Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

The waiter came with our coats and handed us our hats to be put on outside. He helped Yulia into her long winter coat, this time to her great disapproval.

As we moved up the stairs from the sous-terrain, with the waiter following up behind us, we were confronted immediately with the blue flashing lights of a city police car that had just come to a skidding stop in front of the entrance to the restaurant. Yulia looked at me with panic in her eyes and gave me a look of disdain that I had brought her once again into danger. I too stood frozen in place thinking about the forty-dollars I had just handed to the waiter, complicit in an illegal transaction.

The two police men bounded from their car, but instead of moving directly to the entrance of the restaurant they moved to open the back doors of their patrol car. From the back seat, they removed two young men in handcuffs and bloody noses. They looked like they had taken a good beating at the hands of the police officers. The four men came through the restaurant’s main entrance and moved directly through a service door into and through the kitchen. Not a word was said, no polite excuses were given for the disruptions. It was as if they hadn’t even been seen by anybody around them. Yulia and I looked at each other in disbelief of what we had seen, as if to ask each other, “Did you just see that?”

Before we could make any further movement towards the door another car came sliding to a stop outside the restaurant on the snowy cobblestones. The headlights shined directly into the restaurant blinding us. Before we could make a step towards the door, in walked three men who obviously were not going to yield the right of way nor hold the door open for us. We stood aside as three angry faces passed us, glaring and sizing us up for any potential threat; two identical looking bodyguards walked in front of and directly behind a shorter, stouter man with a clean shaven bald head dressed in the latest fashions from Paris. The bald one looked directly at me, and his eyes stayed on me as his entourage passed us, trying to be as flat as possible against the wall. His eyes looked black against his bright white open collar and the concentrated fury in them frightened me, turning my gut into jelly.

After a slight pause in the lobby and some discreet instructions to the waiter who was seeing us out, these three men joined now by two younger cadets from the dining room disappeared through the same service door as the police officers and their prisoners. As they vanished from the lobby Yulia and I both scrambled for the door and exited in tandem, bumping shoulders over the threshold as we rushed out on to the street.

“You there, stand still!” a voice came from behind the precariously parked cars on the restaurant’s sidewalk. The blue lights from the police car twirled around revealing and concealing a third police officer standing in the open driver’s door. “What’s your business here?”

Yulia was tongue tied and looked to me to explain our way out of the situation.

“I am very sorry. I do not speak Russian” I said calmly in English to the policeman. “Angliskiy?” I asked putting on a stupid American face as I approached him slowly, putting a hand to my ear. This seemed to defuse the officer’s suspicion and he spoke again without questioning.

“Please leave here immediately. This is an official police action,” he commanded while using sign language to move us on. Yulia didn’t speak. I nodded and waved in a friendly manner to the cop to acknowledge our understanding and we slipped away into the Pokrovka street towards Gorkiy Square.

Once we were out of sight and ear shot of the police cars, Yulia held nothing back and let into me in another tirade. “How could you, Peter? How could you do this to me again? Why do you think that you can play with fire and not get burned? You shouldn’t tempt fate like this, Peter… and certainly not with me around. They will figure out very quickly who you are, who I am. We just saw them kidnapping people with the help of the police. If those two guys show up dead tomorrow they’ll remember that there were witnesses. Do you think that they are just going to forget about that? Do you think this is normal? And then that stupid foreigner act? They’ll grab you before you know it. We warned you about speaking English with people you don’t know. You don’t know who they are or what they might do to you later, or at that very moment! How could you do this?” She was genuinely frightened.

Yulia stomped off ahead of me with a brisk, angry pace. I called after her trying to calm her down but she wouldn’t yield. I trudged up the street after her and finally caught up and reached out to touch her arm and ask her to stop for a moment and listen to an apology. Instead, she turned and hissed, “I think it’s better that you and I aren’t seen together for a while for safety reasons, and until you get these stupid ideas out of your head. Remember that if things go wrong, you can always leave. I have to live here. Don’t drag me down with your curiosity crusade, Peter!”

I didn’t see Yulia again until the ice on the Volga had melted.

By early March the weather started becoming a bit more unsettled and the air less frozen. Large patches of water began to appear in the middle of the river’s flow between the receding ice sheets on either bank of the river. The snow fell wetter, streets were filled more with slush instead of compacted snow, and where potholes in the gutters were once frozen solid, they now were filled with icy slush water and became a hazard to be avoided for those stepping off buses. The wind coming off the rivers filled with growing humidity would create a chill to my core and the sky was regularly gray with clouds.

Being outside during the thaw was not pleasant, so I spent long days and evenings indoors researching and translating, taking notes and building the outline of my term paper, and waited for the spring to come, and I kept my head down and out of sight… at least for a few weeks.

As I scrolled through articles and skimmed reports the data began to take some form. It clearly said that nobody had any idea of what the future would bring to Russia. To find some answers I ventured out of my corner of the library and reemerged into the city I was hiding from.

The doors to the World Bank office on the corner of Minin Square were locked but all the lights were still on. I was curious if everybody was next door already at four o’clock for “tea-time” with one of New York’s best platters. I was immediately conscious that I had also stood Hans up for fried chicken the last three weeks and wondered how he was.

As I walked a few doors further up the street, I noticed a number of flashy cars parked straddling the curbs and one directly on the sidewalk in front of the pizza parlor. They were anything but inconspicuous. The restaurant was empty though, except for my acquaintances seated in the corner of the pizzeria on plastic patio furniture wrapped in wool coats and scarves, both nursing bottles of soft drinks while waiting patiently for a Russian pizza. I approached their table with a bit of irony in my voice.

“Funny to meet you here,” I removed my black shapka and shook hands with both of them.

“I thought that your office was next to the pizza place…”

“Well, we’ve all got to eat at least once a day,” was Andrew’s guilty confession.

“Come for the grand tour then?” Richard motioned around the empty restaurant acting like a proud owner of a country estate.

“Have a seat. I guess we all got hungry at the same time.” Andrew offered an empty plastic patio chair.

“Naaah, I actually came to talk shop with you,” I replied taking the chair.