“Ja uxozhu, Mama. Poka!”
“Ceychas? Gde, Liliana, gde?”
Gde, she asking—where? Where? How many times in past two days Liliana try to tell to Mama where, and when, and which nice girl she going out to meet? But Mama—poor Mama!—now she get little bit forgetful recent days, or maybe not so good of hearing, or Mama, her attention not so pretty good. Sure—konechno—but look how much stradanya—this means in English ‘misery’ if you translate right—look how much stradanya Mama live through in her life. Bad time for family during Soviet days. Back in kommunisti Russia doctor such as Papa earn small salary for his work—less than man who driving bus. Now things lot better. Even not so famous dancer such as she, can get paid rubles enough for comfortable life, plenty rubles to live for her and Mama both; decent flat as well. And even little extra for tonight, so she can treat Maria to nice last meal in Moskva and maybe new American movie film if she like to see, before she leave for home.
“Poka, Mama,” Liliana says again and push on outside door to close. Look in glass of window here: Yes, she cover pretty good, nobody pay attention on the way. So three streets walk to ostanovka-–closest one to flat—down long eskalator—In English it is same word, the thinks—to get on board of train, then go six more stops to Pushinskaya Ploshad where Maria she tell her they will meet.
Busy at this time in Moskva Metro, but still couple empty place for her to sit. Next to her once train is start to move is student sitting down, look like student anyway, with beard and little cap on top of head—from south, she guessing, Uzbek maybe, maybe Krim. He will be too young to bother her, and anyway, when she tie her hair up like she do tonight and wear cap with koziryok—this word in English she look up later, thing in front for shading face—Koziryok make people not notice her so much and then they do not bother, which is good.
But one man, he notice. Across from her is older paren, looking thirty years of age, maybe thirty-five; he looking up at her time to time and cover up his wedding ring with other hand. Not dangerous kind of parna, though. This guy, this paren, not bold, not shy, but average kind. He will not bother her too much. Try to make conversation maybe, maybe just look her strongly into eyes. This will not big problem, though. She know when she see big problem parni, and figured way to stay away from them.
“Ostorozhno. Dveri zakrivaiutsia. Sleduyushaya stantsia Pushinskaya Ploshad.”
Next one it is her stop, and so she getting up and waiting next to exit door.
Ah! Pushinskaya, this it is her place. Lot of people getting out. Many Metro lines meet here at Pushinskaya, so every time of day always there is rush. This man with wedding ring who sit across, he get off here as well. He does not try to talk, but stand behind her on eskalator going up. Tall man, so she can feel his breathing on back of neck, although step she standing on is higher up. But he does not try to touch—which lucky thing. Her face is cover pretty good, must be. Then up to top, she step to side in group of people standing close to exit, like they are people that she know; and man pass by not bothering, so this is really good.
“Maria!” This thing really good as well—Maria stand there waiting, waving, daleko from Metro exit close to street. Nice American clothes she wearing, good-fitting jeans and top with nice vishivkam—in English is … ‘embroidering’, yes, she look this word up yesterday in slovarie. Maria come from family having much of wealth and wear expensive clothes always. All of ballet company the girls admire these Maria clothes. And lot of money too her family give her for to spend. For three month long now, Maria taking her to places she can never pay for on her own. Tonight, dovolno—Ah, tonight, she will pay Maria back just very little bit of what she really owe. With plenty rubles inside pocketbook—six thousand she has saved—this nearly eighty Euros—she will buy Maria pretty decent dinner just one time, take her out to nice American movie showing if she like. She will really really miss this newfound friend.
But something really strange—Mmm—Now she look more better, she see Maria standing next to car. Big car, expensive like. Talking to person inside of car with window open, talking to person—look like paren, maybe—paren maybe like to someone she know, like to someone she see before someplace, which is strange. Hmmm, really strange….
And as she getting little closer even more toward Maria, twenty meters now, person Maria talking to inside of car look more familiar little bit, and when she get closer even than that, ten meters now or twelve, this person in big car, this paren it look like—this person look like—O Boje moi! …
24
Kenneth Allen Vincent came to the conclusion that he’d made a h-u-g-e mistake.
