Big Brother Is Watching

By the way this blogging platform lets me see the countries of my latest viewers. If you're still watching, Russia, don't be a stranger...

Is there anyone out there?

Sorry I haven't posted. I don't have any fresh fiction to put up, my daily life is a long string of disasters and I haven't quite mustered the mustard to start plastering a confessional of confusion across this wall. 

Let's see how ballsy I can get.  Random thoughts from the dark shit-floored fungus barracks of my mind:

1. Sobriety is a precondition of, and not a substitute for, sanity.
2. Writing is an act of faith and belief that within the Void something is listening and if not approving at least appreciating the message and the medium.
3. From today's Daily Reflections: "On the days when I am grateful, good things seem to happen in my life. The instant I start cursing things in my life, however, the flow of good stops.

That's all for now. Thanks for stopping by.

The Investigation is Continuing

Through the window of her bedroom, Sally Gilbert sits on her bed with a large manila envelope open on her knee and she stares out across the Moskva and the rain at the apartment building on the opposite embankment with the huge red Samsung sign on top of it.  She wants to go out on the tiny little balcony and smoke a cigarette like she had done after the first night she and Paul had made love in the apartment, the night they had moved in, only a few days after their third wedding anniversary.  She remembers standing with him naked except for tapochki and a towel around them, as they watched the short cruise boats loading off the Shevchenko Embankment over by the Hotel Ukraine.  She even has the same bath slippers under the bed; they have not been packed yet in the white mover boxes stacked around the apartment, but her friends will not let her out alone on the tenth floor balcony the size of a bathmat.  Right now her need to be left alone outweighs her need the brace of fresh air and nicotine.  As it is, every few minutes someone either sticks a head in or does a none-too-subtle patrol of the slightly cracked door to the bedroom, casting a swift eye through the aperture.  Each time they see her in the same position, sitting.

“I don’t understand it, you know.  Where was his bodyguard supposed to be?” Nina McLaren is saying.  Her voice, throaty and low, still echoes through the apartment, which has been outfitted in what the local real estate agents have coined as yevroremont.  This means tiled floors from Slovakia, bathrooms from Finland and kitchens from Italy, and sealed window treatments from Denmark.  Their shared joke was that yevroremont translated either as “European Refit” or “American Fairy.”  Sally remembers Paul’s never-quite-right baritone rendering American Pie echoing through the house as he made her Eggs Benedict every Sunday morning for the first two years they had lived here.  They observed the Russian custom -- no phone calls, no guests, no leaving the house before noon on Sunday.  At least once every Sunday, for a time, they ended up on the floor, wrapped in sheets, frantic and feral.  She can still smell him on the pillowcases…

“Nu Nin’, zdes’ ne nado.” This is Nina’s husband Reg, muttering his grammatically perfect but brutally accented Russian at his wife, trying to tell her that this is not the place for a post-mortem.  Sally smiles at the uselessness of attempting to shut Nina up.  Possessed of a fetish model’s body and a 1940s Hollywood pout, Nina rarely stoops to subtlety.  She is by far the most beautiful of the local wives that Paul’s associates have picked up in-country.  Reg McLaren, 15 years her senior, had sent his pale British wife and their three kids back to Liverpool six years ago and married Nina the moment the divorce came through.  Even Reg’s plea that Nina at least switch out of English, on the common theory that Sally’s Russian is not strong enough to follow whispered conspiracy theories, falls on deaf ears.

Sally looks down at the papers in her hand.  She had found them a few months ago in a box in their closet along with their college yearbook.  Sketches by Paul.  The first time she met Paul, she was naked, modeling for his college live drawing class back in the US.  This handsome young man with bushy eyebrows and permanent five o’clock shadow was attracting the attention of other students who were poring over his easel as she sat in a half lotus naked in the center of the room.  She had very curly light blonde hair, very difficult to capture in pencil alone; most of the sketches she saw of her tight blonde waves were shortcuts, squiggles really, done by students who wanted to concentrate on the long slow curves of her spine, legs, arms.  She walked off the stage over to his easel, unselfconsciously amongst her classmates and peered over their shoulders, staring into a perfect representation of her own face.  Sally was nearsighted and never wore her glasses on the modeling table, and she had not brought them with her.  She stood, naked, two feet from him.  Paul had even managed somehow, in pencil, to capture the blue of her eyes.  Her curls were carefully shaded, with a halo of dark broad strokes to create a negative space that brought out her blonde hair.  Paul had not tried to draw her body.  The real challenge, he said, was in capturing a face that radiant.  He was accomplished with a pencil, he joked, albeit his grades in accountancy were higher than in art.  He confided in her that he had worked as a carnival sketch artist in high school and he was taking this as a gut.  He even had some that he had done of her from memory in prior classes, if she’d like to see them.  She asked him if he was seriously inviting her up to see his etchings. They both laughed and only then did she remember that she had to finish modeling.   She took him to her room that night and after they both had done a couple years of graduate school they got married…

Sally smiles as she takes off a shoe to use as an ashtray, a trick she had seen once on a train when she and Paul had decided to pull a runabout vacation.  It had been summer 1998, the one with the heat wave and the bizarre solstice hurricane, and she and Paul decided to take a week off in the middle of August, put a few days’ worth of clothes in a back pack, stick a couple hundred dollars in their pockets, and grab whatever distance roundtrip thirty dollars would get them each on the next train out of the city.  Not understanding the difference between deluxe, coup and platzkart, they had ended up buying themselves thirty dollars of platzkart: three days and a couple hundred kilometers there and back in the railroad equivalent of steerage.  The cars were equipped with flat slatted benches, a toilet at both ends, and a kitchenette that the passengers used to prepare their own food.  Paul said it looked like an American highway reststop on wheels. 

