The Great Glass Sea (47 page)

Now he knew it wouldn’t. Up in the cockpit, the pilot was talking to him, explaining the controls while they waited to take off. Yarik nodded. It was a four-seater, not counting the cockpit—the upholstery leather, the little bar stocked with labels Yarik could never afford, the carpet stamped with the logo of the Consortium—but the two of them were the only ones in the plane.

He looked out his window as they started to roll. It was a small airport—not like the one in St. Petersburg that he and Zina and the kids would have taken the sleeper train to—and he watched the other small planes. They seemed somehow less capable of bringing four human beings up into the air. He told himself that made no sense—how much heavier were those giant jets?—and then he thought,
Four people
? and there was his family in the other three seats, and he quit looking out the window and took a drink. It was whiskey, or basically whiskey, the pilot had said. Yarik had sounded out the American words on the label:
Buffalo Trace
and
Bourbon
and
Kentucky.
He shook the glass to make the ice clink, but the engines were suddenly too loud, the earth tearing by beneath him, the seat back pushing at his shoulders, the ground blurring into something less solid, and then it wasn’t.

The air took over, the plane lurched, as if grabbed beneath its wings and lifted—and the one thing he’d least expected hit him: a sense of having felt that before. On his wrist the clamp of his uncle’s huge calloused hand, the yank on the pit of his arm, his bare feet banging at the dirt as he ran around and around and then his heels lifting, his toes scraping, his body flying up. He could see Dyadya Avya leaning back, shirt off, belly huge, the bulging tendons of his thick neck, crimson face laughing. He could hear the laugh. He could hear his own, his brother’s beside him. Around their uncle they had flown, Dyadya Avya turning circles fast, holding each of them in a fist, crying out,
I am your magic carpet and I will take you wherever you want to go!
They would shout,
To the sun’s sister!
or,
To the witch’s hut!
and when they hit on one he liked he would open his hands and let them fly. Jouncing and skidding in the grass, they’d crash together, rolling, coming to rest in a heap, their uncle dropping to the ground beside them, starting, through his gusts of breath, to tell them a tale:
There once was a merchant who had two sons, and each night before they fell asleep he bade them to remember their dreams . . .

When Yarik opened his eyes, the earth was far below. He took another drink, checked his seat belt. The roar of the engine, the shaking plane. They had taken off pointed north, beyond the Oranzheria, where old forests and a few struggling farms still remained, and he could see they were circling around now towards the south and the lake and somewhere beyond it the Volga and beyond that he didn’t want to think. Below them there stretched the great glass sea. It collared the city on every side except Otseva’s and it was so vast it had become a twin to the lake, a matching geographical wonder, glistening in the sun. Amid the two, Petroplavilsk looked small and dark as an arrow hole poked through the gleaming steel of some Rus knight’s burnished shield. But there was a real hole now: the tiny shadow of the plane slipped across the glass towards it—a jagged crater that had opened in the Oranzheria’s skin.

For the past three days he’d been out there, struggling to keep his crew together, to convince them to stay on the job, filling in whenever another walked off, wearing the same clothes, eating in the cafeteria trailers, collapsing on the couch outside his office any few minutes he could find to nod off. And every time he shut his eyes he saw his brother: Dima from below, all skate-blades and billowing coat; Dima with his scarf-wrapped beard and goggled eyes; Dima in the Web video someone had spliced together with the one from before. Thank God it was so hard to see his brother’s face.

The plane was somewhere over Lake Otseva: the boats, the surface stirred around them as they unfurled their nets, a flock of seagulls swirling, white specks tiny as spilled salt. Along its shores, the forests were a map of how many seasons the land had lived beneath the mirrors’ light: the dead woods closest to the city giving way to evergreens malformed by winterburn, then broad-leafed canopies brown with undropped leaves, until, beyond the border of the artificial light, the forest floor reclaimed its natural calico of freshly fallen reds and golds. But his eyes were drawn back to the brown, to one small flame of color blazing there. Somehow, in all the land the zerkala had claimed, a single birch survived. He’d heard the rumors: that out of all the millions there might be one or two, aberrant among their species, born unable to sense the length of the night, the shortening days, that had adapted solely to reading warm and cold, that through this glitch in their genes had managed to even thrive. Far below, the ground around the birch was a lone burst of brightness, a patch of new-shed yellow leaves, surrounded by a sea of browned and rotting canopies.

