MORNING SERIAL

“CALL your girlfriend and see if she wants you to either go home so the two of you can fight about being penniless, or whether she’d like you to stay out here a while and I will make all those vultures fly away.

“Because these people are vultures, aren’t they?

“And you know what vultures do, don’t you? They wait for you to die before they come down for their fill.

“Not a moment too soon. None of them are hoping you recover.”

He spoke as if he knew more about my financial situation than he was letting on, and that the revelation Francis had picked me to fill his vacated seat in this tower was just the tip of the iceberg.

“I don’t want to sound overly dramatic,” Illie went on, walking me back down from the mezzanine and out the tower door, “but I am offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity here.”

“And I appreciate it,” I found myself saying.

I told him I would think it over, without asking any more about what the job really involved and what would be expected of me.

When I did bring it up on the walk back to the house he would just shrug and laugh and say, “I need you to paint – what more is there to say?”

Back at the house he offered me one drink – he said it was a Russian tradition when an offer had been made, for the two sides of the bargain to share a drink and then share another when a decision had been made.

We stood in the barroom I had been shown into and given the Green Slime on my arrival and he handed me the shot of potato vodka in a thimble glass much taller than those which house a single measure.

We saluted and necked them both – it went down like ice-cold, creamy gasoline and I could not hold in my grimace. Prostakov laughed and slapped me across the shoulder.

“Next time you come I will cook and we will enjoy some cigars,” he said.

“You cook?” I said.

“I enjoy it,” he said.

> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks. com