Inside the room, Lara was waiting for me, totally pissed off.

“Where the hell have you been all afternoon?” She asked me, annoyed.

“Doing chores,” I said curtly.

“Shall we go now? Finally?!” she jumped impatiently from the bed.

“Of course not,” I answered stolidly and stopped in the middle of the room, just hanging there. I wanted to get on her nerves. “I actually need to take a leak!” Then, without looking at her, I turned around and walked to the bathroom.

“Ugh-h!” I heard her grunt behind my back.

In the bathroom, I did everything to waste as much time as possible. I shaved my beard, washed my face, cleaned my ears, clipped my nails, arranged my hair, pissed… In general, I did my best to lose myself there, but in the end, I ran out of fresh ideas and had to go out after all. Lara endured the outrage without saying anything, but I knew she was on edge. That was my intention, actually.

Eventually, despite all my efforts to sabotage our next suicide mission, a few minutes after nine, we were ready to go. I was rather reluctant to start it all, but my assistant was bursting with desire, as usual. She was actually so psyched about it that she tried to leave the room almost naked. Her fly was open, and her breasts were practically out because she had only two buttons on her shirt buttoned up. It wasn’t such a novelty in her world to walk around the street like that, but I decided to bring it to her attention—just to humiliate her, if nothing else.

“Oh, you’re such a boring prick, aren’t you?” She grunted and reluctantly closed her zipper. Then she did one more of her shirt buttons, but that was as far as she wanted to go. Her tits didn’t suffer a significant loss of social status, nor did her ass, because my pants were slightly too big for her and hung pretty loose on her butt.

When she was all “dressed up” and “groomed,” we finally left the room. Naturally, we did it via the fire escape—just to observe the tradition we had established and also in case something got wrong. This time, however, I insisted on climbing down after her. A couple of minutes later, we reached the end of the stairs, and Lara stepped down, spread her arms in the air like the statue of Jesus in Rio de Janeiro, and shouted, “Jump!” I looked at her, surprised, because if I were a small young walnut, there might have been a slight chance to survive in her hands. Unfortunately, though, I wasn’t a walnut. That’s why I never considered following her advice, and I adopted the most boring but secure approach to the task—I cautiously felt the pavement with my right foot before letting go of the staircase.

After we were both on the ground, things went as usual when we had this sort of adventure. We stepped out of the trash, stumbled a couple of times in the darkness, and then walked around the garbage cans. The unusual thing was that we ran into Sandra right after that. She passed by with her little dog, which I didn’t even know she had, and wished us a good evening. She also added that a bungee cord was on the roof if we wanted to leave the hotel even more thrillingly. “One of the painters who refreshed the building last year left it behind,” she explained. “He was also a mountain climber and used to mix up his job with his hobby. That’s why the walls look so weirdly striped now!”

Since it was already too dark to see the walls and their paint job, we just thanked the hotel owner for her kind suggestion and insisted that the fire escape was all we needed for the moment. Then we casually walked to our Fords and got into the one we stole from the scumbags, after which we drove away peacefully. We did our best to pretend we weren’t on a mission to snoop into drug traffickers’ businesses, but I didn’t think we were very convincing in this role.

“What’s the fucking bitch doing out here so late?” Lara grunted sullenly later when we turned the corner in our car.

“She was walking her little puppy! Didn’t you see?” I snapped at her because the entire situation made me angry and frustrated. I just wondered why it all had to be so complicated between Sandra and me. “It’s not like it’s three in the morning, you know. And, by the way, why do you even ask me? I’m not her male secretary!”

“And aren’t you?” She murmured grumpily, turning her head to look at me. “I thought you had an in with her.”

“What ‘in’? What do you even mean by that?” I pretended I didn’t get her point.

“You know exactly what I mean! You dig in her backyard, don’t you?”

