13
NEFTCHILAR WAS BUILT AND DECORATED like a country house owned by an Azerbaijani lightbulb magnate who wanted to show off his wares. A stable door encircled with white forty-watt bulbs fronted the street, with the restaurant’s name spelled out in small but piercing hundred-watt blue, red, and green bulbs (the colors of the Azerbaijani flag) in Cyrillic, Latin, and Arabic letters. A hallway lined with mellow white Christmas tree lights led to a long, low, carpet-strewn dining room with wooden tables and vine-wound beams designed to look like tree trunks (the cigarette burns and graffiti on the trunks ruined the illusion). Strings of multicolored teardrop lights ran along the tops of the restaurant’s walls and up the rough wooden beams and pillars. The maître d’ who greeted Jim had a sad-cowboy horseshoe mustache and wore a Russian translation of Caucasian “native garb” that made him look like a cross between a gaucho, a 1970s lounge singer, and a pincushion. He asked Jim if he had a reservation.
“Woods.”
“What?”
“Woods?”
“No.”
“Vooods. Vooods.”
“Through that door.” He pointed toward the rear of the restaurant. “Farthest on the right.”
Jim left the main room, crossed a cobblestone courtyard artfully strewn with hay, and went into one of the five little stone cottages at the back. He thought his arrival, at 7:30 for a 7:00 reservation, bordered on unadvisedly early, but when he walked in he found dinner in full swing. Five people sat around a low wooden table festooned with colorful overlapping cloths, helping themselves from plates of grilled meats, pickled vegetables, and flatbreads. A brazier smoked merrily away in the corner; the room smelled of grilled meat, winter air, and wood-smoke.
“Jim, hi.” Mina came toward him and kissed him on each cheek self-consciously, standing ramrod straight, laying one hand on his shoulder like a plank, and bending forward awkwardly from her waist. Even to a poker game she wore a sensible pantsuit. “We didn’t want to start without you, you know, but as soon as they showed us back here dinner was already on the table, and we just couldn’t wait. Come in and meet everybody. Everybody, this is Jim Vilatzer, who I told you about. He works for the Memory Foundation.” It really was an American party: name followed by employer. Get your class background out in the open as soon as possible.
“Okay,” said Mina, taking Jim by the hand and turning him to face the crowd, “so starting here, you must remember Ian from last night, right?”
“Of course. Good to see you,” Jim said, not even pretending to mean it. Ian seemed to give his hand an unnecessarily hard warning squeeze, but two and a half decades of kitchen work let Jim hold his own: Ian winced first.
“And this is Tim Weber. He’s the other foreigner tonight.”
A reedy, chinless, balding man in a tan poplin suit gave Jim a dead-fish handshake and a queasy, dying quail smile.
“Foreigner?” Jim asked. “Where are you from?”
“Plano, more or less.”
Jim looked quizzically at Mina. “It just means nonembassy staff. You and Tim. This is Harrison Tunney, in the corner, one of our Defense attachés.” A craggy man in a leather jacket and black jeans, with deep crow’s-feet extending out from coal-black eyes, Tunney nodded silently without standing.
“And Mr. Woods couldn’t come tonight, so this is his secretary, Trudy Wurtzel.”
“Hi, Jim.” Trudy giggled, pumping his hand amicably. She looked like one of the suburban office-tower lunchers he had spent his life serving: frizzy blond hair; agreeably nondescript clothes, face, and body; and an eager, goofy smile much too broad for the occasion. “Mina told us you’re, like, really, really good, and I’ve never played before? So I just wanted to say, you know, you might need, like, a little patience with me?”
“I’m sure you’ll do fine. Nice to meet you.”
“Oh, you, too, Jim. You, too! Why don’t you sit down here and eat something. We were just trying to think of a nickname for Moscow.”
Jim took a seat between Mina and Tunney, and across from Trudy, and helped himself to two long skewers stacked with alternating cubes of lamb ribs, lamb fat, and onion chunks. “A nickname? Like what?”
“Oh, you know. Like the Big Apple, or the Windy City,” said Mina.
