Babylon (30 page)

   ‘I’ll figure it out for myself from the text. It’ll be ready tomorrow at ten.’

   ‘OK, you know best.’

   When Malyuta left the room, Morkovin said: ‘He doesn’t like you much.’

   ‘Nor I him,’ said Tatarsky. ‘We had an argument once about geopolitics. Listen, who’s going to change that bit about the television-drilling towers?’

   ‘Damn, I forgot. A good job you reminded me - I’ll explain it to him this evening. And you’d better make peace with him. You know how bad our frequency problem is right now, but Azadovsky’s still allowed him one 3-D general. To liven up the news. He’s a guy with a future. No one can tell how the market will shift tomorrow. Maybe he’ll be head of department instead of me, and then…’

   Morkovin didn’t finish his train of thought. The door swung open and Azadovsky burst into the room. Behind him came two of the guards with Scorpions on their shoulders. Azadovsky’s face was white with fury and he was clenching and unclenching his fists with such force that Tatarsky was reminded of the talons of the eagle from the greetings card. Tatarsky had never seen him like this.

   ‘Who edited Lebed the last time?’

   ‘Semyon Velin, as usual,’ Morkovin replied in fright. ‘Why, what’s happened?’

   Azadovsky turned towards the young guy with the ponytail.

   ‘You?’ he asked. ‘Did you do this?’

   ‘What?’ asked Velin.

   ‘Did you change Lebed’s cigarettes? From Camel to Gitanes?’

   ‘Yes I did,’ said Velin. ‘What of it? I just thought it would be better stylistically. After we rendered him together with Alain Delon.’

   ‘Take him away,’ Azadovsky commanded.

   ‘Wait, wait,’ said Velin, thrusting his hands out in front of him in fear. ‘I’ll explain everything…’ But the guards were already dragging him out into the corridor.

   Azadovsky turned to face Morkovin and stared intensely at him for several seconds.

   ‘I knew nothing about it.’ said Morkovin, ‘I swear.’

   "Then who is supposed to know about it? Me? D’you know where I just got a call from? J. R. Reynolds Tobacco - who paid us for Lebed’s Camels two years in advance. You know what they said? They’re going to get their congressman to drop us fifty megahertz; and they’ll drop us another fifty if Lebed goes on air next time with Gitanes again. I don’t know how much this asshole was raking in from black PR, but we stand to lose a lot, an awful rucking lot. Do we want to ride into the twenty-first fucking century on a hundred megahertz? When’s the next broadcast with Lebed?’

   ‘Tomorrow. An interview on the Russian Idea. It’s all rendered already.’

   ‘Have you watched the material?’

   Morkovin clutched his head in his hands. ‘I have,’ he replied. ‘Oh, God… That’s right. He’s got Gitanes. I noticed it, but I thought it must have been approved upstairs. You know I don’t decide these things. I couldn’t imagine.’

   ‘Where are his cigarettes? On the table?’

   ‘If only! He waves the pack around all through the interview.’

   ‘Can we undo?’

   ‘Not the whole thing.’

   ‘Change the design on the pack then?’

   ‘Not that either. Gitanes are a different size; and the pack’s in shot all the time.’

   ‘So what are we going to do?’

   Azadovsky’s gaze came to rest on Tatarsky, as though he’d only just noticed him there. Tatarsky cleared his throat.

   ‘Perhaps,’ he said timidly, we could put in a patch with a pack of Camel on the table? That’s quite simple.’

   ‘And then what? Have him waving one pack around in the air and the other one lying in front of him? You’re raving.’

   ‘And we put the arm in plaster,’ Tatarsky went on, giving way to a sudden wave of inspiration. ‘So we get rid of the pack.’

   ‘In plaster?’ Azadovsky repeated thoughtfully. ‘But what’ll we say?’

   ‘An assassination attempt,’ said Tatarsky.

   ‘You mean they shot him in the arm?’

   ‘No,’ said Tatarsky, ‘they tried to blow him up in his car.’

   ‘And he’s not going to say anything about the attempt to kill him in the interview?’ Morkovin asked.

   Azadovsky thought for a moment. ‘That’s actually OK. Imperturbable -’ he waved his fist in the air - ‘never even said a word. A real soldier. We’ll put the attack out in the news. And we won’t just patch in a pack of Camel on the table, we’ll patch in a whole block. Let the bastards choke on that.’