OK, maybe so, maybe he’d been stupid to agree; but who could blame him for accepting Marty’s offer in the first place, though—huh? I mean, seriously—this was the chance of a lifetime no guy from his humble family background could turn down. A trip to Europe? All expenses paid? Gee-ma-nee! It would’ve taken him a lifetime to come up with the kind of dough that this little 3-month junket was gonna cost—And as for his folks, they were kind, they were generous—but if they had in mind to send him on a trip like this—man!—they would have had to pony up the friggin’ house!
And then one day last spring, he gets this call from Marty. He always loves to get a call from Marty—And why? ‘Cause Marty takes him everywhere, is frickin’ why—The Series, the Super Bowl, a couple of times to Florida on Christmas break. But—wow!—this time it’s even better, this time good old Marty, he’s like—
“Hey, Kenny, you there?”
“Sure I’m here, you idiot. I answered the friggin’ phone, didn’t I? What’s up?”
“OK, well here’s the thing: You wanna go to Europe? No joke, I’m serious—My dad just said he’d send me, full ride for flights and rooms and meals. But here’s the kicker though: he’s insisting that I take along a friend. Which of course means you, old Ken, old pal, old buddy, ‘cause I got no other friends, as you prob’ly know—Anyways, I guess he doesn’t trust me on my own, so you gotta go along. You really gotta go for sure. So whaddya say? We leave, like, first of June and head back, like, end of August, so like three full months, OK? So? Whaddya think? I need you, pal—You wanna help a buddy out?”
Well hell, he figured; why not? What else did he have to do? Spend the summer in the local Ace hardware store helping wandering workmen locate their friggin’ screws? Let’s see: Crepe Suzettes or kraut dogs, Montauk with the fish guts in the gutters or a tour of Gay Paree?
And so he said he’d come along—tag along, truthfully—watching Marty Corman do his screwball Marty Corman thing. And honestly, when you added all the good things and the bad things up, the trip hadn’t been so hard to take, after all. The best hotels, the finest restaurants, first class flights everywhere. Oh, Marty was the same old Marty, sure—no mortal man could hope to alter that. Marty was used to getting his way in everything, in clothes, in cars, in front-row seating at the Broadway shows. And even though he wasn’t much to look at, he generally got his way with all the girls.
Which wasn’t that much of a problem for a roommate hustled into signing on, to tell the honest truth. Oh sure, there were a few annoying speedbumps along the way when the roommate had to take a hike or hang out in the lobby so Marty and his lady of the evening could be alone. But Marty was generally quick about his business—fifteen or twenty minutes tops. And there were the occasional romantic benefits for the pudgy extra wheel—Like that pimply Angelina’s friend in Florence, or the cousin of that married what’s-her-name the two of them sat next to when they took the train to Prague. Not rollicking beauties, sure—but you couldn’t get picky, being on the receiving end—any more than you could get picky about the first-class rooms in five-star hotels, or the greasy German food that quarts of pilsner couldn’t quite wash down. All in all, not bad, not bad by a longshot, thought Kenny—Meaning up to here and now, the trip had gone pleasantly enough. And he and Marty had gotten along just fine…. Yep, they got along just swimmingly—Until this gorgeous Liliana came
along.
Which was when Marty, once he saw her, once he talked to her—the guy went, like, totally, ballistically nuts! Ten days in Moscow now slinking around like a couple of KGB spies, like a couple of FBI detectives, just trailing after her in the car like puppy dogs from work to where she went down to the Metro, from where she came up from the Metro to work—And for what, huh? For pipe dreams. Fantasies: Marty was gonna make her like him, take her home with him to show this stunning Russian trophy to his dad, however much time and effort the taking home might take.
So he comes up with this cockamamie plan, old Marty does. Now that they’ve rented this fancy-ass German car, a thousand bucks a week on Marty’s daddy’s card, and spent a few days cruising around spying on Liliana, they notice this other chick coming out of the Bolshoi with the one and only Girl-of-Marty’s-Dreams, dark hair on this definitely lesser light, thin, kind of sort of cute—though hardly in the same category of mesmerizing cuteness as Liliana, not by a hundred thousand miles—But then, shit, who in God’s green overheating planet is?