Organization on the train was classic Russian: order within the appearance of anarchy.  Paul and Sally, camped out on the floor with nothing but their LL Bean backpacks from college and a few CDs of Green Day and Sarah McLachlan, found themselves surrounded by itinerant laborers and single mothers and whole families, pets and all.  There was an enormously pregnant woman whose belly Sally and Paul found themselves drawn to.  She let Paul touch it but when Sally reached out with the same inquiring look, she looked into Sally’s eyes and then muttered something Paul translated as “maybe later” and then got off at the next stop.  Paul thought nothing of it.  Sally always wondered what the woman saw. 

There was more gold in the mouths of their fellow travelers than they had ever seen in a jewelry store.  In less than three hours, these absolutely befuddled Americans were adopted as family.  On the trip outbound to whatever town they had printed on their tickets, they were taught how to make vodka toasts, which pickles and mushrooms went with which sausage, which curse words you could use in front of a lady and which ones you could not, and how to sneak in a furtive drunken midnight screw in front of forty seven of your newest best friends as they pretend, courteously if unconvincingly, to be asleep.  They spent half an hour in that town, debating whether to find hot water and bathe or just to get right back on the train the minute that it was ready to go back to Moscow, when the one television in the train station announced the financial crisis.  Paul and Sally blew the rest of their cash getting to the nearest airport and on the next flight to Moscow.   

Six hours later he was walking into his office straight from Sheremetyevo 1 still dressed and smelling like the family of Uzbek bricklayers they had shared a window with on the train, and he did not come home for two weeks.  Sally brought him new clothes every day on her way to work at the American law firm where she worked part time on secured lending contracts; she suspected that with banks failing right and left it might not be a long term job for her.  Paul’s birthday fell during the first week.  She came to his office, closed his door, dropped his clothes on the chair, stripped for him, and lay back on his desk, the only present she could afford as their rubles were losing value at a rate of about 10% a day.  He took her without a word over his credenza, roughly, and she bit his hand to keep from screaming and embarrassing him in front of his co-workers milling around outside, all of whom remained on at least two phones apiece simultaneously.  Sally whispered in his ear that he was the only man she could ever love.  He slapped her on the bottom and told her to get out before his co-workers saw him crying and laughing at the same time.  She walked home in the warm late August sunshine not afraid of anything, knowing instantly what had just happened to her, thrilled at the new adventure ahead.  Three days later, she missed her next period.  In October she miscarried.  She never told him about either…

“What does the bodyguard have to do with it?” Gretchen Jones asks.  Sally shakes her head as she lights a Dunhill and holds the shoe up as an ashtray as she turns to the first sketch.  It is of her, laying on the couch in sweatpants asleep.  The afternoon sun lays across her legs.  Sally finds dim Gretchen easy to love.  She is prairie-plain in face and dress, and sweet.  Her husband Owen is Paul’s company’s lawyer, and he is the exact opposite of Gretchen: razor sharp, handsome, fashion-obsessed and long past whatever ethical one-way turnstile that separates him from ever practicing law on American soil again.  Gretchen finds Owen easy to love.  Owen treats her like a younger sister in special education, protective and at the same time removed.   Paul’s theory was that Owen was secretly gay and needed to find someone who was fit the narrow intellect range between just stupid enough never to figure out the obvious and just smart enough not to leave the children locked in the car when she goes shopping.

“Do you think he knew?” Gretchen wonders.  “You know, knew the people?”

Sally flips to the second sketch, of her naked on the bed, laying on her side with the covers pulled around her hips and chest, navel exposed.  The next sketch is of her without the covers.  Her hand is between her legs in the manner of a Renaissance nude.  Sally often wonders if that was considered as suggestive as it would be today.  This is an old sketch.  Paul had not drawn her nude, unless from memory, in five years.  The Sally in the sketch is wearing her glasses, looking like she is expecting an answer to a question she has not yet asked.

She remembers the day Paul got his driver and bodyguard assigned to him right around the time the apartment buildings started blowing up in 1999 in the runup to the second Chechen war.  Paul treated it like a non-important perk given in appreciation for the agonizing six months after the Crisis, keeping the company afloat, organizing cash runs in from London to pay salaries, holding on to key employees, poaching failing competitors for business and personnel.  As if the raise they offered him had not been enough, or jumping the queue from running the fixed incomes department to becoming chief operating officer.  In the beginning, Paul was modest, embarrassed even by the turn of events.  He made a few jokes about wartime promotions at parties. 

By 2001 when the money was really flowing in, Paul no longer apologized for his success.  Sunday morning he golfed in the summer or slept in in the winter.  One day he casually instructed her to quit her job with the law firm – which had miraculously survived and kept her on with annual raises and bonuses even though she billed less than a thousand hours a year, because her husband’s company provided about a third of the office’s annual income.

“I know you love it but it sends the wrong message in this market that a man in my position has a wife who works for money.  You’ll have your days and nights free for cultural activities, charities, woman’s stuff.  You’ll love it.”

She turned in her notice the next day.  The law firm offered her a bonus to stay; when she refused, they paid it to her anyway.  Paul told Owen not to fire them for at least one year after she left.

Mikhail, the driver/bodyguard, was very quiet, not as imposing as she expected.  He always wore a suit over a turtleneck.  She assumed but could never be sure that he was armed.  His suit was tailored too well to show the holster.  He had a small tattoo on his hand, between his left thumb and forefinger, a star with the letter J in it.  A memento from Mikhail’s Special Services days in Afghanistan, Paul said.  When Paul was on business trips in London, Mikhail drove her and kept watch over her.  She let him and old Lyuda the housekeeper teach her enough Russian to enjoy their jokes over tea and sardelkis with potatoes... 

Lyuda is walking around the house now, crying softly.

“Oh, this was really professional work, you know.  Twilight on the Novy Arbat, lots of people but no witnesses, black Volga getaway car.  Perfect timing for the evening news and tomorrow’s Moscow Times.  Classic sidewalk job.”

Sally is looking at the fourth sketch, a portrait of Travis Eagle, Paul’s CFO, with his thick black hair and high smooth cheekbones.  Judging by the weight on his face, this one was recent.     In the last few years, people had approached Paul asking him to do quick sketches.  They’d even offered money which he always refused.

