Excerpt from my new novel

This is an excerpt from my new novel. I’m really pleased with the language, and feel I’ve come a long way as an author.

Honey Bee, come buzz in me. I ain’t seen you for so long. I need to feel you. I mean the real you – not the one described to me in song.

– Madrugada

Chapter Twenty Eight

October 2486

Just as surely as heavy snowflakes continued to fall mercilessly over Moscow, like cocaine into the nostrils of one of the many girls who for a while suck the loneliness out of Moscow’s abandoned souls, I knew I had to discuss this latest development in the case with someone.

A quarter of an hour later on the subway, I got off at Tverskaya. The old metro station with its sumptuous archways lit by huge chandeliers always filled me with longing.

As I walked out and towards the small lakes here, called the Patriarch’s Ponds, flanked by their rows of trees which in the winter season are decorated with lights in all the colors of the rainbow and benches where you can often find newly in love couples holding hands and caressing each other, the longing only got stronger.

Cars and buses flew over me back and forth, with no idea why or who was going there, far below them.

After a few minutes of walking, I stood in front of an anonymous brown door with a doorbell next to it. I pressed the doorbell – a few minutes later I was greeted by an Asian, of appearance, cyborg, with breasts like water balloons. She was dressed in an angel-white silk dress.

“Is she in?” I asked.

“You know she is,” she replied undramatically.

“No, I haven’t actually had time to check,” I replied honestly.

“Come down and sit,” she said.

I followed her down the stairs, which for the season were decorated with Christmas lights. At the bottom of the stairs, to the left, I sat down on a white leather sofa and supplied myself with candies from the table in front of me. A TV on the wall advertised self-cleaning condoms.

“Wait here,” she said, and went in behind a scarlet curtain to the left.

After a few minutes, the pedestrians came out in high heels, one by one. Everyone was wearing only bras and g-strings, and stared at me with glances that did not reveal for a single second what kind of impression they got of me. As usual, she came in last. Anna didn’t have the biggest breasts or the longest hair, but she had tattoos. And a twinkle in her green eyes that, the first time I’d seen her, with her fiery red hair that lit up the room like a dragon flame, told me that she was what I was looking for.

“Anna,” I said.

She smiled, gently. Both she and I knew. Knew from the second she entered the room, that I was going to choose her, and none of the others. But I liked to have it this way, liked to have the opportunity to choose, as if I told her that none of the others will be good enough for me, no matter what – it will always be you.

“Wait here,” she said. She went back behind the curtain and took her toiletry bag with her. Then she came out again and signaled that I should follow her into a long, narrow corridor. On each side of the hallway were white doors. She walked in a door marked 208 about the middle of the hallway and signaled for me to follow her. The room was small, shaped like a kind of crypt, with arched ceilings and elongated walls. It was just big enough for a large double bed without a duvet and pillow, with some pegs and a small mirror on one wall. On each side of the bed was a small bedside table. Above the bed was a lamp attached to the ceiling, shaped like a heart. It was the only light source in the room. I hung my coat on the peg on the wall, before I started to undress.

“It’s been a while since you’ve been here,” she said.

“One week and four days. I’ve been busy,” I replied.

“Can I ask what,” she asked.

“What I’ve been busy with,” I corrected her.

I hung my shirt on the peg, took off my pants and hung it up as well.

“I’ve been suspended from my job,” I replied honestly.

“So you’ve come for comfort,” she asked, winking at me.

“Well. I’ve stumbled upon an interesting case,” I said, taking off my boxer shorts, before lying on my stomach on the large double bed in the middle of the room. The first few times I used to like lying on the bed and watching her undress, but I stopped when I started imagining that she’d rather do it without being stared at.

“Tell me more,” she said as she slid across the bed like some red-haired angel, ready to enchant me away from my own loneliness, low self-esteem and Moscow’s frozen streets of death and depravity for an hour. She took oil on her hands and started massaging my feet.

