FILTH

Rudy Kruger gazed with horror at the ceiling as he awoke. The filthy encrusted dirt hung down in strips appearing to cling with glee to the paint, which in turn was struggling to maintain its tender grip on the plaster. The state of the ceiling mocked his lowly role in this post-communist revolutionary state. He had hated Russia ever since he had arrived here from Stuttgart Prison.
The experience of being in jail had provided the kick up the backside Rudy had needed to start him on a course towards earning real money. His fellow Germans had not minded him managing a strip joint which covered for an empire of prostitutes catering for goggle-eyed businessmen arriving from Britain and the United States. The suckers had smooched into the afternoon darkness and paid ten times the bar rate for their weak beers and then, if they considered themselves, lucky had paid much, much more for the pleasure of sex with one of the dancers. It had all seemed so easy Rudy wondered why ordinary people got up so early in order in order to return so late from their mind numbing jobs. He overheard one conversation in the stalls between two men who had been discussing the respective values of their pensions. He had felt sick. Rudy was often feeling sick. Humanity made him sick. But he was cursed to live among human beings who made him feel ill by forcing him to observe their strange and stupid behaviour.
The strip club had provided a decent income but already Rudy’s eyes were set upon possessions which even the club’s easy income would not provide. Rudy had always wanted a Ferrari Testarossa but short of getting a rare hit as a rock and roll star he could not see it happening. It certainly was not going to happen through anything connected with the club. So he had decided to move on.
It had not been the sale of heroin and cocaine which had been his downfall but the casual way Rudy had tried to bribe his way past honest police officers.
During his time inside Rudy had often wondered about the incorruptibility of man. He really failed to understand that some people could not be bought. He thought they had refused his money out of spite, maybe they did not like the fact that he was barely in his twenties and worth more than they would be in their whole lives. In which case, he thought, they should have taken some of the money he was offering and made things easier for themselves.
Sitting on his Moscow bed, he wondered for the thousandth time at the cold. Even walking up to Frederick the Great’s castle at the height of winter he had not been as cold as this. And yet these people lived in these sub zero temperatures for all their lives. ‘And this is their capital city,’ he muttered to himself. ‘No bloody wonder the country’s in such a fuckin’ mess.’ Rudy saw Moscow as a sad city at the heart of a sad country, which delighted in celebrating its novelists and composers while hurling all its modern day geniuses into death camps. ‘Fuckin’ weird, man,’ he told anyone who would listen.
His view of the Russians was formed by their treatment of him. He saw them as a vicious set of bastards with a very good idea of the market value of the goods they were selling. Only a few weeks ago he had all but sealed a deal on some icons. But the Russian dealers had tried to charge him virtually the prices he expected to get in New York or Berlin. In the end he had to pull out of the deal because the profit would have been virtually nil.
He was angry with their treatment of him. Rudy Kruger saw himself, a proud and educated German, doing these peasants a favour. ‘Who do they think they are?’ he asked to the walls of his flat. ‘They’ve spent seventy years fucking up their country and now they try and behave like smart Swiss who take all the dosh and never let an invader cross their borders.’
He got out of bed and looked around for his leathers. He had slung them over a chair before scrambling into bed totally drunk the night before and now he could not find the chair. The room seemed filled with chairs. There were chairs which were functional, there were chairs which were stylish, there were chairs which were made out of very odd metal indeed along with more ordinary chairs made out of straightforward pine. There were many chairs which no one in their right mind would ever have sat upon. Rudy had got the lot for a hundred dollars. He could see each chair making at least that in a London or Hamburg auction. But right now he did not give a damn how much they were worth. He just wanted to find the one on which his leather jeans would be dangling.
Eventually, his eyes focused on them. They were lying on the floor, having slipped off one of the old metal chairs. He walked over and picked up the worn leather trousers. His nose crinkled as he smelt the dry sick which had been the result of too many cheap vodkas two nights earlier. But he had no time to change them. The washing facilities in this rough temporary home of his were non existent. So he broke into one of the bottles of perfume he had been keeping behind the sink and sprinkled the stuff liberally over the inside of the leathers, where it stuck to the silk lining. He sneezed involuntarily with the sudden intake of powerful fumes.
Before leaving his one-room home Rudy looked out of the uncurtained dirty windows. He opened one of them in order to get a clear view of the street. He saw a small square in which people were bustling about selling long-hoarded goods. Rudy noticed they never sold food but always trinkets, photograph albums, little gifts of no value in a world where a pound of sausages would purchase the services of a brain surgeon for a month. Rudy shook his head in amazement.
Rudy slammed the door of the flat in frustrated protest at his appalling living conditions. He had to take out his anger on someone and the occupants of the block would serve him well this morning. ‘Anyway, they should be off their backsides and bloody well out earning a living,’ he told himself as he scuffed his shoes against the side of the pavement. He looked around to see if there was a car he could try and hitch a lift from. There was none. So he strolled on down the deserted pavement staring at the dawn light creeping over the tops of the ancient tiled roofs.
Rudy was furious with the world. He was supposed to be making real money and yet he had achieved nothing more during the past six months than tick over. ‘Two steps forward and two steps back. What an existence.’ True, he had done enough deals to put fifty thousand dollars in his Swiss account. But that was hardly going to buy him a Ferrari. It was just about the right amount for a down payment on a small house. Rudy had no intention of getting a mortgage. ‘If you can’t pay cash upfront then fuck it. You’re nobody,’ he always told his friends. ‘Just remember, when your pension comes in I’ll be three lives on from you, and still having more fun in a day than you get in a year.’ Except life was not working out quite like that for Rudy.
