The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

profit. Fine, let’s do the math. Twenty-five grand a month, how long do we have before the elections—six months? Okay, let’s say seven. Twenty-five times seven—a hundred and seventy-five. You are proposing that I sell”—(And here I break pace for a second: sell what? My country, which foreign secret services aim to shove back into the hole it hasn’t been able to dig itself out of anyway, going on thirteen years already? My friend whose death is on my conscience too, and whose memory is now on my conscience alone? No, none of that will do)—“sell my professional reputation”—(there, that’s better)—“for one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars? For the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Pechersk? That won’t cut it, Vadym. I did spend ten years earning it, you know. And you, as my father-in-law says, want to pay a penny for a handful of nickels.”
    The father-in-law (and Aidy’s dad does say that) is a bonus, pure art: Vadym’s never heard a whiff of any father-in-law, and it won’t sit well with him—it tells him he missed something (and I’m not as naked and defenseless as he’d thought, someone must’ve covered me). The smile remains on his face as he left it there, and now looks as untidy as an unmade bed. He licks his plump lips, his eyes wander around the big room, as if he were trying to remember something, and then he pulls out his cell phone, flips it open—until now thephone’s been off, that’s how important a conversation we are having—and finally refreshes his smile, bringing it now to a waxy ripeness.
    “I remembered this joke about the Place Pigalle...a really old one, from back in the student days,” he starts.
    “The one about women who can’t be bought, but are very expensive?” I smile, too: so there won’t be a raising of the price, it’s nice to deal with an intelligent man. “What did you think? That’s exactly how it is; there’s deep wisdom in that joke.... You know something else they say? An honest reporter only sells out once. This is not one of those times, Vadym.”
    “I am sorry to hear that,” is all he says. Says it from the heart—he really is sorry.
    “Me too. You know why?”
    “Why?” he calls back, an echo.
    The Show Must Go On. The pain is making the world before my eyes congeal into a yellowish gloom, and I focus hard on the bridge of Vadym’s nose, it’s all I see before me, the bridge of his nose, this one fixed point to which the other parts of his face drift slowly, distorted as if filmed under water. Freddie Mercury’s voice ascends somewhere inside me like a bird set free from the dark spilling broken glass into my veins, invisible brushes multiply on my skin, tickling my temples, cheeks, eyelids—I see myself through the eye of a hidden camera, and the camera is Vlada’s: click-click-click. I grow still in the face, holding my breath, and feel myself suddenly grow more beautiful. I feel the flicker of fire under my skin, feel my features grow smoother as in lovemaking, feel my lips darken as they fill with blood—Vadym’s the only spectator of this show, but I am not doing this for him...smithy-smithy, cast me a voice, and now the cello comes in—a low, chest-deep timbre that no man can resist.
    “Why? Because this whole scheme, Vadym, looks to me like one monumental screwup...”
    “Is that so?” echoes the bridge of the nose.
    “Uhu. These big shots of yours cannot possibly be really good professionals. I suspect, in fact, they are nothing but really good swindlers.”
    “What makes you think that?” the bridge of the nose, says, startled. He is scared. So, he’s got his own money tied up in the deal.
    “How should I explain it?” Now it’s my turn to play, like a stage magician juggling knives, at being privy to secret knowledge. “There’s this thing—we professionals,” and I lean into this word with my voice as if pushing against a locked door, and feel the door yield under the spell, “call strength of material.” In his language, professional is a magical word, the object of a savage faith, an element of a religion in which the world consists of human demigods who rule it, the masses that provide the gods with a steady supply of ambrosia, and professionals, a breed of creatures somewhere between priests and useful Jews, who huddle in back storerooms like shadows in Hades waiting for the gods to reach down and tap them to carry out their operations. A professional’s position is