Hotel Moscow

by Talia Carner

  “Welcome into my empire.” The man Brooke assumed was Tkachev rose and smiled broadly at Judd. He gave Judd a vigorous handshake and handed him a business card.

  Brooke watched with amusement as he ignored her; he must think that she had brought her boss along. “I’m glad you can meet my colleague, Judd Kornblum,” she said pointedly.

  “Hello.” Her host gave her a cursory once-over, ending with a slight nod. She would have gotten his attention, Brooke thought, had she appeared in a miniskirt, spiked pumps, and a tight red sweater.

  The moment they sat down, Tkachev said to Judd, “You must agree fifty–fifty.”

  “Excuse me?” Brooke asked.

  “Fifty–fifty for the business.”

  “What business?” Brooke asked.

  The Russian’s gaze remained on Judd as if he had been the invited guest. “What business I’m going to tell you about.”

  “Ninety–ten,” Judd replied, amusement in his voice.

  The Russian shook his head. “No business then.”

  Judd suppressed a chuckle. “What’s the business?”

  Brooke stood up. “Well, this was fun. If your driver would please take us back—”

  Tkachev cut her off. “I’ll tell you what. You came all this way so I will be large and tell you what business.” He motioned for her to sit down.

  Brooke remained standing. “I’m listening.”

  “You buy ten airplanes,” Tkachev said, again speaking to Judd, who was still sitting. “We start domestic airline.”

  “Ten airplanes,” Brooke repeated.

  “First year. And you put four million dollars in bank.” The Russian continued to speak to Judd. “Second year, you buy ten more airplanes—”

  “I buy twenty airplanes and put up four million dollars?” A shade of a smile played on Judd’s face. “And you buy twenty more airplanes and put up four million dollars more?”

  “We don’t buy airplanes. We manage airline.”

  “Where would these airplanes be flying to?” Brooke asked.

  Tkachev made a broad sweep of his hand. “All over Russia.”

  Now Judd stood up, too. “Thanks, but I don’t see what’s in it for us—”

  “Wait. Sit down.” The Russian motioned with his head. The driver-bodyguard opened a panel in the wall, retrieved a tray with vodka and small glasses and placed it in front of them. “We drink to business.”

  Judd remained standing. “We’d better get going.”

  “No. We have a good idea. The government will pay.”

  “How does the government figure into this?” Brooke sat down, her curiosity piqued. This was material for her article.

  “Your four million, government matches with special low-interest loan for airline. Only twenty-six percent. Yes? We put it in the bank and get big interest, maybe three hundred percent. We make maybe eleven million dollars, put it in offshorsky bank. We pay you consultation fee. Yes?”

  “Consultation fee? What happened to the fifty–fifty deal?”

  “Airline is fifty–fifty.”

  “Oh, the airplanes. I forgot,” Judd said. “Do they fly in the meantime?”

  “We will own Russia’s national airline.”

  “Sounds like a Groucho Marx routine,” Brooke murmured.

  “You American make jokes.” Tkachev shot her a warning look. “We are serious businessmen. You are our American partner or government don’t give us money.”

  Brooke rose to her feet again and extended her hand to Tkachev. “It’s not for my firm. Nice meeting you.”

  Tkachev circled the table as they made for the door and gave Judd’s back a hearty slap. “Fifty–fifty?”

  “Maybe ninety–ten.”

  Anger knotted the Russian’s eyebrows into one black line, like electrical tape. “We shake hands on it now or no business.”

  “No deal, then.” Judd smiled, reaching for the door handle. “Any nukes?”

  The man’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed him. “Maybe.”

  “That’s a yes.”

  “I only trust a partner.”

  “Oh, well. If you come across anything good in that department, please let me know.” Judd steered Brooke toward the anteroom.

