The Tool & the Butterflies Page 12

  By the end of his junior year, Iratov had saved up a tidy sum, enough for three two-room cooperative apartments.

  Early that fall in Gorky Park, two men joined him at his table in a Czech beer bar called the Pilsner. They were adults, both with gray faces and arms blue with prison tattoos. One of them—the slightly bigger one—took a sip from his mug and revealed that he was missing his two front teeth. The other had all his teeth, but his nose was tinted lilac.

  “You shark?” the first asked with a toothless grin.

  “Huh?” went Iratov.

  “Looks like we got a real smart guy on our hands, Lilac. You shark? You play cards?”

  “Well, yeah …”

  “‘Well,’ he says. If you were a well, you’d be full of water. Well, go play already.”

  “Nope,” said Iratov. “I only play when I feel like it.”

  “Wow, looks like he’s the boss around here, Lilac!”

  Lilac was in no joking mood. He’d had a killer earache all week. He used a compress, then some drops, but nothing helped. He even tried pouring some vodka in there, but that only made it hurt more.

  “Listen up, Yakut.” Lilac was speaking for himself at last. “We know everything about you! We’ve had your number since last month!”

  “So am I next in line?”

  “What a comedian …” There was a flash of steel—a Finnish puukko that had imperceptibly sliced through Arseny’s brand-new jacket and pierced his skin. A runnel of blood flowed on to his jeans. He felt its long, hot trail.

  “We like to joke around too,” the toothless one admitted. “But not during business hours! Listen up, buddy boy, we’re not some bottom-feeders. We run this park. You’re gonna pay us half of your takings every week. You’re gonna bring it to Lilac in the pool hall.”

  “How come so much?” asked Iratov in surprise, one hand clutching his bleeding side.

  “That’s the tax for interlopers!”

  “I’ll go somewhere else then!” the schoolboy threatened.

  “Who’ve we got at Vodny Stadion?”

  “Gregory the Ferryman and Kesha Mengele,” Lilac said.

  “You’re really gonna get it over there, kid!” the toothless one predicted. “Do you know who Doctor Mengele was?” Iratov took a sip from his mug, shrugged, and admitted that he’d never heard of him. “He was this Nazi doctor during the war. He did experiments on prisoners. Well, that German doctor is small fry compared to Kesha! Didn’t they teach you that at school?”

  “Listen, son, do you know what I can take for an earache?” Lilac asked. “It’s a full-on October Revolution here. I’m getting shot in the head.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

  “I need a quack and I got a shark …” he said, neighing with laughter but being careful not to shake his ear. Then they didn’t say anything for a while.

  “Thought about it?” Lilac finished his beer, hiccupped, bit into a salted slice of black bread, and gave Iratov a look that was almost affectionate.

  “I really don’t know anything about ears, honest!”

  “You think about my half?”

  “How come it’s so damn much?” Iratov turned red with spite. “I do all the work. I put up the cash, I take the risks! There’s cops all over, and the suckers have given me a couple of beatings! Isn’t that enough?”

  “Do you know how many good people are doing hard time right now? You think they get fed like they did in mama’s house?”

  “Don’t thieves take care of their own?”

  “You see …” Lilac began in a satisfied voice, but then the criminal caught another bullet in the ear, and his face contorted into a grimace of pain.

  “So, here’s how it’s gonna be,” the toothless one said. “We’ll keep the cops off your back and take care of it if one of the suckers starts shit. Plus, you eat for free at all the BBQ joints in town. That’s nothing to sneeze at! If you wanna go to Vodny Stadion, we’ll make sure Kesha Mengele is wise to our agreement.”

  “Fine,” Iratov said with a nod. “It’s a deal. After all, it’s like they said in the war. We have nowhere to retreat to—Moscow is behind us.”

  “Then our negotiations are concluded!” Lilac smiled through the pain, and the parties to the new agreement shook on it.

  Then the two men, their skin blue with tattoos, disappeared from the Czech bar. It was like something out of a cartoon—the Road Runner vanishing in a cloud of dust.

