The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

after his hand offered his enemies the released grenade like a heavy ripe fruit on its open palm. His muscles filled out with the weight of their burden—but everything ahead was already cut off by the blast, and it was only his body that moved for that split second that a body already vacated can propel itself forward before it collapses obeying the force of gravity, while the film, overexposed by the flash, continues to rustle its blank frames inside his skull.
    “Gela,” he wanted to call.
    But he was no more.

Room 7. The Road to Zolotonosha
    The Last Interview by Reporter Goshchynska
    W ho is he, really—Vadym?
    He sits across the table from me, heavy and immovable. He always sits like that, wherever he is, as if he were at home where he owns everything—things, and people, even this unsettlingly empty restaurant, like the setting in a Hollywood horror flick, where he has brought me, after he called, in the middle of the night. It actually looks very much like he owns it, because when we came the doors were locked; he pushed a button I hadn’t seen and as soon as the doors opened, went straight in, not waiting (and not letting me go first, how rude!), pulling the scarf off his neck (Armani, 100 percent cashmere), saying to his door-opening lackey over the shoulder, as he walked, “Valera, have Mashenka lay the table for us.” He didn’t ask for the menu, nor did he ask me what I would like, or whether I would like anything at all, and now here he sits, across the table from me, in the large empty room, like Ali Baba in the thieves’ cave (it
is
a cave: black lacquer, black leather, backlit surfaces—the all-too-familiar mix of ostentation and grim industrialism that lacks charm but passes for glamour in our latitude). He is capacious and amiable like a shaved, whiskerless walrus, and his breathing is a bit heavy and irregular, as happens to well-nourished men past their prime: an early shortness of breath that, if you’re not used to it, might be taken for erotic arousal. Did Vlada like it perhaps? Or maybe he didn’t breathe like this back then, with Vlada?
    “Stay out of it,” he says, looking at me without expression in his eyes, vacant like this restaurant of his (when’d he have time to buy it?). “There are serious people involved. You don’t want any part of it.”
    Serious people. Meaning—those who, should you get in the way of their financial interests, might just whack you, another Ukrainian journalist disappeared without a trace. Or you might end up dead in a car accident, or found dead in your own apartment, a suicide. A woman who could not, for instance, get over being fired, why not? A single woman (the boyfriend is not mentioned in the police protocol), without children, all her life in her work, got a pink slip—and that’s it, she couldn’t take it, lost her will to live. And the best thing—no one would even think twice about it: a childless woman is a perfect target, keels over without a thump.
    How nice of Vadym to warn me. And I, truth be told, after that ill-advised conversation we had, started to think nothing would get to him. And he, in the meantime, did some legwork, took the time to ask around—how kind of him. There are serious people behind the
Miss New TV
show, people whose names no one will ever read in the credits. Like the names of the girls who will come to Kyiv for the contest’s preliminary rounds and never make it to the screen, girls who will make it to a completely different place. Not necessarily to foreign brothels even—but right here at home. Someone has to welcome the EU sex tourists and thereby raise the country’s attractiveness-to-foreign-investment ratings; someone has to give a donor a blow job while he is speeding home in his SUV from the meeting at campaign headquarters. Serious people, serious business.
    Crying’s the last thing I need right now, but my nose tickles treacherously, and I begin to breathe hard, like Vadym, hard and fast. We sit facing each other, the two of us, and snuffle like hedgehogs on a narrow path. We must be quite a sight. But, dear God, what a nasty feeling this is—to know a crime is about to happen, and not be able to stop it.
    How much does it cost—one girl? Those who trade in people—how much do they charge for a soul? Why do I not, after ten years of hard-boiled journalism, know these figures? And why can’t I now bring myself to ask Vadym, who must know?
    Who in the hell is he—Vadym?
    All I know