‘And when did you stick that on?’
‘When we were on the way to the room to drink champagne,’ he said with a chuckle.
‘What for? Are you taking such a serious interest in me?’
‘In general, yes,’ he said. ‘But it’s not me any more. Never mind, the boss will soon find out what you’re up to. He’s sorted out trickier specimens than you. By the way, I told him what kind of work you do.’
At this stage I didn’t like what was going on at all, but it was too late to get worked up about it: we were already approaching the familiar building. The car drove into the courtyard and straight in through the metal gates of the garage, which immediately closed, cutting us off from the world.
‘Get out, we’re here.’
As soon as Mikhalich got out, I put the rose on his seat - its long thorny stem was almost the same colour, and there was a good chance that Mikhalich would just plonk his sturdy backside down on it.
‘Take your shoes off,’ he said when I got out after him.
‘What’s this, are you taking me to be shot?’
‘That depends,’ he chuckled. ‘There are slippers over there by the lift.’
I looked around. A round hole in the ceiling, a steel pole, a spiral staircase - we were in a familiar place. But this time there was a light on in the garage and I spotted the door of a lift that I hadn’t noticed the last time. Lying on the floor in front of it there were several pairs of various different slippers. I chose a pair of blue ones with round pompoms - they looked so touchingly defenceless that only a monster could possibly harm any girl who was wearing them.
The lift door opened and Mikhalich gestured for me to go in. There were two large triangular buttons on the panel, combined to form a rhombus. Mikhalich pressed the upper button, and the lift took off with a mighty jerk, carrying us upwards.
When the door opened a few seconds later, I was blinded by light coming from all directions. Alexander was standing there, engulfed in the bright swirling vortex. He was wearing a military uniform and his face was covered with a gauze mask.
‘Hello, Ada,’ he said. ‘Please come in. No, Mikhalich, I’m sorry - I’m not inviting you. Today three would be a crowd . . .’
I’d noticed the penthouse on my first visit. Only I hadn’t guessed that it was a penthouse - from below it looked like a dark knob on the end of the huge concrete pencil. It could have been taken for the housing of the lift motors, some kind of technical premises or a boiler room. But those turquoise walls turned out to be transparent from the inside.
Before I’d even taken it all in, they started turning dark before my very eyes, until they looked like bottle glass. I’d just been squinting at the bright sunlight, and all of a sudden in just a few seconds an entire house had condensed around me. It hadn’t been visible before in the sunshine bouncing off all the mirror surfaces.
I learned later that it was an expensive technical gismo - the transparency of the walls was adjusted using special liquid-crystal membranes that were controlled by a computer system. At the time, though, what happened seemed like a miracle. Only since long, long ago the response that miracles provoke in me has been ironic, not to say contemptuous.
‘Hi, Shurik,’ I said. ‘What’s with the sideshow effects? No money for normal blinds?’
He was taken aback. But it only took him a second to recover and he laughed.
‘Shurik,’ he said. ‘I like that. Well yes. Since you’re Ada now, I suppose I’m Shurik.’
His light-grey double-breasted uniform jacket with a lieutenant general’s shoulder straps and dark-blue trousers with wide red stripes looked a little theatrical. He came up to me, removed the gauze mask from his face, squeezed his eyes shut and drew in the air through his nose. I felt like asking why he was always doing that, but I thought better of it. He opened his eyes and his glance fell on my earrings.
‘What an amusing idea,’ he said.
‘Great, isn’t it? And especially beautiful because the stones are different. Do you like it?’
‘It’s all right. Did Mikhalich give you the flower?’
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘And he told me I should think about the meaning of the message. But I haven’t come up with anything. Maybe you can tell me yourself?’
He scratched his head. He seemed disconcerted by my question.
‘Do you know the folktale about the little scarlet flower?’
‘Which one exactly?’ I asked.
‘I think there is only one.’
He nodded towards a desk with a computer and a silver figurine standing on it. There was a book lying beside the figurine, with bookmarks in several pages. The half-effaced red letters of the title on its cover read:
Russian Fairy Tales
.
‘The story was written down by Sergei Aksakov,’ he said. ‘His housekeeper Pelagia told him it.’
‘And what’s it about?’
‘About a beautiful girl and a beast.’
‘And what’s the little flower got to do with it?’
‘It was the reason everything began. Do you really not know this fairy tale?’
‘No.’
‘It’s long, but the gist is this: a beautiful girl asked her father to bring her a scarlet flower. The father found one in a magical garden a long way away and picked it. But the garden was guarded by a terrible monster. He caught the beautiful girl’s father, and she had to become the monster’s prisoner so that he would release her father. The monster was ugly, but kind. She fell in love with him, first for his kindness, and then simply in love. And when they kissed, the spell was broken and the monster turned into a prince.’
‘Aha,’ I said. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s about?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yes? What is it about?’
‘About love conquering all.’
I laughed. He really was quite amusing. He’d probably bumped off a few heavy hoods and ordered a hit on some banker, so now, with typical human presumption, he thought he was a monster. And he also thought that love would save him.
He took me by the arm and led me across to a futuristic divan standing between two groves of dwarf bonsais with miniature arbours, bridges and even waterfalls.
‘Why are you laughing?’ he asked.
‘I can explain,’ I said, sitting down on the divan and pulling my legs up under me.
‘Okay, explain.’