“What about the Big Smoke?” Trudy yelped, raising her hand eagerly. “’Cause it always smells so smoky!”
“That’s London,” Tunney said, firmly but quietly. Trudy and Tim began tossing other possibilities around, and Jim tuned out.
“No Rodion?” Jim asked Mina.
“No, no,” Mina said, unusually quietly. “He couldn’t come.”
“So, Jimmy,” Tim called out, his Adam’s apple bobbing in time with his head. He was seated at the opposite corner from Jim, and shouted across the table. “So Mina said you live here ’cause you want to. That makes one of us, right?” He turned to the room, awaiting approbation.
“You were posted here?”
“Yeah, you know. Got sent over for a six-month thing. Might stay for more, though, if the pay’s right. Met Tomm over there at a buddy’s Super Bowl party.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a sales rep for Frito-Lay. We’re trying to open the market over here for some of our exotics. Focus groups show the domestic market has really matured, really come a long way, snackwise, from just vodka and bread, you know?”
“Yeah, if there’s one thing Moscow really could use, it’s a decent Dorito, and maybe a Funyun or two.”
“Exactly!” Weber chirped happily just as Mina nudged Jim under the table. “So you just came over ’cause . . .”
“It’s a long story, really. Some family connections, some wanderlust, some inducement.”
“But you like it?”
“I do.”
Jim expected Weber to ask him what Vivek and his friends back home asked, what he sometimes asked himself whenever a policeman hassled him on suspicion of being Chechen, or a store clerk made his life a little more difficult just because she could, or he felt a draft of freezing air slither through his poorly fitted window, or he passed a thug kicking a frostbitten bomzh caked in his own vomit for no reason: Why? And he had the reasons ready, too: the extremes of brutality and warmth, which played out on every level, from the sneering clerk and the office manager who made sure you wore comfortable slippers to the savage apartment blocks and fairy-tale churches; the way the city and its people nurtured their scars; the salutary effects of difference, of being forced to figure out and improvise rather than taking life and its patterns for granted; the lusts unleashed after decades of repression; the honest vibrancy. There were more. In truth, though, falling in love with a city is like falling in love with a person: explicable only up to a certain point. After that other people just have to take your feelings on faith.
As it turned out, though, Weber didn’t ask why: he just launched into an extended whine about how he missed the Cotton Bowl because his corporate apartment’s manager couldn’t find the right satellite channel.
After his second skewer of meat and his third bottle of water (Azerbaijani food tended to be salty, all the better, supposedly, to encourage the consumption of vodka. A night of hydrating with vodka, however, tended to make a person feel the next morning like an anchovy, which in turn encouraged vodka drinking to get over the pain. Lather, rinse, repeat), Tunney, who sat across from Jim and had so far been eating in silence, leaned over the table. “Your job, Jim, allows you to see parts of Russia, and meet Russians, that most Westerners never see or meet. Is that accurate?” He spoke evenly, quietly, his crow’s eyes boring into Jim’s so intently that Jim had to force himself not to look away.
“I guess so. More than some people, anyway.”
“You mean Weber,” Tunney said flatly, decisively. “I doubt he’s met a Russian since he moved here. And except for the secretaries that work in his office, he probably won’t. Why would he? He has no use for them, no feeling for them. But you do.”
“I don’t know about that,” Jim said, trying to extricate himself from the conversation as politely as possible. “I’m really just a researcher.”
“Do you have a researcher’s certificate?”
“Sure.” The Memory Foundation, like every other employer in Moscow, issued identification cards with a picture, seals, stamps, and several signatures. The more complicated the document, the less important the job.
“One of the things you learn, Jim, in a position such as mine, is that we’re really only as secure as our citizens allow us to be.”
Jim was puzzling through this oracular, if slightly nonsensical, pronouncement when he felt something slide beneath his hand. Tunney had slipped him a business card.
“We have to depend on other people’s eyes. If you ever see anything you think we might like to know about, give me a call on that number. Day or night.”
“Oh. Thank you. Thanks very much, I think. . . . You might be overestimating me, you know, but . . .”
