Polutin’s arm dropped onto his shoulder. “So, Viktor. How much are you bidding?”
Uncomprehending, Chemayev looked at him, then at Larissa. The stoniness of her face, in contrast with the soft vulnerability of her breasts and the gentle swell of her belly, seemed to restate the conflict between what he hoped and what he feared. He had the impulse to take off his coat and cover her, but he didn’t move a muscle. “I don’t have any money,” he said to Polutin. “Not for this. I have some, but… I…” He looked again to Larissa. “Why aren’t you at the bar?” He reached for her hand but she pulled away.
“Don’t.” Her chin trembled. “Don’t touch me. Just do what you have to and let me go.”
“What’s happened? Larissa, please!” Chemayev made as though to slide out of the booth, but Polutin caught his arm.
“Be very careful,” he said. “I can’t save you from this.”
Chemayev shook him off, leaned across the table to Larissa. “For God’s sake! I still have the money. All of it. What’s wrong?”
Yuri’s double moved between them, stared at him dispassionately, his thick lips pursed. “You refused to pay,” he said. “You broke the contract. Now”—he shrugged—“you can either bid or you can remain here until your debt is paid.”
“My debt? I don’t owe you…”
“The price of the woman,” said the double. “You broke the contract, you forfeit her price.”
A tiny nebula of platinum and emeralds glinted among the tangles of Larissa’s dark hair. Someone must have given her new earrings. In the silvery light her nipples showed candy pink, her skin milky. A mole the size of a .22-caliber bullet hole on the small of her back above the high, horsey ride of her buttocks. Chemayev realized he was cataloguing these details, filing them away, as if he’d have to remember them for a long time.
“What can I do?” he asked her. “Isn’t there anything?…”
“Leave me alone,” she said.
His desperation and confusion knitted into a third emotion, something akin to anger but imbued with the sort of hopeless frustration an insect might feel when, after an enduring struggle, it has freed itself from a spiderweb only to fall into an empty jelly glass, where it is peered at by the incurious eyes of an enormous child. Chemayev’s hand dropped to the money belt but he did not remove it.
“Make up your mind,” said the double. “There are others who may wish to bid.”
Chemayev had difficulty unbuttoning his shirt. His fingers felt thick and bloodless, and the inside of his head compacted, as if stuffed with gray rags. Stripping off the belt took an inordinately long time—it seemed to cling to his waist. Finally he managed it. The double grabbed the belt and gave it a shake. “There can’t be much here,” he said.
“Four million,” said Chemayev emptily.
“Four million rubles?” The double scoffed at the figure. “The bid’s already much higher than that.”
“Dollars,” Chemayev said. “It’s in gold certificates.”
Polutin was aghast. “Four million dollars? Where did you get such a sum?”
“I didn’t steal from you. I played the German market. The DAX.”
Polutin lifted his glass in salute. “And I thought I was familiar with all your talents.”
“FOUR MILLION!” The double roared into his microphone. “VIKTOR CHEMAYEV BIDS FOUR MILLION DOLLARS!”
The assemblage began to cheer wildly, shouts of “Bravo!” fists pounding the tables, women shrieking. Chemayev put his elbows on the table, rested his head in his hands.
“Here,” said Larissa, her voice like ashes. She thrust out the rose to him, the bloom nodding stupidly in his face, a knurl of convulsed crimson. He was unable to make sense of the thing. He tried to connect with her again, and when she looked away this time, his eyes ranged over her body like a metal detector over a snowy field, registering the fullness of her thighs, the razor-cut strip of pubic hair, the swollen underside of a breast. The least of her human details—she had withdrawn all else. She dropped the rose onto the block of ice. The bloom nestled against an empty bottle of Ketel One. Melting ice dripped onto the petals. Yuri’s double took Larissa by the arm and escorted her toward the stage.
“It might be best for you to leave, Viktor,” Polutin said. “Take the morning off. Come see me in my office around three. And be prepared for a difficult negotiation. These Italians will screw us good if they can.”
