by Josh Weil
His boss was barefooted. He stood with his toes half-buried in the carpet’s soft pile, his metallic black suit jacket still buttoned at the waist, bolo tie clasped to his throat by a silver-set stone. That the formality was unbroken even by his bare feet seemed only to strengthen the seriousness of his face.
Bazarov had been talking into an earpiece when they came in; now he pushed the boom away from his mouth, took the thing off, set it on the table. The room was so quiet Yarik could hear the person on the other end of the line still yammering: a pinched vibration of a voice.
The guard who had been talking stepped forward, put Dyadya Avya’s revolver on the table, too, slid it closer to his boss. It spun, came to a stop with its barrel against the earpiece. Whoever was on the other end shut up.
Bazarov looked at the gun, looked at Yarik, told the two guards to go.
The earpiece made a noise like a voice asking a question.
“I said leave him here,” Bazarov told the men, “and leave the gun, and get out.”
When they were gone, Bazarov reached to the table and turned the earpiece off. Then he picked up the pistol. He unlocked the chamber and clicked it slowly through seven slots, the six empty ones and the one still filled, and pushed it shut again and looked at Yarik. He raised his eyebrows. He made his mouth into a picture of shock.
How stupid to bring the gun. Last night, after all the papers had been signed, after Kartashkin had taken the cash and returned to the izba to get his wife and pack to go, after Yarik had gone back as near to home as the plowing allowed, after he had walked to the apartment block where five stories up his own wife sat waiting, he’d veered away from the stairwell door and walked out into the playground and, ducking inside the rocket ship, hanging by his arms from the bars, thought about what Bazarov had told him that day in Moscow sitting in his armored car. He had tried to come up with a way of getting bullets for the gun. If it had been a rifle, he might have been able to find a shop in the morning; if it had been registered, they might have sold him some, but it was a pistol and illegal to own and the only way would be to flash enough roubles on the street. He had hung there, feeling his weight pull at his elbows, his knuckles, let his body sway. He had looked up through the bars, scanned the lit windows for his home, found it, let go. He didn’t want to live his life scared. He didn’t want his children to, his wife. He didn’t want to be one of those people. The kind who would go down near the dockyards where the lowlife lived, who would buy bullets off someone as likely to put one in him, who would be the kind of person to load the gun and carry it into the billionaire’s office. . . . He couldn’t do it. He would bring the gun in as it was, he’d decided, not as a weapon, but as evidence: how Bazarov had betrayed their trust first. Yet here he was, hands on his head, empty saddlebags over his shoulder, his heart pumping blood as if he had already been opened up.
He watched the revolver in Bazarov’s hands. With his thumb, the man gave the chamber a whirl. “You lied to me,” Yarik said. The click, click of it turning over, stopping. “You said they were explosive tips.”
Bazarov looked at the gun as if it had just been handed to him. “You didn’t fire them all,” he said. “Maybe one is.” And, setting the gun back on the table, he flicked its butt to make the whole thing spin. “Look at you.” He showed a hint of the old grin. “Wearing those bags. Wearing that face.” And the grin busted loose. “You look less like a cowboy than the horse.”
Unclasping his fingers, Yarik lowered his hands, the leather strap shifting on his shoulder. “I’m bringing them back.”
“I told you,” Bazarov said, “they’re yours.”
“I don’t want them.”
At that, the man turned his knuckles on the table. And began to knock a quick, galloping rhythm against the wood.
“I only wanted what was mine,” Yarik said. It was an imitation of hoofbeats, he realized, mockery to accompany the smile Bazarov turned on him, and he hauled the saddlebags off and threw them down. They hit the table in a clattering slap, sent the gun skidding, almost bashed the man’s hands, and, watching Bazarov jerk his fists away, Yarik told him, “And so I took it.”
Bazarov shook out his fingers. “That was very dramatic,” he said. “I feel . . .” He scrunched his toes in the carpet, looked down at his feet. “Maybe I should put on my boots. I think it would help me get into character.” His shoulders hitched a little. “Here,” he said, “let me try.” And looking straight into Yarik’s face, his smile died. His eyes hardened. He said, all hints of humor gone from his voice, “You took the cash?”