I grunted disgustedly because I didn’t like her metaphor, but I said nothing. I had no idea how she knew about our little romance but chose to leave it open and not comment. Instead, I lit a cigarette, which made me realize that, with all the problems I had had with Lara lately, I had started smoking again.

My assistant, for her part, dropped the subject too, and soon she started playing with the radio, changing stations every ten seconds. I smoked and drove silently and pretended I didn’t care. In such a hostile atmosphere, we flew through the gloomy, dark neighborhoods, surrounded by the irritating voices of a bunch of sports hosts and country divas who competed in hysterical gabbling and delirious whinnying the entire time. At some point, they all made me so nervous that I hit a rough patch on the street, and Lara nearly punctured a hole in the car ceiling with her head.

“Ouch!” she cried, frustrated, but she didn’t have the chance to explain what a jerk I was because her knee accidentally caught the glove compartment and got it open. In a second, a whole lot of joints fell on the floor, which totally distracted her.

“What the fuck?” My assistant gasped, and her face shone like she had just seen manna from heaven. “Look at these little motherfuckers! Look at all this beautiful shit!”

Then, she curled up on the floor between the seat and the dashboard to pick up the cigarettes. I glanced at her—absentmindedly at first—but then I started worrying. It was a gradual feeling, like watching a river swell. In the beginning, it was subtle, but soon, the sense of imminent danger increased exponentially, and at some point, I realized I had to react urgently because, literally, a thousand things could go wrong when you put Lara and drugs in the same sentence.

Naturally, since I kept thinking about it for a while, I forgot to keep an eye on the road, and a minute later, I hit another rough patch—this time significantly bigger. As a result, I lost control of the car, and for a moment, it veered off-road. Suddenly, there was horrible tire screeching, sharp steering wheel turning, wild stomping on the pedals, and almost everything else you would expect from a decent action movie. Eventually, I managed to get the situation under control, and the Ford jerked nervously before stepping back on the road, but when I turned my eyes to see if Lara was okay, I saw her sitting among a pile of cigarettes, kneading them on the floor with her ass.

“Don’t you have any shame?” She shouted at me, furious. “Do you really have to destroy the good stuff with your hideous driving?”

I angrily stepped on the brake and stopped the car on the roadside. Then I bent over to pick up whatever of the dope survived and put it back in the glove compartment. I threw the rest of the weed out the window because it was mixed with dirt from the car mat.

“Don’t even think about lighting one!” I hissed uncompromisingly.

“And why is that?” my assistant asked me, irritated. “What will you do about it? Spank me?”

“No, but I don’t intend to save your junkie ass from whatever bullshit you might land yourself in after using. That’s why!”

She made a sulky face but said nothing. She obeyed me for the first time since we met and put the cigarettes she held back into the glove box. Her reaction actually surprised me. After resolving the matter—at least for the moment—we continued our journey, but I drove much more carefully now. About forty minutes later, we approached the seaport, and since the shack of our drug friends wasn’t far from there, it made me extremely nervous. I reduced the speed further and anxiously looked around, and as I did it, another disturbing idea occurred to me.

We were driving in the bastards’ fucking vehicle. If they saw it parked here, they would surely recognize it and know we were in the area. We were so stupid! I was actually so freaked out by the thought that I shared my fears with Lara, but she only mumbled, “So what’s the fucking big deal? They will probably think we dumped it here last night.”

“So soon after we escaped from them?” I looked at her, astonished. “And then what? We continued on foot?!”

She shrugged indifferently. I shrugged, too, because it was simply useless arguing with her, and I didn’t want to wreck my nerves further. If the drug dealers were so hopelessly dumb, they might as well think we were purposefully returning their car, in which case, maybe we should leave a fucking postcard on the windshield with our sincere apologies!

Eventually, I decided to stay safe and simply ignored Lara’s “phenomenal” planning skills, pulling up far enough under the shadow of a big tree. Then we stepped out, and I locked the vehicle, walking off silently and leaving the blonde-haired prima donna drag behind me, nagging about my decision. She thought we were too far from our destination. However, we reached the place ten minutes later, and she had to stop.