He watched it out his window, leaning close, until it was gone. He wondered how far out lay Nizhi. If they were going to fly over it. If he would even know it if they did. He still had never seen more than that one distant glimpse, his brother beside him on the skiff, so long ago. But he thought he would feel it. He watched the water, the dark green islands slipping by, and waited for the pull. Surely he would be able to make out that huge wooden church, the surrounding walls of the pogost. Remembering his uncle’s tales, he almost expected to see chimney smoke, tiny black flecks of monks moving in the fields.

He wondered how long ago it had been abandoned—the lures of life on the mainland, the church embraced again—how long ago the ferry had made its last journey out from Petroplavilsk. That was a trip he would have liked to take. That was what people used to mean when they said the word, when a vacation meant crowding onto a packed deck for a half-day’s drift down the lake to see the loggers’ festival; when a trip meant a railway carriage packed with bunk beds, bustling with passengers unrolling mattresses, flapping out sheets, calling for tea, slapping by in flip-flops and sweat suits and scents of sausage, and he and Dima sharing a top berth so near the ceiling they couldn’t sit, so narrow they barely fit lying side by side for hours, gazing out at the world flicking by; a time when just
that
would have been trip enough to make them happy—their parents, Dima, him. For nearly nothing they had gone away—to a spa village, a summer festival—at least a month of every year.

Had he ever played that flying carpet game with Timofei? When he got home, he was going to take his son out to the playground, he was going to . . . With his lips he made the sound Timofei made when he was being a jet taking off. Then he thought,
If
he got home, and stopped.

The whiskey, or bourbon, or whatever it was, had blanched, the ice cubes all melted into it. He set it down on the empty seat next to him, leaned back. But his eyes refused to shut.

“Good people are kind and merciful,” Bazarov said, taking out the gun, “but they rarely succeed in life. It’s bad people who succeed, and they are rarely kind and merciful.” His eyes creased a little; he showed his teeth. “Chernitsky said that.” Flipping the pistol so he held it by the muzzle, he handed it across the seat to Yarik. “These people you’re going to meet,” he said, “are very successful people.”

They were on a wide highway, heading into Moscow. Half an hour earlier, Bazarov had picked him up at the airport in a black Mercedes—in
two
black Mercedes: a tint-windowed SUV idling heavily and, in front of it, a sedan with silver piping that flashed bright as the oligarch’s eyes when he opened the door, stepped out, pulled Yarik into a handshake. It had been raining; the driver had held an umbrella big enough to cover them both. Now the man was doing his other job, tearing past traffic already faster than Yarik had ever seen, slewing into spaces that seemed to open only once they were already in them, the SUV bulling along behind.

Yarik felt a swerve pull at all the soft parts of him, belly to throat to cheeks. Somehow, Bazarov’s hand stayed unswayed where he held it out, the pistol butt jutting dark against the dark leather of the seat, the crosshatches rubbed bright: an automatic, Yarik could guess that much, some small deadly thing well used.

“Or maybe,” Bazarov said, “you’d rather use the one you brought?” His eyes creased a little more; he tipped his head towards the satchel at Yarik’s feet.

Yarik had bought the bag secondhand just for the trip. In it, at the bottom, beneath his clothes, a black dress sock stretched around the shape of his uncle’s ancient gun. Now, hands rustling in the bottom of the bag, he tried to peel the sock up the handle, shove it over the trigger and off before Bazarov could see the foolish disguise. But his fingers had gone weak. At the edge of his eye he saw the billionaire shift the short-barreled pistol to his other hand, its butt back in his grip.

“What are you doing in there?”