  As he stood in the shower, washing away the dried blood, Iratov thought about his immediate future. He didn’t feel like taking orders from those criminals, and he most definitely had no desire to meet Mengele. He would have to come up with something else. In the meantime, half it was … damn them! Iratov swore to his own reflection in the mirror that he would live in the West one day—and live comfortably, far from these snarling convicts!

  Iratov graduated from high school with all A’s and B’s, but as June came to an end, thoughts about what profession he would like to pursue failed to appear. They went through every available institution.

  “Maybe the Meat and Dairy Industry Institute?” his worried mother asked. That was where absolute degenerates went in those days, because there were always more slots than applicants. “It’s still a degree, and they say you don’t really have to do anything there, just show up once a week …”

  “How about I just go to trade school to be a lathe operator? Or a circus clown! I’ll be the next Nikulin or Shuydin!”

  “Nikulin would be good … He was terrific in When the Trees Were Tall!”

  After all those fruitless conversations, his mother would go cry in her room, and Iratov would hit the streets and broaden the horizons of his young life with piquant pleasures.

  It had already been a year since he first identified Café Lira on the corner of Tverskaya Street. There weren’t all that many people there or anything, but they were all well-off. They didn’t let working stiffs in. That rule was enforced by a curly-haired bouncer nicknamed Artemon. Speculators, black-market dealers and their children, plus other interesting characters hung out at the Lira, dropping crazy money—for the time, anyway. Iratov was set when it came to cash, always packing a bunch of fifty-ruble bills in the inner pocket of his jacket. He was always ready to treat himself, and he loved buying pretty girls champagne cobblers, the specialty of the house. On one of those evenings, two gal-pal, MAI-frosh types latched on to him. Nice boobs, nice butts, looking as cute as strawberry ice cream. The cheerful future architects made eyes at the handsome dark-haired guy, then dragged him back to their dorm once they were good and drunk, where they taught the generous youth the ménage à trois—and a few fancy tricks to go with it. With his looks, Iratov obviously had some experience—he had lost his virginity in eighth grade—but those chicks really blew his mind. They suggested—and demonstrated—things he couldn’t even imagine. The Communist Youth League girl was sweet, and the volleyball girl was pleasantly sour. Iratov himself proved to be more than a “certified hunk.” He had some serious stamina, too. He learned his new bedroom tricks eagerly and easily, and kept going until it was nearly morning, then griped over a sausage omelet that there was no vocation for him—he was a worthless creature who would be dragged off to the army in the fall if he didn’t go to college.

  “Then come here!” the girls suggested. “We’ll get the sketches and designs ready for your application. You’ll definitely get in! What a good idea!” they exclaimed.

  “Shevtsova, you’re the head of our Communist Youth League chapter, you can pull some strings!”

  “I will!” the patriotic young lady promised. “And you talk to the athletic department, Katya. Tell them he plays volleyball or he’s a boxer or something. You don’t happen to play a sport, do you?”

  “I can play strip poker,” Iratov answered. “But what would I do here, build pre-fab apartment blocks? That sounds so boring!”

  “What about us?” Shevtsova asked reproachfully. “Nothing pre-fab abou
t us!”

  “That’s right,” said the volleyball girl. “We’re custom projects! You can spend all your free time on us. Does that sound boring to you?” She drew her bathrobe away from one perky breast.

  “That’s the only good argument for higher education I’ve ever heard!” Iratov said with a laugh and reached for the boldly bare maiden.

  … Iratov was sitting in the bleachers at Vodny Stadion, cleaning out a fresh set of suckers, when it suddenly hit him what he had to do. His hopeless thoughts made him jerk suddenly, and so inopportunely that the winning card, the ace of spades he’d stashed away, suddenly slipped out of the sleeve of his summer shirt, soared skyward like a bird, singing out to the band of beefy men that they were suckers getting cleaned out by some high school kid. Heavy with all the beer they’d drunk, the aggrieved gang was eager to rip him to shreds. Some of them were already yanking boards out of the bleachers, others were twisting Iratov’s arms so hard the joints crackled, on the verge of breaking. Fortunately, his prison-tatted backup arrived in the nick of time: Gregory the Ferryman and Kesha Mengele. Both of them were wearing the red armbands of volunteer patrolmen, and even a young beat cop who had come there for a Ready for Labor and Defense of the USSR swimming competition got involved. The criminals snatched the hapless card shark from the hands of those honest working men and promised that he would be punished to the fullest extent of the law, up to and including death by firing squad.