By the way, it wasn’t so hard to find 22-B. I thought we would wander around the neighborhood in vain for half an hour or so, but we didn’t. Unlike in the area where Larry and Bob lived, many street lamps and signs were installed here, so we found our way pretty soon and sneaked in unnoticed. It was a far bigger problem to pick a suitable place for surveillance, though, because nowhere could I see anything good enough.

We slowly kept advancing between the huge containers—some laid on top of the others—as if we were marching through a deep ravine or a canyon. The situation made me feel exposed and vulnerable, and I expected a bunch of security guys and evil dogs to jump upon us any minute, ripping our asses apart, before even thinking of asking us what the hell we were doing here.

Luckily, none of this happened. After nearly fifteen minutes of hideous searching, we approached a very tall tower, which cast light over the entire dock area, and I turned my head to look at it. I noticed an iron ladder attached to it, leading to its top, where a small platform was mounted with powerful floodlights clustered together in four groups—each pointing in a different direction. It was just the right hiding spot for us.

“Okay, that’s it! We camp up there!” I whispered, relieved, and went to the tower to grab the bars and start climbing. A few seconds later, Lara followed me, glancing distrustfully at the top of the thing. Despite that, she climbed without expressing her obvious doubts about it.

In fact, the entire adventure I embarked on was a bit of a rush, as it turned out because it wasn’t exactly an easy job to do. Two minutes hadn’t even passed when all my confidence evaporated like morning dew in May. I realized our final destination was actually much higher than it looked from the ground. Somewhere in the middle, my arms and legs were already shaking uncontrollably—especially after I turned my head to look at Lara, who was breathing heavily a couple of feet below me. When I saw the far-away ground beneath my feet, my head spun from the intimidating height. Unfortunately, though, there was no turning back. My assistant was blocking the way, and I couldn’t just give up now. Besides, I was going to lose my face and look like a wuss in her eyes, which wasn’t good because I had already lost so much authority in this department.

I puffed heavily, took a deep breath, and kept climbing up. It was a real challenge, and I felt like I would soil my pants any minute now. At some point, the floodlights at the top dazzled me, and since I couldn’t feel my limbs anymore, I was afraid I would accidentally miss the bars and take a plunge for the ground. Eventually, I reached the cherished platform on my last legs, but when I got my body over the edge—trembling like a leaf—I stopped there and looked around, alarmed, and then… Oh, my god! Oh, dear mother of all surprises!

Someone waited for us behind the floodlights!

I shivered unpleasantly and nervously asked myself, was it really possible to be such a moron and believe that a perfect surveillance spot like this would be built unintentionally and not meant for the seaport’s security? It was, in fact, so much easier to sit here and shoot potential intruders from above while they ran like rabbits at your feet instead of chasing them around the area and risking your own life. After a few moments of wondering, I answered my question affirmatively: yes, it was possible that I was such a moron!

Despite everything, I soon realized I was actually jumping to conclusions because the man who lurked here didn’t have the appearance of security personnel. When, after a few seconds, my eyes adapted to the bright light, and I managed to take a better look at the guy, my surprise was so huge that I reeled back and nearly tumbled over the edge of the fucking platform.

Right in front of me, my old ice cream friend—the one with the shabby brown leather coat—lay sprawled on his stomach, bulging his junkie eyes at me. However, there was a little difference from the previous times I had seen him: the tin hat. It usually stayed on his bushy head, but now it was casually balanced on his ass instead. After examining me for a while, the bum blinked his eyes a couple of times, and then the mighty beard on his face slowly split in the middle.

“Hello,” the man mumbled quietly, indicating he recognized me too.

“Oh, hi there!” I heard someone greeting him cheerfully behind my back. It was Lara who was joining us on the platform. She had clearly forgotten what a colossal grudge she had held against the guy just a few days ago.

