The Blog

Turning to his own person, Donkey cut off only “key” in his handle. By that small literary trick he blessed himself with a huge title, and the title obliges, the title it was to bring about the drastic death-rate among the street’s old-timers.

Chris was the last of Mahicans, yet Don still tarried – without Chris all that remained there for him, personally, was the routine rut to cancer-feeding at an estate in the south of France or the Swiss Alps.

"You look like a groom from London, Chris. What shit is your fix? I'm curious, just out of envy."

"You dream of sticking me into your collection? There’s still a spot by the gramophone: 'Chris, the golden age of the street, no screwing up the exhibit’."

To bypass answering, Don laughed in a measured laughter, almost not parting his narrow lips. The two were swapping words which had no purpose any more. They both knew that Don dropped in just to say good-bye to his past.

"You’re a good guy, Chris, but I must be getting back to the mill."

"Would you imagine? I know the uncut version of this byword. In the golden age they used to say, 'You’re a good guy who lives unpardonably long’."

Don chortled, got up, pinched his ear lobe and made for the exit.

The bodyguards started after him.

After marching along for a couple of meters the rear lout made a turn around, neared Chris’ table and, standing behind Nobodya, with a movement trained to automatism slung up a pistol from under his coat and shot at the Chris’ chest. Twice.

Chris, together with his chair, swayed back and collapsed onto the floor to disunite. The victim's legs stretched out under the table.

The black automaton took a step forward and raised his hand with the pistol over the face of the felled man. A program glitch prevented the control shot.

The cause of the glitch—a bulky boarding pistol—bounced off his head and dropped onto the table. The black-coated figure banged face-first on the floor tiles.

Nobodya standing on his knees by the Chris’ body, his hands steeped in the sticky blood oozing thru the victim’s rags shouted:

"Chris! You’re a good guy! Wake up, Chris!"

"Ss…kep…", mumbled numbing lips.

"What? Chris? What?"

"Ess..cape…", the eyes turned over up and to the left.

Nobodya followed the last gaze – along the aisle between the table there was scuffling the second oaf in black, aptly drawing the gun from under his coat.

"Aaaa!", sprung to his feet Nobodya grabs the pistol off the table and hurls it into the widow glass throwing himself after it in a side somersault over the tabletop, and falls thru the jingle of the widening gap onto the snow-clad sidewalk outside.

The black-coated slob runs up to the table. Fuck! It’s in the way. One mighty push sends it aside, the gun handle in his right hand finishes off the sharp fangs of sheet glass in the crashed window, and he jumps out into the imprint of Nobodya’s body in the soft snow.

Meanwhile the fleer rushes across the nightly-thick stream of the traffic, screaming:

"ESCAPE! Chris! ESCAPE!"

The pursuer, without a moment’s hesitation, runs after him to take over, shoots on the run into the fleeing black-and-yellow checker. He’s paid for the accuracy of fire, for doing his job as it should be done. Nobody had ever given him a slip. Navigating thru the screeches of brakes he shortens the distance.

With a hoarse kamikaze-like yell, Nobodya dashes ahead. Is he fucking mad? Running to kill himself?

Never veering, darts he across the sidewalk to plunge himself against the building wall…

A split second later arrives the black-coated hitman hardly panting at all. Cluelessly stares he at the stone surface of the wall. Then under it.

There’s just intact snow. His hat moved to the back of his head, he looks around.

Nobodya’s nowhere…

* * *

Bottle #15: ~ A Step Up ~

The spring that followed generously brought me a job at the Supreme Council of the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh and again, by the bye, by protection. You swiftly make a habit of accepting things to be conveniently arranged by your mother-in-law or thru some other channels.

This time it was Guegham, who I’d seen a couple of times at all-out briefing-meetings in the office of the Head Editor of the paper where Guegham had a job of journalist. He came to our rented apartment in between bombardments, when Satenic was there, and said I had to visit the Reception Office of the Chairman of the Supreme Council on the second floor in the "White House" (which previously accommodated the Regional Executive Committee). Of course and sure enough, I went there, you just can’t spurn such openings.

In the ante-room to the Reception Office there was sitting Vera, the Chairman's Secretary, fairly advanced into the venerable age, yet the vestiges of her former fairness still traceable, who told me to wait because Arthur was busy at the moment.

And at the long desk next to hers there sat two phedais, opposite each other, playing Scrabble with a pencil in a ruled sheet of paper as a fix for having neither board nor letter chips. They also had to kill time in any way till Arthur becomes available.

But what shocked me, personally, was their sloppiness regarding the fair sex. Now, he’s taken his AK off his shoulder and dropped it on the desk by his side, to sharpen his skills at Scramble comfortably, and pays no attention that the weapon’s barrel got directed smack bang at Vera’s belly. Some tactless jerk, I swear.

So, I got up, as if tired of sitting, and that AK quite unobtrusively I turned 90 degrees for the barrel to watch the view thru the window. And all the present played along as if nobody saw nothing. Except for Vera because, when some geezer left Arthur’s Room, she dropped in, went out and invited me to enter although those two phedais had been waiting there before I came.

Arthur, a squat guy in his glasses, asked if I would like to take the position of a translator-analytic at the Press-Center by the Supreme Council of the RMK headed by Guegham, who had visited our rented apartment. How could I turn down the proposal with my diploma of a Teacher of English, from the Nezhin Pedagogical Institute? Letting down the people who had wasted their time and energy on me 4 years at a stretch? I'm not that kind of a guy.

Thus we came to a consensus and Arthur undertook to carry out all the formalities…

And I parted the paper with no regrets, almost, moreover that Isaac Asimov’s grand nothing was over and, besides, I felt kinda hurt by the attitude regarding me displayed recently on the part of the paper employees by a certain part of the editorial office staff. Well, just a fraction of them…

The matter is that after the fall of Khojalu the airport started to operate and JAK-40 jets began landing there. 150 rubles for a ticket and you become unreachable by the theater of militarized hostilities.

And one morning I indicated some unaccustomed vivacity and noise outside the Translators Room, in the corridor, and quite naturally I went out to see what’s up.

As it turned out, the reason for the paper’s staff's get-together was their not being paid the salary for two months and, in the same breath, they knew about presence of some money in the editorial office’s safe although not aware how much exactly.

In the wake of the mutual elation, I also visited the room where it was installed, the safe. And, as anticipated, there it was in the corner by the window.

No, yeah, naming the item a safe would call for a certain stretch of imagination. Just a wardrobe of sheet iron, but the padlock was a really weighty thing. Also of iron.

The only hindrance for going over to a payday routine stood the absence of the Head Editor, Maxim, who more than a month ago went to Yerevan to participate in all kinds of meetings and TV interviews about the ill luck of Mountainous Karabakh and the bad break for its Armenian population.

Yet, The Soviet Karabakh newspaper staff did know a trick or two. And before you say knife they procured a long iron breaker, some really mighty tool in my professional estimation, and did not miss on bringing along the Head Accountant too. Breaking that wardrobe with that breaker was a matter of a couple of moments without turning for my help although I wielded the tool for 2 years at a construction battalion in the Soviet Army.

Of course, I felt offended.

The head accountant, surrounded by half a dozen of eager witnesses, counted the burglarized sum and gauged without any calculator and – guess what? – it turned exactly 150 rubles per a paper staff member!

But she only warned me beforehand to bridle my expectations because my name was not listed in the payroll, and the Head Editor not around but in Yerevan.