Hotel Moscow

by Talia Carner

  “The following weeks, whenever there was money in the bank account, the men returned to demand it. But we needed the funds for our payroll and to purchase raw materials. And now we had to pay interest for a loan that we never saw, on money that was taken away before it left the bank lobby.” Svetlana shrugged. “After two months, my request to change banks was approved.”

  Follow the money. It worked every time. “What do you mean by ‘request to change banks?’ Whose permission did you have to obtain?”

  Svetlana examined her worn black shoes. “A business can work only with a bank that invites it. You can’t choose. We filed a request with the Economic Authority, and they found a bank that would invite us to service our business.”

  “What happened after you switched banks?”

  “Same.” Svetlana’s lips quivered. “The morning the account cleared.”

  Judd appeared with a pint-size vodka bottle. He unscrewed the top and handed it to Svetlana, tossing Brooke a glance of understanding. She watched him stride away back to the hotel. His lithe figure radiated confidence.

  Svetlana sipped the vodka.

  “How have you been paying your bills if no money stays in your account?” Brooke asked.

  Two old women carrying large brooms began sweeping crushed cigarettes butts from the circular driveway in front of the hotel. Svetlana eyed them.

  “We—the workers—sell our vouchers,” she finally said.

  “What vouchers?”

  Svetlana’s hand shielded the side of her mouth as if she was concerned that the cleaning women were listening. “The shares in government properties all Russian citizens received when communism ended. Many people lost their savings because of inflation. These vouchers are the only thing they have left.”

  “The employees sell their shares in order to keep the business afloat?” Brooke sighed. “You won’t own your business much longer if you sell your rights to it. That’s what selling means.”

  “What choice do we have? The government gives us no money. We haven’t paid our workers in three months. We’ve been issuing veksels, I.O.U.s, but they trade those for half their value for food. We’re just trying to survive!” Svetlana finished the vodka. “We’re just trying to survive,” she repeated.

  Sadness crept over Brooke. Survival was the best these women hoped for. “The hoodlums have taken all the money they could get. What more do they want?” she asked, wondering if they’d been the ones to attack Svetlana again in the past hour.

  Svetlana’s gaze followed the two old women moving away with their brooms. “Why do you want to know so much?”

  “I’m trying to find out who’s behind the intimidation of small cooperatives like yours. Maybe we’ll be able to stop this.”

  “Stop the mafia?” Svetlana raised her eyebrows. “You’re a foreigner. You’re naive. No one can stop them.”

  “It’s not my idea. There are Russians who think it’s possible.”

  Again, tears welled up in Svetlana’s eyes. “You want to know what they want? They want us to pretend we transferred ownership but received nothing for it!”

  Whoever was behind this scheme still had an interest in the factory after it had been sucked dry and ransacked. Where was the value?

  “We’ll talk more after I give it some thought.” Then an idea hit Brooke. “How far is your home?”

  “Why?”

  “I want you to take your daughter to the circus. Use my ticket. I know Amanda has one for you, too. Go home and get Natasha.” What was it like to see the world through her child’s eyes? Brooke rooted in her bag and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. “Take a taxi, have the driver wait while you get her, and have him drive you to the arena. You’ll just make it in time.”

  Svetlana took the money. “For my daughter, I cannot refuse. Thank you so much!”

  “It will do you both good.” Brooke rose to her feet. Once, after Brooke’s father demanded that his wife pretend to have fun for their daughter’s sake, her mother took her to the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Bertha’s begging for cotton candy, though, had met a wall. Cotton candy wasn’t food, her mother said, producing instead a tomato-and-cheese sandwich and a banana softened into brown. Bertha wanted to scream and demand cotton candy, but that wasn’t behavior she could inflict on a mother who had suffered so much. Pretending to eat the soggy sandwich, she had stared, envious, at the children around her. Their fluffy pink concoction looked as if plucked from sweet clouds in the sky.

  Svetlana sniffled, but there was alacrity in her step as she got up.