“No, I don’t think I am. Keep it; you might find it useful sometime.”
“Jim?” Mina piped up, saving him. “Do you want to help me clear this and set up the table?”
“Sure. Thanks,” he whispered. They started moving the empty grease-stained, bone-strewn plates from the main table over to a pair of round plastic trays in the corner. Nobody else made a move to help.
“Does he always talk like that?”
“Always. We call him ‘Spooky.’ You know, not like Scooby-Doo spooky, but like a spook spooky. I think he likes it.”
“Is he?”
“Is he what?”
“A spook?”
She shrugged. “How would I know that? He acts like one. He likes to think he is. But nobody tells me anything. Hey,” she said, raising her voice and hefting a tray, “Ian, if you want to get the table set up, Jim and I can bring these over to the kitchen.”
“Now you have a servant? You’re torturing the poor kid?” Jim asked quietly, when they were clear of the door and a few steps into the courtyard.
“Only a little. No more than he wants to be,” she said with a coquettish, knowing smile. He had always thought of her as somewhat gender-neutral, blessed with gifts she wasn’t entirely aware of; it was heartening to see that she could use them. “So the thing you asked about? The license plate? We think it’s from the Interior Ministry.”
“We think?”
“Jim, I just told you: I’m the last to know. I’m not exactly on the Kremlinology e-mail list.”
“So how’d you get it?”
“I wore the right clothes and asked the right man.” She flashed a quietly confident smile, and Jim returned it. “I didn’t give up anything more than a smile and the implied promise of future smiles. Just put that down here,” she said, pointing to the back door of the kitchen.
The doorway of the kitchen opened, and two sweaty cooks stepped out to have a smoke. The smaller one said something to Mina in a bouncy, jostling language. Jim could infer the general content from the way he eyed her up and down and looked immediately to his larger colleague for approval. When she responded in kind, however, his face went red, and the big man laughed at him and said something to Mina that raised a smile. He waved at her fondly, paternally, as she and Jim headed back across the courtyard.
“But of course: Mina Haddad speaks Azeri. I would have expected nothing less.”
“You know a little Turkish, you know a little Arabic, then you can get by in Azeri.”
“What did he say?”
“The little one? Like you can’t guess. Like you’ve never said anything like . . .”
“I haven’t,” Jim protested earnestly.
“Of course not. It had to do with the cut of my suit being too long. I think the bigger one said, ‘A woman who is allowed to talk outside of the house sings her worth from the mountains.’ It’s a double-edged proverb: on the one hand, we love a strong, smart woman; on the other, those are the only ones we’ll let speak outside the house. I have to tell you, I think it’s about as good as I’ll get in Central Asia. Anyway, he meant well. Hang on a minute. Do you have a cigarette?”
Jim’s estimation of Mina rose yet again as he shook two Winstons from a battered pack. “I had no idea.”
“It’s a useful habit.” She put fire first to Jim’s smoke then to hers.
“Oh, yeah?”
She nodded. “It gives you time. It breaks the ice. It takes a few cells, of course, as you know, and I wouldn’t want to do it forever, but you’d be surprised how much you can learn about somebody by smoking with them.” Mina held her cigarette between two fingers, her palm down and her arm extended rigidly downward. “Can you tell me again, just for curiosity’s sake, where you saw these plates?” Her voice rose at the end, but it wasn’t really a question.
“After a couple of interviews I did. One at Izmailovsky Market and one at a casino by Universitet.”
“A casino? Up there?”
“Not a real casino; a trailer full of slot machines. Nasty place.”
“And you’re sure these cars were there for you. Watching you.”
“Not one hundred percent. I mean, I didn’t ask anybody. But yes, I got the distinct feeling that they were.”
“And who were you interviewing? Survivors, I know, but specifically.”
“Specifically? A stallholder at Izmailovsky Market named Vilis Balderis and a drunk named Dato Tsepereli. Why?”
“Just curious,” she said, holding up her cigarette hand. She tried but failed to be disarming; again, she had that blank, hungry, calculating look that made Jim feel totally transparent. “You ask me for a favor, I get to ask you for information. Fair?”