Sally remembers the first high-profile murder that happened after they arrived in Moscow.  Some Duma deputy was gunned down like a gangster on the New Arbat, about two blocks away from their home, in front of one of the casino-nightclubs that ran 24 hours a day; it was broad daylight.  The news treated it with a shrug, and it was clear that nobody was going to be arrested or much less convicted of the murder.  Paul had shared her horror at the murder, but she alone was shocked that this man, married father of three, elected representative in the lower house of the federal legislature from some unpronounceable district where he had never lived and probably never seen, was shot coming out an all-hours gaming and hooker joint.  That was when she learned the police catchphrase “appears to be connected with the professional activities of the victim.”  Paul explained that this was a forensic euphemism for “obviously a contracted and sanctioned hit.”  The news item usually closed with the reassuring prognosis “the investigation is continuing” which Paul translated as “we know exactly who did it but he’s untouchable so one of these days we’ll pin it on some Chechens we’ve had our eyes on, now stop bothering us…”

“Yes, but do you think he KNEW them?”  Gretchen’s voice brings Sally back to now.  Even after nearly ten years, Sally, against her natural horror, is still fascinated at Gretchen’s predictability.  Maybe Paul had been wrong about Owen.  Maybe Owen loved Gretchen for the fact that she would simply never change. 

Over the years, Sally and Paul had learned to accept street killings as a fact of outdoor life in Moscow, just like driving on the sidewalk.  Everyone knew someone or knew someone who knew someone who had been contracted.  Around their third or fourth year in town, Paul started repeating his stock joke whenever someone ended up bloody and face up on a busy city street: the bad news about Moscow is that being greedy can get you killed; the good news is that stealing a few million dollars is not really considered greedy.  It wasn’t funny to Sally the first time she heard it.  It did not get better as he retold it year after year.  However somewhere around 2002 or 2003 people started noticing that it was happening only once or twice a year.   Apparently the contract murder business had undergone a change of management, and the common thing now was slayings in the suburban cottages of the victims.  Sally’s favorite was the guy found drowned in the plunge pool for his sauna.  Police suspected suicide, although they admitted that the fact that the suicide note was in someone else’s handwriting was a problematic fact at the inquest.  As for the fact that when his body was found, the ropes tying his wrists and ankles together behind his back had only partially come undone, the police explained that some suicides are much more determined than others…

“No, but they certainly knew him, I think.  Paul was in a crowd of people, but nobody else was touched.  Really professionals.  When we pulled out of all those countries, lots of special services guys, they need money too, you know, and they have too much self-respect for another government job.  Nobody is ever going to solve this one, Gretchen.  This is Moscow, you know?”

Sally remembers when she first met Nina at an office function.  Nina had an economics degree and wanted to be an analyst but with her looks they stuck her at the front desk.  Sally had already heard rumors – oddly enough from Reg’s original wife, who chose to frostily ignore the girl she made a point of calling “Natasha or Nina or Whatever” – about the bombshell with the blue eyes and the jet black straight hair in the office who was making a point of flouncing around every expat’s office dressed like a cocktail waitress.  Sally expected to find this brazen gold-digger appalling, but Nina had approached her warmly and honestly and Sally decided that keep your friends close and the office floozy closer was sage advice. 

In return for not cutting Nina in public, Sally was rewarded with Nina’s life story over deviled eggs and caviar.  Nina was originally from Kiev, which meant she did not have Russian citizenship; more importantly, it meant she would find it hard to get a propiska, a residence permit for Moscow.  One way around this was to marry someone in Moscow with a residence permit.  “Think of it,” Nina said back when she still dropped her articles, “like Green Card for Moscow.  No propiska, cops stop you on street, you pay spot fine of fifty dollars, or you get sent back to your home city, or you spend night in jail getting called cow by pigs.  And no real company hires you either.  So I make a few calls, get Moscow hairdresser named Slava to marry me, I get Moscow Green Card.  I pay that nice fairy one grand American dollars.  Now I find American or British man to marry me, sell goluboy Sasha a divorce, get my thousand dollars back, he can rent propiska to other sad girl from the province.  With foreign husband, I get foreign passport and propiska.  And if I get thrown out, I get thrown out to London or New York.  Good plan, you know...?” 

Sally can hear Owen’s voice next, trying to change the subject.  “I think I’d better check on Sal,” he says.

“Good idea,” answers Reg.  Sally looks at the ceiling and practices her heavy sigh as Owen’s footsteps approach her cracked open door.  Sally bites her lip to keep the tears coming, to keep from laughing at the image she has in her mind of Reg attempting to shut up his mouthy trophy by putting a hand on her bare thigh, muscled and waxed, and having it slapped away with a hissed zatknis’ ty sam thrown at him for good measure.

Sally remembers Reg’s divorce.  It was the first real divorce among the expat managers, as Gretchen liked to say, nobody counted the childless marriages that broke up within a few months of landing at Sheremetyevo 2.  After all, Gretchen would continue, if you don’t have kids, a marriage isn’t really much more than a post-college shackup; dissolving it is a matter of who gets the coffee machine and who gets the stereo.   Coming from anyone less dense, this remark would have struck Sally as insensitive at best, even though she had not told anyone that she’d miscarried four pregnancies in sixteen months.  Paul’s talk of children, his romantic visions of responsibility and fatherhood, in their grad-school and newlywed days, had ceased without discussion after the Crisis.  Between the miscarriages and the fact that they were having intercourse on average about once every three weeks, Sally was not likely to bear children in the near future.

 The ugly part of Reg’s divorce – where they were still technically living together although Reg was absent enough to give Mommy the opportunity to come up with new and more vitriolic explanations every day to answer “when’s Daddy coming home for good?” – lasted four months until the kids’ school semester ended.  Reg’s first wife made a point of using that time to find every other expat wife in the company and buttonhole her, usually while drunk, with a brief little speech about how “that conniving fucking Ukrainian milkmaid would keep trading up so be careful or you’ll be next.” 

