smaller baby. He put it in the shoe box and taped the lid shut. Decided on no airholes. Put the shoe box in an oversize shopping bag and took the stairs down rather than meet anyone in the elevator.
The general didn't know Moscow well but his plan was to leave the bag amid the crowds and confusion of Three Stations. The problem was that when he got to Kazansky Station, he discovered how little confusion there actually was. Everyone moved with a purpose and had four or five eyes instead of two and all on the watch for suspicious behavior. He regretted the shopping bag; unfurled, it was large and gaudy and had an Italian logo that drew attention. He had to be casual. Unrattled. Even so, when the box shifted in the bag he panicked and headed for the nearest tunnel. He found himself in a pedestrian underpass that was a gallery of stalls staffed with women who would no doubt detect a baby's least whimper. Kassel was grateful to reach the blaring speakers of a music stall.
The problem was that his wife was so high-strung. She wasn't meant for the army life of moving from one dreary outpost to another, living in cold-water housing and forced to be grateful for that at a time when thousands of officers of the highest ranks were being shoved into early retirement. She said a million times that the only thing that would make her happy was a child.
Toward the end of the stalls, militia officers were stopping people at random to check their papers and search their bags. It was a fishing expedition for bribes and Kassel's impulse was to backtrack because he had forgotten his ID. If he had been in uniform, he would have been waved through. Instead the flow of foot traffic trapped him and pushed him toward an officer who was already reaching for the bag when a gang of street kids, none older than eight, squirmed through. They came and went like a swarm of gnats and collapsed the line, and by the time order was restored, the general was safe on the other side.
Now that he believed that luck was on his side, he marched directly to the boarding platforms, where he joined a crowd of passengers. He set the shopping bag down and stared down the track with a cigarette between his teeth, the picture of impatience, moving only to avoid the giant suitcases of day peddlers and the sharp edge of porters' carts. The baby was silent. No kicking, no fuss. Although the general took no pleasure in harming a baby in any way, he felt he had kept damage to a minimum.
Simple plans were the best, the general thought. When the train pulled in, he would join the disembarking riders and leave the shopping bag and baby behind. At this point it seemed providential that he hadn't had an ID to show the militia. There was no way to identify him. It was as if the baby had passed through the world as undetected as a gamma ray. As if it had never existed at all, not officially.
People stirred as a commuter train approached across a field of rails. This was the end of the line. As it drew closer the general saw riders standing in the aisles, folding their newspapers, closing their cell phones. He was in the perfect position to slip among them.
Only where was the Italian bag?
The bag had been at his feet and he hadn't strayed more than a few steps, yet it had disappeared. In the press of riders leaving the train and others boarding, the bag had vanished.
He melded with the stream of arrivals. Either the bag had been kicked into the gap between the platform and the train or a thief had unwittingly done him a favor. The general felt a guilty relief and could barely keep from running.
The scare came later, in the middle of the night, when two detectives knocked on the apartment door. Kassel felt that someone at the platform must have seen him with the bag. But the detectives only asked questions about a dead prostitute in a totally unrelated case and he honestly said he couldn't help. So, overall, he felt he had done fairly well. In fact, the memory of the baby was already starting to fade. At sunrise a half-dozen runaway kids hit a twenty-four-hour supermarket on the same street as police headquarters. They came like a gang of mice and created as much nuisance as possible, stuffing jars of Spanish olives and tins of tuna fish into their pockets, picking over organic fruit and avocados with their dirty hands. Some days ice cream was the target, other days any aerosol to sniff.
Security cameras tried to follow them, although grown men and women chasing homeless six-year-olds did not make a pretty picture. The staff ejected the kids as discreetly as possible and took a quick inventory of stolen items, petty stuff not worth reporting to the police, including sliced bread, strawberry jam, orangeade, energy bars, baby formula, nappies and a bottle.
18
Things were never what they seemed. Maya had the face of an angel, but when Zhenya opened his eyes, she was gone and with her his money.
He searched the casino, the bank and security rooms, the restrooms and dealers' lounge. Whispering her name, he searched among the slots, the one-armed guards of the Kremlin, as if they were carrying her off to a tower and some jolly bacchanal. There were no signs of resistance, not a stack of chips toppled, not a single plastic pearl spilled from the crown jewels. He tried to sleep but his anger was a match struck before a mirror and he saw what a fool he had been.
Bitch!
She had turned him from a hustler into an easy mark. It wasn't as if there was anything romantic or sexual between him and Maya. Zhenya wouldn't have presumed. But he thought they had a good relationship. He brought Moscow know-how and intellect, while Maya contributed physical daring, sexual experience and, by virtue of being a mother, adulthood. Assuming that her name really was Maya or there really was a baby or that anything she said was true. Where was she now? In his mind's eye he saw Maya and Yegor on a bed of twisted sheets. When he imagined Yegor's grunts and her submissive whimper, Zhenya covered his ears. Or perhaps Yegor wanted to show Maya who was boss and was giving her a rough ride over the fender of a car. Zhenya had never appreciated how masochistic his imagination was. It was like setting a house on fire and choosing to sit in the flames.
There was a more practical problem. If Maya switched sides, she was sure to tell Yegor about the Peter the Great. The casino's stock of liquor alone was worth thousands. Yegor would rip out what he could carry and trash what he couldn't, which was a shame because there was a certain perfection about a casino. The brushed felt of the tables. The chips neatly stacked by color. The new dice. The sealed decks of cards.
He spent the day waiting for night, watching the clouds grow thick and dark, and he remembered how once when he was four years old he and the other kids in the shelter were taken to a petting zoo. The only animal Zhenya was interested in petting was the sheep, because their fleece was always described in children's books as so soft and white. Instead their fleece turned out to be gray and greasy and knotted with shit. For a long time he thought that was what clouds were like. In the daytime Yegor might be anywhere but in the evening he could reliably be found around Lubyanka Square. One entire side of the square was taken up by the Lubyanka itself, a handsome eight-story building of yellow brick with a subtle illumination like votive candles. There was a time when vans arrived at the Lubyanka every night with a haul of bewildered professors, doctors, poets, even party members accused of being foreign agents, wreckers, saboteurs.
Now no one lingered in front of the Lubyanka, any more than they would walk under a ladder or let a black cat cross their path. Not that anything could happen, but why wake the devil?
Directly across the square was a toy store, the biggest in Russia, with an indoor carousel that turned under chandeliers fit for a palace. Now the store was dark and gutted, ready for renovation and efficiency. Whimsy was the first item to go.
Children still came. They vamped in doorways, bummed cigarettes, trotted beside slow-moving cars. At eleven years of age, some of the boys already had the heavy gaze and sullen slouch of rough trade.
Zhenya looked straight ahead rather than meet the predatory gazes of drivers cruising by. Lubyanka Square was not top browsing for pedophiles-that honor went to Three Stations and the streets around the Bolshoi-but it was a fair start for a pimp as young as Yegor.
Zhenya was determined not to let Maya walk all over him. Yegor would interpret that as weakness and an invitation to double the price of 'protection.' Zhenya wasn't going to wait. He knew from chess that the player who moved first had an advantage.
Nevertheless, he shied away when a Volvo station wagon came to a stop and the man on the passenger side called him over to the curb.
