The Last Watch (20 page)

She spoke in a gentle, reassuring voice, in the same tone as adults use when they're talking to a little child. The inspector was
about
to say something else, but just then the middle-aged woman who was sitting facing all the other bookkeepers intervened.

‘Vera, I'm sorry, but the inspector is quite right. It's a very sickly smell. By the time evening comes it gives you a headache.'

‘In India the windows are probably always kept wide open,' a third woman put in. ‘And they burn their fragrances all the time. It's terribly dirty there, there are always cesspits somewhere close by, and everything rots very quickly because of the climate. They have to smother the stench somehow. But what do we need it for?'

A fourth girl, the same age as Vera, giggled and pressed her face towards the screen of her computer.

‘Well, you should have said!' Vera exclaimed. Her voice sounded tearful. ‘Why didn't you tell me?'

‘We didn't want to offend you,' the older woman replied.

Vera jumped to her feet, covered her face with her hands and ran out into the corridor. Her heels clattered on the parquet flooring, and the door of the restroom slammed in the distance.

‘We had to tell her sooner or later,' the middle-aged woman said with a sigh. ‘I'm really sick of smelling those sticks of hers. It's always opium, or jasmine, or cinnamon …'

‘Do you remember the chillies and cardamom?' the young girl exclaimed. ‘That was really horrible!'

‘Don't make fun of your friend. You'd better go and bring Vera back, she's much too upset.'

The young girl willingly got to her feet and left the room.

The inspector gazed round at the women with a wild expression. Then he glanced at the man beside him – a plump young, individual wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Beside the inspector in his respectable uniform, he looked very untidy.

‘This is a madhouse,' the inspector declared. ‘Nothing but
breaches
of the fire-safety code everywhere I look. Why haven't you been closed down yet?'

‘I'm surprised at that myself,' the other man agreed. ‘Sometimes when I'm walking to work, I wonder: What if it's all over now? What if they've put an end to the whole mess, and from now on we're going to work according to the fire-safety regulations, without breaking a single rule …'

‘Show me the fire-safety board on the second floor,' the inspector interrupted, looking at his plan of the building.

‘Gladly,' said the man, opening the door for the inspector and winking at the women they were leaving behind in the office.

The inspector's indignation was lessened a bit by the sight of the board. It was brand new and very neat and tidy, painted red. Next to it were two fire extinguishers, a bucket of sand, an empty conical-shaped bucket, a spade, a gaff and a crowbar.

‘Well, well. Well, well, well,' the inspector murmured as he glanced at the buckets and checked the date when the extinguishers were last refilled. ‘The good old-fashioned kind. I didn't really expect that.'

‘We make an effort,' said his guide. ‘When I was still in school, we had one just like that on the wall.'

The inspector turned his plan round and thought for a moment.

‘And now let's take a look at … at your programmers.'

‘Yes, let's,' the other man said brightly. ‘That's upstairs – follow me.'

At the foot of the stairs he stepped aside to let the inspector go first. He turned back and glanced at the fire-safety board, which faded and then dissolved into thin air. Something fell to the floor with a quiet sound. The man smiled.

The visit to the programmers gave the inspector another reason to be indignant. The programmers (two young women and one young guy) were blithely smoking at their workstations and the wires from the computers were twisted into terrible tangles. (The inspector
even
crawled under one desk and checked that the sockets were earthed.) When they came back down to the first floor fifteen minutes later, the inspector walked into an office that had the strange title ‘Duty Pointsman' on the door and laid his papers out on the desk. The young man acting as his guide sat down facing him and watched with a smile as the inspector filled in his report form.

‘What sort of nonsensical title is that you have on the door?' the inspector asked, without looking up from what he was doing.

‘“Duty Pointsman”? He has to deal with anything that turns up. If some inspector or other calls, if the drains burst, if someone delivers pizza or drinking water – he has to handle everything. Something between a receptionist and an office manager. It's a boring job, we take turns to do it.'

‘And just what is it that you do here?'

