The Book of Air and Shadows

inside, actually, steamy and redolent of cinnamon and cabbage. I sat under the ornately framed portrait of the eponymous mad monk, a place with my back to the wall and facing the doorway, and ordered a tea and a couple of piroshki. The place was half-full, mainly of local denizens seeking a break from Chinese or Italian or overpriced trendy. At ten past, a man walked through the door and stood in front of my table. I rose and shook his extended hand and he sat down, looking smilingly around the place. He was about my age and half my size, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, a big jut of a nose, and intelligent deep-sunk dark eyes. He was wearing a shearling coat, a black silk turtleneck and fashionably

    Oh, what the fuck does it matter what he looked like or what he was wearing? I just came back from a walk around the property. All is silent in the early-morning mists. I checked out the boathouse, the pump house, and the two-car garage, in which I have parked my rented Cadillac Escalade, a vehicle nearly large enough to contain me in the driver’s seat. I can see why these behemoths are popular among the bulky Americans. Next to my rental is Mickey’s Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, which he bought shortly after I got my BMW bike back in the day, to show me, I suppose, that he was a daring fellow too, although I had bought my machine because I could not afford to run a car in the city. A little breakfast and here I am back at the keyboard.

    I must have looked around inquiringly because Shvanov caught the look and said, “What, you’re expecting someone else?” and I said I had always imagined that Russian gangsters traveled with an entourage. This made him laugh and show teeth that had been expensively capped in one of the industrial democracies. “Yes, six bullet-heads in black leather and a couple of Ukrainian sluts. Would you like? I can make a call.” He spoke a nearly unaccented English, and made only infrequently the mistakes of article and pronoun omission typical of people whose native tongue is highly inflected. He wished to make small talk, as if we were old friends meeting after a brief separation. I indulged him in this, and we spoke about my sister and her fabulous career and about Rasputin’s and he said he was one of the early investors and I made a crack about had he made an offer they couldn’t refuse.
    Here his smile grew a little tighter and he said, “Mr. Mishkin, I don’t know what you think I am, so let me tell you, so we won’t have any misunderstandings. I am a businessman. In past times, I worked for Soviet government, like everybody, but since fifteen years, I am in business. I have interests in Russia, in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in state of Israel, and also here. What kind of business, you wish to know. Primarily, I am investor. Someone has an idea, I have the money, and also the contacts. Contacts are very important in Russian community, because this is how we learn to do business in the old days. Trust, you understand? Because we don’t have what you call the business norms, the court system, and so forth. In return for this investment I have a piece of the business, just like New York Stock Exchange.”
    “You’re a loan shark,” I said.
    “And Citicorp is loan shark, J. P. Morgan Chase is loan shark-what do you think, they don’t charge interest? They don’t take over collateral? This is subprime lending I do, like for this place, no one else would find this money for them, so they come to Shvanov and they give me some piece of this and we are all happy.”
    “And if not happy, you have people come and break their legs, which is one thing that distinguishes you from Morgan Chase.”
    Again the tight smile and he waved his hands dismissively. “Please, I have no contact with any types of collection business. This is all outsourced to completely different firms, I assure you.”
    “Outsourced?”
    “Exactly. You buy a pair of Nikes, how do you know who made? Maybe a kidnapped little girl chained to machine in China, they starve and beat her. It says Nike-this is all you know, a respectable firm. I think Nike don’t even know who makes. If you want to be so pure as that you should be in church and not in business. You agree?”
    “Not really. And speaking of kidnapped girls, since you bring the topic up, I believe one of your outsourced firms assaulted an employee of mine and kidnapped a young woman from my domicile the other night.”
    Shvanov motioned to