The Great Glass Sea (49 page)

The table stilled.

“Well,” someone said.

And, as if he had cleared the air to start over again, Bazarov began: “Now . . .”

Across the table, a man held up his hand and stopped him. He wore a dark gray suit that made his face look pink beneath a bald pate that was almost crimson. His eyes were a deep, soft brown. They looked at Yarik. “You don’t look like you think that was funny.” The man cocked his head, as if he expected Yarik to answer. Then went on. “Either you don’t have much of a sense of humor or your don’t have much in the way of manners or”—he turned both his palms up—“you’ve got something serious that you want tell us.”

Yarik tried to make his mind work, his mouth say something, but he could see Bazarov’s blond hair in front of him, the stillness of the head not looking at him, not saying anything, and all he could think was that if Bazarov so much as moved he would hit him. The brown eyes held on him—never hardening, never rushing him—and looking back into them, Yarik tried to think of what he could say that would keep them from turning away, that would be the thing he had been brought all this way to speak, but there was only one thought that his mind seemed able to make, and so he said it.

“I’ll do anything,” he told the man. The man’s eyes held. “I’ll do anything if you don’t hurt him. Anything. Whatever you want. I’ll do anything.”

The man looked down. “That is serious,” he said, and folded his hands, and looked back up. “But not very helpful.”

The eyes of the other men turned away from Yarik, found their hands, their cigarettes, Bazarov, and with each pair that Yarik felt leave him he felt something else fill in, felt it as clear as the tie around his throat, growing tighter with each look lost, as if someone was pulling the thin end in a fist—the knowledge that if he let this pass, did nothing, it would be the same as standing on the riverbank, watching his brother beaten, except worse—and then his arm was twisting behind his back, his hand shoving at his jacket, his fingers closed around the gun, and it wouldn’t come out; it wouldn’t move; his hand was stuck; he couldn’t move his arm.

The scraping back of chair legs: stopped.

The rattling of the table: slowing.

Four walls of men around him, guns drawn: waiting.

Someone’s chair thumped over in the leaves. Half the men at the table had stood up from it. All the bodyguards’ guns were sighted on him, a line of small black holes perforating the world in front of him, and the same on his sides, and behind.

“Whoa,” someone said. Bazarov. The voice close to his ear. When he turned to look, the man was standing tight up next to him. He was gripping Yarik’s wrist. “I’m going to let go,” he said, “and you’re going to lift your hands very slowly above your head.”

“OK.” Yarik’s voice came out so softly he wasn’t sure he’d said it.

Then his hands were up above him and the pistol was slipping from his waistband and he felt the cold air find the sweat where it had pressed, and Bazarov, holding the gun up, laughed. “‘OK,’ he says.” Bazarov smiled at them all. “Just like that.” He turned his smile to the surrounding wall of guards, to all the muzzles of all their guns suspended a second away from slaughter, to the men still sitting at the table, sure to be hit in the potential fuselade, to the ones who had stood up, as if that could have saved them. Holding the gun out, he waited for one of his own guards to come and take it, and then, his hand relieved, clapped Yarik on the shoulder. “OK?” Bazarov smiled at the oligarchs again. “OK?” None of the men who had stood up sat back down. None of the men who were sitting stood up. “No?” Bazarov said. “Then let me make it OK.”

And, his hands still held above him, the place where the gun had been growing warm again with sweat, Yarik listened to Bazarov explain to them why it would make things worse if they hurt Dima. How it would only rally the strikers. “Look at what just the mention of it did to him,” he said, and Yarik, feeling his shoulders begin to burn, watched the men all look, as if Bazarov had put him on display. “You want a city full of
that
?” Bazarov asked them. He told them Dima would only stir The Dachas up, and he told them the solution had nothing to do with Dima at all, and by the time that Yarik’s arms were shaking and he didn’t think he could hold them above him any longer, Bazarov was explaining to the men what the solution was.

