“So I think it’s time to send a message, don’t you?” the Ukrainian asked.
Oleg agreed.
“We want all—”
“Not ‘we want,’” Oleg corrected. “We demand. They expect demands. Let’s not disappoint.”
“We demand that all Arctic nations renounce their claims to the region’s oil, gas, and minerals and make it a non-exploitation zone.”
“Yes, that sounds good. Very progressive.”
“Or else?” the hacker asked.
“What do you mean, ‘Or else?’” Oleg asked.
“What will we do if they don’t renounce their claims?”
Oleg laughed quietly at the Ukrainian hacker. He thought the demand applied to Russia, too. That was why he was working so hard. He wants Russia to get screwed, too, the way Russia screwed the Ukraine by claiming Crimea, then backed the rubes in the eastern half of the country with guns and bombs so they might realize their dreams of separatism. Hilarious.
“We have a submarine with nuclear missiles, right?” Oleg didn’t wait for an answer. “We don’t have to say what we’ll do. They know.”
“When do we bomb them?”
The hacker sounded excited to get on with it. That worried Oleg, but not too much. He had him by the short hairs in so many ways. The hacker had kids. “Hostages to fortune,” as some English philosopher once said. PP liked to quote him. Such a paterfamilias. But Oleg knew that kiddies kept daddies in line. Not all, but this Ukrainian daddy, definitely.
“We don’t bomb them,” Oleg said cryptically. “Better than that.”
“What could be better than that?”
“You’ll see.” Oleg cut off the call. He wasn’t getting into a discourse right now, not with PP on the monitor right in front of Oleg’s parking place. He was wrinkling his forehead. Oleg could read his lips. “Come in. Come in.” PP the Prince of Impatience. So fond of saying, “Patience is a vastly overrated virtue.” But only true for plutocrats.
Oleg spotted Dmitri on the screen hovering in the background. He saw the resemblance between father and second-born son. Both handsome. PP was a “silver-haired devil” in the words of wife number six. He was seventy-six years old, but still tall and straight with shoulders that hadn’t begun to slump. Clear blue eyes. He appeared twenty years younger. By all rights he should have looked like a ham hung in the smokehouse too long. He’d been puffing all his life. But he had very few lines on his face. The picture of health.
Dmitri was as well. But a skull injury had scrambled too many brain cells. The neurologist had said the accident had severely damaged the boy’s brain. “It was an accident, right?” the doctor asked.
Which had made PP stare at Oleg, who’d claimed he found him at the bottom of the dungeon stairs. Oleg had nodded at the doctor and said, “I don’t know what he was doing there.”
In any case, Dmitri’s skull had been crunched and his brain hadn’t looked so good. A lot of bleeding in both hemispheres, and it had gone on for too long before he got help. Oleg knew exactly how long: four and a half hours. He’d figured that was long enough — and he’d been right.
So Dmitri looked good on the outside, but not so good where it counted. At least he didn’t drool anymore, a big plus, and if he’d had any life in his eyes and didn’t try to talk, just played the silent mysterious type, he could probably have gotten laid a lot — on his own. But instead, PP had to pay his “special friends” to play with him. Dmitri didn’t seem to mind. Nothing wrong with the south end of the complex. PP’s friends and the ten-meter waterslide for the heated indoor pool kept Dmitri very happy, except… he was missing Galina.
He called her “Gull,” like the English word for that disgusting seabird. Oleg always told him “Gull” had flown away. “Doesn’t like you anymore.”
Which meant nothing to him.
“Oleg, my firstborn son,” PP said when he walked into the castle. That had always been the old man’s greeting. It was as if he were reminding himself of the birth order, which actually made Oleg wonder if PP had another firstborn, the real one, still stashed away in a dacha somewhere like a lot of Party hacks had done in the old days. Of course, that would have meant that the real firstborn might have been a grandfather by now. PP had been “rutting like crazed weasel” for more than six decades, which he let everyone know after a few bottles of Stoli.
He told his son to sit in a big stuffed chair in the living room that he had redone to look like the one in Downton Abbey after wife number six insisted that as a “lady of sorts”—an ex-stripper — she should have some gilded bookshelves, furniture, and woodwork to “grace” her eyes. So she had. Even gilded books. PP bought them by the pound. Oleg found a complete collection of Karl Marx’s works beautifully bound and preserved. He never told PP. He guessed the old man would have just shrugged and said, “Let the free marketplace of ideas compete on a level playing field.” Or some such platitude widely embraced by monopolists.
“Dmitri, tell your brother what you told me.” As an aside to Oleg, PP said Galina had been making great strides with him.
“Galina? She was here?” News to Oleg. His lovely lady had gone behind his back? Not good.
“Yes. She’s so helpful,” PP said to him. “You remember how Dmitri was saying ‘Gull, Gull, Gull’ all the time? Well, Galina came over Sunday. You were busy. She’s going to keep coming over. I think it’s a good idea.” Turning to second-born son, PP said, “Go ahead, tell him what you can say now. After just one session with Galina,” PP added in a second aside to Oleg.
He watched his little brother, who was much bigger than him now, struggle to say something other than his mangled attempt at Galina’s name. His lips twisted grotesquely, and all Oleg could hear at first was “Skkkk,” like he was trying to say “skank,” maybe. Must have been eavesdropping by PP’s big bedroom. Boy was learning.
But then the last sound came out and it went straight to Oleg’s solar plexus: “Skkkkuullll.”
“What?” Oleg shook his head.
“That’s what I said,” PP agreed. “Why when my baby boy hasn’t said a word in ten years, except for ‘Gull,’ does he suddenly say ‘Skull’? And then baby boy dragged me to the dungeon.”
Oleg reminded himself to keep a poker expression. He shrugged. Why would he say that? That’s so weird. But the news had shaken him so that he didn’t actually speak those words. When he finally said them, he had to force them out. And though he knew it was not possible, he imagined his lips twisting and his voice struggling just like baby brother’s.
“So the rose is going to keep coming. See if we can make him bloom some more.” PP’s eyes looked clearer than ever. “Isn’t this wonderful? I think Dmitri is trying to tell us something, or maybe he’s remembering the names of my museum pieces. I can’t wait to hear it all. Now, tell me what you’ve been doing, but take that device out of your ear. I’m talking to you.”
Oleg removed his phone’s Bluetooth earbud, but all he wanted to know was what the hell happened down in the dungeon, so he asked.
“That’s the sad part of the story,” said PP. “He started to cry on the bottom step and wouldn’t go any farther. We’ll see if Rose can get the rest out of him, yes?”
Oleg shrugged. His shoulders felt set in concrete.
PP yammered about the massive icebreaker his company was building so they could mine methane in the Arctic. The Japanese were already trying to do it in their own waters, but the Siberian shelf was so rich with methane — and the waters so relatively shallow — that the gas was bubbling up from the bottom of the sea.