“Get a load of this place,” said Alexi, slowly turning around. Bright red carpet and red leather banquettes, gold firebirds on the walls, gold on the ceiling, and gold samovars on the counters, for tea. The Moscow skyline carved in ice.
“Incredible,” said Vladimir, studying a scale model of the Kremlin.
Ivan watched a sturgeon swimming in a fifteen-foot revolving aquarium shaped like a bear. “Everyone back home should get a chance to see America. We certainly don’t have anything like this where we come from.”
They waited in the lounge for their table. The bartender came over. “What’s your pleasure?”
“What should we get?” Dmitri asked the others.
“When in Rome…” said Ivan.
“Manhattans?” said Dmitri.
“Try the Russian Quaalude,” said a stockbroker three stools down.
“Never heard of it,” said Ivan. “What’s in it?”
“Not sure,” said the broker, turning to the bartender. “Hey Bob, what’s in a Russian Quaalude?”
“One second,” said the bartender, walking to a wall phone by the stemware.
Alexi got nervous and stood up. “Who’s he calling?”
“Relax,” said Ivan. “This is America. He’s on the bartender hotline.”
The man hung up and returned. “Frangelica, Baileys, vodka, layered in that order.”
“Five,” said Ivan.
The bartender grabbed a bottle of vodka by the neck. “I was a technical adviser for the movie Cocktail.” He swung the bottle up quickly like he was going to twirl it in the air but didn’t release, for liability reasons. “The trick to twirling bottles is to pick ones with only a little liquor left. The cast tried to twirl full bottles. Liquor flew everywhere. Had to edit it out.”
Dmitri whispered to Ivan: “You meet everybody in New York.”
Their table was ready when they finished the drinks. They all got the hot borscht and Stroganoff, except Dmitri.
“How’s the chicken Kiev?” he asked the waiter. “I hate it when it’s tough.”
The waiter said it wasn’t.
Sevruga caviar and gazirovannaya vodka arrived, then the main course. The men ate with gusto as they admired winter paintings above their booth by Surikov and Kustodiev. Dmitri poked his chicken with a gold fork. “It’s tough. I knew it.”
In the back of the restaurant, a visitor from Florida sat alone, sipping tea, reading a paperback.
The check arrived. Ivan patted his full stomach. “We better get going for the meeting. Who has to take a leak?”
They went downstairs to the men’s room. After finishing business, Ivan set the briefcase on the floor and turned on the ornate gold faucets. The others lined up at adjacent sinks and turned more gold faucets.
Eugene Tibbs handed out paper towels.
Ivan lifted the lid off a jar. “Mint?”
“Take as many as you want.”
The Russians each took one of the round, hard, red-and-white mints. They liked those.
Ivan threw a five in the tip basket and picked up his briefcase.
The Russians started across midtown on foot, the temperature dropping fast. They picked up the pace, passing twenty consecutive windows with pictures of restaurant owners and Giuliani. Icy gusts blew down the Seventh Avenue canyon. More windows, more pictures. Pauly Shore, Ron Howard, Julie Newman, Goldie Hawn, Kim Basinger, Mike Tyson, Damon Wayans.
Ivan pointed across the street at a blue-and-yellow sign, LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN. “We’re getting close.”
They went around the south side of the Ed Sullivan Theater, over to Fiftieth Street and down the stairs into the subway.
“Where is it?” asked Alexi.
“Not sure,” said Ivan, reading his own scribbling on a Moon Hut matchbook.
“You said we were supposed to meet Yuri and make the submarine deal at a clandestine KGB document drop station.”
“That’s right. It’s disguised as a little subway bakery — bagels and stuff for morning commuters.”
Dmitri looked across the subway platform. Nobody else except a man in a trench coat playing the tenor sax in a rueful way that made people want to forgive Third World debt. A deep rumbling noise grew out of the darkness at the end of the platform, then a bright light. A late train on the 1-2-3-9 roared out of a tunnel and stopped. The doors opened. Nobody got on or off. The doors closed. The train left.
Vladimir studied a map on the wall. “I think that was the red line.”
A gravelly voice: “Are you looking for Siberia?”
The Russians turned around. A homeless face poked out of the shadows from a dark corner of the platform.
“What’d you say, old man?”
“You looking for Siberia? That Commie place?”
The Russians glanced at each other. The document drop station was a tightly guarded Soviet secret. Just great. Even the bums knew about it. And he was calling it Siberia, adding insult.
“I’ll tell you for a dollar,” said the bum.
Ivan handed him a folded George Washington.
“Go over this platform and around to the other train. Don’t worry if you think you’ve gone too far — just keep going. It’s way down in the bowels of this thing. You’ll find it, just keep going down….”
They started walking away. Ivan stopped and turned and called back to the old man. “How do you know about this place? It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“It is a secret,” said the bum. “But the in-crowd knows about it. They’re always coming by to check it out, usually on the weekend if there’s nothing else to do.”
“It’s become idle amusement?”
“Pretty much,” said the bum.
“Wonderful,” said Igor.
The Russians went farther down into the subway. And down. And down.
“Where the hell is it?” asked Vladimir.
“He told us to just keep going,” said Ivan, trotting down another flight of stairs. “If we…hold it, what’s that?”
They saw a dark glass door and approached slowly. The door had a little sign. In small, plain black letters: SIBERIA. Ivan thought he heard something. “Is that music?”
Next to the door were several large windows, also dark, wallpapered from the inside with newspaper clippings. The Russians began reading the articles, all about the discovery of a Soviet document drop station. Their hearts sank. Ivan continued reading: in the mid-nineties, someone had leased the shop for a pub, and they started knocking out interior walls for more space. That’s when they found all the KGB documents and Russian passports and rubles inside the studwork. The clippings said the station was traced to a Soviet agent known as Yuri, who had fled long before the FBI swarmed the place. Other articles chronicled the new, literally underground, coolest bar of the moment that had since sprouted at the location. One story explained that the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority doesn’t allow bars in the subway, but this specific location fell in a jurisdictional crack because of complex subterranean rights with foreign corporations in the area of Rockefeller Center.
“There goes the rendezvous,” said Ivan. He took several deep breaths of subway exhaust. “What the hell — let’s get something to drink.” He opened the door.
Inside was a dive’s dive, like if the producers of Animal House rejected a set for being too slovenly. Nobody picked up the empties, which collected on tables with cigarette butts and got knocked over and rolled under broken chairs and sofas. There were two undependable jukeboxes, a novelty photo machine, and cases of Amstel and Red Stripe stacked high against walls with profane graffiti. Behind the bar, a row of Russian military hats hung from the shelf that held the liquor bottles, over a picture of Hillary and the owner.
The bartender yelled over the Clash on one of the jukes: “What can I get you guys?”
The Russians began draining longnecks.
“…The shareef don’t like it…”
Ivan heard a familiar voice. He turned around. In the darkness, at one of the tables, a squat old man made a sales pitch to a pair of Juilliard students. He held up a painted wooden figure, twisted it apart at the middle, and took out a smaller figure. Then he twisted that one apart and took out an even smaller one, and so on until he had six figurines of descending size lined up across the table. The man gestured proudly.