'I said go away, you dirty animal.'
I burst into floods of tears again. A minute or two later he tried to touch my shoulder again.
'I asked you three times,' he said.
'Are you trying to be funny?'
'What do you mean? I told you. About the bestial body, about physical intimacy. Didn't I?'
'How was I supposed to guess?'
'Well, for instance, from the smell.'
'Foxes don't have any sense of smell.'
'I understood all about you straight away,' he said, stroking my arm awkwardly. 'In the first place, people don't smell like that. And in the second place, Mikhalich has been dinning it into my ears. "Comrade lieutenant general, I've looked at the recording - you've got to sort this dame out properly. She stands on all fours, with her eyes blazing, I've never seen eyes so terrible, and on her back she has this huge red lens. And she uses that lens to burn right through our consultant's brain! She turned the beam on him, and he was totally zonked . . ." At first I thought the ketamine had sent him totally insane. But then I watched the recording, and there it was . . . He took your tail for a lens.'
'What recording's that?'
'Your client, the one you lashed until he bled, was shooting amateur porn. With a concealed camera.'
'What? When I was working on credit?'
'Well, I wouldn't know about that, that's your business. As soon as he came round he brought the tape to us.'
'The fucking intelligentsia,' I said, unable to restrain myself.
'Yes,' he agreed, 'not very nice. But that's what people are like. You mean Mikhalich didn't show you the photos? He had a whole file of them, specially printed for your conversation.'
'He didn't have time . . . You mean Mikhalich is going to watch all the vile things you just did with me?'
'I don't have a single camera here, relax, my darling.'
'Don't call me darling, you beast,' I sobbed. 'You filthy depraved male. Nobody's done that to me in the last . . .' - for some reason I suddenly decided not to mention any dates - 'ever done that to me in my life. How vile!'
He pulled his head down into his shoulders, as if he'd been lashed with a wet rag. That was curious - although my tail apparently had no effect on him, it seemed that my words affected him quite powerfully. I decided to test this observation.
'I'm so tender and delicate down there,' I said in a pitiful voice. 'And you've torn everything with your huge prick. I'll probably die now . . .'
He turned pale, unbuttoned his tunic and took a huge nickel-plated pistol out of its holster. I was afraid he was going to shoot me, the way Robert De Niro shot that tedious woman he was talking to in Tarantino's film, but fortunately I was wrong.
'If anything happens to you,' he said in a serious voice, 'I'll blow my brains out.'
'Put it away,' I said, 'put it away . . . So what if you do blow your stupid brains out? What good will that do me? I told you, don't!'
'I thought,' he said quietly, 'that you were just being coy.'
'Coy? Your dick is three times the size of that pistol, you wolf! I wasn't being coy, I just wanted to stay alive! Nowadays they even teach children in school that if a girl says "No", it means precisely "No", and not "Yes" or "Oh, I don't know". All the rape cases in the West are centred round that. Didn't they explain that in the FSB Academy?'
He shook his head dejectedly from side to side. It was a pitiful sight. I felt the time had come to stop, or I might overdo it. That recollection of Tarantino had been no accident.
'Do you have some bandages and iodine?' I asked in a weak voice.
'I'll send Mikhalich,' he said, jumping to his feet.
'I don't want Mikhalich here! The last thing I need is Mikhalich giggling over me . . . Can't you go to the chemist's yourself?'
'Yes, I can.'
'And don't let that Mikhalich of yours come in here while you're gone. I don't want anyone to see me in this state.'
He was already at the lift.
'I'll be quick. Hold on.'
The door closed behind him and I breathed a sigh of relief.
As I've already said, foxes don't have any sexual organs in the human sense. But we do have a rudimentary cavity under our tails, an elastic bag of skin that's not connected with any other organs. It's usually squeezed into a narrow slit, like the bladder of a deflated football, but when we experience fear it expands and becomes slightly moist. It plays the same role in our anatomy as a special hollow plastic cylinder does in the equipment of employees in a great ape reserve.
The great apes employ the same technologies of social control as are found in criminal and political circles: the males who are in charge ritually humiliate other apes who they think are aspiring to an unjustifiably high status. Sometimes outsiders like electricians and laboratory workers find themselves in this role (I mean in special reserves). In readiness for such a turn of events, they carry an empty plastic cylinder suspended on straps between their legs, and this cylinder is known by the glorious name of a 'prick-catcher'. It is their guarantee of safety: if a large male obsessed by a sense of social justice jumps them, all they have to do is bend over and wait a few minutes - while the ape's indignation is expended on the cylinder. Then they can continue on their way.