This of course got back to Nina as it was designed to.  “Look, Sally,” Nina said over Parliaments and espresso a few weeks after getting back from the honeymoon Dubai shopping trip.  Nina wanted to sit outside to let the sun capture the 4-karat diamond ring Reg had bought her down there.  She was also very proud of the starburst tattoo she had just gotten around her navel and showed it to Sally right at the table.  “It will expand when I get pregnant with Reg.  The rose tattoo, I show you that another time where I can take my panties off.  Look, you and whatsername come from countries where men are taught to feel guilt and shame, you know, real human beings.  Divorce is traumatic and expensive.  This makes them good husbands but lousy lovers, so you do not have to learn how to keep them, they have very own feminine side does that for them.  Here the men are good lovers and terrible husbands.  No feminine side.  Cavemen.  Divorcing your wife in this country cost only marginally more than having her killed.  So we have to learn how to keep them.  These here?” and she lifted her breasts up higher for a second. “They might get a husband, but THIS” and she lifted one leg and slapped her buttock “is what keeps him.  Reg tells me that for seventeen years once a month he is trying to get that birdie wife of his to roll on her stomach for five minutes and every month she is telling him to get lost.  Well, now he found a nice fucking Ukrainian milkmaid to do that for him and so he does get good and lost.  British birdy has a good and lost husband because she has not heard they make lubricant for the asshole.  How is that my fault, you know..?”

Sally looks at a sketch of Reg, his broad English face cracking into that gaptoothed smile that makes him automatically funny after two beers.  Reg had been Paul’s mentor at the company, welcoming him in the door and showing him around.  She remembers how happy he was for the first year after marrying Nina, but then Paul got promoted over Reg.  Paul made Oleg, the owner and Chairman of the company, and at home Paul’s complaints, dry and spare at first, began to pile up about Reg’s priorities. 

“We are in a tough competitive market,” Paul would say over and again.  “If Reg wants to make full partner in the coming year, he needs to get off that trampoline he married and start putting in the time covering my files while I am on the road. I mean, I’ve bent over backwards to get Oleg to make Reg my first deputy; if he wants to step into my shoes in a year or two when I am promoted to the board, he’s going to have to prove he’s ruthless enough.  Maybe he’s right and his sperm count has dropped, I don’t know, but if he puts a baby in her before he’s promoted, he’s in deep shit.”

It was all noise to Sally, and she said so to Paul.  She felt good for Reg and Nina.  Maybe they would find happiness.  Maybe that happiness would be a good example.  Paul looked at her and shook his head. 

“Sal, Reg is not going to make Nina happy by rubbing her feet and being home every night for 9 pm dinner.  That is totally not what she wants.”

Sally looked at Paul and asked exactly how he became such an expert on what Nina wanted.  She was expecting a fight, or a denial, or a blush.  Instead, he smiled.

“Mrs. Gilbert, some women are simpler to understand than they look, and some women aren’t.”

Taking the risk that he was flirting, Sally flirted back.  Leaning back on the couch she asked him which type of woman she was, and he smiled and started to lean into her.  Then the phone rang, he muttered “sorry, I have to” and he took the phone call as the moment was lost…

Sally braces herself for Owen to state his professional and personal concerns in unclear proportion, but the door bell rings.  Sally recognizes the voice of the man from the Embassy, Olmsdale or Homesdale or something like that.  He had been by once before, to make sure that she was aware that if the militsia had any questions for her she was entitled to have a legal affairs officer from the consular section present but that any Russian legal advice on procedure or the disposition of the remains or her rights would have to be obtained locally.  She had given him all of Paul’s biographical information in order to coordinate transferring the body from Russian to Embassy custody for burial.  She and Owen have been expecting this visit.

She looks at the next sketch, a study that Paul used for his larger pieces.  He often planned to go into inks or oils, and intended the studies as preparation.  She looks casually at the study of the hand, the ring with the obscenely large stone, the dark talon nails. 

Sally remembers that Paul had done a sketch of Mikhail’s hand, the one with the J.  He had done it from memory, but he had captured the muscles, the wiry hair, the oddly long fingers with their impeccably manicured nails, that played guitar as Mikhail sang for her those Russian prison and war laments that made Sally think of old cowboy tunes and the blues.  For a brief moment, Sally regrets burning that picture.  Then she puts down the pack to deal with the Embassy man.

“Oh, thank God you came,” Owen is telling Olmsdale, who is explaining that it is slightly outside of policy but he will be glad to certify Sally’s signatures here on the necessary documents to transfer custody.  In light of events, etc.  The two of them discuss legalities in hushed tones as Nina continues on what she thinks must have happened with Mikhail, and then Owen and Olmsdale come in, with a stack of documents on a clipboard.  Sally shows Olmsdale the same blue passport she showed him the first time they met, with the seven-year old picture from when her curly hair was still in a barely containable ponytail.  What was left of Paul’s passport, which had been in the left inside pocket of his jacket, had been picked up by the investigators from the sidewalk of the New Arbat and surrendered ultimately to the Embassy.  She answers Olmsdale’s prompts, affirms that she is signing under penalty of perjury, and signs various forms.  He takes these, seals them with his stamp, and leaves a copy with her.  He extends his condolences and offers whatever further assistance her government can provide.  She thanks him and he leaves.  She has never left her position on the bed.

Owen is crouching on the floor, a position he does not find comfortable but apparently he feels is comforting to her, keeping him on eye level.

“Sally, I know this is a terrible time, but…”

She surprises him by reaching over and tousling his hair the way she recalls her mother doing with the family dog at her father’s wake.  The memory makes her smile.  Owen waits, his lawyer’s instinct telling him to keep his mouth shut when the opponent shows teeth.

She asks Owen what he thinks Paul would have wanted for her, for all of this.