I turned to look at her, quite astonished. I had the feeling she thought we had climbed on top of a garbage pile here, and the presence of the bum was the most natural thing in the world. Sometimes, I really wanted to be as insensitive and easygoing as she was because it seemed like a much easier way to live.

Anyway, after my two colleagues in surveillance finished with the protocol formalities, we stared at each other rather awkwardly because we didn’t know how to proceed in this strange situation. I, in particular, felt even embarrassed for crashing the bum’s little party, but then he suddenly opened his bearded mouth again and asked me, “Are you loafers too?”

“What?” I blinked my eyes, confused.

He repeated his question, articulating it very clearly, “I say, are you loafers too?”

“Of course not! We are from Cats and Kittens Rescue and on a rescue mission here!” Lara cut in before I even had a chance to answer.

“Oh, really? But what’s wrong with the cats and kittens?” The man with the basin on his ass wanted to know.

“Nothing! They’re just fine.”

“They are?” Our friend thoughtfully stroked his beard with his right hand, visibly confused. His gesture allowed his lips to appear briefly behind the impenetrable bush of his facial hair.

“Yes, they are!”

“You mean they’re not in danger?”

“Not in the least!”

I sharply turned my head to look at them, puzzled—one after the other. Their stupid conversation seemed pretty nuts to me, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what they were talking about. As a matter of fact, it didn’t matter because I suspected they didn’t have any idea either.

“But if so, why are you rescuing them?” After finishing his evening toilet and leaving his beard alone, the man with the tin hat continued to ask.

“Pardon me?” The CKR activist with an extremely short memory smiled softly at him. “Who are we rescuing?”

“Well, the cats and kittens!”

“But, we aren’t!”

“But a few seconds ago, you said you were!”

“Yes, but a few seconds ago, we just joked!”

Lara was clearly having fun with him. I didn’t actually mind that, but I didn’t think it was the right place or time because I felt pretty nervous at the moment. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to stop all this, so I said nothing.

“Oh, you’re joking! That’s wonderful!” After a short pause, the bum attempted to renew their ridiculous chat. “I love jokes, too. I really do! And if you were loafers like me, we could have told each other many jokes while waiting here!”

At this point, I couldn’t bear it any longer and decided to end the madness.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, we’re no loafers, okay?” I grunted angrily. “We’re just taking a walk. That’s all we’re doing!”

“But why did you have to climb all the way up here then?” the cuckoo asked me a very reasonable question.

“It’s simply because our walk path passes through here!” Without even realizing it, I started losing myself in the same kind of bullshit. “Why are you hanging out on this extremely high platform, by the way? I mean, besides the loafing!”

“Well, I’m here for the performance, you know. Just like you, I guess. The ship has arrived, and the show will start soon!”

It was only then that I finally started to catch on. He had come for the same reason we came. The only thing I didn’t understand was his motive because as I watched him, he was hardly carrying out an investigation. I was just about to ask him what business he had with the damn ship when Lara beat me to it with her next question.

“In this case, we intend to join you and watch the performance with you. Do you mind?” She smiled again.

“Please be my guests!” The man kindly invited us and made room for us next to him. There were plenty of empty ice cream boxes and cigarette butts everywhere around him, so we had to push the garbage aside to lay down—Lara in the middle. I figured all the junk here served as popcorn for him while he watched the previous “films.”

“And when is it all expected to begin?” My assistant tried to inform herself about the show’s start after she made herself comfortable between us.

“It’s about thirty minutes after midnight,” the loafer replied, making me wonder if he really knew how to tell the time because I doubted he had possessed any kind of watch for the last twenty years at least. I looked at mine, and if he was right, we had an hour and twenty minutes to go.

“Is the show interesting?” I decided to ask him just for the sake of the conversation.

“Very!” the connoisseur of industrial art confirmed excitedly. “And do you know what the most interesting part is?”

We didn’t answer and just looked at him expectantly.

