play an entire person. But it would require a large orchestra, and of course, there is no way I’d ever learn how to play a person, even the simplest one.”
“You won’t learn how to play a person, but that song, all hundred and seventy-three minutes of it, that you will learn?”
“I will,” Alyona said very softly and very stubbornly. Aspirin’s chest hurt without warning.
“Can you play love?”
“Lust—yes, I can. Easily.”
“Not lust. Love, Alyona. Do you know what that is?”
She continued sawing, eyes downcast. “What you mean is a book concept. The love they write about in Lolly-Lady cannot be played. Because it’s not an emotion. It’s nothing—a candy wrapper, an empty word.”
Aspirin had still been looking for the proper response when the hacksaw screeched for the last time and the handcuff chain broke off.
“. . . And so, my dear listeners, here is what I wanted to tell you. All of us are at work right now, all want idleness and comfort and dream of vacation, and none of us realize this: music can be a hell of a lot more of an escape than we think. More powerful. Imagine this: you get home from your office, your refrigerator is empty . . . and what do you do? You pick up a violin, or maybe a harmonica, and you play yourself a pizza. That is, if you don’t have a music degree, and no musical ear whatsoever. And if you have a good ear, you can play yourself a bit of poached fish in white sauce, or mushroom julienne, or a wild parrot baked with cacti, whatever you want! And if you are a really good musician, you can play yourself a woman, and oh what a woman you can play for yourself! One to take your breath away! Can you imagine? And now let’s imagine what the next singer could sing to us? What sort of, shall we say, material results would her singing bring us? Is your imagination vivid enough? No? Then simply listen.”
He wiped his saliva off the mic with a tissue.
Love, an empty candy wrapper . . .
“You, young magician, can you play death?” he’d asked her the night before, poking a screwdriver at the handcuffs.
“Leave me alone,” she said. “I am going to bed.” Alyona got up to go to the living room. Before she left the kitchen, she turned around to look at him. “Do you know what my scariest dream is? It’s about a string breaking. Ding—and that’s it.”
“And now, my dear friends, we have a phone call! Tamara is on the line, good morning, Tamara! What are you going to share with our listeners?”
“I want to share how much I love my boyfriend,” a shaky young voice mumbled. “His name is Slava. And I want us not to fight so much . . .”
Aspirin’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. It quivered like a fish on a hook.
“Not to fight so much—what a splendid idea, dearest Tamara! All the philosophy of love in five words. If you didn’t fight at all, I would certainly doubt the true nature of your feelings, because lovers’ quarrels are essential for a good relationship, and as the old Russian saying goes, if he doesn’t beat you he doesn’t love you!”
Behind the glass, Julia winced and rolled her eyes.
Babbling away, Aspirin pulled out his phone and saw Whiskas’s number.
The familiar shiver ran down his spine. Leaving for work, Aspirin had to fight the urge to ask Alyona—with Mishutka and her violin—to accompany him to the studio. As bodyguards.
He had overcome the urge and gathered enough courage to leave on his own, utterly defenseless.
And now, at least electronically, they’d found him.
“This song is for you, Tamara, and for your wonderful Slava!”
His phone kept jerking and buzzing. Bracing himself, Aspirin pressed Answer.
“Hello.”
“Alexey, we need to meet,” his old friend said solemnly.
Aspirin said nothing.
“Untwist your knickers,” Whiskas said in an unexpectedly friendly manner. “You are very lucky. You don’t even understand how lucky you are, Aspirin.”
“This girl of yours is a hypnotist—a regular Franz Mesmer.”
They sat in a dark, smoky café. A connoisseur of expensive cigars and an expert on smoking pipes, in moments of trouble Victor Somov always reached for a pack of cheap unfiltered cigarettes.
“Gypsies have nothing on her, Count Cagliostro is turning in his grave, Anatoly Kashpirovsky is shitting bricks. She could be a millionaire, a billionaire, actually. Maybe she already is.”
Aspirin was shaking his head. “Hold on. When that guy was thrown up in the