  “I’ve just thought of something else.” Brooke stopped Svetlana with a touch on her arm. “Is there a way to get hold of your file at the Economic Authority?”

  Svetlana stared at her. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful. You have a good heart, even if it is Jewish. But you know nothing of what you’re talking about.” She waved down a passing car that braked with a screech. Turning back at the car door, Svetlana repeated, “Thank you very, very much.”

  Brooke watched her drive away, forcing herself to ignore Svetlana’s naive anti-Semitism, at least for now, and focus on the problem. Who was right—Svetlana or Olga? One had faced the mafia’s wrath, the other had access to resources of information Brooke couldn’t begin to fathom.

  Brooke climbed up the front stairs of Hotel Moscow to call the embassy and the airline. While she waited for the elevator, Judd approached. “What was that all about?” he asked.

  She waved her hand in dismissal. “Svetlana’s got problems.” The elevator door opened and they stepped into it together.

  “Aren’t you going to the circus?” he asked.

  “I just gave her my ticket.”

  “Let’s have dinner this evening,” he suggested.

  Heat coursed in her. In a voice as gentle as she could muster, she asked, “How would your wife feel about that?”

  Something dimmed in his eyes. “You’re right to ask.” He looked away, then back at her. “It’s complicated.”

  She noticed with regret the hazel speckles of his eyes behind the glasses. “It’s not a multiple-choice question. Either you are married or not. Sleeping on the living-room couch doesn’t constitute marital separation.”

  “Fair enough.”

  But as she stepped out of the elevator at her floor, he held the door. “Will you let me explain at dinner?” When she nodded, he let go of the door and stayed behind to take the elevator back down two flights.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THERE WAS NO one of authority to come to the phone at the embassy. No, her passport hadn’t been lost or stolen. No, this wasn’t a medical emergency either. No, she wasn’t in physical danger right this moment, but needed advice regarding security. Brooke left a message for someone to call her back. No, she wouldn’t be by the phone all day tomorrow, but please try her later that night or early in the morning. Hanging up in frustration, she thought of the moment in New York when she had decided to travel to Moscow and could now laugh at herself. How the significance of coming here in these historic times had burst into kaleidoscopic colors in her romantic head. She had anticipated watching history unfold, but not this kind of history. Svetlana’s sentence The Economic Authority selected the banks had made this history real.

  Brooke needed to watch herself from being carried away too easily by fantasy. Ditto with Judd. If she weren’t careful, she might be swept into feelings she would be unable to rein in; she couldn’t afford more personal mistakes.

  She had been fourteen when she changed her name from Bertha to Brooke. But the name change failed to free her from the sorrow that hung around her family. At seventeen, when applying for a scholarship at Berkeley, she changed her last name from Feldman to Fielding. She had not revealed to her parents that she hadn’t applied to any universities in the east, and as she planned to flee across the country she forced her heart to ignore their stunned reaction, to harden herself against the pain she was causing them. She had to save herself.

  Her classes lef
t her stimulated and the new music spouting out of transistors everywhere was thrilling. But the best part was the big, old Victorian house on Allston Way that she moved into within a few months. There, she found a home. Instead of regarding their house as a booby trap of loss and pain, those people created a family life full of hugs and words of love.

  The commune consisted of hippies fired up by antiwar protests. While staying around school longer than intended, they clung to their alternative way of life as their new utopia. For the first time, Brooke’s lacerating loneliness eased. These people, who believed in the goodness of the planet and its inhabitants, had chosen her. They loved her for who she was, unlike her parents, who had viewed her only as a stand-in for all their lost relatives. In the spirit of fair-mindedness, her new friends accepted with good humor the business-major teenager who had landed in their midst, even as she seemed indifferent to talks about war. Besides, she was the only one who could balance the commune checkbook—or cared to.

