A Partial History of Lost Causes (46 page)

“Another day,” said Viktor.

“In the new world order?” I said.

Our soldier, Valentin Gogunov, was sitting upstairs in a VIP lounge. As Viktor had predicted, he was watching the girls from behind a mirror while drinking an iridescent cocktail. When we closed the doors behind us, the room was corked with silence. We waited. We could feel the throttle of the song under our feet, but we couldn’t hear anything anymore. Gogunov ignored us for several long moments with one finger in his mouth, until, presumably, Justin Timberlake’s distorted hiccupping was over and the girls had stopped dancing. Then he spoke. “Hello,” he said to us, not looking at us. “You are Bezetov’s posse.” A woman in a shred of pink fabric was dancing near a sullen security detail. “If you could go get us some drinks,” Gogunov said to the woman. She pouted momentarily and went.

“The posse,” said Viktor. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“Sort of a ragtag assortment, aren’t you?” said Gogunov, turning in his chair to face us. There was something rehearsed in his manner, and
I found myself liking him for that. Here was a drug runner who really thought about the impression he was making, and you don’t see that every day. “You look like graduate students,” he said. At this, Viktor cringed.

“You like any of the girls out there?” Gogunov said to him. “We could have them sent up.”

“Not just yet,” said Viktor. “We’d like to do the filming first.”

Gogunov eyed me. “What’s the story with the American?”

I wasn’t sure how he’d been able to tell that I was American before I even spoke.

Viktor looked at me. “What’s the story, American?”

“Mr. Bezetov hired me,” I said. “I’m fixing the syntax on the English subtitles.”

Gogunov regarded me, then turned to Viktor. “Is he fucking her? He could do better.”

“All right,” said Viktor. “Enough. She’s our colleague.”

“Your colleague? Oh, great,” said Gogunov. “What, you’re going to make her chairman of the Central Bank? Whatever, I don’t care. You can keep the American. I’m sure it’s all part of Bezetov’s master scheme for world domination. Or capitalist utopia. Whatever it is this week. Hey, you have that way of obscuring the face in the film, right?”

“Right.”

“And a way to distort the voice? My voice is very distinct. I want that thing that makes the voice low and terrifying.”

“Yes,” said Boris. “Fine.”

“I don’t give a shit about your documentary,” said Gogunov. “Just so you know.”

“Fine,” said Viktor wearily. “We are not asking you to give a shit. We are not paying you to give a shit.”

“You can put it underneath my name. Not my real name, of course. ‘Former Soldier: Does Not Give a Shit.’ You can write that.”

“Anything for you, soldier,” said Boris.

“I don’t think your Bezetov’s going to get anywhere with this,” he said. “I want it on the record. I want it noted that I’m not stupid. If Bezetov’s trying to commit suicide, he could do it a lot more cheaply than
this. He wouldn’t need all the fancy equipment. He wouldn’t need to buy the rights to American pop songs. There will be pop songs, right?”

“If this is suicidal, it’s very nice of you to join us,” said Boris.

“Oh, I’m not joining you, friends,” said Gogunov. “My people know all the tricks. Anyway, why bother a small businessman?”

“Why bother a small businessman if you haven’t already, you mean.”

Gogunov made a face. “I just want to get my revenge on the fucking Russian ground forces. Worst years of my life. Half those people were common criminals before they signed their contracts, you know? Hard to have a civilized conversation with anybody. I’m a man of letters. And then you don’t know what fun is until you’ve had dysentery in Siberia. Ever had shit freeze to your ass? It happens. Now, how much are you paying me?”

“What are you telling us?”

“Depends on what you’re paying me.”

“You seem like you do fairly well already,” said Boris. “For a small businessman.”

Gogunov frowned. “Entrepreneurs are the backbone of society.”

“I only hope you can manage the tax burden,” I said.

“Just barely,” said Gogunov. “But I suppose it’s my civic duty.”

“Well,” said Viktor. “Consider this your civic duty, too.”

“For love of the motherland?”

“Whatever.”