And now I could do the same - continue on my way.
It led me into the bathroom, where the first thing I did was to examine my body. Apart from the fact that the rudimentary cavity under my tail was chafed and reddened, there was no problem. True, my posterior section ached as if I'd been riding a crazed horse for at least an hour (which was a fairly accurate description of what had happened), but that couldn't really be called an injury. Nature had definitely prepared foxes for encounters with werewolves.
I'd sensed earlier that I would have to wash myself in his mother-of-pearl bath - and my premonition had not deceived me. My entire tail, back, stomach and legs were covered in that wolf's filthy muck, which I carefully washed off with shampoo. Then I quickly dried my tail with a hairdryer and got dressed. It suddenly occurred to me that it would be a good idea to search the premises.
There was practically nothing to search in that luxurious, empty barn of a place - no cupboards, no sideboards, no drawers that opened. The doors leading into the other rooms were locked. But even so, the results of the search were interesting.
Standing on the desk beside the elegant all-in-one computer was a massive silver object that I had taken at first glance for a figurine. On closer inspection the object turned out to be a cigar clipper. It was a figure of Monica Lewinsky lying on her side with one leg raised towards the ceiling to act as a lever, and when it was pressed (I couldn't resist it) not only did the guillotine in the ring between her thighs snap into action, but a tongue of blue flame appeared out of her open mouth. It was a great little gadget, to my mind the only superfluous touch was the American flag that Monica was holding in her hand: sometimes just a tiny weight is enough to shift the balance and transform a piece of erotica into kitsch agitprop.
The silver Monica was holding down a big loose-leaf binder on the desk. Inside it there was a pile of very different-looking papers.
To judge from its high gloss, the paper lying on the very top was a page from some illustrated art book. Staring out at me from it was a huge, yellow-eyed wolf with a rune that looked like the letter 'F' on his chest - it was a photograph of a sculpture made of wood and amber (the eyes were the amber part). The caption said:
FENRIR: Son of Loki, an immense wolf who pursues the sun across the sky. When Fenrir catches the sun and devours it, Ragnarek will begin. Fenrir is bound until Ragnarek. At Ragnarek he will kill Odin and be killed by Widar.
It wasn't clear from the caption just how Fenrir was going to catch the sun and devour it, if he was bound until Ragnarek, and Ragnarek would start when he caught the sun and devoured it. But then, it could well be that our world had only continued to exist so far thanks to inconsistencies of that kind: it was frightening to think just how many dying gods had cursed it.
I remembered who Fenrir was. He was the most fearsome brute in the Nordic bestiary, the central character of Icelandic eschatology: the wolf who would eat the gods when the northern project was shut down. I wanted to believe that Alexander did-n't identify too closely with this creature, that the yellow-eyed monster was simply an unattainable aesthetic ideal, something like a photo of Schwarzenegger hanging on the wall in a novice bodybuilder's room.
Further down the pile there was a page from a book with Borges's miniature piece 'Ragnarek'. I knew the story, which had astounded me with its somnambulistically precise depiction of something important and terrible. The hero and his friend witness a strange procession of gods returning from centuries of exile. A wave of human adoration carries them out on to a stage in a hall. They look strange:
One was holding a branch, something out of the uncomplicated flora of dreams; another flung a clawed hand forward in a sweeping gesture: Janus's face glanced repeatedly at Tot's crooked beak with a certain apprehension.
A dream echo of fascism. But then something very interesting happens:
Probably roused by the applause, one of them - I don't remember now exactly who - suddenly broke into a triumphant screeching, unbearably harsh, as if he were either whistling or clearing his throat. From that moment everything changed.
