Who: Yuri Chekhov & Zach Smith
What: Russians know how to work a crowd at the rat nightclub.
When: February, 2008
Where: East London
Rating: G
Status: Closed; Unfinished
The notepad in his hands smelled like all sorts, or the words, the language brought to his nostrils scents foreign to the docks on the East side of the Thames. The smell of shit and sulfur, of sewage and garbage mixed with the river like wet dog, and the smell of coal. Yuri sank down on his haunches and leaned against the metal fence separating him from the Thames, a paperback dangling from his fingers. It was either Dickens or Hugo, and Yuri was thinking of a forty-two page discourse on the state of the Parisian sewers in the nineteenth century, and the trickling of the Thames almost brought it to life in his mind. Almost. All that was missing was the sound of rats, and he would have the image in his mind, more real than life.
Sticking the book in his jacket, he shoved off the street, weaving past warehouses and cheap apartment buildings, into places where there was more crumbled brick than concrete, more stripped-bare walls than peeling wallpaper, until he found a familiar place. He listened for the sound of a furnace or of breaking glass before he headed into an alleyway between this building, this old grubby warehouse, and the next building over. There was a dumpster at the far end of the narrow alley where it opened up again so that two men could stand shoulder to shoulder rather than one man span the width of the gap. He headed toward it, and shoved aside a pile of moldy newspapers that sat in a stack against the wall. A hole was exposed.
Smiling cheekily, he pulled a thin cardboard tube with a string at one end from his pocket and some matches. Lighting the string with a flame that burned purple when the match was pulled from the matchbook, he shoved it quickly into the hole and replaced the stack of newspapers.
He stuck his index fingers into his ears.
The newspapers exploded into damp, musty bits that made him sneeze violently, but he wiped his nose with the back of his hand and climbed onto the dumpster, peeking through a dirty window. A stampede of a dozen rats fleeing the walls moved like a small shadow across the floorboards, rodents startled from their place of refuge invading their host's workshop. "Cheers!" he called gaily, whispering in case he should be caught.
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