Babylon

THE MORE YOU KNOW: DAVIDOFF CLASSIC

At the first sight of the wise, wrinkled face, Tatarsky immediately began wondering just what it was that this foreign smoker knew. The first explanation to come to mind was rather sombre: a visit to the cancer clinic, an X-ray and a dreadful diagnosis.

Tatarsky’s project was in total contrast: a light background, a youthful face expressive of ignorant happiness, a white pack with slim gold letters and the text:

‘FOR IN MUCH WISDOM IS MUCH SORROW AND HE WHO INCREASES KNOWLEDGE INCREASES GRIEF.’ DAVIDOFF LIGHTS

Pugin said Davidoff’s agent would be unlikely to be interested, but some other cigarette market leader might very well take it. ‘I’ll have a word with Azadovsky.’ he said casually. ‘He’s got an exclusive on sixteen brands.’ It seemed to Tatarsky he’d heard that name before. He jotted the phrase down in his notebook and casually dropped it into several conversations with clients, but his natural shyness found expression in the fact that he usually halved the number of brands.

At the beginning of winter Tatarsky had his one-room flat redecorated after a fashion (against the background of cornflower-blue Soviet-era tiles that were coming away from the wall, the expensive Italian mixer-tap looked like a gold tooth in the mouth of a leper, but he had no money for major renovations). He also bought a new computer, although he had no particular need for it - he’d simply begun to have difficulties getting texts printed out that he’d typed in his favourite word-processing program: one more muffled groan under the iron boot of Microsoft. Tatarsky didn’t feel seriously aggrieved, although he did note the profoundly symbolic nature of the event: his interface program - a medium by its very nature - was becoming the most important message, taking over an incredible amount of computer memory space and resources, and that reminded him very much of a brazen new Russian running the funds for teachers’ salaries through the accounts in his bank.

The further he penetrated into the jungles of the advertising business, the more questions he had to which he couldn’t find the answer, neither in Al Rice’s Positioning: a Battle for your Mind, nor even in the latest book on the same topic. The final Positioning. One colleague swore to Tatarsky that all the themes that Al Rice hadn’t touched on were analysed in Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy. In his heart of hearts Tatarsky suspected Ogilvy was really the same character who appeared for a second in George Orwell’s 1984 in the consciousness of the hero in order to perform an imaginary feat of heroism and then disappear into the ocean of oblivion. The fact that comrade Ogilvy, despite his double unreality, had nonetheless made it to the shore, lit his pipe, donned his tweed jacket and become a world-famous advertising guru filled Tatarsky with a mystical, rapturous admiration for his own profession.

But the book he found particularly helpful was by Rosser Reeves: he discovered two terms in it - ‘penetration’ and ‘involvement’ - that proved very useful when it came to throwing curves. The first project he managed to design on the basis of these two concepts was for Nescafe Gold.

‘It has long been recognised,’ Tatarsky wrote just twenty minutes after he first learned about it, that there are two basic indicators of the effectiveness of an advertising campaign: penetration and involvement. ‘Penetration’ is the percentage of people who remember the advertisement. ‘Involvement’ is the percentage of people the advertisement has persuaded to consume the product. The problem is, however, that a brilliantly scandalous advertisement, capable of producing high-level penetration, is absolutely no guarantee of high levels of involvement. Likewise a campaign that cleverly demonstrates the virtues of a product and is capable of producing high levels of involvement is no guarantee of high-level penetration. Which is why we propose taking a new approach and creating a kind of binary advertising, in which the functions of penetration and involvement will be performed by different sets of information. Let’s examine how this approach would work in an advertising campaign for Nescafe Gold coffee.