Owen sighs.  Sally can hear Lyuda and Nina muttering in the kitchen.  She can’t follow it, but the tones are clear.  Something about where Mikhail was, where he is, Nina is pressing.  Lyuda’s answers are long, drawn out, but they must be ultimately uninformative.  Sally hears Nina use a number of words she had been taught women are not even supposed to know.  She had heard Paul use them sometimes, on the phone, in the past few months, spoken in the same angry tones.  He had said that these were conversations with Oleg, the Chairman and ultimate owner of the company.

Owen pulls a report from his briefcase; it is in a plastic sleeve and the coversheet is in color.  It has the logo of one of the Big Four on it.  Sally thumbs through it quickly, like a college student looking for the grade on the term paper.  She sees the number at the end.  It is large enough to support her for the rest of her life on interest alone.

Sally asks if Travis signed off on this, and she motions for her cigarette pack.

Owen nods as he reaches for it.  “Travis signed off on our audited financials for last year; we’ve projected this year’s numbers based on the unaudited six months.  Sally, that’s a fair valuation of the business and of Paul’s stake in it.  In a couple years, it might be worth more.  We would hope so, anyway.”  He pulls out a cigarette and lights it for her.

She smiles at him and blows smoke out the side of her mouth, so as not to hit him in the face with it.  They are both lawyers, aren’t they? She could always just take Paul’s shares, couldn’t she? She’d probably get his board seat, too, wouldn’t she?

Owen shakes his head.  “Board seats left vacant before the end of a director’s term by that director’s death are filled for the remainder of the term by nomination the Chairman.”

Sally continues the hypothetical.  But if his partner’s widow were to make it publicly obvious that she wants that seat to carry on her husband’s legacy of service to the company and community, then she would imagine the Chairman would have to choose between nominating her for that seat and appearing to have something to hide.

Owen, still kneeling, cups his hands like an ashtray for Sally.  “Define publicly.”

Sally taps into his hand and shrugs.  It could be anything, she says.  That the company could be worth more than what the Chairman allows them to report, and he’s trying to cheat a poor American widow out of her lawful estate, not to mention the Russian taxman out of his cut of realized capital gains on the value of the offshore subsidiaries.  Or, what would be more likely is that the company could be worth a lot less than what they are reporting, and the Chairman is trying to cheat his investors and creditors, not to mention his regulators.  If the latter is the case and the market starts to believe that, the company – which has already been the subject of media speculation recently – becomes a prime takeover target and it spends the next couple of years and tens of millions of dollars fighting off unwanted suitors in proxy battles that never needed to start in the first place.

Owen gets up, opens the door to the balcony and lets the wind blow the ashes from his palm.  A small residue remains, but Owen would never wipe his hand on his trousers.  He takes a few drops of moisture off the balustrade on the ledge, rubs it in his palm, and then rubs his palms together to dry them.  After inspecting them, he turns back to Sally.  He is smiling.  “I told Oleg that you might look at it this way.”

Sally holds her cigarette out for more ash, waiting for it.

“He said that if there is a special hell for Russian men, the only women they get are probably all American.”

Sally wonders who is really getting punished in that arrangement. 

Owen reaches into his back pocket and hands Sally a slip of paper.  He crouches down again, eye to eye with her, but the smile is gone.  It’s closing time.  “That’s available today, one lump sum, you sign everything over, quit all claims to future income, you go home, and you speak no ill of the dead or living.”  He shrugs as if to apologize in advance.

She opens the paper.  This number is almost twice the first number.  She nods.  Owen winks and hands her a stack of papers and a pen, marked for her signature.  She looks over the paperwork with pursed lips, looking the part of the grieving widow trying to look like she’s still a lawyer.  She holds out her hand for the pen and starts signing.

Owen pulls out a mail envelope too stuffed with orange currency to allow the envelope to be sealed.  “To take care of incidentals around here, like Lyuda?  All of Paul’s local bank accounts will take a while to unfreeze – we’ll take care of that, and forward it when it’s done – and your bank in the States might have a cash withdrawal daily limit.  We’ll handle rent and cell phones, and forwarding all of this, and everything else.  All you have to do, Sally, is sign this, and take Paul home.”

Sally finishes signing. Owen gently puts the glutted envelope on the windowsill, scans through the pages, and separates Sally’s copies for her.  “I have to run this back to the office, but I’ll see you off at the airport tonight.  Gretchen is happy to stay until the car comes.”

Sally shakes her head.  She’ll say her goodbyes at the airport. 

“Okay, then I’ll take Reg and Gretchen then.”  Sally nods yes at the unspoken Nina question, ignoring Owen as he leaves, turning back to the sketches, continuing with the ones Paul had never showed to her.  Her eyes are drawn to two of them.  One is of a voluptuous headless torso, hand not at all demurely in its lap with two of the nails visible, starburst around the navel and rose peeking shyly out of the black brush between the fingers of that hand.  But the one that still makes her cry and whisper his name whenever she sees it, is of her.  It is the most beautiful drawing she has ever seen of her, and he never showed it to her.  Paul must have done this from memory and imagination, because her face shows this year’s haircut but her breasts are fuller and nipples darker, lolling joyfully on top of and either side of an abdomen distended by at least seven months of pregnancy.  She has admired the craftsmanship of the piece, the way Paul stippled in a linea nigra starting to show up her belly, the way he made her smiling face glow.  If she concentrates, she can ignore the huge X drawn through it.

Sally leaves them on the bed, face up, and invites Nina in. 

“I can only stay a minute, you know?  But I just wanted to tell you that we all loved Paul so much and we, I mean I, I mean we, I…”

Sally has stood up, and Nina’s eyes are drawn to the pictures, unmentioned but obvious.  Sally holds up a pack of cigarettes and invites Nina to join her for a smoke on the balcony.

Nina turns away from the pictures.  “No, I can’t, you know.  My own mother did, of course, but I guess I’m a good British wife now.”

Sally lets her eyes fall down Nina’s body, dressed for once more for comfort than for speed.  Her angles are softening, her curves resplendent.  Silly of her to forget, Sally says, and inquires how it is going. 

