"Victor Pelevin. Babylon (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

listened with his face half-turned away, nodding and doodling meaningless
flourishes in his notebook. He surveyed the room out of the comer of his eye
- there was nothing interesting to be seen there, either, if you didn't
count the misty-blue reindeer-fur hat, obviously very expensive, that was
lying on the upper shelf in an empty cupboard with glass doors.
As promised, after a few minutes the pager on his belt rang. Tatarsky
unhooked the little black plastic box from his belt. The message on the
display said: 'Welcome to route 666.'
'Some joker, eh?' thought Tatarsky.
'Is it from Video International?' Sergei asked from the comer.
'No,' Tatarsky replied, following his lead. 'Those blockheads don't
bother me any more, thank God. It's Slava Zaitsev's design studio. It's all
off for today.'
'Why's that?' Sergei asked, raising one eyebrow. 'Surely he doesn't
think we're that desperate for his business ...'
'Let's talk about that later,' said Tatarsky.
Meanwhile the client was scowling thoughtfully at his reindeer-fur hat
in the glass-fronted cupboard. Tatarsky looked at his hands. They were
locked together, and his thumbs were circling around each other as though he
was winding in some invisible thread. This was the moment of truth.
'Aren't you afraid that it could all just come to a full stop?'
Tatarsky asked. 'You know what kind of times these are. What if everything
suddenly collapses?'
The client frowned and looked in puzzlement, first at Tatarsky and then
at his companions. His thumbs stopped circling each other.
'I am afraid,' he answered, looking up. 'Who isn't? You ask some odd
questions.'
'I'm sorry,' said Tatarsky. 'I didn't mean anything by it.'
Five minutes later the conversation was over. Sergei took a sheet of
the client's headed notepaper with his logo - it was a stylised bun framed
in an oval above the letters 'LCC'. They agreed to meet again in a week's
time; Sergei promised the scenario for the video would be ready by then.
'Have you totally lost your marbles, or what?' Sergei asked Tatarsky,
when they came out on to the street. 'Nobody asks questions like that.'
The Mercedes took all three of them to the nearest metro station.
When he got home, Tatarsky wrote the scenario in a few hours. It was a
long time since he'd felt so inspired. The scenario didn't have any specific
storyline. It consisted of a sequence of historical reminiscences and
metaphors. The Tower of Babel rose and fell, the Nile flooded, Rome burned,
ferocious Huns galloped in no particular direction across the steppes - and
in the background the hands of an immense, transparent clock spun round.
'One generation passeth away and another generation cometh,' said a
dull and demonic voice-over (Tatarsky actually wrote that in the scenario),
'but the Earth abideth for ever.' But eventually even the earth with its
ruins of empires and civilisations sank from sight into a lead-coloured
ocean;
only a single rock remained projecting above its raging surface, its
form somehow echoing the form of the Tower of Babel that the scenario began
with. The camera zoomed in on the cliff, and there carved in stone was a bun
and the letters 'LCC', and beneath them a motto that Tatarsky had found in a