The Great Glass Sea (48 page)

Unless, Yarik realized, the difference in weight between cartridges filled only with powder and those with lead wouldn’t be enough for him to feel it.

“It means that he or his men can do anything, to anyone, and all he has to do is show that card and the police will nod and bow and back away. Now
that
,” Bazarov said, “cost him more than my watch.” With his chin, Bazarov indicated Yarik’s hand full of bullets. “You bringing those to the meeting like that?” He grinned. “That’s what I call a power handshake.”

Yarik opened the chest pocket of his shirt and spilled the bullets in. When he looked back up at Bazarov, the man’s smile was gone.

“You think I’d give you dummies?” Bazarov said.

“No,” Yarik told him.

“Yes you do.” He reached into the seatback drawer, took out the box, handed it to Yarik. “Do you know what those are?”

“I’m sorry—”

“Stress relievers. Hollow tips. They explode on impact. These people here today, they’re not people you want to put a little hole in. If you shoot them in the arm, you better take it off.” Bazarov reached out and patted Yarik’s shoulder. “See?” he said. “A little less reason to worry.”

Yarik nodded. He stared ahead at the traffic giving way before them. The driver was cutting things so close that any second one of the side mirrors would burst, come crashing up against the window. “These people,” he asked, “they’re members of the board?”

“The board?” Bazarov shook his head. “No, no. These, my trusty Cossack, are the people who make the decisions that the members of the board pretend to make. These are the people who have the money, who own the businesses that are the partners in the Consortium. Which is why they care about the Oranzheria. Which is why they’re here. Because for these people, Yaroslav Lvovich, business is their life. Life
is
business. And sometimes in life we have to make decisions in private, decisions that would be difficult for people in public—say, members of a board—to make.”

Each time the driver accelerated, Yarik could feel the hard lumps of the bullets push a little against his skin. “What about me?” he asked.

“You?”

“What do they expect me to do?”

“They don’t expect you to do anything. They don’t even know you’re coming. That’s why you’re here. That’s why—” He put his hand on his chest, then slipped it inside his suit jacket, excused himself, took out a phone.

Yarik was glad to look out the window for a while. He hadn’t been to Moscow since he and Dima were small, and it seemed a wholly different city now. The golden domes still shone against the slate gray sky, the viridescent rooftops slanting sharply down from needle tops of towers, the old buildings with their white filigree and fading pastel facades, the slabs of pale concrete that smothered swaths of the city, rows of windows amassed like the battalions that had shaken Red Square on May Day parades. There was even Red Square, the clifflike rufous brick, the gold tower clock, the crimson stars on the spires. But across from it was a blurred plastic banner stretched long as the Kremlin’s walls, high as the crenellations, a garish sales pitch beside the ancient stones. Billboards had shot up everywhere, faces florid with maquillage, soft-lit cars with their chrome agleam, frenetic video screens stamped into the still sky. To the city’s south skyscrapers loomed, gleaming glass and steel in place of Stalin’s ornate wedding cakes. Passing parks, he glimpsed flashes of eye-level billboards lining the paths, people careening by them on roller blades, skateboards, in suits and ties and flesh-flashing skirts, so many, so much time and money, as if somehow in the short span from his childhood to now Moscow had molted all it was—stolid, serious, stern—and wriggled out into a slick new sheen of everything opposite.

They were racing along the river’s southern bank, down a narrow street fishboned with vehicles driven onto the curb and left, when Tolya slowed, said, “Hold on, we’re parking,” and slammed onto the sidewalk, too. The SUV pulled up next to them, rolled its wide tires over the curb. Its doors slapped open, spilled men: suits, sunglasses, heads swiveling as they hit the ground. One went into the street, another came close beside the sedan, the other two made their way forward with hands free at their sides and cautious lifts of their chins, as if acknowledging a greeting from someone ahead. Yarik tried to see, but as he leaned towards the window, a finger tapped his shoulder. He jerked around.

Bazarov’s eyes seemed grayer than Yarik remembered them, no tinge of color at all. But they were crinkling at the corners.

“Is this where we meet?” Yarik asked him.

