There was a first time for everything.
Stella and Ivan Marenko walked unflinchingly under the turning rotors with posture erect and heads held high as if the mere ruffling of their hair thereby was perilously close to an excess of lèse-majesté.
Stella Marenko was a tall, robust, big-breasted woman in middle age, of the sort to appear on poster art of the mid-Bolshevik period heroically driving a tractor, or, by the look of her, picking it up and throwing it into a ditch.
She had a broad high-cheekboned Slavic face and eyes like sapphire lasers. Her long blond hair was secured above her ears by a silver tiara encrusted with black pearls. She wore a red silk pants suit secured by a sash crafted of lapis-lazuli beads and silver chain mail, high black boots, and a high-collared black silk cloak liberally trimmed in ermine.
Ivan Marenko was of roughly the same age, half a head shorter, and burly not quite to the point of being fat. His sleek black hair was artfully cut into a medium-length mane to blend with a full but neatly trimmed beard to create the impression of an expensively barbered Rasputin. His lips were full and expansive and there seemed to be laugh lines around his deep-set brown eyes.
He wore a black velvet take on a twentieth-century business suit without a shirt, the better to display his hirsute chest and the enormous gold medallion depending thereon, and, of all things, gold lamé boots.
And as they approached, Monique realized that both of them were dripping with jewelry, she in silver, he in gold. Every finger save the thumbs. Bracelets on both wrists. Pendants. Earrings in his left ear and both of hers. Heavy and rough-hewn for him, finely wrought and bejeweled for her.
Monique found herself wondering how much of it they were wearing under their clothes and on which body parts, then decided she really didn’t want to know.
“I’m Monique Calhoun, of Bread & Circuses VIP services—”
“And we are your Very Important Potentates!” Ivan Marenko boomed out at her, then grabbed Monique in a bear hug and kissed her on both cheeks before she could even catch her breath.
“Nikulturni, Ivan!” Stella Marenko said.
She smiled ruefully at Monique as Ivan Marenko released her.
“He is again being . . . what is the word . . . ?”
“Asshole!” proclaimed Ivan Marenko proudly. “I am again being an asshole. Yes, Ms. Calhoun, this is correct?”
“Uh . . .”
“You are embarrassing the girl, Ivan. Ms. Calhoun, feel free to tell this nikulturni asshole he is behaving like . . . like . . .”
“Like an asshole!” said Ivan Marenko and burst into laughter.
And his wife joined in.
“Uh, perhaps you’d like to choose your accommodations now . . . ?” Monique suggested in a bit of a daze.
“Perhaps,” said Ivan Marenko, eyeing the ornate grand entrance of the top hotel in Paris like a three-star chef perusing yesterday’s leftover goods at the fish market.
“Or perhaps not,” Stella Marenko said dubiously as Monique led them up the stairs and into the entrance lobby, where, as per her instructions, they were met by the hotel manager, and a tuxedoed waiter bearing two glasses of champagne and caviar canapés on a silver tray.
The Marenkos slurped down the champagne in a few quick gulps, then sampled the canapés. They exchanged disdainful glances.
“Russian crap,” Stella Marenko muttered.
Ivan Marenko held up his empty glass.
“Where is bottle?” he demanded.
The manager quickly dispatched the waiter to fetch it. It only took a couple of minutes, but Russian crap or not, the Marenkos managed to gobble up the caviar canapés before he returned.
After which, trailed by the fawning hotel manager and the champagne-pouring waiter, Monique took the Marenkos on a tour of the best accommodations the Hotel Ritz had to offer, immense bedrooms, more immense parlors, suites featuring libraries, dining rooms, grand pianos, even one with a harpsichord. Suites furnished with millions of wu’s worth of antiques. Suites with huge terraces looking south over the Seine, westward into an Eiffel Tower sunset. Suites that had accommodated CEOs and heads of state, cine stars and royalty.
The Marenkos were mostly silent during all this, except for muttered exchanges in Russian, and the occasional demand for more champagne when the waiter was slow enough to let their glasses go dry.
By the time they had seen it all, the champagne bottle was empty, and steam was all but coming out of the hotel manager’s ears. Monique, the Marenkos, and the manager descended to the lobby in the fancy elevator in stony silence.
“I have a few other things to attend to,” the manager said, as stiffly as if someone had shoved a curtain rod up his rectum. “Do let me know as soon as you’ve made your choice.” And made his exit, leaving Monique and the Marenkos standing there by the elevator bank.
Ivan Marenko stared at his wife.