  There were no bodyguards in the elevator; probably Brooke and Judd had passed security clearance. She would have entered the elevator laughing at Tkachev’s offer had it not been for the hidden cameras she was certain were trained on them. She whispered to Judd, “You blew your chance of being an airline tycoon.”

  “A steal for only four million dollars.”

  “What’s with the nukes? You can’t be serious.”

  “Contacts here are convoluted, interlocking. It was a test to find out who I’m dealing with.”

  The answer didn’t satisfy her. It would never have occurred to her to ask about nuclear weapons. But Judd had obviously recognized Tkachev’s name when the interpreter mentioned it. The Wild West had attracted many unsavory opportunists, and she had just learned how no one in power in Russia “bought” anything. This privatization orgy was nothing but the biggest transfer of government-owned rights to a few robber barons since the European nations had carved up Africa.

  The driver, in dark aviator glasses and a black leather jacket, was waiting outside and held the limousine door open for them. Once Brooke and Judd were in, he pointed to the teakwood bar in the center of the car, where cut crystal glasses and a decanter of vodka shimmered on a silver tray.

  Brooke stared out the window, feeling Judd’s presence at the far end of the same seat. Nukes? There was no free market in Russia, or it was free indeed but the only “market” was the competition among the vultures descending on it both from the inside and the outside. How did Judd fit into this, and what had really brought him to Russia in the first place?

  Chapter Twenty-two

  SATURDAY WAS THE day her parents expected her to visit—or at least expected to hear from her if she were either working on the weekend or traveling. With the time difference, it was dawn in New York, but they were early risers and would soon be staring at the phone, willing it to ring. Yesterday, her father would have received her fax in his office. She hadn’t asked him not to tell her mother, leaving it to him to decide whether to hurt her.

  “EuroTours forgot to book a tour bus,” Amanda told Brooke upon her return to their room. “But they’re sending one now.” She went downstairs to wait for it.

  Brooke placed a request with the international operator and waited for the call back. Through the window she could see only some distant buildings. Somewhere, hundreds of kilometers west in Riga, Latvia, her mother had spent her pubescent years.

  Brooke recalled first becoming aware of her mother’s “otherness” on a summer Saturday, when her mother came to pick her up from dance class. All the other mothers picking up their daughters wore shorts or Capris in pastel colors. Her much-older mother looked out of place in a dark, flowery cotton dress that hung below her knees. And not only was her hair not highlighted, teased, or coiffed, it was steely gray and pulled back into a severe bun. Her mother looked more than just ancient; she looked embarrassingly foreign, a stranger Brooke wanted nothing to do with.

  Glancing at the phone, waiting for its ring, remorse and fondness filled Brooke. She wished she hadn’t been so judgmental of her mother’s shortcomings, so acutely alert to what was lacking in their home life. From the vantage point of maturity, Brooke could see that her mother was a brilliant woman whose education had been cut short, whose life had been thrown out of orbit. In spite of the hurdles, her mother managed to pave her own professional path in a new land, in a new language she studied obsessively. Starting as a bookkeeper, she eventually majored in accounting, and by the time Brooke was a teenager, her mother had learned to drive and had opened her own accounting office. The same frugal, exacting, opinionated, and unforgiving nature that made her difficult for Brooke to bear were perfectly suited for this career.

  It was only in the bosom of her famil
y that her mother’s austere and tormented soul snuffed out any moments of joy. Bertha had been merely five years old, still living in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, when one night she overheard her father begging her mother to “just try once in a while.” Her mother had responded, “My dead relatives don’t get a ‘once in a while.’ They are dead. And so am I—or I should be.”

  Brooke sighed. When the phone finally rang, she dreaded what she had to say. “Mom? How are you?” she asked in a cheerful tone.

  “No better than expected. Not worse either. Where are you?”

  Brooke gulped air. “In Moscow.”

  Thunderous silence, then, “What do you want with those anti-Semites?”

  Brooke’s father had picked up the other extension. “She’s probably there on business.”

