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“Why so quick about Moscow? What if I’m not from Moscow? Who’s also not from Moscow?” Freda was offended. There turned out to be many “non-Muscovites.” Lena was even from Kiev.
“Fine. It means not only Moscow,” yielded Danny. “For that matter I’m from Novosibirsk. A year ago we dragged ourselves here and now we regularly feel sorry… Let’s think a bit more! Appearance, height, sports training, psych profile, gender sign, all different for us. Useless to search for similarities here.”
“Gender what?” Makar frowned. Sashka noticed that the term “psych profile” also seemed suspicious to him, but he did not risk asking about it.
“You’re a dude or a dame,” Rina explained from the last row. Makar squinted at her, checking if she was serious, and made an understanding face.
“Let’s analyze further. Any geniuses among us?” Danny continued to find out. Cyril again put up his hand.
“Cyril, precious! Lower your paw and continue to search for the pass!” Lena asked with southern softness in her voice.
“Any others besides Cyril,?” Besides Cyril and the modestly blushing Danny, there turned out to be no other candidates. Danny played with the crease on his forehead. “Of course, it would be tempting to acknowledge that if we’re not geniuses, then at least talented in our own way,” he with melancholy raised his eyes and immediately lowered them, “nevertheless I fear that this is the deciding factor here.”
“But wha did you look at me? You, beanpole!” Makar exploded.
“I didn’t look at you!”
“Did too! You eyeballed me and started to talk all sorts of nonsense! Are you hinting that I’m stupid?”
Sashka felt that the showdown could stretch on for a long time. Bad enough that they were travelling from Moscow at one-and-a-half kilometres a minute. “He didn’t look at you. He looked at me!” he said and caught Danny’s grateful glance.
“I looked at him,” confirmed Danny.
Forced to be satisfied with the answer, Makar made a disapproving sound into the broken window. “In sync? This long leader cramps and you bring him a stool? OK! Take care of yourself, guys!”
Freda was tired of filming. She lowered her hand with the phone. “Let’s take it from another side!” she stated. “How did we turn up in the route D minibus at all? Each specifically? Here, you?” she poked Lara.
It turned out Lara was going to try out as a model in a summer collection ad. “I was given a piece of paper in the subway! For screen tests!”
“Rush along on a piece of paper handed out at the subway… In the city, alone! Heavens!” Lena delivered tunefully.
“Do you want to say something?” Lara raised her eyebrows.
“I said, ‘Heavens!’”
The suited precisionist Vlad Ganich was on his way to collect a monitor and speakers from a guy who had phoned him last night. Vlad did not get who he was. Some friend of a friend.
“I immediately sensed that you’re a fan of freebies!” stated Makar. Vlad with indignation straightened his tie.
Cyril informed them that he found himself by chance in the route D minibus. He liked someone and, out of natural shyness, was too timid to approach the person on the street. However, when they asked him whom he liked precisely, Cyril began to beat around the bush. It was clear that he was choosing between a pie in the sky and a bird in the hand.
“Well, everything is clear with this… Will lie to the last! And what are you doing here? Hey you, boy!” Freda fearlessly poked Makar. Makar choked. The last time a female inspector had called him “boy” was in matters of minors.
By chance dropping his line of vision onto Makar’s wrist, Sashka saw three small round bluish scars on the outside of the palm. Clearly tracks of cigarette butts put out against the skin. “Who did this to you?” asked Sashka.
Makar looked at his hand. He clenched and unclenched his fist. The bluish burns were filled with blood and became violet. “None of your business!” he said sharply and, after hiding his hand behind his back, moved to the window.
“He did it himself,” Cyril whispered to Sashka.
“Why himself?”
“Side by side and regular. If it were someone else, he would fidget. Likely, he punished himself for something. Who knows!” Cyril said cautiously.
Freda herself was going to find out about the new humanities-theatrical college, which she by chance had heard about on the radio. Moreover, she had heard it in such a way that she understood neither the name nor the precise address, but only to get on the route D minibus from the Planernaya subway station. And on the whole, it turned out Freda flew into Moscow only the day before yesterday, settled at her coach’s former wife’s, and after a day and a half, had time to go around to seven institutes and three universities.