“You can turn the camera on,” said Gogunov cheerfully. “Though it’s probably worth reminding you that my security apparatus is just as extensive as your Bezetov’s and probably somewhat less scrupulous. And they’re very, very defensive of my character.”

“Yes,” said Boris through gritted teeth. “We understand.”

“I can’t predict how they will react to any number of slights, such as a failure to obscure my face or voice, or failure to compensate me properly, or failure to be protective of my privacy.”

“Yes,” said Viktor. “We got it.” He set up the camera, and Gogunov settled back in his chair.

“How do I look?” he said.

“You should be in the pictures,” I said.

“Wrong answer,” said Gogunov.

“It doesn’t matter how you look,” said Viktor. “You’re going to look like a shadow.”

“Right answer,” said Gogunov. He leaned forward. “You understand I’m not fucking with you fellows, right? I’m addressing you, too, gorgeous. You have children, girlfriends, lesbian loves? Little expensive pets?”

“No,” said Boris. “But we’re awfully fond of ourselves.”

“Good,” said Gogunov. “That’s as it should be. I’m not doing this for democracy. So don’t think I won’t have you all killed if you screw me over.”

“We won’t screw you over,” said Viktor. “And we don’t care why you’re doing it.”

“I’m ready now,” said Gogunov.

Viktor assembled the camera, which issued a clinical red light. Gogunov looked down at his nails, then up at the camera. Suddenly, he seemed slightly bashful—he was self-conscious about arranging his face, even though he seemed to believe it wouldn’t matter. “Can I start?”

“Whenever the muse moves you,” said Viktor.

Gogunov waited a couple of moments more, and then he started. “I was a guard at the military facility,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to be on duty that night.”

“And what night was this?” said Viktor.

“This was the night of September 3, 1999.” Something about talking on camera—even though it wouldn’t be his voice or his face doing the talking—had made Gogunov polite, almost deferential. It occurred to me that this man—this drug runner, this soldier—was mildly afraid of public speaking.

“The night before the first of the bombings,” said Viktor.

“Right.”

“The one at the mall.”

“Right,” said Gogunov. “I’d switched schedules with one of the other guards, who was sick that night. He was always getting sick—maybe he was faking, I don’t know—but it worked out for me either
way. We had a deal. I wasn’t in charge of the RDX silo, but I had a good view of it. Most nights we’d spend half the shift drinking cognac and bullshitting each other. But that night I’d opted out of all that and gone to stand by the door. I was stone-cold sober, and I know what I saw.”

“What made you go stand by the door?”

Gogunov winced. “I was texting my wife, to be perfectly honest, and I didn’t want the guys to see. I’d just gotten texting on my phone, and she was always making me text her. That should have been a clue. We were married seven years, and the texting should have been the
first
clue. Don’t put that in, okay? You’ll edit that out, right?”

“Yes,” said Viktor tiredly. “Probably.”

“Anyway. This was maybe quarter to three in the morning. A convoy of trucks wheeled up, and the door was opened for them.”

“What did you think of it at the time?”

“It’s the military’s facility. It exists for their use. It’s not uncommon for orders to be placed for these materials—although less so then, before the second war, and rarely, it’s true, in the middle of the night.”

“And?”

“And it wasn’t recorded in the logs, which is, as you can imagine, a pretty serious, pretty unusual oversight.”

“And so?”

“And so I don’t know what the fate of that RDX was. All I know is that it sailed out of the facility at three in the morning, and it went to military men. There was no break-in. There were no Chechens.”

We let the camera see it. We let whoever would one day see the film hear it. Gogunov leaned forward.

“There was something else,” he said. “One of my coworkers brought me tea around three-fifteen, which was about the middle of my shift. He handed it to me, and I took a sip and spat it out. It tasted horrible—beyond rancid, not like something organic that had rotted but like something you were never supposed to consume in the first place. I almost vomited onto the concrete right there. ‘What the hell is this?’ I asked him. ‘It’s tea,’ he said. ‘What did you put in it?’ I asked him. ‘It tastes like poison.’ And it did. ‘What,’ he said, ‘is the milk off? It’s just tea, milk, and sugar.’ ‘What sugar?’ I asked, because we were
out of sugar in the back office. ‘I took some from the truck,’ he said. ‘From the bags of sugar. Just a tiny bit.’ ‘
What
bags?’ I said. I went out to look. Sure enough, on the trucks, on these bags, was printed the word ‘sugar.’ The next day, the mall in Moscow exploded.”