  Business reasons might be acceptable to her mother, as had been Brooke’s visits to her firm’s Frankfurt office; profiting from the Germans was the little that Jews could do in return for the horrors they had suffered. “You can call it that,” Brooke said.

  “Meaning what? Are you there on business or not?” her mother demanded.

  “What else would send her to that cursed country?” her father replied. “She needs to know all the international machinations.”

  “Can’t she exclude the one country that killed my whole family?”

  Brooke held the phone away from her ear, letting their bickering take its course. A couple of exchanges later, when the two of them ran out of steam, she asked, “So how is the weather in New York?”

  “Weather, shmether. Who cares? It’s raining, all right? Now can you explain why you went to Russia, of all places?”

  “Actually, Mom, I came here to take a look at the new economy. But I got involved in helping women make sense of it. They know nothing about business. They are like five-year-olds when it comes to finances or marketing—”

  “Helping? You’re there for charity? Of all places on earth, you chose to help our enemies?”

  Brooke bit her lip, holding back the retort that, perhaps by showing them benevolence, they’d no longer be enemies. Such liberal ideas had never taken root in her mother’s thinking. “It came by chance. All the executives at the office were told by the new management to take two weeks off. That new banking practice was applied to us.” Brooke shifted the receiver to her other ear. “Amanda already had this mission set up so I just joined—”

  “Why not just stick a knife in my back?”

  “Martha, leave her alone,” her father said. “She’s a grown woman.”

  “Grown? And where did she grow up, you tell me? What kind of home did she need to grow up in in order to know that she owes it to her dead grandparents, aunts, and uncles not to go out of her way to help these murderers?”

  Pulling the phone cord, Brooke stepped to the window. When had her mother’s enemies ceased to be her enemies? At what time in the process of purging herself of her parents’ past had she leaped over the clear separation of “us” versus “them”? She sat down on her cot, the enormity of her betrayal filling her. She had been insensitive to her mother’s psyche, to her own family heritage.

  “Next she’ll be helping the murderers of your children in Prague,” her mother told her father. “Will you defend her then? Maybe you’ll send a donation?”

  “Bertha, there are other miserable places around the globe,” her father said feebly.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “India. Lots of unhappy people there—and they never had pogroms. You can find poverty there, even leprosy. But get out of Russia!”

  “Go to Israel, and do tzedakah for our own people,” her father said.

  Brooke dropped her head into her hands as she clutched the phone to her ear. Her heart pounded with the old pain, the wound her parents had carved in the center of her being. They had assigned her one job—to remember—and she had willfully ignored it. “Mom, I just arrived two days ago,” she said. “I’ve made promises—”

  “Why do you care about the feelings of some Russians more than you care about the feelings of your family? Why can’t you do the simple thing and maintain respect—” Her mother’s indignant voice suddenly pinched and choked.

  Dead people did not have feelings, Brooke thought.

  “Brooke,” her father took over the conversation, using the name he’d never grown comfortable with. “Do they know you are Jewish?”

  “It rarely comes up.” Brooke shifted the chain so the Star of David returned to rest in the front. Instinctively, she had turned it when Irina arrived, wanting to keep her Jewishness out of the picture.

  Her mother sobbed into the phone.

  “Okay, Mom. I’ve been considering not staying for the whole program—”

  “Today,” her mother cut her off. “Get out of there today. Please. Remember—”

  “I remember! You never let me forget!” Brooke screamed, then sobered. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She replaced the receiver in the old-fashioned cradle, feeling drained and ashamed of her outburst.

  She could fly to Frankfurt; it would be a good opportunity to discuss the new office landscape with Hoffenbach. Also, she could use visiting his office as an excuse to tell Amanda that although she, too, was deserting the group, she would explore the launching of a micro-lending fund here. Yet, how could she manage such a project without setting foot in Russia again? Anti-Semitism wouldn’t be eradicated here in the coming decades. No, there was nothing for Brooke here. She’d be better off investing her energy helping Israeli women and making her parents happy in the process.

