Pig: A Thriller Read Free Page B

options, possible complications, etc. -- with the surliness of a government food store clerk, a faceless type who made you wonder if he invented the rubber stamp or it invented him. A homeless Palestinian with a Jordanian passport, he was welcome to use the papers just so long as he didn’t actually return to Jordan. Paper will stand whatever you write on it. As a result, he would do whatever Pig told him to. It was either that or go back to being homeless.
    “ Nado zhits, ” he’d de claim anytime someone challenged one of his many questionable actions . “You have to live.”  Then he’d comb over a few straggly hairs that seemed to grow out of his ears over the top of his bald head, creating the first human bar code.
     

     
    Magda Perskanski had gone into the gulag as a Communist in a Communist country. She had come out as a realist in a chaotic one. In the interim, the Bolshevik Party had fallen, the country was no longer the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin was distinguishing himself by visiting foreign countries only long enough to get out of the plane and piss on the end of the runway then go back in the plane to sleep off his hangover while his advisors pillaged the nation.
    The rest of the Union was in even worse shape than Boris’ liver . Released from the gulag , the penniless Magda had been put on a train for Moscow and told to resume her life as she wanted. Sh e got only as far as Noyabrsk , whe re the train broke down and no one could say when it would be fixed or another one sent to replace it. With no money in her pocket, no job, and no idea when – or if – the train would be functional again, she did what she had to survive.
     

     
    What does a fallen Physics professor do to survive?
    Whatever she has to, using w hatever hard-earned experience she’d gained in the gulag . Deciding to do what she knew best, Magda opened up her own beauty shop, not such an oxymoron even in a town as prosaic as Noyabrsk. God lends a touch of beauty even to the ugly. Perhaps it was even more important to be touched by beauty in such a drab atmosphere. And so the local ladies flocked in. And h ad their hair done, their cuticles clipped, their bushes trimmed. Who could have ever guessed that Brazilian wax jobs would become so well-known in the taiga .
    Using another skill she’d learned at the gulag, Magda combined this service with a "deficit e xchange club . " Besides good men, Noyabrsk was short of just about everything. Good products were hard to find except on the black market, s o Magda acted as a go-between for people who worked in industries that had access to desirable goods . Her job was not vital, noble or important -- but, then, not everything had to be. And she knew that. Those with access to cosmetics, push up bras , I-pods, Nintendo, Swiss chocolate: they all brought the surplus to Magda's shop and exchanged them for something else just as desirable that they happened not to have. Magda did not sell things here, she just set the barter rates. So many tubes of lipstick were worth one Victoria’s Secret promise . And so on. She did char ge m embership dues however and the privilege was steep. How did she get away with it? She’d fooled herself into thinking it was because of how clever she had set it up, c ustomers came in with full bags to have their nails done and left with the same bags just as full. Who was to know the contents had been swapped? In truth, in the New Russia, what she was doing was no longer forbidden. What it was, was just the new way of doing business.
    Finally, Magda advertised herself as a psychic who could read people’s pasts. “ P sychic” and “P hysics ” and were almost spelled the same way, anyway. She put on an old tiara that had once belonged to Catherine the Great and charged a fee for telling people to do what they wanted to do anyway but needed an excuse to justify it . The tiara was so tacky no one even checked to see if it was real or not. Which it was , unknown