Lately, he had fallen into a habit of turning his past life over and over in his mind. It had not been his fault to have been born to parents who had taken no interest in him. He had done well to have made a living, and a good one at that, although his family, his foul sanctimonious family, hated his work with the strip clubs and the cocaine cafes. But that was their problem. What had they ever done to offer him a decent life outside of that world? He was good enough to survive amongst the gangsters and the dirty little hookers and their tough boxer pimps who ran from a gun like the cowards he knew them to be.
Rudy had done well and had been stamped on because of it.
But his family had no right to sit in their two bedroom flat whingeing about their baby son going to the devil. What had they done as fervent Christians during the Nazi era? Why, join the party and serve the Fuhrer of course, just like so many other good Germans. Rudy had no need to feel ashamed.
One day he would own a company and it would make honest money and he would be an honest citizen. But he was not fool enough to hang around waiting for some other person to recognize his talent. Rudy did not believe in dreams. Rudy was not a harsh man, he just did not care what others thought about him. He had even helped people who had been down on their luck. He saw himself as being rather a caring kind of person.
This morning he was angry with himself. He had lost rather too much money at the poker game he had attended purely to ingratiate himself with a man he had been erroneously led to believe was a Moscow Godfather. Rudy had watched the man and listened to his stupid utterances and his need for pure vodka every third or fourth minute. He had watched until the moment when it had dawned on him that this man was no more than a simple tramp who had struck lucky with a good line of patter. Rudy had cursed himself for being led down a wrong path and had drunk even more beer to calm his temper. Despite having seen through the man he knew it would not have been a wise move to have antagonized his guests by turning on their friend. Nor would it do have done him any good to leave the game before the appointed time. So he just had to sit there seething while the wasted hours dripped on by. Rudy had felt really angry with himself.
Then, he had slumped on the dirty scuffed sofa and drifted off to sleep, knocking over his half-drunk cup of foul coffee. The constant hard rapping on the door had awoken him in a temper more foul than the one in which he had gone to sleep.
The visitor had scared him shitless. Rudy had met men like that before, but only rarely. He saw them as dark avenging angels who crawled across the surface of the planet looking for people to abuse. Rudy could not work out whether the visitor had a connection with the drunken chancer. In the end, he assumed the visit was a result of his night with the ‘Godfather’ figure. But he could not work out why or how. And he was far too scared to ask. It would not have been at all appropriate.
The man had told him he needed to join a ‘group of friends’ in order to continue working in Moscow. The visitor said there would be a subscription. When Rudy asked what would happen if he did not pay his ‘subscription’ the man had drawn a finger slowly across his neck. Rudy had got the message.
‘I have no money. How can I pay protection?’
‘This is not protection. Have I used the word protection? This is a subscription enabling you to join a select society of like-minded individuals. You should be grateful. Look out of your window. Most of the population does not have this privilege brought to their doorstep. Think of it as a tax on your earnings. We operate just like a proper government. We are even democratic, in our way.’
When Rudy asked what earnings he was likely to make in the future the visitor had written down an address and told him to be there at six the following morning.
‘Don’t be late. Our friends...’ he continued as though Rudy had now signed a contract in blood. ‘Our friends don’t like to be kept waiting. They are busy men.’ And with that he had left, leaving Rudy puzzled and more than a little worried about the following day.
The morning had come too soon for Rudy’s liking. He had a hardy constitution. So a few coffees and a five minute burst of Moscow ice under the cold shower had been enough to kick start him back into action.
He thought of waving down the passing Lada but it skidded and turned the corner before he had decided that would have been a bad idea. He wondered whether it was a KGB patrol. Rudy laughed at the incongruity of secret policemen driving around in Noddy mobiles. Although he did not fancy being taken off to the Lubyanka especially if it was a Lada which would take him there.
As he reached the corner he saw the car in the far distance. He decided on a whim to take a diversion down the side alley. ‘You can never be too careful with these Moscow policemen,’ he told himself.
The warehouse was twenty floors high. Even in a neighbourhood dominated by tall buildings it stood out from the others, an aristocrat of a building surrounding by artisan terraces. The side door was eight feet high and four feet wide and made of solid oak, although it was well worn. The lock had long since broken. Rudy leant hard on the door with his shoulder and pushed his way through to reveal the rickety wooden stairs. He was surprised that they started a couple of feet from the entrance.
Five floors up he walked over a hole in the wooden floor, where a couple of planks had finally succumbed to dry rot and just faded away, crumbling onto the floors below.
His visitor had not given him explicit instructions, just to get to the building and walk up the stairs. ‘You will be met.’ Rudy wondered when he would be met. The warehouse stank of centuries of damp. There must have been wet and dry rot in every inch of the wood. The bricks were turning to dust and crumbling onto the floor, now a hundred feet below him. The warehouse filled him with foreboding, as if it was a place of horror he had been warned about in a long forgotten dream. Now the dream, or rather the nightmare, was returning to him bit by bit, but only after he had lived the part of the earlier experience which was lodged in his subconscious.
Just as Rudy thought the stairs were going to go on for ever a figure appeared on the landing immediately above him. Rudy thought he must be a bodyguard. His clothes were shabby Moscow Godfather-minder style. That is to say they were quite dirty, with the ends of the trousers frayed and dangling around the old brown leather boots. His style of jacket would have been trendy in the fifties, in a spit and sawdust pub in some English backstreet pub.