He sat at the other end of the divan and crossed his legs. I noticed the edge of a holster peeping out from under his uniform jacket.
‘It’s one of those folktales that express the horror and pain of a woman’s first sexual experience,’ I said. ‘There are lots of stories like that, and the one you just told me is a classic example. It’s a metaphor of how a woman discovers the essentially bestial nature of man and becomes aware of her own power over that beast. And the little scarlet flower that her father picks is such a literal symbol of defloration, amplified by the theme of incest, that I find it hard to believe the story was told by a housekeeper. It was probably composed by some twentieth-century Viennese postgraduate to illustrate his thesis. He invented the story, and the housekeeper Pelagia, and the writer Aksakov.’
While I was talking, his expression turned noticeably gloomier.
‘Where did you pick up all that stuff?’
‘It’s all truisms. Everybody knows it.’
‘And you believe it?’
‘What?’
‘That this fairy tale is not about how love conquers everything on earth, but how defecation realizes its power over incest?’
‘Defloration,’ I corrected him.
‘It doesn’t matter. Is that what you really think?’
I thought about it.
‘I . . . I don’t think anything. That’s simply the contemporary discourse of folktales.’
‘So you’re saying that because of this discourse, when someone gives you a scarlet flower you think it’s a symbol of defecation and incest?’
‘No, don’t be like that,’ I replied, a little embarrassed. ‘When someone gives me a scarlet flower I . . . I’m simply pleased.’
‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘And as for contemporary discourse, it’s high time to take an aspen stake and stuff it back up the cocaine-and-amphetamine polluted backside that produced it.’
I hadn’t expected such a sweeping generalization.
‘Why?’
‘So it won’t defile our little scarlet flower.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I understand about the cocaine. You mean Dr Freud. He did have that little peccadillo. But what have amphetamines got to do with it?’
‘I can explain,’ he said, and tucked his legs up underneath himself in a parody of my pose.
‘Okay, explain.’
‘All those French parrots who invented discourse were high on amphetamines all the time. In the evening they take barbiturates to get to sleep, and they start off the morning with amphetamines so they can generate as much discourse as possible before they start taking barbiturates to get back to sleep again. That’s all there is to discourse. Didn’t you know that?’
‘Where did you get information like that?’
‘There was a course at the FSB Academy about modern psychedelic culture. Counter-brainwashing. Oh yes, I forgot to say - they’re all queers too. In case you were going to ask what the backside had to do with anything.’
The conversation was headed in the wrong direction, and it was time to change the subject. I prefer to do that abruptly.
‘Alexander,’ I said, ‘explain to me, so I can understand, just what I’m doing here. Do you want to screw me or re-educate me?’
He shuddered, as if I’d said something terrible, leapt up off the divan and began striding backwards and forwards past the window - or rather, not the window, but a rectangle in the wall that was still transparent.
‘Are you trying to shock me?’ he asked. ‘You’re wasting your time. I know there’s a pure, vulnerable soul hiding behind your affected cynicism.’
‘Affected cynicism? You mean me?’
‘Not even cynicism,’ he said, stopping. ‘Flippancy. A failure to understand the serious things you’re playing with, like a little child with a hand grenade. Let’s talk frankly, to the point.’
‘Okay, let’s.’
‘You say - the bestial essence of man, the horror of the first coitus . . . These are such terrible, dark things. If you want to know, even I am sometimes afraid to glance into those abysses . . .’
He really was funny after all - ‘even I’. He went on:
‘But you talk about it all like it was just peanuts. Don’t you have any fear of the beast in a man? Of the man in the beast?’
‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘Mikhalich told you who I am, didn’t he?’ He nodded.
‘Well, then. If I had problems like that I wouldn’t be able to do my job.’
‘You’re not afraid of the intimate contact with someone else’s body - immense and ugly, living according to its own laws?’
‘I simply adore it,’ I said and smiled.
He looked at me and shook his head dubiously.
‘I mean physical intimacy? In the very lowest sense?’
‘For spiritual intimacy I charge an extra hundred and fifty per cent. How long can you go on chewing over the same thing? Do you always yatter on like this before you have a screw?’
He frowned.
‘There’s no need to talk to me as if I were a bandit. That’s because of the FSB uniform, is it?’
‘Maybe. Try taking it off. Including the trousers.’
‘Why do you talk that way?’
‘Don’t you find me at all attractive?’
I lowered my head and gave him an offended look from under my eyebrows, screwing my eyes up slightly and pouting my lips. I worked on that look for over a thousand years, and there’s no point in trying to describe it. It’s my own patented brand of provocation - brazenness and innocence in the same armour-piercing package: it zaps straight through the client and then ricochets back to get him again. The only effective protection I know against that gaze is to look in the other direction. Alexander was looking at me.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said with a nervous twitch of his head. ‘And how!’
I realized the critical moment had arrived. When the client jerks his head like that, the control centres of his brain are failing, and he can throw himself at you at any moment.
‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said. ‘Where is your bathroom here?’
He pointed to a round wall of blue semi-transparent glass. There was no door - the way in was through a passage that curled like a snail’s shell.
‘I’ll just be a moment.’
Once I was inside I took a deep breath.
It was beautiful on the other side of the wall. The gold stars on a blue background and the bath lined with mother-of-pearl reminded me of the baths at Pompeii - perhaps the designer had deliberately evoked that image. But the owner was unlikely to know about that.