Mahogany paneling, old chandeliers, long bar, de-silvered mirrors that Tolya told me he picked up at the flea market in Paris, and which caught the light. On the walls were the Soviet posters he had collected: Mayakovsky, the Stenberg Brothers, Rodchenko, a painting by Malevich that must have cost millions. Waiters in white bistro aprons checked the tables, the linen, glass.
People were filtering in quietly, the early part of the evening, most coming for dinner.
A handsome guy in a beautiful black suit, the cut so perfect I knew it was custom-made, approached me and asked if he could help.
I needed help. I told him I knew Sverdloff through a friend. It worked like a charm. The guy offered me a table, I said I’d sit at the bar. He offered me a drink, I said Scotch, please.
Konstantin was the suit’s name, and I told him I was Max Fielding and gave him the information I’d given the kids on the bus. I didn’t know if he believed me or not, but he welcomed me to Moscow and said did I need anything, and excused himself to greet somebody who had arrived and had perched on a barstool four down from where I sat.
While I drank I read an English-language paper I’d picked up at the airport. Fifty-four per cent of Russians, according to a poll, consider money the most important thing as compared to eleven per cent of Americans, the piece said. Things were going to fall into an abyss, another columnist had written. Give it two months, give it until October, he said, and the price of oil would plunge, and everybody would be left high and dry, stranded, screwed. Putin announced, meanwhile, that everything would be wonderful for a hundred years.
A couple of men who had planted themselves at the bar began telling jokes. They were well dressed, nice clothes, good accents. I made out that they were a pair of Moscow architects.
After a couple of drinks, they started talking about people from the former Sov republics. Then one cracked a joke about Obama. They laughed. What a joke, one said to the other in Russian.
“I say to myself, hope?” he said. “I say, change? I see a black guy, and I say, okay, how much?”
I was slipping between planets. I didn’t bother telling them Obama was probably the only candidate who could help us out, and we needed help. I didn’t bother. They wouldn’t get it.
I sat and drank for a while until the suit-Konstantin-came over, and asked if I needed anything else, and I mentioned I was looking for a place to stay. An apartment, maybe, instead of a hotel, I said. I wanted to get the real feel of being in Moscow.
I was pretty surprised-maybe it was too good to be true and I should have known it-Konstantin said he might have a solution. He asked if I wanted to eat, a waiter brought me some smoked fish and another drink, and about half an hour later, the American appeared.
Konstantin made the introductions and the guy got up on the stool next to me, asked for a beer, shook my hand. He had a Midwestern accent, and asked where I was from.
“New York,” I said.
“I love New York. I’m from Minnesota,” he said, and grinned. “Small town you’ve never heard of. You just got here? Max, right?”
I nodded.
“Willie Moffat,” he said. “Konstantin over there told me you were looking for a place to stay?”
In the background, Sinatra sang “Moonlight In Vermont”.
“I have to go back to the States, I fixed my flight,” said Moffat. “I was trying to set up to rent my apartment. My Russian sucks. So I asked Konstantin who knows everyone in Moscow, if he could help. I want to do it off the books, so I get it back, it’s for a few weeks.”
I ordered another drink and listened to Moffat, wondering who he really was, this tall balding American with square shoulders who had appeared suddenly with an apartment for rent. I looked in the mirror at the people behind me. Half expected to see Grisha Curtis shadowing me the way he had in London.
“How long for? The apartment?”
“Like I said, few weeks, a month tops. Listen, I’m sorry to make it kind of urgent, but I have to leave tonight, and it would be great if you wanted it,” said Moffat, fumbling for a pack of cigarettes. “Great thing about Moscow is you can still smoke,” he said. “The thing is, my mom is sick, and I don’t want to leave the apartment empty, you know? I just got it, and if you leave it empty, even after you pay off the realtors and do the bribes and shit, you can lose it. I don’t exactly have all the paperwork signed and sealed yet. But you’d be fine for a few weeks, honest.” His words spilled out in a rush, he was a guy in a hurry, but best I could tell he really was in a hurry to see his sick mother.
“Go on.”
Moffat looked reassured.
“I just started a new job here,” he said. “I’m on a private water project, and everybody is desperate about housing, it’s insane, you want to rent a decent place in a good area, it’s like the competition is completely nuts. I found this place. I mean, this girl found it for me, and it’s in a building that’s not really finished, look I could show you.” He was repeating himself. He was eager. Too eager?
“Yeah, I’ll take a look, why not,” I said casually as I could. If it worked out, I’d have a place to stay and nobody would know, I wouldn’t have to deal with a hotel, and the paperwork. As best I could, I was trying not to leave a trail, trying to keep to myself.
“My car’s outside,” he said. “If you want, I can leave you my car with the apartment,” added Moffat, who found Konstantin in the middle of the laughing drinking crowd, pressed some money into his hand, thanked him.
“I’ll tell Mr Sverdloff I saw you if he comes by. Mr Fielding, isn’t that right?” said Konstantin.
“Is he in Moscow? You didn’t say.”
“I heard so,” he said, his face bland and unrevealing. “But he has not been into the club yet.”
“Doesn’t he always come here?”
“I don’t ask these questions.”
“Sure, tell him Max said hi. And thanks,” I said, slipped a few large bills into his perfect suit jacket, and went to get my bag and look at Moffat’s apartment.
In Moffat’s new blue BMW, he asked me what I did. I told him I was planning to write a travel guide to the new Moscow.
“Who’s the girl?” I said, making conversation as he drove us to the building.
“You knew? You had to figure I didn’t care so much about the apartment just for myself, right?” He grinned and said his girl was really something, but he knew she wanted that apartment, and he had taken it on a six-month basis with an option to buy.
He was an engineer, he said, and told me about his life in Red Wing, Minnesota in so much detail, by the time we got to the apartment, I knew that his father was a doctor, an internist, and his brother liked golf, and more or less everything else about the Moffat family.
I made some conversation about the baseball season to prove I was a good American.
Moffat was a diehard Twins fan, but he commiserated with me over the Yankees and over Torre leaving and I admitted only a dumb fan like me could stay loyal to such a fuck-up of a team.
We talked politics a little. It was all Americans talked about, that and the baseball season. He liked Obama, he said. Had shaken his hand at a rally. I fell in with the conversation.
“You sound homesick already,” Moffat said.
“Yeah. For sure.”
“I don’t know your last name,” he added amiably.
“Fielding,” I said.
At Moffat’s building, a caretaker was half asleep on a chair in the lobby. He looked at me suspiciously. Moffat stuffed some money in his hand.
“I call him Igor, he reminds me of Young Frankenstein,” said Moffat, chuckling. Igor also worked with the construction crews, said Moffat in English. Igor didn’t speak English. He didn’t speak much at all.
I followed Moffat up six flights of stairs-the new elevator wasn’t installed yet, and I was panting by the time we got there. He showed me around the two-room apartment with high ceilings and tall windows, peeling mint green paint in the bathrooms and olive green tiles, a big sofa and flatscreen TV in the living room, a brand-new king-size bed in the bedroom. In the kitchen a Soviet-era Elektra stove that was six feet tall, and emitted a strange smell I couldn’t pin down. Gas? Sewage?