The first step in the campaign is directed exclusively at implanting the brand name ‘Nescafe Gold’ in the consciousness of the largest possible number of people (we start from the assumption that any means are justified to this end). For example, we organise the planting of fake bombs in several large shops and railway stations - there should be as many of them as possible. The Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Security Services receive calls from an anonymous terrorist organisation informing them that explosive devices have been planted. But the searches carried out by the police at the sites named by the terrorists produce nothing but a large number of jars of Nescafe Gold packed in plastic bags. Next morning this is reported in all the magazines and newspapers and on television, following which we can regard the penetration phase as complete (its success is directly dependent on the scale of the operation). Immediately after this comes phase two - involvement. At this stage the campaign is waged according to the classical rules: the only thing linking it with phase one is the basic slogan:

‘Nescafe Gold: The Taste Explosion!’ Here is the scenario.’or the advertising clip:

A bench in a small city square. A young man in a red tracksuit sitting on it, with a serious expression on his face. Across the road from the square a Mercedes-600 and two jeeps are parked outside a chic town house. The young man glances at his watch. Change of camera angle: several men in severe dark suits and dark glasses emerge from the mansion - the security guards. They surround the Mercedes from all sides and one of them gives a command over his walkie-talkie. A small fat man with a depraved face emerges from the mansion and looks around in a frightened manner, then he runs down the steps to the Mercedes and disappears behind the dark-tinted glass of the car, and the guards get into the jeeps. The Mercedes starts to move off and suddenly there are three powerful explosions in rapid succession. The cars are scattered in flying debris; the street where they have just been standing is hidden by smoke. New camera angle: the young man on the bench takes a thermos flask and a red mug with a gold band out of his sports bag. He pours some coffee into the mug, takes a sip and closes his eyes in ecstasy. Voice-over: ‘He brewed it rough and dark. Nescafe Gold. The real taste explosion.’

The term ‘involvement’ didn’t only come in useful at work. It also forced Tatarsky to start thinking about just who he was involving in what and, most importantly of all, just who was involving him in what.

He first began thinking about it when he was reading an article devoted to cult porn films. The author of the article was called Sasha Blo. To judge from the text, he should have been a cold and world-weary being of indeterminate sex, writing in the breaks between orgies in order to convey his opinions to a dozen or so similar fallen supermen/women. The tone adopted by Sasha Blo made it clear that de Sade and Sacher-Masoch wouldn’t even have made it as doormen in his circle, and the best Charles Manson could have hoped for would have been to hold the candlesticks. In short, Blo’s article was a perfectly formed apple of sin, worm-eaten, beyond a shadow of a doubt, personally by the ancient serpent himself.

But Tatarsky had been around in the advertising business for a long time now. In the first place, he knew that the only thing these apples were good for was to tempt suburban Moscow’s kids out of the Eden of childhood. In the second place, he doubted the very existence of cult porn films, and was only prepared to believe in them if he was presented with living members of the cult. In the third place, and most importantly, he knew Sasha Blo himself very well.

He was a fat, bald, sad, middle-aged father of three, and his name was Ed. In order to pay the rent on their flat, he wrote simultaneoulsy under three or four pseudonyms for several magazines on any topic. He and Tatarsky had invented the name ‘Blo’ together, borrowing the title of a bottle of bright-blue glass-cleaning fluid they’d found under the bath (they were looking for the vodka Ed’s wife had hidden). The word ‘Blo’ summoned up the idea of inexhaustible reserves of vital energy and at the same time something non-humanoid, which was why Ed used it carefully. He only used it for signing articles imbued with such boundless freedom and ambivalence, so to speak, that a common signature such as ‘Ivanov’ or ‘Petrov’ would have been absurd. There was a great demand for this ambivalence in Moscow’s glossy magazines, so great indeed that it posed the question of just who was controlling its penetration. To be honest, even thinking about the topic was a bit frightening, but after reading Sasha Blo’s article, Tatarsky suddenly realised that it wasn’t being implanted by some demonic spy or some fallen spirit who had assumed human form, but by Ed and himself.