   ‘What’ll we say in the news?’

   ‘As little as possible. Clues pointing to Chechens, the Islamic factor, investigations proceeding and so forth. What car does Lebed’s legend say he drives? An old Mercedes? Get a film crew sent out into the country straightaway, find an old Mercedes, blow it up and film it. It’s got to be on the air by ten. Say the general left immediately to get on with his work and he’s keeping up with his schedule. Yes, and have them find a fez at the site of the crime, like the one Raduev’s going to have. Is the idea clear?’

   ‘Brilliant,’ said Morkovin. ‘It really is brilliant.’

   Azadovsky gave a crooked smile that was more like a nervous twitch.

   ‘But where’ll we get an old Mercedes?’ asked Morkovin. ‘All ours are new.’

   ‘There’s someone here who drives one,’ said Azadovsky. ‘I’ve seen it in the parking lot.’

   Morkovin looked up at Tatarsky.

   ‘But… But…’ Tatarsky mumbled, but Morkovin just shook his head.

   ‘No,’ he said, ‘forget it. Give me the keys.’

   Tatarsky took his car keys out of his pocket and submissively placed them in Morkovin’s open hand.

   ‘The seat-covers are new,’ he said piteously; ‘maybe I could take them off?’

   ‘Are you rucking crazy?’ Azadovsky exploded. ‘D’you want them to drop us to fifty megahertz so we have to dismiss the government and disband the Duma again? Bloody seat-covers! Use your head!’

   The telephone rang in his pocket.

   "Allo.’ he said, raising it to his ear. ‘What? I’ll tell you what to do with him. There’s a camera crew going out into the country straightaway - to film a bombed car. Take that arse-hole, put him in the driver’s seat and blow him up. Make sure there’s blood and scraps of flesh, and you film it all. It’ll be a lesson for the rest of them, with their black PR… What? You tell him there isn’t anything in the world more important than what’s about to happen to him. He shouldn’t let himself be distracted by minor details. And he shouldn’t think he can tell me anything I don’t already know.’

   Azadovsky folded up his phone and tossed it into his pocket, sighed several times and clutched at his heart.

   ‘It hurts,’ he complained. ‘Do you bastards really want me to have a heart attack at thirty? Seems to me I’m the only one in this committee who’s not on the take. Everybody back to work on the double. I’m going to phone the States. We might just get away with it.’

   When Azadovsky left the room, Morkovin looked meaningfully into Tatarsky’s eyes, tugged a small tin box out of his pocket and tipped out a pile of white powder on the desk.

   ‘Right,’ he said, ‘be my guest.’

   When the procedure was completed, Morkovin moistened his finger, picked up the white grains left on the table and licked them off with his tongue.

   ‘You were asking’, he said, ‘how things could be this way, what everything’s based on, who it’s all controlled by. I tell you, all you need to think about here is to cover your own ass and get your job done. There’s no time left for any other thoughts. And by the way, there’s something you’d better do: put the money into your pockets and flush the envelopes down the John. Straightaway. Just in case. The toilet’s down the corridor on the left…’

   Tatarsky locked himself in the cubicle and distributed the wads of banknotes around his pockets - he’d never seen such a load of money at one time before. He tore the envelopes into small pieces and threw the scraps into the toilet bowl. A folded note fell out of one of the envelopes - Tatarsky caught it in mid-air and read it:

   
Hi, guys! Thanks a lot for sometimes allowing me to live a parallel life. Without that the real one would be so disgusting! Good luck in business, B. Berezovsky.

   The text was printed on a laser printer, and the signature was a facsimile. ‘Morkovin playing the joker again,’ thought Tatarsky. ‘Or maybe it’s not Morkovin…’

   He crossed himself, pinched his thigh really hard and flushed the toilet.

   They were shooting from the bridge, the way they do these things in Moscow. The old T-80s only fired at long intervals, as though the sponsors, short of money for shells, were afraid it would all be over too quickly and so they wouldn’t make the international news. There was apparently some unwritten minimal requirement for reports from Russia: there had to be at least three or maybe four tanks, a hundred dead and something else as well - Tatarsky couldn’t remember what exactly. This time an exception must have been made because of the picturesque visual quality of the events: although there were only two tanks, the quayside was packed with television crews with their optical bazookas blasting out megatons of somnolent human attention along the river Moscow at the tanks, the bronze Peter the Great and the window behind which Tatarsky was concealed.