The man only motioned for him to come close. “Look.” Bazarov pointed. In the middle of the river stood the tallest statue Yarik had ever seen, a tower built out of some fable dream—swells of a metal sea lifting a life-size galleon dwarfed by a titan astride its deck, feet planted, chest out, one hand gripping a giant captain’s wheel, the other thrusting forth a scroll the size of the car they sat in—and Yarik asked, “Are the others here already?”

“I think he looks a little like me.” Bazarov’s laugh was short and tight. “The hair,” he said, brushing his own back with his hand. There was something awkward in the movement. Then an SUV was pulling in front of their view; it rocked onto the curb across the street, followed by another, followed by a sedan.

“It was meant to be Christopher Columbus,” Bazarov told Yarik. “Meant to stand in some country over there. Mexico? Canada? Maybe even America.” The car doors burst open. “But they thought it was too ugly.” The same stiff laugh. The same kinds of men in the same kinds of suits spilling out of the cars. “So we took it. Called it Peter the Great. Got it for a steal.”

The wind came up off the river, blew open the men’s coats; Yarik could see the butts of their guns.

“We Russians”—Bazarov tapped his temple—“have always had a head for business.” He looked at Yarik, their faces close. Slowly, he reached out, poked a finger at Yarik’s chest, jiggled the bullets in his pocket. They clinked around.

“I like to hear your heart,” Bazarov said, and this time his smile seemed real. “But maybe it’s not the best place to keep bullets.” Spreading his fingers on Yarik’s chest, he puffed his lips into a soft “Boom.”

One by one, his fingers shaking, Yarik took the bullets out. And when he had them in his hand again, Bazarov opened the seatback drawer, motioned for him to dump them in. While he did, the man slid his own pistol into a holster beneath his arm. Peeling Yarik’s fingers off the Nagant’s handle, he reached behind Yarik, his arms slipping inside Yarik’s jacket, pressing against his sides, and wedged the revolver into the pants’ waist at Yarik’s back.

“It’s good manners,” Bazarov said, “to keep your weapons out of sight.” His hands patted Yarik’s sides. And, for a moment, held on. “It’s OK to be scared,” he said. “We’re all scared, all the time, we bad people.” He smiled, and it was real, and it was also tight and thin. “Maybe Chernitsky was right. Being bad is what makes us successful in life. But being scared is what keeps us living.” He patted Yarik’s sides once more, then drew his hands away, put on his sunglasses, and reached for the door. “Or not,” he said, and stepped out.

They met in the sculpture park behind the New Tretyakov, the museum’s gray marble even more ashen in the rain, the square-edged columns and stark walls blurry behind the stockade of black iron spikes that enclosed the park. Beyond the fence, Moscow roared and pounded. Inside, bare-branched birch trees rattled at the rain, dark firs dripped a drumbeat on the cobblestones, the grass was smothered in old leaves murmuring. All throughout the park, the statues stood in their stillness. Once loomed above city squares, once peered down at thundering parades, once glowered over an entire empire, now pastured here: Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev, Stalin, Lenin; it was a rest home for giants brought low, stone idols toppled, bronze bodies hauled off in ropes.

The park had been cleared out, sealed off. There were just the old statues and those the country’s new sculptors had made—figures that seemed cast out of the very emotions the old Soviet ones refused to show—and, walking between them all, in dark suits and overcoats swishing beneath black umbrellas, the businessmen.

In his secondhand suit and stained blue parka, Yarik felt sure he would draw everyone’s eyes, but when he chanced a look he found no one seemed to notice him at all. For most of the meeting they barely glanced his way, barely seemed to know that he was there. They had all converged upon an open-sided tent set up between two enourmous sculptures: on one side a red CCCP-stamped banner unfurled beneath two huge steel globes, on the other a mesh of rusted rebar holding hundreds of stone severed heads. Between them, beneath the tent, the men sat at a table. Around the sides, their guards stood out of the rain, a wall of black suits shaking out umbrellas.