“Everything happens in total silence! First, a ship comes so quietly that you think they had put it in slippers. Unfortunately, you missed that act because the boat is already here. Then they would open the hold, and a mobile crane in slippers would approach to unload all the hidden stuff. Other people would come in slippers, too, and they would transfer the things into a truck in slippers. When everything is done, everybody will disappear in a few minutes without making any sound again. It’s really amazing! It feels like you are watching a silent movie.”

“And how many times have you watched this silent movie?” Lara stirred uneasily while looking around impatiently.

“Many times, I simply lost count.”

“But what’s your role in it exactly?”

The bum suddenly turned to look at her and blinked twice without saying anything. It took him some time to answer the question as if we were on television, and he wanted to think it over very carefully because he didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the entire nation. After almost a minute, his beard slowly stirred.

“Well, I’ve never been a lead, you know,” the man explained rather vaguely. “They never gave me a secondary or supporting role either. I’ve always been a simple extra, and I suppose I’ll always be.”

“Oh, come on now! Are you suddenly telling me you play in the movies?” I exclaimed, frustrated because I didn’t want to hear more of his bullshit.

“We all do,” the crackpot nodded knowingly. “And don’t get me wrong here! It’s not like I don’t want to be a star or something, but unfortunately, that’s my fate. They probably think I’m only good for a loafer because I’m not interesting enough of a character, and that’s what they give me. They wouldn’t even allow me to be a loafer with artistic value!”

Lara and I simultaneously looked at him, totally confused and not understanding a single word of what he was saying.

“What are you talking about?” I grunted.

“But who are they?” My assistant asked.

“The masters of the universe! You see, this is not the real world we live in here. It’s just a movie production in a bigger world, which in turn is a movie production in an even bigger world, and so on and so forth. It’s all connected. And the screenwriters above us decide what we should do, and in turn, their screenwriters decide what our screenwriters will write about what we should do, and it goes on like that up the ladder. We’re all puppets!”

For almost a minute, neither of us said anything. We only kept looking at each other, and I, in particular, had no idea how to respond to this, even if I wanted to.

“So?” At some point, Lara couldn’t endure the silence. “What was your role exactly?”

“I don’t know. That’s the point!” the cuckoo shrugged, trying to summarize his idea about the multiverse for us. “I guess, as a loafer, my job is to hang around here, in the middle of the mise-en-scene, and watch the show, regardless of my true ambitions. And if something falls out while I’m still hanging around, all the better. If something falls out, the entire hanging around wouldn’t be in vain!”

“What do you mean, ‘if something falls out’?” I ignored his other blabbering, focusing on the last sentence because it suddenly looked suspicious.

The professional loafer didn’t answer, though. Instead, he started shaking his bushy head like hypnotized and somehow forgot to stop it. His eyes stared fixedly at something invisible in the air, and he seemed totally lost in his loafer’s thoughts. He just repeated endlessly, “That’s right. That’s right. If something falls out, it’ll be totally worth my time.”

I watched him patiently for a while but eventually felt tired of listening to his stupid chanting. I figured he had gone too far with his hanging around here or with his chewing of cigarette butts because, back in the milk bar, he seemed a lot more adequate. To get him out of his stupor and restart him, I sharply clasped my hands in front of his face. He jumped up, startled, as if a bee had stung him, and the basin slid off his butt, rattling hideously in the darkness and making me look around, worried. In a flash of panic, the guy turned around to grab the thing.

“We have stayed unguarded for far too long now!” he explained in a confidential tone after regaining possession of his property. “It’s time for safety measures.”

And when he said that, the crackpot put the tin potty on his head, pulling it low over his eyes. Then he assumed his previous pose and stared at the loading dock again.

“Does this… device actually help?” I couldn’t restrain myself from asking him because I suddenly remembered our meeting at the hotdog stand. Back there, he mentioned it was a radio shield or something.

