'Business. Somebody has been jacking NoviRus Oil trucks and draining the tanks. It's happening in your part of Moscow -in your soup, so to speak.'
Anton circled again, throwing jabs, crosses, uppercuts. He backed, covered up, seemed to dodge a punch and then moved forward, rolling his shoulders and snapping jabs while the cell got smaller and smaller. Anton may not have been a champion, but when he was in motion, he took up a lot of room. Finally he dropped his fists and blew air. 'He has this prick in charge of security, a former colonel from the KGB. They caught one of my boys with one of their trucks and broke his legs. That's overreaction. It put me in a difficult situation. If I didn't retaliate, my boys would break my legs. But I don't want a war. I'm sick of that. Instead, I wanted to go straight to the top, and also make a point about the colonel's bullshit security by calling Ivanov on his personal phone. I said what I said. It was an opening line; maybe a little crude, but it was meant to begin a dialogue. I have body shops, tanning salons, a restaurant. I'm a respectable businessman. I would have loved to work with Pasha Ivanov, to learn at his knee.'
'What was the favor? What did you have to offer him?'
'Protection.'
'Naturally.'
'Anyway, I never got through and never saw him face-to-face. It seems to me, when Pasha died I was right here, and that phone call proves it.'
'Pretty lucky.'
'I live right.' Anton was modest.
'What did they pick you up for?'
'Possession of firearms.'
'That's all?'
A firearms charge was nothing. Since Anton always had a lawyer, judge and bail money standing by, there was no good reason for him to spend an hour in jail, unless he was waiting for some bumbling investigator to come along and officially mark how innocent Anton Obodovsky was. Arkady didn't want to provoke the dangerous side of Anton, but he also didn't like being used.
Anton grabbed some travel brochures off the bunk. 'Hey, as soon as I'm out, I'm going on holiday. Where would you suggest? Cyprus? Turkey? I don't drink or do drugs, and that leaves out a lot of places. I want a tan, but I burn easily. What do you think?'
'You want creature comforts? Quiet? Gourmet food?'
'Yeah.'
'A staff that caters to your every whim?'
'Right!'
'Why not stay in Butyrka?'
Zhenya stared like a manacled prisoner at what most people would have called an escape to the country. The population of Moscow was pouring into the low hills that couched the city, to rustic dachas and crowded beaches and giant discount stores, and though the highway was designed with four lanes, drivers improvised and squeezed out six.
Arkady wasn't clear on what good cause benefited from Pasha Ivanov's Blue Sky Charity picnic, but he did not want to miss the millionaires Nikolai Kuzmitch and Leonid Maximov. Such dear friends were sure to appear. After all, they had vacationed with Pasha in Saint-Tropez when a limpet mine was discovered on his Jet Ski. Tomorrow they would be scattered to the four winds on their corporate jets, behind their ranks of lawyers. Hence, Arkady's use of Zhenya as a disguise. Arkady tried to shrug off his guilt by telling himself that Zhenya could use the sun.
'Maybe there'll be swimming. I brought you a swimsuit just in case,' Arkady said, indicating a gift-wrapped box at the boy's feet. Up till now Zhenya had ignored it. Now he began crushing it with his heels. Arkady usually kept a pistol in the glove compartment. He'd had the foresight to remove the magazine; he patted himself on the back for that. 'Or maybe you're a dry-land kind of man.'
Even with cars weaving over the median and the shoulder of the road, traffic advanced at a snail's pace. 'It used to be worse,' Arkady said. 'There used to be cars broken down by the side of the road all the way. No driver left home without a screwdriver and hammer. We didn't know about cars, but we knew about hammers.' Zhenya delivered a last savage kick to the box. 'Also, windshields had so many cracks, you had to hold your head out the window like a dog to see. What's your favorite car? Maserati? Moskvich?' A long pause. 'My father used to take me down this same road in a big Zil. There were only two lanes then, and hardly any traffic. We played chess as we went, although I was never as good as you. Mostly I did puzzles.' A Toyota went by with a backseat full of kids playing scissors-paper-rock like normal, happy children. Zhenya was stone. 'Do you like Japanese cars? I was once in Vladivostok, and I saw stacks of bright new Russian cars loaded for Japan.' Actually, when the cars got to Japan, they were turned to scrap metal. At least the Japanese had the decency to wait until they received the cars before crushing them like beer cans. 'What did your father drive?'
