No Way Out at the Entrance. Дмитрий Емец

pulled the door and carefully got out. He took a step, expecting the elastic force to catch him and throw him back into the minibus. The bus was standing on an asphalt area surrounded by lilac bushes. Before them was an ordinary two-storey building. Two structures and a gallery connecting them. Low stairs, wide porch, and black double doors. Next to them was a blue doorplate, on which crawled cockroaches of indistinguishable letters.

      “What’s written there? Can anyone see?” asked Sashka.

      “It says HDive,” someone beside him answered. Sashka turned. Standing next to him was the person by the name of Rina, squinting in the sun.

      “You can see the letters from here? What eyesight!”

      “Well no, I can’t. I read them earlier,” she admitted with a sigh.

      “How?”

      “Well, on the whole, I came from here. I was ordered to meet, accompany, and explain nothing. That kind of thing,” Rina shrugged her shoulders slightly, and Sashka understood that she did not particularly like this task. Sashka belatedly realized that she sat more quietly than everybody in the minibus and did not panic.

      “So it’s you who dragged us here? I’ll strangle you!” Makar began to yell and rushed at Rina.

      Sashka caught him in a chokehold and discovered at the same time that everyone had already got out of the minibus. “Stop!” he ordered and asked Rina, “What next? Where are we going now?”

      Rina looked first at the sun, and then at her phone, checking if the sun was slower than the clock on her phone. “Well, come on! They’re waiting for us!” she said and, having turned around, made her way to HDive. Exchanging glances, the rest followed her.

      “Only not me! I’m not going!” Freda said and, after passing everyone, went first.

      Alice stepped with pleasure on the heads of the yellow flowers shooting out between the flagstones. If somewhere there were no flowers, she specially made a zigzag in order to crush some flowers elsewhere. “If this decoy also counts, then ten of us,” she stated.

      “Well, so wha?” Makar was puzzled.

      “No wha!” Alice mimicked and tinkled the death dog tags with a challenge.

      END OF AUGUST – BEGINNING OF SEPTEMBER

      Chapter 3

      Three Wishes

      It is very difficult to love one who is near. It is simple to love one who is far. Let us assume I love the writer Chekhov but we live together in one place; how he laughs, gurgles with tea, or drops a wet spoon on a polished surface would irritate me. That is, until I learn to tolerate someone near, there is no point in saying that I love someone.

From the diary of a non-returning hdiver

      The chubby middle-aged person waiting for Guy on board the Gomorrah was so cheerful and efficient that Guy, dressed in a stretched sweater and canvas pants, momentarily wanted to confine himself in a pinstriped suit and be shaved. “Oh, Guy!” he said, leaping up. “No, no! I know that you’re monstrously busy! Several minutes for me will be enough!”

      Guy, not looking, sat down. He knew that Nekalaev would manage to move a chair. Moreover, not only for him but also for the stout Till. Thirty paces from the elevator, five steps, and Till was already gasping for breath.

      “Your call surprised me,” said Guy. “And the foolish mysteriousness irritates me. Why did you decide that I’m sure to buy from you what you’re offering? And, by the way, what is it exactly?”

      The cheerful person started to smile soothingly and lifted his hands, showing that all the answers would be given in their time. Then he took out a hard rectangular business card and tapped the table with it.

      “I’m… hmm… a little of everything. Broker? Antique dealer? Bibliophile? Now and then the most interesting people die. Writers, artists, academicians. The heirs remain. Quite often not particularly competent.”

      “I find this hard to believe,” Guy remarked absent-mindedly. “They cannot but know what their ancestor killed his whole life for.”

      Chubby began to nod hurriedly. “Goes without saying! It’s well known to them that there’s quite a lot in grandpa’s and father’s library. But that’s all they know! Almost no one suspects that 95 percent of collected works in luxurious bindings have very little value, but some tiny unpretentious little book is priceless. The first limited edition Akhmatova8 collection with her autograph, or a well-preserved bundle of Satyricon,9 or something similar. I politely buy dozens of beautiful books, paying three times their value for them, and out of courtesy I take the tiny booklet in an overall pile of all sorts of unnecessary things.”

      “In other words, your task is to find this five percent and get it for nothing, after leaving the rest to the fool of an heir?” Till, wheezing, spelt it out. The round face of his collocutor strayed somewhere between the sun and a pancake.

      “Each business has its special quirks. Can’t teach them. Can only learn them. In the spring, a decrepit old lady on Ostozhenka passed away, the widow of an artist of battle scenes. Her niece couldn’t wait to get rid of the junk. She was simply happy when I bought from her two trunks of all sorts of old stuff.”

      “Soiled palettes? Drying tubes of paint?” Guy asked.

      The cheerful person started to laugh with exaggerated energy. He had a habit of overstating the worth of mediocre jokes like that of book collections. “Not quite. The artist drew historical paintings, and for that, reliable historical things were necessary. Weapons, cloth, goblets. The entire second trunk turned out to be crammed with ancient horse harness. Bridles, belts, stirrups, adornment.”

      “Do you want a bridle?” Guy asked Till.

      Till shook his head and started to crumble bread with his thick fingers. “I now rarely sit behind the wheel. Gotten old, clumsy,” he complained.

      These jokes did not fool the cheerful person. Once such people have heard you out up to this point, they will listen some more. Then they will pay, there is no getting away from it.

      “The lid of the trunk interested me most of all. It was suspiciously heavy. I tapped it and found a secret compartment, which even the owners themselves clearly didn’t know about. An hourglass in a copper case lay there.” After mentioning the hourglass, the antique dealer stopped talking and quickly looked at Guy. “A very interesting hourglass. That and something else belonged to some first-hdiver Mityai Zheltoglazyi,” he sweetly added.

      Guy stopped cleaning his nails with a corner of the business card and looked attentively for the first time at his collocutor. “What do you know about hdivers, Sergey Ilich?” he asked sharply.

      Pancake-face grinned and stroked the napkin lying in front of him as if stroking a dead rabbit. “A little. You see, the hourglass was wrapped with a scrap of skin. On the skin was text. Very brief, but I examined it… For example, I understood that hdivers would hardly pay me. But you here are a different story.”

      “What, me personally?” Guy doubted.

      Sergey Ilich lowered his eyes so shyly that one wanted to give him some money. “No, of course not. I spent three months in order to come to you. Several times the thought flickered in me that there exist neither hdivers nor warlocks. So many centuries have gone by. I despaired, and here’s a piece of luck! I discovered on the Net the description of a strange anomaly – an enormous column of water on the Moscow River. Someone shot it with his cell phone. Immense! Such could only be done by a hdiver marker, the description of which was on the reverse side of the skin. And you yourself know only who could drop it… hee-hee… So I came to Gomorrah. The rest is a technical matter.”

      “Not bad!” Guy showed approval. “I see you’ve done some good work. Can I have a look at the hourglass and the skin?”

      The antique dealer looked cautiously at Till. Till was calmly chewing a piece of dill, which was hanging from the

8

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko, one of the most acclaimed modernist poets of the Silver Age.

9

Satyricon was a Russian weekly satirical magazine (1908-14).