a game of Miner. The simple game proved to be as effective as a drug. Aspirin managed to perish on the cartoon minefield before the brandy kicked in, and an outline of an article appeared through the fog in his leaden head.
It was about intelligence agencies abducting people. About an extremely talented girl violinist who becomes famous after a single performance at a single recital. Rushing through the first five thousand characters, he took a deep breath. The article was rather insipid, and he was too professional not to notice it. So a child was abducted. Big deal.
He fought the impulse of slamming his fist into the keys and pulled himself together. He should make the girl a genius of extrasensory perception and telekinesis, and her abductors should be not just any intelligence agency, but a worldwide web of deeply secretive experts on astral projection. Or aliens? No—aliens were so last year.
Mulling over the details, he slid closer and closer to the edge of his swivel chair, and when a key turned in the lock, the chair slid from under Aspirin and rolled backward, seemingly in jest.
Luckily, there had been no witnesses to the fall, and his tailbone—if not his dignity—remained intact.
Standing in the puddle provided by Aspirin’s wet shoes, Alyona pulled off her snow-covered boots, a gigantic bruise under her right eye.
“Did they hit you?”
“Who?”
Alyona’s voice was tired and perfectly calm. With an enormous effort, Aspirin pulled himself together again.
“Where have you been?”
“I fell.” She could barely move her lips. “I slammed my face into that goddamn machine.”
“What machine?”
“The automatic coffee machine.” She smiled with one corner of her mouth. “What did you think I would say?”
This time she nearly succeeded—she played for fifty-three minutes with very few mistakes. However, Alyona admitted, the tempo was slower than it was supposed to be. Aspirin imagined Alyona standing at the intersection of two human streams, playing, playing, playing . . .
“And how did people react?”
“Differently. Because of my tempo being too slow, the melody became kind of vague. Some people swore. Some passed by without looking. An old woman screamed for half an hour, then got tired and left. And then . . .”
Alyona unlocked the case. Aspirin froze: a pile of wood chips lay where the violin was supposed to be.
“It’s fine,” Alyona said. “It’s nothing. The strings are intact.”
She pulled out the remains of the neck and began taking off the strings.
“I told you already, no one hit me. We simply fought over the violin, I stumbled a little and went face-first into that stupid thing, the coffee machine.”
“You fought a cop over your violin,” Aspirin repeated.
“There was this other guy, in plainclothes. He protected me from the cop. But the cop still took my violin and then he threw it against the wall. At first I . . . well, there was a moment when I got really scared. But when I saw that the strings were still intact, I felt better. Everything was fine.”
“A guy in plainclothes?”
She was indifferent to that detail. “Then I picked up all that was left, put it into the case, and came home.” Alyona wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “I was afraid Mishutka would worry.”
She plopped on the sofa, hugging Mishutka and gently stroking his ear. “Did you miss me, sweetheart? I told you I’d be back soon.”
“They could have taken you! Without the bear, and without your violin, they could have stuffed you in the car, and that would be it!”
“You are obsessed with abduction.” She allowed herself a dry smile and pressed Mishutka to her chest. “Don’t worry, Alexey, it’s not that easy to stuff me into a car. Did you buy any honey?”
“Honey?”
“I asked you to buy more honey for Mishutka! What is he supposed to eat tonight?”
Her voice was so full of accusatory scorn that the dejected Aspirin shuffled into the kitchen in search of options.
“My child is no longer involved at your music school.”
Svetlana Nikolaevna stood on top of the staircase facing Aspirin. It was extremely rude of him not to invite her in, but wasn’t she being incredibly rude herself showing up unannounced at a stranger’s house, especially when he’d made it clear he had no interest in seeing her?
“Alexey Igorevich, you are wrong. We are talking about your child’s future . . .”
“Svetlana Nikolaevna, one more word, and I will throw you