July 3, 1993
Saturday
4:35 PM
The apartment was magnificent. Five-meter ceilings, windows onto a quiet courtyard and Chistye Prudy, an enormous kitchen and a limitless entryway, all of it impressive. Zhora reported: «Three hundred forty square meters. Built under the tsar! The bourgeois knew what brought joy. They don’t build like this anymore.» Then he pulled a stack of papers out of his briefcase.
— I suggest you look over the documents. I can give you three days to check them. No more than that. Flight to San Fran on Friday. Decide. If you turn it down, there are other interested parties. You offered the highest sum, the rest are dawdling around, dragging their feet. As it stands, the apartment’s worth twice this, but there’s no time to wait. First to pay gets the place.
Sergei turned the papers over in his hands:
— Fifty thousand, like we agreed? If so, I’m ready to pay right now.
— No objections here, — Zhorik shrugged and his eyes flashed.
On the way over he’d let slip that he wasn’t expecting the money for at least a week. Incredible! Zhorik always had luck in absolutely everything.
One of the boys set a briefcase on the windowsill, clicked it open, pulled out five bundles of foreign bills. Handed them to Sergei. He tossed the bundles onto another windowsill — count it yourselves!
Zhorik rubbed his hands on his jacket lapels, let out a whoop like he was about to down half a liter in one go, tore open the first bundle, and dove into counting.
The agency rep handling the «sale-purchase» surfaced with a question: «Whose expense is the paperwork on?» Zhorik, buried in his counting, let the question sail past. Sergei had to answer instead: «Mine, I suppose.» The rep’s answer satisfied him:
— Excellent. Have fifteen hundred ready after the legal registration of the deal, that is, once it’s actually done. Now, please, your passport. And you, — the rep turned to Zhorik, — sign a receipt confirming you received fifty thousand dollars from the client, and get your passport ready too.
Zhorik didn’t say a word. Only after the fifth bundle, mussed up from being counted by hand, did he conclude:
— Exact to the penny. A pleasure doing business with Siberians.
He pulled out a Montblanc pen and started signing the sheets the realtor kept sliding under his hand. Once the ink strokes had landed in all the indicated spots, Zhorik exhaled: «Done!» and handed the sheets to Sergei. Then he laid a set of keys on the table: «See you at closing,» and gave a salute with his open palm.
We left Sergei, his bodyguards, and the apartment that would soon stop counting as their property, slowly and with dignity. Ugly and unseemly, all of it.
That’s exactly what I said once we got in the Taurus. Zhora smirked:
— Don’t worry about it. Seryoga’ll only get to use the apartment for a month, tops. Then a whole different show starts up. He’ll forget about the place and fall out with his brother.
— How do you know that?
— From over there. Remember the chick? — Zhora slowed the car and nodded toward a girl in a pale blue dress walking past.
I didn’t remember her. An elegant figure hurrying about her business, important and glamorous. Looked like she was carrying a review of a ballet tour to some illustrated magazine, or maybe a roundup of trendy restaurants. Both her appearance and her expression suggested as much. It was with eyes just as wide as saucers that Anastasiya Vertinskaya’s Assol had once greeted Vasily Lanovoy’s Captain Grey, docking under his scarlet sails.
The stranger Zhorik had pointed out, her heels barely brushing the pavement, seemed to fly above the waves of everyday life toward some castle in the air.
— Not even close, — Zhora shook his head. — That girl knows as much about ballet and restaurants as she does about stems and bowsprits. Meaning nothing at all. And she’s not rushing off to any castle of Mandragora, she’s headed for the apartment we just unloaded. Feel anything pressing on your neck?
— No. Why?
— Because she’s the one who put the collar on you.
— Vera?
With a crack in my neck vertebrae, I turned to get a look at the very one.
Too late. She was gone.
Well, another day full of events and not-so-coincidental encounters. Ran into Mityay, turned scholarly property manager… took part in a scam… watched Vera, airy and romantic, drift by.
— Right, Roma. I’m off to see the broker, you head home.
Dropped me off at the metro station and was gone.
