The Great Glass Sea (61 page)

“Good people don’t succeed,” Yarik said. “Right? It’s bad people—”

“I told you,” Bazarov said, “there are no bad people. Just good people who do bad things.” He reached over to one of the saddlebags, lifted a flap, glanced in. “What do you think you’ve done, Yaroslav Lvovich? A good thing or a bad?”

“That depends for who,” Yarik said.

“For you,” Bazarov told him. “Oh, you definitely got a good price,” he admitted. “Unless . . .” And he dropped the flap back closed, came close to Yarik. In his bare feet, he was a little shorter. “What else did I tell you about success?”

That close, Yarik could see that his eyes, above the tie clasp, were tinged with turquoise.

“Half of success is lying to people,” Bazarov prompted. Then reached out with a finger and made as if to tap Yarik on the forehead. Yarik jerked away. “The other half,” Bazarov told him, “is knowing to whom you don’t.” He brought his finger back to his own forehead, tapped it on his own brow. “Remember Chernitsky? With his armored car and his—What’s the best way to put this? Ubiquitous?—his ubiquitous driver.” He looked like he would smile, and then like he would suppress it, and then it got the best of him and he mimicked a little explosion with his hands. “That guy,” he said, “got around everywhere.” He shook his head at himself, and when he looked up again, his smile was gone. “You didn’t believe,” he said, “that a squirmy sonofabitch like Korotya had the balls to do that, did you?” He stepped to the table, turned his back, undid the latches of a briefcase, took something out. When he turned to Yarik again, he was holding a small red rectangle of gleaming plastic. “Here.” Bazarov tilted the card so the glare slid off. He stepped close again. Yarik glanced away from the man’s face long enough to see the face in miniature, laminated over, and some words, someone’s signature scrawled. When he looked back at Bazarov, the man was watching him. “You think Gauk’s the only one who knows the minister of the interior?”

Yarik tried not to look away, and then he tried to find the card to hold his gaze, but Bazarov had slipped it into his breast pocket, his hand over his chest; he gave the place over his heart a pat. “Cowardice,” Bazarov said, “is the most terrible of vices.”

The man’s hand patted out three beats. Four.

“That’s from Bulgakov,” Yarik told him. “And I’m not scared.” As soon as he’d said it, he wished he hadn’t. When he looked up, the man’s face was grim.

“I bet your wife would be,” the man said. “I bet she is right now.”

Yarik could feel the blood throbbing through the bruise in his back where the guard had shoved the pistol.

“I know she’s religious,” Bazarov went on, “so we can hope that gives her some peace. But your son? Surely, little Timosha is too young to have that kind of faith. Surely, you’ve thought about that. And has your daughter spoken her first words yet? No? If she could, what do you think she would say to you?”

He left Yarik standing there, walked around to the other side of the table. It was long and narrow, flanked with leather chairs. Bazarov waved a hand at them. Yarik stayed standing. Across the table, his boss stopped, tipped his face to the ceiling, neck muscles straining as it bent back, throat stretching, until all Yarik could see was the bottom of his jaw, the blond goatee.

“The Afterlife,” the jaw said, the goatee twitching. “I don’t believe in it. Too much like The Past Life. Everyone equally happy, every need equally fulfilled. Except, of course, for a few lucky ones who happen to sit a little closer to God.”

The ceiling up there was made of glass and Yarik knew that somewhere above were the night and the stars, but the lights in the room were too bright: he could only see the reflected table, his own face looking up, and then the top of Bazarov’s head as the man went back to looking at him.

“Sit down,” Bazarov said. And when Yarik still stayed standing, the oligarch pulled out a chair for himself and sat. “Heaven’s for the kind of people,” he said, “who would have been Communists if they weren’t suicide bombers. People who don’t have second thoughts. People I’ve never wanted to know. The way I wanted to know you.”

Under the man’s stare, Yarik’s legs began to feel stiff, his whole body exposed and awkward, and when Bazarov said it again—“Sit down”—he did.

