I stopped for a smoke and a rubbernecking as the cops went inside, and the paramedics brought out the gurney with the lifeless body under a white sheet. The wind snagged the edge of the sheet and it fluttered, exposing the bluing face of businessman Ipatov and his naked shoulder, branded with the cruel marks of the electric iron.
“Racketeers,” I informed Petro.
He scoffed. “You don’t say.”
His scorn was justified, I thought as I transferred the jug of beer from one cradling arm to the other and ashed my cigarette with a flick of lower lip. Racketeers overtook cancer, heart disease and traffic accidents on the list of death causes of common businessmen somewhere in the late eighties; by the early nineties, they had all but run the other ailments off the mortality and morbidity reports. As Russian business grew healthier, so did its practitioners-nary a single one of them died of any diseases.
One of the paramedics, a young lad with a blond and green Mohawk, smiled at me. “Can’t go anywhere.” He slouched against the gurney and lit up. “Fucking canaries are blocking us in.” His gesture indicated the yellow cruisers huddled behind the van. “Assholes. They’re still investigating the scene.”
The other paramedic, an aging man with a paunch and chronically disapproving eyes, nodded at my beer jug. “Rest it on the gurney, son. Heavy, ain’t it?”
I confirmed and set the jug next to the lifeless remains of my once neighbor. I didn’t know yet that beer and the recently dead from violence were a dangerous combination.
“Did you know him?” the old paramedic asked, indicating Ipatov’s outline under the sheet with a jab of his cigarette.
“Neighbor,” I said. “Seen him around.”
“His hands were lashed together with that blue electrical tape,” the young paramedic said. “The cops said his employees called the police when he didn’t show up for a meeting this morning. His wife doesn’t even know yet. The cops said, take him to the morgue; his wife won’t thank us if we leave this for her to find.”
Petro emerged from the front doors, passing by the murder of old ladies on the bench. “Electric iron?” he said as he reached the gurney.
I nodded and squinted up at the stingy May sun. “Getting warm.”
“Yeah,” said the younger paramedic and licked his lips thirstily. “Who knows how long we’ll be stuck here?”
By all rights, I should have been winging my way home, up the stairs to the third story, beer under arm. But the weather was nice, the company seemed all right, and the beer was best drunk with friends or, missing that, acquaintances. “You want any beer?” I said to Petro and the paramedics.
They kicked dirt for a bit but agreed.
“Funny how it is,” the older paramedic named Misha said, taking a large swallow out of the jug he held with both hands. “Here’s a man, who lived, lived, and then died. May he rest in peace.”
His younger fellow, Grisha, took the jug from his mentor. “God giveth,” he said and drank hastily, as if worried about the taketh away part.
The old ladies looked at us disapprovingly, and I tried my best to ignore them.
But not Petro. “What are you staring at, hags?” he challenged, and waited for his turn with the jug. “Haven’t seen a dead man before?”
The grandmas squawked, indignant, but avoided the altercation.
Yes, the dead man. The telltale signs of the iron torture indicated that the thugs wanted something-probably money. I wondered why Ipatov didn’t just give in to their demands. Or it could be a turf war. “Hey Petro, do you remember what sort of business he ran?”
“Money,” he said. “All businesses make is money. Did you notice how they don’t manufacture anything anymore? All the food and shit is imported. Even vodka.”
“Yeah,” I said, and glanced apprehensively at the half-empty jug as it made its way back to me. I would miss it.
The four of us killed the jug, and as its amber contents diminished, Misha’s loquacity grew. “You know why a Russian man is driven to drink?” He didn’t wait for an answer and gestured expansively. “It’s cause of all the space. Steppes, tundra, everything. You have all these open horizons and the human soul can’t take all that sober.”
I could see a weak point or two in this theory but didn’t point them out, enchanted by the image of a soul cowering in fear of horizons.
“What do you do?” Grisha asked me.
“I’m an actuary,” I told him. “Manage risks.”
“He should’ve hired you,” Grisha said, pointing at dead Ipatov.
I shrugged. There was no point in telling them that the risk of death in businessmen was so close to certainty that the only thing I ever recommended was saving enough money for a coffin. They liked them ostentatious. I should probably attend Ipatov’s funeral, I thought. This is when the dead man’s memories first stirred in me.
#
Businessman Ipatov led a quiet life for most of his existence-I remembered his grey adolescence as a treasurer for his school chapter of Komsomol, his joyless pursuit of a college degree in one institute of technology or another, his brief courtship and marriage. After that, I could not remember anything.
Not being given to superstition, I arrived to the only logical conclusion-the dead man’s soul and/or memory had entered mine, either due to my extended proximity to the gurney or to the consumption of beer that rested against him. If I were a dead soul, I supposed, I too would be drawn to the golden shine of the beer jug, I too would prefer it to the cold eternity of whatever awaited Ipatov as an alternative. Still, I found it disconcerting; sleep had proven elusive that night, as I kept reliving Ipatov’s tremulous first masturbatory experiences and his terror of the laws of thermodynamics and physical chemistry.
I went outside and looked at the windows of the façade. As expected, there was light in Petro’s, and I walked to the second floor and knocked. He opened quickly, as if he were waiting just behind the door. His eyes were haunted.
“Come in,” he said, and led me to the kitchen. My mother always said that the kitchen is the heart of every home; Petro’s apartment’s heart was clogged with crap that spilled into the swelling pericardium of his one-room efficiency. “Sorry for the mess.”