‘Is that really any business of the fire-safety service?' the man asked thoughtfully. ‘Well … we guard Moscow against manifestations of evil.'

‘You're joking!' said the inspector, giving the ‘duty pointsman' a dour look.

‘Not at all.'

A middle-aged, eastern-looking man walked in without knocking on the door. The duty pointsman quickly got to his feet as he entered.

‘Well now, what have we got here?' the newcomer asked.

‘One item left in the accounts office, one in the toilet, one in the fire-safety board on the second floor,' the duty pointsman replied eagerly. ‘Everything's in order, Boris Ignatievich.'

The inspector turned pale.

‘Las, we haven't got a fire-safety board on the second floor,' Boris Ignatievich observed.

‘I created an illusion,' Las replied boastfully. ‘It was very realistic.' Boris Ignatievich nodded and said:

‘All right. But you didn't notice the other two bugs in the programmers' room. I think this is not the first time our guest has combined the duties of fire inspector and spy – am I right?'

‘What do you think you're—' the man began, and then stopped.

‘You feel very ashamed of carrying out industrial espionage,' said Boris Ignatievich. ‘It's disgusting! And you used to be an honest man … once. Do you remember how you went to help build the Baikal–Amur railroad? And not just for the money, you wanted the romantic dream, you wanted to be part of some great effort …'

Tears began running down the inspector's cheeks. He nodded.

‘And do you remember when you were accepted into the Young Pioneers?' Las asked cheerfully. ‘How you stood in line, thinking about how you would devote all your strength to the victory of communism? And when the group leader tied your tie for you, she almost touched you with her big bouncy tits … ‘

‘Las,' Boris Ignatievich said in an icy voice. ‘I am constantly amazed at how you ever became a Light One.'

‘I was in a good mood that day,' Las declared. ‘I dreamed I was still a little boy, riding a pony …'

‘Las!' Boris Ignatievich repeated ominously.

The duty pointsman fell silent.

The silence that followed was broken by the fire-safety inspector's sobbing.

‘I … I'll tell you everything … I went to the Baikal–Amur railroad to avoid paying alimony …'

‘Never mind that,' Boris Ignatievich said gently. ‘Tell us about being asked to plant bugs in our office.'

CHAPTER 1

‘I THINK YOU
can guess why I've gathered you all together,' Gesar said.

There were five of us in the boss's office. Gesar himself, Olga, Ilya, Semyon and me.

‘What's to guess?' Semyon muttered. ‘You've gathered all the Higher and First-Level Others. Svetlana's the only one missing.'

‘Svetlana's not here because she's not on the staff of the Night Watch,' Gesar said and frowned. ‘I've no doubt that Anton will tell her everything. I won't even attempt to forbid it. But I won't connive at breaches of the rules, either … this is a meeting of the Night Watch top management. I have to warn Ilya straight away that some of what he hears will be new to him, and under normal circumstances he would never have heard it. So he must not talk about it. Not to anyone.'

‘What exactly is that?' Ilya asked, adjusting his spectacles.

‘Probably … probably everything that you are about to hear.'

‘A bit more than just “some of it”,' Ilya said, with a nod. ‘Whatever you say. If you like, I'm willing to accept the mark of the Avenging Fire.'

‘We can dispense with the formalities,' said Gesar. He took a
small
metal box out of his desk and began rummaging in it. Meanwhile I carried on looking round with my usual curiosity. What made the boss's office so interesting was the huge number of little items that he kept because he needed them for his work or simply as souvenirs. Something like Pliushkin's bins in
Dead Souls
, or a child's box in which he keeps his most cherished ‘treasures', or the apartment of some absent-minded collector who's always forgetting what it is that he actually collects. And the most amazing thing was that nothing ever disappeared, even though there was almost no space left in the cabinets: new exhibits were added all the time.