From then on the text was covered with marks and notes. Words were underlined, framed with exclamation marks and even ringed - evidently to convey the relative intensity of emotion:
It began with the suspicion (evidently exaggerated), that the Gods could not talk. Centuries of wild and nomadic life had destroyed in them all that was human: the Islamic crescent moon and the Roman cross had shown no condescension to the exiled. The low sloping foreheads, yellow teeth and thin moustaches of mulattoes or Chinese and the out-turned lips of animals spoke of the decline of the Olympic breed. Their clothing was out of keeping with their modest and honest poverty and put me in mind of the dismal chic of the gambling houses and bordellos of Bakho. A carnation bled out of a buttonhole. The outline of a knife-handle was discernible beneath a close-fitting jacket. And then we realized that !they were playing their last card!, that they were !cunning, blind and as cruel as mature, powerful beasts when they are flushed out of the bushes!, and - !IF WE GAVE WAY TO FEAR OR COMPASSION - THEY WOULD ANNIHILATE US!
And then each of us took out a heavy revolver (the revolvers appeared from somewhere in the dream) AND WE SHOT THE GODS WITH DELIGHT.
After that there were two pages from the Elder Edda - apparently from a prophecy by Velva. They had been torn out of some gift edition: the text was printed in large red script on glazed paper in a very wasteful manner:
The wind raises
Waves to the sky,
Casts them on to the land,
The sky grows dark;
The blizzard hurtles along,
Swirling furiously:
These are the portents
Of the death of the gods.
'The death of the gods' in the last line had been underscored with a fingernail. The message of the text on the second page was equally morose:
But there is yet to come
The most powerful of all,
I dare not speak
His name;
Few are those who know
What will come to pass
Following the battle
Between Odin and the Wolf.
All the rest was in the same vein. In one way or another most of the papers in the file related to northern myth. The one I found most depressing was a photograph of the German submarine Nagelfahr - in Scandinavian mythology that was the name of the god Loki's ship, which was made out of the nails of the dead. A highly appropriate name for a Second World War submarine. The unshaven crew members smiling from the bridge looked perfectly likeable - they reminded me of a detachment of modern 'greens'.
As I got closer to the end of the file, there were fewer marks on the sheets of paper: as if the person who had been leafing through them and thinking about the collection of material had rapidly lost interest or, as Borges put it in a different story 'a certain noble impatience' had prevented him from leafing through all the way to the end. But the guy's pretensions had been serious, especially by the standards of our mercenary times ('the age of swords and pole axes' as it was described in one of the extracts in the file, 'the time of cursed wealth and great lechery').
The last item in the file was a lined page torn out of a school exercise book. It had been inserted into a transparent plastic envelope to protect it. The handwritten text on the page was something like a gift dedication:
To Sashka, a memento.
Transform!
WOLF-FLOW!
Colonel Lebedenko
I closed the file and put it back under Monica, then continued with my search. I wasn't surprised when I found several CDs beside the music centre, all with various performances of the same opera:
RICHARD WAGNER
DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN
G?tterd?mmerung.
The next curious item that caught my eye was a thick, grey notebook. It was lying on the floor between the wall and the divan - as if someone had been looking through it before going to bed, fallen asleep and dropped it. On its cover was written:
'Shitman' Project
Top secret.
Copy No. 9
not to be removed from the building
At that moment I didn't make any connection between this strange title and the story about the Shakespeare specialist that Pavel Ivanovich had told me. My thoughts followed a different route - I decided it was yet another proof of the power of American cultural influence. Superman, Batman, another couple of similar films, and the mind begins to stereotype reality in their image and likeness. But then, I thought, what could Russia put up against this? The Shitov Project? Who would be willing to spend nights sweating over that for low pay? That Shitov in a poor suit had been responsible for the collapse of the Soviet empire. The substance of life doesn't change much from one culture to another, but the human soul requires a beautiful wrapper. Russian culture, though, fails to provide one, and it calls this state of affairs spirituality . That's the reason for all the disasters . . .
I didn't even bother to open the notebook. I'd had a horror of secret documents ever since Soviet times: they did you no good and they could snow you under with problems, even if you had FSB protection.
My eye was caught by several graphic works on paper that were hanging on the walls - runes that had been roughly drawn with either a broad brush or a paw. They reminded me a bit of Chinese calligraphy - the crudest and most expressive examples. Hanging between two of these runes there was a branch of mistletoe - I learned that from the caption on the wall: to look at, it was simply a dry, pointed stick.
The design on the carpet was curious, it showed a battle between lions and wolves - it looked like a copy of a Roman mosaic. The books on the only bookshelf were mostly massive illustrated editions (The Splendour of Rome, The New Revised History of the Russian Soul, The Origin of Species and Homosexuality and other, simpler titles about cars and guns). But then, I knew that the books on shelves like that had nothing to do with the taste of their owners, because they were chosen by the interior designers.