  Snug inside this cocoon of affection, Brooke prized their commitment to love, to each other and to their mutual happiness. At night, they slept cuddled together like puppies, in clusters of three or four, with sprigs of sage grown in their garden spread around their mattresses. Suddenly Brooke had a huge family to replace all the siblings and cousins that she could never have.

  Her euphoria ended without notice when the house lease came up for renewal. The landlord, who had watched the neighborhood replacing the free love of the sixties with middle-class families of the seventies, wanted to refurbish and sell. As though suddenly awakened from a protracted adolescence, the commune members rolled up their futons, removed their beads, cut their long hair, and unrolled their diplomas. They wrote their first résumés and went on job interviews. Within two weeks, they had scattered in all directions, the pledges of commitment an embarrassment, the words of love outgrown. The sage garden was left to wilt.

  Brooke was left alone again, with no idea which of the five men in the commune—the tall Swede, the stout Japanese, the black hunk, the Jewish Marxist, or the blue-eyed Texan—had left behind the one sperm that impregnated her fertile egg.

  BROOKE AND JUDD stepped outside the hotel into the cool, clear evening. He paid the guard at the door to stop a car. Before entering it, he presented the driver with a note in Cyrillic with the address.

  When the driver nodded, Judd put his hand on the small of Brooke’s back while he opened the back door with the other. The feel of his hand, so assured, so intimate, sent a dangerous swell of warmth through her. “Ready for a home-cooked Russian meal?”

  She laughed as she slid into the car. “I’m ready for anything better than fried chicken that has been run over by a tank.” She would only bear Hotel Moscow’s food through the weekend, then she’d see. When she had called Delta Air Lines, she learned that there was a daily flight at five P.M. to Frankfurt, but only twice a week nonstop to New York. The flights weren’t full. Her options were open. All she had waiting at home this weekend was her cat Sushi, cared for by the superintendent’s wife.

  Judd slid in behind her. Just as he was about to shut the door, Jenny materialized. “I’m coming with you,” she called out and grabbed the door handle, pulling it open.

  Brooke was taken aback. “Didn’t you go to the circus?”

  “All those gymnasts were trained for the Olympics. I can see them better on TV.”

  Judd seesawed his eyebrows toward Brooke in warning and mouthed, “No way.”

  Brooke leaned over. “I’m sorry, Jenny.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “We’re off.” Judd yanked the door shut, leaving Jenny at the curb, her mouth puckered in a pout. The driver pulled away before Brooke could hear Jenny’s retort.

  She laid a hand on the left side of her chest. “Did we have to be so rude?”

  “You weren’t. I was—and she was even more.”

  “She’s misguided. Or craves attention.”

  “More like missing a chromosome.”

  “The Russians admire her. And she has a good sense of the craft market.”

  “Your good breeding is taking you too far on this one. Do you take care of every person who suffers from low self-esteem? She has too much chutzpah, that’s all.”

  Remembering how Jenny had cornered Judd in the dining room, Brooke said no more.

  No outside sign indicated that a restaurant was housed in the building where they stopped. They entered a gap in the wall with no door, took a lit flight of steps to the basement, and Judd rang a doorbell. A matron with cheeks like ripe peaches and a huge bosom opened the door and greeted them with a broad smile.

  With only a few tables well spaced in the front room and a ten-inch-wide stenciled strip of red roses running along the ceiling and door frames, the place felt cozy, like someone’s dining room. Paintings of the Russian countryside depicted bales of hay, gushing springs, log cabins, plowing oxen, and fields of snow edged by tall forests—Olga’s nostalgic description of the Russia she loved.

  Fleshy wings hung from the matron’s bare arms as she reached out to hug Judd and addressed him in Russian.

  He shook his head. “English?”

  The woman seemed perplexed. She peered up at his face again and spoke again in Russian.

  “She thinks she knows you,” Brooke observed.

  Judd said again, “Do you speak English?”

  The matron shrugged and called over a strapping youth with pale blue eyes identical to hers.

  “Please.” The young man bowed from his waist and led them to a table.

