The next afternoon we fly to London. Akbar is very quiet the whole morning, constantly typing something on his phone with a serious expression. The moment we take off, he opens the ivory drawer and gets straight into snorting line after line after line.
‘You shouldn’t do so much coke,’ I chide.
‘I don’t need you to tell me what to do,’ he reprimands.
Offended, I retreat into the corner of the L-shaped couch, cross my arms and legs and look at the golden floor, playing with my hair.
When the door opens after touchdown, the chilly air rushes into the cabin, piercing through my bones. Watching the cold, gusty wind and rain surge through the trees, I intuitively roll into the cashmere Hermès blanket I’ve been sitting on.
‘Here, this is Ibrahim’s.’ Akbar passes me a large camouflage jacket and a hat he takes from underneath the seat. ‘He must have left it behind after his trip to Siberia.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, involuntarily putting on the stinky combat parka, not failing to notice a few brown bloodstains.
I put on the military hat and carefully walk down the slippery stairs in my pointy Louboutins and hasten through the puddles straight to the car that’s waiting for us.
We drive into the monotonous wet drear of London, where passing red buses provide the only occasional fleeting injections of joy.
Soon we enter yet another luxury hotel reception: air conditioning at full blast; shiny, monochrome interior; slow, friendly staff; Vivaldi piped through the speakers.
It now comes as no surprise that our suite is the size of a soccer field, and filled with antique furniture. On the terrace, pine bushes growing in stylish white pots stand in a line like Snow White’s dwarfs, looking out across the bustling - and not exactly dry - Knightsbridge, to the grassy sward of Hyde Park beyond.
‘Nice room,’ Akbar says, pouring himself a large glass of whiskey and crashing on the white upholstered sofa.
‘Yeah,’ I nod, getting more and more pissed off that he has stopped paying any attention to me, and did not even open the car door for me.
‘You look like G.I. Jane in that outfit,’ he comments.
‘Demi Moore, huh? Do you want to fuck her?’ I ask, pulling the hat down lower over my eyes and walking towards him, determined show him who the hot butt is around here.
‘Oh … that was a long time ago,’ he mumbles.
‘Pull your pants down,’ I order, in stereotypical Russian military style.
‘OK,’ he cynically smirks.
‘You do what I say, Private Gromov!’ I press the pointy end of my shoe right down on his cock, exerting more and more pressure, feeling my power. ‘Squad will turn to the left in file,’ I command, getting carried away, slightly pinching his balls with the point of my shoe and shuffling his wobbly penis to the left, feeling it gradually getting bigger and harder.
Suddenly, he gets up, grabs me and turns me around, and bends me over the armrest of the ultra-plush sofa, burying my head in the stinky, suffocating mountain of parka.
Well, yes, yes, to be enslaved to you is a pleasure. There is, there is pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance!
‘What the hell?’ I shout, trying to fight and extricate myself from his iron grip, but he forcefully spreads my legs and abruptly stabs his giant weapon inside me.
‘Take it, bitch,’ he sneers, angrily pumping, painfully and repeatedly spanking my rebellious back with his heavy palm.
Devil knows, maybe there is pleasure in the knout, too, when the knout comes down on your back and tears your flesh to pieces … But maybe he wants to try other pleasures as well.
‘Stop,’ I howl in a disobedient, croaky voice, wanting to release myself from the pain that is simultaneously sharp and dull, but it only makes him move more vehemently.
‘Fuck off, sergeant,’ he roars, digging my head out from the miniature greenhouse effect of the jacket, folding my underpants around my neck, harshly tightening them, making me gasp for air.
Akbar plants his lacquered loafer right next to my face on the white sofa. ‘Kiss my shoe,’ he orders, grabbing my hair and forcibly angling my head so that I have to lick his cold, reptilian toe. ‘Kiss it,’ he repeats, gagging me tighter.
Squinting, I obediently kiss his toe as if it were a black polished boot, the act symbolizing my vulnerability and submission. At that very moment, Akbar starts trembling … like a high priest invoking the higher spiritual powers to kill demons.
Eventually he bends over me and releases my hair.
I slowly turn around, finally liberating myself from his grasp, and throw the clammy jacket off. ‘It’s probably about fucking time to take that thing to the dry cleaner’s,’ I shriek.
‘Jeez, Katya, what the hell was that?’ he asks, still breathing heavily.
‘Whatever it was, it was really painful,’ I say grouchily.