Having concluded my inspection, I went across to the glass door on to the roof. The view from there was beautiful. Down below were the dark pits of pre-Revolutionary courtyards improved by restoration work. Towering up above them were a few new buildings of the phallic architecture - an attempt had been made to insert them smoothly and gently into the historical landscape, and the result was that they looked as if they were smeared with some kind of personal lubricant. After them came the Kremlin, proudly thrusting up to the clouds its ancient dicks with the gold balls sewn into their tops.
This damned job, I thought, it's terrible how badly it's perverted my perception of the world. But then, has it really perverted it all that much? It's all the same to us foxes - we pass through life and barely touch it, like a light shower of rain in Asia. But to be a human being here is hard. Take one step away from the secret national gestalt, and this country will screw you over. A theorem that has been proved by every life followed through to the end, no matter how many glamorous coverlets you spread over the daily festival of life. I should know, I've seen plenty of it. Why? I have my own suspicions, but I won't go into the subject. People probably aren't simply born here by chance, it's no accident . . . And no one is able to help anyone else. Could that be the reason why Moscow sunsets always make me feel so sad?
'A great view from up here, isn't it?'
I swung round. He was standing by the door of the lift with a tightly packed plastic bag in his hand. The design on the bag was a green snake wound around a medical chalice.
'There wasn't any iodine,' he said anxiously, 'they gave me fuxidine. Said it was the same, only orange. I think that's even better for us - it won't stand out so much beside the tail . . .'
I felt like laughing and turned away towards the window. He walked across and stood beside me. We looked at the city for a while without speaking.
'It's beautiful here in summer,' he said. 'Put Zemfira on the player, watch and listen: 'Goodbye, beloved city . . . I almost found a place among your annals . . . What do you think she meant - something like she's been in deep shit for far too long?'
'Don't try to soft-soap me.'
'You seem to be feeling better.'
'I want to go home,' I said.
'But . . .'
He nodded towards the plastic bag.
'No need, thanks. When they bring you in a wounded comrade, you'll be able to treat him. I'm off.'
'Mikhalich will drive you.'
'I don't want your Mikhalich, I'll manage.'
I was already at the lift.
'When can I see you?' he asked.
'I don't know,' I said. 'If I don't die, call in three days.'
After copulation, all animals are sad - so the ancient Romans used to say. Apart from foxes, I would have added. And apart from women. I knew that for certain now.
I don't mean to say that women are animals. Quite the contrary - men are much closer to the animals in every respect: the smells they give off and the sounds they make, their type of physicality and the methods they use to fight for personal happiness (not to mention what they actually think of as happiness). But the ancient Roman who described his own mood after the act of love in metaphorical terms was evidently such an entirely organic sex-chauvinist that he simply failed to take woman into account, and that means I have to restore justice.
Generally speaking, there could be at least four explanations for this saying:
1. the Romans didn't think woman was even an animal.
2. the Romans thought woman was an animal, but they copulated with her in a way that really did make her sad (for instance, Suetonius tells us that the law forbade the killing of virgins by strangulation, and the executioner used to ravish them before the execution - how could you help feeling sad?).
3. the Romans didn't think woman was an animal, they assumed that only man was. For this noble view of things, the Romans could be forgiven a great deal - apart, of course, from those foul-ups of theirs with virgins and strangulation.
4. the Romans had no penchant for either woman or metaphor, but they did for livestock cattle and poultry, who did not reciprocate and were unable to conceal their feelings.
There could be an element of truth in each of these explanations - no doubt all sorts of things happened in the course of several centuries of empire. But I was a happy animal.
For the last fifteen hundred years I'd had an old maid complex - not, of course, in relation to human beings, to whose opinion I was profoundly indifferent, but within our small community of foxes. It had sometimes seemed to me that I was the butt of secret mockery. And there were good grounds for these thoughts of mine - all my sisters had lost their virginity in ancient times, in the most varied of circumstances. The most interesting story was what had happened to sister E - she had been set on a stake by a nomad leader, and she had honestly acted out her agony for three days. She had to wait until the nomads drank themselves into a stupor before making good her escape into the steppe. I suspected that this was the origin of the insatiable hatred for the aristocracy she had manifested for so many centuries in her most whimsical escapades . . .
