The Beggar and the Hare Read Online Free Page B

suburb of Bucharest, where Yegor Kugar’s new career began.
    ‘A rough country, with rough people. Damn gypsies, the lot of them. I went to night school, which means that I began to roam the streets to show them how barmy I was. That’s how I began to get work. The main commodity was broads aged seventeen to thirty-four, and the main market was Central Europe. In between there were these deadly boring trips to the North to collect the pennies scraped together by beggars like that loser Vatanescu. I should never have gone anywhere near him.’
    With this background it was very hard for Yegor Kugar to turn a blind eye to Vatanescu and Balthazar’s barbecue feast. A beggar must not look better off than the people he is begging from; a beggar must not eat fillet steak flambéed in brandy. A fat beggar was an absurdity. Bad for business. But an even worse mistake was to oversleep in the morning.
    Yegor thought that his men sprawled in their caravans or outside in the caravan park looked like pigs on some decadent farm. He said he knew that Vatanescu was behind it all; he sensed the aura of a rebel, had been able to detect such auras back when he was in the security police, possessed one himself. It usually took a man to problems, riches or a zinc coffin.
    Yegor Kugar emptied the embers of the barbecue over Vatanescu. Yegor Kugar locked the doors of the caravans. Yegor Kugar said there would now be a week without pay and a twenty-four-hour workday. Go away and shake off those calories, and don’t come back until you look like what you are, not like homeowners in some plush suburb!

Chapter Three
    In which we learn how Vatanescu burns his bridges and meets his soul-mate
    Y egor outsourced the most unpleasant tasks to the Svetogorsk Speedfreaks. The Speedfreaks cut off the electricity to the beggars’ encampment at 7pm and made sure there was no surplus food or pleasure in the caravans. The lights came back on at five. When this was combined with a darkness that fell ever earlier, an increasing amount of rain, a strong wind that brought an icy chill, and the reluctance of people to part with their small change, Vatanescu sank into dejection. The passers-by snarled, spat – even the woman who distributed the religious newspaper hurried rudely past on her way to holy-roller meetings held in old cinemas.
    The streets are amazingly clean.
    Am I the only rubbish?
    Balthazar consoled him, telling him that his anger would eventually subside, but Vatanescu saw no further than the following day, and not even that far. He had the same symptoms of burnout that afflicted the givers of alms. People wanted to get back to their communally heated homes by the quickest possible combination of bus, train and walking, and they did not feel obliged to help a person who was capable of working.
    Inevitably the day came when the Organisation gave the order that there must be more results. There were to be discussions about layoffs, because International Crime was a supranational company listed on the stockexchange, just like Nokia or Gazprom. Moreover, the Organisation’s advertising and marketing department noted that the public image of begging had taken a battering. The police were tackling the beggars ever more snappishly, and public opinion was hardening by the day. The mayor wanted the ragged riff-raff off his streets.
    The Organisation’s head office demanded increased productivity. They must all increase their output by thirty per cent, and at the same time the least productive ones would be fired. Those who had arrived last would be the first to go. The row of beggars listened to Yegor’s speech, Vatanescu slightly apart from the others on the steps of his caravan. His nose was running; perhaps it was fever, maybe hypothermia was setting in.
    Yegor Kugar.
    To you a quiet stretch of water is a place where you can duck the head of your fellow man and drown him.
     
    And inevitably the day also came when the camp was filled with the flashing