“A man I’ve been looking for just showed up. “He’d apparently hung himself from a bridge near Red Square,” I said.

She suddenly stopped massaging me.

Without being able to see her, it felt as if her whole body had suddenly frozen to ice. I sighed, almost imperceptibly. Several years in the police force had taught me that not everyone was as used to hearing about death and murder as I was. But I was still taken aback, every damn time, because I never managed to see it coming.

She continued to massage me.

“Apparently?” she asked in a silky soft voice, as if she was trying to wipe out the situation that had just unfolded.

“Well, the thing that was weird – someone, whether he or someone else, had sprayed Murderer on his stomach, written in big black letters,” I said.

“So you’re not sure if he killed himself or was killed?” she asked.

“Exactly,” I said. She had started on my other foot. She tickled me under the sole of her foot because she knew I loved it. I laughed a little.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked.

“Well, you paid for my time,” she said.

“Do you have experience with fetishes?” I continued.

“Well.” She thought about it. ‘I’m not that fond of fetishes. Some of my clients want me to suck their feet. I let them “reluctantly” suck my feet, “she said.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“If you want someone to whip you, there are others here who can do it. I don’t do that,” she said softly but firmly.

“I don’t like fetishes. But do you think it’s possible that the man who … died … could have sprayed himself?” I asked.

She’d reached my legs now, working hard to rub her strong fingers into them.

“Fetish is fetish. I don’t know much about it, but I know that people don’t kill each other over a fetish,” she replied.

I said nothing, and let her continue up my spine, until she finally finished with my neck and arms. Then she let her bare breasts touch my back, from bottom to top. “You can turn around,” she whispered in my ear.

I let my lips suck her breasts to the tunes of an old Norwegian band. Madrugada, I think their name is.

She bent down, bit my earlobe and slowly but surely began to move her lower body steadily up and down. She’d tattooed a large, black panther on her shoulder. Every time she came at me with steady thrusts, it looked like it was about to attack me. We worked our way slowly but surely into a rhythmic dance, where the only thing that existed was her moans and my heavy breathing. Her red tongue of hair danced wildly around me now, as if it’d been evoked by a shaman with murder in his eyes.

She put her green eyes in me, and every time she stared at me it was as if she could see right through my soul, and read every thought that had passed through me from the time I was born to this moment. Our souls fused together, becoming a viscous mass of horniness, tenderness and lust that enveloped us like a bubble. The bubble got bigger and bigger, grew and grew. Finally, it burst into a storm of sperm. She came on my crotch, I squirted over her breasts, her stomach, her thighs.

A little while later we lay wrapped in the middle of the bed, with the sheet under us curled up into a sweaty bundle. I looked at her shoulder. In the light from the lamp above the bed, I could barely see something reminiscent of an identification code. I knew immediately what it was and that it could only be seen properly in infrared light.

“By the way – I’ve never asked you before – this isn’t your real body, is it?” I asked and stared longingly into her green eyes.

“This body was born in one of Lenin Industries’ laboratories. It has a few details that I would like to have in my real body, but I cannot afford to buy a body for private use.”

“Have you ever used your body at work?” I asked.

“No, never. Only my closest ones know what I really look like, “she said.

“So your body is in the back room somewhere, on ice?” I asked.

“Something like that,” she said, placing a finger over my lips. She kissed me. I closed my eyes and indulged in the moment, focused on every bit of her, as if I could suck her soul out of her body as long as I focused hard enough.

Suddenly I opened my eyes and pushed her away. She looked at me as if I’d been bewitched.

“OMG. What if he was ashamed? ” I almost screamed. “What? What? Whose?” she asked.

“The man who died. What if he was ashamed and wanted to make death easier to bear by indulging in his fetish and proclaiming to the whole world that he was a murderer?” I said.

“Did he have an erect penis?” she asked, as easily as if she’d asked what time it was.

“When you mention it… yes, he had,” I said.