‘It was so surreal, uncontrollable … like a trance.’
‘Glad you enjoyed it,’ I huff.
‘Katyusha, don’t throw missiles at me. You provoked it yourself.’
‘Fuck you,’ I whisper furiously, and storm off to the bathroom.
With the hot, foamy bath and aromatic essential oils my mood gradually improves, and now I am almost hoping he did not hear me say the f-word.
All pampered with luxurious crèmes and conditioners and wrapped in a cozy white bathrobe, I venture out to check on Akbar. He is washed and clean-shaven and wearing exactly the same robe as me, calmly sitting and drinking his whiskey on the white sofa, aka demon-killing altar. In front of him, a white tray table has appeared as if by magic, laden with all sorts of expensive-looking food.
‘This place has the best fusion cuisine, so to speak,’ he says, pouring me a glass of red.
‘Nice location,’ I say, trying to sound casual. ‘My dream is to own an apartment here.’
‘That’s a rather narrow-minded strategy,’ he retorts, cracking open a lobster clam.
‘Why? That’s what everyone wants!’
‘That’s exactly the reason why you shouldn’t do it,’ he reasons. ‘We are living through a major power paradigm shift. Trust me, there’ll be even more unimaginable things happening very soon all around the world,’ he says, eagerly tearing apart the rest of the lobster. ‘The current technological developments in nuclear, biological, biochemical and pilotless weapons are there to create more managed chaos … and good old Europe will go first …,’ he smirks, spilling mayonnaise over the rest of the truffle chips, making the dish unfit for human consumption.
‘Do you always blame the US for everything?’ I ask, sipping a rather acerbic Bordeaux from my glass.
‘It’s just a country … a puppet show, pretty much like any other,’ he says, grabbing a fancy-looking sushi roll with his thick fingers and tossing it into his mouth.
‘Who’s the bad guy then?’ I ask, taking a plate with what seem to be two square brownie cakes stacked on top of each other.
‘There’s no good or bad country, government or president … just business interests,’ he says, as I cut into the brownie, but instead of chocolate, red blood spills out, revealing it to be a rare steak chateaubriand.
‘How’s that?’ I ask, feeling cheated.
‘The people behind the various multinational companies across the globe … often have conflicting interests, because of the nature of the projects they invest in,’ he explains. ‘I’m actually meeting some of them tomorrow with regard to the gas pipeline from Qatar to Europe. Can you imagine how much steel they’ll need? And those people want to work with me because I’m a world-class businessman.’
‘You certainly are,’ I say, with all the admiration I can muster. ‘But won’t it squeeze Russia out of business with its biggest trading partner and lead to mass unemployment and lower wages?’
‘Katyusha, darling - who in Russia lives on wages?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Even a janitor on three hundred dollars a month, cleaning a high-class building, would get creative.’
‘How’s that?’
‘For example, he’d forbid the residents to put garbage outside their doors, and then he’d charge them for every sack they throw out.’
‘Not every janitor works in a high-class building,’ I retort.
‘True. The other ones would sweep up around any office buildings nearby, to get some extra cash,’ Akbar explains, educating me in Russian undercover survival tactics.
‘So what’s criminal about that?’
‘That he should do it for free. The office pays the city tax but the janitor can sabotage the system, even shit outside the office door.’
‘Pretty entrepreneurial janitor,’ I remark.
‘The entire country is like that, so to speak,’ he continues. ‘It’s impossible to do anything without some kind of a scheme. If you have borehole-drilling equipment you can’t just sell it to an oil company without an offshore firm, to which you’d sell your equipment for one rouble first, and then sell it to the oil company for ten. Thanks to that nine-rouble difference, you can buy a villa on the Côte d’Azur, and a couple of mansions in London.’
‘And luxury apartments in Moscow where the forward-thinking janitor takes out the trash,’ I quip.
‘Yes, that too,’ Akbar snorts.
‘But what about the pensioners?’ I ask, downing my glass of wine. ‘They might be too old to devise those kinds of schemes …’
‘Darling, I’m very tired. Let’s talk about it tomorrow,’ he pleads, throwing his ketchup- and mayo-stained napkin over the unfinished dishes, and getting under the golden silk sheets on the majestic, supersized bed. ‘This is heaven … Come over here.’
‘Just a second,’ I shout, rolling the tray table over to the fridge, so I can give the leftovers to Richard tomorrow … he’ll be delighted.