A beep scratched the silence — eight-bit, cutting-edge. Vest Guy unclipped the mobile from under his belly, pressed it to his ear, froze, listening… op!… and, in a manner wildly out of proportion to his build, started rattling away like a straight-A student at the blackboard:
— Yegorka! Yeah! Hey! Sweet. Yeah! Yeah-eah! Like we agreed. In position! Fat-cat businessmen! Yeah-eah! Like we set it up. I owe you one. We’ll be there by five! For sure. Yeah I remember, I remember. At Tretyakovka. The Terem place. Pinned it down. For sure! No shit, I swear! I’m telling you! Two weeks! I swear on my teeth. What? I stand by every word, I’m telling you! Yeah. Later. Later, I said!!! Take care!!!
Whether he was putting on a show for some distant boss or just trying to squeeze it all into his prepaid call minutes was hard to say.
What was certain was that, once the call ended, the gang leader spat at his feet, tucked the mobile back under his belly, and went back to his conversation. Just as slow and stately as he’d been before the call.
I couldn’t hear, only see how his associates nodded their heads, shrugged their shoulders. Their shaved heads were pressed down into shoulder-mounted mounds of muscle, and from above — from my window — the gangsters looked like busts that had somehow sprouted legs, straight from the homeland of heroes. Any nodding of the head was actually accomplished by a wiggle somewhere down around the hips, while the entire upper structure remained paralyzed. Except for the facial expressions. Those drifted lazily between “don’t get it” and “sweet” and back again. There were no other destinations available.
Pasha broke away from the staff and approached the athletic busts. He delivered something elaborate, the spitting image of Ostap Bender introducing himself to Elena Stanislavovna. The gangster’s reply was short and loud as a duel shot: “You’re a corpse. Got it?”
Two-meter-tall Pasha shrank down to dwarf-size, hobbled away from the gangsters, and limped over to the general director. He poured a hot whisper into the director’s ears.
The gym-rats lined up in a row. Their movements — slow, confident, unstoppable — were the movements of excavators. At any moment they could scoop anyone up and bury them on the spot. Every gesture carried an excavator’s grace and an excavator’s inevitability. The air grew thick with diesel fumes. With my sense of smell, my sense of touch, with my very guts, I understood what “heavy industry” meant.
I felt sick. I peeled myself off the window, pressed my back to the wall, squeezed my eyes shut, str—str—straining to slam shut the curtain of my consciousness, stuck fast in confusion…
Heavy footsteps pulled me back from the edge of fainting. I crawled away from the wall and flattened myself into the vinyl chair. Took up my post.
To the creak of the door hinges, I tried on the mask of a vigilant guard and was knocked clean off my stool. Pasha slugged me in the ear. With a mighty fist, watermelon-sized at the very least.
My brain split into pieces, scattered into shreds from the ringing inside my skull. My breath caught. Pasha grabbed me by the collar and shook me like a handkerchief:
— You’re fired!
I bobbed my head up and down and slid downward, back against the wall, down-down-down…
Pavel sped up my descent with a smack to the crown of my head and dashed off into the office. As for me, the eternal outsider, a lifelong cripple, I hit my tailbone against the baseboard and my slide came to a stop.