But even so I was just a little bit sad. As the grammar-school girl Masha from Nikolaev, one of my colleagues on the game in the year 1919, said, there's a good angel who abandons us when we lose our virginity. But the sadness I felt was radiant, and on the whole I was in an excellent mood.
There was one suspicion clouding it, though. I had the feeling that I'd been treated the same way I had been treating others all my life. Perhaps the whole thing was a suggestion that had been planted in my mind? It was pure paranoia - we foxes can't be hypnotized. But there was a certain vague unease gnawing at my heart.
I couldn't understand the transformation that Alexander had gone through. Foxes also undergo a supraphysical tranformation, which I will tell you about later. But it never goes so far - what Alexander had done was mind-blowing. There was an ancient mystery still alive in him, something that foxes had already forgotten, and I knew that I would keep coming back to it in my thoughts for a long time.
And I was also afraid that the loss of virginity might affect my ability to implant suggestions. I had no grounds for any such concerns, but irrational fear is always the hardest to shake off. I knew I wouldn't calm down until I'd tested my powers. And so when the phone rang with an offer, I decided right away to go.
From his manner of speaking the client sounded to me like a bashful student from the provinces who had saved up enough money for a ritual of farewell with his childhood. But something in his voice made me check the number that lit up against the database I keep in my computer. It turned out to be the nearest militia station. Obviously the fuzz were calling me out for a subbotnik - a working Saturday in honour of the spring - the kind of event I simply couldn't stand ever since Soviet times. But today I decided to enter the beast's lair voluntarily.
There turned out to be three cops. There was no shower-room in the station, and I had to prepare myself for battle in a toilet with a cracked toilet-bowl that reminded me vividly of the Cheka's place in Odessa during the revolutionary years (they used to hold people's heads down over a toilet bowl like that when they executed them - to avoid getting blood on the floor). My fears, of course, proved entirely unfounded - all the militiamen sank into a trance just as soon as I raised my tail. I could have gone back to the equestrian complex, but an interesting idea occurred to me.
Early that morning I'd been thinking about Rome and remembering Suetonius, and clearly that was the reason for my sudden flash of ingenuity. I remembered a story about Tiberius's orgies in Capri: it mentioned the so called 'spintrii', who inflamed the ageing emperor's sensuality by conjoining themselves three at a time in front of him. This story fired my imagination - in my own mind I even translated 'Splinter Cell' (the title of an innocent computer game about Tom Clancy) as meaning 'The Sect of the Splintrii'. Now that I found myself in the company of three moral outsiders, I couldn't resist trying an experiment. And I managed it perfectly! Or rather, they did. Though I must say, I failed to understand what Tiberius found so arousing in this crude spectacle - to my mind it looked more like an illustration of the first noble truth of Buddhism: life is dukha - suffering and pain. But I already knew that, without a triad of copulating militiamen.
In the station I discovered four thousand dollars, which could-n't have come at a better time. And as well as that, I came across a scholarly large-format volume on criminal tattoos, with photographs, which I enjoyed leafing through. The tendency that this genre had followed in its evolution matched the development of world culture perfectly: religious consciousness was reclaiming the positions it had lost in the twentieth century. Naturally, the manifestations of this consciousness were not always recognizable at first sight. For instance, I didn't immediately realize that the words 'SWAT SWAT SWAT' tattooed under a blue cross that looked more like a German military award than a crucifixion were not meant to be the name of the Los Angeles Police Department's special assault force, but the Russian phrase 'Svyat, Svyat, Svyat' (meaning 'Holy, Holy, Holy') written in Latin letters.
The photograph that made the biggest impression on me was a man's back with a diptych depicting heaven and earth. Heaven was located between his shoulder-blades - the sun was shining and there were angels who looked like postal pigeons flying about. The earth level looked like the official crest of Moscow, with the dragon-killer mounted on his steed, except that instead of a lance, there was a bundle of different-coloured rays emerging from the horseman's hand, and there were lots of little dragons - spiteful little ones, crooked squashed ones and some who looked quite nice, all crawling along an alleyway planted with trees. The whole scene was entitled 'Saint George driving the lesbians off Tverskoi Boulevard'.