Of course, not just by them alone - Moscow probably had two or three hundred Eds, universal minds choking on the fumes of the home hearth and crushed under the weight of their children. Their lives were not one long sequence of lines of coke, orgies and disputes about Burroughs and Warhol, as you might have concluded from their writings, but an endless battle with nappies and Moscow’s own omnipresent cockroaches. They weren’t obsessed with arrogant snobbery, or possessed by serpentine carnal lust or cold dandyism: they demonstrated no tendencies to devil worship, or even any real readiness to drop a tab of acid occasionally - despite their casual use of the term ‘acid’ every day of the week. What they did have were problems with digestion, money and housing, and in appearance they resembled not Gary Oldman, as the first acquaintance with their writing led you to believe, but Danny de Vito.

Tatarsky could not gaze trustingly into the distant expanses sketched for him by Sasha Blo, because he understood the physiological genesis of those expanses in the bald head of downtrodden Ed, who was chained to his computer in just the same way as they used to chain Austrian soldiers to their machine-guns during the First World War. Believing in his product was harder than achieving arousal from telephone sex, when you knew that the voice hoarse with passion speaking to you didn’t belong to the blonde promised by the photograph, but to an old woman with a cold who was knitting a sock as she read off a set of standard phrases from a crib soaked by the drops falling from her running nose.

‘But how do we - that is, Ed and me - know what to involve other people in?’ wrote Tatarsky in his notebook.

From one point of view, of course, it’s obvious: intuition. No need to inquire about what to do and how to do it - when you reach a certain degree of despair, you just start to intuit things for yourself. You sense the dominant tendency, so to speak, with your empty stomach. But where does the tendency come from? Who thinks it up, if - as I’m convinced - everyone in the world is simply trying to catch it and sell it, like Ed and me, or to guess what it is and print it, like the editors, of those glossy magazines?

His thoughts on this theme were morose and they were reflected in his scenario for a clip for the washing powder Ariel, written soon after this event.

The scenario is based on motifs from Shakespeare. Loud music, solemn and menacing. The opening shot shows a cliff on the seashore. Night. Down below, menacing waves rear up in the dim moonlight. In the distance is an ancient castle, also illuminated by the moon. Standing on the top of the cliff is a girl of incredible beauty. She is Miranda. She is wearing a medieval dress of red velvet and a tall pointed cap with a trailing veil. She raises her arms towards the moon and utters a strange incantation three times. When she pronounces it for the third time there is a rumble of distant thunder. The music grows louder and more menacing. A wide beam of light emerges from the moon, which is visible in a break in the clouds, and extends until it reaches the rocks at Miranda’s feet. Her face expresses confusion - she is clearly afraid of what is about to happen, and yet she wants it. A shadow slides down the beam of light, coming closer, and as the melody reaches its climax, we see a proud spirit in all his evil beauty - his robes are flowing in the wind and his long hair is silvered by the moonlight. On his head is a slim wreath set with diamonds. He is Ariel. He flies close to Miranda, halts in mid-air and holds out his hand to her. After a moment’s struggle Miranda reaches out her own hand to his. Next frame: close-up of two hands approaching each other. Lower left - Miranda’s pale weak hand: upper right - the spirit’s hand, transparent and glowing. They touch each other, the spirit instantly transforms into a box of Ariel and everything is flooded in blinding light. Next frame: two boxes of washing powder. On one it says Ariel. On the other, in pale-grey letters, it says Ordinary Caliban. Miranda’s voice-over: ‘Ariel. Temptingly tempestuous’.

Possibly the specific elements in this clip were inspired by a black and white photograph that hung above Tatarsky’s desk. It was an advertisement for some boutique, showing a young man with long hair and carefully tended stubble in a luxurious wide-cut coat carelessly hung across his shoulders - the wind filled out the form of the coat so that it echoed the sail of a boat visible on the horizon. The waves breaking against the rocks and splashing up on to the shore fell just short of his shiny shoes. His face was set in a harsh, sullen grimace, and somehow he resembled the birds with outstretched wings (maybe eagles, maybe seagulls) soaring into the twilit sky from a supplement to the latest version of Photoshop (after taking a closer look at the photograph, Tatarsky decided that the boat on the horizon must have come sailing in from there too).

