but still unhappy-looking homeless woman, and his other around Philipp Kirkorov, who is dressed up like Freddy Krueger. Instead of a knife, there is a wad of dollars in Freddy’s ring-studded hand. He is handing the dollars to the bum, and the bum is leaning toward him—a true idyll. There was another version with Ksyusha Sobchak in a black evening gown with vampire fangs and a stack of dollars again. The slogan reads, Become a real human, show mercy (or, We don’t need blah-blah, we need ChaBa!). And, of course, the account number below.
Not many ordinary citizens wanted to become real humans, even little by little. Anyway, I hadn’t exactly been counting on ordinary citizens to begin with.
The most important of the posh guests were sent invitations embossed in (real) gold, and of course the bank account number was written on each one. Those monsters went all out.
Having journeyed through the accounts of various individuals and organizations (those of you who have sent money on such a journey will understand; as for those of you who haven’t, tough luck), a sum of half a million dollars ended up in my bank account. As a matter of fact, that is the same amount—$500,000—that Stary spent on the media campaign in preparation for ChaBa. The natural monetary cycle had gone full circle; nothing personal and nothing extra. Nobody knew a thing and everyone was happy. Stary had drawn some good PR, the merciful monsters had gotten their publicity, the television viewers had gotten their circuses, and I had received my bread. The only one who didn’t get anything was Destitute Russia; but no matter how much you give destitute Russia, it will never be enough. Even the guys in the gauze masks know that. Eh, guys?
Just in case, purely by intuition I stayed away from Stary at the ball. I also had a ticket in my pocket for a plane that would take me across the planet the very next day. If you were to examine the situation as a whole, then of course Stary had no real reason to be upset with me, even if he were to find out about my golden bank card. But Stary rarely examined a situation from afar. In that respect he was nearsighted. He looked at things close-up, made decisions quickly, and shot unexpectedly (though not himself, of course). Furthermore, I would no longer be working for him; and, well, yes—I had a ticket…
“Ladies, choose your partners!”
When the slow dance was announced, Death approached me slowly. She invited me without a word, motioning with her hand. She was not ugly. She was just your average old lady with a scythe, a skull mask, thick white hair, and a mantle that reached down to the floor; but I had no desire to dance with her. Nonetheless, I nodded politely and stepped toward her. The hand that beckoned me was wrapped in a white leather glove covered in little diamond studs. I took one look at that glove and I knew it would be better not to refuse her request. God knows whose spoiled little bitch I might offend in the process. It would be so stupid to get a bullet in the head, not because of my new credit card, shiny and golden like life itself, but because of somebody’s bitch dressed up like Death.
I took her by the waist, which was surprisingly slim beneath the shapeless clothing, with a slight feeling of disgust. We began to dance and she leaned close to me with her bony face. The synthetic locks of gray hair tickled my nose, and I prepared myself for the smell of rot, the smell of decomposition and mold, but I sensed none of this. There was only the smell of expensive perfume. Only when she laughed, only when she spoke quietly, only then did I notice the thick red locks peering out from beneath her wig.
“But you weren’t wearing a disguise…”
“I put one on so Stary wouldn’t recognize me.”
“Why do you want to hide from him?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?” asked Foxy. “So that I can dance with you.”
“You took that costume with you just so you could dance with me?”
“Yes,” said Foxy. “Yes, yes!”
And then she lifted her mask up, just a little, and she kissed me. Very gently. She tasted of cheap apricot-flavored chewing gum. She made my head spin. I lost my voice.
Stary’s guys were nearby. Some of them were even looking at us funny.
“They see us!” I gasped, leading her to the center of the hall.
“Not us. They saw you,” said Foxy calmly. “You, dancing with Death. They couldn’t have recognized me.”
And she kissed me again, and I thought it was a good thing I was wearing loose trousers. At first I was thinking of wearing those tight black ones…
Then she asked me: “How are you going to spend your five hundred grand?”
And at that moment the size of my pants didn’t matter, because all of that blood poured right back to my brain and temples. My head stopped spinning, and for a moment I let go of Foxy, but then hugged her and pulled her toward me again. I shook her to the music and asked her the stupidest question that I could, given the situation. “How do you know? How?”