“Here’s another lesson for you,” Bazarov continued. “We come to know who people are by watching what makes them scared. How they let it drive what they do. If they let it push them. Or what they do in order to push it away. That’s the beautiful thing about using a pistol to hunt boar. You get to see your partner’s fear up close. How he overcomes it. You see it in yourself. What a shame we never did that, huh?” He smiled across the table at Yarik. “Of course, I guess I’m getting to see it now. Yaroslav Lvovich, I know you think you’re doing the right thing. Taking this chance, coming straight at me. But the only one who charges straight ahead, who has no second thoughts, Yarik, is the boar. Don’t be the boar, my friend. I’m sure he’s very brave. But in the end he squeals like hell.”

How, Yarik wondered, had he ever thought of this man as a friend? Was this friendship in the billionaire’s world? A series of tests? Even if they had hunted together it would have been nothing more than another test he had to pass. The man had never truly believed in him. The way a friend would, the way his mother had wanted to, the way he hoped his wife did, knew his brother always had. Looking across the table, Yarik understood then that in this world he had stepped into no one else ever would. From here on out he would have to watch every movement everyone made around him the way that Bazarov, over the briefcase and the saddlebags and the earpiece and the gun, was watching his. And when the man leaned forward and started to reach, Yarik jerked so fast he half-fell from his chair, his hand shooting out, onto the pistol, grabbing it to him.

Bazarov stayed midlean, hand still hovering. And in that moment Yarik thought he saw a ripple of doubt, a glimpse of fear. Before it was washed away in Bazarov’s laughing. He laughed loud, one hand still held out, the other on the table, laughed hard enough to make the table shake. When at last he could get the words out, Bazarov said, “I thought you told me they were all blanks?” Then, continuing his reach, past the place where the gun had been, he took up the earpiece.

He sat back, put it on, pressed the button on the side of the mike. “Yes,” he said, “get me the control room, please. Thank you, Masha.” He winked across the table at Yarik, leaned back in his chair till it creaked. He rocked a couple times, creaking. “Hello, it’s me. Yes.” He said a string of numbers and then, “That’s right,” and “Do you think I give a fuck about them?” And listening to him tell whoever was on the other end how bad it would be if he had to walk over and write the order out, catching a couple names he remembered from the men that day in Moscow, listening to the billionaire say “What
isn’t
on my head?” Yarik understood the enormity of it all—the Consortium and the zerkala and the Oranzheria—in a way he never had till then, not the scale of the thing, not its mass, but its weight, the weight of responsibility for the thousands who worked beneath it, on it, the hundreds who had invested fortunes in it, and, heaviest of all, the gaze of whoever must be watching Bazarov from above. Because, he knew, suddenly, that there was someone—with more money, or more power, or simply in a position so high up he could press his weight down even on a man like Bazarov. He knew that for every story the billionaire had told of things that had been done to others, there must be one about the things that others had done to him.

“When am I
not
sure?” Bazarov said and, reaching to his earpiece, pushed the button, tossed the thing onto the table. His eyes held on Yarik. In them, there was the other thing about that weight: the strength it must take to hold up under it.

“You want to know the other half of success?” Bazarov said. “Who it is you shouldn’t lie to?” His bare heels shoved on the carpet, his chair scooted backwards, hit the wall. “You want to know who you shouldn’t fuck around with?” He reached up to a bank of switches. And in one swipe of his hand knocked all the lights off.

Blackness. The sound of his feet, the wheels of the chair returning. The table shaking with his thump. Then nothing. Yarik sat in the dark, listening. Nothing but the sound of his own breathing. And, if he listened past it: Bazarov’s. Gradually, as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out the shape of the figure sitting across from him, its neck craned back, face tilted to the ceiling glass again. He could swear he saw, as if reflecting the light of the stars, a ghostly sliver of wet white gleam: the man’s teeth.

Looking away, Yarik tilted his own head back. It
was
the light of the stars; they were up there by the trillions. And he realized that, in this past mirrorless month, his children must have seen them for the first time. It pained him that Timosha had said nothing of it to him, that, if Polya had whooped a first word at the sight, he hadn’t been there to hear. He promised himself then that if they ever got to the Black Sea he would take them out to the beach at night and lie with them on the sand—Zina and his daughter and his son—and simply gaze up. The way he hadn’t since he was young, since before he was married, when he and Dima used to bed down for the night in a field or pasture or wherever their ride had let them off between the city and the farm.

