The Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko Read Free Book Online

guitar in the middle of the
night and before that had the strange musician made his racket
entirely unchallenged?
    One person on each floor? It was probably even less than
that . . .
    But then who had sent the letter?
    I tried to imagine Las cutting letters out of Pravda with nail
scissors. I couldn't. Someone like him would have come up with
something a bit more imaginative.
    I closed my eyes, picturing the grey shadow of my eyelids falling
across my pupils. Then I opened my eyes and looked round the
apartment through the Twilight.
    Not the slightest trace of any magic. Not even on the guitar,
although a good instrument that has been in the hands of an
Other or a potential Other remembers that touch for years.
    And there was no trace anywhere of blue moss, that parasite of
the Twilight that feasts on negative emotions. If the owner of the
apartment ever fell into a depression, then he didn't do it here.
Or else he had such a genuinely good time that it burned away
all the blue moss.
    I sat down and started carving the rest of the salami. To be on
the safe side, I checked through the Twilight to see if it was really
a good idea to eat it.
    The salami turned out to be all right. Gesar didn't want his
agent to go down with food poisoning.
     
    'Now that's the right temperature,' said Las, removing the wine
thermometer from the open bottle. 'We didn't leave it in for too
long. Some people cool vodka to the consistency of glycerine, so
that drinking it's like swallowing liquid nitrogen. Here's to our
meeting!'
    We drank a glass and followed it with salami and crispbreads,
which Las had brought from my apartment – he explained that
he hadn't bothered to get any food in that day.
    'The entire building lives like this,' he explained. 'Well, of course
there are some people who had enough money to finish their
places and furnish them as well. Only just imagine how wonderful
it is living in an empty building. There they are, waiting for the
petty riff-raff like you and me to finish our places off and move
in. The cafés aren't working, the casino's empty, the security men
are freaking out from sheer boredom . . . two of them were sacked
yesterday – they started shooting at the bushes in the yard. Said
they'd seen something horrible. They probably did too – they were
as high as kites.'
    And so saying, Las took a pack of Belomor cigarettes out of his
jacket pocket and gave me a cunning look:
    'Want one?'
    I hadn't been expecting a man who poured vodka in such good
style to fool around with marijuana.
    I shook my head and asked:
    'Do you smoke many?'
    'This is the second pack today,' Las sighed. And then he suddenly
realised. 'Hey, come on, Anton! These are Belomor! Not dope! I
used to smoke Gitânes before, until I realised they were no different
from our very own Belomor.'
    'Original,' I said.
    'What's that got to do with anything?' Las said, offended. 'I'm not
trying to be original. You only have to be a bit different, not like
the rest, and straight away they say you're putting on airs. But I like
smoking Belomor. If I lose interest a week from now, I'll give up.'
    'There's nothing wrong with being different,' I said, putting out
a feeler.
    'But really being different is hard,' Las replied. 'Just a couple of
days ago I had this idea . . .'
    I pricked my ears up again. The letter had been sent two days
earlier. Could everything really have come together so neatly?
    'I was in this hospital, and while I was waiting to be seen, I
read all the price lists,' Las went on, not suspecting a trap. 'And
what they do there is serious stuff, they make artificial body parts
out of titanium to replace what people have lost. Shinbones, knee
joints and hip joints, jawbones . . . Patches for the skull, teeth and
other small bits and pieces . . . I got my calculator out and figured
out how much it would cost to have all your bones totally replaced.
It came out at about one million seven hundred thousand bucks.
But I reckon on a bulk order like that