  She called Delta and booked a flight for the next day, Sunday. Then she left a message at Hoffenbach’s office because she didn’t have his home number.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THE MORNING WAS bright and warm, and Olga was filled with anticipation for the evening. Who would have ever believed that one day she’d host an American guest in her own home? In the outdoor market, on rickety tables constructed of wood planks, autumn colors played in the piles of yellow squash, brown potatoes in open burlap sacks, mud-covered carrots, and mounds of purple beets. Every few meters, Olga examined a bottle of oil, a wheel of cheese, or a crock of butter produced in the farmers’ kitchens.

  The chicken merchant beckoned her, pointing at four emaciated fowl hanging from a post over his head. The state of the chicken reflected the economic problems of Russia, Olga thought: the leaner the times, the scrawnier the chicken.

  “How much?” She poked her finger at the clammy, yellowish skin.

  He unhooked one from the post and held it up in both palms, like an offering. “Three thousand rubles.”

  “That’s a week’s salary! Thievery!” She sniffed the chicken front and back for signs of decay. “Two thousand.” She pointed at the smudges of feathers left. “Burn them and clean the insides.”

  “Twenty-five hundred.”

  “Twenty-two hundred. And let me check the inner organs before you wrap them. Don’t break the liver or the spleen.”

  “Do you think this is America?” In quick, short slices, his knife cleaved the chicken’s center. “Twenty-three hundred.”

  “We should only have it as good as in America.” She lit a Dukat. “In America citizens have shopping centers and supermarkets. Do you know they have stores with dozens of washing machines where you can do your wash and then put them in other machines that dry your clothes while you wait?” She punctuated her words with a wave of her cigarette. “In America, every woman has electric appliances to do her kitchen work—to peel, chop, or mix. You can’t begin to imagine what they have in America. Have you heard of an electric toothbrush?”

  “They’re too lazy to brush their own teeth that they need a machine for that?” The merchant’s knife gutted out the chicken’s innards and laid them on a newspaper for her to examine. “Americans are stupid. They order things by mail! Can you imagine not inspecting the merchandise before they send it to you? What do you do when they dump on you all the ruined o
r broken items? And anyway, anybody can steal from the package before you even get it.”

  Olga nodded. “You may be right about that. But think of the other things that make life easy: freezers with prepared frozen meals, ready to eat, and canned vegetables of the best quality, not rotten stuff like here.” She would ask Brooke what they did with the bad fruits and vegetables, if they didn’t slip them onto consumers’ plates.

  She scrutinized the chicken’s liver and heart for color, and the guts for feed, then watched as the merchant dangled the chicken over a candle to burn off the remaining feathers. “Throw away the head, but I’ll use the stomach, neck, and the knuckles in my soup.” She would cook the iron-rich liver over the open flame of her stove. It would be a delicacy for Galina.

  “In America, chicken is bought already cleaned, cut up, and wrapped.” The merchant rolled the purchase into a newspaper. “Even seasoned. Ha! A sure way to hide an old chicken that died of disease.”

  As she tucked her purchase into her string bag, Olga thought that tonight she’d ask Brooke how American housewives knew how to select a chicken if it came preseasoned and wrapped.

  There would be other questions, such as how to proceed with her investigation. She hoped it would be their investigation. Olga couldn’t do it alone, not without the American’s financial savvy. She had no idea how to follow “the money trail.”

  An hour and a half later, Olga’s legs throbbed from walking on the uneven, muddy paths of the market. The strings of her three bags, filled with onions, beets, carrots, parsley, squash, turnips, cucumbers, and radishes, strained her shoulder muscles. For her guest tonight, she had splurged on herring and cheese, and had even bought three eggs. Her favorite meat merchant had been in the market, and she bought sausage, almost certain he didn’t make it out of old horse meat.