sympathy. During the conversation, he decided that her bottom was really a little too large and her full breasts were slowly losing the battle against gravity, but that despite this he would gladly have at them if she offered him the chance. In parting he also invited her to stop for a cup of coffee sometime. Then, while getting in the lift, he once again saw his bald spot was growing and said, ‘Fuck, everything’s going to hell,’ and finally in his flat, while still in his ugly but practical windbreaker, hurled himself on the couch, picked up the remote, and turned on the sports channel, which was showing a league match. Two unfamiliar teams with difficult to pronounce names played for him, while at the bottom of the screen current results of all kinds of other matches scrolled by. He slowly dug crumpled bets he made yesterday out of a pocket in his windbreaker to see if he might have hit on any of his wagers. Already on the first two pairings his selections turned out wrong, so he didn’t bother to check further. He resignedly crumpled up the paper and instead of putting it in the bin, which was too far from where he was sprawled on the couch, he stuck it back in his pocket. It was obvious that the chances of him someday hitting the sports lottery were as good as him managing to get some decent sex in the foreseeable future. The last time, with Nataša from the finance office, was too great a catastrophe to really count. He tired of the fifty-year-old, whose husband had left her for someone twenty years younger, after five minutes of sex without foreplay, with her screaming and calling endlessly on everyone from God to her mother.
He rolled out of bed as the ringing became louder – something that was not that simple on account of the extra kilos he had progressively gained over the past fifteen years. For a few seconds he couldn’t actually locate the phone. He finally found it between three empty cans that he had left on an end table by the television the night before. He could allow himself such a mess after Tanja and the child had left. While he was looking for the phone, he was seized with fear that something had happened to little Luka. Soon after his birth, Peter became acquainted with a whole variety of fearful nuances that he hadn’t known before. Sometimes he would have an irrational attack of fear that something would happen to the little one. Then he was afraid something was wrong with him, or that Tanja would be a victim in some way. He never ever talked with anyone about these fears, because he understood them to be weaknesses, which he didn’t want to reveal. But when it seemed to Peter that his phantom impending catastrophes were going too far, he was able to comfort himself: they were only the first signs of a midlife crisis, and he would have to get used to them.
When he finally turned up the phone and read Goran’s name on the screen, he first breathed out and then sat down on the couch. He sensed the fear slowly receding, and anger taking its place. He had known Goran his whole life, so to speak. They grew up together on the North Side, where their parents had moved right after it was built. Goran was one of those people that you can’t remember first noticing or meeting. Goran was simply always there. All of Peter’s childhood memories were full of him. He was at all the birthday parties and in the school pictures. From pimply kids with yellow kerchiefs in the first photograph they turned into teenagers in jeans and heads covered with hair gel. The last one was taken at graduation in the school cafeteria, outfitted like a kind of dance hall for the occasion. They gradually lost touch somewhere between their thirtieth and thirty-fifth birthdays, when Peter got married, something that ended ingloriously not long ago, while Goran continued his bachelor life as a manager in a small factory. During the first year after the wedding, when Luka was born, Goran might call twice a week at similar night-time hours from his outings to bars and, drunk on whiskey and sometimes high on cocaine, explain all that Peter was missing while he was folding nappies. When one night Tanja boiled over and told him never to phone at such an hour again, the calls stopped.
‘What, don’t you have a clock on your fucking Blackberry?’ he answered this time, clearly unhappy about the late hour.
‘Heh, sorry, man, I’m, hmm, it’ll sound strange…’
This time Goran’s voice was different, and there wasn’t a loud mix of blaring music, clinking glasses, and numerous casual conversations. This time there was complete, pure silence in the background.
‘I can’t quite figure out, I, screw it... how to… OK, I’ll just say it: I’m in a tight corner and can’t get out.’
‘Where? Fuck! I know that. You don’t have to call me at this hour to tell me that.’
‘I’m not screwed like that! I’m in a suitcase, briefcase, in a fucking Samsonite! The workers lost the plot, they ran up to the offices, started raising a stink, where’s the money, and so on. I thought they were going to lynch me. I shit myself I didn’t know what to do, so I hid in a suitcase.’
More than the absurdity of what Goran was telling him, Peter was surprised at how quickly he took on the bizarre story as true. Actually, the whole thing seemed somehow unbelievable, but he didn’t long doubt the truth that his childhood friend was calling from his polyurethane business suitcase. While he was listening to Goran’s story, he started seeing the outline of events that supposedly took place that afternoon in a small factory at the edge of town, and a faint smile started playing over his face.
That morning, Goran was bargaining on his office phone with one of his clients for him not to send payment for a job to the company’s account, because the voracious government was waiting for it along with perpetually dissatisfied employees and a lot of lenders, but to send it instead to the account that he and the director, Stepinšek had quietly opened at a Liechtenstein bank, when he heard the security guard yelling downstairs, followed by the approaching pounding of many pairs of heavy work boots doggedly coming up the stairs. Fortunately, they went past Goran’s office and to Stepinšek’s first.
Jože Stepinšek had been the director of the insulation materials company for more than twenty years. During that time, he had risen, by means of some clever moves, from ordinary socialist director of a state-owned enterprise all the way to majority owner. He hired Goran as an intern as soon as the latter graduated from the School of Economics, at the request of his father, who during his years as an inspector often did audits at the company. Of course, the audits always ended up in Stepinšek’s office over exceptional single malt, expertly served in exquisite glasses shaped like tulips. And of course, Goran’s father, his tongue and throat soothed by the rich Lagavulin taste, had no thought of entering any of the blatant violations in his report. Stepinšek immediately took a liking to Goran because he was young and acted by the book, and soon Goran became his main confidant. The first several years, it went really well for them. The company was getting subcontracts on all of the largest projects in the country, and like a rising river, money filled its account and spilled over its banks. It was naturally Stepinšek who enjoyed the greatest share of the good years’ fruits. First, he built a huge villa on the edge of Ljubljana and then vacation houses on the coast and in the mountains. But old Stepinšek also allotted a respectable share of the success, which he measured exclusively by the number of zeroes on any given invoice, to his young protégé. Goran bought himself a modest penthouse downtown, which he turned into the debauched bachelor’s pad of his wettest youthful dreams. He parked his Mercedes SL 350, a two-seat sports convertible that Peter jokingly called a ‘gaymobile’ in his reserved spot in the garage under the building. Goran regularly brought women home in it – from those obviously fascinated with his possessions to those Peter would have without hesitation bet half his pay that they couldn’t have been taken with such empty invitations, and that they were after something completely different. The latter kept disappointing him when the next day Goran would report all the details of the evening, about every intimate corner of their bodies, every loud gasp, and the dirty words they let out as they neared climax.
After some weighty words from the rebellious workers, Stepinšek, genuinely enraged, raised his voice threateningly, convinced that the world outside his stylishly appointed office was still the same as he saw it when he came in that morning. Neither at that moment did Goran think too much of the commotion in the hall. He assumed that old man Stepinšek would handle the ingrates, say a few powerful words about loyalty, and chase them back to work. Up until now, the men in blue smocks and overalls would always return each to his own machine, turn them on without a word, and continue where they had left off – not satisfied, that is, but reconciled to the facts as laid out in