“No. The cash I gave to Kartashkin.”
“OK.”
“All of it.
“Five million rubles?”
“Ten. My share, too.”
“Why would you do that?”
“In exchange for the land.”
“Exchange?”
“Bought,” Yarik told him. “I bought the land.” He could see Bazarov’s eyes beginning to crinkle. “For myself. I bought the land for myself.”
“Oh,” Bazarov said. It was a small sound that told Yarik nothing, made with a movement of lips so small it that showed nothing, either. “He sold it to you for that little?”
“I own it,” Yarik said. “We signed the documents. Had them notarized.”
“Oh,” Bazarov said again. He shook his head. “You are a cowboy.”
“I did what you taught me to do. What Slava would have done.”
The man’s smile was small and brief and held nothing in it of a smile at all. “Well,” he said, “welcome to the Wild West.”
“I saw an opportunity—”
“And you grabbed it.” Bazarov lifted his palms. “But why?”
“You were the one who told me playing it safe was the most dangerous thing to do.”
“True.” And in his smile this time there was a little bit of pleasure. “But this is pretty dangerous, too.” He held his hands forward, as if presenting Yarik to Yarik. “Why are you here?”
“Good people don’t succeed,” Yarik said. “Right? It’s bad people—”
“I told you,” Bazarov said, “there are no bad people. Just good people who do bad things.” He reached over to one of the saddlebags, lifted a flap, glanced in. “What do you think you’ve done, Yaroslav Lvovich? A good thing or a bad?”
“That depends for who,” Yarik said.
“For you,” Bazarov told him. “Oh, you definitely got a good price,” he admitted. “Unless . . .” And he dropped the flap back closed, came close to Yarik. In his bare feet, he was a little shorter. “What else did I tell you about success?”
That close, Yarik could see that his eyes, above the tie clasp, were tinged with turquoise.
“Half of success is lying to people,” Bazarov prompted. Then reached out with a finger and made as if to tap Yarik on the forehead. Yarik jerked away. “The other half,” Bazarov told him, “is knowing to whom you don’t.” He brought his finger back to his own forehead, tapped it on his own brow. “Remember Chernitsky? With his armored car and his—What’s the best way to put this? Ubiquitous?—his ubiquitous driver.” He looked like he would smile, and then like he would suppress it, and then it got the best of him and he mimicked a little explosion with his hands. “That guy,” he said, “got around everywhere.” He shook his head at himself, and when he looked up again, his smile was gone. “You didn’t believe,” he said, “that a squirmy sonofabitch like Korotya had the balls to do that, did you?” He stepped to the table, turned his back, undid the latches of a briefcase, took something out. When he turned to Yarik again, he was holding a small red rectangle of gleaming plastic. “Here.” Bazarov tilted the card so the glare slid off. He stepped close again. Yarik glanced away from the man’s face long enough to see the face in miniature, laminated over, and some words, someone’s signature scrawled. When he looked back at Bazarov, the man was watching him. “You think Gauk’s the only one who knows the minister of the interior?”
Yarik tried
not to look away, and then he tried to find the card to hold his gaze, but Bazarov had slipped it into his breast pocket, his hand over his chest; he gave the place over his heart a pat. “Cowardice,” Bazarov said, “is the most terrible of vices.”
The man’s hand patted out three beats. Four.
“That’s from Bulgakov,” Yarik told him. “And I’m not scared.” As soon as he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t. When he looked up, the man’s face was grim.
“I bet your wife would be,” the man said. “I bet she is right now.”
Yarik could feel the blood throbbing through the bruise in his back where the guard had shoved the pistol.
“I know she’s religious,” Bazarov went on, “so we can hope that gives her some peace. But your son? Surely, little Timosha is too young to have that kind of faith. Surely, you’ve thought about that. And has your daughter spoken her first words yet? No? If she could, what do you think she would say to you?”