“On the whole, everything here is vague. Nothing in common,” Danny summed up.
The minibus kept going for a long time. Calm Kievan Lena even managed to snooze, moreover, of the two nearby shoulders, on Vlad Ganich’s. It was unrealistic to sleep on Cyril’s shoulder, because every three seconds he leaped up to meet someone. Vlad did not shake off Lena’s head, but it was noticeable that he was suffering and perceived her as a contaminated object threatening his suit.
Makar leaned out the window with distrust. “Just in case! Seems we’re driving up!” he reported.
***
The minibus slowed down. They had turned from the highway long ago. Monotonous concrete fences occasionally with graffiti stretched out. Reaching the end of the last one, Route D unwillingly rolled onto a broken unpaved road. To the right was a field. To the left was a colourful show of Moscow groves of different sizes, often small birches and maples covered with caps turning yellow and almost supported by nothing. The minibus went along slowly, swaying on the way. After about fifteen minutes, it stopped at some gates. The gates opened. They again set off, drove for about twenty metres, and finally stopped.
Sashka pulled the door and carefully got out. He took a step, expecting the elastic force to catch him and throw him back into the minibus. The bus was standing on an asphalt area surrounded by lilac bushes. Before them was an ordinary two-storey building. Two structures and a gallery connecting them. Low stairs, wide porch, and black double doors. Next to them was a blue doorplate, on which crawled cockroaches of indistinguishable letters.
“What’s written there? Can anyone see?” asked Sashka.
“It says HDive,” someone beside him answered. Sashka turned. Standing next to him was the person by the name of Rina, squinting in the sun.
“You can see the letters from here? What eyesight!”
“Well no, I can’t. I read them earlier,” she admitted with a sigh.
“How?”
“Well, on the whole, I came from here. I was ordered to meet, accompany, and explain nothing. That kind of thing,” Rina shrugged her shoulders slightly, and Sashka understood that she did not particularly like this task. Sashka belatedly realized that she sat more quietly than everybody in the minibus and did not panic.
“So it’s you who dragged us here? I’ll strangle you!” Makar began to yell and rushed at Rina.
Sashka caught him in a chokehold and discovered at the same time that everyone had already got out of the minibus. “Stop!” he ordered and asked Rina, “What next? Where are we going now?”
Rina looked first at the sun, and then at her phone, checking if the sun was slower than the clock on her phone. “Well, come on! They’re waiting for us!” she said and, having turned around, made her way to HDive. Exchanging glances, the rest followed her.
“Only not me! I’m not going!” Freda said and, after passing everyone, went first.
Alice stepped with pleasure on the heads of the yellow flowers shooting out between the flagstones. If somewhere there were no flowers, she specially made a zigzag in order to crush some flowers elsewhere. “If this decoy also counts, then ten of us,” she stated.
“Well, so wha?” Makar was puzzled.
“No wha!” Alice mimicked and tinkled the death dog tags with a challenge.
END OF AUGUST – BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER
Chapter 3
Three Wishes
It is very difficult to love one who is near. It is simple to love one who is far. Let us assume I love the writer Chekhov but we live together in one place; how he laughs, gurgles with tea, or drops a wet spoon on a polished surface would irritate me. That is, until I learn to tolerate someone near, there is no point in saying that I love someone.
From the diary of a non-returning hdiver
The chubby middle-aged person waiting for Guy on board the Gomorrah was so cheerful and efficient that Guy, dressed in a stretched sweater and canvas pants, momentarily wanted to confine himself in a pinstriped suit and be shaved. “Oh, Guy!” he said, leaping up. “No, no! I know that you’re monstrously busy! Several minutes for me will be enough!”
Guy, not looking, sat down. He knew that Nekalaev would manage to move a chair. Moreover, not only for him but also for the stout Till. Thirty paces from the elevator, five steps, and Till was already gasping for breath.
