Beg looks at the man across from him, and has his doubts. It seems as though the man isn’t even here, but somewhere far away.
‘Smoke?’ Beg asks.
He lights a cigarette himself and slides the pack with the lighter on top of it across the table. A junkie rarely has only one addiction.
The man reaches for the pack with both hands; but because his cuffs are chained to a ring on the table, he can barely get to it. Two fingers on his right hand are missing. He takes a cigarette from the pack and puts it between his lips. The wheel scrapes across flint, and then comes the flame, and the quiet crackling of paper and tobacco. He keeps his eyes closed as he sucks the smoke into his lungs. Pleasure has returned to his life, thanks to the man across from him. He doesn’t know it yet, but inside him gratitude and dependence have formed a reluctant alliance — he is being made ripe for a regimen of punishment and reward. He will be thankful for either; he has earned both the punishment and the reward.
The little bump on the table is a tough one. Beg can’t get it off with his fingernail.
There is no ashtray, and the cone of ash on Beg’s cigarette is growing longer and longer. He gets up and walks to the door. Holding it open with his foot, he shouts to someone out there to bring him an ashtray.
Halfway through his cigarette, the man begins coughing violently. He sounds like he’s choking.
‘Been a long time, I suppose?’ Beg asks once he’s calmed down a bit.
The man nods, his eyes filled with tears.
‘How long?’ Beg asks.
The man smiles and shrugs. Long ago.
‘A few months? Six months?’ Beg asks.
The smile fades. An expression of endless melancholy takes its place. He leans forward and puts out the cigarette in the ashtray. The question dissipates along with the smoke.
‘Where are you from? Is there someone we can inform about your being here? Wife, children, family? Isn’t there anyone who wants to know where you are?’
‘No family,’ the man says in an unsteady voice.
‘And where do you come from?’
He shakes his head. ‘The thicket … of horrors.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The poacher says … he says we have to pass through that, that then we’ll get home.’
‘Who’s the poacher?’
The man remains silent.
‘Do you know where you are right now?’
But he has sunk back into himself already, to a place where Beg can’t reach him.
‘You’re here because a man’s head was found in the baggage of someone in your group,’ Beg said. ‘You are all suspects, unless you tell me who crushed that man’s skull. If you do that, you’ll be a free man soon.’
The man says nothing.
‘This thicket you were talking about, what does it look like?’
Not a word. Beg raps his knuckles on the tabletop. The highest row of windows is as grey as a television screen. It snowed again last night. When he left the house, the morning was windless and cold.
The man’s chin has sunk to his chest. His breathing is deep. Has he fallen asleep again?
Earlier that morning, as he came into the office, Oksana said to him: ‘The mayor’s here.’
There could have been no worse way to start the day. Oksana rolled her eyes.
‘He’s down in the cellar.’
Whenever she rolled her eyes, Beg knew, it meant trouble.
Blok had arrived with two of his men and made someone take them downstairs. When Beg came in, he had just summoned the prisoners. They were standing lined up in front of him, shivering.
‘Pontus!’ Blok shouted.
The door fell closed behind him with a click. He stood there and looked. Looking had a way of slowing down the events, of giving you time to think about what to do.
‘What a bunch of beanpoles, man,’ Blok said. ‘And what’s this I hear? They were carrying a head? A head? Pontus, listen … Why don’t you call me about things like that? One little call, right?’ He held up his thumb and forefinger to mimic a telephone. Beg made a mental note: boisterous, talkative. Red eyes; pupils like keyholes.
The prisoners stood in a wretched clump, their shaven heads bowed. Broken sunflowers.
With brusque, pent-up waves of his arms, Beg herded the prisoners back into their cells.
‘Hey, Pontus, what are you doing now, man, hey?’
Beg turned. Semjon Blok came closer, as though he were planning to push Beg aside. Beg smelled whisky. They had been up all night drinking and snorting cocaine. Then they’d decided to have a little fun. The party must go on.
‘And now I want everyone out of here,’ Beg said. ‘This is not a fashion show.’
Blok wagged his index finger in front of his face. ‘No, Pontus, you’ve got it all wrong. This is not up to you.’
Beg didn’t budge. Rage had cleared the way for him; now there was no going back. ‘Shoo,’ he said, ‘get out, now.’
‘Pontus, Pontus.’ Semjon Blok shook his head, but his dash had shrivelled, he was suddenly so incredibly tired. Wasn’t there someplace around here where he could lie down?
‘You’re a gutsy one, Pontus,’ he said. ‘Real gutsy.’
He gestured to his companions. The guard pressed the buzzer, and the electric lock clicked open. Laughing feebly in disbelief, Blok left the room, defeat like a monkey on his back.
The guard cleared his throat. ‘Commissioner, you put them back in the wrong cells, I’m afraid.’
Beg’s index finger punched thin air. This was the fucking limit. The guard’s mouth slammed shut like the muzzle of a dog snapping at a fly.
Blok will never forgive him for this. Somewhere, in an unguarded moment, he will strike back, and Beg will think back on this morning.
The office of mayor has given Semjon Blok almost limitless power. Michailopol is his private domain. He parks his black Cadillac Escalade on the sidewalk, he drives too fast, he ignores all the traffic lights. During his term of office, the property he owns has doubled. No one crosses him in any way; he stands above the law.
Feathering one’s own nest, giving and taking bribes, nepotism — all part of a system, true enough, but that system is defective and shortsighted. In the last ten or fifteen years, Beg has seen everything slow down, as the city’s entire economic life has fallen under the spell of favouritism and greed: no land is sold, no house built, without dubious permits and money changing hands under the table — which means that, often enough, nothing is built at all. Social relations have become bogged down in the mud of corruption; no one can call anyone else to account, for they all have dirt on their hands. No one looks beyond his own interests. Not a single manager or government official thinks about the long term. It’s a system that demands your participation; if you don’t join in, you relegate yourself to the sidelines. In the end, it corrupts even the purest soul. This way, everything goes rotten.
This morning, he not only hurt Semjon Blok’s pride, but he also ran the system off the rails. Not for long, though. It will avenge itself. It will exclude him, somewhere, at some point, not long from now. His position will be undermined, and he will have to step down. He knows that; that’s the way it works. The system protects you as long as you play along.
It doesn’t bother him; it had to happen sometime. In some ways, the overt hostility between him and Blok comes as a relief. He has jammed the tip of the scalpel into the abscess, and the stinking pus that wells up reminds him of a dignity he lost long ago.