“Naturally!” Our weird friend nodded vigorously, and the basin did, too. The thing fell even lower, covering his eyes entirely, so he had to push it back up.

“And what is it you are protecting yourself from?” I wanted to know.

“Many things. Many objects fall from the sky these days,” he answered meaningfully.

“Like raindrops, for example?” I suggested hesitantly. I just didn’t want to come across as ridiculing him.

“Raindrops, yes! And much heavier things as well.”

“Like wild geese or seagulls shot dead?” Lara attempted to initiate the next round of their absurd conversation from before.

“Well, flying saucers often fall down too.” The bum immediately bit the bait.

“And when you wear this, they bounce back from your helmet and return into space?” I was amazed at his strange way of thinking.

“No, but at least their whispering is blocked!” The man knocked knowingly on the basin with his right hand. “It’s a radio-frequency shield, man! It’s not just a helmet. Without it, I would be brainwashed like everybody else nowadays!”

“Ahaa,” I drawled, fully enlightened, recalling the theories of my other weird friend—the bartender with the miniature broadcast units that fitted in the pocket of your pants.

“Besides,” the bum kept shocking us with more information on the subject, “lately, even Coca-Cola bottles started falling down from the sky!”

“Is that so?” I gasped in disbelief.

“Definitely! I watched it in a documentary about the Kalahari Desert. There, they fall quite regularly, in fact, because the air traffic is so heavy, and there are too many irresponsible pilots.”

I nodded understanding because I had seen this material, too. It was called “The Gods Must Be Crazy”—an excellent “documentary” which hit movie theaters recently. I just wondered where the hell the cuckoo had watched it.

After filling us in on the dangers of desert life, our friend pulled the basin back over his eyes as if the aliens were going to shoot bottles of Coca-Cola at him from their flying saucers any minute now. About half a minute later, when nothing really happened, he took the luxury of cutting himself some slack, going through the empty boxes around in search of god knows what. Naturally, he didn’t find anything in any of them. Eventually, he dug into the as deep as septic tanks pockets of his coat and pulled out a horribly looking and unfinished cigarette butt.

“This is top quality!” He showed it to us with pride. “It shoots you right into space. Do you want some?”

“No, thanks!” Lara was quick to refuse his generous offer. “We actually have ours.”

And then she reached into her pocket to take out a lost cigarette. It was probably part of Larry and Bob’s little treasure, which she had obviously appropriated from the glove compartment under my nose, and I didn’t like it, but I said nothing about it. My assistant straightened the joint and used the bum’s matchbox to light it while he pushed the remains of his cigarette into his mouth, munching with gusto. After that, the two junkies momentarily forgot about me and embarked on a hideous conversation again. For a whole hour, I had to listen to the stinker’s life story: how he didn’t want to be part of society because he was too lazy to work, how he became a bum, how his father explored Canada in a coal train car, how he got lost in the woods near Lake Huron, and so on and so forth.

Interestingly enough, his narrative was suspiciously similar to the one his successor at the milk bar told me about—especially the part about his father in Canada. It actually made me believe there was a whole business of begging for drugs, and the competitors were actually stealing each other’s unfortunate stories to achieve an advantage in the market. Anyway, I didn’t want to take part in the conversation, so I just listened to the bullshit silently, keeping an eye on the loading dock at the same time.

At some point, my two companions got so lost in the chat and had so much fun that Lara turned to me, frustrated, attempting to thrust her already fourth or fifth cigarette into my mouth—probably to encourage me to join the party. I refused with dignity, and by doing so, I wanted to demonstrate my total disapproval of her irresponsible behavior. Unfortunately, she was too high to get my drift, so nothing really changed.

About fifteen minutes after midnight, the talks on the platform gradually died out, and we all fixed our eyes on the “screen” because the ads were obviously over now, and it was time for the real show to begin. And it began ten minutes later. First, we heard quiet humming, and from the seaport darkness, two trucks and a car came out. They quietly crawled to the waterfront with their headlights off and then stopped. I had to admit we had an excellent view of the whole thing from our seats on the “balcony.” The entire area lay stretched out at our feet, clearly visible and convenient for observing without any risk.