Arkady hoped the boy might mention a car that could somehow be traced, but Zhenya sank into his jacket and pulled his cap low. On the side of the road stretched a memorial of tank traps in the form of giant jacks, marking the closest advance of the Germans into Moscow in the Great Patriotic War. Now the memorial was dwarfed by the vast hangar of an IKEA outlet. Balloons advertising Panasonic, Sony, JVC swayed in the breeze above an audio tent. Garden shops offered birdbaths and ceramic gnomes. That was what Zhenya looked like, Arkady thought, a miserable garden gnome with his flapped cap, book and chess set.
'There'll be other kids,' Arkady promised. 'Games, music, food.'
Every card Arkady played was trumped by scorn. He had seen parents in this sort of quagmire-where every suggestion was a sign of idiocy and no question in the Russian language merited response-and Arkady, for all the sympathy he mustered, had always delivered a sigh of relief that he was not the adult on the cross. So he wasn't quite sure why, now, an unmarried specimen like himself should have to suffer such contempt. Sociologists were concerned about Russia 's plunging birthrate. He thought that if couples were forced to spend an hour in a car with Zhenya, there'd be no birthrate at all.
'It'll be fun,' Arkady said.
Finally Arkady reached a suburb of fitness clubs, espresso bars, tanning salons. The dachas here were not traditional cabins with weepy roofs and ramshackle gardens but prefabricated mansions with Greek columns and swimming pools and security cameras. Where the road narrowed to a country lane, Ivanov's security guards waved him to the shoulder behind a line of hulking SUVs. Arkady had on the same shabby raincoat, and Zhenya looked like a hostage, but the guards found their names on a list. So as infiltrators, Arkady and Zhenya went through an iron gate to a dead man's lawn party.
The theme was Outer Space. Pink ponies and blue llamas carried small children around a ring. A juggler juggled moons. A magician twisted balloons into Martian dogs. Artists decorated children's faces with sparkle and paint, while a Venusian, elongated by his planet's weak gravity, strode by on stilts. Toddlers played under an inflated spaceman tethered to the ground by ropes, and larger children lined up for tennis and badminton or low- gravity swings on bungee cables. The guest list was spectacular: broad-shouldered Olympic swimmers, film stars with carefully disarranged hair, television actors with dazzling teeth, rock musicians behind dark glasses, famous writers with wine-sack bellies overhanging their jeans. Arkady's own heart skipped a beat when he recognized former cosmonauts, heroes of his youth, obviously hired for the day just for show. Yet the dominating spirit was Pasha Ivanov. A photograph was set near the entrance gate and hung with a meadow garland of sweet peas and daisies. It was of a buoyant Ivanov mugging between two circus clowns, and it as good as gave his guests orders to play, not grieve. The photograph couldn't have been taken too long before his death, but its subject was so much more impish and alive than the recent man that it served as a warning to enjoy life's every moment. The guards at the gate must have phoned ahead, because Arkady felt a ripple of attention follow his progress through the partygoers, and the repositioning of men with wires in their ears. Children sticky from cotton candy raced back and forth. Men collected at grills that served shashlik of sturgeon and beef in front of Ivanov's dacha, ten times the normal size but at least a Russian design, not a hijacked Parthenon. A DJ played Russian bubble gum on one stage, while karaoke ruled a second. Separate bars served champagne, Johnnie Walker, Courvoisier. The wives were tall, slim women in Italian fashions and cowboy boots of alligator and ostrich. They positioned themselves at
