When I woke up, I was lying on top of Rouenna, the only girl I knew who was big enough to absorb my weight. She was snoring peacefully, I could feel her massive vagina rubbing against my tummy. Alyosha-Bob came into the bedroom, trailing the sound of laughter and television from the downstairs parlor.
“Hey, Snack,” Alyosha-Bob said. “Microphone check, big buddy.” He looked warmly at my naked Rouenna passed out on the bed, or rather, the couch. My favorite room was designed to resemble the office of my New York analyst, Dr. Levine, with two black leather Barcelona chairs facing a matching Mies van der Rohe daybed, the kind I used to lie on five times a week until my fat was branded by its indentations. I managed to find replicas of the colorful Sioux tepee photographs Dr. Levine had hung on his walls, although a copy of the drawing resplendent above his couch—a West African stab at the Pietà—has so far proved elusive.
Alyosha-Bob patted my pretty curls. “Captain Belugin wants to talk to you, homey,” he said. “Come down to breakfast.”
Breakfast? Morning already? The sky out the window was yellow with cheap exhaust and nearby peat fires. It made me hungry for eggs sunny side up served in a Brooklyn diner. I didn’t say anything. I imagined I was a hospital patient, and draped myself over my friend. I let Alyosha-Bob lead me into the downstairs parlor, past the six empty upstairs bedrooms with their endless tin-pressed ceilings and salmon-colored walls, past the winding wrought-iron staircase embellished with serpents and apples, which I had recently installed in some bizarre biblical gesture.
Wasn’t there a mourning period for dead parents among the Judeans? I distinctly recall Papa made me sit on a box for a week when my mother died, then we covered up every mirror in the apartment. This was according to custom, I suppose, but mostly we were trying to avoid looking at our own fat, teary punims. Finally we sold the mirrors, along with my mother’s American sewing machine and her two German bras. I can still recall shaky-handed Papa standing in the courtyard of our building, holding aloft the white bra, then the pink one, as the women of our building stepped up to inspect the goods. The Yeltsin era was still ten years away, but already Papa was angling to become an oligarch.
Downstairs, my parlor was lousy with Russians. I suppose that’s what you get for living in Russia. My manservant, Timofey, and the junior policemen were making venison pie in the kitchen, singing army songs from their stints in Afghanistan, and propositioning my fat cook, Yevgenia. Andi Schmid, the German boy who had caught my father’s last moments, was videotaping himself crawling around the parquet floor, howling fanatically at Lyuba Vainberg’s stupid terrier. The widow herself was, by all accounts, still passed out in the downstairs guest room, pumped full of Halcion and our German guest’s synthetic drug MDMA.
My appearance stirred no one. The dead man’s son might as well have been dead, too. The television was blaring the morning news program, the Minister of Atomic Energy telling his favorite Chernobyl joke, the one about the balding porcupine. Only Captain Belugin got up to shake my hand. “My heart is filled with sorrow,” he said. “Your father was a great man.”
“He’s dead, so he’s dead!” one of the policemen yelled from the kitchen.
“Shut your mouth, Nika, or I’ll fix you one in the mug!” Belugin shouted. “Forgive Nika,” he said to me. “My boys are soccer hooligans in uniform, nothing more.” He bowed a little, both hands on his heart. Belugin’s manner reminded me of one of Gogol’s crafty peasants, the kind of fellow who knew when to flatter his master but also when to copy the ways of educated folk. A far cry from my manservant, Timofey, who thought he was clever if he made off with a block of Dutch cheese or a T-shirt he could pounce at with the Daewoo steam iron I gave him for New Year’s.
“Who can forget,” said Captain Belugin, “when your dear papa killed that stupid American. Oh, if only we could kill all of them! Now, Germans I like. They’re much more civilized. Look at that nice young Andi pretending he’s a dog. Keep it up, sonny! What does the doggie say? Gav, gav!, he says.”
“I’m sorry for interrupting,” Alyosha-Bob said. “But why are you here, Captain Belugin? Why don’t you leave Misha to his mourning?”
“I am here to settle some business,” the captain said. “I am here to talk about the terrible crime that has shaken our world. I am pleased to announce that we have solved the mystery of your father’s death, Misha. Your father was killed by Oleg the Moose and his syphilitic cousin Zhora.”
“Ah!” I cried, but it was no surprise. Oleg the Moose and my papa were once friends and confederates. They had opened a graveyard for New Russian Jews, famous for its designer tombstones that featured the latest S-model Mercedes superimposed over a kind of ballistic menorah. As a follow-up, they were going to build a chain of American hero-sandwich shops on Nevsky Prospekt. The interiors of several landmark nineteenth-century palaces had been completely wiped out and festooned with inflatable fries and man-sized Pepsi bottles. But then, just at the stage when each investor could smell the sweaty odor of roast beef bathed in oil and vinegar, Papa and the Moose, goaded by their various relations and bookkeepers, went on the path of war.
It was time to say something heartfelt. “The evildoers must be punished,” I said quietly and raised a big, squishy fist.
“That’s one way to look at it,” Captain Belugin said. “Here’s another way. Oleg the Moose is a childhood friend of the governor of St. Petersburg. They went to chess academy together. They own adjoining property on Lake Como. Their wives go to the same pedicurist, and their children to the same Swiss boarding school. The Moose will never be prosecuted.”
“But there’s a tape of him murdering Misha’s father,” Alyosha-Bob said.
“The tape can disappear,” said Captain Belugin, drawing a rectangular outline of the videotape with his index fingers, then making a fluttering motion with his hands.
“What about the German with the camera?” Alyosha-Bob said, pointing to the filmmaker Andi Schmid, who had taken off his PHUCK STUTTGART T-shirt and was thoroughly examining his own nipples. “He’s a witness.”
“The German can disappear,” Captain Belugin said. He drew a slender Teutonic outline with his index fingers and made the fluttering motion again.
“That’s ridiculous,” Alyosha-Bob said. “You can’t just disappear an entire German.”
“There are eighty million of them, and they all look fairly alike.”
We were pressed into a brief silence by the last remark. “Maybe I should refer this matter to a lawyer,” I said at last.
“A lawyer!” Captain Belugin laughed. “Where do you think we are, dear boy? Stuttgart? New York? Your father is dead. This is sad for you. But maybe not entirely sad. Everyone knows you don’t want your father’s business. You’re a sophisticate and a melancholic. So here’s what we do. We broker a deal with Oleg the Moose. He takes over all of your father’s assets for a fair-market value of twenty-five million dollars, plus another three million for killing your papa. Twenty-eight million overall. You and Oleg shake hands. No more blood.”
Alyosha-Bob stared into the captain’s eyes with an American disgust that I hadn’t seen in years. He spat into his own hand in emulation of our lower classes. “How much is Oleg the Moose paying you?” he demanded. “And who approved Boris Vainberg’s murder? You or the governor?”
“My commission is fifteen percent,” Captain Belugin said, shrugging. “That’s the standard commission around the world. As for the second question, why talk about ugly things that will only spoil our friendship?”