A stubborn crowd of workers huddled on the office steps for a cigarette, despite the falling snow and the biting air. It was a life-affirming statement somehow, this morbid embrace of the cold each person encased in their own thoughtful, glum smoke-cloud.
This morning Kolya was among them. A strong-chested man of sixty-one, with misty, rather large blue eyes he wore a somewhat wistful, hangdog look that clung to his ruddy and careworn face like fog, and sometimes his expression was softened by his short white hair which was nearly always short, and this and the clean white beard extending from temple to temple gave him the bearing of a hermit or a saint.
But thunder would roll across the roughened face, breaking in the centre of the prominent forehead suddenly in a black wave that made his body shake with suppressed anger and the emotions that he could not articulate to the boss, that made him stand fixed to the blue carpet like a lightning-conductor absorbing the voltage of a lightning strike - Kolya was earth, and forest and a hunter of beasts; he liked to shoot wild ducks on the outskirts of Moscow and carry them home to the dacha slung over his shoulder in a hunting bag, the gun in his other hand, whistling.
Brandishing at lunch his new company-issued i-phone, with aplomb he appalled his colleagues with a photo album from last month's holiday in Vietnam, flicking through it with his pink fleshy fingers.
The Hawaiian T-shirt revealed his enduring physical strength in the breadth of his shoulders, his smile was a boyish grin of satisfaction and they could all see his pride, standing there in flip-flops and tuquoise bermuda shorts with boat symbols, holding up a live cobra by the neck while his Vietnamese guides, much slighter than he in their khaki hats and uniforms, laughed raucously at the joke, baring missing or rotten teeth.
Abruptly, one of the men decapitated the struggling yellow snake, squeezed out venom and blood into a glass jar; then, with a practiced motion, slit open the body, extracted the small muscular heart, and put it down bloody and small, into a ceremonial dish - and true to the ritual, Kolya ate the heart, triumphant, virile, man over beast.
Kolya had a pretty petite wife, with auburn hair and sunglasses, wearing a light green summer dress, who looked on smilingly at the men. He had a grown-up daughter in Moscow and a grown-up son living in London.
And Kolya was a medical doctor - he had trained as a pediatrician and practiced in Moscow until the fall of the USSR and, coming of necessity to the drug industry, toward the end of the '90s he naturally knew everyone in the pediatric hospitals throughout Moscow, he drank vodka with the geneticists from the RAMS Medical Center, he was equally intimate with the doctors from Novosibirsk and Komi and Penza, and he was a man who commanded respect but whose quiet, rather brooding demeanour most of the time and whose broken English meant he often was not respected, especially by the foreigners who came in via Sheremetevo and fucked for hard currency the thin, still-teenage girls who serviced the big hotels; only last week, he had seen one incident, the round, powerful American, pink almost and freshly-showered, hasten in white hotel slippers and a dressing-gown to the locked glass doors of the corridor that gave upon the rooms, just as the tiny bell announced the elevator, to chaperone his girl inside, he - Kolya - standing there, a hermit, invisible behind this snip of a nineteen-year-old girl, her body a devilish gift, and as she glided onto the tenth floor he took in her perfume and could almost feel in his throat her tiny heart quiver.