Hotel Moscow (23 page)

The militiaman pointed at the newly made hole in the street. “
Bombe.
Kill America. Stupid bitch.”

Brooke’s body shook. The trembling underscored the pain in her mouth. She turned and ran, powered by primal panic, stumbling over debris, until her feet pounded flat pavement and the wind blew in her face. She didn’t stop until she reached the subway. Inside the entrance she hesitated. Should she wait for Svetlana here, on top, or go down to the platform?

The adrenaline rush sent her down. Weak-kneed, she sank onto the first bench on the platform. She pulled a square of toilet paper from her purse and spat dust into it, then reached for a stick of cinnamon-flavored gum, her shaking hands barely able to unwrap the paper. When she slipped the gum into her mouth, the cinnamon stung her tongue, but numbed the throbbing. Chewing was too painful, so Brooke sucked on the gum to produce saliva. A minute later, the pain refocused as a sharp ice pick.

Setting the bag in her lap and her purse atop it, she waited. Now she felt her knees burning from scrapes beneath her pants,
although the gabardine hadn’t torn. Her neck, clammy with sweat, itched where pebbles had left small cuts. She tore open the wrapping of a Wet-Nap and cleaned herself as best as she could. Brownish-red stains appeared on the napkin after she dabbed her neck around the chain holding her Star of David.

She touched the gold amulet. She had never given it magic powers, but right now she could believe it had saved her life. She brought it to her lips to kiss it. A few more steps and that unattached leg would have been hers. It could be her dead body being hoisted on a stretcher. Poor, poor boy. She fought back a wave of tears.

Stupid bitch indeed. Why hadn’t it occurred to her, when she was ordered to take this time off, that she should go to the Caribbean and spend them on a beach, stretching out in the sun and digging her toes in the warm sand?

Soldiers lurked on the opposite platform, and Brooke felt a momentary relief when a train slowed down and blocked them from her view. But the train did not stop. Brooke took a few deep breaths, trying to regain her faculties. Where was Svetlana? She looked around. The station was grand, with high, vaulted ceilings, the mahogany paneling punctuated by heroic bronze sculptures. From here, the shelling was barely audible.

A whiff of cigarette smoke—entirely different from gunpowder—reached her nostrils. Brooke turned her head and saw a lone soldier leaning against a column, his eyes narrowed on her. Between two farther columns framing a side corridor, a group of soldiers materialized, sending her long glances. What if they asked to see her passport?

A train pulled in and came to a stop. Brooke remained seated
as passengers got off. The group of soldiers turned their attention to checking the new arrivals’ documents. But the lone soldier’s stare pierced the side of Brooke’s head. She turned and saw him detaching himself from the column and sauntering toward her.

A bell rang. The train’s doors huffed a pneumatic sound and began closing. Brooke jumped to her feet and sprinted inside just before the doors shut. Wherever this train was headed was surely preferable to staying put.

Twenty minutes later, when no passengers got on the train, she guessed that she was far enough from the city center. She exited the subway to an uncanny silence. The cannons were indeed far, replaced by a thumping headache. She hailed a passing car, and when it stopped, presented the driver with a ten-dollar bill and the Cyrillic note with Olga’s address at the Institute for Social Research.

All she wanted was to get rid of the files and fly back home.

S
VETLANA CHIDED HERSELF.
How had she failed to think about the eavesdropping center, a holdover from the K.G.B. reign? Since receiving Dr. Rozanova’s phone call early in the morning, she had been in a state of confusion. She had hoped the respected sociologist would release her from the dangerous scheme she had concocted with Brooke. Instead, Dr. Rozanova broke into the double-speak that had been used during Soviet days. “Today is
not
a good day to tackle a new project,” she said, meaning the exact opposite. “Government offices are closed. No one wants to look at documents when so much is going on. Many downtown metro stations are closed; the trains just pass through them without stopping. I don’t know why Smolenskaya station is open.”

“No one can move about—”

“Don’t you think it’s a good thing roadblocks have been erected everywhere to prevent more help from reaching the rebels?” Dr. Rozanova went on in her double-speak.