“Of course. No problem.”
“Do you guys do your interviews alone?”
“Yes. For archival research we need to take a fixer, but when we’re actually speaking with someone we go alone. It’s easier to talk one-on-one than two- or three-on-one. Especially for someone who’s been through what they have.”
“So you did these interviews by yourself.”
“I did. Why so many questions? And why after you helped me instead of when you were deciding whether to help?”
“Because you just told an embassy official you’re being trailed by the Interior Ministry,” she said sharply. “Because I would like to know why. And how. And who.”
“I don’t know who. That’s why I asked you.”
“Jim, in my experience, people know far more than they think they know. They just have to be asked properly.”
“I thought your experience was processing.”
Mina shot Jim a pitying look, crushed her cigarette underfoot, and pulled the door open for him, forestalling the chance for more questions. As he passed, he caught a scent of lilac and Mina, and let his hand drop to her hip, not quite on purpose, but not by accident either.
“Oh, there they are,” cooed Trudy. “Just one hand. Don’t worry; we didn’t start without you. I just wanted to see, since I hadn’t gone yet, what it would look like. I thought I had a flush.” She giggled the hand’s name like it was funny. “But it was just all black.”
“Yeah,” Ian said, trying but not really trying to stifle a grin. “I told her it doesn’t really quite add up to, you know, a whole hand. Now that you guys are here, though—you know, especially you, Jim, since Mina says you’re, like, The Man—we can start. We got the chips, so we’ll do one hundred dollars buy-in? We’ll see how everything goes, then we can maybe buy in again later.”
Jim rolled his eyes, perhaps more obviously than he intended, because Ian, pleased at the reaction he induced, smirked. Jim preferred being underestimated to being feared, well reputed, or ever taken at face value, but at this point—with Ian smirking and Tunney squinting and Mina with her hand, gently but noticeably, guiding him to his seat and Trudy beaming like a happy cow heading for the blades—that wasn’t going to happen.
The cards hadn’t even been dealt before Jim realized he was in trouble. Ian badly wanted to beat him; all he had to do was lose a couple of dumb early hands to get Ian’s confidence up, then take him late. Mina would break if he so much as looked at her harshly, but he didn’t have the heart to do it. Tunney was inscrutable, but perhaps insane, or, better still, all front.
Trudy, unfortunately, messed everything up, because as a beginner and an apparently guileless literalist, she was exactly as good as her cards, no better or worse. This was the rookie problem: you can’t bluff them; you can’t play them; you can just get out of their way when they go in and hope for a minimum of anomalies. With Trudy out of the way, he could play his opponents; if everyone were like her, he could play the cards, but with a mix, all he could do was batten down the hatches and hope for the best.
As it turned out, his best wasn’t so good: Jim hailed a gypsy cab home with thirty-five dollars in his pocket (they played, of course, with American green as table currency). The only saving grace was that Ian lost everything, and he bought in three times. Tunney had the misfortune of squinting intimidatingly around the table at his opponents whenever he bluffed, and the Frito-Lay guy proved himself a rare and powerful species of moron. Mina acquitted herself honorably, breaking more or less even, but Trudy made out best—Jim would have put money on beginner’s luck at the beginning of the night—taking home a little over seven hundred dollars. She took most of Jim’s money on a hand where he held a queen-high straight. She scrunched up her face and revealed jacks and eights, until Jim pointed out, reluctantly but hoping that heaven existed, that she had in fact made a flush draw on the river that she didn’t even know she had.
There was nothing to do but laugh. Spit at fate, it spits back; laugh at its jokes and you’ll have a brother. This was one of the first Russian phrases he knew, courtesy of his grandfather, an elementary school janitor with a ringing tenor voice, a teetering gait, and a perpetual crinkle-eyed half smile, like he heard music nobody else could hear. He had a million unfulfilled schemes to make enough money to buy a house in Wyoming—for some reason when he saw money he saw Wyoming, but could never imagine just moving out there without striking it rich.
