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whoever it is that Dante and successful IT managers ran into along their way.
    “So what happened to the telepathic rabbits in the story?” Ksyusha asks.
    “I don’t remember,” Olya replies. “I think they’ve all been eaten before the story even starts. Before anyone has even realized that they are telepaths.”
    “Bang-bang, aye-aye-aye, see my little rabbit die,” says Ksyusha, citing the old children’s song. And she knocks her cell phone over as if it has been hit by a hunter’s bullet.
    Olya smiles, and her lips cramp at the memory of two wolves glaring at each other from behind the trees in the dense forest of their joint business.
    “Listen, Ksyusha,” she says, “I need your help. Will you help me?”
    Ksyusha suddenly turns serious – a businesswoman, IT manager, senior editor in the news department of a popular online newspaper – she sets her thin elbows on the table and leans her head to one side, as if to say: I’m listening, come on Olya, tell me what’s bothering you.
    And Olya tells her.
    Three years ago, at the height of the investment boom, two major internet companies decided to invest in the shop that Olya managed. They bought it from the first owners, gave Olya her twenty-five percent, and divided up the rest between them. Two major companies? Actually just two investors, two men who had known each other since before the internet. Kostya and Grisha, Konstantin and Grigorii. Friends and competitors, rivals and comrades. For three years their furious skirmishes didn’t interfere with the business; it remained a joint interest, until this December when they quarreled big-time over dividing up the funds from the election campaign. And this morning Grigorii slammed the door of Olya’s office and shouted “I wouldn’t even shit in the same field.” The little online shop – a rather trivial business by Kostya’s and Grisha’s standards – turned out to be the little goat from that other children’s song that took it into its head to go wandering into Dante’s dark forest at just the wrong time. The situation was tragic in an entirely literal sense – Olya’s business was about to sing its farewell
goat song
and become a ritual sacrifice in a squabble between two former friends.
    She can repeat the old familiar move and bring in a big new investor to buy the business from Grisha and Kostya. There isn’t anyone like that in the Russian internet – but Olya knows who she could go to. If, that is, she can really take the risk of going to him – because Olya doesn’t like this man. He’s an outsider, someone from a different and dangerous world, from offline, ordinary business, business that makes Kostya’s and Grisha’s wild, remote forest look like a tidy English park.
    Olya explains all of this to Ksyusha now, explains it carefully, trying to avoid any allusions to Dante, jokes about the little gray goat and goat song – because she’s not sure that Ksyusha knows about scapegoats, Dionysian sacrifices and the birth of tragedy out of the spirit of music. After all, Ksyusha didn’t graduate from the history faculty in Petersburg; immediately after school she set out like an emancipated Little Red Riding Hood along the winding path to a place where there had never been any granny, but there was at least some faint hope of earning your own piece of bread and butter.
    As Olya tells her story, Ksyusha watches the way she waves her hand, and the way the bracelet on her wrist shimmers. Large dark stones, as dark as Olya’s eyes. Olya waves her hand beautifully, she draws beautifully on her long cigarette holder, she talks beautifully and even sighs beautifully. If Ksyusha could fall in love with a woman, she would definitely fall in love with Olya. You might say she has already fallen in love: at the negotiations three years earlier she said “Wow!” to herself the moment she saw this tall woman with the well-groomed hands, short light-tinted hair and deep, dark eyes. They