Potboiler

Pfefferkorn waited. The clerk grinned inanely. Pfefferkorn dug out a ten-ruzha note. The clerk took the money with the same practiced motion as his predecessor. He bowed.

“Monsieur will please to partake of breakfast buffet,” he said unctuously.

Pfefferkorn stepped inside the restaurant. Intent on finding the coffee urn, he did not notice Fyothor sneaking up from behind to poke him in the ribs.

“Greetings, friend! How was your night? Yes? And how did you like our morning exhortations? Very inspiring, yes? Although, between you and me—twenty-two, my arse. Already the thermometer is pushing thirty and it’s not even half past six. Twenty ruzhy says we hit forty by noon.”

They went down the line together. There were two options: last night’s pierogi and a chafing dish of gruel, both dispensed by the indomitable Yelena. There was no coffee, just sour brown tea.

“You didn’t take any of the sauce,” Fyothor said, waving at Pfefferkorn’s plate as they took the same corner table. “The sauce is what makes the dish.”

Pfefferkorn, remembering a formula from long ago, said, “Forty degrees—that’s over a hundred, Fahrenheit.”

“One-oh-five, I think.”

Pfefferkorn groaned and pushed away his steaming bowl of gruel.

“But friend, this is delicious.”

“What is it.”

“We call this bishyuinyuia khashkh

. It is like your oatmeal.”

“Doesn’t smell like oatmeal.”

“It is made with root vegetables,” Fyothor said. “And goat’s milk.”

“Goatmeal,” Pfefferkorn said.

Fyothor laughed and thumped him on the back. “Akha, good one, friend. To your health.”

“I’ll stick with tea, thanks.”

“I understand. But as our most insightful Party leaders say, let nothing go to waste.” Fyothor winked and reached for Pfefferkorn’s shot glass. “To your health. Surely it is fate that we meet again, yes?”

Pfefferkorn didn’t know what to say to that.

“I have taken the liberty of making some phone calls on your behalf,” Fyothor said.

Pfefferkorn was nonplussed. “Is that right.”

“Take it from me, friend. We say: ‘A man cannot cut his own hair.’”

Pfefferkorn recognized the adage as having its origin in an episode of Vassily Nabochka wherein the prince attempts to cut his own hair, the moral of the story being: sometimes it’s better to ask for help. Although Fyothor’s interference made him uneasy, Pfefferkorn saw no choice but to play along. Any sensible foreigner looking to do business in West Zlabia would be grateful for an inside track. Declining one would be the fastest way to blow his cover. And Fyothor literally kept him close at hand, taking him around the waist as they rose from the breakfast table.

“Stick with me, friend, and you will have more shit than you know what to do with.”

Their first stop was the Ministry of Media Relations. Nobody said a word as they cut to the front of the line. Fyothor entered the co-sub-undersecretary’s office without knocking and launched into a stirring discourse on the importance of fertilizer to the people’s revolution. Here, he said, holding up Pfefferkorn’s arm, was a comrade from overseas who could do much to advance the collective principles by demonstrating to the world at large the innate superiority of West Zlabian goats, proven by science to produce waste with a nitrogen concentration higher than that of any other goats in the northern hemisphere. To substantiate this point he waved an article torn from that morning’s sports section. The co-sub-undersecretary nodded, hmmed, and finally concurred that Pfefferkorn’s was indeed a worthy project. He promised to write a memo to this effect. They toasted to mutual cooperation, and Fyothor and Pfefferkorn departed.

“That was fast,” Pfefferkorn said. The idea that they might accomplish his stated goal troubled him, as he had no idea what to do if someone actually offered to sell him a large quantity of fertilizer.

“Akha,” Fyothor said. “The man is an ass. He has forgotten us already.”

A similar scene played itself out four more times before noon, as they whipped through the Ministry of Fecundity, the Ministry of Objects, the Ministry of Nautical Redistribution, and the Ministry of Resealable Barrels. Everywhere they went, Fyothor was received with kisses, and he was frequently stopped on the street by people wanting to shake his hand. Upon learning that Pfefferkorn was with him, they shook Pfefferkorn’s hand as well. Pfefferkorn felt as though he was back in high school and had somehow fallen in with the star quarterback.

“You remind me of someone I used to know,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Yes? This person is a friend of yours, I hope?”

“He was.”