   The cannon of one of the tanks standing on the bridge roared and the same instant Tatarsky was struck by an interesting idea: he could offer the people in the Bridge image-service the silhouette of a tank as a promising logo to replace that incomprehensible eagle of theirs. In a split second - less time than it took for the shell to reach its target - Tatarsky’s conscious mind had weighed up the possibilities (‘the image of the tank symbolises the aggressive power of the group and at the same time introduces a traditional Russian note into the context of cosmopolitical finance’) and immediately the idea was rejected. "They’d piss themselves,’ Tatarsky decided. ‘Pity, though.’

   A shell caught Peter the Great in the head, but it didn’t explode, passing straight on through and continuing its flight roughly in the direction of Gorky Park. A tall plume of steam shot up into the air. Tatarsky remembered that the head of the monument contained a small restaurant complete with full services and facilities, and he decided the blank must have severed a pipe in the heating system. He heard the TV crews yelling in delight. The swirling plume made Peter look like some monster knight out of Steven King. Remembering how the rotting brains of the monster in
The Talisman
had dribbled down over its shoulders, Tatarsky thought the resemblance would be complete if the next shell severed a sewage pipe.

   Peter’s head was defended by the Defence of Sebastopol committee. They said in the news that didn’t mean the city, but the hotel, which was being fought over by two mafia groups, the Chechens and the Solntsevo mob. They also said the Solntsevo mob had hired stuntmen from Mosfilm and set up this strange shoot-out in order to attract TV coverage and generally inflame anti-Caucasian feeling (if the abundance of pyrotechnics and special effects was anything to go by, it had to be true). The simple-minded Chechens, who weren’t too well versed in the protocol of PR campaigns, hadn’t figured out what was going on, and they’d hired the two tanks somewhere outside Moscow.

   So far the stuntmen were returning fire and giving as good as they got - there was a puff of smoke in the hole beside Peter’s ragged eye and a grenade exploded on the bridge. A tank fired in reply. The blank struck Peter’s head, sending fragments of bronze showering downwards. For some reason every new hit made the emperor even more goggle-eyed.

   Of all the participants in the drama the only one Tatarsky felt any sympathy for was the bronze idol dying slowly before the glass eyes of the TV cameras; and he didn’t feel that very strongly - he hadn’t finished his work, and had to conserve the energy of his emotional centre. Tatarsky lowered the blinds, cutting himself off completely from what was going on, sat at his computer and re-read the quotation written in felt-tip pen on the wallpaper over the monitor:

   
In order to influence the imagination of the Russian customer and win his confidence (for the most part customers for advertising in Russia are representatives of the old KGB, GRU and party nomenklatura), an advertising concept should borrow as far as possible from the hypothetical semi-secret or entirely secret techiques developed by the Western special services for the programming of consciousness, which are imbued with a quite breathtaking cynicism and inhumanity. Fortunately, it is not too difficul to improvise on this theme-one need only recall Oscar Wilde’s words about life imitating art.

   
‘The Final Positioning’

   ‘Sure" said Tatarsky, ‘that’s not too difficult.’ He tensed as though he was about to leap into cold water, frowned, took a deep breath and held the air in his lungs while he counted to three, then launched his fingers at the keyboard:

   
We can sum up the preceding by saying that in the foreseeable longer term television is likely to remain the primary channel for the implantation of the customer’s schizo-units in the consciousness of the Russian public. In view of this, we regard as extremely dangerous a tendency that has emerged in recent times among the so-called middle class - the most promising stratum of viewers from the point of view of the social effectiveness ofteleschizomanipulation. We are referring to total abstinence or the conscious limitation of the amount of television watched in order to save nervous energy for work. Even professional television writers are doing it, because it is an accepted maxim of post-Freudianism that in the information age it is not sexuality that should be sublimated, so much as the energy that is squandered on the pointless daily viewing of television.

   
In order to nip this tendency in the bud, for this concept it is proposed to employ a method developed jointly by MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency for neutralising the remnants of an intellectually independent national intelligentsia in Third World Countries. (We have proceeded from the initial assumption that the middle class in Russia is formed directly from the intelligentsia, which has ceased thinking nationally and begun thinking about where it can get money.)