Pig: A Thriller (7 page)

"Maybe you're glad he's here,"
Pig
accused. "Glad he's sick."

"What are you saying?" Magda asked.

             
"Your boyfriend. The rich Yankee. Snowball. Makes five times what
I do. Twenty. A fucking Documents Clerk
! With investments. Stocks, maybe. They know about such things there. Insurance. I know. He could be worth a lot to you dead.
You’re as lucky as a girl with big tits.
"

Canadian, not Yankee, thought Magda, knowing immediately Snow wouldn't care. Being Canadian, to him, was a curse, rather than a statement of who he was.

"God brought me
Sneg
," she said instead, using the Russian word for
Snow
. "How could I give him up?"

"Sure, God brought him and now you'd like to give him back, eh? But God won't take him will he? We got to him in time."

"You know who you are," Snow had once told Magda when she asked him what he liked about being in Russia. He hadn’t been sure if he had a soul. If he did, he shouldn’t have felt empty most of the time.
He had the sense of a monk, a man who was happiest without responsibilities and alone.

"You've got your history, a sense of place. But me? What have I got? I'm a Canadian. Just anger. Anger at realizing that I have no history; no past or identity, just two cans of maple syrup, some beavers, and a Mountie with mouse ears.   We’re the only people in the world who dream of being Clark Kent instead of Superman, the
vichyssoise
of nations
-- cold
, half-French and difficult to stir. We don’t believe in History in Canada. Here, you don’t believe in anything but
History
. I like that.”

In 1991, hard-line Communists
had
attempted a coup against the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. It failed. Long time Communist-cum-populist rebel Boris Yeltsin led the resistance to the coup and became the first Russian President, dissolving the Soviet Union and pledging to implement a market economy.

The Communist laws had been removed from the books so recently you could still see eraser crumbs on the page
s
. In 1995, a Presidential Decree ordered that State ownership of the oil producing facility in Noyabrsk, a refinery in Omsk and the related exploration and distribution companies be privatized. Every citizen was given a voucher entitling them to a share in the new entity. The problem was,
having never known any life but Communism,
very few of them understood exactly what that was. The concept of private ownership of industry and shares in it – like being a teetotaller -- was a foreign concept to them.

The voucher itself didn’t look like much, a simple piece of paper with faded ink, embossed gold and a registration number. It looked more like a lottery ticket than a share. And that was how people treated it. “If the state is giving it away, it can’t be worth much,” most thought. During the depression and rampant inflation that followed the fall of Communism, people would sell them for next to nothing. Vouchers could be sold for cash, invested in an enterprise of the holder’s choice or put in an investment fund. Two of Yeltsin’s financial advisers started up a fourth market, trading vouchers for vodka, usually at the rate of three vouchers for one bottle. A year later, they used the vouchers to take the company private again and became instant billionaires. This was who Pig worked for.
Omsk Bacon, once part of the enterprise, was sold and Pig came to the run the Camp with a group of camp followers who enforced his rule, the
oprichnina,
Pig’s modern-day version of Ivan the Terrible’s secret police.

In 1995, shortly after the fall of Communism,
P
orfiry
Makahonic
(his friends –
those that weren’t in the hospital or dead -- called him Pig) h
ad been appointed Camp Boss
at the ever-growing residential camp that serviced the Noyabrsk oil production
facility
.
Prior to that, he had held
some
nebulous position at Omsk
Bacon, Russia’s largest pork producer.
The two companies were
part of the same corporation
. The Camp provided se
rvices and shelter, after a fashion
, to the employees of the nearby production facility. Rooms consisted primarily of porta-cabins, with the recreational facilities, service shops, laundry and local C
losed
C
ircuit
TV system all
housed
in larger trailers.
Pig was in charge of what was in effect the Camp’s own local cable TV system, the highlight of which was a porn movie every night that Pig
had
personally
watched and
recommended.
Both construction and management of the Camp was slip-s
hod, haphazard and largely arbi
trary.
Approval to get anything done, from having your heater fixed to getting new sheets required the approval of the Camp Boss.
Descended f
rom a long line of army deserters and alcoholics, Pig sucked up sycophants like an aardvark licking ants. If it seemed as if the entire camp and setup had been designed entirely round him, it was; he’d made sure every system and new procedure first asked the question, “How did it affect Pig?” In effect, Pig was the local dictator and not a benevolent one.
Like all little men in big uniforms, Pig was a martinet about the rules, but could ostrich-ize himself anytime it was necessary, burying his head in the sand in order “not” to see what he was supposed to.

"Buy low, sell high," Pig would tell you if you asked him for advice.

"Don't get too low or too high," Magda would say.

"
H
igh sticking," would be what Snow said.
“
A t
wo
-
minute
penalty
in the sin bin. Unless the other team scores first.”

P
i
g scared
Magda
; just looking at him frightened
her
. Not because he had the skinhead neo-Nazi skull, prison-quality tattoos and jackboots. Not because he had a posse of slavish devotees who’d kill if he told them to,
not just his
cobra-yellow eyes or a mind that only functioned as a cash register. No, it wasn’t the presence of anything Pig
“
had
”
that frightened her. What
scared here
was the absence of something. A lacking. And it frightened her to even think about what it might be.
Look into his eyes and you’d see someone who’d never be changed by Party, therapy, religion,
Komsomol
or pharmaceuticals.

Watching Pig wrestle with a moral dilemma was like watching
professional
wrestling
: mostly fake. He had managed to combine the roles of bully, braggart, sexual predator, vulnerable child, flamboyant drunk,
charismatic
leader a
nd charlatan all in one persona, rolled in greed and selfishness like perogies in sour cream.

“
I don’t really think about
why
I do things,
”
Pig
had once
admitted
to her
in a moment of candour
.
“I just do whatever is good for me.”

The two of them couldn’t have had more contempt for each other if one were Serb and the other Croat. The only thing the two had in common was their fondness for and skill in the use of “
mat
.”