Alexander Chernov had been a wheeler-dealer in the black market in Kiev during the days of the Soviet Union. When the Union ended and the underground black market became an overground but still illegal market for goods, food, and services, Chernov had made even more money. He had, however, made the mistake of bribing a Kiev police officer, only to discover-to his amaze-ment-that the officer was completely honest and incorruptible.
Chernov had not believed such a creature existed. The officer had taped their conversations, arrested Chernov with plenty of evidence, and brought him in to face a great deal of prison time. The officer’s superior, who was not quite as honest as the man who had trapped Chernov, had struck a deal with Chernov. Chernov could continue to operate in exchange for a regular payment to the official. In addition, Chernov might be called upon to perform certain acts, tell certain lies, betray certain friends. Chernov had readily agreed. This time his assignment had been simple. If called by anyone in Moscow about a certain Dmitri Kolk, he was to say that Kolk was well known in Kiev for his dogs, and that the young man had made a great deal of money in a variety of ventures, including illegal passports and drugs. Even if Sasha were found out, Chernov could claim to have been duped.
“And?” Elena prompted.
“Not much more to tell,” said Sasha, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and feeling quite dizzy from the effort. “I bet, watched, talked to Boris, was introduced to some of his associates.
I told Boris and his friends that I had a dog I was interested in having fight in Moscow. I told him I had other dogs, all great fighters, in Kiev and that I could send for them. Perhaps we could arrange a cooperative venture. Boris said he would call me here.
We drank. I watched animals maimed and killed. I pretended to be excited by it, to enjoy it.”
“And did you?” asked Elena.
“Did I?”
“Enjoy it,” she said. “Were you excited by it?”
“Is this relevant to your report?”
“No,” she said. “I was just curious.”
“Perhaps I did, a bit. I had more to drink than I ever had, but I was careful to keep alert and perhaps the drink made me. . I don’t know.”
Sasha tried to stand and with one hand on the bed managed to do so. He stood on unsteady feet, wearing nothing but his under-pants. Even had he shaved and had no hangover, Elena knew she would not be moved sexually by the sight of her partner. Sasha was not her type, and she knew too much about him to be interested.
She reached over and turned off the tape recorder, watching Sasha stagger toward the bathroom.
“You have anything else to add about your adventure, either on or off the record?” she asked.
“No,” he said, taking another slow step toward the bathroom.
“I picked up your clothes and hung them in the closet,” she went on.
“Thank you,” he said, one hand on the wall next to the bathroom to steady himself.
“Your clothes reek of perfume and the smell of a woman,” she said. “Your jacket has red marks, lipstick.”
“You sound like a wife,” he said, holding his head.
“When you look in the mirror,” Elena said, “you’ll see more lipstick marks on your neck and chest.”
Sasha turned to look at Elena, who sat looking up at him ex-pressionlessly. It had been nearly two in the morning. He had downed several drinks. Boris had taken him to a private room up-stairs, a living room, and introduced him to the woman. He couldn’t even remember her name at the moment, but he did remember that she was young, had very short dark hair and clear white skin, smelled wonderful, was slim but let her cleavage show, and that she had full, erect breasts. She had worn a red strapless dress and. .
it had happened. Boris disappeared. She had led him to a bedroom. His first thought when it was over was AIDS. Things like this had happened to him before, not often. Each time he had felt guilt and fear. He would have to be tested. The woman was either an expensive prostitute who could have any disease, or a tyolki, a gangster’s woman, who could also have a disease.
Sasha looked at Elena.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Your battle scars will not be in the report.”
“Thank you,” he said, moving into the bathroom and looking at himself in the mirror. It was a horrible sight.
“Why is it so shoomeet, so noisy?” he asked, closing his eyes.
“Did you expect the great Mayor Yuri Luzkov to stop billions of dollars of construction because one man wakes up with a headache?”
“It would be considerate,” said Sasha.
Construction of a new Russia with money that had best not be questioned had begun two years earlier. The change was enormous. Supposedly, the construction had been for the celebration in September of Moscow’s eight hundred fiftieth anniversary, a number in some dispute. The celebration had come and gone and the construction went on and on.
New ornate buildings with stucco facades; massive fake cathedrals; new wrought-iron lampposts that echoed those of a century ago; and two or three floors added to old buildings and the buildings themselves remodeled and sandblasted by workmen in orange overalls. The skyline had already changed and it was due to change even more.
It was not the first time in this century that the face of Moscow had undergone a major change. Lenin, who moved the capital from St. Petersburg to Moscow, had disdained the czarist past and brought on a new era of modern architecture that was supposed to reflect the new Russia. Lenin’s Moscow was a hodgepodge of styles, and the construction was often subpar and crumbling almost before it was completed.
Stalin in the 1930s had a new vision of elaborate and impressive metro stations underground, and imposing and threatening skyscrapers and great statues aboveground. The seven skyscrapers that still tower in the skyline were a Stalin contribution. Monu-ments to who-knew-what. But Mayor Luzkov was planning what he called the “eighth tower,” a pink monster on the grounds of Moscow State University.
Then the Krushchev 1950s brought the construction that resulted in blocks of huge gray apartment buildings.
And now, not the leader of Russia or the Soviet Union, but the mayor of the city, who wanted to replace Yeltsin, had unveiled great plans, none of which would do much to change the housing problem. He planned a third ring circle; more underground park-ing-though only twenty percent of the people of Moscow have cars; a railroad running alongside the new ring road; at least two new subway stations; American-style shopping malls; a new business district called Moskva-Siti, at a cost of over eight billion in American dollars; and the world’s tallest building, the Tower of Russia, which would reach 1,950 feet into the sky.
Little if any of this construction promised much to the vast majority of Muscovites, who still lived in crumbling, poorly constructed housing. But the people of Moscow loved their mayor, and ninety percent of those who voted, voted for him.
Sasha, even through the hangover, had to admit that since the rise of the new mayor, his salary and that of city workers, and of those employees of the government who worked in the city, had come regularly. There had even been a small raise at the start of the year.
But the noise. Just a moment of respite. A brief pause. A blessed silence.
The phone rang.
“So many places,” said the woman sitting on the spotless white sofa.
She shook her head and looked down at her folded hands. At her side, a lean young man put his arm around her and said,
“Mama, he is not worth it.”
The woman was Olga Pleshkov. She was fifty-two years old, well groomed, with stylishly cut, short gray-black hair. A dozen years earlier she had been acknowledged to be one of Moscow’s great beauties and that beauty, it was generally agreed, had been more than slightly instrumental in her husband’s political rise, a rise that came in spite of the fact that he was less than sympathetic to the existing government and had only reluctantly joined the Party, an affiliation he had been one of the first to denounce when Yeltsin mounted the steps.