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.

PERFUME

Every now and then she sighed and deleted a whole chunk of words. It was clear she was having difficulty trying to express herself.
She wished there were windows in the newsroom. Working in the cloistered hothouse environment with its pretty pictures and towering plants was all right as long as you did not have to spend several hours at a stretch in the one room. Then you noticed the lack of natural light. She knew that was one reason why so many of the staff seemed prematurely aged, wrinkles appearing where most people had flat skin, white faces and desolate expressions. It was clear human beings needed a little light in the darkness of their day.
Working for ‘The Nation’ deprived you of all natural light on your working days, unless you were lucky enough to leave the office. Many did not and so they often represented the embodiment of Mummified corpses waiting for official recognition of their everyday condition.
‘No matter,’ she used to murmur to herself. ‘It’s their lives they are wasting. Not my concern.’
Nevertheless, despite her ambition, Alison was not a heartless person and felt sorry for the condition of these people who always struck her as rather sad and desolate.
Almost without exception they all had dreams which had failed for one reason or another. The happiest were the recent failures who were happy to joke about the enormous cock-ups in their lives and how they planned to rescue themselves from what they clearly saw as nothing more than a temporary setback.
There were others, though, who were quite different. They carried themselves as though the world’s cares were resting on their shoulders. These people walked around the newsroom with their backs bent and their clothes never quite fitting properly. When one of them would catch Alison’s eye she would think of the tailor’s dummies which had been left in a shop window overnight, naked and ill-proportioned, a dirty yellow colour with scuff marks where they had landed after being frequently dropped on the floor over many years by careless hands. She always wondered about these dead dummies. Who had decided to leave them so exposed during the long dark hours of the night? Had the new clothes not arrived or had the shop assistants simply been too tired to bother to dress the mannequins for the morning.
She recalled a shop she passed once in East Berlin. It was just off the Friedrichstrasse. She had turned left after passing through the security checks and transferring her proper Deutschemarks into the joke money which the communists had forced tourists to take with them no matter how short their journey.
About a hundred yards up the road she had decided to turn left, heading onto the Unter Den Linden, with the blocked-off Brandenburg Gate in the far distance. Crossing the road she had come across a line of shops where nothing seemed to be on display. Moving closer she realised her eyes had been fooled. There were items for sale. Items which were obviously highly praised by the shop owners and consequently of value to the many would be shoppers in this half a city. Except they had been almost impossible to see.
She recalled one perfume shop in particular. It was part of a large building with a massive front window, of the kind of size found in the prestigious shops fronting Regent Street in Central London. But there the comparison ended. This was no toy shop or sophisticated department store. This was just an exceedingly large window from another age which had been allowed to decay.
There were horrible scratches which collected dust and dirt and formed odd patterns reminding her of the paintings she had made as a child by dripping ink onto paper and then folding it in half.
Through the dark glass she could see a display which quite took away her breath. It was obviously a perfumer’s. The prize bottles of perfume were arrayed on plinths of varying sizes, arranged to show them in their best of lights. Except the bottles were no more than the cheap throwaway miniatures dumped on passengers by airlines. And the plinths they were resting on in their Romanesque glory were just cheap cardboard boxes. Their sides had shrunk and the concave pillars, with their faded colours and dust, barely visible through the dust of the window, seemed to express a forlorn sadness which was somehow ageless.
Alison had felt as she imagined she might have done in the presence of a child who had just discovered that she had been given the cheapest Christmas present in the class.
Something of that feeling struck her now as she cast her eyes around the newsroom looking at the worn figures struggling to better each other in a state of fear and desperation. None of them were the cossetted stars, the highly paid and much lauded public names who seemed to ride the surf of life without ever having to ask for anything more than the best bank in which to deposit their rapidly increasing amounts of money.
She turned back and looked at the screen. It had been taunting her with its inability to provide the correct words to describe the story. Now she had them. They rolled off her fingers and onto the keyboard and then the screen with consummate ease. Alison printed out a copy for herself and then went for a coffee. She stood in the corridor, secretly smoking a cigarette and proof reading her story, before going over to the newsdesk.
‘So this is it, then, is it,’ the chief assistant said as he scrutinized her words.
‘You better get this checked by Simon, before he unleashes the world of the secret services on his back.’
‘I’m about to fax it to his home. I thought you might like a copy first, that’s all.’
The chief had a way of getting right under Alison’s skin. Even the way he said hello in the mornings would drive her mad.
She went back to her desk to wait for the call from Simon.