  “Ain’t that right, flatfoot?” asked Gregory the Ferryman, tugging on the cop’s tunic. The young patrolman, feeling a newly arrived ten-spot from Kesha against his thigh, answered cheerfully.

  “We’ll shoot him, no doubt about it! Or drown him!”

  The suckers obviously didn’t believe the two bruisers with rings and rising suns tatted on their arms, but nobody wanted to pick a fight with them. The presence of the patrolman had confused them, too. Long story short, they got Iratov off the hook. They let the flatfoot run off to his swimming competition and had a brief, harsh exchange with the card shark.

  “What the hell?” Gregory the Ferryman inquired.

  “It was the heat,” Iratov replied. “Sweaty fingers! So it just hopped out of my—”

  “Bring a damn handkerchief!” Kesha advised. “Around here, if you’re all thumbs, you’re getting all ten of them rammed up your ass, you get me?”

  Iratov was on a stepladder half the night, rummaging around in the crawl space his family used as a storage area. He went through hundreds of his father’s designs, amazed at how he’d managed to produce so much junk. The paper alone must have cost a pretty penny! It would have been one thing if he meant to show them to someone, but he was doing it for himself …

  Iratov selected three sets of sketches and blueprints. He’d decided to go with a completely deranged vegetable theme: the Tomato Building, a cucumber skyscraper, and a stadium shaped like a carved pumpkin drew Homeric laughter out of him!

  “Well, alright,” he thought. “These designs will be the portfolio portion of my application. I’m a misunderstood genius! And it’ll get Mother off my case for a while …” Iratov studied the details of the drawings with great care, submitted them to the admissions committee, and then promptly forgot about them. He shifted his attention to more relevant and worthwhile matters.

  A while back, he had noticed this very fashionable grifter sitting with a whole bunch of speculators in Café Lira—and observed him paying their tab with an American ten-dollar bill. He slipped it to the bartender under a napkin. Ho-ly shit! Iratov instantly decided that he would never try to make money playing cards again, and all those Lilacs and Mengeles with their three- and five-ruble chump change could eat a dick. He had found his vocation now! If a ten was enough for a whole gang to eat and drink, then if he had a wad of hundreds, he could stuff the whole of Moscow until it burst and douse it until it sloshed! This wasn’t Gorky Park and Vodny Stadion anymore! It was a clean business: no suckers snarling at him with their ugly soused mugs, no getting in bed with ex-cons. It would be risky, sure, but that’d make it more rewarding for him … and his ego. Iratov was already imagining having skills that were transferable anywhere, counting for something on the world’s financial markets, knowing the real movers and shakers. His mood soared and the whole universe swelled with high spirits.

  “My vocation,” he whispered over and over as he lay in bed that night, unable to fall asleep, grinning like Mephistopheles.

  The future currency speculator spent a few days patiently waiting for the grifter to show up at Café Lira so he could make his acquaintance and discuss business, but he seemed to have vanished without a trace. As anyone can tell you, youth and patience seldom go together. Iratov was determined to make his entrance into the world of currency speculation, so he sat next to the bartender and spoke without preamble.

  “I need five thousand dollars.”

  Lyosha, the bartender, who drove the only Volvo in the capital, gave the young man a condescending look and answered him in an equally condescending tone. “Have you gone bonkers?”

  “I mean it!”

  “What makes you think I deal currency?”

  “I’ve seen you!”

  “Wow, Mr. Eagle Eye over here. You’re a card shark, aren’t you? Yakut, right? You hustle in the parks! Sharks don’t deal currency! That’s a different ball game.”