So they cruise around till on the third day—or maybe it was the fourth (with all their sneaking, it’s hard as hell to keep track)—Liliana goes down in the Metro, as usual, then they follow the other girl, the dark-haired one, cruising slowly down this street whose name you can’t make out what with the friggin’ Russian lettering no mortal man can actually hope to read, Marty figuring he can maybe get some info from this dark-haired chick that will help him make his move on Liliana with a little more success than if he’s got to go in cold.
And, lucky son-of-a-bitch that Marty Corman is, and has been since the moment of his birth, turns out the dark-haired girl is from where? From friggin’ where? Damn straight, she’s from the States, of all places—Man-oh-MAN! And not only from the States, wouldn’t you know it? but from New York, for Chrissakes! Meaning that she speaks English, even super-duper English with the familiar New York twang. Maria Fenton is her name—Fenton, as in Richard Fenton, the scumbag lawyer that puts up all those billboards along the Thruway and the Parkway alerting everyone who reads them to call his office (right now, today, operators are standing by) if you take some harmless drug that happens to get you sick, or have an operation that comes out bad by happenstance, or slip and fall on the property of some unlucky honest bastard who’s got plenty of insurance or a lot of dough. And lucky as hell for good old Marty, once again, turns out the daughter has the same down-in-the-gutter code of ethics as her Dear old Daddy lawyer Richard Fenton does. Two seconds of asking, no more, and: Sure she’ll help with Marty’s plotting. Why not? Marty’s dad can get her in the door of some top dance company in New York in exchange, can’t he? (He actually can, in truth.) You scratch my back, Miss lawyer’s daughter Fenton, and I’ll be overjoyed, reciprocally, to scratch yours. So, the trap set and the bait in place, ten days later, here they friggin’ are.
Maria’s job, the way old Marty had it figured, was not that big a deal: Get your luscious girlfriend in the car, playing decoy, then I (says Marty to Maria)—then I can take it by myself from there. And so to the persuasion: Lots of pleading, lots of head-shaking and refusals, there along the street beside the Metro exit; Maria out on the pavement begging, batting her pseudo-wetted eyes, Ken and Marty sitting in the car looking on—Ah, but somehow nice Miss Fenton gets her malignant duty done. You couldn’t make their disputation out all that clearly from the car, but what you heard from fifteen feet away showed the gorgeous girl’s intractable reluctance: “Not with parnem I do not know,” that much you heard. ‘Parnem’ no doubt met ‘stranger’ or maybe just ‘guy’ or ‘person’. Whatever—anyway, you could kind of catch the drift.
So, tearing done effectively, arm twisted to compliance, finally in the car, the both of them, there in the big back seat, then good old fullback Marty takes the ball and runs. Hell, they had it all arranged the night before, banking on Maria’s assistance and anticipating her success: Fifty bucks to the maître d’ of the high-class restaurant they were planning on going to, up on the second floor of their super-duper-luxury-class hotel—The Moscow Four Seasons, costliest joint in town. ‘You ladies ready for a terrific meal?’ asks Marty—he’d even rehearsed the words in the rear-view mirror. Liliana wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the offer, nor the restaurant, and certainly not the slightest teensy weensy bit about coming to some obnoxious guy’s hotel. But Maria did her Lawyer Fenton thing again with gusto, batting her weepy eyes, twisting that exquisite Russian arm.
With the result that: The car gets taken by the valet, the four of them go up to Two, right on schedule, exactly at the preplanned time; and the guy at the reception desk of the five-star, Quadrum restaurant does his carefully preplanned, fifty-dollar prepaid thing, on perfect cue in idiomatic English (and in Russian too for good measure for Liliana’s sake): No reservations, esteemed Amerikantsi? he asks. No dinner jackets?—What! Nyet—nyet, Amerikantsi! Hmpf! says Marty, again on perfect cue, how ‘bout this then, boys and girls? How ‘bout we run up to the room, huh? and order our delectable dinner up there? Anything you’d like, soup to nuts, with all the trimmings. Sound good? Whaddya say? Liliana baulks, and squawks like a cornered chicken with the farmer’s axe in hand, but Maria twists her arm a third time, and then a fourth—ouch! and….
And the result of all of Marty’s careful machinations, despite the squawking, is: Yep, here they sit over a truly fabulously scrumptious meal. And, let me tell you in no uncertain terms: this friggin’ food is GOOD!
