The Museum of Abandoned Secrets
now look how they’ve spread!
I felt a kind of uplift in my rage—a certain purifying relief from having found a more deserving object of scorn than Yulichka, who’d been running schemes with my competitors behind my back—I’d shaken off the nasty feeling of having been robbed that had burned me all day, and felt myself filling with a pure, ethyl-alcohol-like civic outrage: Who do they think we are, these bastards? Do they think they’ll get away with this? I opened my shoulders wide and stood up tall facing a
real
, worthwhile enemy, one with whom you
want
to cross swords—while Lolly, by contrast, remained amazingly composed the whole time, as if she weren’t really surprised to hear my news (I’ve always suspected that she disliked Yulichka). She asked succinct, businesslike questions and generally appeared quite calm—as if all the blows that came this evening fell, for her, onto an invisible protective pad. She used to behave differently under stress. When she was resigning from thestudio, she went around all but shaking. But something new has emerged in her; she is somehow distant: she even spoke without triumph or melodrama about how elegantly she undid that fat Rep. My poor girl’s nose has sharpened to a point and grown pink with exhaustion; the lamp above the table cuts deep, unmistakable, graphic lines from her nose to her lips—without makeup, she is always so dear, so sweet I get shivers inside when I look at her, but only now do I see how much she’s worn away in these last few days, become all ether, even her face has grown longer and gaunt. She no longer looks like a teen, I thought. For the first time since we’ve been together, I felt that she really is older than me—and not by a mere six years, but by a much greater, immeasurable distance.
“Let’s go to bed, love”—I could barely stand up straight myself, and wondered, what happened to being nineteen, when I could party all night like the Energizer bunny and in the morning grab a breath mint to blunt my hangover breath before running to class all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed?
“Uhu,” she nodded, “let’s,” and raised her eyes at me, and they suddenly pierced me through all the fatigue, the mental numbness of the late hour, and the burnt-to-cinders adrenaline; they went through me with a living music as though they’d gained a voice and sang—her eyes glowed with tenderness, and obedience, and sadness, and something else so inexpressibly feminine that I a felt a lump rise in my throat.
“Can we go see that man in the country tomorrow?”
“If you want to,” I wheezed in the voice of the old Mafioso from Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs
. God damn it, I was so moved I just about broke down crying right there. The next morning, I planned to go to Boryspil anyway, to see that country hick Yulichka had expropriated—to find out the details and assess my losses (a cuckoo clock, a walnut credenza, what else did that witch hand over to Brey & Co. behind my back?)—but I’d intended to go alone; I’d never gotten Lolly involved in my business before.... The business, however, had never been subjected to anything like what Yulichka did to it. I’d warmed a snake on my own chest, as they say.
This, essentially, is the thing—as it became clear once the ball of initial shock had a chance to settle a bit, to steep, loosen, and unravel into separate strands of damage: where I suffered financially, where I suffered morally, where the firm’s image was damaged, what pieces I had to pick up first to try and patch at least some of the holes—this is what cut me the deepest—that I had warmed a snake. Of all the damage, of all the holes, the breach of trust is the most painful, and there’s no way to fix it. Such a great secretary, my irreplaceable assistant, my right hand! She was so perfect I wanted to pinch myself. And she was always informed of all my plans, damn it, and damn it again! How could I have missed it—the little bitch’s been swindling me for six months? And I just ate from her hand when she fed me the story about the man’s heirs, a son and a daughter, who got cold feet and convinced their old man not to sell any of his stuff. She was all seriousness, so preoccupied—“Gosh, Adrianambrozich, wat are wee goin to do, thei refius to sell nou?”
“We have to make them a better offer,” I said like an idiot. “We’ve no other choice.” And the interested parties, it would appear, made Yulichka a
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