Yarik stood with them. They didn’t talk to him. Every now and then a couple leaned together in whispered conversation, but mostly they just watched—their bosses, each other—and the rain drummed and dripped, and Yarik strained to hear what the men in the middle said. What little he could make out he mostly didn’t understand—convertible preferreds and xenocurencies and premoney valuation—but he put together that they were talking about the collapse, the strike. He had not known there were plans for Oranzherias in other cities, that in some places glass had already gone up: Syktyvkar at the edge of the Urals, Salekhard on the Gulf of Ob, Nizhnevartovsk in the Siberian lowlands, Lensk way over towards the Asian Coast—all across the country, all built by the Consortium, all funded by the men who were here. They talked of what they’d been able to keep out of the papers, off TV, what had leaked through on radios or computer screens or just by word of mouth. They spoke of foreign investors growing anxious, funds curtailed, any expansion of the original Oranzheria put on hold until Petroplavilsk was brought back under control. Most of it was said to Bazarov, or at him, or between the others about him, and he leaned into it all, gesturing across the table, running his hands through his hair, his laugh loud and his voice loud and everything about him tight. To Yarik, it all seemed beyond his ken—a world of such a different scale that the markings he lived by had no bearing—and he had begun to wonder if the meeting would end and Bazarov would walk him back to the car and put him back on the plane and return him to his life at home as if from a dream, had begun to think he’d been brought soley to make him see how small his dreams were—his hopes, his plans—when he heard his name.

No, they were speaking of his brother. Bazarov turned in his seat and let his face wilt—away from the others for a moment, the man’s eyelids drooped, his cheeks slacked, the weight of his chin seemed to pull apart his mouth—and then it all firmed up again and he thrust out a hand, beckoned Yarik
come
.

Now they were all looking at him. His legs felt as if they had forgotten how to walk. But they got him there. He stood just behind Bazarov, feeling the bulge at his back as if the stares of all the bodyguards behind him were pushing at the pistol, and not caring, because the stares of the men sitting at the table in front of him had gone right through and were pushing at his heart.

“This is Yaroslav Lvovich,” Bazarov told them, “Zhuvov’s brother.” He glanced at Yarik, winked. “His twin.”

“So?” one of the men said.

“So he’s also a manager on the north-northeast sector of the P-vilsk Oranzheria.”

“And?” one of the men said.

“Can he do anything?” another said.

“I don’t know,” Bazarov said.

“Why the hell did you bring him then?”

And Bazarov turned again to Yarik, raised his brow. “Can you do anything?” he asked. “About your brother? These gentlemen want to know if you can help us . . .”

“Get rid of him.”

Yarik wasn’t sure if they meant him or Dima, but he knew that, either way, he was not going to say anything. He was not going to move his hands, or his face, or anything, and he was not going to speak.

The rain pelted the tent. Something touched his shoulder. He looked down to see Bazarov’s hand. The man slid his arm behind Yarik’s back—Yarik felt the movement in the guards, their hands easing towards their own jacket flaps—and then Bazarov’s forearm was pressing the pistol into Yarik’s spine, the man’s hand around his waist. He gave Yarik a slight squeeze, left his hand resting there.

“Why did I bring him?” Bazarov said to the men at the table. “Because I wanted you to see his face. Because it’s the face of the man you’re talking about. A man. A human being. His brother. I brought him because you’re talking about killing—murdering: that, after all, is the word for it—his brother. Not some strange figure on a video. But this man’s twin. Look into his eyes. Those”—Bazarov’s free hand pointed at Yarik’s face—“are the eyes of the man you want to murder. I brought him because if you do what you’re talking about doing, I want those eyes to look forever on your souls.”

Through the rain, Yarik could just make out the hiss of the traffic along the wet roads. The men at the table were so still that the breeze blowing the smoke from their cigarettes seemed intrusive. On his hip, Yarik felt Bazarov’s finger twitch.

And then they were all laughing. Bazarov’s hand was gone from Yarik’s waist. The She Bear sat there beaming. His laugh was louder than all of theirs. The table shook with it, one man’s belly pressed against the edge, jerking it up and down, another laughing out his nostrils like a sneeze, some wiping their eyes, one flapping his cigarette back and forth before his face.