Jennifer duBois - A Partial History of Lost Causes

He took a sip of his drink. He was slowing down. He was starting to enjoy the camera.

“I don’t know what happened to that RDX. I don’t know for sure. But I do know that the military facility at Perm does not, and has never, spent its resources on the armed defense of sugar.”

He looked into the camera. “That’s it,” he said. “You can turn it off.”

Viktor turned it off. “That’s helpful,” he said. “That’s really helpful.” He started to fold up the camera’s arthropod limbs.

Gogunov leaned forward again. “That’s not all,” he said. “I lied a second ago when I said that that was all.”

“Yes?”

Gogunov took a sip of his drink and smiled. “The real question is who supervised this transfer? Who let go of the RDX, and where did they think it was going? Why did they think they were mislabeling the truck? I was just a common soldier. And you know, they don’t buy us flak jackets, so I’m inclined to be bitter. My perspective is maybe not worth as much as somebody out at Perm. Somebody who is in charge, who might know the answers to these questions. You get a real answer from any of them, and then you’ve got military involvement. Not just tacit endorsement or blundering incompetence. But military involvement — government involvement. As much as I hate the Russian army — and I fucking loathe the Russian army — even I don’t think they engage in these kinds of tricks for fun. And as much as I think you people are ridiculous — and words can’t do justice to how ridiculous I think you are — even I can’t resist a good conspiracy theory. That’s just human nature. They’ve done studies on this.”

“Okay, okay,” said Viktor. “You have a name for us?”

“There is a man out there,” he said. “The lieutenant running Perm. Andrei Simonov. I am sure he knows. But I have no idea how you’ll get him to talk to you. I don’t think you can buy him. I don’t think you can blackmail him. But then you people are charmers. Especially that one.” He pointed at me. “She’s a dream.”

“Enough,” said Viktor.

“You know,” said Gogunov. “I am not a fan of your Bezetov, particularly. I don’t like his face.”

“You’ve mentioned,” I said.

“He’d probably do better with this country than Putin, but that’s not much of a compliment. And I don’t think he’s going to win this election. But there’s this. Even if the town madman kills the dragon, the people will cheer. They will celebrate him. They will make him their king.” He winked at me. “It’s an aphorism. It’s a metaphor. Putin is the dragon, in this case, and Bezetov—”

“I get it.”

“Think about it.”

“I will,” I said.

“I bet you will. You must have gotten here by thinking, yes? Since it wasn’t by sitting around looking pretty, that’s for sure.”

“Enough,” said Viktor, and I looked at him.

“You are free to stay,” Gogunov said. “But I’m going to order up a lap dance now.”

“We’ll go,” said Boris, and we did — retreating down the stairs, underneath the cerulean light of the aquarium, past the box of emaciated women miming fellatio. Silver pixels caught in my coat, and I held on to Viktor’s shoulder to keep from drowning.

Outside, the car was waiting for us. Viktor packed the equipment into the back. We drove away from the club. I turned and looked out the window again as we whirred through the city. As Gogunov had instructed, I thought about what he had said. And all around us, lights wavered like undiscovered civilizations across an ocean, and music pounded out into the street, and drunk girls collapsed silently into the snow.

St. Petersburg, 2007

For New Year’s, Nina insisted on a party. She wanted it catered, though Aleksandr had said that the risk was too high; instead, she’d bought everything separately and spent the afternoon watching the servants assemble great plates of appetizers — herring soaking in cream, boiled beef tongue, salmon caviar, salads drowning in mayonnaise, pickled cucumbers to go with the vodka. Vlad stood at the door wearing a suit, pretending to welcome the guests and eyeing them up and down — for forbidden faces, for pocket bulges, for eyelid twitches. He had a list, and he checked their names and IDs against it, and when he’d found the guest’s name — and only then — did he smile and nod at one of the servants to offer a plate of hors d’oeuvres.

Nina stood nodding magnanimously at anyone who entered. She took jackets, then covertly handed them to one of her women attendants. Aleksandr stood off to the side — out of the line of vision of the doorway, out of the line of fire of the doorway — and greeted his guests. Mostly, they were friends and friends of friends and close colleagues, though there were a few other, more distant people, too. Aleksandr ducked into a linen closet and pretended to look for napkins when he saw Misha enter. In recent years, Aleksandr had tried to avoid being in the same room alone with Misha. Over the months, Right Russia had only grown shriller; Misha tolerated ever meaner elements in its ambit, and Aleksandr tried to keep his dealings with them to a minimum. Aleksandr had even asked Vlad to keep the wingnuts away from him so that he wouldn’t have to talk to them socially, though Vlad had said that was really not his job.

At any rate, Aleksandr had to admit that Nina had done well with the party. The lights were low, the tables were decorated with vases of some sort of pale winter flower, and tiny tea candles lined the windowsills. Outside, St. Petersburg was twinkling and delirious, done up in its New Year’s finery, illuminated by the adamantine windows of fifteen thousand fraying mansions. In the corner, Irina stood drinking a glass of white wine and talking to Viktor and Boris, who seemed to be tolerating her presence better since their return from Moscow with the interview. At eleven-thirty, the staff came around with chilled bottles of champagne. Aleksandr rarely drank, and when he did, he almost always drank alone. Alcohol was too easy a target; it was hard to taste something acrid in it, and the early effects of a poisoning could be too easily confused with intoxication. But it was New Year’s, and Aleksandr was feeling a tad reckless — it wasn’t a feeling of celebration, exactly, it was the kind of subdued, bittersweet tenderness that takes you into rooms to look out over your gorgeous nocturnal city, alone. So he took a glass of the champagne and went into the study. Through the window, he could see the glowing onion domes, the angular business offices, the indigo fold of the sky, the splashes of neon light from the clubs. From the living room came the trill of a woman’s laughter; the gruff arpeggio of a man telling a story. Aleksandr liked having these sounds in his apartment, but he also liked walking away from them and into an empty room.

Irina and the boys had come back from Moscow earlier in the week, and he’d listened and felt childishly jealous when they talked about riding through the streets, watching the women, gazing at the capitalistic vigor of the Arbat, even if they couldn’t shop there. They’d encountered some difficulties — hotels that knew who they were wouldn’t accommodate them; restaurants that knew who they were wouldn’t serve them — but they were protected by a veil of some anonymity, and they were stopped only when rumors went running out ahead of them. They could still go to museums mostly unmolested; they could watch the great Muscovite nightlife from a car in the street.

Aleksandr shivered. Out the window, the preemptive fireworks flashed icy silver against blue sky; the starlight skimmed across the river, making it glitter like the eyes of animals in the dark woods.