He left Yarik standing there, walked around to the other side of the table. It was long and narrow, flanked with leather chairs. Bazarov waved a hand at them. Yarik stayed standing. Across the table, his boss stopped, tipped his face to the ceiling, neck muscles straining as it bent back, throat stretching, until all Yarik could see was the bottom of his jaw, the blond goatee.
“The Afterlife,” the jaw said, the goatee twitching. “I don’t believe in it. Too much like The Past Life. Everyone equally happy, every need equally fulfilled. Except, of course, for a few lucky ones who happen to sit a little closer to God.”
The ceiling up there was made of glass and Yarik knew that somewhere above were the night and the stars, but the lights in the room were too bright: he could only see the reflected table, his own face looking up, and then the top of Bazarov’s head as the man went back to looking at him.
“Sit down,” Bazarov said. And when Yarik still stayed standing, the oligarch pulled out a chair for himself and sat. “Heaven’s for the kind of people,” he said, “who would have been Communists if they weren’t suicide bombers. People who don’t have second thoughts. People I’ve never wanted to know. The way I wanted to know you.”
Under the man’s stare, Yarik’s legs began to feel stiff, his whole body exposed and awkward, and when Bazarov said it again—“Sit down”—he did.
“Here’s another lesson for you,” Bazarov continued. “We come to know who people are by watching what makes them scared. How they let it drive what they do. If they let it push them. Or what they do in order to push it away. That’s the beautiful thing about using a pistol to hunt boar. You get to see your partner’s fear up close. How he overcomes it. You see it in yourself. What a shame we never did that, huh?” He smiled across the table at Yarik. “Of course, I guess I’m getting to see it now. Yaroslav Lvovich, I know you think you’re doing the right thing. Taking this chance, coming straight at me. But the only one who charges straight ahead, who has no second thoughts, Yarik, is the boar. Don’t be the boar, my friend. I’m sure he’s very brave. But in the end he squeals like hell.”
How, Yarik wondered, had he ever thought of this man as a friend? Was this friendship in the billionaire’s world? A series of tests? Even if they had hunted together it would have been nothing more than another test he had to pass. The man had never truly believed in him. The way a friend would, the way his mother had wanted to, the way he hoped his wife did, knew his brother always had. Looking across the table, Yarik understood then that in this world he had stepped into no one else ever would. From here on out he would have to watch every movement everyone made around him the way that Bazarov, over the briefcase and the saddlebags and the earpiece and the gun, was watching his. And when the man leaned forward and started to reach, Yarik jerked so fast he half-fell from his chair, his hand shooting out, onto the pistol, grabbing it to him.
Bazarov stayed midlean, hand still hovering. And in that moment Yarik thought he saw a ripple of doubt, a glimpse of fear. Before it was washed away in Bazarov’s laughing. He laughed loud, one hand still held out, the other on the table, laughed hard enough to make the table shake. When at last he could get the words out, Bazarov said, “I thought you told me they were all blanks?” Then, continuing his reach, past the place where the gun had been, he took up the earpiece.
He sat back, put it on, pressed the button on the side of the mike. “Yes,” he said, “get me the control room, please. Thank you, Masha.” He winked across the table at Yarik, leaned back in his chair till it creaked. He rocked a couple times, creaking. “Hello, it’s me. Yes.” He said a string of numbers and then, “That’s right,” and “Do you think I give a fuck about them?” And listening to him tell whoever was on the other end how bad it would be if he had to walk over and write the order out, catching a couple names he remembered from the men that day in Moscow, listening to the billionaire say “What isn’t on my head?” Yarik understood the enormity of it all—the Consortium and the zerkala and the Oranzheria—in a way he never had till then, not the scale of the thing, not its mass, but its weight, the weight of responsibility for the thousands who worked beneath it, on it, the hundreds who had invested fortunes in it, and, heaviest of all, the gaze of whoever must be watching Bazarov from above. Because, he knew, suddenly, that there was someone—with more money, or more power, or simply in a position so high up he could press his weight down even on a man like Bazarov. He knew that for every story the billionaire had told of things that had been done to others, there must be one about the things that others had done to him.