Nina’s eyes are waiting for Sally’s.  “Of course, I’m still throwing up but Reg is thrilled, you know.”

Sally reaches out with two fingers for Nina’s belly, stopping an inch away from the spandex, and recalls aloud that Paul always said he had a baby in him.

Nina raises her hands to her shoulders and smiles, inviting the touch, but her eyes are the eyes of the woman on that train to nowhere years ago.  “Excuse me?” Nina asks, betraying nothing.

Sally puts her hand on Nina’s belly, starting with the fingertip and flattening the palm.  Reg, she clarifies.  Paul always said Reg had a baby in him.  Nina relaxes and Sally raises her other hand quickly to Nina’s cheek, watching for the telltale split second flinch and then the immediate exhale of relief.  Nina does not disappoint.  When the moment passes, Sally taps her cheek twice with force but no speed: a decaffeinated slap.

Nina continues to look her in the eye.  Tears are forming but she will not blink.  “Sally, please…” and she cannot finish.  Sally has never seen her cry before. 

Sally takes Nina’s hand to put it over hers.  Soon all four of their hands are on their secret.  She tells Nina it is all right, this will be a good baby, a healthy baby.

“I’ll be good mother,” Nina promises, sobbing as she loses her articles again.  “I’ll be such a good fucking mother to it, Sally, I fucking swear, you know.”

Sally knows this, and says so, but she takes one hand away.  She is trying to withdraw.  She does not want to literally cry over this child.

Nina sniffles.  “Do you want, do you…”  but she cannot finish the thought.  Instead she puts her hands back up in supplication.

Sally shakes her head, no.  She will not walk Nina through the rest of this, through the confessions and the absolutions to the reconciliations.  Her hand still on Nina’s belly, she reaches behind her for the sketch and using it as a guide, she crouches turns her hand over Nina’s womb until, if Paul drew right, the bottom of her palm is over the rose and the middle finger is touching the sunburst.  She hands the picture up to Nina who is too stunned not to hold it.

She gives Nina three pieces of advice, sounding like a mechanic dictating transmission problems to a car owner from under the hood.  One, Reg needs to think he got all of this on his own.  Two, Lyuda is going to need a job at the start of next month.  Third, Nina is advised to be nice to her because Lyuda loved Paul too.  Sally leaves Mikhail unmentioned.

            She pauses, not caring whether Nina has nodded or if she is even listening.

“Goodbye,” she whispers and pulls her hand away, waving Nina out without looking.  She waits for the closing door before she picks up the sketch, and she waits as the first teardrop falls on her own pregnant belly before she lets out the sob, the last howl she will give to this bedroom, this city, this man.

Intermission

It's premature for me to do an intermission in much detail. I have not populated this blog with much material yet. I also have not collected enough of an obvious following to assume that anybody is reading. Still, while I am dredging up material to post, it is good discipline to write a certain amount of copy every day just to keep up interest. Maybe I will say something that provokes a comment that in turn provokes an idea for a piece to write.

So, a bit of Q&A:

Q: Visually, this is a stark blog. No pictures, no links to videos, no music. Will it stay that way?

A: I don't know. Multi-media blogs have the potential to be great because they are incredibly entertaining. But my fondest memories of reading go back to a childhood where, when it was time to read, everything else went off except maybe some instrumental background music. That let you put your entire brain to work on the words. Maybe at some point I'll realize that I'm just another shop in a massive mall and I need bells and whistles and displays to get you to come in and browse the shelves. But for now, I'm offering you a quiet corner of a sunlit library. Feel free to bring your own coffee.

Q: How old is this material?

A: Thus far what I have put up is between six months and seven years old. I write slowly because I have other things I have to do to make money. That's not an excuse, it's an acknowledgment that I am still learning to treat writing as a tool to stay sane and not an obligation to be resented. Maybe the reason for this blog is to force me to produce copy until I am ready to (sorry, can't resist) Keep Calm and Carry On.

Q: How much of the material is autobiographical and how much of it is fiction?

A: I think when someone is beginning to write, the first narratives chosen are the ones easiest to remember, the writer's own history. At some point the writer graduates to being able to construct the story, characters, conflict etc. from any and all sources. I think I am in the middle. From time to time it will be raw. I'll try to remember that as therapeutic it might feel to put up, my first obligation is keep you entertained.

The Power Vertical

One Sunday morning, Davis Wicklow’s study phone rings him out of bible study in his apartment on the compound of the US Embassy. He lifts himself off of his knees, ruffles the hair of his youngest child Min and kisses Junette on the forehead. There is no question he will be leaving, as only the officer on duty would dare ring him during services. He closes the study door behind him and picks the receiver up. A three word code is delivered to him and he nods as if the person on the other end can see him. He has been requested to meet in half an hour at the Moscow Zoo, two blocks away. Davis exits his study, smiles at his son Elijah, who has taken over the services for him, and pulls on his sneakers and windbreaker. He pats his pockets to make sure that he is carrying his diplomatic passport and a few hundred rubles (to buy Min another refrigerator magnet in the shape of a giraffe for her collection). The last thing he does is hit the button on the coffee pot. When the coffee is brewed, Junette will pour it down the drain, like they do once a day.

Davis has been watching a caged South American spectacled bear scratch itself uselessly for about twenty minutes when a man walks up to him.  “You like mustard?” Dmitry asks as he holds out a hot dog in a napkin and an orange soda to Wicklow.

“I like to spend my Sunday mornings at home.” Wicklow accepts his early lunch.

Dmitry Lavronenko, one hand now freed of fast food, points at the bear. “Davis, you think they put saltpeter in the food here? Every other zoo I ever see in the world, the bears and the primates – all of the creatures that walk on two feet – they cannot keep their hands off their privates. Not here, here our male bipeds are positively docile. Why?”

“I suspect my government has never really expended the proper effort to discover whether erectile dysfunction is more common in your zoo animals than in ours. Although I will be sure to report that you found this an area worthy of discussion.”

