The First Billion

Suddenly, he smiled. There was a time when his parents would have been glad if he'd said he wanted to be a plumber, or a carpenter, or just about anything else that would have stopped him from walking around town with his fists in front of him looking for a brawl to get into. With a bolt of clarity, he remembered how he felt in those days. The wild yearnings that would well up inside him, the unheroic desire to slug another man in the face- always someone bigger, someone imposing- to see the blood gush from his nose, maybe even hear the crunch of bone. For the life of him, he'd never understood why he was such a mean little bastard.

Now, these twenty-five years later, he had the answer. Divinity. God, nature, the force- whatever you wanted to call it- had provided him with some early on-the-job training for what was to come later in life.

For what was to come tomorrow.

Gathering the rod and capton, he slid from beneath the sink. A length of curtain wire would bind the two together; padding from beneath the carpet would serve as a grip.

He only needed something to sharpen the rod into a killing blade.

54

You want Kirov, I can help. Meet me at Pushkinskaya Metro, southwest exit, at seven o'clock. And make sure to bring a briefcase. You won't believe the shit I have on him."

A coarse laugh, and the call ended.

Yuri Baranov, prosecutor general of the Russian Republic, put down the phone. Eyes rimmed with sleep, he checked his watch. It was six o'clock. Through the curtains, a hazy sun filtered in. It took him a few moments to clear the cobwebs from his head and evaluate whether the call was legitimate or a crank. Since the investigation into Novastar had begun, his office had been inundated with complaints against Konstantin Kirov. Everything from an employee's griping about her unfair dismissal to anonymous promises to obtain Novastar's offshore banking records. Baranov thought the call a ten-to-one shot, but decided to go anyway.

Rising, he ducked beneath the clothesline that bisected his one-room apartment, picking off a shirt, some clean underwear, and a pair of socks, then shuffled to the window. There was a carton of milk on the sill, along with a jar of pickles, some plums, and a plate of smoked herring left over from last night's dinner. He owned a refrigerator, but it was broken and he couldn't afford to repair it, never mind the electricity to run it. Opening the window, he brought the food inside and performed a hurried ballet, dressing and eating at the same time. A strip of herring while he buttoned his shirt. A plum while he threaded his belt. A last sip of milk as he knotted his tie.

Four days after seizing some eight hundred fifty-three pages of documents from Kirov's headquarters, his investigators had yet to find the evidence they needed to link Kirov to the millions of dollars stolen from Novastar Airlines. Oh, they'd dug up false receipts, double billings to clients, all manner of petty schemes to launder money and avoid paying income taxes. The practices were illegal. The state would file suit. But they'd come across no smoking gun that Baranov could set before a magistrate. The few documents he had found from the Banque Privé de Genève et Lausanne had led nowhere. The Swiss bank would not even confirm that Kirov was the holder of the numbered account.

Finished dressing, he considered taking some of the precautions that had become second nature to any government official working to put a crimp in an oligarch's style. He thought about calling his deputy, Ivanov, and asking him to come along. No, he decided; Ivanov deserved to eat breakfast with his family. Better to request a police escort. Baranov dismissed that idea, too. The police would never show up on time, even if they had a car parked in Pushkin Square. Besides, he wasn't so old that he couldn't meet an informant on his own. He was hardly meeting a gang of thugs in a dark alley at midnight. This was Pushkin Square. Early on a Monday morning there would be throngs of passersby.

Dressed in yesterday's trousers, his scuffed briefcase strangely light in his hand, he headed down the stairs and walked the fifty meters to the subway. The morning air was crisp and clean, not yet fouled by the legions of automobiles that had taken Moscow hostage these last years. Street signs advertised the latest American films. One showed four grotesquely obese Negroes seated on a couch, smiling like idiots. Baranov had no doubt but that the picture was an unquestionable masterwork, something Eisenstein himself might have directed. Giant billboards demanded he drink Coke and enjoy it. Part of him bristled at this relentless onslaught of Western imperialism, this secret invasion of the Rodina that was occurring can by can, frame by frame, ad by ad.

Relax, Yuri, he told himself in a voice that belonged to the new millennium. Let the people enjoy themselves. Life is hard enough as it is. Besides, Coke beats the hell out of Baikal any day.