At that the young woman’s face contorted as if she had been offered a handful of cockroaches to eat. She grabbed her handbag and walked over to the check-in desk without even saying goodbye.

The man shrugged. He picked up his phone and raised it to his ear—and it rang immediately.

“Gorodetsky . . . Completely? No, third-level won’t do at all. A full charter flight to Barcelona. You can accept it as second-level . . . Can’t you?”

He paused for a while, then said: “Then one seventh-level for me. No, that’s wrong. The boy has a First- or Second-Level gift of clairvoyance. The Dark Ones will dig their heels in . . . A single fifth-level intervention—a change in the fate of one human and one Other . . . All right, put it down to me.”

He stood up, leaving his unfinished mug of beer on the table, and set off towards the check-in desk, where the fat boy was standing in the queue beside his mother with a stony look on his face, shifting nervously from one foot to the other.

The man walked straight past the checkpoint (for some reason no one even tried to stop him) and approached the woman. He cleared his throat politely. Caught her eye. Nodded.

“Olga Yurievna . . . You forgot to turn off the iron when you were ironing Kesha’s shorts this morning . . .”

A look of panic appeared on the woman’s face.

“You can fly on the evening charter,” the man continued. “But right now you’d better go home.”

The woman tugged at her son’s hand and then went dashing towards the exit. But the boy, whom she suddenly seemed to have forgotten completely, gazed at the man wide-eyed.

“You want to ask who I am and why your mum believed me?” the man asked.

The boy’s eyes misted over as if he were looking inside himself, or at something far, far away on the outside—something in a place where well-brought-up children weren’t supposed to look (and where badly-brought-up adults shouldn’t look either, unless they really had to).

“You are Anton Gorodetsky, Higher White Magician,” said the boy. “You are Nadka’s father. Because of you . . . all of us . . .”

“Well?” the man asked keenly “Well, well?”

“Kesha!” the woman howled, suddenly remembering her son. The boy shuddered and the mist in his eyes dispersed. He said: “Only I don’t know what all that means . . . Thank you!”

“Because of me . . . all of you . . .” the man murmured pensively, watching as the woman and her child rushed along the glass wall of the terminal building towards the taxi rank. “Because of me . . . all of you will live lives of luxury . . . All of you are doomed. All of you have been bankrupted . . . All of you are, will, have been—what?”