“On Friday morning, I was woken up by a phone call. When I picked up the receiver, I heard an unfamiliar male voice calling me by my first name and patronymic—and I instantly understood that all my plans for the coming weekend had gone down the drain. The caller clearly didn’t know that for private detective Tatyana Ivanova, assuming she isn’t occupied with an investigation, the morning starts a bit later.
‘Hope I didn’t bother you with my call?’ my extremely tactful interlocutor asked right away.
Realizing that at ten in the morning it’s rude to be blunt with a potential client, and barely managing to open my eyes after sleep, I heroically lied:
‘No. Of course not.’
This was followed by a series of stock phrases like ‘I was recommended you’ and ‘people spoke about you as a professional in your field’… While the stranger was talking, I managed to accept the thought that I wouldn’t get any rest this weekend—but what could I do, that’s my job. I could, of course, refuse the meeting by inventing a thousand reasons—for example, saying I was leaving the city urgently and right now I was packing my bags. But all of that occurred to me later; at that moment I had not a single suitable thought. Besides, it turned out my new acquaintance wasn’t just very polite—he also knew how to intrigue the person he was speaking to. ‘My offer will seem to you extremely interesting,’ he said in the end, ‘and you’ve never had cases like this before.’ I skeptically hummed, but agreed to meet.”