Svetlana had leaned against the wall. If she refused, her life would remain unchanged. Yes, she had hated it when all her tomorrows looked the same as her yesterdays, but right now sameness seemed comforting. Jenny’s idea “to go for it” meant little now that the riots had spread. And what would happen to Natasha if something befell her mother? She glanced through the open door at her daughter, sleeping next to Jenny’s precious new doll. It was so large that it was unclear who was cuddling whom.

In the kitchen, Svetlana rushed through the preparations of
mannaya kasha,
the breakfast semolina gruel for Natasha. Her thoughts continued to swirl. Could there be a worse fate than to believe in nothing and aspire to nothing? Her life, always devoid of possibilities, had been presented with a challenge, with hope. She could be submissively pathetic like she’d always been, or daring like Brooke and Jenny.

She brought the pot into the room and placed it on the table, folding an old towel over it to keep the breakfast warm. She pulled her simple floral dress over her woolen undershirt. The dress was too summery for the cold fall weather, but she had nothing else presentable that the Americans hadn’t seen. She kissed the sleeping Natasha’s forehead, grabbed her blue cardigan, and tiptoed out again.

In the street, she stopped beside the aging oak, her heart pounding. If this was how it felt to be brave, it was the same as feeling terrified. Still, there was a difference: Her center, where forlornness and dejection had resided, had turned into a fist.

Now, in the corridor of the Economic Authority, her mission not half accomplished, she faced this new obstacle. Katerina had told her the eavesdropping center still operated twenty-four
hours a day to cover all phone conversations of the Economic Authority’s guests. Katerina had suggested that Svetlana could use her language skills for a job there, but the thought of losing her soul in the process of spying was more than Svetlana could stomach. At least at her factory her comrades believed in her, looked up to her with hope.

In the elevator, she jabbed the button for the top floor, the one marked “off-limits.” A minute later, fighting nausea, she struggled to assume an authoritative air. Without knocking first, she pushed open the door and gasped at the sight of the large room stretching out before her. All but three of its many cubicles were unmanned. Three men wearing headsets faced panels of wires, plugs, and flickering yellow lights. One of them, a man in his fifties with thinning blond hair and a face ruddy with broken capillaries, raised his head, and Svetlana realized how foolish she had been not to think this whole thing through. She had no clue how the operation ran. How could the Economic Authority wire itself to all of Moscow? Didn’t the phone company control the switches?

The realization hit Svetlana like a slap of wet canvas: The Economic Authority didn’t need to be wired to all of Moscow—just to places where its guests stayed. Such as Hotel Moscow. “I’m here to check on the status of Sidorov’s requests,” she blurted.

“We’re doing as instructed.” The man adjusted his earphones, as though listening to something requiring his attention.

“Well, what’s the status?”

“Who’s asking?”

Svetlana swallowed hard. Giving her name would be like sticking her head in the oven and turning on the gas. “Zoya
Samoilva,” she replied. Her witch of a neighbor deserved this. She held her breath. He might ask her to identify herself with her internal passport.

“You’re working with Aleksandr Kusnetsov?” he asked.

Aleksandr? What did he have to do with anything?
“Absolutely,” she exclaimed.

“Listening in on Miss Fielding’s phone has been no problem all along. We wired Dr. Rozanova’s home this morning.”

Svetlana’s heart skipped. He could have picked up the sociologist’s call to her apartment instructing her to come here! And, furthermore, if Sidorov could wire whomever he wished at such short notice, his
po blatu
at the phone company must be extraordinarily strong. “At what time this morning was Dr. Rozanova’s line wired?” she asked.

“Before eight. Our men had to break curfew to be out early. Tell your boss that.”

She managed to nod. “I’m sure he’ll remember the favor.” For all she knew, Sidorov had learned of her own part in the investigation. Something heaved into Svetlana’s throat, then receded back into her stomach. She clamped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled through her fingers.

“Pregnant?” He leered and pointed. “Bathroom’s on the left.”

She vomited into a filthy sink, and retched again. But there was no time to waste; she must escape now. She washed her face and rinsed her mouth in a hurry. Her terror must have coagulated her blood, because an icy calm seized her. She would get Brooke where she had left her—and run as far as Siberia, if needed.

While she waited for the elevator, the sour taste still clung to
her mouth. She decided to sacrifice one of her chocolate bars. Only one small bite, and then she would save the rest for Natasha.

