«Have you got anything to do with it?» asked Pipe after a pause. «Have you got your hands dirty?»
«Local business. I keep out of it. First, some crazy guy shot the local gang leader, then the infighting started. So, things are pretty hot around here.»
They both uttered senseless phrases, a completely different meaning showing through.
«God fashioned man out of clay but I made you out of shit and I gave you a name, money and power!» was what Karimov heard during the pause. «And you bite the hand that fed you!»
«You can win everything by force except love,» Karimov told himself by way of justification, wiping his bristly, dimpled chin.
«I love a good settling of scores. There's less work for the cops,» said Pipe, breaking the silence. «But that's not why I'm ringing. People want to play us off against one another…»
«As if they could,» said Karimov, interrupting.
Pipe pretended he hadn't heard.
«People are telling me you're planning a mutiny. That you want to take over the factory…»
«Rubbish! How? A factory isn't a wallet. You can't just grab it and stuff it in a pocket…»
The dialling tone was the only response.
The old man never said hello or goodbye. He would break off a conversation mid-word by replacing the receiver, get up from the table without taking leave of his guests and never stayed the night with a woman, his trousers already half-on as she fell back onto the pillows. Karimov had often tried to beat Pipe by ringing off first or pushing back his chair and leaving a meal before dessert but the old man was always a fraction of a second ahead. Just as he was getting ready to leave, Karimov would see his hunched and already departing back. He once thought of leaving as soon as Pipe arrived. He waited in their usual restaurant, drumming the funeral march on the arm of his chair. He picked a table by the window and had drunk a cup of coffee when he heard a knock on the glass. Wagging his finger at Karimov as if he were a naughty child, Pipe walked past, laughing.
Karimov looked at the telephone and decided it was time to be rid of his bothersome guardian.
Out where the ground was frozen and cold even in the summer, the taiga merged into tundra. The slender trees with their fantastically twisted trunks were smaller than the gigantic boulders. The tundra stretched for miles, blending into the swollen clouds on the horizon, and the sky seemed low enough to reach out and touch. Savage wandered among the dwarf trees like Gulliver in Lilliput and, looking around in fright, he began to stoop even more as if he wanted to be more on their level. In the taiga, severe and louring as a strict mother, he hadn't felt lonely among the laughing rivers, whispering trees and cackling wading birds. Here, though, it was so quiet that Savage suddenly wanted to shout out loud so that he could be heard on the other side of the tundra and, crossing himself superstitiously, he went back the way he had come.
Savage had been the master of his fate only in his dreams where he reworked his life over and over like a rough draft. It was like role play: he put on decorations and costumes, one minute trying out the role of a mover and shaker, the next going back to his own childhood. «What's hotter: the flame of a candle in our imagination or the cold drops of wax on the candle holder?» he thought by way of consolation. He tried to persuade himself that all those around him were circumscribed by their own fates, had come to terms with it and were living their lives as though asleep, to see the dull and dismal dream through to the end. Now he realized that you were only aware of blood if it was in your mouth and that blood shed by someone else [another] was like red paint in a film.
Soil samples left behind by geologists looked like shallow graves. Water had collected in the abandoned quarry. Its walls glittered with mica in the sun, driving the crows crazy. The ground had been trampled all around. The soft grey earth bore the wounds of vehicle tracks and the mounds at the bottom of the quarry brought to mind a cemetery without crosses. It was here that Saam had organized the bloodbath liquidating those he suspected of betraying him.
Savage was sitting on the edge of the quarry, legs dangling. He was dizzy with hunger but wasn't afraid of falling in.
«I'm not a person any more, I'm a wild animal. My life's like an animal's, my feelings are like an animal's. Have you got that?»
«Got that, got that…»
«A wild animal should be in a cage. Once it gets out, you won't get it back in, ever…»
«Ever, ever…»
Savage buried his face in his hands and the echo took up his sobs.
When no-one was using the banya, the only people there were the attendant and Salmon, disfigured and hiding away from prying eyes in the back rooms. Saam had brought her here with an order not to take eyes off her. The girl knew so much that she should have been got rid of long since but Saam didn't lift a finger. Coffin hated Salmon and when the Big Man put in an appearance at the banya, the girl hid in the forest. Some people said that Coffin had doused her in petrol and tried to burn her alive, others that she had put her head in the stove and stupidly switched it on. One half of her face had been so badly burnt that when he saw Salmon the tubby attendant lost his appetite. There was a wan smile on her lips and her eyes were so sad that looking into them made you want to cry for nothing. But people tried not to look at Salmon, shrinking away from her face that looked like a scorched pie crust.
Once, when he went quietly into the steam room, the attendant happened to overhear a conversation.
«Just let her die in peace!» Saam yelled. «She hasn't got long!»
«Do you want her to take us with her?» asked Coffin. «If they get a whiff of her being here, they'll put the frighteners on her and she'll be delighted to rat on all of us! Can't you tell times have changed? If they can find something they can get their teeth into, they'll get rid of the lot of us.»
When Coffin was shot, Salmon laughed all day long as if she'd gone mad and then wept all night long so that the girls spending the night at the banya drove her off into the forest and she howled outside like the north wind. Since then, though, her disfigured face had never lost its smile as if Coffin had taken her sorrow with him when he died.
Steam rose from the kebabs that were cooking outside, the tubby attendant fussing over them. The girls, wrapped up in towels in the arbour, whiled away the time discussing TV serials, celebrity gossip and clothes. Previously, girls were brought in from the fishing villages where a net-load of fish and a night with a girl cost the same, and it was possible, by arrangement, just to buy the fish and have the girl thrown in on top. The girls had rosy cheeks, plump calves, and heels as hard as pumice stone but they laughed so loudly and infectiously that Trebenko loved going to the banya just to hear them laugh.
«You're decent, hard-working girls,» he would say, gathering them in his arms. «You should be getting married!»
The village girls, like fish, went off quickly. Their teeth fell out, their cheeks withered and their eyes became as colourless and woebegone as a pike's. The gangsters loaded them into a car and took them home and brought back fresh new giggly girls who struggled in an embrace like a herring on a hook.
When Karimov saw the solid, country cut of these girls, he pushed the fleshy creature snuggling up to him away in disgust and demanded that prostitutes from town should be brought in when he was due to visit. The village girls were replaced with girls from town, who were tempted by offers of clothes and money and brought in straight from the Three Lemons.
Karimov and the mayor were sitting in the steam room. Krotov, with a frown, was stripping leaves from the birch twigs like telling fortunes with daisy petals.