Denis laughed. ‘Gorodetsky, you’re acting as if an evil magician had deprived me of my will. That’s not the way it is at all, Gorodetsky! I let him into myself!’
He turned to Alexei, who stepped off the pavement into the road. The two magicians took each other by the hand.
‘Now we are united in a single whole!’ Alexei added.
It was clear enough. The usual verbal diarrhoea of someone possessed: ‘I let this into myself!’ ‘Now I’m stronger and wiser, and I don’t sweat!’ ‘When I allowed the Dark One to think for me, the world became simple and clear!’
‘I’m so glad, Anton,’ said Svetlana, taking me by the hand. ‘I’m so glad that you were right!’
Now there was a ludicrous kind of parallel between the Two-in-One and the two of us, with both pairs holding hands.
Except that our daughter was standing behind us, and she promptly repeated Denis’s question.
‘But Dad, how did you really guess?’
‘It’s all very simple, little daughter. They didn’t look at their mum even once. A genuine magician may be fascinating for a child, but Mum’s even more important than that.’
Nadya laughed.
We stood there looking at each other, waiting to see who would make the first move. Making the first move isn’t always a winning strategy.
‘Do we have any grounds for compromise?’ Svetlana suddenly asked. ‘Any possibility of negotiations? After all, there was a time, Two-in-One, when you used to deal with Others without dashing straight into combat.’
Denis and Alexei shook their heads simultaneously.
‘Compromises are made with the strong,’ Denis replied.
‘And that’s not you,’ Alexei added.
‘But you’re dragging things out,’ I said. ‘Maybe we’re not so very weak after all? Maybe we’ll lose, but what if we manage to kill one of you in the process? How would you like being the One-in-One?’
Alexei opened his mouth as if he was about to say something… But he didn’t. He and Denis swung round in a strange way – their entwined arms swivelled unnaturally at the shoulder – and the former Light One and Dark One walked away along the narrow street.
‘Looks like I gave them something to think about,’ I said. ‘Or him. Which is right? Christ, I had no idea I was so eloquent.’
I turned round.
The Tiger was standing beside Nadya, holding a paper cup of coffee and sipping it through a straw.
‘Hello, Anton,’ he said. ‘Hello, Svetlana. Yes, I probably put them off. Sorry if I interfered – today really is a splendid day to die.’
CHAPTER 2
THE COFFEE BAR was small and hot, the tiny little tables were packed close together and the lamps on them had plush red shades. As well as coffee the place served cognac and whisky, canapés and tiny little cakes. It was a fairly niche-type venue, a place where you could sit for a while with a good coffee and eat something strictly symbolic.
And the coffee here really was good: there were varieties from at least a dozen different places – Nicaragua, Brazil, Kenya, Cuba, Costa Rica…
‘Do you like this place?’ I asked the Tiger.
He nodded and took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Yes…’
‘I feel guilty,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you pick up that terrible habit from me?’
‘Yes, I did,’ the Tiger agreed. ‘And the coffee, too.’
I wrinkled my brow, remembering. ‘I wasn’t drinking coffee then…’
‘Not right then. But you were thinking how much you would like a cup of coffee…’
‘Dealing with you gods is hard work,’ I said with a forced laugh. I looked at my daughter, who seemed to be the calmest of us all. She looked completely at home in this coffee shop, where the crowd mostly consisted of young people between the ages of fifteen and thirty. I noticed that almost no one here was drinking alcohol, only coffee. It was strange, the way one generation differed from another. The old ways disappeared, and the old myths went with them… Not many people outside our country knew that modern-day Russia no longer guzzled vodka at the slightest possible excuse. There was no one smoking in the coffee bar, either – except the Tiger, of course.
‘Like one?’ the Tiger asked.
‘It’s against the law here to smoke in public buildings,’ I replied gloomily. ‘We’re civilised people and this is the twenty-first century.’
‘Here,’ said the Tiger, handing me the pack. ‘No one will notice that you’re smoking. And the smoke won’t harm anyone. Not even you. And they’ll be the most delicious cigarettes you’ve ever smoked.’
‘You should work in the tobacco business,’ I murmured, taking the pack. I’d never seen one like it before – the cigarettes were called ‘Twilight’. The nicotine content was shown as zero and the tar content was -0.6.
‘They clean out your lungs as you smoke them,’ said the Tiger. ‘A good marketing idea?’
‘I think you’ve become dangerously humanised,’ I remarked as I opened the pack. ‘And I don’t mean the coffee and the cigarettes, I mean your sense of humour.’
‘That’s your fault too,’ the Tiger told me.
‘How come? I’m not funny at all, except maybe when I fall face down in the salad.’
‘Yes, you’re as serious as a tombstone,’ the Tiger admitted. ‘You reduced that situation to a stalemate. I couldn’t kill the boy-Prophet. But there was still a risk that the prophecy would be proclaimed. So I was obliged to remain here, among people, indefinitely, until Innokentii Tolkov dies, and preferably until you, your wife and your daughter die too.’
‘Well, thanks for being so candid,’ Svetlana sighed.
‘I abandoned the idea of accelerating the process,’ the Tiger said resentfully. ‘I had to wait for the natural course of events. But that meant I had to stay here. Indefinitely.’
‘And you started living a human life,’ I said, taking out a cigarette and sniffing it. It smelled of tobacco. A pleasant smell, to the nostrils of a smoker. No, I wasn’t going to break the law by smoking in a coffee shop! I regretfully jammed the cigarette back into the pack. ‘Let me guess… you have an apartment?’
‘Not just one, I have homes in several different cities,’ the Tiger replied. ‘You should see my bungalow in the Dominican Republic!’
‘And you probably have a girlfriend too?’ I suggested. ‘And maybe not just one?’
The Tiger smiled modestly.
‘The mind boggles,’ I said. ‘And then the children will be born with superpowers.’
‘No, no,’ the Tiger replied hastily. ‘That’s a very serious step – I’m not ready for that yet.’
‘So were you incarnated in a human being, then?’ I asked, lowering my voice for some reason.
‘I don’t understand,’ the Tiger said with a frown.
‘He means the Twilight,’ said Nadya. ‘Right, Dad?’
I nodded.
‘I am not the Twilight,’ the Tiger said with a sigh of annoyance. ‘The Twilight doesn’t have…’ He pondered for a moment. ‘A personality? A mind in the human sense? An incarnation? Essentially, I’m a certain part of it. A functional organism. Or mechanism. I exist in my own right.’
‘That’s what you’ve become,’ I remarked. ‘You’ve been corrupted by human life. With all its little joys.’
The Tiger nodded.
‘Well, good. I’ve got nothing at all against that. You don’t go around killing poor Prophets left and right – and that’s just great! So tell me, who is the Two-in-One?’
‘I don’t have any more information than you do,’ said the Tiger, slightly offended. ‘Another part of the Twilight.’
‘That is, part of you?’ Sveta asked.
‘Of the Twilight!’ the Tiger replied insistently. ‘Does your left hand know what your right hand is doing?’