Free Penguin Lost by Andrey Kurkov

Salzburg. Heaven alone knew how they had ended up in Kiev.
    He turned anxiously to Pasha, who was now showing the crate-unpacker the legs of the billiard table and explaining what had to be done. The latter, looking scared and anything but confident, was nodding thoughtfully. The task proposed was not one of which he had daily working experience.
    Hearing that the limbs were too small, Pasha panicked, and Viktor felt suddenly back on even keel again.
    “We stick them back in their crates and present the crates,” he said.
    The TV crew were a little late, Andrey Pavlovich a good fifteen minutes. In the end it was decided to film the crates being carried into Café Afghan, which involved carrying them out again, and here the evil-smelling unpacker-packer came into his own, three takesof the carrying in being needed. At last, clean-shaven, tweed-suited Andrey Pavlovich, grey hair gleaming with lacquer, shook hands with the young, legless, manifestly grateful manager of the café. Lyosha, too, had his hand shaken for the camera. Directing the cameraman, a thickset fellow in sleeveless, multi-pocketed jacket, was a tall, leggy female with an attractive but off-puttingly predatory sort of smile. The half hour of filming completed, Andrey Pavlovich handed her an envelope, and she graciously handed him her card.
    “We didn’t want the bloody things anyway,” said Lyosha, learning that the limbs were for children “Best take them back. The billiard table’s what matters.”
    When Andrey Pavlovich declined to take them back, it was decided to add them to the rubbish littering a hillside above Nagornaya Street. Pasha’s man helped.

24
    Polling Day minus 6
    This time Nina answered the phone.
    “How are you both?”
    The warmth of her response surprised him. “You should come back. Sonya’s been asking for you.”
    “Is she there?”
    “No, outside with the little girl from the next flat.”
    “I’ll be there in a day or two.”
    Drinking his coffee, he pondered her affability. Maybe she was scared he’d kick her out.
    Andrey Pavlovich had left early with Pasha. The house help arrived and set about washing the floors. Later the computer expert calledin by Pasha turned up to examine the image makers’ computer. Viktor showed him up to the nursery, then returned to the kitchen. The solitude and relative silence appealed to him. He was glad he was not needed that morning. He found himself thinking of Andrey Pavlovich’s Snail’s Law. For the time being he, Viktor, was himself snug in the shell of a good solid house. Here was calm, quiet, an even tenor of existence. Outside much was astir, and would be for the next six days. After which the lucky snails would be handed new shells, Deputy shells, commensurate with their degree of official immunity, while the unlucky would have to go their separate ways, back to hide and act as if nothing had happened …
    Viktor looked out at the desolate, tyre-marked gravel yard and the well-pruned lilac along the fence. The sky was blue and cloudless. A tiny swallow swooped low, then darted skywards – a sure sign that rain was coming.
    His attention was diverted to the computer expert, who having passed through and out into the yard, was lighting up, looking anxiously about him. Pulling out his mobile, he dialled a number, spoke insistently, listened, nodded, then ground his cigarette into the gravel and came back into the house.
    Shortly afterwards the computer expert passed through and out again, this time wearing his jacket, carrying his briefcase, and apparently in a hurry to be off.
    Up in the old nursery Viktor found the computer still on, and making no sense of the file names displayed and selecting one at random, he brought to screen the image of a People’s Deputy particularly active in the last Supreme Council, a lawyer and much publicized dispenser of gratuitous advice on anything from the privatization of a former collective farm perk plot to the purchase of small-business