“Above all,” he murmured.
“Ace in the hole,” he said, but that day he couldn’t quite make the words mean anything.
Vladimir was probably with Aksinya, cupping her new potatoes. Or he could be skating, but the ice wasn’t thick yet, and Ilya looked and could see the shine of Vladimir’s skates in the bin under the couch. Maybe he was clinging to the back of the #33 bus with Sergey, though Ilya didn’t know if they even rode out to the refinery anymore. And then, as though Ilya had conjured him, Vladimir burst through the door. His boots were untied, the laces wet and whipping at his ankles, and there were two girls following close behind him.
“We saw Fyodor Fetisov!” he said. “We were up on the bridge and all of a sudden all these black cars roll out—one after the other—and then this SUV that is—” Vladimir kissed his fingers the way Italians did on TV when they saw a beautiful woman. “He was going like one fifty. He almost hit us.” Vladimir grabbed the blini off of Ilya’s plate and took it down in two bites, as though his brush with death had left him famished. Then he said, in a softer voice, “I touched his car. Just reached out and touched it.”
Ilya could see it: his brother’s fingers touching that perfect paint job, the car shocking him with the import of the man inside.
“Bozhe moy,” Babushka said. “Why do you do things like that? You’re going to get yourself arrested.” She collapsed the fan of cards in her hand into a neat stack and said, “Who are you?” to the girls.
One of them was almost too beautiful to look at, with long, dark hair like the Nenets and blue eyes that were all Russian. “Aksinya,” she said, and then, to Vladimir, “I don’t know why you wanted to touch his car. He’s terrible. That’s what my sister says.”
“It’s no business of ours,” Babushka said.
“I’m Lana,” the other girl said. She was blond, softer, with a gap between her teeth that suggested a gentle stupidity.
“Lana Vishnyeva. I know your father,” Babushka said, and Lana nodded.
Ilya asked if they’d seen the oligarch’s face, and Vladimir shook his head. He said that the windows were as black as oil. “I saw Maria Mikhailovna’s husband through the windshield though,” Vladimir said. “He was driving.”
“Why’s Fetisov here? He hasn’t been here since—” Ilya paused. As far as he could remember, Fyodor Fetisov had never been to Berlozhniki.
“Some new pipeline project,” Vladimir said.
“Because the billions he has aren’t enough,” Babushka said, her tone sharp, and then it softened, and she said, “Are you hungry, girls?”
Once Vladimir had asked her if she ever got tired of asking people if they were hungry, of feeding them. “There’s nothing that makes me happier in the world than being able to feed a child,” she’d said in that tone that old people used when they talked about the Great War, and Vladimir had rolled his eyes.
“I’m starving,” Lana said, without any shame.
Aksinya nodded, and Babushka brought out more plates. Ilya cleared his books, and the prostoy durak game was put on hold. They crowded around the table, and the apartment got that feeling that it could sometimes have, like it was holding something golden and sweet, like it was filled to the brim with honey.
CHAPTER FIVE
From down in the basement, Ilya could hear the Masons eating dinner. The clink of dishes. Chairs scraping, water running, the occasional shriek of Marilee or Molly. He had yawned enough times during Mama Jamie’s tour of the basement—the “rec room,” she called it—that she had relented and allowed him to skip dinner and whatever other orientation activities she had planned.
The basement had a set of glass doors that framed a dark patch of earth under the deck where a few bikes were slumped in a pile. A ping-pong table stretched across half the room. The net had given up in the middle, the paddles peeled at the edges, and Ilya was comforted by these tiny signs of neglect. Over the bed, there was an enormous poster of a beach with footprints near the surf. The sky had been enhanced till it looked radioactive. The water was the color of Freon. It had something to do with Jesus, but Ilya wasn’t sure what exactly. He had his own bathroom. “Feel free to flush the t.p.,” Mama Jamie had said, and she’d ripped a few squares off the roll and flushed them herself to prove the power of American plumbing. Then she’d opened a shallow cabinet over the sink to reveal a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo, each in its own bright packaging. Ilya wished that he didn’t need them—if he had left under different circumstances, his mom would have packed them—but he did.
In a little nook by the glass doors was a desk with a computer. The monitor was off, the screen the gray of a dead tooth, but still Ilya’s stomach lifted and flipped when he saw it. He wanted news of Vladimir. He wanted, so badly, just to see Vladimir’s face. As soon as Mama Jamie had retreated up the basement stairs, he pressed the button on the hard drive. For a long second there was nothing, and he thought it must be broken, aged out by the sleeker model in the den, but then the computer exhaled softly. Something inside began to spin. A weak green light flicked on, and the screen came to life. The background loaded: Papa Cam, Mama Jamie, and the girls on a beach. They were all in turquoise shirts and white shorts. Sadie’s hair was a darker blond—her natural color, Ilya guessed—and now that he could stare at her unabashedly, he saw that there was something strange about one of her eyes. One pupil was slightly jagged, as though it had suffered a tiny explosion. Then the applications popped up. One covered Sadie’s face, and Ilya pulled the mouse over to the internet browser and clicked.
First he checked his email, hoping for some sort of good news, but of course there was nothing but spam—ads for penis enlargements and hot American pussy and cheap flights to Lake Baikal. He couldn’t log in to VKontakte without converting the keyboard to Cyrillic, and so he spent half an hour Googling keyboard conversions, and another half hour in the bowels of the computer settings, until, finally, the Roman letters on the keyboard called up his old, familiar alphabet. Then he logged in, typed Vladimir’s name in the search box, and waited for his profile to load.
He’d last checked Vladimir’s profile the day before Maria Mikhailovna drove him to the airport, and there were dozens of new posts since then:
Rot in Hell.
Even GOD won’t forgive you.
I hope you get raped up the ass every day for the rest of your miserable life. That will = what you deserve.
Ilya forced himself to read each one, to wait until the sting had faded, and then to read it again. He moved slowly, deliberately, sounding out each word in the same way he did with his lists of English vocabulary. Pyotr Vladimirov, who lived two floors below them, had written Genesis 3 without any additional explanation, and Pasha Tretiak, who had skated with Vladimir the one year he’d been on the School #17 team, had written I always knew you were a sick fuck.
One person had posted a picture of Vladimir superimposed over a picture of the devil—horns, tail, and all. Another had posted a picture of Olga Nadiova, the second girl killed, and written, Why?
Russians murdering Russians—this is capitalism, one man had written, and a political debate had unspooled in a dozen more posts.
You are why the death penalty exists.
If only Stalin were alive to deal with you.
They were the same things that people had spat at him and his mother and Babushka in the bathroom line; the same things that people had spray-painted on their apartment door.