The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

Does a man here ever have a chance to focus and finish a decent thought? What’s that goose screaming about?
    Yulichka stands at the door, holding on to the frame like she’s being pursued by gangsters in an action flick—spooked, her face drooping, and for that reason really resembling a goose.
    “What happened?” I ask as sternly as I can manage. “What, are we being raided? By the Red partisans, perhaps?”
    Yulichka stares at me with her yellow goose eyes: she’s lost. Of course, she never met Lyonchik Kolodub; she came later, when he was already gone. For an instant, I feel intensely sorry that no one remembers him anymore—the last romantic from the tribe of Komsomol rats, and I don’t even have anyone with whom I could share the insight that just now occurred to me: that Lyonchik must have run all the way to Latin America, not after cocoa-skinned mulatto girls, but after the shadow of his Gypsy grandfather, the unfortunate partisan chicken thief. To seek there, among the slackers just like him, blissed out on the world’s best pot, his lost ideal motherland: red-cockaded soldiers, Kalashnikovs over their shoulders, firewater at their belts, and Lenin so young and so fair. All good Komsomol men go to Latin America after they die. Shit, am I getting so old no one in my circle remembers the friends of my youth?
    And only then do I grasp the fact that someone has really scared Yulichka, and I finally rise from behind my desk—crack the ceiling of my own thoughts with my head. (Mom once taught me that a man must always rise in the presence of a woman, but seven years in Ukrainian business relieved me of all the good manners imparted to me in childhood.)
    “What’s going on?”
    “Telefon!” Yulichka exhales noisily, and it scares her even more: the word drops too inappropriately for her stormy entrance, and I’ve already put her down on the appropriateness front today. “I don’t knou, Adrian Ambrozich...Veri strendzh kolls...”
    “What do you mean, strendzh? Like threats?”
    It appears I still have a pretty good grip on my voice (the slight hoarseness can be written off to my sleepiness)—enough not to betray a sickening shift in my stomach—with a chill filling the gap that’s opened up. That’s the last thing I need today. Could I really have crossed someone? Me, barely a stringer in the bush leagues? I’m just the dregs, a bottom-feeder not even worth the bother.... But how, what could they want?
    “Yulichka.” I come around the desk, take her hands (icy cold, like a frozen chicken) into mine; I’m all shelter in the storm now, her good daddy. “You just calm down, okay? Everything will be fine,” I assure her, already with complete certainty, and believe it myself—as if I were casting, through some incomprehensible leap in space, my protective spell on Lolly, not on her. “Let’s take it slow: Who called, and what did they say?”
    “I...I don’t knou.” Yulichka makes a visible effort to focus. “I don’t anderstend, it’s oll so strendzh.... Several taims in a rou—it ringz, and wen I pick ap—hissin, very laud, Adrian Ambrozich, I’ve never herd anysin laik zat! Crackle, haulin, laik wind in ze wires.... Clicks, and somesin laik,” she looks at me cautiously, “laik mashin gun shutin.... ”
    “And do you know what mashin gun shutin actually sounds like?” I ask lightly, to calm her down, while my mind quickly cycles through the possibilities. Doesn’t sound like wiretapping—and who the hell would ever want to bug my phone, what am I, some political bigwig? Although I wouldn’t put it past those bastards, they’ve all gone insane with the elections now. They say every summer camp around Kyiv is packed with hired guns from Moscow that our mobsters have brought in to have them win the elections for them. So what if one of those “working groups” that sits up all night hatching increasingly outlandish scenarios suddenly got theitch to tap, say, every tenth name on the voters’ list? Or maybe, hmm, what if it’s Yulichka’s nerves? That’s weird, I never noticed any trouble; she’s such a sensible miss, always has a plan for ten steps ahead, an ideal secretary really.
    “Zose were gunshots, Adrian Ambrozich.” Yulichka pulls back her thawed little paws and fixes her skirt, apparently recalling the talking-to she got earlier today. “Don’t iven sink, I’m not gallucinatin. And I knou wot gunshots sound laik—mai first boifrend worked for