The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

thirty percent!—audience, bragged about the channel already buying meters to measure ratings in cities of a half a million people and up—and that’s just to start with, the one hundreds were next—and all she wanted to spit back was: What the heck for?
Ukraine’s Got Talent
?
    He was burying all her professional aspirations alive and had not the slightest inkling of what he was doing. He never felt the studio darkness expand into infinity on the other side of the cam-eras; there was no one sitting in fear for him, ready to cough and creak their chairs in response to any falsity; he couldn’t care less about what he put on the air. Professionalism, for him, meant how, not what, and if the Insurgent Army theme was better left alone for the time being, then it wasn’t worth bothering with at all, and anyway, entertainment programming was the safest niche—he said it exactly like that, using that word, and it made her cringe, and then laugh with all the spite she had in her: ah, the niche again!
    Nose already twitching with the nonexistent roach whiskers, he assured her she would be protected from politics, all that dirt, he gave his word. Sure, she’s “the face of the channel,” and it was never her business to care about the provenance of substances that bubble in its guts, so why should it start being her business now? That’s only logical. And then he told her—intimately, a little wearily almost like he’d had enough of her tetchy jibes, her crooked half-grins, and her little bitten-down lips, all of which had the singular purpose, as any idiot could see, of drumming up her price, a pretty woman’s usual ritual resistance before she gives in and takes the hardened dick into her mouth—how much she would be paid. Cash, of course, in an envelope, off the books.
    She gasped silently, unsure of what face to make so he wouldn’t notice anything: she felt naked—no one had heard of such salaries in Ukrainian television before; the ceiling was five grand a month, unless, of course, you count those who got their kickbacks in envelopes, directly from their political clients, and their channel was never among the wealthy ones. She’d been getting two, and was fine with that. That’s when it went to her head, spinning, dizzying, for an instant: they could buy an apartment downtown if they sold Aidy’s digs—and better still—oh the impossible dream!—a small house in the country, in some near-Kyiv quaint alpine hamlet; it’s all “Alps” around Kyiv, everywhere you turn—hills, meadows, lakes, ponds, and not everything’s sold yet, although the prices are stratospheric indeed, but all they need is a little patch of land, like in Roslavychi, where Vlada had been planning to live with Vadym. And right away, with dazzling, sobering clarity, it occurred to her that Vlada’s death was also connected to this hidden churn of financial flows—with the invisible gigantic intestine where blood and oil mixed in the same pipe: Vadym was into oil, and Vlada was into Vadym, and she got the blood. What was it she said in that dream—“too many deaths”?
    Frozen, Daryna felt the breath of the subterranean bog—its invisible vapors rose against her skin, fogged her mind. Bank accounts’ credit columns endowed with cell-like, self-replicating ability, the flickering of mysterious numbers on computer screens and stock-market monitors: all this was alive—it rose, throbbed, grew, moved. “I’d be curious,” she said to the boss, “I’d be really curious to know—where’s the mother lode?” Boss took it as an expression of admiration and winked, with bravado, just like that time at his housewarming party. “I mean,” she said, not yet aware of how close she’d come to lifting the manhole cover and seeing the blind acidly greenish glimmer below with her own eyes, “don’t get me wrong; I know I’m an expensive woman,...” (he gave her a sleazy snigger) “but I’m also aware that free cheese is only found in the mousetrap—braids don’t fetch that kind of dough!”
    That was her swerving off road and cutting straight through the rough—she no longer cared; she knew her cause had already been lost and wanted to have one last satisfaction: to know the mechanism that was behind this, let it be her last journalistic investigation; she’s a professional after all, isn’t she? (For the fall, the anniversary of her friend’s death, she’d planned to make a separate film about Vlada,