You can’t scare them back to work, he said. You can’t force them. They’d be as useless and bitter as in Soviet days. “What we need,” Bazarov said, “is a workforce as productive as in the States. Which, in the first years of the Oranzheria, we had. How do we get
those
workers back? That’s what we need to be asking. How do we make them
want
to be back.
Believe
in why they’re back. That’s why American workers are so productive: they believe in the work. In what it will bring them. And that, my friends, isn’t something you can force. Not any more than America could force a market economy on the USSR. Not until the people wanted it. That’s why it has nothing to do with getting rid of some fool in a video. And everything to do with getting rid of everything else. You take away what they have, gentlemen, and before long they will remember how much they wanted it. They will need it back. They will choose to come back to work. They will choose to work even harder. Luckily”—reaching up, he slowly guided Yarik’s hands to a rest on top of Yarik’s head—“you have me.” He grinned. “And I have a way to speed that choice up.”

“What did you tell them?”

Bazarov looked up from the thin ruby drink he was pouring. “That you almost got half of the richest men in Moscow killed today.” He filled Yarik’s glass, started to pour his own. “Then I told them that I was taking you to supper, anyway. And that we would be delighted if any of them cared to join us.” He set the bottle down, made an exaggerated show of looking to his left, his right, of giving Yarik a puzzled face. “I don’t know”—he shrugged—“maybe it was something you did?”

Yarik tried not to smile, but he could tell from the way Bazarov’s eyes lit up another notch that his face had showed it anyway. That was how it had been the last few hours. He had gone from fury to gratitude and didn’t understand it, didn’t understand the feeling that had flooded over him when the man’s hand had eased his own hands onto his own head, pressed protectively on top of his knuckles, the almost childlike wish that they would stay there just like that, didn’t understand why he had reached for the gun in the first place, what he had thought that could fix. After Bazarov had ordered Yarik be brought back to the sedan, in the hour he’d been sequestered in the backseat, his emotions had come unfastened from his thoughts: love for his brother; fury at him; confusion about what his role had been, about how—even if—he had been used; missing his children; longing for his wife; thrilled by being here, in Moscow, sitting on soft leather looking out a tinted window at the surface of a river alive with rain. All he’d understood then was that he owed it all—that he would see his children again, his wife, that he had a brother still—to Baz.

Now, sitting across from his boss in the restaurant Baz had taken him to, Yarik watched a trio of waiters lay dishes on the table: olives and pickles and cucumbers sliced thin as parchment; tiny eggs sprinkled with saffron; a flower of golden pastries ringed around a crimson dipping sauce; a pyramid of rice bejeweled with semolinas; heat-wizened pepper skins stuffed with meat; bread strewn with blackened sesames, steamy with the scent of butter. It all smelled of butter. And mint and lamb and fennel and cinnamon. And over everything the chef had scattered gems: some sort of small crimson fruit seed, bright as a rain of rubies showered all across the table.

Taking in the spread, raising the glass the billionaire had filled, Yarik said the only thing he could: “Thank you.” He used the formal word—“
blagodaryu
”—and looked the man in the eyes, and added, “Baz.”

There came the crow’s feet wrinkling. “It’s nothing,” Bazarov said. “What would my mother think if I put you back on the plane without even filling your belly?”

“I don’t mean for the meal.”

The wrinkles deepened. Bazarov lifted his glass. “To life,” he said.

The drink tasted like some fruit Yarik had never had and he took a second sip before he set it down. “Not just for my life,” he said. “But for my brother’s.”

Bazarov tore a hunk from the loaf, swiped at a plate of earth-colored paste, spoke through his chewing: “Well, I guess I’m not Chernitsky. I don’t believe anybody is truly good or bad. It’s the things that we do that are good or bad. And we all do both. The key”—he cleaned his fingers with his napkin—“is knowing when to do which.”

“You’ve done a lot of good things for me,” Yarik said. He had finished half his glass already, but he took another sip.

“You like it?” Bazarov asked.

“And I don’t think there’s even any vodka in it.”

“No, no alcohol.”

“What is it?”

“Pomegranate.” Bazarov reached into a dish on the table, plucked one of the scattered rubies, held it out in his fingers. Yarik took it—in the light of the table lamp the fruit was translucent, luminous as a tiny incandescent bulb—and slipped it between his lips. “Not bad, huh?”

He nodded, chewing, reached to a dish and picked out another.

