Free Pig: A Thriller by Darvin Babiuk Page B

nothingness.
     

     
    A Document Controller is a person who manages documents for an organization, ensuring reliability, security, availability, archiving and, most importantly, a controlled and reliable audit trail. These could be blueprints, drawings, engineering designs, reports and minutes, records of safety meetings, or invoices. The Document Controller compiles them, numbers and files them, ensures their validity, and distributes items as needed. Compliance with regulatory procedures is a large part of the job.
    Having to interact and talk with people is not. The vast majority of communication regarding the documents under Snow’s control was done electronically. The only person Snow saw most days was Kolya, who looked up at him laconically as Snow walked in now, knees clicking like castanets as he hobbled up the steps into the office.
    “Hmmph,” Kolya grunted by way of greeting, satisfied that Snow had arrived on time. Kolya – Snow never knew his last name and Kolya never offered one – was a throwback from Soviet times, a devoted Communist who believed wholeheartedly in Marx and Lenin, admitting only that the system hadn’t worked because of the people implementing it, not the ideas themselves. Kolya had spent the years of the Soviet experiment managing documents for the Party. While others were purged and transferred and rehabilitated as the winds shifted, Kolya remained constant, his mastery of the information inside the files enough insurance to keep his enemies from pouncing. It was the same method Stalin had used to reach the top of the Bolshevik morass, making the obscure post of General Secretary (the keeper of the documents) the most powerful in the USSR.
    “What were you?” was a common question Russians asked each other after the fall of Communism, when the command economy collapsed and doctors became ice cream vendors and physicists started driving taxis. Criminals became biznizmen , KGB  officers presidents and communist apparatchik the new masters of capitalism.
    All except for Kolya. Kolya never changed jobs at all. Documents were still his life. For Kolya, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the new Russia had been an unmitigated disaster.  In his opinion, Yeltsin had managed to do in just a few years what the Bolsheviks had failed to do in seventy five: make the people long for Communism.
    Kolya was wearing the same utilitarian blue suit he wore to work every day, saving Sunday to clean and press it. For Kolya, document control was God’s – strike that – Lenin’s work, the lifeblood of any controlled economy. Hands ribbed with blue veins the size of earthworms, his fingers lumbered over the keyboard, sorting out the priorities in the current day’s document shuffle.
     

     
                  “Had a visitor,” Kolya told Snow in as few words as possible. He never bothered looking up. He wouldn’t have offered even this much of an observation if the event wasn’t so unusual. No one came to Document Control unless they had to.
                  “Oh, yeah?” Snow offered disinterestedly, expecting Kolya to tell him who. When he didn’t, Snow felt obliged to ask.
                  “Not some lady, was it? Looked kind of like a refrigerator covered in donut sugar?” After last night, Snow was starting to feel stalked by Magda. First the visit, then the equally unwelcome phone call.
                  “Pig,” Kolya sneered. His opinion of the Camp Boss was clear in the single syllable. Kolya was of the opinion that anyone who could rise to the position of wealth and power Pig had attained in the new Russia without shaking hands with at least three kinds of devil knew nothing about the devil and probably even less about Russia.
                  “What did he want?”
                  “Documents,” shrugged Kolya. “What else?”
                  “Did you give them to