I’ve heard that in neighboring clubs there have been situations when angry drunken groups beat up the security, and threw the bouncers out on the street with their faces smashed. I’d be very unhappy if something like that happened to me.
But you’ve got to admit that there’s nothing unusual about this: for every bouncer there’ll always be some animal that is stronger and more persistent; especially if there are several of these animals.
But there are just two of us, Molotok and I. For a club like this, four bouncers wouldn’t be enough, but Lev Borisych, who as I already said is the owner, is incomparably economical.
The young people showed us their tickets — blue strips of paper with a stamp and price on them. Syoma cocked a cheerful eye at the girls.
As always, Lev Borisych entered swiftly, carrying his enormous stomach past us lightly; he nodded to us, barely noticeably, without opening his mouth for a greeting.
Molotok greeted him, but without any sign of servility — he’s just friendly in general.
I didn’t say anything, I didn’t even nod in response. Lev Borisych passes by so quickly, that I could quite easily say hello to him when he can no longer see me, as he opens the door to the club. Let him think that that’s the way things are: the heavy glass door has long been swinging before me, barely dispelling the thick scent of the owner’s eau de cologne, and I’m still saying “…ello… ysovich!..”
I have no idea why he’s in such a hurry. He’s going to sit in his office with a cup of coffee all night, occasionally going to the ticket seller’s office, counting the earnings and looking out into the street to see if there are any new customers. Does he really need to be in such a hurry for such important activities?
Sometimes Lev Borisych comes out into the club, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, and if a fight breaks out, he vanishes very quickly. But he knows about everything that happens at the club, for example, how many mugs of beer I drink a night, or how much the barmen steal over the same period of time — and he does not fire the barmen every day, because new barmen will also steal. However, the staff still changes constantly, only Molotok and me are left alone. Perhaps because we’re not particularly worried about keeping this job, and perhaps because we’ve never screwed up.
I’ve been inhabiting a nightclub for so long that I’ve forgotten about the existence of other people, besides our customers, taxi drivers, a few gangsters, a few dozen idiots pretending to be gangsters, prostitutes and mere sluts.
Although I see all these people every night, I have no idea what they do, or where their money comes from. Well, it’s more or less clear with the prostitutes and taxi drivers, but what about the rest? I work here every day, but I would never come here to drink: you could spend as much at the club in fifteen minutes as I could live on for a week. If they took me on, these generous people, I would protect them for an additional payment, I don’t care. Neither does Syoma. What do we care about you.
But they often care about us. Many of them think that a bouncer was created so that they could measure his strength and stupidity against theirs. The main thing is to get seriously wasted and then come to us in the foyer: What are you looking like that for? Want to throw me out? I’m with friends…
But even they are not the most problematic clients, of course.
There could be problems with the people who just walked past Molotok and me, for instance.
Five guys, and they just went through the door sideways, with big shoulders, big arms, and a heavy calm on their faces. They didn’t even notice us — that always makes us tense.
They were dressed in jackets and light sweaters — and, as I said, they had big shoulders. I have big shoulders too, but I’m wearing two sweaters and padding, hence the shoulders. Molotok is larger, of course, but he can’t compete with them either. He’s not even embarrassed to admit this:
“Did you see that?”
And he shakes his head.
Molotok, of course, isn’t scared, and he will stand to the end, if he has to. But his chances are zero.
Molotok and I call them “serious people.”
They’ll never get disgracefully drunk. They sit at a long table partitioned off by a heavy screen, in the corner of the club, away from the dance floor. They talk unhurriedly, and sometimes laugh. Lev Borysich walks around them. They called him over, quite affably. Lev Borysich sat down on the edge of a bench, like a compressed balloon — just waiting for a chance to fly away. And he did, as soon as they turned away from him, mumbling something vague about things to do or a phone calclass="underline" someone was supposed to call him. At three in the morning, sure.
They rarely come here, once a month probably, and every time I’m surprised at how tangibly you can feel a real human power emanating from them.
And they don’t pay attention to the women, I noticed, watching them take their habitual seats behind the screen, moving the table as if they were at home.
They don’t pay attention because they’re not interested in women, but because they already have women, any women they want.
They gave the vase of flowers that was on the table to the waitress who came over to them, and didn’t even say: Take it away — she worked it out for herself, after standing for a moment with the vase in her hands.
In the dance room, the music started blaring. The first pair of young people went in, indecisively, like people entering water.
That’s OK, in half an hour everyone will relax.
Sometimes, as morning approaches, I go into the dance room, and quite stupefied, I look at these ruddy people in motion. I get a feeling like you do in childhood, when you’re hot and frantic, and you’ve been storming a snowy slope for five hours in a row, and suddenly you fall out of the game and look at everyone for a minute in surprise and think: who are we? why are we making all this noise? why is there a ringing noise in my head?
How strangely these people behave, I think, tired, in my morning mood, sleepy, looking at all the backs, heads, legs and hands. They’re adults, why are they waving their arms around like this, it’s so stupid…
But the next day I go to work again, and this feeling is almost forgotten. If I remember it, I don’t understand it, I can’t feel it.
“The boss wants to see you,” Lev Borisych’s secretary said to me, having stuck her bird-like, dark, small head with its bright lips between the glass doors.
Lev Borisych has never wanted to see me before.
“What’s this about?” I asked Molotok cheerfully.
He made an uncomprehending face. We both thought that we had probably been fined. But we couldn’t quite work out when this had happened.
I leapt off the stool, pushed the door, and saw Lev Borisych coming towards me and waving his hand: stay, I’ll be there shortly.
“Outside, let’s talk outside,” he said quietly; he has the habit of repeating every phrase twice, as if testing its weight: whether he gave it away too lightly or cheaply.
We went out, and walked for a few seconds in silence, away from the club doors, and the people smoking by the entrance. I glanced sideways at Lev Borisych’s stomach: Doesn’t he get cold, just wearing a shirt… I thought.
“Can I rely on your confidentiality, Zakhar? On the confidentiality of our conversation?”
“Of course,” I said, trying to say this very seriously, and even sincerely.
“Good, good… We work together, I see how you work. I’m happy with your work, I’m happy with it. There are a few little things… little things… But essentially I’m happy…” Lev Borisych said all of this quickly, looking away from me, into the bushes, at the asphalt, very attentively, as though hoping to find a coin that someone had dropped. “And we want to expand… The time has come, there are possibilities. Red light, you understand? A red light, that’s what we’ll have here. I’d like you to be the head of security. You understand, there can be all kinds of… excesses… excesses. Right?”