On the last page, a Montblanc pen will trace out thirteen lines:
- Yegor Voronin
- Miroslav Likhachev
- Marina Belskaya
- Anatoly Vyrubov
- Chicha
- Gennady Lozhechnikov
- Vadim Troshkin
- Kirill Stamm
- Elena Zholtova
- Vera Panskaya
- Veronika Sergeyevna
- Anastasia Igorevna
- Roman Peskov
The pen will flutter, rock up and down, and in neat, even strokes begin crossing out one line, then a second, a third… With the thirteenth, the last one, a voice will sound from the driver’s seat:
— There he is.
The passenger in the back seat will set the daybook down on the seat and give the order:
— Go!
While the driver starts up the bright red “BMW-325,” pulls out of hiding, and picks up speed, the passenger will manage to:
- put on his gloves;
- sigh: “myself, myself, all by myself…”;
- take a Kalashnikov out of the sports bag;
- flip the safety to firing position;
- rack the bolt;
- level the barrel out the open window;
- breathe in;
- pull the trigger;
- breathe out: “the last one…”
The cabin will fill with the sour smell of gunpowder smoke. The BMW, tires screeching, will tear forward with a black streak on the asphalt and vanish behind a giant slab the color of baked milk. It will vanish, only to turn up five minutes later abandoned in a courtyard on Ordynka.
Behind a bench by the playground, a Kalashnikov will press the grass flat.
In the sandbox a daybook will rustle its pages. That is a light whirlwind making sense of the stains, the ink blots and the scrawls. Without result.
All is vanity and a chasing after the wind.
The sky will change from pale straw to lead. A pre-storm gloom will wrap the city, and in the sky an echo will sound:
— A dull way to live, gentlemen. Dull…