Flicking through several pages with the traditional Stalins, Hitlers, snakes, spiders and sharks (under one of them it said 'deep is my motherland', instead of 'broad is my motherland' as in the old patriotic song), I came across the religious theme again: someone's back decorated with a panoramic view of hell with sinners in torment. I was especially impressed by Bill Gates being devoured by worms and Bin Laden blazing on a bonfire in a frivolous white T-shirt with the emblem:
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
The final page showed a pale, dystrophic shoulder with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, in which the cap of the mushroom had been replaced by the NIKE streak with the word NUKE in it - evidently a memory of the future.
With the groaning and panting of the spintrii in the background, all this seemed particularly dismal. Where was humanity going? Who was leading it? What was going to happen on earth in fifty years? A hundred years? My springtime mood was spoiled, despite the good haul I'd made. But at least my conscience was clear. I didn't consider that I was stealing anything - I'd just taken payment for my services. The fuzz had got their sex, I'd got my money - and I'd never concealed the fact that my prices were high.
On the way home I thought about tattoos. I like them, but I almost never have any done. On foxes they don't last more than twenty years. And apart from that, they often blur in the weirdest way. It's something to do with the rather different nature of our physical being. In the whole of the last century, I only had one tattoo - two lines that the poet W. H. Auden burned into my heart for ever, and the one-eyed tattooist Slava Kosoi inscribed temporarily on my shoulder:
I am a sex machine.
And I'm super bad.
Below the words there was a large blue tear, which for some reason my clients used to take for either an onion or an enema syringe - as if the inhabitants of the shabby Soviet paradise really didn't know what it was to be sad.
That tattoo caused me a whole heap of problems - during the struggle against the Soviet Teddy boys - the 'stilyagi' - I used to get stopped all the time by the fuzz and the public order squads, who wanted to know what that inscription was in the language of the supposed enemy. I had to work a few Saturday freebees a lot tougher than this one. In short, they put me right off the idea of wearing sleeveless dresses. I still avoid them, even today, although the tattoo faded away ages ago, and the supposed enemy crept up unnoticed and became a supposed ally just as soon as the dust had settled a bit.
When I got home I switched on the TV and tuned in to the BBC World Service. First I watched their review of the Internet, presented by a guy who looked like an immoral version of Bill Clinton, and then the news began. I could tell from the presenter's dynamic expression that they had a good catch.
'Today in London an attempt was made on the life of the Chechen essayist in exile, Aslan Udoev. A terrorist suicide bomber from a militant Shiite organization tried to blow him up. Aslan Udoev himself escaped with a minor concussion, but two of his bodyguards were killed at the scene.'
The camera showed the cramped office of a police official who carefully measured out his words into the black gun-barrel of a microphone:
'We know that the assailant attempted to get close to Aslan Udoev when he was feeding the squirrels in St James's Park. When Udoev's guards spotted the terrorist, he detonated his bomb . . .'
A correspondent appeared on the screen - he was standing on a lawn, with the wind ruffling his yellow hair.
'According to other sources, the device went off prematurely, before the suicide bomber had reached his target. The explosion took place at precisely twelve noon GMT. However, the police have so far declined to make any comment. Witnesses to the event said that before the explosion, instead of the usual "Allah u Akbar", the suicide bomber shouted "Same Shiite, Different Fight!" But on this point the testimony of witnesses varies slightly, possibly because of the terrorist's strong Arab accent. It was reported earlier that "Same Shiite, Different Fight" was the name of a Shiite terrorist organization which has stated that its goal is to open a second front of the jihad in Europe. In its ideology this group is close to the Mahdi Army of the radical cleric Mokhtad Al-Sadr.'
The camera showed the police official squeezed into his narrow little space once again. The correspondent's voice asked:
'We know that the Chechens belong to the Sunni branch of Islam. And the attacker was a Shiite. In this connection, can we say, as many analysts are already doing in their commentaries, that clashes between Shiites and Sunnis are now taking place in London?'
'We are avoiding any hasty conclusions concerning the motives for the crime and whoever is behind it,' the police official replied. 'The investigation has only just begun. And in addition, I should like to emphasize that at the present time we have no concrete information on the programme and goals of any terrorist group called "Same Shiite, Different Fight", or about any militant Shiite groups in England.'
'Is it true that the terrorist had wires embedded in his head?'
'No comment.'
Aslan Udoev appeared on the screen. He was walking along a hospital corridor, squinting hostilely at the camera and holding his bandaged forehead in his hand.
After that they started talking about some footballer's marriage.