Still, good or not, it’s Liliana who’s the subject of all this cost and preparation. She’s the girl that Marty’s after this time—her and not some little pimply-faced chippy he ran into on a train. Liliana, we’re talking! The amazing, the incomparable Liliana. Which is, like: Yeah, right, Marty old pal, old buddy, old chum! You couldn’t have picked someone a little closer to your league?—Hell, this ridiculous endeavor is like some high school sandlot losers taking on the ’32 Yankees with Ruth and Gehrig on the team. And against an even-money bet!
But Marty? Marty Corman, the Casanova of Long Island? Try and tell him that. Try and tell him friggin’ anything. Marty is incapable of listening when some gorgeous woman tells him ‘no!’ And why should he behave any differently anyway, huh? I mean, the guy has had a platinum spoon in his mouth from his birthday right on up: He’s had the best car, the best apartment, he went to the best college; he gets tickets to the NBA finals front row, center court with an autographed game ball tossed into his lap. That’s the way the guy has always lived, the only manner of existence he’s ever known—So when he got that fatal glimpse of Liliana ten days ago there on a Moscow street, well, screw it—over with and done. He had to have this one-in-a-million trophy girl to sit beside him in his bright blue Lambo back in the States, to hang out with him in the Sky box at the Nets games, to snuggle up beside him in his outrageously optioned custom bed. To snuggle for a while, anyway—until the fickle Marty Corman sooner or later happens to get bored.
Through ten years of middling friendship Kenny Vincent has lived with this loony business and never said a word. But now, this time, with this amazing Russian girl, amazingly gorgeous, amazingly sweet; the kind of girl that just getting a look at her makes you want to smile, makes you want to put her on a pedestal in a museum with all the other precious, perfect things. So no—NO! This wasn’t the sort of fun and games that Kenneth Allen Vincent could sit by idly and watch from the sidelines with his hands behind his back. Something needed to be said, needed to be done. And he was gonna say it, he was gonna do it, friendship or no, promises or no; that he assured himself in no uncertain terms!
Only not right now. Not until he had something good to eat—‘Cause, hell, you couldn’t screw your closest friend on an empty stomach—could you, for God’s sake? And Kenneth Allen Vincent was starving! Famished! I mean, not a single bite since breakfast, what with all the planning and arranging they’d had to do, cluing people in, handing out the cash to compensate the vast supporting cast to play along. So yeah,
first the food, then he’d have a little talk with Liliana. Or with Marty. Time to put a stop to this thing.
But that would have to wait a little while—‘cause—damn!— this stuff was good! GOOD! The way they cooked the steaks in this place—Mmm! Awesome! Fabulous!—Probably one of those high-temp ovens he’d read about somewhere—They had ‘em in some of the high-class places back in the States—And this Quadrum joint, or whichever of the in-house restaurants had cooked ‘em up, they’d coated ‘em with butter and seared the damn things crispy till the surface of the meat got kind of like a nacho chip, and—Geez-oh-man!—the inside all runny-like with fatty juice and whatever butter happened to get drizzled in—Amazing! Amazing French fries too—Awesome!—Done just right; and the salad with this fabulous dressing, all cheesy and rich. Expensive wine as well—not that Kenny himself could tell it was expensive from the taste—probably Marty couldn’t either—But Marty never ordered anything within a thousand miles of average. The wine was meant for Liliana, probably to impress her with the exorbitant cost before it finally got her drunk enough for Marty’s bad intent—But the funny thing about the wine: She wasn’t drinking any—not a drop. Marty filled her glass right up to the brim, but the thing just kind of sat there at the topped-off summit while she and Maria hungrily devoured their steaks.
Devoured them like wolves, pretty nearly, ‘cause they were famished too. They’d done their ballet practicing from early in the morning till sometime in the later afternoon—so said Maria anyway—and hadn’t had a thing to eat till now. So lots of calories out and nothing going in till these fantastic steaks showed up. So could you blame them? They ate—the three of them, Kenny and the girls, like there was no tomorrow. Not Marty, though—Said he wasn’t all that hungry. Sure, with all the plotting going on in that sneaky-ass red head of his. His problem of the moment being: Liliana wasn’t going for the wine. Not a sip, not a taste, not a smidgeon, in fact—and so:
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