February 4, 1994
Friday
20:00
Chicha was knocking balls around in the billiards room, ignoring Zhora entirely as a class of person. Let a wish for good health sail right past his ears. To «How’s it going?» he answered with a bank shot off the sixth ball. Something like a reaction came only at the question: «Could Chicha’s athletes, purely theoretically, pull off a job without his knowledge?»
Chicha crumbled the chalk against the tip of his cue and shrugged – anything’s possible. Explained, lining up his shot on the seventh ball, that life’s an even road, chance is a round wheel, no telling which way it’ll roll.
Zhorik inquired about the hierarchy of Chicha’s group and whether there was unity of command, screwing in a mix of the Latin «Ordo anima rerum est» and «Ordnung über alles».
No result.
Chicha grumbled back something about a wolf, will, and willy-nilly. Zhorik froze, taken aback, stood stock-still. Coming back to himself, he waved a hand at me, signaling I should head back down to the first floor and not interrupt the philologists debating the difference between semantics and ethics.
Before leaving, I noticed a gleam in Zhorik’s eyes, and that he was holding the cue with both hands not by the thick end, the way billiards players do, but by the thin one.
I went down to the dining hall, looked around. To avoid hearing the muffled sounds of what might have been a struggle or a beating from the second floor, I distracted myself by inspecting the renovation work done at the Terem.
It became clear why, treating Alina to cocktails a month ago, I’d felt out of place.
The concept had changed. Where a single hall had once served everyone present, three zones had been walled off. The corner where I used to sit with Zhorik was gone. A spiral staircase had gone up to the second floor. Where the bartender used to pour drinks, a little closet had appeared with a «VIP» sign. The stage was gone. The bar had moved to the center of the room. Three zones had formed: on the left, a bigger zone, where we’d raised hell at the New Year’s banquet not long ago. On the right, two smaller zones. In the dark, intimacy-oozing nook under the stairs they’d crammed two tables with little sofas and fenced them off with potted palms. In the remaining space they’d set up half a dozen tables with chairs. Half an hour ago Zhorka had picked a spot facing the girls sampling the fresh juice selection.
I went back to the place I had chosen. I ordered a cocktail at the waiter’s discretion from one running past. Waiting for the drink, I glanced at the platinum-dyed girls and listened to the philologists holding forth above and below. On the second floor Chicha and Zhora were conducting conversations about discourse, epistemology and the talk a man must answer for. In the basement the industrial-obscene branch of philology was helping to bring down walls.
I went over to the bar, ordered «the usual» from Misha, threw in a question: how come the working girls had taken such a shine to the Terem?
Misha reported that before the renovation, Bug-Eyes used to drag in every whore he could find to treat them to the trendy «B-52» cocktail and then screw them upstairs for a hundred bucks. So he’d fed them right into it. Now Vadik’s whores warmed their asses here from noon till midnight, waiting for other benefactors.
In the old days the working girls were afraid to be in the same room as Chicha and the rest of the criminal element. Either they’d catch a fist to the eye, or end up working it off like galley slaves. After the renovation, things eased up. Chicha moved to the second floor and stopped coming down among the plebs. The whores got bolder, set up shop on a permanent basis.
The moneyed men hanging around the Terem got one less problem to worry about: no need to drive to Tverskaya for whores anymore.
I learned a great deal, nursing my beer at the bar. Went back to the table. Zhorik joined me:
– Murky business. Chicha swore up and down he had no idea, no clue. Promised to tear apart whoever’s responsible like Tuzik does a hot water bottle. Keep that in mind. If someone needs punishing, Chicha will sign on for five thousand… in a couple of weeks… once he’s out of the hospital. And that… whose whores are smiling and waving at us over there? Yours?