UNDERGROUND

There’s a whole world which lives underground in Washington. People work there as if they were coal miners, arriving before dawn and leaving after dusk, never seeing the sun.
The underground railway system which transports congressmen and senators also houses a group of shops where the good and the great can buy a vast variety of products at cheap prices. It was in one of those strange warehouses that Robert Harding the Third was buying rolls of Kodachrome 25 film. He was flirting with the young raven-haired assistant. Robert could never turn down a chance to dally with any member of the opposite sex.
He took his film and his Visa receipt and made his way to the train. Emerging twenty minutes later into the sunlight of the late winter morning he blinked and waited for his eyes to adjust to the bright light.
A tall man with a wooden stick stood near the corner of the opposite street. He carried a neat black briefcase which looked more like a woman’s handbag. The man was standing so still he resembled a lamp post or hydrant. He had arrived a quarter of an hour early. No one was paying any attention to him. That did not surprise this man. He would have been shocked had anyone come up to him and started talking. Washington was a city where people minded each other’s business. The people who walked the streets were rarely worth paying attention to.
He gave a little cough, as if to reassure himself he was still alive, then moved to the corner to meet the person who had emerged a few moments earlier.
‘Let us stroll down the street for a block or two, Ted,’ Robert Harding said, as their paths met. The two men walked in silence for a while as if they were two chickens walking down a mountainside with their eyes wide open watching not for other chickens but for the fox hiding in its bushy lair.
The tall man spoke first. ‘Anthony has been in touch with me.’
Robert did not alter his pace nor did he look at Ted Garner.
‘He was on the telephone from Moscow. Things are moving fast.’
‘What are you planning?’
‘All the evidence from our point of view is to be wiped. A special team is working on it right now.’
‘How can we trust these people you are employing?’
‘There is no problem over that. None of them have any idea of the whole story. Each is set a small task which they have to complete without doing any more than confirming they are destroying the correct files.’
Ted Garner stumbled. ‘Damn this leg.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Quite all right, thank you. Just a weakness I’ve had since a teenager. Some nervous problem.’
‘You ok to fly?’
‘Of course. As I said, it is an ever-so-slight disability I have had since I was a child. Please do not worry about me. I am more robust than many an Olympic athlete.’
Robert Harding did not laugh. His sense of humour was so well refined it only reacted to his own jokes.
‘We want you to fly to London.’
‘Don’t tell me you let any of their people know about the operation.’
‘Not exactly.’
A little girl, furiously pedalling a cheap yellow bicycle, swished by on the inside of the pavement.
‘Bloody child. Could have paralyzed me.’
‘You have health insurance Robert. You would be all right.’ Two jokes in as many minutes were more than enough for Robert Harding. The operative was getting on his nerves. It was a pity Anthony Marshall thought so highly of him. He would far rather have used one of his own men who were trusty, reliable, young and competent. People who were of the New World Order not these decrepit middle-aged old men who seemed to live on another planet.
‘The problem is not one of our making. Long before our operation came into effect some of the Brits got involved. We fear they may have kept track of us. Anthony simply wants to find out how much they know. You’re good at prising information out of pompous old men in gentlemen’s drinking clubs.’
‘What an accusation,’ Ted commented, with an infectious chuckle.
‘But most certainly true. I think they like you. They see a doddering old fogey with no physical presence and a bit of a simple mind. People are such snobs.’
‘I am ready to go. It will be good to leave this Sodomic City of Sin for the fresh carbon dioxide fumes of London.’
‘We’ve booked a flight tonight. That will be suitable?’
Ted Garner nodded his approval.
As Robert hailed the taxi he looked at with concern at his partner’s briefcase.
‘I do wish you would come with a proper briefcase. I think you do this deliberately. I feel such a fool returning with your woman’s handbag.’
Ted Garner smiled softly. He was glad he had found some way of getting under the skin of the little prick.