“Even if my curiosity is of less than an official nature? What question is more personal than the sin of Onan?” Dmitry pops the cola. 

“What question is more relevant to our profession,” Davis muses at the spectacled bear, who appears to be counting his hands, “than that which relates to organs, eh, Dmitry?”

“Davis Wicklow, the punning Saint.”

Davis turns to Dmitry and raises his orange soda, raising it in a toast. “Did you call for me this morning to see if I am going to blush at the concept of masturbating zoo animals, or are you trying to start a dialogue about what can or cannot be left out of a contact report?”

Dmitry lifts his can and winks. “You first, I think. Davis, what do you think I want?”

“I think you are here to deliver the tit-for-tat list.” Davis is referring to the napkin he has just palmed. There will be four names on it. When he gets back to the Embassy, he will open the napkin, read the four names to the Chief of Station, who will inform the Ambassador, who will tell his Deputy Chief of Mission for Protocol and Diplomatic Affairs, who will call four households and tell them that they are going to be expelled.

The previous week, the United States identified four diplomats at the Russian Embassy in Washington whom they accused of “engaging in activities inconsistent with their status” and gave them forty-eight hours to leave the United States. Russia had called this expulsion outrageous and said it would consider its options. What everyone knew it would do is pick four diplomats at the US Embassy in Moscow of roughly similar rank, make the same accusation, and throw them out with the same ceremony and the same deadline. The United States would declare this outrageous, say that it will consider its options, and then the matter will be dropped with no further rhetoric or escalation. The matter will be ended for the time being.

This practice of reciprocal expulsions is known as tit-for-tat. As a sign of improved relations in the 1990s, Russia and the US began to extend to each other the courtesy of an extra day or two of informal notice ahead of the official announcement to give the tit-for-tat expellees the chance to say their goodbyes and their friends the chance to throw more extravagant expulsion parties. If the expellee had a family with him, the family would even be allowed to stay in the host country until the end of whatever school period the children were in.

Dmitry shakes his head. “Been here, done that, but I am still here. Why, Davis?”

The zoo is divided by Bolshaya Gruzinskaya Street, over which a footbridge with a chicken wire gable connects the two sections. As they cross over the bridge to the side with the monkeys and the reptile houses, Davis reflects that for the moment, it is he and Dmitry that are in the cage.

“The same thing you probably want every time you call me out to some park or garden on a Sunday morning. The pleasure of my company. I assume that you are aware that when my government delivers the tit-for-tat list ahead of time, they simply have someone from State call your Ambassador and read him the names. State makes the official announcement a day later.”

Dmitry shakes his head. “As if this is diplomat business, catching spies and throwing them out when they refuse to defect. No, I do it this way because this is how professionals do it. Face to face. The traditional way. Showing respect for one’s adversary. Old habits, like the way you still toss a pot of coffee down the sink every day because you all heard at Langley twenty years ago that we flagged anyone we thought was Mormon as a probable spy.”

“Aren’t we?” Davis teases.

“You know, my daughter is twenty one? Beautiful girl.”

Davis nods. “Svetlana, right?”

“Sveta. So last week Sveta got her first marriage proposal. On her cell phone. By SMS. Do you believe that?”

“What does one put into an SMS marriage proposal?”

“This boy, he wrote her a chastushka, asked her to marry him in it. You know chastushki?”

Davis nods. “The equivalent of a limerick, same subject matter and meter, only with four lines instead of five.”

“He wrote her ‘I’m in love with a girl named Sveta/So I send her this electronic letter/If she marries me I promise you/She’ll get that which separates Christian from Jew’.”

Davis bites his lip. “I think we might have been the last generation of romantics, Dmitry.”

“I don’t know. The boy has good taste in women and poets. The last two lines are almost verbatim from Pushkin. Anyway, I had the kid put in a holding cell on Dzerzhinskaya.”

“How did he like it?” Davis is neither surprised that Dmitry would incarcerate his potential future son-in-law in the most notorious address in the country nor that Dmitry is discussing this with him.

“It was not even a real cell, just a storage room with a cot. I locked him in with a chamberpot and a roll of toilet paper. In the morning I pulled him out, gave him some tea and told him that he has twenty-four hours either to put a ring on my daughter’s finger or get as far away from Moscow as he can.” Dmitry shrugs again. After twenty years of speaking Russian at near native competency levels, Davis still does not pretend to decipher the nuances of the Russian shrug. “What kind of seeds do you want?”

The zoo, no longer fully financed and subsidized by the city, raises funds by renting almost every corner and turn of the walkways to hawkers of toys, books, balloons, charms, cold drinks, cotton candy and cellophane-wrapped paper cones filled with a choice of seeds: pumpkin, sunflower, cedar. “Sunflower,” Davis decides. Dmitry buys two cones of seeds and motions Davis to sit down, handing the sunflower seeds to him.

In front of the park bench are layers of sunflower seed husks, some ground into the asphalt years ago, some rolling around in the wind. Davis absentmindedly unwraps his cellophane, wondering when Dmitry would ever get to the point. Lavronenko’s resume is as quietly vicious as his own: South Yemen, Laos, Afghanistan. Doubtlessly, the man can be piercing and direct. But with Davis, with whom he will only speak in person and outdoors, he is always meandering through the zoo, or Gorky Park, or the Botanical Gardens down by Moscow State University.

“… like I would care that his father is the First Deputy Prime Minister. Are you afraid of politicians in your country, Davis? Davis, what are you doing?”

Davis has a sprinkling of seeds already on the ground and he is about to pinch more. A flock of ravens, ugly and mean, descend for a late morning snack. “I’m feeding the birds, Dmitry.”

Lavronenko’s laugh reaches around the bench and the two of them and the sullen birds and the seed seller. “Davis, we EAT the seeds. We do not feed winged vermin.”