Stella Marenko stared back, nodded.
“Shithole,” she said.
“Da.”
“Rent us a town house, Ms. Calhoun,” Stella Marenko said. “Three, four floors. Left Bank. Nice view of the Seine. Sauna.”
“Maybe a swimming pool?” suggested Ivan Marenko.
“Ivan! Don’t make the girl crazy! If it doesn’t have a swimming pool, you’ll just have to live with it.”
Ivan Marenko gave Monique a warm apologetic smile.
“Take your time,” he said. “We wait in the bar.”
“You want what?” exclaimed Eric Esterhazy.
“Rent bar,” said Stella Marenko.
“La Reine de la Seine does not rent out its salons for private parties,” Eric Esterhazy told these comic-opera Siberians. Least of all when we’ve sold half the guest-list rights to Bread & Circuses already, he refrained from adding.
“Only small bar,” said Ivan Marenko. “For big money.”
Eric was going to have an unpleasant word or two with the security guards in the embarkation pavilion for letting these arrogant clowns on board in the first place.
The best casting director in the world could not have done better than Ivan and Stella Marenko for super-rich Siberians, she wearing a flowing dress sewn together out of python hide and cut low in the bodice to display the huge ruby pendant hung upon her mighty breasts and a tall leopard-skin hat and matching cloak, he sporting a chamois-colored suit tailored out of actual chamois pelts and trimmed with gold braid, the both of them tastelessly festooned with enough expensive jewelry to open a major branch of Cartier.
Eric had been on the forward upper deck when they made their entrance, affording him the pleasure of watching them storm up the gangway as if they owned his boat, or soon would, if they felt like it.
Eric had dashed down to the lower deck to confront this apparition, and by the time he was descending the interior staircase to the restaurant, the Marenkos were already inside, opening the door to the stern bar, peering inside like real-estate agents.
“Who do you think you are?” Eric had demanded angrily.
“I think we are Stella and Ivan Marenko,” said the woman. “Is this not so, Ivan?”
“I am sure of it. It is not yet late enough in the day for me to be drunk enough to have forgotten my own name.”
“Later, it may be different.”
“How did you get on my boat?” Eric snarled.
“Your boat?” said Stella Marenko. “Ah, then you must be the famous Prince Eric Esterhazy!” She held out a paw so laden with rings that it must’ve been a considerable athletic feat to hold it horizontal. “Shouldn’t you be kissing my hand?”
Eric managed to remain enough of a gentleman not to tell the woman what part of his anatomy she could kiss, but not by much. “How the hell did you get past the guards?” he demanded.
Ivan Marenko had given him a broad wink.
“We are very big tippers,” he had said.
Rent them the stern bar for the duration of the UNACOCS conference? Au contraire, the Marenkos had earned themselves a permanent e
ighty-six from the guest list.
“Perhaps I do not make myself clear?” Ivan Marenko said. “English is not my first language. We want to rent big table in bar to entertain guests. All nights of UNACOCS conference. We buy drinks. We buy drugs. We pay you regular bar prices. We ask no discount for volume.”
“Where is problem?” said his wife.
“I say who the guests on this boat will be,” Eric said, temporarily half-truthfully and not put in a better mood for it.
“So, as Stella says, where is problem? We buy your guests drinks and drugs from you with our money. This is your idea of a bad deal?”
You are my idea of an arrogant boor was what Eric wanted to tell him.
“I maintain a highly selective guest list, and thus far, I must say, you have done little to convince me that you even have a place on it,” he said instead, which amounted to a more elegant phrasing of much the same thing.
“You should now consult your principal,” Ivan Marenko said.
“What?”
“Call your principal, Prince Potemkin,” said Stella Marenko.
Suddenly the theatricality had been turned down and something else had been turned up. Suddenly they were speaking better English.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eric said, not sounding very convincing even to himself.
“So have Eduardo Ramirez explain it to you,” Ivan Marenko said evenly.
Eric locked eyes with him for a long silent moment without being able to fathom what was behind them. But it was enough to convince him that it would be prudent to do what the Siberian suggested.
Stella Marenko had stepped into the stern bar and apparently inspected the stock. “Ivan!” she called out. “Come here! Let the boy make his call in private! They have pepper vodka!”
“In freezer?” Ivan Marenko boomed back at her without changing gaze or expression. “Real stuff?”
“In refrigerator! Russian!”
“Vodka you keep in freezer compartment,” Ivan Marenko told Eric. “Best pepper vodka is Ukrainian. Russian stuff is knockoff for export.”