But the chocolate was so good. It had been so long, she had forgotten the rich, sweet taste. She broke off a second section and placed it on her tongue. She put the rest in her bag, but soon opened it to bite one more piece. The end of the world was near; one chocolate bar would do no good.

The minutes it took to get back to the eleventh floor and down the hallway to Katerina’s office were among the longest in her life. Inside Katerina’s office, dangling leaves swayed as she burst into the room. But in the silence of the greenhouse, there was not one soul. Brooke was gone.

T
HE CAR PULLED
up in front of a large office building. The bright light of the sunny day pierced Brooke’s eyes as she looked up. “Is this it?” she asked the driver, knowing he understood not a word.

The driver examined the note Svetlana had written, nodded vigorously, and handed it back to Brooke.

Apprehensive, she scanned the area. The single office building sat amid behemoth residential complexes, which stood on vast lots strewn with puddles and overgrown with dry weeds. Even the occasional poplar trees along the sidewalk were scraggly looking, dwarfed by the open space. Past the wide but desolate four-lane road, produce stands were almost bare, and there were no shoppers. In this quiet, forgotten neighborhood, the battle raging downtown seemed as improbable as a passing parade of jesters and flowered floats. Brooke scanned again the all-concrete office building and the large sign in Cyrillic on
top. She recognized the four initials for the Institute of Social Research from the translated sheet announcing the symposium scheduled for the next day, Tuesday.

Her tongue throbbed, her temples pounded, her joints ached, and a muscle in her back spasmed. Glancing at her watch, she was surprised that it was only nine-thirty in the morning. She pushed herself out of the car, eager to see Olga. Hopefully Svetlana was somewhere safe.

A main entrance to the building was permanently boarded, but a single side door led into a narrow, concrete passage like a man-high foxhole. “The better to check you with, my dear,” Brooke mumbled, and realized that her swollen tongue moved with difficulty. She watched the brick walls on either side of her as if any moment something might jump at her. She watched them so closely that she almost tripped over a metal bar fixed across the bottom, an inch above the floor. In the United States, consumers—people—had basic rights to safety. Tort law saw to it, she thought.

A narrow door at the end opened onto a modern, spacious lobby with a brown marble floor. A mosaic mural glorifying the working proletariat stretched across the length of the vast wall: Under a canopy of clear skies, workers toiled in fields, factories, mines, and ports—robust and healthy, smiling and proud.

A diminutive man sat in a booth set high and protected by iron bars, his face as dark and grooved as a walnut. He looked at Brooke’s passport, turned it up and down and over, and leafed through the pages, mumbling with astonishment, “America, America, America,” then waved her in.

As in the Economic Authority building, the fourteenth floor was devoid of business activity. Brooke found the bathroom by the stench and splashed water on her face and neck. She didn’t trust the water to rinse her mouth even though her tongue throbbed. Outside the bathroom again, she dried her cheeks and neck with the edge of her shirt, powdered her face, and combed her hair.

One office door along the hallway was open, daylight streaming into the corridor. Cautiously, Brooke peeked inside. Olga stood facing the large window. She didn’t turn when Brooke entered, but waved her in with her hand.

Brooke came up behind her. Olga’s finger pointed at a spot in the distance where the city outline met the blue, indifferent sky. A gray feather of smoke burped upward in slow motion. With no wind to diffuse it, it curved gently into the sky and hung there for a while before melting away. Was that what neighbors of concentration camps had seen coming out of the incinerators? Had it seemed similarly unreal?

“They’re shelling our parliament.” Olga’s raspy voice was choked. When she finally turned toward Brooke, there were tears in her eyes. She dropped into the chair by the window. “Enough! The price is too high.”

Brooke stepped closer and squeezed Olga’s shoulder.

“Who could have imagined it?” Olga turned to Brooke. “I didn’t realize until I saw this how dangerous it was for you to go downtown. I’m so sorry. You hear about it on the radio, you see on TV, but you just don’t know how bad it is. Are you all right?”

“More or less, but I’ve lost Svetlana.”

“You’re speaking funny.”

“I bit my tongue badly. May I have some boiled water? I need to take a Tylenol.”

Olga poured water from a jug, and Brooke downed two pills while watching the White House blacken on the far horizon as if in a silent movie. After the events of the last hour, she finally felt safe.

“Sit down. We’ll have tea,” Olga said.

