I came out to the bus stop and scanned the accumulation of potential passengers with my eyes. Nobody was selling drugs. Hmm, this isn’t Hamburg for you. There it would have been simpler. There I would have gone to St. Pauli, to the Reeperbahn. Stop.
I jumped out into the roadway, flagged down a private driver and rattled off the question that had just rustled through the convolutions of my brain: «Where do they sell gear round here?»
The driver twirled a finger at his temple and, smoking away, sawed off into the distance. But I, an exultant, joyful seeker of adventure, did manage to come to terms with some taxi driver: for a twenty-five he’d whisk me off to a place known to every sufferer – to the Cheryomushkinsky market.
Yes. Whatever anyone may say, I’m a smart lad, even if my nose is a potato, my cheekbones stick out and my gaze looks dim. That’s all for show, lads. In fact my little head cooks up a storm.
Judge for yourselves. Would flap-eared small-timers really go poking into Germany to push dope out of the blue? No. Only a solid outfit could take a risky step like that – one that had crushed the local market underfoot, run into a crisis of overproduction, and therefore decided to strike out for new frontiers, so to speak. From that logical construction two things followed. First: Hans had sniffed in the courier’s appearance the smell of unhealthy competition from the East, and so had summoned me to snuff the competitors out in the bud. Logical. Second: the suckers who had set their minds on competing with Hans will be beaten. By me. Because I know where to look for them. If they have flooded the whole of Russia with their chemicals, then somewhere there must be retailers pushing the product to the population. My task: to take a retailer by the arse, find out the address of the base and neatly bring the copper basin down on it. Also all logical. Hurrah! And here, it seems, we’ve arrived.
Well, and so what?
I spent a solid two hours loitering around the market and the surrounding back alleys, made friends with three emaciated junkies, picked out a couple of greedy potion-merchants among the idlers, and cursed everything under the sun. Just as Mother Russia used to take pride in the naturalness of her produce, so she takes pride in it to this day. What was being traded was exclusively natural dope – poppy straw, grass, opium rags. From the synthetic preparations offered to me came the smell of hospital-and-pharmacy criminality a mile off. Nothing home-cooked and chemical was on offer. For the fiddly word «empathogen» they were ready to smash my face in without bothering to work out what it meant.
As soon as suspicious, appraising looks of the «shall we do the little sucker in?» variety began sticking to my back, I cleared off, glad along the way to be alive.