nervously at the large woman’s strife. We were reminded of something deeply Soviet—a person’s dignity being slowly dismembered in front of others.
Respectful of the Hyatt sign on our jeep, the soldiers waved us through, the locals banging on the sides of our vehicle, hoping we could enable their safe passage to the hotel. “Unfortunately we have to save our own hides first,” I said to Sakha.
The democrat nodded and said nothing. As we maneuvered into the Hyatt’s circular driveway, he shouted two words that made no sense, turned the wheel sharply to the left, and slowly drove us into the camouflaged side of a BTR-70. The air bags inflated before us. Smothered with white, my fat cheeks scratched by the billowing nylon, I stumbled out of the jeep. An officer was running up to us, followed by a line of soldiers. At last I understood what Sakha was screaming behind me. Two words. “Colonel Svyokla.”
In a novel written during the golden age of Russian literature, a man named Svyokla would look like a
“Misha Vainberg,” Colonel Svyokla said, shaking my hand. “What a pleasure. My mother will be your mother…”
While he addressed me, the soldiers were dragging Sakha out of the Hyatt jeep. Sakha was not resisting them; he was merely being carried along by their collective force, his dark head bobbing in a sea of camouflage. “I used to work for your father, Boris, as his local oil consultant,” Colonel Svyokla said, gamely ruffling my hair. “His death was a terrible tragedy. A major light was snuffed out for the Jewish people. My condolences.”
At the far edge of the driveway, beneath a sign reading DANGER: LOW OVERHEAD CLEARANCE, a group of men had been assembled at gunpoint. They stood there with a terrible resignation, their ties hanging limply around their necks, arm hair glistening beneath their short sleeves, some of their eyes already swollen shut, presumably from rifle blows.
“There has been an attempted Sevo putsch,” the colonel explained to me. “We’ll take care of it in a few minutes. Go back to the hotel, Misha.”
I ran as quickly as my weight allowed and burst headlong into the chilled Hyatt lobby. Alyosha-Bob and Larry Zartarian caught me in an embrace, and we all fell to the marble floor.
“You have to… You have to…” I said, scrambling all over them, my hands flopping up and down as if I were swimming toward a distant lighthouse.
“There’s nothing… There’s nothing…” both of them were saying in answer. “There’s nothing we can do.”
I spotted Josh Weiner among a clutch of oil workers, their hands filled with afternoon beer mugs. “Josh,” I cried. “Josh, help me. They’ve got Sakha.”
The diplomat was looking deep into his palms, which he had stuck out in front of him. He turned his hands over carefully, never shifting his downward gaze.
“Josh!” I said. Timofey leveraged my weight with his and brought me to my feet.
I hobbled over to Weiner, but he silently turned away from me.
“We’ve already filed a protest,” I heard him say.
“The people they’re going to shoot… they’re not rebels. They’re all democrats!”
“Did you hear what I just said, Vainberg?” Weiner grated through his teeth. “We’ve filed a protest.”
I turned around and made for the sunlight. “Misha, no!” Alyosha-Bob shouted, throwing himself upon me, but I knocked him out of my way with one enormous squishy fist.
I emerged onto the driveway to the sound of angry male voices. “On the ground!” the soldiers were yelling to Sakha and his cohorts. I
“On your knees!” the soldiers shouted.
The men, some of them heavy, others bestowed with an academic’s lack of physical grace, found it difficult to arrange themselves in this tenuous position. Several were tipping over and had to be dragged up by their collars. The soldiers had fallen in line behind them, one soldier to a man, a ratio that did not bode well.
Sakha’s eyes fixed on me. There were tears on his face; I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. “Misha,” he shouted to me. “Mishen’ka, please. Tell them to stop. They will listen to a man like you. Please. Say something.”
I felt Alyosha-Bob’s hand tugging on my sleeve, his little body pressing into mine. “Golly Burton!” I yelled. “KBR!”
The soldiers looked to Colonel Svyokla, who nodded. They shot the men through the back of the head, the bodies of their victims jerking up in unison with the discharge, then hitting the driveway with tremendous speed, a cloud of loose gravel swirling around them.
The spent bullet casings rolled down the driveway to my feet. A dozen bodies lay on the ground.
19
Forty stories above the war, civilization a la Hyatt enclosed us.
Generators hummed deeply within the skyscraper, allowing the illusion that we were on an American spaceship floating past the tanks and armored personnel carriers, the fake Irish bars and Royal Dutch Shell oil platforms, toward some remarkable and disingenuous Hollywood conclusion. “Everybody into the pool! It’s party time!”
I dialed, and misdialed, and dialed again Dr. Levine’s number. Finally the good doctor came on the line, coughed, sneezed (seasonal allergies again), hacked, and wished me a good day. “Dr. Levine, emergency,” I said. “I’m in Absurdsvani Republic. I’m in great danger. Terrible things. Please advise me—”
With great patience and analytic equipoise, Dr. Levine beseeched me to calm the fuck down. “Now, where is this place?” he asked.
“Have you been watching the news?”
“I saw the news last night.”
“So you heard about the civil war.”
“What civil war?”
“In Absurdsvani. In the capital. They’ve sealed off the airport. And they shot my friend in the back of the head.”
“Okay, let’s start from the beginning.” Dr. Levine sighed. “What is this Absurdsvani?”
“Absurdsvani is on the Caspian Sea.”
“Which is where, exactly? My geography’s a little off.”
“The Caspian Sea? It’s, you know, south of Russia, near Turkmenistan—”
“Near Iran.”
“Near Iran? I thought you were still in Moscow last time you called.”
“St. Petersburg.”
“Still, Iran must be a great deal farther off than Moscow. What are you doing there?”
I explained in so many words that I had traveled to Absurdistan to buy European citizenship off a crooked Belgian consular official after nailing my dead father’s young wife. A reproachful silence followed. “Is this a legal way to get citizenship?” Dr. Levine asked.
“Well,” I said. “ ‘Legal’ is a relative word…”