After contemplating it for days Tatarsky finally understood: all the cliches to which the photograph was alluding had been born together with romanticism in the nineteenth century; their remains, together with those of the Count of Monte Cristo, had survived into the twentieth, but on the threshold of the twenty-first the count’s legacy had already been completely squandered. The human mind had sold this romanticism to itself far too many times to be able to do any more business on it. Now, no matter how sincerely you wished to deceive yourself, it was virtually impossible to believe in any correspondence between the image that was being sold and its implied inner content. It was an empty form that had long ago ceased to mean what it should have meant. Everything was moth-eaten: the thoughts provoked by the sight of the conventional Niebelung in the studio photograph were not about the proud Gothic spirit implied by the frothing waves and sideburns, but about whether the photographer charged a lot, how much the model got paid and whether the model had to pay a fine when his personal lubricant stained the seat of the trousers from the company’s spring collection.

Tatarsky’s deductions led him into a state of total and utter confusion. On the one hand, it seemed that he and Ed crafted a false panorama of life for others (like a battle scene in a museum, where the floor in front of the spectator is scattered with sand and worn-out boots and shells, but the tanks and the explosions are only drawn on the wall), guided solely by their intuition as to what the punters would swallow. On the other hand, his own life was a frustrating attempt to move a bit closer to the contents of this panorama. In essence it was an attempt to run into the picture drawn on the wall. Being a co-author of this picture made the attempt more than grotesque. Of course - or so it seemed to Tatarsky - a rich man could escape the bounds of false reality. He could move beyond the limits of the panorama that was compulsory for the poor. Tatarsky didn’t actually know much about what the world of the rich was like. There were only vague images circling around in his consciousness, cliches from advertising, which he himself had been rebroadcasting for such a long time he couldn’t possibly believe in them. What was clear to him was that you could only find out what prospects opened up to a man with a substantial bank account from the rich themselves, and on one occasion - by pure chance - Tatarsky managed to do just that.

While he was drinking away a small fee in the Poor Folk bar, he eavesdropped on a conversation between two TV chat-show hosts - it was after midnight and they were continuing a drinking spree begun earlier somewhere else. Tatarsky was sitting just a couple of metres away from them, but they paid no more attention to him than if he’d been a stuffed model of a copywriter nailed to the counter in order to brighten up the decor.

Although both of the showmen were thoroughly drunk, they’d lost none of that strange holographic gleam in every fold of their clothes, as though their physical bodies were not actually sitting at the next table but were simply being shown on a huge television standing next to Tatarsky. When he noticed this inexplicable but undoubtedly real effect, Tatarsky found himself thinking how long it would take them in limbo to scrape away all the human attention that had eaten into the pores of their souls. The showmen were talking shop, and Tatarsky gathered that one of them was having problems with his contract.

‘If they’d just extend it for next year.’ he said, clenching his fists.

‘Say they do,’ the other replied. ‘At the end of the year it’ll be the same thing all over again. And you’ll be living on tranquillizers again… And then what?’

‘Then what? Then I’ve got a serious plan.’ He slumped over the table and poured himself some vodka. ‘I’m just five hundred thousand short,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ve got to make.’

‘What plan?’ ‘You won’t tell anyone? Listen…’

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, rummaged around for a long while and finally pulled out a sheet of glossy paper folded into four.

‘There.’ he said, ‘it says it on here… The kingdom of Bhutan. The only country in the world where television is forbidden. Unnerstand? Completely forbidden. It says here that not far from the capital they have an entire colony where big TV moguls live. If you spend all your life working in television, the very coolest thing you can do when you retire is move to Bhutan.’

‘Is that what you need the five hundred grand for?’

‘No, I need the five hundred grand so no one will come looking for me in Bhutan afterwards. Can you just imagine it? Forbidden. Not a single television set anywhere except in counter-espionage! And the embassies!’

His companion took the sheet of paper from him, unfolded it and started reading.

