I walked through midmorning Moscow toward Cherkizovsky Market. Then, on a whim, I stopped by a supermarket.
It was an unremarkable building in black, white, and ash gray. The display cases were practically empty, but the place was packed. Probably because it was almost time for the distribution of milk and dairy products. I saw everyone from children to housewives.
I felt some odd looks directed at me as I walked around in my body armor, but I didn’t care; I just got in line at the register.
Finally, it was my turn.
“Next!” The clerk, a dignified working woman in a white uniform, didn’t smile, merely eyeballed me as I approached.
“One box of curd snacks and four hundred grams of doktorskaya,” I said.
“Fifty kopecks.”
“Sure.”
I handed over the coins and took my receipt. Then I went to the selling counter. Everyone stood waiting their turn, clutching their receipts.
“Next!”
“One box of curd snacks and four hundred grams of doktorskaya,” I said again.
“Receipt.”
“Sure.” I handed over my slip of paper, and the worker stuffed my purchases into a paper bag in return. The curd snacks, which were cheese curds wrapped in chocolate, and the doktorskaya, a kind of sausage, were both pretty decent. The fact that you didn’t even have to buy them at the black market only made them better.
The black market—Cherkizovsky Market—had anything and everything, but the watchwords were buyer beware.
Then there was the Vernissage Market, set up on the reclaimed vestiges of a defunct amusement park and some hotels that had once catered to Eastern bloc tourists. It was Moscow’s largest bazaar, and beside it stood a huge arcade of tin and corrugated iron. That was Cherkizovsky Market, and it’s where I went right after I left the supermarket.
“We have Playboy! Stars and Stripes! Blond-haired super solider beauties!”
“We’ve got the latest software from Ono-Sendai! Armies and tetrominoes are yesterday’s news! You want your games from Japan!”
“Cola here! Get yer cola! This isn’t Zhukov’s stuff; this is good, dark cola! Pure! No adulterations!”
“The newest records! Original rock ’n’ roll, limited to just ten copies!”
A sultry voice drifted from the record, which was carved into discarded X-ray tape. The voice wasn’t as nice as Stasia’s, but it carried some emotion. Evidently, the woman was called Jazz. I didn’t know what the song was about, but it felt very imperialist, and it sort of appealed to me.
The shops stood cheek to jowl, with shady characters (not that I wasn’t shady) hawking their stuff and trying to fire people up about their illicit wares.
Around here, you traded money directly for products. No receipt to get in the way. And no reports to the government of what had been sold. There were bootlegs, illicit imports, samoizdaniya <underground publications>, pirated goods. The stuff might be real or it might not, but it was there.
I found myself sucking in the air, a heady mix of the stench of people pressed together along with food and oil and iron.
“Whoops! Sorry, comrade!”
“Hold it right there.”
As some kid tried to reach for the paper bag I was clutching to my side, I didn’t miss a beat—I kicked him in the shin. I was wearing a steel-toed boot, so he definitely yelled and took a tumble, but I didn’t break anything—I was nicer than some people that way.
If he was going to steal, he ought to do a better job of it—and anyone who would lay hands on me was no friend of mine, anyway.
—What’s the big deal? This probably happens to him all the time.
Anyone who would make a big scene over a little thing like that would never have reached his age. Let alone twenty-four.
I worked my way through the crowd until finally I saw my objective.
It was a little coffee stand, suffused with the smell of powdered beans being boiled in a pot to within an inch of their lives.
A girl with long black hair and a wistful expression sipped some of the resulting mud-like liquid.
The fact that she was wearing cast-off military gear might have raised a few eyebrows, but there were girls who looked good in that sort of thing.
For example, girls with white skin, cold eyes, and a piercing stare—girls like a metel, a blizzard.
Her gaze was like a knife that rebuffed any man who thought about catcalling her—and suddenly those eyes were trained on me.
“You took your time, didn’t you, Comrade Danila Kragin? Yes, I daresay you’re late.”
“Sorry about that, comrade. I stopped for a bite.”
“You mean you stopped to get someone to feed you.”
The person before me had indeed grown into a beautiful woman—this nineteen-year-old, my little sister Mariya. She gave a disgusted click of her tongue. “…Tsk. Sobaka.”
When had my sweet little sister learned to do something as uncouth as clicking her tongue like that?
I shrugged, reached into my bag, and took out the curd snacks, which I tossed to her. She caught them against her chest, her eyes as wide as that of a five-year-old who’d just gotten some candy.
She put the box away, then pursed her lips and gave me a look. “Don’t think you can buy me off with some snacks, Danya.”
“It’s a gift. Just say thank you and take it,” I replied, then ordered coffee from the old guy selling it. He might have been awake or asleep; it was hard to tell. I handed him some coins and immediately received a cup full of what really, really looked like mud.
Mariya drank this stomach-turning stuff without so much as milk or sugar. Me, I took a drink of the bitter brew, disappointed to let the sweet taste of tea finally leave my mouth.
“So?” I asked.
“All right, all right.” She wasn’t going to try to pull her punches. “It’s an escort job this time.”
“Guard work, huh?”
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s fine. I was just thinking about what a respectable business that is.”
Sure better than murdering Ivan while he was on his way to his girlfriend.
Mariya stared at me for a moment, then sighed, her eyelashes fluttering.
She opened her bag and took out her trusty portable device, an Elektronika MK-170. It sat neatly in her palm and had a little LCD screen accompanied by a keyboard so small it looked like you would have to press the buttons with the tips of your fingernails. To me, it looked like a pocket calculator with a mess of cables attached to it.
Actually…I guess it basically was. It could run programs, which was the real difference.
Mariya took an acoustic coupler she had ready and plugged it into the receiver of a corded telephone. That was probably why she liked this coffee place so much—the old guy who ran it had a phone.
I checked the guy out: Maybe his real line of business was lending out his phone. The proof was in the coffee.
We heard a dial tone, then the shriek of a connection. Mariya hit the keys with her delicate fingers.
A moment later, the telex terminal started clacking away, then finally spit out some paper. Mariya elegantly tore off a full meter of it with the grace of a world-class typist.
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
I’d tried to give Mariya some education, as best I could with hardly any myself, but she was far beyond me now. The fact was, I didn’t have the foggiest idea what Mariya did these days. She would tell me it was communications and operations. I think the Western-bloc expression was tele-computing.