The game broke up in good spirits: Trudy was over the moon but felt guilty. She was even trying to give money back to the people she’d taken it from. Jim was rueful but probability owed him one: a bad night now meant a good one a few months down the line. Tunney and Tim at least got a night out in good company; the business cards they exchanged flashed white on the deserted, sodium-lit street. Only Ian stepped onto Povarskaya down in the mouth: didn’t the cards and his opponents know he was supposed to win? He paced back and forth outside the locked restaurant, his head down, seemingly absorbed in thought, but not entirely oblivious: his pacing just happened to lead him around to Mina’s side.
“Which direction are you going?” Tunney asked. His walk, apparently, was as dulcet, eerie, and modulated as his voice: Jim hadn’t heard him approaching.
“Straight down Krasnaya Presnya to the Garden Ring. Not too far, but the opposite direction from you guys. Right?”
He shrugged. “I could offer you a ride, if you’d like to continue our conversation, or hear a bit more about what I do.”
“No. Thanks, but I can hail a cab across the street. When a night treats me this badly, I usually like to just get out of its way.”
“Don’t be insulted, Tunney,” Mina said, sliding an arm under his. Ian had her other arm. She was smiling too broadly, speaking too loudly, and her cheeks had a merry flush to them. He was glad to see she was a happy drunk; it spoke well of her. “Jim probably has someone waiting up for him back home.”
“Again she starts with the flattery. The only thing waiting for me in my apartment is roaches and dust.”
“No actress?” she teased. “Early rehearsal?”
“Something like that, I guess. I think rumors of our involvement were greatly exaggerated.” Then, just to twist the knife back, he kissed her on the cheek, winked at Ian, and, as he raised his hand to hail a gypsy cab, told them to “get each other home safe and warm.”
HE AWOKE NINE HOURS LATER to something tapping him on the head. “Jim. Jim, come on. Wake up.” Tap tap tap.
“Mmph. What time is it?”
“It’s just after noon. Come on, time to get up.” Tap tap.
Jim realized he had no idea who was talking to him. He sat bolt upright in bed. It was Mina, holding a ballpoint pen and preparing to do another paradiddle on his crown. He would not have been more shocked if it was his own mother.
“How did you . . .”
She held up an instrument that looked like one of the picks dentists use to scrape plaque.
“What is that?”
She gestured with it toward the hallway. “That triple-bolted steel door you have is heavy, and I’m sure it makes you feel secure, but it doesn’t do any good when it’s open. You have a pretty basic wafer-tumbler lock system.”
“You pick locks?” Jim moved into a seated position, his blankets still pulled around him. She smiled.
“Come on.” She tapped him on the calf with her lock pick. “Put some pants on. Crow wants to see you.”
“Crow? ‘Crow’ wants to see me? Come on, give me a break. Let me make us some coffee and wake up.”
Mina stood up and smoothed out her skirt, then handed Jim his jeans and a sweater. “Jim, I don’t know what kind of friends you have at home, but mine? When they come over for coffee and a chat, they call first. Then they ring the doorbell and I let them in. They don’t show up unannounced and pick the locks. Let’s go; this isn’t a social call. I’m here because Crow thought you’d come if I asked, but if you’d rather stay, I have two friends in the car downstairs who aren’t much for asking.”
“You’re not kidding.”
She shook her head.
“Well, who’s the Crow?”
“Crow. I told you: Crow’s the one who wants to see you.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“If you ask the same question you’ll get the same answer.”
“It’s okay. I have a good idea who he is anyway.”
“Congratulations.” She didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
“Well, can you at least wait outside while I get dressed?”
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head and held up a hand to forestall Jim’s objections. Even to a Sunday afternoon kidnapping, she wore a slender gold bracelet and a long gold pendant with a single pearl at the end. “It’s actually against protocol to leave you alone.”
“Whose protocol? What the fuck is going on? What are you doing in my house?” Jim slipped into his sweater, but kept his lower half beneath the blankets.
“All in good time. Look, I understand this must seem . . . a little disconcerting, I guess.”
“Disconcerting, Mina, is a polite word for what it is.”