‘You unnerstand?’ - the first showman carried on speaking regardless - ‘If anyone is keeping a television at home and the authorities find out about it, the police come round, unnerstand? And they cart the queer fucker off to prison. Or maybe they even shoot him.’

He pronounced the word ‘queer’ with that sabre-whistle intake of breath you only ever hear from latent homosexuals who have deprived themselves of the joys of love in the name of a perverse misinterpretation of the social contract. His companion understood everything and didn’t take offence - he was looking through the article.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘out of a magazine. It’s interesting all right… So who wrote it? Where is it now… Some guy called Edward Debirsian…’

Tatarsky almost knocked over his table as he stood up to go to the toilet. He wasn’t surprised that TV personalities should feel that way about their work, although the degree of these people’s spiritual degradation did make it possible to allow that some of them might actually like their jobs. It was something else that had finally finished him off. Sasha Blo had a particular foible: any material that he liked, he would sign with his own real name. And what he liked more than anything else on earth was to pass off the products of his own untrammelled imagination as a narrative of real events - but it was a luxury he allowed himself only very rarely.

Tatarsky laid down a line of cocaine on the cold white cheek of the toilet tank and, without even bothering to crush the lumps, snorted it through a rolled-up hundred-rouble bill (he was already out of dollars), then took out his notebook and wrote:

In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately, the author of this fragment will again be Ed-but even that is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what?

He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: ‘Trapped? Masturbate!’

Going back to the bar, he sat further away from the TV personalities and attempted to lean back and enjoy it. But it didn’t work for him - it never did. The repulsive Moscow cocaine, cut almost to nothing by the unwashed hands of a long chain of dealers, deposited an entire bouquet of medicinal smells in his nasopharynx - everything from streptocide to aspirin - and triggered an intense, stressful trembling in his body. They did say the powder they took a hundred and fifty dollars a gramme for in Moscow was not cocaine at all, but a mixture of Estonian speed with an assortment of Russian pharmaceuticals. As if that wasn’t enough, for some reason half of the dealers always wrapped the powder in a glossy advertisement for the Toyota Camry cut out of some magazine, and Tatarsky was tormented by the unbearable suspicion that they made a fat living not just at the expense of other people’s health, but by providing a PR service as well. Every time Tatarsky asked himself why he and others paid all that money in order to subject themselves once again to a humiliating and unhygienic procedure, the only explanation he could come up with went as follows: people weren’t sniffing cocaine, they were sniffing money, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill required by the unwritten order of ritual was actually more important than the powder itself. If cocaine was sold in chemists’ shops for twenty kopecks a gramme as a mouthwash for toothache, he thought, then nobody but punks would sniff it - the way it was, in fact, at the beginning of the century. But if some ether-based glue sniffed by juvenile junkies cost a thousand dollars a bottle, all the gilded youth of Moscow would be delighted to sniff it, and at presentations and buffet luncheons it would be tres chic to waft the volatile chemical vapours around yourself, complain about your brain neurons dying off and disappear for long periods into the toilet. Youth fashion magazines would devote revelatory cover stories (written, of course, by Sasha Blo) to the aesthetics of the plastic bag that was placed over the head for this procedure.

‘Oho!’ Tatarsky exclaimed, smacked himself on the forehead, took out his notebook, opened it at the letter ‘C’, and noted down:

Youth market colognes (all manufacturers). Link them with money and the Roman emperor Vespasian (tax on lavatories, the saying ‘Money doesn’t smell’). Example:

MONE Y DOES SMELL! "BENJAMIN" THE NEW COLOGNE FROM HUGO BOSS

Putting away his notebook, he felt that the peak of the loathsome sensation had passed and he was quite strong enough to walk as far as the bar and get himself a drink. He wanted tequila, but when he reached the barman for some reason he ordered Smirnoff, which he normally couldn’t stand. He downed one shot right there at the bar, then took another and went back to his table. In the meantime he’d acquired a companion, a man of about forty with long, greasy hair and a wild beard, dressed in a crazy kind of embroidered jacket - in appearance he was a typical former hippy, one of those who had failed to find a place for themselves either in the past or in the present. Hanging round his neck was a large bronze cross.

