These Are the Names Read Free Page A

Her skirt clung to the lines of her lower body; there, where the elastic pressed against flesh, he could see the contours of her underwear. The top buttons of her glossy white blouse were unbuttoned. A person in government service, Beg felt, shouldn’t walk around like that. Maybe in the brothel at the Morris Club, but not at police headquarters.
    He stared helplessly at the monitor.
    â€˜Has it stopped working again?’ she asked.
    He rolled his chair away from the desk. Oksana squatted down and pushed POWER . Then she stood up and walked around to the far side. ‘Oh, okay,’ she said, ‘that’s not too complicated.’
    She held up the plug for him to see. She promised to give the cleaners hell, and stuck the plug back in the socket. The computer sighed, and the monitor blipped on.
    Beg longed for his typewriter.
    One hour later, Oksana came back to say that neither Koller nor Menchov had showed up. The two men were still in the waiting room.
    â€˜Tell Koller I’ll break both his legs if he doesn’t get down here now. He’s on weekend duty, for Christ’s sake. There’s no reason why he can’t draw up a report with a fistula.’
    â€˜An abscess.’
    â€˜Whatever the hell it is.’
    â€˜I’ll tell him that in so many words.’
    Beg opened the office safe. At the bottom of it lay that month’s takings: money in little plastic bags, in envelopes, folded between sheets of paper, held together with paperclips, wrapped in rubber bands; money his men had garnered at roadside from speeders, from those who ignored traffic signals or drove barefooted — driving without shoes on your feet was an obvious violation. First you pulled them over, and then you asked the driver if he wanted to be registered as a traffic offender. That was the signal for the transaction to begin. No one wanted to be registered. Fines were paid on the spot.
    Beg counted it all and divided it according to rank and seniority. Before him lay a large pile of banknotes, which he split into many smaller piles. He stuffed the notes into envelopes, and wrote the recipients’ names on them. They all came in on the first of the month to pick up their share.
    In this country, he thought, everyone steals from everyone else. And those who don’t steal, beg. Everywhere he looked he saw outstretched hands: no house was built, no service rendered, without the hands intervening, claiming their piece of the transaction. The system was all-embracing, a colossal weave of kickbacks, bribes, extortion, and larceny — whatever else you might chose to call it. As police commander, he found himself somewhere halfway up the ladder: big hands pinched the chunks above him; little hands scrabbled at the crumbs below. Everyone took part. It was an economic system from which everyone profited and under which everyone suffered.
    Around noon, he left headquarters and drove to Tina’s Bazooka Bar for lunch. Michailopol: it was his city. Thirty-nine thousand inhabitants, according to the latest census. A border town, it had once been home to a prestigious nuclear-research institute and an ice-hockey team that had been promoted in two consecutive seasons and came within an inch of the national championship. Beg remembered the excitement. At its peak, early in the last century, the city had numbered one hundred and fifty thousand citizens. Michailopol station, with fifteen departures an hour, had been the gateway to the wide world. Now Beg couldn’t even remember where the tracks had been. The steel had been torn up, and used to build sheds and fences. The sleepers were chopped into pieces, and disappeared into stoves during the coldest of winters. The Jugendstil station itself was still there, but had decayed beyond rescue. A mortician stored his coffins in one of the outbuildings.
    Michailopol’s demise had been as turbulent as its rise. There had been sixteen churches once — Orthodox