My gaze slid across the interiors, then moved past the window. Maybe some bird would chirp: “Chirpy-chirp!”? Or some stray cat would meow: “Don’t sweat it, student, we’ll pull through”?
No.
No!
And once again, no!!!
In the courtyard, flagrantly violating every local parking rule, stood three cars, parked crosswise across everything in sight. The director’s cherry-red Ford Sierra, a red “девятка” (that’s a VAZ-2109, a “Lada Nine”), and a gray Nissan Patrol with tinted windows, not local, looking like one of the statues off Easter Island.
Four employees of the firm shuffled around by the Nine. Three of them looked wilted; the fourth was ruffling through a notebook. That was Pasha, chief of the watchmen and fixer of problems. He was the one who’d climbed through the window and woken me up. He could’ve done anything to me... and plenty of things I wouldn’t have liked, too...
A door slammed. The foursome in the courtyard exchanged glances, shifted, and froze.
The director, coming out of the office, joined his subordinates. He looked just as wilted. The guy in the vest, who’d followed him out, radiated megawatts of pleasure. The doors of the Patrol flew open and two giants tumbled out, wearing black t-shirts tucked into dark blue tracksuit bottoms. Huge, square, a perfect match for the vehicle. In five or six synchronized strides they reached their leader and planted themselves, legs spread wide. Vest Guy said something quiet, turned his face toward the office staff. Where a neck should have been, there loomed a solid, inflexible lump of muscle. The face turned along with the whole torso. The figure’s expression seemed to be asking:
— So what’s the deal here? I don’t get it…
I didn’t get it either, and shifted my gaze to the ones shuffling around by the director’s car.
I got it! I got it all!
It was simple and unambiguous: gangsters had come down on the firm!
Carefully, sidling along, I raised myself up and, terrified of the creak as if it were nuclear war, slowly, gently, like a sapper defusing a mine, cracked open the little window vent, so I could not just watch, but listen in too.
Pasha and Vladislav Arkadyevich were muttering something private and secret to each other, inaudible at this distance. Pavel, judging by his gestures, was hammering some sensible point into the director, jabbing a finger at his notebook. The director, limp, introverted, altogether nothing much, kept shaking his head. Every so often Pasha erupted into exclamations, like Zhvanetsky’s barge demolition man. The rest of the staff sniffed around quieter than mice.
The citizen-gangsters stood around relaxed. They trampled the courtyard like they owned it, in blindingly white sneakers, discussing yesterday’s antics at Yegorka’s place.
Their speech reached me clear as day: “Yeah-eah... For real... we straight up killed it last night… Uh-huh… So basically… I didn’t quite get it… Uh-h… Who chugged the booze?… Yeah, Karabas with the pacifier… like, passed out, yeah… Get this… Yeah-eah... We straight up torched two boats… No way… So basically… Chubby’s on the butt-end… Yeah-eah... Then the little scaredy-cat kicked up a fuss… Uh-h, get this, she got her wires crossed… I’m throwing down a stick… Accusations flying… What’s the deal… So basically, soon as he walked in he freaked out… Yeah-eah... Blah blah blah… Karabas lost it… Get this, the little monkey ratted everybody out… Uh-h… Who puked in the bathtub? Uh-huh… Couldn’t even wash up, couldn’t even rinse off… So basically...”
The vest-clad gangster, with the same proletarian pride as a revolutionary commander decorated with red harem pants, broke away from his companions, stood there deep in thought for a moment, and turned to face the bourgeois director:
— Uh? So what’s up? You looking to get shot, or what?.. Ehh… See, I genuinely didn’t get that. Go get a shovel. We’re gonna bury you now. Heh-heh.
He walked back to his crew slowly, like a commissar before executing some White Guard in a black-and-white Civil War film. He stood there again, holding a proper Moscow Art Theatre pause. The spitting image of actor Zharov playing Aniskin, and the spitting image of Boris Chirkov from “The Youth of Maxim.” All that thespian magnificence packed into one plain Ryazan face. Just a simple lad off the Meshchera thicket, so stuffed with anabolics and steroids his muscles rang like bells, who through the clang and crash of a basement gym had grasped the higher meaning of revolution…