Davis nods, bested. He starts to crack open the seed with his fingernail when Dmitry leans in to whisper. “This is why your guys always get made, you know. The little things. Let me show you.”  Dmitry teaches Davis how to crack sunflower seeds with his teeth, spit out the husk, get the seed on the tongue all in one or two crunches, and then pop the husk out without spitting on to the ground.  For about five minutes this keeps them quiet, until halfway through the cone, Dmitry sighs and leans back, his signal that it is time for the other side of their relationship.

“Pitchfork,” Dmitry says. “That operation is over, I think. I suspect that whatever information we are getting from that particular joint exercise is no longer reliable.”

“Over in the sense of on hold for awhile because you are annoyed that we rolled up a couple of your legals, or over in the sense of – ”

Dmitry crushes his soda can in his fist and regards it. Davis watches him judge the distance between the bench and the nearest overfilling trash can, and decide against the toss. He switches to English. “Officially, my government does not sulk like a schoolgirl who is stood up for the prom. Unofficially, my government is not in the mood to do your government any favors at the moment.  But that is coincidence.  This decision has nothing to do with the recent business with the tit-for-tat.”

“So in my contact report,” Davis says, following Dmitry into his own native language, “I will say that the organs are pulling the plug on five years of mutually profitable anti-terrorism surveillance coordinated between my Agency and your Service, unprecedented solid intelligence on financing networks that supply fundamentalist terrorism throughout Central Asia, because – well, Dmitry, that’s the question. Because why?”

Dmitry pushes a seed husk off his lower lip with his tongue. “Officially, I will tell you we suspect our sources have been corrupted and dangerously unreliable.”  He does not look Davis in the eye.

“Dmitry, if I were a cynical man, I would suggest here that perhaps the corruption is not completely external to your Service. I would note that a principal source of funding for these networks comes from heroin trafficking. I would draw the shortest distance from the poppy fields of Afghanistan to major Atlantic ports of Western Europe and neither of us would be particularly surprised to find that two-thirds of this line runs right across the territory of your country, through Moscow herself. I would posit that it is hard to resist the opportunity to make several hundred million dollars a year simply guaranteeing safe passage of more than half of the world’s raw heroin supply across that trade route. I would refer back to that map and remind you that our bearded acquaintances in the cloth headgear live a lot closer to you than to me. And I would conclude with the sad theory that someone somewhere has made the decision that putting that money in his own pocket is worth whatever risk that poses to your country’s own long term security.” Davis pauses, and switches back to Russian. “Fortunately, I am not a cynic nor do I wish to offend your patriotism, so I will save all of that for my contact report.”

Dmitry gives another Slavic shrug and stands up. “Your discretion is fortunate. As a dedicated professional I would find any such speculation on your part of rampant corruption within the power ministries of my government a reason to recommend objective measures be taken with you.” He leans into Davis and stares into his eyes. “Do you want some chocolate?”

“Sure, an Alyona if they have it.”

As Dmitry walks back from the seed seller fifty rubles poorer and a pair of sodas and one chocolate bar richer, Davis asks him, “I thought the organs no longer liquidate people like me to avenge a reputational slur.”

“We don’t,” Dmitry answers. “But we still are in the business of killing those who reveal our secrets. Here, all they have is a Kuzya.”

Davis takes the chocolate bar and the orange soda, opens the bar and breaks off a small piece which he passes back to Dmitry, who pretends to be hurt by the implication.

“Please,” he says. “Only North Koreans poison chocolate.” He takes the piece anyway.

“Well, it would be more effective than that time you had a motorcycle courier try to knock me off the Bosphorus Bridge on my morning run.”

“What happens in Istanbul stays in Istanbul. Jogging at middle age is foolish. But while we are on the topic of the unfriendlier moments of our twenty-year competition, are you trying to tell me that you had nothing to do with that unfortunate incident in Luanda?”

Davis lets another piece of chocolate melt on his tongue and washes it down with soda. “Hard to believe, but apartheid-era Pretoria did not always consult with us when they went after the ANC’s Soviet financiers in Angola. However, if you think jogging is foolish, then what do you call soliciting a pair of sixteen-year-old twin Korean girls off the street?”

Dmitry chokes on his cola and coughs out a curse. “Macao was you? That was a dirty trick, in more ways than one. Setting honey traps is the mark of an amateur, you know.”

“And falling for them is the mark of an expert? Shame on you. Marina is a fine woman.”

“As is Junette. I do not envy our wives, Davis. Do you think that when we retire they will find us unbearably boring, being at home with nothing but stories we cannot tell?”

“We have a saying in Langley: Old agents never retire, we just subcontract.”

“To the CIA?”

“Hollywood. Apparently you do that too. We had one of your guys from the San Francisco Consulate defect with his wife and kids on a tour at Universal Studios, remember that?”

“I knew that pederast. He told you he was First Directorate, right? He lied.”

Davis nods. “We know. We squeezed him and came up dry, but we put him and his family up in protection anyway. He just asked for a passport and a place in Los Angeles. We gave it to him, and he hired an agent, and in six months he was getting consulting credits on Bruce Willis movies.”

“Serves you right. Who would station a real spy in California, where nothing happens without it showing up on six television networks by the next morning?” Lavronenko crumples the second can, stands, and holds his hand out.

Wicklow finishes his soda, stands as well, and hands the can to be crushed. Dmitry tosses the two crushed cans and then puts his hand out again, which confuses Davis for a moment. The unwritten rule is that there is never physical contact. Davis takes the hand and shakes it.

Dmitry switches again to English. “We do not say we are sorry in this business. But I want you to know I took no pleasure in this. It was the move I had to make.”

Davis finds himself giving Dmitry the same shrug. “Very professional of you.”

They both laugh for a moment before Dmitry turns without a word and walks away.

Davis stops at the gift shop to get the giraffe magnet and returns to the embassy, where the Marines let him in on his face and password alone. He kisses Junette at the door, goes into his study and opens the napkin. He calls the Chief of Station, reads the other three names to him, and starts to pack.