Babylon

TAMPOKO

• OPEN JOINT STOCK COMPANY SOFT DRINKS AND JUICES Shares Placement Manager:

Mikhail Nepoiman

‘Aha,’ muttered Tatarsky. ‘I see we’re old acquaintances.’

He tucked the card in his pocket, turned towards the stream of cars and raised his hand. A taxi stopped almost immediately.

The taxi-driver was a fat-faced bumpkin with an expression of intense resentment on his face. The thought flashed through Tatarsky’s mind that he was like a condom filled so full of water you barely needed to touch it with something sharp for it to soak anyone nearby in a one-off disposable waterfall.

‘Tell me,’ Tatarsky asked on a sudden impulse, ‘you wouldn’t happen to know what the Russian idea is, would you?’

‘Ha,’ said the driver, as if he been expecting this very question. ‘I’ll tell you about that. I’m half Mordvinian. So when I was serving in the army, the first year, on training, there was this sergeant there called Harley. Used to say, "I hate Mords and nig-nogs," and he’d send me off to scrub the shit-house with a toothbrush. Two months the bastard took the piss out of me. Then all of a sudden these three Mordvin brothers arrived for their training, and all of them weightlifters, can you imagine that? "So who is it round here doesn’t like Mordvinians?" they said.’

The driver laughed happily and the car swerved across the road, almost skipping out into the opposite lane.

‘What’s that got to do with the Russian idea?’ Tatarsky asked, hunched down in his seat in fear.

‘I’ll tell you what. That Harley got such a belting he spent two weeks on his back with a medical battalion. That’s what. They worked him over another five times until he was fit for nothing but demobbing. But they didn’t just work him over…’

‘Can you stop there, please,’ Tatarsky said, not wanting to hear any more.

‘I can’t stop here,’ said the driver, ‘I’ve got to find a place to turn. I tell you, if only they’d just beaten him… But, oh no!’

Tatarsky gave in, and as the car took him home the driver shared the fate of the chauvinist sergeant in a degree of detail that destroyed even the slightest possibility of sympathy - after all, sympathy is always based on a brief instant of identification, and in this case that was impossible - neither heart nor mind would dare risk it. In fact, it was just a typical army story.

When Tatarsky got out of the car, the driver said to him: ‘As for that idea of yours, I’ll tell you straight: fuck only knows. All I want is the chance to earn enough to keep me in petrol and booze. Yeltsin-Schmeltsin - what do I care, so long as they don’t go smashing my face against a table?’

Perhaps it was these words that made Tatarsky remember the handcuffed manager who’d dialled the telephone number in the empty air. Inside the entrance-way of his house, he stopped. He’d only just realised what the case really required. He took the card out of his pocket and wrote on its reverse:

THERE’S ALWAYS SOMEBODY WHO CARES! PUT YOUR TRUST IN TAMPOKO SHARES!

‘So it’s a conifer, is it?’ he thought.