Gradually he became aware that he couldn’t hear Bazarov’s breathing anymore. Holding his own breath, he thought he heard an intake—then nothing. He breathed again, and heard, from across the table, the breathing begin again, too. Only when he sped his own up, and Bazarov’s matched it, did he realize the man was trying to keep in synch. He stopped, exhaled one long hard breath. And when it petered out there was just Bazarov’s long own dissolving into laughter. For a moment, the sound filled the darkness. Then the darkness was gone.

It was as if a searchlight blasted the room. Yarik shut his eyes. Opened them again. The stars were gone, too. Instead: their dim doppelgängers returned, drifting in their man-made constellation as they washed the night out of the sky. The light they sent down lit the table, pulled the carpet from the dark, showed the gun glinting in Yarik’s hand, and Bazarov, sitting there, staring at him.

From the hallway, behind the door, came muffled sounds of celebratory shouts.

“No,” Bazarov said, “if you’re going to try to betray someone, you probably don’t want to chose the guy with his hands on the controls of the fucking sun.”

Yarik had forgotten how different the light of the zerkala was. Eyes still adjusting to it, he told the man, “You know, I get to see it, too. The boar hunt. You.” In that second, Bazarov’s face looked blown out with brightness and shadow, the blond of his goatee and hair almost white. “When were you supposed to switch the mirrors back?” Yarik asked him. “How much too soon did you do it just now? Who were you supposed to check with first? Whose hands are on you?”

Bazarov leaned forward across the table. A low long sigh. As if he had been storing air in his lungs ever since they’d met and now was at last letting it out. “Do you remember,” he said, “the first question I ever asked you?”

“Yes,” Yarik told him. “But this isn’t about what I want. It’s about what I have. What you
don’t
have your hands on. What whoever has their hands on you wants.”

Bazarov stayed with his weight on his forearms. “What makes you think they can’t just take it? These hands you talk about.” He closed his into fists. “Just squeeze it out of you, and take it, and throw what’s left of you away.”

Yarik pushed his chair back. “Me?” he said. “I know they could do that to me. But to your spokesman? The face of your entire publicity campaign? The person people see when they see the word
Next?
People who you spent so much time and money to convince? To convince that they’re following in his footsteps? In mine?” He stood up. “Slava?” he said. “Him I think it would be very hard to throw away.”

“What
do
you want?” Bazarov asked.

“Or his family,” Yarik said.

His weight still on his elbows, still leaning forward, Bazarov lifted his hands off the table, turned up his palms. “Yaroslav Lvovich, how can I give you what you want if you don’t tell me?”

“I want my family safe,” Yarik said, “and my job secure, and my roll as spokesman continued, and my promotions in the company guaranteed.”

“But you already had all that,” Bazarov said.

“And,” Yarik told him, “I want the rest of the money.”

Looking down at the man’s face turned up to him, Yarik thought he saw the flicker of a smile. “Cossack,” Bazarov said.

“The other ten million,” Yarik told him.

“Cowboy.”

“All of what the farm is worth.” And there was no question now: the man was grinning. “What,” Yarik said, “you were going to pay Kartashkin from the start.” The sound Bazarov made was like a snore cut short. “What you were going to pay to buy it from him.” Again, the sound, drawn out longer. “Except,” Yarik told him, “now you’re buying it from me.” And the man’s mouth gaped, his cheeks caved, his nose sucked the air: a long rattling snort. Yarik stared at him. The billionaire’s eyes were rolled up to look back at him, and his entire face was stretched with the effort of his snorting, and then it was gone, slipped out of sight below the table, and in the second it took Yarik to realize the man was coming for him, to put together the clattering of table and chairs with the body rushing beneath them, he raised the gun. But when Bazarov burst out and saw it—saw Yarik backing up, the gun leveled at his boss—the man didn’t stop, didn’t leap for the pistol, didn’t quit snorting. Instead he threw himself at a scrambling crawl across the carpet, lunging after Yarik’s legs.