‘Come on in,’ he said, letting me past him.
The bedroom at the end of the corridor looked perfectly civilized, only I didn’t like the smell - it smelled of dog, quite unmistakably, like in some dogs’ love hotel. As well as a bed, the room contained a low coffee table with a drawer and two armchairs. There was a bottle of champagne on the table, with two glasses, and standing beside them was a telephone with a large number of keys and a blue plastic document folder.
‘Where’s the shower?’ I asked.
The man sat in a chair and indicated the one beside it.
‘Wait, there’s no hurry. Let’s get to know each other first.’
He smiled paternally, and I decided I must have got stuck with one of those soulful clients. Those men who don’t just want your body for their two hundred bucks, but your soul as well. They’re the ones who really wear you out. To stop a soulful client getting carried away, you have to be morose and unsociable. Let the nice man think the girl’s got adolescent problems. During the period when their personalities are taking shape, teenagers are unsociable and uncommunicative, as every paedophile knows very well. Therefore, that kind of behaviour rapidly inflames a pervert’s lust, which results in a saving of time and is helpful in obtaining better payment for your work. But the important thing here is to shut yourself in the bathroom in good time.
Some foxes who live in America and Europe take a scientific approach to the use of this effect. That is, they think they take a scientific approach, because they prepare by reading the literature that ‘reveals the soul of the modern teenager’. They are particularly fond of reading alleged fifteen-year-old authors who specialize in removing the panties from the inner world of their generation with a shy blush on their cheeks. It’s ridiculous, of course. Teenagers don’t have any common internal dimension - just as people of any other age don’t. Each of them lives in his or her own universe, and these insights into the soul of the young generation are simply the market’s simulacra of freshness for the consumer who’s surfeited with anal sex on video, something like the chemical scent of lily-of-the-valley for toilets. A fox who wants to imitate the behaviour of a modern teenager accurately shouldn’t read those books: instead of making you look like a teenager, they’ll turn you into an old theatrical queer acting out a travesty.
The correct technique is quite different. And like everything that really works, it’s extremely simple:
1. In a conversation you should look off to one side, best of all at a spot on the floor about two metres away.
2. Never answer what people say with more than three words, not counting prepositions and conjunctions.
3. Every tenth utterance, or thereabouts, should break rule number two and be slightly provocative, so that the client doesn’t get the feeling he’s dealing with an imbecile.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Adele,’ I said, squinting at the floor.
‘How old are you?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘You sure you’re not lying?’
I shook my head.
‘Where are you from, Adele?’
‘Khabarovsk, in the Far East.’
‘And how are things back in Khabarovsk?’
I shrugged.
‘Okay.’
‘So why did you come here?’
I shrugged again.
‘Just felt like it.’
‘You’re not very talkative.’
‘Can I go to the shower?’
‘Hang on. We have to get to know each other first. What are we, animals?’
‘It’s two hundred dollars an hour.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t it disgust you doing this kind of work, Adele?’
‘I have to eat.’
He picked the folder up off the table, opened it and spent a while looking at it, as if he were checking some kind of instructions. Then he closed it and put it back on the table.
‘And where do you live? Are you renting a place?’ he asked.
‘Uhu.’
‘And how many of you are there in the flat, apart from the madam? Five? Ten?’
‘That depends.’
At this stage the ordinary pervert would already have reached boiling point. And it looked like my employer wasn’t too far away from it either.
‘Are you really seventeen, little girl?’ he asked.
‘Yes, daddy, I am,’ I said, raising my eyes to look at him. ‘Seventeen moments of spring.’
That was a provocative outburst. He snorted in laughter. What I should have done then was to go back to the short, vague phrases. But it turned out he knew how to be provocative as well.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘If that’s the way our chat’s going, it’s time for me to introduce myself.’
An official ID card appeared on the table in front of me, open. I read what was written in it very carefully, then compared the photograph with his face. In the photograph he was wearing a uniform jacket with epaulettes. His name and patronymic were Vladimir Mikhailovich. He was a colonel in the FSB.
‘Call me Mikhalich,’ he said with a smirk. ‘That’s what people who know me well call me. And I hope we’re going to get to know each other very well.’
‘To what do I owe the pleasure, Mikhalich?’ I asked.
‘One of our consultants complained about you. Apparently you upset him. So now you’ll have to recompensate for it. Or recompense for it. Do you know which is right?’
He had a stereotypical appearance: a strong chin, steely eyes, a shock of flaxen hair. But a certain trapezoidal quality in the plebeian proportions of his features made his face look like the West’s cliche of its Cold War opponent. Movie characters of that kind usually drank a glass of vodka and then ate the glass as a snack, muttering through the crunching that it was ‘an old Russian custom’.
‘Fuck it,’ I muttered. ‘A freebee?’
‘Hey,’ he said, offended, ‘don’t you confuse the FSB with the pigs. You’ll get your money all right.’
‘How many of you are there?’ I asked in a tired voice.
‘Just one . . . Well, two at the most.’
‘And who’s the other one?’
‘You’ll see in a moment. And don’t worry, I won’t cheat you.’
He pulled out the drawer of the table and took out a box with all sorts of medical bits and pieces - little jars, cotton wool and a pack of disposable syringes. One syringe was loaded - the bright-red cap on the needle made it look like a cigarette someone has dragged on so furiously that the flame has extended all the way along it.
‘I not shooting up with you,’ I said. ‘Not even for quintuple fees.’
‘You fool,’ he said merrily, ‘who’s going to give you any?’
‘And I want the money up front. Who knows what you’ll be like in half an hour?’