‘Excuse me,’ said Tatarsky, ‘I was sitting here.’

‘So be my guest,’ said his new neighbour. ‘Don’t need the entire table, do you?’

Tatarsky shrugged and sat facing him.

‘My name’s Grigory,’ his neighbour said affably.

Tatarsky raised his weary eyes to look at him. ‘Vova.’ he said.

Catching his glance, Grigory frowned and shook his head in sympathy.

‘You’ve got the shakes bad,’ he said. ‘Snorting?’

‘A bit,’ said Tatarsky. ‘Just now and again.’

‘Fool,’ said Grigory. ‘Just think about it: the mucous membrane of the nose - it’s as good as the exposed surface of the brain… And did you ever think about where that powder came from and who’s been sticking his body parts in it?’

‘Just this moment,’ Tatarsky confessed. ‘But what’s all this about body parts? What other body parts can you stick in it except your nose?’

Grigory glanced around, pulled out a bottle of vodka from under the table and took a quick swallow from it.

‘Maybe you’ve heard of an American writer called Harold Robbins?’ he asked, hiding the bottle away.

‘No,’ answered Tatarsky.

‘A total arsehole. But all the English teachers read him. That’s why there are so many of his books in Moscow, and the children’s knowledge of the language is so bad. In one of his novels there was this black guy, a professional fucker who pulled rich white dames. So before the procedure this black dude sprinkled his…’

‘OK, I get it,’ said Tatarsky. ‘I’m going to be sick now.’

‘…his massive black dong with pure cocaine,’ Grigory concluded with satisfaction. ‘You might ask: what’s this black dude got to do with anything? I’ll tell you. I was re-reading Andreiev’s "Rosa Mundi" recently, the part about the soul of the nation. Andreiev says it’s a woman and she’s called Navna. Then afterwards I had this vision - she’s lying there like she’s sleeping on this white rock, and leaning over her there’s this vague black figure, with short little wings, you can’t see his face, and he’s just giving her it…’

Grigory pulled an invisible control column in towards his stomach with his hands.

‘You want to know what it is you’re all using?’ he whispered, leaning his leering face close to Tatarsky. ‘Exactly. What he sprinkles on himself. And at the moment he sticks it in, you’re all shooting up and snorting. When he pulls it out, you all go running off trying to find more… And he just keeps on sticking it in and pulling it out, sticking it in and pulling it out…’

Tatarsky leaned down into the gap between the table and the counter and puked. He glanced up cautiously at the barman: he was engaged in conversation with some customers and didn’t seem to have noticed anything. Looking around, Tatarsky noticed an advertising poster on the wall. It showed the nineteenth-century poet Tyutchev wearing a pince-nez, with a glass in his hand and a rug across his knees. His piercingly sad gaze was directed out of the window, and with his free hand he was stroking a dog sitting beside him. The strange thing was, though, that Tyutchev’s chair wasn’t standing on the floor, but on the ceiling. Tatarsky looked a little lower and read the slogan:

RUSSIA - NO WAY IS THERE TO UNDERSTAND HER NO WAY HER SECRET SOUL TO RENDER SMIRNOFF

Everything was calm. Tatarsky straightened up. He was feeling significantly better.

Grigory leaned back in his chair and took another swig from his bottle. ‘It’s disgusting,’ he asserted. ‘Life should be lived cleanly.’

‘Oh, yes? And how’s that done?’ Tatarsky asked, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin.

‘Nothing but LSD. Only via the gut and always with a prayer.’

Tatarsky shook his head like a dog that has just clambered out of the water. ‘Where can you get it?’

‘What do you mean?’ Grigory was offended. ‘Just you come round here.’

Tatarsky obediently got up, walked round the table and sat beside him.

‘I’ve been collecting for eight years,’ said Grigory, taking a stamp album out from under his jacket. ‘Take a look at that.’