“Your call surprised me,” said Guy. “And the foolish mysteriousness irritates me. Why did you decide that I’m sure to buy from you what you’re offering? And, by the way, what is it exactly?”
The cheerful person started to smile soothingly and lifted his hands, showing that all the answers would be given in their time. Then he took out a hard rectangular business card and tapped the table with it.
“I’m… hmm… a little of everything. Broker? Antique dealer? Bibliophile? Now and then the most interesting people die. Writers, artists, academicians. The heirs remain. Quite often not particularly competent.”
“I find this hard to believe,” Guy remarked absent-mindedly. “They cannot but know what their ancestor killed his whole life for.”
Chubby began to nod hurriedly. “Goes without saying! It’s well known to them that there’s quite a lot in grandpa’s and father’s library. But that’s all they know! Almost no one suspects that 95 percent of collected works in luxurious bindings have very little value, but some tiny unpretentious little book is priceless. The first limited edition Akhmatova[8 - Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko, one of the most acclaimed modernist poets of the Silver Age.] collection with her autograph, or a well-preserved bundle of Satyricon,[9 - Satyricon was a Russian weekly satirical magazine (1908-14).] or something similar. I politely buy dozens of beautiful books, paying three times their value for them, and out of courtesy I take the tiny booklet in an overall pile of all sorts of unnecessary things.”
“In other words, your task is to find this five percent and get it for nothing, after leaving the rest to the fool of an heir?” Till, wheezing, spelt it out. The round face of his collocutor strayed somewhere between the sun and a pancake.
“Each business has its special quirks. Can’t teach them. Can only learn them. In the spring, a decrepit old lady on Ostozhenka passed away, the widow of an artist of battle scenes. Her niece couldn’t wait to get rid of the junk. She was simply happy when I bought from her two trunks of all sorts of old stuff.”
“Soiled palettes? Drying tubes of paint?” Guy asked.
The cheerful person started to laugh with exaggerated energy. He had a habit of overstating the worth of mediocre jokes like that of book collections. “Not quite. The artist drew historical paintings, and for that, reliable historical things were necessary. Weapons, cloth, goblets. The entire second trunk turned out to be crammed with ancient horse harness. Bridles, belts, stirrups, adornment.”
“Do you want a bridle?” Guy asked Till.
Till shook his head and started to crumble bread with his thick fingers. “I now rarely sit behind the wheel. Gotten old, clumsy,” he complained.
These jokes did not fool the cheerful person. Once such people have heard you out up to this point, they will listen some more. Then they will pay, there is no getting away from it.
“The lid of the trunk interested me most of all. It was suspiciously heavy. I tapped it and found a secret compartment, which even the owners themselves clearly didn’t know about. An hourglass in a copper case lay there.” After mentioning the hourglass, the antique dealer stopped talking and quickly looked at Guy. “A very interesting hourglass. That and something else belonged to some first-hdiver Mityai Zheltoglazyi,” he sweetly added.
Guy stopped cleaning his nails with a corner of the business card and looked attentively for the first time at his collocutor. “What do you know about hdivers, Sergey Ilich?” he asked sharply.
Pancake-face grinned and stroked the napkin lying in front of him as if stroking a dead rabbit. “A little. You see, the hourglass was wrapped with a scrap of skin. On the skin was text. Very brief, but I examined it… For example, I understood that hdivers would hardly pay me. But you here are a different story.”
“What, me personally?” Guy doubted.
Sergey Ilich lowered his eyes so shyly that one wanted to give him some money. “No, of course not. I spent three months in order to come to you. Several times the thought flickered in me that there exist neither hdivers nor warlocks. So many centuries have gone by. I despaired, and here’s a piece of luck! I discovered on the Net the description of a strange anomaly – an enormous column of water on the Moscow River. Someone shot it with his cell phone. Immense! Such could only be done by a hdiver marker, the description of which was on the reverse side of the skin. And you yourself know only who could drop it… hee-hee… So I came to Gomorrah. The rest is a technical matter.”