He took a sip of his drink. He was slowing down. He was starting to enjoy the camera.

“I don’t know what happened to that RDX. I don’t know for sure. But I do know that the military facility at Perm does not, and has never, spent its resources on the armed defense of sugar.”

He looked into the camera. “That’s it,” he said. “You can turn it off.”

Viktor turned it off. “That’s helpful,” he said. “That’s really helpful.” He started to fold up the camera’s arthropod limbs.

Gogunov leaned forward again. “That’s not all,” he said. “I lied a second ago when I said that that was all.”

“Yes?”

Gogunov took a sip of his drink and smiled. “The real question is who supervised this transfer? Who let go of the RDX, and where did they think it was going? Why did they think they were mislabeling the truck? I was just a common soldier. And you know, they don’t buy us flak jackets, so I’m inclined to be bitter. My perspective is maybe not worth as much as somebody out at Perm. Somebody who is in charge, who might know the answers to these questions. You get a real answer from any of them, and then you’ve got military involvement. Not just tacit endorsement or blundering incompetence. But military involvement—government involvement. As much as I hate the Russian army—and I fucking
loathe
the Russian army—even I don’t think they engage in these kinds of tricks for fun. And as much as I think you people are ridiculous—and words can’t do justice to how ridiculous I think you are—even I can’t resist a good conspiracy theory. That’s just human nature. They’ve done studies on this.”

“Okay, okay,” said Viktor. “You have a name for us?”

“There is a man out there,” he said. “The lieutenant running Perm. Andrei Simonov. I am sure he knows. But I have no idea how you’ll get him to talk to you. I don’t think you can buy him. I don’t think you
can blackmail him. But then you people are charmers. Especially that one.” He pointed at me. “She’s a dream.”

“Enough,” said Viktor.

“You know,” said Gogunov. “I am not a fan of your Bezetov, particularly. I don’t like his face.”

“You’ve mentioned,” I said.

“He’d probably do better with this country than Putin, but that’s not much of a compliment. And I don’t think he’s going to win this election. But there’s this. Even if the town madman kills the dragon, the people will cheer. They will celebrate him. They will make him their king.” He winked at me. “It’s an aphorism. It’s a metaphor. Putin is the dragon, in this case, and Bezetov—”

“I get it.”

“Think about it.”

“I will,” I said.

“I bet you will. You must have gotten here by thinking, yes? Since it wasn’t by sitting around looking pretty, that’s for sure.”

“Enough,” said Viktor, and I looked at him.

“You are free to stay,” Gogunov said. “But I’m going to order up a lap dance now.”

“We’ll go,” said Boris, and we did—retreating down the stairs, underneath the cerulean light of the aquarium, past the box of emaciated women miming fellatio. Silver pixels caught in my coat, and I held on to Viktor’s shoulder to keep from drowning.

Outside, the car was waiting for us. Viktor packed the equipment into the back. We drove away from the club. I turned and looked out the window again as we whirred through the city. As Gogunov had instructed, I thought about what he had said. And all around us, lights wavered like undiscovered civilizations across an ocean, and music pounded out into the street, and drunk girls collapsed silently into the snow.

F
or New Year’s, Nina insisted on a party. She wanted it catered, though Aleksandr had said that the risk was too high; instead, she’d bought everything separately and spent the afternoon watching the servants assemble great plates of appetizers—herring soaking in cream, boiled beef tongue, salmon caviar, salads drowning in mayonnaise, pickled cucumbers to go with the vodka. Vlad stood at the door wearing a suit, pretending to welcome the guests and eyeing them up and down—for forbidden faces, for pocket bulges, for eyelid twitches. He had a list, and he checked their names and IDs against it, and when he’d found the guest’s name—and only then—did he smile and nod at one of the servants to offer a plate of hors d’oeuvres.