Chemayev laboriously pushed himself up from the booth. People were continuing to cheer, to talk excitedly about the size of the bid. On stage Yuri sailed one of the gold certificates into the air, where it burst into flames; the fire assumed the shape of a pair of flickering wings and then flew apart into a flurry of small orange birds. With gasps and delighted cries, the crowd marveled at what they assumed was a trick, but might well have been something more extraordinary. Yuri bowed, then sailed another of the certificates high—it floated above the heads of the crowd, expanding into a sunburst, becoming a stylized golden mask like the representation of the benign east wind on a medieval map. Golden coins sprayed from its mouth. One of the coins was plucked out of mid-air by a pale dark-haired man wearing a leather trenchcoat. Chemayev had only the briefest glimpse of him before he vanished in the swarm of people scrambling for the coins, but he could have sworn it was March. Niall your fucking Welcome Wagon March, the rage of Kilmorgan, the pale Gombeen Man. Chemayev could not sustain interest in the implications fostered by March’s possible presence, but he wondered about the man. Who the hell had March been, anyway? What he said he was, who he variously seemed, or a surprise waiting behind the game show’s mystery door?
“Come a little before three,” said Polutin. “That way we’ll be sure to have time to talk.”
As Chemayev turned to leave he noticed the rose. Contact with the cold had darkened the edges of several petals, but it remained an alluring complexity, vividly alive against the backdrop of ice and white linen. After a moment’s hesitation he picked it up. Chances were he would only throw it away, but considering the cost, he wanted no one else to claim it.
Outside, the snow was no longer falling. Long thin curves of wind-blown powder lay across the asphalt like the ghosts of immense talons; white crusts shrouded the windshields of the surrounding cars. Chemayev sat at the wheel of his Lada, the engine idling, wipers clearing a view of the bunkerlike entrance to Eternity. In the morning, he thought. In the morning when Larissa went to school he’d meet her at the door and ask why she had treated him so coldly. Was it simply because he’d failed her? Maybe they’d threatened her, lied to her. Whatever the reason, he’d be honest. Yes, he’d say, I fucked up. But it’s this place that’s mostly to blame, this broken down ex-country. Nothing good can happen here. I’m going to set things right and once we get away I’ll be the man you believed in, the one who loves you… Even as he rehearsed this speech he recognized its futility, but the plug of nothingness that had stoppered his emotions during the auction had worked itself loose, the speedball of failure and rejection had worn off, and all the usual passions and compulsions were sparking in him again.
A gaunt, gray-haired man in a tattered overcoat stumbled into his field of vision. One of the krushova dwellers, holding a nearly empty bottle of vodka. He lurched against the hood of a Jaguar parked in the row across from Chemayev, slumped onto the fender, then righted himself and took a pull from the bottle. He wiped his mouth, stared blearily at the Lada, and flung out his arm as if shooing away a dog or an annoying child. “Fuck off,” said Chemayev, mostly to himself. The man repeated the gesture, and Chemayev thought that perhaps he had not been gesturing at him, perhaps he’d been summoning reinforcements. Dozens… no, hundreds of similarly disheveled figures were shambling toward him among the ranks of gleaming cars. Bulky women with moth-eaten sweaters buttoned wrong; men in duct-tape-patched hooded parkas, ruined faces peering grimly through portholes lined with synthetic fur; others in ill-fitting uniform jackets of various types; one in rubber boots and long johns. Shadowy drabs and drudges coming from every corner of the lot, as if they were phantoms conjured from the asphalt, as if the asphalt were the black meniscus of Yuri’s brimful kingdom. Clinging to one another for support on the icy ground like the remnants of a routed army. Drunk on defeat. They stationed themselves along the row, all glaring at Chemayev, each with a charcoal mouth and inkdrop eyes, faces with the ridged, barren asymmetry of terrain maps, the background figures in an apocalypse by Goya come to life, each beaming at him a black fraction of state-approved, party-sponsored enmity. Yuri’s state. Yuri’s party.