“Careful,” Bazarov plucked one for himself, “the seeds can hurt your teeth.” He popped it in his mouth, chewed, said, “Hm,” as if appreciating the taste anew again. Then he asked Yarik, “Do you want to know the truth?”

Yarik let the pomegranate seed sit against his teeth.

“You asked, before, what my business partners wanted you to do.” Bazarov reached for a stuffed pepper, grinned, said, “Not, I assure you, what you did,” and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth.

Swallowing the seed, Yarik watched the man chew, waited.

“The truth,” Bazarov said, when he’d finally gotten the pepper down, “is that I didn’t bring you here to
do
anything. I brought you here to watch. Did you?”

“Watch?”

“Watch.” Bazarov stared at Yarik staring at him. “What did you see?”

“Under the tent?”

“If I was watching”—Bazarov shrugged—“that’s probably where I would look.”

“I don’t know what you want me—”

“I want to know what you saw. Who you saw.”

“I don’t know who was who,” Yarik said. “I don’t remember their names. I don’t know—”

“Whose names?”

“Them.”

“Them?”

“The businessmen.”

“You saw businessmen?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I don’t know,” Yarik said. “I saw their bodyguards—”

“And?”

“And you.”

Bazarov sat back. “Me?” he said. He plucked a dumpling off a plate, dipped it in a purple sauce, and asked, “What was I doing?”

Yarik picked his napkin off his lap. He held it in his hands. “Why are you asking me this?”

“Yaroslav Lvovich,” Bazarov said, “do I not have the right to ask you a simple question?”

“Mr. Bazarov—”

“Baz.”

“Baz—”

“Do I not have the right to ask you any fucking thing I want?”

Yarik stopped twisting at the napkin. He put it down on the table. “I already thanked you for protecting my brother. I thought I already—”

“Oh!” Bazarov cut him off. “
That’s
what I was doing. I was protecting your brother.”

“And me,” Yarik said.

“
And
you.” He shook his head, as if at the wonder of it. “I bet that wasn’t easy. Did it look easy?”

“No.”

“I bet,” Bazarov said, “there were times it wasn’t even easy to tell that that’s what I was doing. I bet there were times when you couldn’t even tell if I was doing something good or something bad. From your viewpoint,” he said, “from what you saw, did it look like I was doing something good or bad?”

“Good,” Yarik said.

“That’s what it looked like?”

“No.”

“But?”

“It was good.”

“For who?”

“Me,” Yarik said. “And my brother.”

“Huh,” Bazarov said. “Now why would I do that?”

“Because,” Yarik said, “you know when it’s the right time to do a good thing.”

Bazarov grinned, lifted his shoulders a little. “Or a bad one,” he said and, turning towards the waiters emerging from the kitchen, “ah, here comes the main course.”

He winked when he said it. And all the while that the waiters laid out the dishes, the baked lamb and grilled fish, ground spices and hot fat and the sweet sharp smell of onions fried, Yarik didn’t once look down at the table. He kept his eyes on the man across from him. The man who, when the waiters were gone again, leaned in a little closer, nothing playful about his face at all.

“Cossack,” Bazarov said, “I have something good that you can do for me.” He selected a skewer and clinked the metal tip on Yarik’s plate and with his knife started sliding pieces of charred sturgeon off. “This strike won’t last long,” he said. “In a few weeks those people will flood back to work. They’ll ask for
more
hours. The Oranzheria will be repaired. Its expansion will begin again. And with the other potential build-sites watching from all across the country, I’ll push it outward at twice the pace. Let those other cities drool. Let their mayors beg for us to set up for them that kind of revenue. Let the investors break down the goddamn doors.” He popped off the last piece of sturgeon. “I won’t let anything get in the way of that.” He set the skewer aside and dipped a ladle into a yellow stew, dished out on Yarik’s plate onions and tomatoes, lamb on the bone. He made a small sound in his nose, shook his head a little. “I didn’t mean to say
those people
,” he told Yarik. “I’m sorry.” He looked up through the steam rising off the stew. “They’re your people, of course. You’re still one of them. After all, that’s the whole point of the publicity campaign. Except, the
other
point is that you’re rising above them, out of them. That must be a tricky place to inhabit.” He lowered the ladle towards Yarik’s plate. “You aren’t going to eat?”