This time my attention was caught by a small terrarium. It didn't have a lid, and there was a piece of paper glued to its side, with the letters OOO (or the numbers 000). Standing inside the terrarium was a stupid little toy made in China – a small plastic toilet, with a tarantula squatting on it in a regal pose. At first I thought the spider was dead or made of plastic, but then I noticed its eyes glinting and its mandibles moving. There was another spider crawling across the glass walls: fat and round, looking like a hairy ball with legs. Every now and then the spider stopped and spat a drop of green venom onto the glass, clearly aiming at something outside. At the same time something showered down off the spider into the terrarium. There were some other spiders moving around on the bottom, greedily reaching out their legs to catch the treat. The fortunate ones who managed to grab something began jumping up and down for joy.

‘Interested?' Gesar asked, without looking up.

‘Uh-huh … what is it?'

‘A simulation. You know I like to study self-contained social groups.'

‘And what does this simulation represent?'

‘A very interesting social structure,' Gesar said evasively. ‘In its basic form it should have become the traditional jar of spiders. But here we have two principal spiders, one of whom has taken up a dominant position by climbing onto a high point, while the other is acting as if he is providing protection against external aggression and caring for the members of the community. As long as the dominant spiders remain active, this simulation can continue to function with minimal internal aggression. I just have to spray the inhabitants with beer every now and then to relax them.'

‘But doesn't anyone ever try to climb out?' Ilya asked. ‘There's no lid …'

‘Only very rarely. And only the ones who get fed up of being a spider in a jar. In the first place, the illusion of conflict is constantly maintained. And in the second place, the experimental subjects regard being in the jar as something out of the ordinary.' Gesar finally took some object out of his box and said, ‘All right, that's enough of the small talk. Here is the first thing for you to think about. What is it?'

We stared in silence at the grey lump of concrete that looked as if it had been chipped out of a wall.

‘Don't use magic!' Gesar warned us.

‘I know,' Semyon said guiltily. ‘I remember that incident. A radio microphone. They tried to put it in here in the 1950s … or was it the 1960s? When we were the “Non-Ferrous Mining Equipment Assembly Trust”. Some bright guys from the KGB, wasn't it?'

‘That's right,' said Gesar. ‘Back then they were very keen on looking for spies, and on a sudden impulse they decided to check us … we had provoked certain suspicions in the “organs” … It was a good thing that we had our own eyes and ears in the KGB. We organised a campaign of misinformation,
certain
vigilant comrades managed to get others rebuked for the pointless squandering of expensive equipment … And what about this?'

A huge steel screw glinted in Gesar's hands. To be quite honest, I didn't even know that they made screws that large.

‘I doubt if you know about this,' Gesar told us. ‘It's the only attempt – at least, I hope it is – ever made by the Dark Ones to spy on us using human means. In 1979 I had a very difficult conversation with Zabulon, and afterwards we signed an appendix to the agreement on prohibited methods of conflict.'

The screw was put back in the box. In its place two tiny brown ‘tablets' were taken out.

‘That was when they wanted to take our building away!' Ilya said brightly. ‘In 1996, wasn't it?'

Gesar nodded.

‘Absolutely right. A certain ambitious young oligarch got the idea that the former state enterprise which had become the “Non-Ferrous Metal Mining Company” looked like a very tasty and absolutely defenceless little morsel of property. However, when their listening devices and external observation revealed the kind of people who simply dropped in for tea and a chat with the old director, the oligarch cut his ambitions back sharply.'

‘That was misinformation as well, of course?' Olga asked curiously. It seemed that the boss's unusually complicated introduction was intended for her, because she had missed all these old events.

Semyon giggled and drawled in a voice like Yeltsin's:

‘You un-der-stand, my friend, you decide important matters at the city level, and you don't ask for any help … Call round if anything happens.'

Gesar smiled and replied:

‘“Call round if anything happens”, is putting it a bit strongly.
But
never mind, no one judges the victors … Right, those were cases from the past. But here is today's catch …'

He took something that looked like a Band-Aid out of the box. A thin white square, slightly sticky on one side – it was not easy for Gesar to pull it off his finger.