It’s risky to push a client up so far so fast, I thought, some day it will end badly. And maybe Alexander was injecting something, like Mikhalich? Or taking something by mouth? There must be some reason for the strange way he kept sniffing the air like that . . .
I took off my jeans and put them on the floor, then took a look at myself in the mirror. My pride and joy was like a Japanese fan painted to look like a red brush. It was beautiful. And against the starry blue background it looked simple fabulous. I was more sure of my powers than I had ever been - I was simply brimming over with energy, just a little bit more and the hairs of my tail would have started shooting out little balls of lightning. I remembered the funny Russian saying ‘to hold your tail like a pistol’, meaning to keep your spirits up. I don’t know where it came from, but a fox must have been involved one way or another. Well then, I thought, all guns blazing . . .
When I reached the way out, I prepared for take-off by taking a few deep breaths, seized that one and only right moment when every cell in your body says ‘Now!’ and hurtled out of the bathroom like a tornado.
After that there was no time to think. I braked, turned my backside to the target, thrust my hands and feet hard against the floor and curved my tail above my head. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the mirror surfaces - I looked like a menacing red scorpion prepared for battle . . . Alexander raised his eyes to look at me, but before he could even blink, my tail had delivered its precise, perfectly aligned, impeccably accurate blow to the very centre of his brain.
He put his hand over his eyes, as if to protect them against a blinding light. Then he lowered his hand and our eyes met. Something was happening that wasn’t right. My tail simply was-n’t able to sense him - and he was standing just a few steps away and looking at me as if he couldn’t believe that anything so beautiful could possibly exist in all the world.
‘Adele,’ he whispered, ‘my darling . . .’
And then the nightmare began.
He staggered, made a terrible howling sound and literally fell out of his own body - as if it were a bud that opened up into a sinister, shaggy flower in just a few seconds. It turned out that the man who was called Alexander was no more than a drawing on a door into the beyond. Now that door had opened, and the creature who had been watching me through the keyhole for a long time had come tumbling out.
Standing there in front of me was a monster, something halfway between a man and a wolf, with gaping jaws and piercing yellow eyes. At first I thought Alexander’s clothes had disappeared. Then I realized that his tunic and trousers had been transformed together with him: his torso was covered with ash-grey fur, but his hind legs were darker, and I could see the irregular traces of the stripes on them. There was an elongated mark on the beast’s chest, like the imprint of a tie that has slipped to one side. When my gaze moved lower I was horror-struck. I’d never seen how that place looked on a wolf that was aroused. And to my mind it looked more terrible than any gaping jaws.
At that point I realized I was still standing on all fours with my tail up in the air and my defenceless behind stuck out in his direction. Defenceless, because my antenna wasn’t working and I had nothing to stop him with. I could guess how my pose might be interpreted, but I was paralysed - instead of jumping back, I kept looking at him over my shoulder. That happens in some dreams - you need to run away fast, but instead you go on standing there and there’s just no way you can lift your leaden feet off the ground. I couldn’t even wipe the idiot grin off my face - like a burglar caught on the job.
‘’Grr-rra-rra,’ he said. ‘Gr-rrrrra...’
‘Hey, bro,’ I babbled, ‘wait. I’ll explain everything . . .’
He growled and took a step towards me.
‘Don’t you even think about it, all right? I’m serious, you big grey wolf, slow down . . .’
He fell gently on to his front paws or hands and took another step towards me. Entirely different words were required. But where could I find them?
‘Listen . . . Let’s discuss everything calmly, eh?’
He grinned, opening his jaws wide and raising his huge grey tail, almost copying my working pose.
‘Wait, grey beast,’ I whispered, ‘don’t . . .’
He jumped, and for a second I thought the world had been covered by a terrible, low storm cloud. The next moment the cloud collapsed on top of me.
Lying on the divan, covered with something like the skin of an albino mammoth, I sobbed into the pillow, unable to understand how there could have been so many tears inside me - the pillow was already soaked on both sides.
‘Ada,’ Alexander said and put his hand on my shoulder.
‘Go away, you monster,’ I sobbed and shook his hand off.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said timidly, ‘I didn’t mean . . .’
‘I said go away, you dirty animal.’
I burst into floods of tears again. A minute or two later he tried to touch my shoulder again.
‘I asked you three times,’ he said.
‘Are you trying to be funny?’
‘What do you mean? I told you. About the bestial body, about physical intimacy. Didn’t I?’
‘How was I supposed to guess?’
‘Well, for instance, from the smell.’
‘Foxes don’t have any sense of smell.’
‘I understood all about you straight away,’ he said, stroking my arm awkwardly. ‘In the first place, people don’t smell like that. And in the second place, Mikhalich has been dinning it into my ears. “Comrade lieutenant general, I’ve looked at the recording - you’ve got to sort this dame out properly. She stands on all fours, with her eyes blazing, I’ve never seen eyes so terrible, and on her back she has this huge red lens. And she uses that lens to burn right through our consultant’s brain! She turned the beam on him, and he was totally zonked . . .” At first I thought the ketamine had sent him totally insane. But then I watched the recording, and there it was . . . He took your tail for a lens.’
‘What recording’s that?’
‘Your client, the one you lashed until he bled, was shooting amateur porn. With a concealed camera.’
‘What? When I was working on credit?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that, that’s your business. As soon as he came round he brought the tape to us.’
‘The fucking intelligentsia,’ I said, unable to restrain myself.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘not very nice. But that’s what people are like. You mean Mikhalich didn’t show you the photos? He had a whole file of them, specially printed for your conversation.’
‘He didn’t have time . . . You mean Mikhalich is going to watch all the vile things you just did with me?’
