March 9, 1995
Thursday
By March of ninety-five, the headaches had me in a stranglehold. Zhorik’s doctor recommended cutting my workday to twelve hours and giving up alcohol.
I listened. The headaches didn’t stop.
It got extreme on March 9th. At five in the morning I nearly climbed the walls, feeling like my skull had been clamped in a vise and put through a stress test. Didn’t climb very far.
I wandered the apartment looking for somewhere to lie down, sit, curl up. There was no whiff of hangover behind it — I’d had nothing but juice and mineral water.
The moment Karabas showed up, I told him to skip the office and race straight to my doctor’s on Romanov Lane instead. Zhorik would later say the change of route was what saved me. The trip took ten minutes instead of the usual twenty-five.
The car pulled up, I pulled the door handle, and I saw myself from outside, as if from a bird’s-eye view: the sidewalk with the Durandal, an explosion from under the trunk, the door frame I flew out of, arms flailing, crashing into a grocery kiosk.
Darkness!
...
Came to in the hospital, for the second time that year.
Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything.
I couldn’t feel my own body. Saw Zhora through a haze, caught fragments of words about a terrible scare... about one hundred and forty over Moscow... it worked out... say thanks you’re still alive!
Just as suddenly as he’d appeared, Zhorik vanished: Trading House Erlan had collapsed, and there was money to be made off the wreckage!
Bandaged up like a mummy, I wasn’t thinking about business. What interested me was the meaning of what had happened. It seemed to me that my life wasn’t dictated by Zhorik and his boss. They pointed the direction, but I was the one making the decision: which way to move, at what speed, with what determination, toward what goal...
...I never got to finish the thought. A wave of pain crashed over me. I tried to scream, couldn’t. Groan? Grind my teeth? Claw at something?
I passed out.
Lying in the hospital, I turned things over in my head.
The first attempt on my life turned out to have a mundane explanation. Gennady, wandering around the Khryakino warehouse, dreamed up an elegant business model: hand off warehouse liquor on consignment to some business-minded guys he’d gone to school with. He sold it slightly above the price list, but with a month’s grace period on payment. At the time, Proma didn’t offer any grace periods. Gennady’s little venture took off. Just kept climbing, right up until his old classmates couldn’t cover what they’d taken on consignment: blew it at the casino, or spent it on whores, who knows. They settled the matter the simple way, the street way: a knife for the creditor, and the goods hauled off.
My own tip set off a gang war: Chicha wiped out the warehouse belonging to the idiots who’d knifed Genka. The warehouse’s protection turned out to be a Podolsk gang, stunned by the wipeout. As compensation, Luchok and his crew demanded Chicha hand «Proma» over to their protection, or else.
Chicha couldn’t stand the Podolsk crew, called them athletes with muscle instead of brains. He ignored the threats and, to make a point, wiped out a yogurt warehouse that was under Podolsk protection.
The Podolsk crew, in the course of «negotiating» with Chicha, made their own point by shooting up my Torus’s engine and the passenger-side windshield — of a passenger who wasn’t even there. That’s when I did something stupid, throwing myself onto the passenger seat. Caught three bullets in my left collarbone, shoulder, and forearm on the way down. But that’s not the important part. What’s important is that someone in our office was in on it with Gena, feeding cash into the register for liquor «sold,» to fake the sale on the books. Who? No idea.
The standoff between Chicha and the Podolsk crew wrapped up six months later. A meeting was arranged with Chicha, and shooting broke out, leaving a dozen bodies behind. The cops pinned one of the bodies on the Podolsk side as the scumbag who’d tried to kill me. A gun found on him, run through ballistics, closed the book on the whole attempted-murder question. Case solved and closed! The Podolsk crew’s claims to a piece of Proma’s business evaporated along with it.
The second attempt, the recent one, turned out to be even simpler. Kalkin had been up to no good, having lost his business in Russia and marking his departure for Rotterdam with fireworks! On this one, I had no complaints — I got blown up for good reason.
