began to slip away; and I was alone, except for Kim who called out, “One more, please?” and held up her phone and with serious determination took a final picture as if to capture me for once and for all. I was now the official prisoner of little Russian girls in pink t-shirts. I ¦ Putin.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Moscow was hot and dusty. The National Hotel was full. I couldn’t remember any other hotels, only the National and the old Intourist, which had been replaced by a Ritz Carlton where they wanted twelve hundred bucks a night.
I didn’t have that kind of dough. I didn’t really want to stay in a hotel anyhow. It would make me too visible. I glanced around the lobby at the Ritz Carlton, and left.
I needed a place to stay.
As soon as I hit the streets, a fog of paranoia descended and clung to me like the humidity. I went towards Red Square. Everything in this place led to Red Square. I went on instinct, God knows why. I had to think of a place to stay, so I walked, trying to lose myself among the tourists.
There was a replica of Resurrection Gate that had gone up since I’d been here. I had heard about it as a kid. The sixteenth-century gate which had formed an entrance to Red Square was torn down by Stalin in l931 to make it easier for tanks to get through to the square. And just in front of the gate-it looked like cardboard-was a guy with some monkeys.
“Picture, picture, you want a picture?” shouted the monkey man.
He had two monkeys working the crowd for him, in fact. One of the monkeys looked like a little old man in a child’s outfit, little blue shorts, a jacket, a cap. The other was smaller, and had a skirt on.
“Fuck off,” I said.
Before I knew it, the man had tossed the monkeys at me, one into my arms, the big one on my back. He snapped my picture.
“Get them off of me,” I said, beginning to panic. “Get them fucking off me.”
The wall of noise from traffic was incredible, a million cars in gridlock. Hummers, Range Rovers, Mercs, Moscow money liked its cars big and loud. On the street a guy sidled up to me to offer me police kit for twenty grand, complete with flashing blue light, siren, special plates, which would get me out of traffic and into the VIP lane.
Was this Tolya’s alternative universe, this place where we had both grown up? Was this Tolya’s other planet, the place where he had disappeared? I barely recognized Moscow, the traffic, the stores, the signs, the neon, the crowds. I’d only been back once in the early 1990s. I looked around for a taxi.
Parched, I went into a grocery store to buy a bottle of water. It felt like a stage set, stocked like a fancy New York deli with salad, bread, meats, cheeses, imported canned goods, flowers, fresh fruit, cookies, wine, cake.
I walked some more. It was getting late now, sun going down, the Moscow night coming on. The whole city seemed about to explode, as if somebody had tossed a lighted match onto a sea of oil.
In the street, I held out my hand for a cab. A shabby beige Lada pulled up. The driver in jeans and a red t-shirt asked where I was going. I gave him the address of Tolya’s club. As he drove, he bent over the wheel in a weird contorted way. After a few minutes, I realized he was a hunchback.
The driver asked if I was a foreigner. He said did I need anything?
What was he offering? Girls? Drugs? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about this place.
When the driver finally pulled up at the curb and turned around, I saw he had a soft young face, and I gave him extra cash.
For a few seconds, standing on the street, I fantasized that I’d find Tolya at Pravda222, find him behind the bar, cradling some thousand-dollar bottle of wine the way I had that morning in New York. But I knew he would be lying low, looking for Grisha Curtis. I had already called his apartment, his ex-wife’s dacha. I didn’t want to try anybody else. I was afraid my calling would get him into bad trouble.
If Tolya was hiding, I’d try for anonymity here. Nobody else at the club would know me. As I went in, and dropped my bag at the coat-check, I became Max Fielding, a travel writer, always making notes in my little notebook.
Pravda222 was pretty much exactly like Tolya’s other clubs.
“Branding, Artyom,” I could hear Tolya say. “This is how it works. Rich people like security, they like a name they know, you must have a brand.”
How excited he had been when he opened his club in Moscow, his third club, and now he was on his way to a global brand. But Moscow, this is special, Artyom, he had said. This is like coming home.
Mahogany paneling, old chandeliers, long bar, de-silvered mirrors that Tolya told me he picked up at the flea market in Paris, and which caught the light. On the walls were the Soviet posters he had collected: Mayakovsky, the Stenberg Brothers, Rodchenko, a painting by Malevich that must have cost millions. Waiters in white bistro aprons checked the tables, the linen, glass.
People were filtering in quietly, the early part of the evening, most coming for dinner.
A handsome guy in a beautiful black suit, the cut so perfect I knew it was custom-made, approached me and asked if he could help.
I needed help. I told him I knew Sverdloff through a friend. It worked like a charm. The guy offered me a table, I said I’d sit at the bar. He offered me a drink, I said Scotch, please.
Konstantin was the suit’s name, and I told him I was Max Fielding and gave him the information I’d given the kids on the bus. I didn’t know if he believed me or not, but he welcomed me to Moscow and said did I need anything, and excused himself to greet somebody who had arrived and had perched on a barstool four down from where I sat.
While I drank I read an English-language paper I’d picked up at the airport. Fifty-four per cent of Russians, according to a poll, consider money the most important thing as compared to eleven per cent of Americans, the piece said. Things were going to fall into an abyss, another columnist had written. Give it two months, give it until October, he said, and the price of oil would plunge, and everybody would be left high and dry, stranded, screwed. Putin announced, meanwhile, that everything would be wonderful for a hundred years.
A couple of men who had planted themselves at the bar began telling jokes. They were well dressed, nice clothes, good accents. I made out that they were a pair of Moscow architects.
After a couple of drinks, they started talking about people from the former Sov republics. Then one cracked a joke about Obama. They laughed. What a joke, one said to the other in Russian.
“I say to myself, hope?” he said. “I say, change? I see a black guy, and I say, okay, how much?”
I was slipping between planets. I didn’t bother telling them Obama was probably the only candidate who could help us out, and we needed help. I didn’t bother. They wouldn’t get it.
I sat and drank for a while until the suit-Konstantin-came over, and asked if I needed anything else, and I mentioned I was looking for a place to stay. An apartment, maybe, instead of a hotel, I said. I wanted to get the real feel of being in Moscow.
I was pretty surprised-maybe it was too good to be true and I should have known it-Konstantin said he might have a solution. He asked if I wanted to eat, a waiter brought me some smoked fish and another drink, and about half an hour later, the American appeared.
Konstantin made the introductions and the guy got up on the stool next to me, asked for a beer, shook my hand. He had a Midwestern accent, and asked where I was from.
“New York,” I said.
“I love New York. I’m from Minnesota,” he said, and grinned. “Small town you’ve never heard of. You just got here? Max, right?”
I nodded.
“Willie Moffat,” he said. “Konstantin over there told me you were looking for a place to stay?”
In the background, Sinatra sang “Moonlight In Vermont”.
“I have to go back to the States, I fixed my flight,” said Moffat. “I was trying to set up to rent my apartment. My Russian sucks. So I asked Konstantin who knows everyone in Moscow, if he could help. I want to do it off the
