Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [31]
“Football in school.”
“Position?”
“Mainly goal.” Arkady wasn’t going to claim any athletic distinction in Borya’s company.
“Like me. The best position. You study, see the attack, learn anticipation. The game comes down to a couple of kicks. And when you commit, you commit, right? If you try to save yourself, that’s how you get hurt. For me, of course, playing was a way to see the world. I didn’t understand what food was until we went to Italy. I still referee some international games just to eat well.”
“To see the world” had to be a mild description of Borya’s ambition, Arkady thought. Gubenko had grown up in the concrete “Khrushchev Barracks” of Long Pond. In Russian, Khrushchev rhymed with slum, giving bite to the title. Borya would have been raised on cabbage soup and cabbage hopes, and here he was talking about Italian restaurants.
Arkady asked, “What do you think happened to Rudy?”
“I think that what happened to Rudy was a national disaster. He was the only real economist in the country.”
“Who killed him?”
Without hesitating, Borya said, “Chechens. Makhmud is a bandit with no concept of Western style or business. The fact is, he holds everyone else back. The more fear, the better—never mind that it closes a market down. The more unsettled everyone else is, the stronger the Chechens become.”
On the tees a tier overhead, the Japanese hit a unified salvo, followed by excited shouts of “Banzai!”
Borya smiled and pointed his club up. “They fly from Tokyo to Hawaii for a weekend of golf. I have to throw them out at night.”
“If Chechens killed Rudy,” Arkady said, “they had to get past Kim. For all his reputation—muscleman, martial arts—he doesn’t seem to have been much protection. When your best friend, Rudy, was looking for a bodyguard, didn’t he come to you for advice?”
“Rudy carried a lot of money and he was concerned about his safety.”
“And Kim?”
“The factories in Lyubertsy are closing down. The problem with interacting with the free market, Rudy always said, is that we manufacture shit. When I suggested Kim to Rudy, I thought I was doing them both a favor.”
“If you find Kim before we do, what will you do?”
Borya aimed the club at Arkady and dropped his voice. “I’d call you. I would. Rudy was my best friend and I think Kim helped the Chechens, but do you think I’d endanger all this, everything I’ve achieved, to take some sort of primitive revenge? That’s the old mentality. We have to catch up with the rest of the world or we’re going to be left behind. We’ll all be in empty buildings and starving to death. We have to change. Do you have a card?” he asked suddenly.
“Party card?”
“We collect business cards and have a drawing once a month for a bottle of Chivas Regal.” Borya controlled a smile, barely.
Arkady felt like an idiot. Not an ordinary idiot, but an outdated, socially uninformed idiot.
Borya put down his driver and proudly led Arkady to the buffet. In chairs upholstered in red, white and black Marlboro colors were more Japanese in baseball caps and Americans in golfing shoes. Arkady suspected that Borya had hit upon the exact decor of an airport lounge, the natural setting of the international business traveler. They could have been in Frankfurt, Singapore, Saudi Arabia—anywhere—and for this very reason felt at home. Above the bar a television showed CNN. The crowded buffet offered an array of smoked sturgeon and trout, red and black caviar, eggplant caviar, German chocolates and Georgian pastries around bottles of sweet champagne, Pepsi, pepper vodka, lemon vodka and five-star Armenian cognac. Arkady was dizzy from the smell of food.
“We also have karaoke nights, putting tournaments and corporate parties,” Borya said. “No prostitutes, no hustlers. It couldn’t be more innocent.”
Like Borya? The man had not only gone from football to the mafia, but had made the second, steeper evolutionary leap to entrepreneur. The way his Western sweater draped his shoulders, the directness of his eyes, the freer gestures of clean hands, all said: businessman.
Borya gave a discreet, proprietary