  A few moments later, he placed a small jar of caviar with silver dollar–size blinis in front of them and popped open a Champagne bottle they hadn’t ordered.

  “Thanks. We’re starving.” Judd flashed him a smile. “What do you have?”

  “I bring food Mama cooked.”

  A Gypsy couple in colorful costumes and handkerchief headdresses swooped over, their long nails clacking against their string and percussion instruments. The woman broke into a dance, and the fake coins strung into her black curls jiggled to her singing.

  “To new friendship.” Judd touched his glass to Brooke’s.

  She smiled. “To Moscow?”

  “To a new friendship that begins in Moscow.”

  She clinked her glass to his. “And to Russia quickly catching up with the rest of civilization.”

  “Wow, you’re down on this country.”

  “I’m confused. It is a place of extremes. And our Jewish people’s bloody history here is yet another layer I haven’t begun to deal with.” There. She’d opened the subject a crack.

  Just as Judd was about to speak, three suit-clad teenagers, one of them sporting the fuzz of a mustache, entered the restaurant. They wore giant gold-and-diamond pins, finger-thick gold chains, and heavy rings. A watch winked from under one of the sleeves. The bling of mafia saplings.

  Brooke shifted her gaze back to Judd. “To be fair, I love the women I’ve gotten to know, and I’m enormously impressed with the ones I’ve counseled today. They have so much to catch up on, yet the odds are stacked against them.” She bit into a caviar-covered blini. “I advised a marketing director for a ladder company about exporting her products. But guess what? Russian ladders are a joke in Poland and Romania, a synonym for products deemed unsafe. The steps are known to fall off.”

  “Along with the unlucky user who happens to be climbing them?”

  She smiled. “They need to understand quality control as the basis of market economy, where there is open competition. They can’t just unload inferior or defective products and expect a second order—”

  “Here, let me.” Judd interrupted, and reached over to touch Brooke’s nose. He turned his finger to show a black caviar egg stuck to it, then placed it on his tongue. “It tastes better now.”

  She laughed and sipped her Champagne. It tasted both earthy and heavenly. “In poking around business ventures here, have you dealt with the Economic Authority?” sh
e asked. “What do you know about the privatization process?”

  “I believe that after the fall of communism, the Economic Authority issued the original sets of ownership vouchers as part of the privatization of industries. It’s now helping these ventures by channeling financing through its Finance Division. Without steady revenues, most need operating cash flow to get started. The Economic Authority arranges for bank loans to newly privatized businesses. Why do you ask?”

  That’s it! Brooke sat back. She could feel the taste of victory in her mouth. All Olga needed to do now was to get hold of the ventures’ files. “I’m still waiting to meet my host, Nikolai Sidorov. Have you heard anything about him?”

  “He’s a close adviser to Yeltsin, Russia’s reformation meister.”

  Sidorov might be ignorant of the corruption at one of his divisions, right under his nose. Or he might not, Brooke thought.

  The son-waiter served the food. He pointed at the names of the dishes printed on a card: “Okroshka, cold soup with a base of beer.” He set the bowl in front of Brooke, then placed pelmeni, meat dumpling, in front of Judd and put kotleta po pozharsky, chicken cutlets, on the table for both of them. He also served several small dishes, rattling off names that Brooke could no longer follow. Without asking, he set down tiny glasses and poured vodka into them.

  “No, thanks,” Brooke told him.

  “In Russia, drink vodka,” he replied.

  “Shall we give it a try?” Judd placed his glass on the back of his hand, and, as she had seen the official do at the Gorbachevskaya Street Factory, tipped it toward his mouth.

  She tried to emulate his movement, but her glass tilted precariously. She caught it with her other hand before it spilled. “I should sign up for your ninja school to learn Russian survival tricks.”

  When he just smiled, she took a spoonful of her soup. “It’s delicious.” She took another spoonful, then looked up to see Judd examining her. Heat rose up her neck. “Is there another caviar egg on my nose?”