“If it makes you happy I’ll look the other way.”
“It makes me exuberant, Mina. Thanks.”
Mina turned back toward Jim after she heard the zipper. “Good. Now, let’s go.”
“Can I just . . .”
“No. Look, let’s make this as friendly as we can, shall we? Let’s just go downstairs and get in the car. We need to have a talk.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“The home team.” She walked out of his bedroom and into the hallway with a sort of swagger he’d never seen before. “Come on,” she said, holding open the front door and dangling the pick tauntingly between her thumb and forefinger. “You first. I’ll lock up.”
She led him out of the courtyard through a back exit, across the street, through another apartment’s archway, and into one of those haphazardly placed and sized asphalt patches that serve as Moscow’s de facto parking spaces, parking lots, kiosk habitations, drinking spots, and trash dumps. A black GMC with a blue light on top sat idling. The blue light indicated not police status but sufficient privilege or money to buy police status: private citizens who could afford it bought blue police lights, which entitled them to flout any and all traffic laws.
“Right here. Would you mind getting in the back, please?” Her usually businesslike tone had a steeliness to it that made the final question mark a pure formality.
As Jim reached for the back door it popped open. Inside sat two hulking blond men, whom Jim recognized immediately, and with no small amount of relief, as American: something about the way they carried themselves gave them away—smirking rather than grimacing, with the sculpted muscles and soft hands of the weight room rather than the meat hooks and bulk of the brawler. Also, the one who got out to let him sit in the middle wore a University of Illinois sweatshirt.
“You play offensive or defensive line for the Illini?” Jim asked.
“If you could just climb in, sir,” he grunted.
“Jim, I’m sorry about this,” Mina said from the front seat as they turned onto the Garden Road. She addressed the rearview mirror; however sorry she was, it wasn’t enough to turn around and face him. “We just needed to make sure we got you. If it’s any comfort, your seatmates, Gramm and Joseph, were supposed to come up to your apartment with me.”
“No problem. I don’t have much food at my place anyway.”
The bruiser on his left grunted something close to a laugh and shifted in his seat, driving an elbow into Jim’s ribs.
“So can I presume you’re taking me to the embassy?”
Nobody answered. They stayed straight on Novinsky Bulvar, but when they reached the American embassy they passed it, then the driver—sunglasses, dark sweater, utterly silent—took them into a thicket of Khamovniki side streets. They headed up Ulitsa Lev Tolstovo, past the author’s beautifully preserved gold and green estate, and past Moscow’s most beautiful church, the Church of St. Nicholas of the Weavers, with its scalloped, Christmas-colored, pagoda dome.
They turned left at an optika into the parking lot of a trio of apartment buildings doing the Moscow upgrade shuffle: one was naked cinder block; one had an Italianate umber façade with Florentine detailing around all the double-glazed windows; one was somewhere in between, with the façade abruptly stopping around the fifth floor.
Mina hopped out, at speed, and pulled open the back door. Gramm hustled Jim out. He turned toward the closest entry door, but Gramm grabbed his shoulders and pushed him into a narrow alleyway running between the finished and half-finished buildings. They crossed Let Oktyabrya, with the stark white walls of Novodevichy promising a quieter and holier world just up the street, then turned toward Sportivnaya. Neither breaking stride nor looking around, Mina led them into a shuttered confectionery shop.
Gramm shoved him through the door, into a completely bare room with a concrete floor, cinder-block walls, and three bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. A few cans of paint, brushes, a ladder, and scaffolding stood near the front door, but Jim neither smelled paint nor saw any evidence of its use. As soon as Joseph came through the door he locked it, pulled down the shutters, and set the alarm.
Mina was nowhere in sight. Jim’s heart flopped into his throat for a moment, thinking she had left him in this anonymous, empty store-front with two enormous, probably armed strangers.
Then she emerged, frosted in fluorescent light, from a door at the back of the shop. “Jim,” she called. “If you could just come this way.”
“You want me to just . . .”
“What we want,” called a familiar voice from the back room, “is to know just what the fuck it is you think you’re doing.”