“What are you doing?” shouted the diplomat. “That’s an EU passport!”
“In Russia, when one graduates from a university, he spills vodka on his diploma for good luck.”
“Yes, but that’s an EU passport!” the diplomat repeated, scrambling backward on his mattress. “You paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it. You don’t want it smelling like vodka.”
“I can do as I please!” I began to shout, my anger suddenly matched by the sound of crashing china and cutlery behind me. We looked to McDonald’s, aware that the restaurant offered only plastic and paper service.
“What are these idiots doing now?” Lefèvre said.
Several middle-aged women with very full lungs were screaming inside the McDonald’s. Almost immediately, the women’s roar was joined by a distant counterpart, issuing presumably from the Sevo Terrace below. A strange sonic displacement seemed to be taking place all around us, as if the summer heat with its layers of shimmering, highly sulfuric air were taking on an acoustic quality. “Shit,” Lefèvre said as the recycling bins started to shake violently, which I surmised could not have been the result of the female screaming alone. “Oh, fuck me,” he said.
Sakha ran out of McDonald’s, his hands trembling with the yellow remains of a cheeseburger, his Zegna tie stained with a trail of ketchup. He tried to speak but could only sputter and whinny in an impotent intellectual way. It took the McDonald’s junior manager, Misha, to make the situation clear for us.
“Georgi Kanuk’s plane has just been shot down by Sevo rebels,” he said.
18
To the Hyatt Station
“I predict,” said Lefèvre, “that we’re all going to die here in Absurdistan.”
A lone MiG-29 punched a hole through the stratosphere above us and swooped alarmingly over the gray bowl of the Caspian. The Svanï Terrace rumbled in its wake.
“We’re Belgians,” I shouted at the diplomat, brandishing my new passport at him. “Who would want to hurt us?”
“I predict that before this ends, we will all be dead,” repeated Lefèvre.
“What the hell, Jean-Michel?” Misha the junior manager said. “You told me there wasn’t going to be a civil war until August. You said everything would be quiet through July. We would get the Vainberg money and leave. We were going to be on a plane to Brussels next week.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” the diplomat said. “They’ve shut down the airport by now. That’s for certain.”
“How could this have happened?” the junior manager shouted, one hand raised in anger, the other draped passionately over his hip. “And what about that luxury American Express train that runs across the border? The one that costs five thousand dollars a ride. How could they cancel that?”
“I’m sure it’s all finished,” Lefèvre said. “They lied to me.”
“Who lied to you?” the junior manager said.
“Everyone,” Lefèvre said. “Sevo, Svanï, Golly Burton…”
I turned to Sakha, who looked as discarded as a burger wrapper. “Sakha, what’s happening?” I said. “They don’t shoot Belgians, do they?”
“Vainberg,” Lefèvre said, “you have to do something important.”
“I’m always ready to do something important!” I cried, scrambling over a recycling bin to get to my feet.
“You have to get the democrat to the Hyatt immediately. Put him under Larry Zartarian’s protection. It’s not safe for him out here.”
My heart beat like that of a young girl in love. I was blissful and manic at the same time. Think one person can save a democrat? So do I. “We have a Hyatt jeep out front,” I said. “But are you going to be okay, Monsieur Lefèvre? Is there anything I can do for you?”
“Just get the fuck out of here,” Lefèvre said. “Everybody hurts, Misha. But some hurt more than others.”
“What?”
“Godspeed, Gargantua! Go!”
The starchy McDonald’s was filled with the sounds of women and children whimpering, the men contributing an undignified stream of curses revolving around the all-purpose Russian swear word blyad, or “whore.” The people had hidden beneath the greasy square tables and behind the counter, as if a robbery were in progress. Cardboard versions of the McDonald’s mascots, a scary American clown and some kind of purple blob, had been commandeered as “human” shields by several armed customers.
“They think this is a multinational space,” Sakha said. “They think they’ll be safe here. The only safe places are the embassies, the Hyatt, and the Radisson.”
“Yes, yes!” I said, not knowing what I was agreeing to but thoroughly enjoying every second of it. “We’ll get you to the Hyatt, Mr. Sakha. You have my word as a Vainberg.”
Outside, we became aware of what had accounted for the initial noise of crashing china and cutlery. The used-remote-control market was being pulverized beneath the tread of the advancing heavy infantry. I was looking at a convoy of stubby caterpillars outfitted with battering rams, which I realized were Soviet T-62 tanks, followed by a ring of equally obsolete BTR-152 armored personnel carriers, forests of anti-aircraft cannon poking out of the roof hatches. (When I was a child, the Red Army was one of my main pre-masturbatory obsessions.)
Circuit boards, batteries, and infrared bulbs rained down on us in batches of crushed civilization. The remote sellers tried to salvage their wares, dumping the choicest models into their burlap sacks and then slaloming between the slow-moving vehicles to the relative safety of the Moorish-style opera house adjoining McDonald’s. Alexandre Dumas looked down upon them silently from his mural, recording everything on his scroll.
The sound of heavy machine-gun fire reverberated throughout the city. I searched excitedly for the telltale plumes of smoke that to me define a war zone, but the sky was given over entirely to the treacherous sun. It was time to do something manly and American. “Go, go, go, motherfuckers!” I yelled to Sakha and Timofey, pushing them toward our car. The jeep’s alarm was blaring and a rear window had been partly smashed, but the imperious Hyatt logo had apparently scared off the thieving locals. “You have to drive this thing,” I said to Sakha, goading him into the driver’s seat. “I have no idea how to do it, and my manservant’s no better.”
Sakha was hyperventilating. He kept pointing at his mobilnik and gesturing toward Gorbigrad, meaning, I suppose, that he wanted to call his family. I reached for my fanny pack and took out a bottle of Ativan. “What is that?” Sakha wheezed. “Valerian root?”
“Hardly,” I said. I crammed a handful of Ativan into his mouth and flooded that orifice with forty ounces of Coca-Cola from the cup holder. “This is going to take effect immediately,” I lied. “Breathe, Mr. Sakha, breathe. Would you like me to sing a calming Western song? ‘My name is Luka,’” I sang. “ ‘I live on the second floor.’”
“Stop,” Sakha said. “Stop singing, please. I need to think positive thoughts. I want to see my girls again.”
A passing T-62 had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends. “Drive!” I shouted to Sakha.
We careened through the McDonald’s parking lot and toward a half-assed side street. Wretched balconies groaned beneath laundry lines, terrified occupants peered out their windows, from every direction televisions cackled in the local tongue announcing imminent disaster. The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared. We ran through a gauntlet of terrified city cats and swerved onto yet another narrow street, this one dominated by the stone face of a Svanï church.