After that, two men stepped out of the car, a Chrysler Plymouth Fury. The vehicle was the same as Larry and Bob’s, so it was only natural that the guys down there were my old friends. I was actually able to confirm that pretty soon. When they started pacing back and forth and giving orders, their gold chains rattled so loudly that all the “slippers” the bum talked about instantly became irrelevant. The morons made much more noise with their jewelry than all the machinery combined!

I stared fixedly at the bastards. They seemed agitated and nervous, and I could easily understand that because the deal seemed quite big. As I watched the massive trucks, I really doubted the jerks would ever need to lift a finger again and work. It made me remember Bob saying that they would take a prolonged vacation to another ocean’s shore when all this was over. I thought he meant Southern California back then, but now I suddenly realized it was actually the Southern Pacific, the Indian Ocean, or some other exotic place.

Very soon, a second car came out of the darkness behind our backs, startling us. This time, it was a Lincoln sedan quietly pulling behind the Chrysler. From there, a tall man in a suit stepped out, and as soon as I saw his silhouette, I knew who the guy was. He had the figure of a small three-leaf wardrobe, and when the light from the other vehicle hit his face, it became clear that he was blond-haired. He was my other dear friend—the dandruff fairy!

“This must be the middleman the whore told us about,” Lara whispered tensely, even though there was absolutely no chance they could hear her voice from so high.

“No, I don’t think so,” I shook my head without elaborating on my skepticism. “He’s just an ordinary thug who oversees the deal.”

“What middleman?” The bum immediately pricked his ears.

“Never mind. We just commented on a documentary,” I answered curtly.

“Oh, okay then!” Our pal nodded his head. Then he started his usual blabbering again. “I love documentaries, too. However, if you think about it, most of them are actually made by aliens, which is their way of keeping us misinformed. They think they can have us all but don’t have me!”

I didn’t bother to answer and let the nutcase blather on because the next moment, I had to lay low since a phenomenally quiet rail-mounted seaport crane crawled out of nowhere and scared the shit out of me. The cabin passed only ten yards from my head before slowly sailing away. I could even see the wedding ring of the man who operated it while pulling the levers! In fact, everything happening so far was precisely as the bum had predicted, and it was amazing. It felt like we were watching a silent movie!

In the following minutes, the crane briskly approached the ship and started taking the goods out of its hold and putting them on the loading platform almost without any noise. The entire operation ran very smoothly, and at some point, the dandruff-haired thug paid some guy some money. The latter was clearly a security guard, and when he took the bribe, he turned around and silently vanished into the darkness. Soon, the crane finished all the work, and the operator drove it back to us and further away. Then, a dozen dockworkers moved the drugs into the trucks in no time, and they also left. At last, the trucks and the two cars disappeared, too. Less than an hour after everything started, it was all quiet and peaceful on 22-B—as if nothing had ever happened.

“What a perfectly organized smuggling operation!” Lara expressed her admiration after the “film” was over, and we waited a few minutes for the final credits to roll.

“Yeah, what a pity we missed the trucks!” I added casually.

She suddenly looked at me, startled, and jumped to her feet, but then grasped the entire situation and stopped. We were probably at a hundred feet above the ground and would need at least half an hour more to climb down, so there was no need to hurry. As it seemed, we hadn’t thought all this through when we climbed up, which is to say, I hadn’t thought it.

“What? You want to watch the behind-the-scenes movie?” the bum suddenly asked. “It’s not that interesting, you should know. The freebies here are far more exciting.”

And he nodded meaningfully toward the loading platform.

I did not know what he meant, but I didn’t bother asking him. I just assumed he was talking about the “exciting” effort we had to make to get to the ground. Apart from the paralyzing fear, one of the most unpleasant things about climbing high is that climbing down is usually ten times more unpleasant. My stomach hurt even if I just thought about it.

