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
Facewise, Ryabets resembles a skull: 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
