April 22, 1996
Monday
12:00 p.m.

The briefing, long, tedious, and incomprehensible, wouldn’t end. Zhora kept piling it on, thickening it, and as we turned into the Khryakinsky forest, he concluded:

– Chik-chirik-pizdyk-ku-ku! I’m mustering out, your free ride is over. You answer for Proma alone and you don’t belong to yourself. Any wrong decision will land on the friends you called in to build the business. You screw up – they suffer, not you. Granted, the lads are clever, they graduated from MEPhI, they’ll manage. Look a level lower. Under your friends there are ten thousand workers with wages and plans for the rest of their lives.

I mulled that over.

Zhora fired up the stereo from the remote. Bass thumped, drums crashed out of twenty speakers, «Highway to Hell» kicked in. I broke out in a cold sweat.

…Phew…

Dodged that one…

«Granite Pebble» started strumming.

We pulled onto the estate grounds.

Men stood lined up by the main entrance.

Zhorik introduced the first:

– Head of facilities, Sergei Alexandrovich. Runs everything that breathes on the property.

Second in line was the man tasked with making sure only those who were supposed to breathe on the property did: head of security, Vladimir Vladimirovich.

Last in line stood Akhmed, shuffling his feet, a jack-of-all-trades. In a previous life, an associate professor in the Russian language department of some far-off regional university.

After meeting the people who kept the estate running, we got a guided tour. Akhmed explained how to order breakfast, how to get ready for the banya, and what to do if the intercom for reaching staff went quiet…

Clear enough. Zhorik is handing over his «henhouse» to me. He is flying off to England. Picaresques are written there, all the pícaros have cleared off to London...

At the end of the tour, in the cellar with its wine racks, Zhorik picked out a couple of bottles. We went up to the attic, out onto the terrace on the third floor. Gorgeous!

The forest ringing the lawn, the size of a football pitch, looked solid at first, but at just the right spot it thinned out, parted, revealing the river bluff, a silvery bend in the water, and an achingly blue April sky. Zhorik sank into an armchair. Behind him – I never caught his name, some fellow who’d stood second-to-last in the line – opened both bottles of wine and poured the contents into four glasses. Two glasses ended up in front of Zhorik, two on the side table. I tore myself away from the postcard views and settled into the armchair by the table. Threw a blanket over my legs, picked up a glass.

– What’s this swill? – Proma’s veterans called any wine «swill.» They drank the noble spirits: whiskey, cognac, rum, or tequila, all from their places of origin.

– A hick you were and a hick you remain... – Zhora sighed, scanning the same distance. – Bordeaux. Saint-Émilion. Eighty-nine against eighty-two.

I sat there feeling gloomy. A hundred grams of Ballantine’s or Jameson would’ve had nature bursting into color in an instant. Out of pure desperation I took a gulp of the wine and nearly choked on it. Sour as a stale cracker! Ugh!