Yarik pulled his own gun out. The sock still bulged over the chamber, the barrel stiff inside it, the toe dangling over the tip.

“When I said
protection
. . .” Laughing, Bazarov reached over, tugged the sock off the gun, tied a knot in the open end, and dangled it between them, an exaggerated look of disgust on his face. Then he dropped it to the floor. Merriness in his cheeks and eyes, he tugged the revolver from Yarik’s hand.

“According to Korotya,” he said, turning the old Nagant over to appraise it, “that was the problem with Chernitsky. He thought too much about life.” He set the other pistol in his lap, unlocked the revolver’s chamber, spun the cylinder with his thumb. “Korotya used to work for Chernitsky. Back before Chernitsky’s armored car blew up like a Chechen in the metro. His driver . . .” Bazarov leaned forward and with the pistol barrel flicked his driver’s ear. “Hey, Tolya, what happened to Chernitsky’s driver?”

“Which piece of him?” Tolya said, and the two men were laughing.

“Of course”—Bazarov cut his chuckle short—“Chernitsky lived. But his business started to die. Korotya swears he had nothing to do with the exploding car. The damage to Chernitsky’s business, on the other hand. . . . When President Slatkin decided to destroy the man, who do you think was whispering in his ear?” Bazarov popped the pistol’s cylinder open, pointed the Nagant at the roof of the car, jiggled it. The bullets dropped like berries into his palm. “By then,” he said, “Korotya was working for Yegupov. Yegupov might be there today, but I doubt it. He won’t want to be around Shulgin, Shulgin’s guards. Last time his men ran into Shulgin’s men”—he held his hand full of bullets out to Yarik— “Yegupov had to buy more men.” He shook his hand. “You don’t want them?”

One by one, Yarik transferred the bullets to his own palm.

“People say Shulgin was there himself,” Bazarov went on, “that he went around to those of Yegupov’s men who were only wounded, right after, with a gun like this”—he tapped the automatic still sitting in his lap—“shooting them in the head and saying, ‘One million roubles, one million roubles’ each time he did it.” Grinning, he turned his hand over, dumped the last bullet in Yarik’s palm with the others. “That’s how much an employer owes a bodyguard’s family if the guard dies.” He grinned wider. “Yegupov was pretty pissed after that.”

“Because he owed so much?” Yarik asked.

Bazarov barked a laugh. “Because it was so
little.
Because it was done just for the insult. Three million roubles?” He shook the empty gun in his hand so his sleeve slipped down his wrist to show his watch. “That’s not even enough to buy this. Shulgin might as well have raped Yegupov’s wife, then filched her earrings.” He reached to a button in the seatback before him. “So, at the meeting? Probably not Yegupov. But definitely Shulgin.”

Out from the back of the seat, a drawer slid silently open. It was full of small boxes—bullets, Yarik realized, all different kinds—and while Bazarov searched through them with his free hand (“Where did you get this antique? Out of the grave of some tsar’s guard?”), Yarik tried to think of where to put the bullets in his palm so, if he had a moment away, he might slip them back into the gun.

But Bazarov had found the box he wanted. “I’m out of black powder and musket balls,” he said, “but these thirty-twos should work.” With the new bullets, he reloaded the revolver’s chamber, one by one.

Yarik tried to see on the side of the box, or on the open top, or anywhere any indication that they might be blanks.

“Talietzin, Vashchenko, Solovyov,” Bazarov said, slipping a bullet in with each word, “they’ll all be there. The others will probably send someone in their stead.” He slapped the chamber shut, locked it. “The only one who might come unarmed is Gauk,” he said. “And he has something a lot more powerful than this.” He held the gun, handle first, out to Yarik.

Yarik dumped the bullets from his right hand into his left, took the revolver.

“Of all of us, Gauk is the one closest to the minister of the interior. He has a little laminated card, a dark red little plastic card that happens to have on it the signature of the minister.”

As far as Yarik could tell, the gun felt the same. He told himself that was a good thing.

“A signature,” Bazarov said, “that means the cops don’t even have the right to stop him, let alone search him.”