‘I don’t have a single camera here, relax, my darling.’
‘Don’t call me darling, you beast,’ I sobbed. ‘You filthy depraved male. Nobody’s done that to me in the last . . .’ - for some reason I suddenly decided not to mention any dates - ‘ever done that to me in my life. How vile!’
He pulled his head down into his shoulders, as if he’d been lashed with a wet rag. That was curious - although my tail apparently had no effect on him, it seemed that my words affected him quite powerfully. I decided to test this observation.
‘I’m so tender and delicate down there,’ I said in a pitiful voice. ‘And you’ve torn everything with your huge prick. I’ll probably die now . . .’
He turned pale, unbuttoned his tunic and took a huge nickel-plated pistol out of its holster. I was afraid he was going to shoot me, the way Robert De Niro shot that tedious woman he was talking to in Tarantino’s film, but fortunately I was wrong.
‘If anything happens to you,’ he said in a serious voice, ‘I’ll blow my brains out.’
‘Put it away,’ I said, ‘put it away . . . So what if you do blow your stupid brains out? What good will that do me? I told you, don’t!’
‘I thought,’ he said quietly, ‘that you were just being coy.’
‘Coy? Your dick is three times the size of that pistol, you wolf! I wasn’t being coy, I just wanted to stay alive! Nowadays they even teach children in school that if a girl says “No”, it means precisely “No”, and not “Yes” or “Oh, I don’t know”. All the rape cases in the West are centred round that. Didn’t they explain that in the FSB Academy?’
He shook his head dejectedly from side to side. It was a pitiful sight. I felt the time had come to stop, or I might overdo it. That recollection of Tarantino had been no accident.
‘Do you have some bandages and iodine?’ I asked in a weak voice.
‘I’ll send Mikhalich,’ he said, jumping to his feet.
‘I don’t want Mikhalich here! The last thing I need is Mikhalich giggling over me . . . Can’t you go to the chemist’s yourself?’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘And don’t let that Mikhalich of yours come in here while you’re gone. I don’t want anyone to see me in this state.’
He was already at the lift.
‘I’ll be quick. Hold on.’
The door closed behind him and I breathed a sigh of relief.
As I’ve already said, foxes don’t have any sexual organs in the human sense. But we do have a rudimentary cavity under our tails, an elastic bag of skin that’s not connected with any other organs. It’s usually squeezed into a narrow slit, like the bladder of a deflated football, but when we experience fear it expands and becomes slightly moist. It plays the same role in our anatomy as a special hollow plastic cylinder does in the equipment of employees in a great ape reserve.
The great apes employ the same technologies of social control as are found in criminal and political circles: the males who are in charge ritually humiliate other apes who they think are aspiring to an unjustifiably high status. Sometimes outsiders like electricians and laboratory workers find themselves in this role (I mean in special reserves). In readiness for such a turn of events, they carry an empty plastic cylinder suspended on straps between their legs, and this cylinder is known by the glorious name of a ‘prick-catcher’. It is their guarantee of safety: if a large male obsessed by a sense of social justice jumps them, all they have to do is bend over and wait a few minutes - while the ape’s indignation is expended on the cylinder. Then they can continue on their way.
And now I could do the same - continue on my way.
It led me into the bathroom, where the first thing I did was to examine my body. Apart from the fact that the rudimentary cavity under my tail was chafed and reddened, there was no problem. True, my posterior section ached as if I’d been riding a crazed horse for at least an hour (which was a fairly accurate description of what had happened), but that couldn’t really be called an injury. Nature had definitely prepared foxes for encounters with werewolves.
I’d sensed earlier that I would have to wash myself in his mother-of-pearl bath - and my premonition had not deceived me. My entire tail, back, stomach and legs were covered in that wolf’s filthy muck, which I carefully washed off with shampoo. Then I quickly dried my tail with a hairdryer and got dressed. It suddenly occurred to me that it would be a good idea to search the premises.
There was practically nothing to search in that luxurious, empty barn of a place - no cupboards, no sideboards, no drawers that opened. The doors leading into the other rooms were locked. But even so, the results of the search were interesting.
Standing on the desk beside the elegant all-in-one computer was a massive silver object that I had taken at first glance for a figurine. On closer inspection the object turned out to be a cigar clipper. It was a figure of Monica Lewinsky lying on her side with one leg raised towards the ceiling to act as a lever, and when it was pressed (I couldn’t resist it) not only did the guillotine in the ring between her thighs snap into action, but a tongue of blue flame appeared out of her open mouth. It was a great little gadget, to my mind the only superfluous touch was the American flag that Monica was holding in her hand: sometimes just a tiny weight is enough to shift the balance and transform a piece of erotica into kitsch agitprop.
The silver Monica was holding down a big loose-leaf binder on the desk. Inside it there was a pile of very different-looking papers.
To judge from its high gloss, the paper lying on the very top was a page from some illustrated art book. Staring out at me from it was a huge, yellow-eyed wolf with a rune that looked like the letter ‘F’ on his chest - it was a photograph of a sculpture made of wood and amber (the eyes were the amber part). The caption said:
FENRIR
: Son of Loki, an immense wolf who pursues the sun across the sky. When Fenrir catches the sun and devours it, Ragnarek will begin. Fenrir is bound until Ragnarek. At Ragnarek he will kill Odin and be killed by Widar.
It wasn’t clear from the caption just how Fenrir was going to catch the sun and devour it, if he was bound until Ragnarek, and Ragnarek would start when he caught the sun and devoured it. But then, it could well be that our world had only continued to exist so far thanks to inconsistencies of that kind: it was frightening to think just how many dying gods had cursed it.