Brooke sank into the faded green chair, surprisingly comfortable in spite of its uneven springs. While Olga busied herself in front of a white wooden chest, Brooke closed her eyes. She opened them a few minutes later to see the Russian filling china cups from the hissing samovar. Olga laid out the tea cups on a small table covered with lace.

“Our group has brought a carton of disposable cups and plates for tomorrow’s symposium—if it takes place,” Brooke said, speaking slowly so her speech wouldn’t come out garbled. No need to mention again that if the symposium held, she might not be there if the airport opened. “I helped Amanda box up all the tea and coffee you’ll need, plus a lot of cakes and cookies.”

Olga handed her a cup. “A gift well appreciated, but we will not insult our guests by serving in plastic dishes. China is the only way.”

“Aren’t you expecting a hundred people? Do you have enough porcelain cups? And who’ll wash everything?”

“The employees will donate theirs. Then we’ll clean up. No problem.” Olga lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and tapped the gray wisps from its tip into an ashtray. She sucked again, and her lungs responded with a long, violent cough. When she had
recovered, she dabbed her bloodshot eyes with an embroidered muslin handkerchief.

“I can’t help but comment that you should quit smoking,” Brooke said.

Olga shrugged. With careful movements, she unwrapped a sugar cube, quartered it with her teeth, picked up a piece and motioned to Brooke to pick one too. Olga placed hers between her front teeth and, with pursed lips, sucked in a dainty sip from her cup. “That’s the best way to drink tea.” Her eyelids drooped as steam from her cup rose to her nostrils.

“That’s how my mother still drinks her tea,” Brooke said, dropping her sugar into the cup. She stirred it. “She also quarters the sugar cube and rations it.” Savoring the moment was one tiny pleasure her mother permitted herself.

For a while, neither spoke. Exhausted, Brooke brought the tea to her lips, careful not to aggravate the pain in her tongue. She closed her eyes. Scenes of her life in New York flashed in her head: the ballet performances, Broadway shows, and gala concerts to which she treated clients; the invitations to opulent black-tie charity events that made the gossip columns. With all the comforts, had she or her clients ever enjoyed their tea the way Olga did?

Olga cleared her throat. Brooke peeked again at the horizon of downtown buildings. The burning White House’s center now appeared like a gap between twin teeth. Brooke’s near-death experience and its rush of adrenaline knitted itself into her body, and images of the boy writhing in the crater, his leg torn off, flashed in her head. But the worst was behind her now. Her
tongue would heal, and a shower and an afternoon nap would revive her. But the boy, if he lived, would be crippled.

“You’re so certain people will show up for the symposium tomorrow,” Brooke said. “How will they get here? What if the fighting escalates?”

“They’re coming from all over Russia. Many are already here. Others have been traveling for days.”

“Are the trains running in all this chaos?”

“The fighting, as you see, is only in Moscow.” Olga glanced at the White House and back. “Our women are so eager to meet American businesswomen; they can hardly believe it’s happening. It’s better than meeting our Olympian stars.”

If history hadn’t intervened, this American would be gone. Olga didn’t say it, but the knowledge hovered between them like miasma.

“Let’s get to work,” Brooke said.

Olga locked the door and cleared her desk. A large black fly hurled itself against the window, bounced back, and circled the room only to hurl itself again against the glass.

Brooke yawned and scanned the ceiling. The paint was yellow and chipped, and the bare fluorescent lights glared.

“My office is not bugged,” Olga said, but she nevertheless unplugged the phone and her computer. Her hand swept toward the ceiling. “If bugs had been put in, it would have left marks in the plaster.”

Brooke removed the stack of files from the vinyl bag and placed them on the desk. “I hope you can make heads or tails of this.” She rifled through a file. It was neatly partitioned with col
ored dividers labeled in Cyrillic and jammed with documents. “A lot of papers for such a new institution,” she remarked.

Olga picked up another file. “The documents are organized chronologically within each category: Permits, Production, Purchasing, Orders, Shipments, Expenses.” She leafed through the pages. “Lots of figures.” She pushed it across the desk. “Your turn. Our numerals are the same as your Arabic ones.”

Brooke peered at the file. Untangling a financial scheme required a forensic accountant; she had no experience investigating fraud, but she knew a lot more about accounting than Olga did. She sighed and pointed to the title of the thinnest file. “What does this say?”