However, a few minutes later, when the three of us started down the ladder, our exercise turned out to be even worse than we had imagined. Or at least for some of us, it was. Our dumbass friend had no problem, actually, and he jumped on the task like a chimpanzee chased by a leopard. It was amazing how he squeezed himself between the bars instead of stepping on them and made it safely to the ground before Lara and I had even begun our journey. We panted heavily and swore wildly for almost twenty minutes, and we looked like a pair of adult elephants trying to walk down a water slide without killing themselves. On top of it, my assistant, who followed behind, hung above my head like the sword of Damocles and regularly stepped on my fingers as if she thought it would help me get a better grip on the bars.

When everything was almost over, I looked down, exhausted, and took the last few steps by following Lara’s advice when we climbed down the fire escape of our hotel. I just jumped because I couldn’t bear it anymore. My feet hadn’t even touched the ground when she decided to do the same—probably because she wanted to be true to her principles.

We rolled in the dust for a while, now like a pair of giant sparrows taking their evening bath, and when we got to our feet and patted ourselves clean, I suddenly realized why the bum had hurried so badly to come down before we did. I saw him squirming on the ground like a worm, sniffing and searching for scattered dope. That was, in fact, what he meant when talking about freebies.

“Hey, why did you presume up there that we wanted to watch the behind-the-scenes movie?” I asked him because it suddenly occurred to me he might have had a hidden point. “Do you know where it’s played?”

“Sure,” I heard him grunt, after which he stopped searching to look at us, worried that we might want a share of the loot. “Eternity’s the place. They won’t let you in at this hour, though. You should be very careful if you go!”

We shrugged and thanked him for his concern, and before we left, I returned his gesture, warning him about Cleopatra and her new boyfriend, to which he didn’t pay much attention. After that, we left him alone and hurried to our car, but just before we reached the vehicle, Lara, who was walking in front of me, suddenly turned around and jostled me behind the nearby tree. At the same time, she tried to gag my mouth with her hand and almost broke my not-yet-healed nose again.

With eyes full of tears, I looked at the Ford, surprised, and saw a dark figure sniffing around. It looked like a cop. The guy was extremely obese, and he examined the vehicle with the help of a flashlight. Since we had nothing else to do except wait, we waited patiently until he finished his task. The examination turned out to be far more thorough than we expected, though.

First, the fatso went through the exterior of the vehicle and shone the flashlight into every hole there was—he even tried the exhaust pipe—which actually made me wonder what on earth he expected to find in there. He got pigheaded about the interior after that. For almost half an hour, he “rummaged” through the glove compartment, trying to read the nonexistent papers of the Ford while standing outside. He almost lost himself in it, and when he finally assured himself he wouldn’t do it in this life or the next, he had to give it up. Instead, the cop just checked the tires to see if they were inflated enough, tried the doors to see if they were locked—lucky for us, they were—and in the end, he turned off the flashlight, very disappointed. Then, the man reluctantly went away.

After he was gone, we waited three more minutes behind the tree and cautiously approached the vehicle. We hopped inside, and I instantly revved the engine to hurl the car toward Eternity, but just a hundred yards down the street—right behind the next corner—we unexpectedly ran into our fatso again. His cruiser was parked there with the driver’s door open, and he was standing outside, trying to eat a colossal hamburger—almost as big as he was. There was also a Coca-Cola bottle on the roof, and when we zipped past him, exceeding every possible speed limit for this area at least twice, the guy stared at us, surprised, from behind his dinner. Unfortunately, the cop had no partner, and since his mouth was full of food and his hands were all greasy, he couldn’t do anything about it. I saw him in the rearview mirror waving his left hand to say whatever, and then he greedily bit into the hamburger again.

I stepped on the gas, and soon, we lost him in the darkness behind us.

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