“Not bad!” Guy showed approval. “I see you’ve done some good work. Can I have a look at the hourglass and the skin?”
The antique dealer looked cautiously at Till. Till was calmly chewing a piece of dill, which was hanging from the right corner of his mouth as from a horse’s mouth. “They’re at my place. No, no, it goes without saying, not with me! First we agree on a price!”
“What will the price be?” asked Guy.
“High. Transactions of this grade happen once in a lifetime,” the antique dealer said firmly. “I’ll ask three things, quite normal.”
“What are these three things?”
“Money. Health. And I want to know always what threatens me!”
Guy drew a circle with a wet finger on the polishing. “Why the last one? With money and health?” he asked.
The cheerful person looked tritely downcast. “I don’t like to move blindly! You can see that my work is also tricky. I’m always meeting people I don’t know. All or nothing. That’s my motto.”
“Great,” Guy approved. “Are you sure that I’m capable of supplying you all this?”
“Sure, I could demand even more. Three wishes is quite modest, taking into account that the sand in the hourglass has almost trickled through.”
Guy stopped examining the chin of his collocutor and looked him in the eyes for the first time. “Sand? Do you mean to say it has been flowing all this time? All these decades?”
“Yes,” touching the napkin, Sergey Ilyich confirmed. “It’s a strange hourglass. The sand runs only in one direction. And very slowly. One grain of sand a day at dawn. Must admit, I tried to cheat. Turned the hourglass over. And then the grain of sand – I swear! – fell from the bottom to the top!” Sergey Ilyich looked sharply at Guy, checking what impression his words would make.
“You’re observant. Difficult to notice one grain of sand a day. You probably have a lot of free time,” Guy acknowledged.
“I used a web cam and examined slowly at high magnification.”
Guy stretched, getting up. Overtaking the waiter, Nekalaev dashed to move aside the chair. The antique dealer also jumped. “Well, fine, my dear!” said Guy after a long pause. “We’ll fulfil your wishes if the hourglass actually belongs to… what did you call him?”
“Mityai Zheltoglazyi,” smiling with understanding, the antique dealer prompted. “When will you be ready?”
“I’m always ready,” said Guy, listening to something going on inside him. “At least health and the knowledge of the future I’m ready to give you now. As for the money… possibly we’ll have to make a couple of calls!” He looked at Till.
Looking sombrely, Till promised that he would find the money even without Dolbushin. From his small personal reserve. “And we still haven’t settled our misunderstanding with Albert,” he acknowledged.
“Soon?”
“Yes, perhaps I’ll manage in an hour. You need so much,” Till said complacently. “Bring the hourglass!”
Sergey Ilyich anxiously turned pink. He thought for several seconds, knitted his brows, and made a decision. “I’m quick! I had the feeling that everything would be decided today.”
“So the thing is with you?” Guy was surprised.
“No, no, not at all! A friend is waiting for me not far from here,” he acknowledged.
Guy smiled. “Ingvar! The money!” Guy reminded Till, who got up reluctantly and began to get down tottering. He returned quickly. The berserkers accompanying him unloaded from the trunk an enormous TV box glued together with Scotch tape.
Their recent guest emerged from the parking lot simultaneously with Till. Apparently, he had been watching from the bushes. His boots were wet. He was holding in his hands a briefcase stained with soil.
“Saw your friend?” Guy asked with irony. “Let’s have a look!”
The antique dealer nervously looked sideways at the box. “This is ridiculous! You’re a serious person. Of course you won’t cheat me!” he said, having convinced himself, and handed the briefcase to Guy.
Guy wiped with his sleeve the soil from the lock. He took out a bulky, thick hourglass with a copper stand. The sand inside the hourglass was bluish. “No doubt. The work is truly his,” Guy acknowledged in an undertone. “Look, Ingvar! What do the numbers 300 and 1 mean?”
Till took the hourglass from Guy, looked at it, and poked at the stand with a rigid finger. “I don’t know about the numbers. Doesn’t this clay idol remind you of anyone?” he asked, wheezing.