“When am I not sure?” Bazarov said and, reaching to his earpiece, pushed the button, tossed the thing onto the table. His eyes held on Yarik. In them, there was the other thing about that weight: the strength it must take to hold up under it.
“You want to know the other half of success?” Bazarov said. “Who it is you shouldn’t lie to?” His bare heels shoved on the carpet, his chair scooted backwards, hit the wall. “You want to know who you shouldn’t fuck around with?” He reached up to a bank of switches. And in one swipe of his hand knocked all the lights off.
Blackness. The sound of his feet, the wheels of the chair returning. The table shaking with his thump. Then nothing. Yarik sat in the dark, listening. Nothing but the sound of his own breathing. And, if he listened past it: Bazarov’s. Gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out the shape of the figure sitting across from him, its neck craned back, face tilted to the ceiling glass again. He could swear he saw, as if reflecting the light of the stars, a ghostly sliver of wet white gleam: the man’s teeth.
Looking away, Yarik tilted his own head back. It was the light of the stars; they were up there by the trillions. And he realized that, in this past mirrorless month, his children must have seen them for the first time. It pained him that Timosha had said nothing of it to him, that, if Polya had whooped a first word at the sight, he hadn’t been there to hear. He promised himself then that if they ever got to the Black Sea he would take them out to the beach at night and lie with them on the sand—Zina and his daughter and his son—and simply gaze up. The way he hadn’t since he was young, since before he was married, when he and Dima used to bed down for the night in a field or pasture or wherever their ride had let them off between the city and the farm.
Gradually he became aware that he couldn’t hear Bazarov’s breathing anymore. Holding his own breath, he thought he heard an intake—then nothing. He breathed again, and heard, from across the table, the breathing begin again, too. Only when he sped his own up, and Bazarov’s matched it, did he realize the man was trying to keep in synch. He stopped, exhaled one long hard breath. And when it petered out there was just Bazarov’s long own dissolving into laughter. For a moment, the sound filled the darkness. Then the darkness was gone.
It was as if a searchlight blasted the room. Yarik shut his eyes. Opened them again. The stars were gone, too. Instead: their dim doppelgängers returned, drifting in their man-made constellation as they washed the night out of the sky. The light they
sent down lit the table, pulled the carpet from the dark, showed the gun glinting in Yarik’s hand, and Bazarov, sitting there, staring at him.
From the hallway, behind the door, came muffled sounds of celebratory shouts.
“No,” Bazarov said, “if you’re going to try to betray someone, you probably don’t want to chose the guy with his hands on the controls of the fucking sun.”
Yarik had forgotten how different the light of the zerkala was. Eyes still adjusting to it, he told the man, “You know, I get to see it, too. The boar hunt. You.” In that second, Bazarov’s face looked blown out with brightness and shadow, the blond of his goatee and hair almost white. “When were you supposed to switch the mirrors back?” Yarik asked him. “How much too soon did you do it just now? Who were you supposed to check with first? Whose hands are on you?”
Bazarov leaned forward across the table. A low long sigh. As if he had been storing air in his lungs ever since they’d met and now was at last letting it out. “Do you remember,” he said, “the first question I ever asked you?”
“Yes,” Yarik told him. “But this isn’t about what I want. It’s about what I have. What you don’t have your hands on. What whoever has their hands on you wants.”
Bazarov stayed with his weight on his forearms. “What makes you think they can’t just take it? These hands you talk about.” He closed his into fists. “Just squeeze it out of you, and take it, and throw what’s left of you away.”
Yarik pushed his chair back. “Me?” he said. “I know they could do that to me. But to your spokesman? The face of your entire publicity campaign? The person people see when they see the word Next? People who you spent so much time and money to convince? To convince that they’re following in his footsteps? In mine?” He stood up. “Slava?” he said. “Him I think it would be very hard to throw away.”
“What do you want?” Bazarov asked.
“Or his family,” Yarik said.
His weight still on his elbows, still leaning forward, Bazarov lifted his hands off the table, turned up his palms. “Yaroslav Lvovich, how can I give you what you want if you don’t tell me?”
