18

Things were never what they seemed. Maya had the face of an angel, but when Zhenya opened his eyes, she was gone and with her his money.

He searched the casino, the bank and security rooms, the restrooms and dealers' lounge. Whispering her name, he searched among the slots, the one-armed guards of the Kremlin, as if they were carrying her off to a tower and some jolly bacchanal. There were no signs of resistance, not a stack of chips toppled, not a single plastic pearl spilled from the crown jewels. He tried to sleep but his anger was a match struck before a mirror and he saw what a fool he had been.

Bitch!

She had turned him from a hustler into an easy mark. It wasn't as if there was anything romantic or sexual between him and Maya. Zhenya wouldn't have presumed. But he thought they had a good relationship. He brought Moscow know-how and intellect, while Maya contributed physical daring, sexual experience and, by virtue of being a mother, adulthood. Assuming that her name really was Maya or there really was a baby or that anything she said was true. Where was she now? In his mind's eye he saw Maya and Yegor on a bed of twisted sheets. When he imagined Yegor's grunts and her submissive whimper, Zhenya covered his ears. Or perhaps Yegor wanted to show Maya who was boss and was giving her a rough ride over the fender of a car. Zhenya had never appreciated how masochistic his imagination was. It was like setting a house on fire and choosing to sit in the flames.

There was a more practical problem. If Maya switched sides, she was sure to tell Yegor about the Peter the Great. The casino's stock of liquor alone was worth thousands. Yegor would rip out what he could carry and trash what he couldn't, which was a shame because there was a certain perfection about a casino. The brushed felt of the tables. The chips neatly stacked by color. The new dice. The sealed decks of cards.

He spent the day waiting for night, watching the clouds grow thick and dark, and he remembered how once when he was four years old he and the other kids in the shelter were taken to a petting zoo. The only animal Zhenya was interested in petting was the sheep, because their fleece was always described in children's books as so soft and white. Instead their fleece turned out to be gray and greasy and knotted with shit. For a long time he thought that was what clouds were like. In the daytime Yegor might be anywhere but in the evening he could reliably be found around Lubyanka Square. One entire side of the square was taken up by the Lubyanka itself, a handsome eight-story building of yellow brick with a subtle illumination like votive candles. There was a time when vans arrived at the Lubyanka every night with a haul of bewildered professors, doctors, poets, even party members accused of being foreign agents, wreckers, saboteurs.

Now no one lingered in front of the Lubyanka, any more than they would walk under a ladder or let a black cat cross their path. Not that anything could happen, but why wake the devil?

Directly across the square was a toy store, the biggest in Russia, with an indoor carousel that turned under chandeliers fit for a palace. Now the store was dark and gutted, ready for renovation and efficiency. Whimsy was the first item to go.

Children still came. They vamped in doorways, bummed cigarettes, trotted beside slow-moving cars. At eleven years of age, some of the boys already had the heavy gaze and sullen slouch of rough trade.

Zhenya looked straight ahead rather than meet the predatory gazes of drivers cruising by. Lubyanka Square was not top browsing for pedophiles-that honor went to Three Stations and the streets around the Bolshoi-but it was a fair start for a pimp as young as Yegor.

Zhenya was determined not to let Maya walk all over him. Yegor would interpret that as weakness and an invitation to double the price of "protection." Zhenya wasn't going to wait. He knew from chess that the player who moved first had an advantage.

Nevertheless, he shied away when a Volvo station wagon came to a stop and the man on the passenger side called him over to the curb.

Zhenya said, "I'm not…"

"Not what?" The voice was flat.

"For… you know."

"Know what?" The man's face was a gray shadow. The same with the driver, as if they had been shaped from the same clay. Their station wagon bore dents and creases of rust, suggesting that the vehicle had been rolled, left for dead and resurrected.

"I don't know," Zhenya said.

The man said, "We're looking for a girl. She ran away from home and her mother and father are very worried about her. There's a reward for helping us."

He showed Zhenya a photocopy of Maya sitting with the baby in the bus shelter. The baby existed and Maya smiled as if she could hold it forever. Zhenya made much of trying to see the picture in better light.

"It's her baby?"

"Yeah. That's another reason to find her. Her parents are worried sick about the baby."

"Who are you?"

"Not that it matters, but we're her uncles. It's family business."

"What's her name?"

"Maya. Maya Ivanova Pospelova. The person who delivers her gets a reward of a hundred dollars. The last time anybody saw her she dyed her hair red. Keep the picture. There are two cell-phone numbers on the other side."

"She's pretty."

The driver said, "She's a whore."

The car moved on to a streetlamp at the end of the block where a convertible with the top down had attracted a circle of boys. The station wagon rolled to a stop and flashed its high beams. The convertible was a BMW, a German driving machine unlikely to make room for a wreck, and its driver made a rude gesture without bothering to turn and look behind. When the Volvo rolled forward and tapped the rear bumper of the BMW, its driver called on the heavens to rain shit on idiots who drove shit cars. The passenger emerged from the Volvo, opened its tailgate and drew out a long-handled shovel. He marched to the front of the convertible and brought the shovel edge down on the hood. The driver of the BMW ducked so quickly he broke his nose on the steering wheel and blood covered his mouth and chin. That was only teeing up. The second swing had sufficient whip to buckle the hood and a third set off the windshield wipers. Three swings were enough. The convertible rode over the curb in its haste to escape and the Volvo took its place at the curb. The boys had retreated but in a minute they crowded the car for pictures of Maya.

Zhenya had no idea where Maya and Yegor were. All he could do was race up one block and down the next, avoid being hit by the high-speed traffic exiting the roundabout and dart between the cars slowly cruising the side streets. He wasn't used to running and he blamed Arkady as a poor role model. The second time around, the blocks were longer, the air thinner. He was staggering to a stop when he became aware that the Volvo station wagon, its lights out, was immediately behind him. It didn't matter; he couldn't take another step.

The man on the passenger side got out and opened a rear door for Zhenya. He gave the boy a chance to catch his breath.

"Where is she?"

Zhenya had not panicked in a thousand games of chess, which only underlined the difference between fantasy and reality. A multitude of escape scenarios always came to mind over a chessboard but the man had a grip on Zhenya's arm that squeezed his bicep in two.

"I don't know anything."

"Then you have nothing to worry about."

He was pushing Zhenya into the backseat when an older boy skidded up to the Volvo and said they had the wrong guy; the girl they wanted was with a pimp named Yegor only a few blocks away.

To the men Zhenya no longer existed and he found himself sitting on the curb loathing his newfound cowardice.