“And me: one morning, nine months after that ghastly encounter, I discovered I couldn’t get out of bed. My legs had gone numb. And since then I’ve been a modern version of a centaur—half human, half wheelchair.”
“Didn’t you want to know what was behind it all?” I asked him.
“There’s no behind, sonny. Behind doesn’t exist,” Gonzales snarled, waving dismissively. “Everything is surface; it’s just that a few places are terribly deep, and if you look too long, you think you see something there.”
reality
[GEORGIA]
LASHA BUGADZE
The Sins of the Wolf
“It’s taken me ages to find your number. Two days I’ve been trying to call you.”
“What can I do for you?”
Silence.
“Oh God, this is so embarrassing…”
“What was it you wanted?”
“It’s embarrassing. Should I just say it?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
Silence.
“You sound different on the phone.”
“Do I know you?”
She laughs. “No, but I know you. I’ve seen you on TV.”
I’m getting tired of this. “Right… What was it you wanted again?”
Silence.
“I really liked your book.”
“Thank you. Which one?”
(Silence again—has she forgotten the title?)
“The Sins of the Wolf. I’ve read it twice already…”
“Thank you, that’s very kind.”
“Who are you talking to?” my wife asks.
“It was just so true to life, so realistic…”
She sounds like a young girl, and I can’t work out what she wants. Does she want to be my friend? Does she want to send me something she’s written? I mean, girls are always calling me to read me their poetry.
“Thank you.”
Maybe I should hang up? Pretend we’ve been cut off?
“I feel really bad asking… Oh God, I’m sorry, but look…”
Down to business, finally!
“Yes, what is it?”
“I wouldn’t normally bother you, but I just didn’t know what else to do…”
“Who is it?” My wife pulls a face.
“Please, go on. I’m listening.”
Silence.
“It’s Bakar Tukhareli. I really need to see him. Can you put me in touch with him? Or give me his number?”
(Did I hear that right?)
“Sorry? I didn’t catch that. Whose number?”
“Bakar Tukhareli’s. You know, Bakar the Thief.”
(She’s having me on.)
“This is a joke, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not serious?”
“What? Why?”
“Well, how am I supposed to introduce you to Bakar Tukhareli?” I look toward my wife and smile. But really I’m already starting to get angry.
“Why, don’t you know him?”
“Okay, kid, you’ve had your fun. It was a good joke, very funny…”
“I wasn’t joking…”
“Good-bye,” I say and hang up. “Who was that?”
“Some kid, wanted me to hook her up with the Thief.”
“Which thief?”
“Mine, Bakar.”
“Oh boy…” She laughs.
I was working on the third part of my trilogy. I needed to kill off the Gypsy Baron as quickly as possible and get my heroes safely to the coast. One dead body should have been plenty this time. In the second part (The Sins of the Wolf) there were so many bodies I almost lost track. In the end I actually counted them: 134 deaths in a five-hundred page novel. But no, that was too few for my publisher—he pretty much asked for one per page. Talk about bloodthirsty. His motto: new page, new corpse. When I took him the manuscript for The Sins of the Wolf, he asked me—and I’m not kidding—“How many are there?”
Almost as if he was joking. But he was actually dead serious.
“How many what?”
“Don’t ‘how many what’ me. Bodies!”
“Loads.”
“What do you call loads?” He wouldn’t let it go.
And it was then that I knew that if I’d had eighty-six bodies in The Pig Skin—the first part of the trilogy—then this time I needed even more.
“Throw in another ten, some incidental ones,” he said when he’d finished reading the manuscript.
He was still smiling at me. He was worried I’d laugh at him. But we talked about it anyway (again, almost jokingly), and he seemed absolutely convinced that it was because of the eighty-six bodies that The Pig Skin was such a bestseller. What could I say? Perhaps he had a point.
This time around I had a big surprise in store—the third part of the trilogy, Children of the Sun, was going to be completely different from the first two parts. Maggie was about to write a letter to absolve the criminal… and declare her love.
There were two things I was supposed to be doing that day: writing Maggie’s letter and taking my twins to their first guitar lesson (my wife wouldn’t back down on that one).
There she was, standing by the entrance to my building, smoking a cigarette. She was dressed like a boy, in jeans and a denim jacket, a black Charlie Chaplin T-shirt underneath. She wore a silver ring on her thumb.
As we came out of the building she called over to me:
“Excuse me!”
And she ran over. She looked like an angry dyke. At first, I actually thought she was a boy. Her gait seemed strange, somehow—almost ape-like. She hunched her shoulders too, like some street-corner hoodlum bending forward in the cold.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “I phoned you the other day about Bakar…”
I realized who she was, but I asked her anyway, instinctively: “Bakar who?”
“Bakar the Thief. I asked you for his number…?”
“Oh come on, honey,” I said angrily, and shoved the twins toward the car. “Go take the piss out of somebody else.”
“I swear on my brother’s life, you’ve got it all wrong.” She stood in front of me, her arms outstretched. “You said that to me last time too. You hung up on me before I could speak…”
There was a hidden camera somewhere, surely? I looked around again.
The twins were staring at me in astonishment.
“What do you want, kid? Have you got a bet with someone? Is that it?” I had to bite my tongue to stop myself swearing at her.
“The Baron did let him go, didn’t he? He’s not in hiding anymore and—I mean, that’s what you wrote, isn’t it?”
She was insane. It suddenly hit me. Her face was deadly pale, her lips were twitching nervously. She wasn’t taking the piss; she was out of her mind.
My anger vanished. For a second I was afraid; I grabbed the twins’ hands. Then I started to feel sorry for her…
“What did I write?” I asked her, almost sympathetically.