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By Root 677 0

store, the snow-smeared cobblestones of Red Square – they all looked exactly as I’d hoped they’d look. The Lubyanka – KGB headquarters and the site of the notorious prison where a countless number of Stalin’s victims had been tortured, coerced, interrogated, and finally dispatched with a single gunshot to the neck – looked strangely neutered now that Dzerzhinsky’s statue no longer gazed down on its square. There may have been slot machines on the subway, casinos everywhere, prowling hookers, and street signs sponsored by Western brand names – Gorky Street – Brought to You By the Fine Folks at Philip Morris! – but this still looked like the Russia of my fevered imaginings: dead drops, brush contacts, burst transmissions, betrayals. It was where Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, and Guy Burgess had spent their days in pampered limbo. This had been the epicenter, ground zero for all the evil in the world (according to my kindergarten teacher and most right-thinking Americans) back when I was a little kid, crouching under my desk during duck-and-cover drills, the cause of or justification for all sorts of dimly remembered madness: the Cuban missile crisis, my neighbors’ backyard bomb shelter, Vietnam, JFK, CIA, LBJ, Nixon – all the purported saints and boogeymen of my youth. I grew up thinking the Big One could come at any moment, and this country – or fear of it, the way my country reacted to the threat – radicalized, marginalized, and alienated me in ways that still affect me.

And there was ‘Dimitri,’ my first and most important mentor and partner in the restaurant business. The first professional I knew who was actually passionate about the craft of cooking, a guy who cooked on his day off. Romantic, curious, literate, maudlin, gregarious, mercurial, he had been my first glimpse of Russia’s beating heart and dark, tormented soul. As the train chugged through the snow, I wanted a closer look at that soul. I wanted borscht, zakuski, caviar, black bread, and vodka. I wanted a big furry hat and snow on my boots.

A lightly padded fist crashed into the nose of an overweight lug with a crew cut, flattening it with a sickening, wet Whapp sound. The larger of the two men in the cage dropped back onto the canvas; blood spread across his face, running off his chin onto his chest. His opponent, a ripplingly muscled young fellow in clapped-out tube socks and faded athletic shorts, didn’t hesitate – he drove his knee twice into the fallen man’s liver and began pounding mercilessly at the side of his skull with both fists.

The mood in the room was controlled but festive, kind of like a company cocktail party. Well-dressed women in short short skirts and backless dresses looked on from their tables, expressionless behind carefully applied makeup. Next to them, their male friends, most of a type and appearance described in Russia as ‘flathead’ – big, bordering on huge, with monster muscles bulging through elegant dark suits, low brows, brush cuts, and the eyes of underwater predators – sipped drinks and talked among themselves, the women largely ignored. The venue? I’ll call it ‘Club Malibu.’ (I still have friends who live there.) It was a modern black and chrome nightclub/disco/restaurant complex built inside an older building, sort of goombah chic, circa 1985 (like the China Club), with recessed lighting, glitter balls, big noise, and nice clothes. I was sitting ringside on a high leather-backed stool with an older guy with shoulder-length hair and one of those denim brim caps that Freddie Prinze might have worn. He spoke not a word of English and I spoke no Russian. An apparently well-known singer/songwriter, he shared the VIP table with me, close enough to the ring to catch the blood spray. I was at the VIP table because that’s what it took for me to get a glimpse of what my Russian friends sarcastically call the ‘new Russians,’ the mad, bad, and very dangerous to know successors of old Russians. In the new Russia, everything is possible. And nothing is for certain.

It had taken some arranging to pull this evening off, and a lot of very