  “How do you know about me?” Now it was Iratov’s turn to be surprised.

  “That’s my job,” the bartender explained. “Knowing who’s doing what and where. Want a drink?”

  “I’ll pay an extra ruble for every dollar. Pour me some Chartreuse.”

  “Do you know about the four main castes in India?”

  “What the hell would I want to know that for?”

  “First there are the Brahmans, the priests—they’re the highest caste.” The bartender splashed the liqueur into a glass. “A little bit lower, you have the Kshatriyas—they’re the warriors. Then after them are the Vaishyas, the artisans, and the Sudras, the laborers and servants. Then there’s the untouchables, too. Anyone who touches them becomes an untouchable themselves! They’re the lowest caste, and—”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Jumping to a higher caste is impossible. You can only fall. You can’t become a Brahman if you’re a Kshatriya. Not with family, not with money, no way, no how. If you’re born a Vaishya, you’ll die a Vaishya! If you want an example they’ll have covered at your school, I’ll quote you some Gorky. ‘Those who are born to crawl shall never fly.’”

  “So what you mean,” Iratov deduced, “is that if I’m a card shark, I need blue blood to deal currency? Is that it?”

  “There you have it!” said Lyosha with a smile. “Want another? On me.”

  “How about you have one on me?”

  “Count your blessings, kid! At least they don’t put you against the wall for card tricks.”

  “Three.”

  “Three what?”

  “Three more rubles for every dollar. Are you really gonna get that on the black market?”

  “God, you’re such a pain in the ass! Don’t you have enough money as it is?”

  “That’s not the point.” Iratov wouldn’t give up.

  “So what is?” Lyosha took an orange wedge from a dish and shoved it into his mouth, peel and all.

  “Brahmans can stay Brahmans, but the caterpillar crawled and crawled until it could fly! You’ll be the middleman. You can keep a third for yourself. You’ll make fifteen thousand rubles on this transaction. You can buy Zykina’s dacha with that kind of money! Seven and a half acres! Three houses, a sauna, and your own lake! I’ll introduce you to the broker!” With enviable calm, the bartender replied that he would think about it.

  “Wait here for a moment. How about some julienne? Or caviar on toast?”

  Iratov waited nervously. He was almost shaking with impatience. Lyosha had gone off somewhere, probably to some back room where he was talking on the phone, consulting so
mebody. He didn’t come back for a long time, then he returned with a plate of bloody beef languette. He put it on the bar, cut up the meat, and began to eat slowly. He chewed tediously, like a cow chewing its cud.

  Another half hour went by. Then another. The fan on the bar chirred. Iratov looked at the bartender, watched him masticating like a camel, and waited.

  The bartender finally finished eating and picked up the last pea. He examined it in the light as if it were some precious treasure, then nodded for Iratov to approach and delivered a brief admonition.

  “One mistake and it’s a bullet. For both of us. Got it?”

  “Got it. How come that took so long? Tough meat?”

  “Brahmans chew every piece up to sixty times. Tomorrow morning at eight. Right here.”

  “How come you’re so sure you’re a Brahman? You could be an untouchable …”

  “And count the dough right!” Lyosha ignored Iratov’s jab. “I’ll take care of it.”

  They made the exchange the following morning. It all happened quickly and easily. An old Moskvitch pulled up. A little guy in a rumpled hat with tiny eyes behind his Coke-bottle glasses who looked like an accountant from the housing department came into Café Lira, where Iratov was already waiting for him, eating a curd snack. Lyosha was bustling around nearby, nervously wiping the tables. The cocktail wizard wasn’t as calm and collected as he had been yesterday. He was scared. Scared that this kid could just hand him over to the spooks, that there could be some fateful foul-up, some monkey wrench—but fifteen large! Lyosha was well aware that he was risking his life. He was sweating, but it felt like his balls were full of ice.

  The little guy came in, ignoring Lyosha’s invitation to have some breakfast. He pulled a chubby envelope with an Avia stamp on it from his coat pocket and carelessly flung it on the table.