Pig: A Thriller Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside the dungeon of his own head. Wouldn't have had to fight.
    She'd considered the question. Carefully. "About half," she finally said, enjoying a sound he didn't make often enough. A laugh.
     

     
     
    "Maybe you're glad he's here," Pig accused. "Glad he's sick."
    "What are you saying?" Magda asked.
                  "Your boyfriend. The rich Yankee. Snowball. Makes five times what I do. Twenty. A fucking Documents Clerk ! With investments. Stocks, maybe. They know about such things there. Insurance. I know. He could be worth a lot to you dead. You’re as lucky as a girl with big tits. "
    Canadian, not Yankee, thought Magda, knowing immediately Snow wouldn't care. Being Canadian, to him, was a curse, rather than a statement of who he was.
    "God brought me Sneg ," she said instead, using the Russian word for Snow . "How could I give him up?"
    "Sure, God brought him and now you'd like to give him back, eh? But God won't take him will he? We got to him in time."
     

     
    "You know who you are," Snow had once told Magda when she asked him what he liked about being in Russia. He hadn’t been sure if he had a soul. If he did, he shouldn’t have felt empty most of the time. He had the sense of a monk, a man who was happiest without responsibilities and alone.
    "You've got your history, a sense of place. But me? What have I got? I'm a Canadian. Just anger. Anger at realizing that I have no history; no past or identity, just two cans of maple syrup, some beavers, and a Mountie with mouse ears.   We’re the only people in the world who dream of being Clark Kent instead of Superman, the vichyssoise of nations -- cold , half-French and difficult to stir. We don’t believe in History in Canada. Here, you don’t believe in anything but History . I like that.”
     
                 
                 
    In 1991, hard-line Communists had attempted a coup against the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. It failed. Long time Communist-cum-populist rebel Boris Yeltsin led the resistance to the coup and became the first Russian President, dissolving the Soviet Union and pledging to implement a market economy.
    The Communist laws had been removed from the books so recently you could still see eraser crumbs on the page s . In 1995, a Presidential Decree ordered that State ownership of the oil producing facility in Noyabrsk, a refinery in Omsk and the related exploration and distribution companies be privatized. Every citizen was given a voucher entitling them to a share in the new entity. The problem was, having never known any life but Communism, very few of them understood exactly what that was. The concept of private ownership of industry and shares in it – like being a teetotaller -- was a foreign concept to them.
    The voucher itself didn’t look like much, a simple piece of paper with faded ink, embossed gold and a registration number. It looked more like a lottery ticket than a share. And that was how people treated it. “If the state is giving it away, it can’t be worth much,” most thought. During the depression and rampant inflation that followed the fall of Communism, people would sell them for next to nothing. Vouchers could be sold for cash, invested in an enterprise of the holder’s choice or put in an investment fund. Two of Yeltsin’s financial advisers started up a fourth market, trading vouchers for vodka, usually at the rate of three vouchers for one bottle. A year later, they used the vouchers to take the company private again and became instant billionaires. This was who Pig worked for. Omsk Bacon, once part of the enterprise, was sold and Pig came to the run the Camp with a group of camp followers who enforced his rule, the oprichnina, Pig’s modern-day version of Ivan the Terrible’s secret police.
     
                 
                 
    In 1995, shortly after the fall of Communism, P orfiry Makahonic (his friends – those that weren’t in the hospital or