“Factory number three hundred seventy-six. Manufactures soap and toothpaste.”

“How many brands?”

Olga crinkled her forehead. “Brands?”

“How many different products in each line?”

“Just those two. Toothpaste and soap.”

“No different types of each, such as toothpaste for children, toothpaste in large tubes and small tubes, in different flavors? Different names of toothpaste?”

“Just toothpaste, and the soap is a large, big cube.” Olga’s hands shaped themselves around an imaginary solid block. “Russian soap. Doesn’t smell good, but we use it to wash everything: clothes, hair, dishes.” She laughed. “Our national soap.”

“The soap may be rough, but it sounds like it’s a leading brand. That’s huge,” Brooke said. “Okay. Let’s look first for the privatization certificate. When were the ownership shares issued, and to whom?”

Olga looked at the papers. “In January 1992, with privatization, ownership vouchers were distributed to each of the four hundred employees.”

Olga went over the file page by page, briefly translating each. The fly left the window, circling and buzzing around their heads. Brooke threw her scarf over it, caught it, and then opened the door to the corridor to let it free.

Olga raised her head. “Why didn’t you kill it?”

“It’s harmless. Another one of God’s creatures, don’t you think?”

Olga chuckled. “No wonder Americans fight for human rights. You spare even the life of a fly.”

“Probably my Jewish upbringing.” Brooke resettled in her chair and yawned again. “Go on.” The length of each form and the number of copies filed with various government agencies created a staggering amount of paperwork, much of it redundant.

“The Economic Authority arranged to open a bank account and also guaranteed the bank loans for the initial operating costs,” Olga explained haltingly as she gathered the facts under Brooke’s probing. “Then a request was filed to switch banks. Let me see. It was signed by the head of the Finance Division at the Economic Authority.”

“Like in the Gorbachevskaya Street Factory and Vera’s. We’re moving along.” Brooke craned her neck above the file. “Let’s look for the ledger. It should have two to four columns of figures.” But there was no page with columns. No accounting practices, Western or other. “Hmmm,” Brooke said. “Since the factory has been doing business with one bank or another, there should be some
sort of a bank statement. A monthly or a quarterly list of transactions. Something.”

Olga shook her head as she flipped through a stack of yellow slips barely larger than theater tickets.

“What about those?” Brooke asked.

“Copies of transactions. Bank deposits and withdrawals.”

“I’ll have to reconstruct the financial history,” Brooke said. Olga’s cigarette smoke didn’t help her headache, but Olga seemed to need it like air. On a lined sheet of paper, Brooke drew up columns for a hypothetical ledger and began to fill it in. “Dictate for me each bank deposit—from sales, from loans—and each withdrawal. Start with the dates.”

Soon, her reconstructed ledger began to tell a story. Each deposit from a sale was followed by a cash withdrawal of the same amount, leaving no operational cash flow. The salaries that had been paid at the early stage of privatization had stopped months ago, and no other bills had been paid either.

Brooke tapped her pencil. “How does the factory buy raw materials? And what about gas and electricity? They can’t keep running for so long without paying their electric bills.”

“This may answer your question.” Olga held up a three-page form. “This is a request the factory has filed, asking for the Economic Authority’s permission to sell parcels of ownership certificates. The employees—now the owners—want to sell their shares. It says here that since the venture has failed to manage itself—”

“Failed? What’s the factory’s output? Let’s go back to the previous documents. Can you find the output in ’91, when the factory was still government owned?”

After a short review of the file, Olga dictated the 1991 number of tons shipped for each of the two products: twenty million tons of soap and seven million tons of toothpaste.

“It’s safe to assume that production would show a marked upturn after privatization,” Brooke explained. “That’s the case when workers have a new incentive to succeed as owners.” She examined her ledger, then waved it. “We already totaled the purchase orders in 1992. We can assume this was the minimal output because additional inventory may have been stored rather than shipped.” She pointed to the next page. “You see? In 1992 they almost doubled the factory’s output from 1991.”

“Meaning what?”

“The factory did well—is doing well and producing more. No failure here, only financial shenanigans. More important, now with the government out of the picture, owners of a private venture shouldn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to sell their shares. And regardless, there is no need to; their factory should be making a profit.”