Tatarsky opened the album. ‘Well I’ll be damned,’ he said. ‘Look at all those different ones.’

‘That’s nothing,’ said Grigory. ‘What I’ve got here’s just for swapping and selling. I’ve got two shelves of these albums back at home.’

‘And you mean they all have different effects?’

Grigory nodded.

‘But why?’

‘In the first place, because the formula’s different. I’ve not gone into it too deeply myself, but there’s always something added to the acid - phenamine maybe, maybe barbiturate or something else - and when it all works together, the effect’s cumulative. But apart from that, the most important thing is the drawing. There’s no getting away from the fact that you’re swallowing Mel Gibson or Mitsubishi, get it? Your mind remembers it; and when the acid reaches it, everything follows a set path. It’s hard to explain… have you ever tried it once at least?’

‘No,’ said Tatarsky. ‘Fly-agarics are more in my line.’

Grigory shuddered and crossed himself.

‘Then what am I doing telling you about it?’ he said, glancing mistrustfully up at Tatarsky. ‘You should understand well enough.’

‘Yes, I understand, I understand,’ said Tatarsky casually. ‘And these here, with the skull and cross-bones - does anyone take those? Are there people who like those?’

"They take all sorts. People come in all sorts, too, you know.’

Tatarsky turned over the page. ‘Hey, those are pretty,’ he said. ‘Is that Alice in Wonderland?’

‘Aha. Only that’s a block. Twenty-five tabs. Expensive. This one here’s good, with the crucifixion. Only I don’t know how it’d go down on top of your fly-agarics. I wouldn’t recommend the one with Hitler. It’s euphoric for a couple of hours, but afterwards there’s bound to be a few seconds of eternal torment in hell.’

‘How can you have a few seconds of eternal torment? If it’s only a few seconds, how come they’re eternal?’

‘You just have to go through it. Yeah. And you might not make it through.’

‘I get you.’ said Tatarsky, turning the page. ‘And that glitch of yours about "Rosa Mundi" - which one was that from? Is it in here?’

‘Not a glitch, it was a vision,’ Grigory corrected him. ‘There’s none in here. It was a rare tab with a dragon defeating St George. From the German series: "John the Evangelist’s Bad Trip". I wouldn’t recommend that one either. They’re a bit longer and narrower than usual, and hard too. Less like a tab than a tablet with a label on it. A lot of stuff. You know what, I’d recommend you to try this one, with the blue Rajneesh. It’s kind and gentle. And it’ll sit well on top of the booze.’

Tatarsky’s attention was caught by three identical lilac rectangles set between a tab with a picture of the Titanic and a tab with some laughing eastern deity.

‘These three here all the same, what are they?’ he asked. ‘Who’s this drawn on them? With the beard and the cap? I can’t tell whether it’s Lenin or Uncle Sam.’

Grigory chuckled in approval.

‘There’s instinct for you,’ he said. ‘Who it is that’s drawn on them I don’t know. But it’s really wild stuff. The difference is the acid’s mixed with a metabolic. So it cuts in really sharp and sudden, in about twenty minutes. And the dose in them is enough for a whole platoon of soldiers. I wouldn’t give stuff like that to you, but if you’ve been eating fly-agarics…’

Tatarsky noticed the security guard looking at them attentively.

‘I’ll take them,’ he said. ‘How much?’

‘Twenty-five dollars,’ said Grigory.

‘All I’ve got left is a hundred roubles.’

Grigory thought for a second and nodded.

Tatarsky held out the banknote rolled into a narrow tube, took a stamp out of the album and tucked it into his breast pocket.

"There you go’ said Grigory, putting his album away. ‘And don’t you go snorting that garbage any more. Ifs never done anybody any good. Just makes you tired and ashamed about yesterday and makes your nose bleed.’

‘Do you know what comparative positioning is?’ Tatarsky asked.

‘No,’ said Grigory. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s an advertising technique you’re an absolute master of"