He winked. “You will remember this, yes, Prince Potemkin?” He clapped Eric heartily on the shoulder. “Now go be a good Bad Boy and call Ramirez.”
There was a phone behind the bar of the main saloon at the other end of the restaurant, sound only, and Eric went there to call Eduardo.
“There’s a couple of Siberians on the boat slurping up our vodka even as I speak and demanding I rent them a permanent table for the duration,” he said, after passing through several layers of intermediaries.
“Ah, so you’ve met the Marenkos,” Eduardo said, sounding rather amused.
“I’ve endured the dubious pleasure. Who in hell are they?”
“Important clients, Eric.”
“Clients?”
“Movers and shapers in the upper realms of the Siberian syndics.”
“Those buffoons?”
“Those buffoons paid a handsome price just for a look at the recordings that prove the white tornadoes are disneys,” Eduardo Ramirez told him. “They’re here to decide whether to put together a consortium to buy the reproduction and distribution rights and use them against the Big Blue Machine. If they do, we are talking hundreds of millions of wu. Need I tell you that they are therefore to be afforded every conceivable courtesy?”
“They seem so . . . so . . .”
Eduardo laughed. “Indeed they do,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“And have you miss such an amusing experience?” Eduardo said, and laughed again. “And a lesson as well, Eric,” he said quite seriously. “Remember what I said about assuming your adversaries are fools . . . ?”
“It’s never an advantage to assume that your adversaries are fools, even if they are. . . ?”
“Just so,” said Eduardo. “Now consider the advantage in persuading potential adversaries that you are.”
Stella Marenko did not seem impressed as she gazed at the formidable displays of climatech machineries laid out on the floor of the Grand Palais for the perusal of just such potential patrons as herself.
“So this is famous Crystal Palace,” she said dubiously.
“Grand Palais, Mrs. Marenko,” Monique Calhoun told her.
“Whatever. Looks like flea market in old Baikonur cosmodrome.”
Her husband seemed more interested in the overarching glass and iron framework ceiling than what was under it.
“Smart glass, da?”
“That’s right.”
“So why is smart glass faking crappy gray day with storm when it’s blue skies and sunshine outside?”
“Supposed to be white tornado, Ivan.”
“They put whole conference inside commercial for itself?” Ivan Marenko said sardonically. “This is what your syndic calls deep sell, Monique? Deep as what’s left of Aral Sea. Subtle as Socialist Realist metrostation mural.”
Monique found herself giving him a sudden sharp look. The Marenkos were the biggest ass-pains she had ever experienced in her career in VIP services, totally and unreasonably demanding, entirely unselfconscious of their own arrogance, crude, boorish, and in their own terms, nikulturni.
But sometimes a native shrewdness broke through to remind her that these people couldn’t have gotten to the position where they could get away with behaving as they did by being as thick as they generally seemed.
And Ivan Marenko had a good point.
Having spent yesterday miraculously securing the Marenkos their town house close enough behind the Musée d’Orsay to give them their required view of the Seine, finding and moving in the portable sauna that it unfortunately lacked, renting them additional furniture and more agreeable paintings, and stocking the place with food and drink, Monique hadn’t been to the Grand Palais at all.
But as she had learned from the news coverage, after Allison Larabee’s passionate plea to turn down the planetary heat, the conference sessions had degenerated, and she suspected according to plan, from a scientific symposium into a series of sales presentations by representatives of the climatech companies sponsoring UNACOCS for expensive schemes to do just that.
Create and maintain a vast orbital ring of finely divided dust to reduce incoming sunlight. Or do it with gigantic mylar occluders. Use cloud-cover generators on an unprecedented massive scale to create permanent blizzards to rebuild the crumbling ice caps. Use orbital mirrors to change ocean currents to somehow bury excess calories in the abyssal oceanic heat sink.
Suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by reforesting every available meter with Qwik-grow trees. Or with a new gene-tweaked hemp supposedly able to thrive in desert extremes. Or by enriching oceanic nutrient upwellings with iron to increase photosynthetic plankton.
Would you buy a used planet from these people?
Because Monique lacked the financial means to do so, making such decisions was not her problem. But since, according to Posner, the Marenkos were here as representatives of interests who did, it apparently was a decision they were here to consider.
Yet despite the fact that she now found herself working for the Big Blue Machine in the service of a campaign to separate these fools from huge amounts of Siberian money, Monique was not displeased to see that they were not swallowing it whole.
“Would you like to attend the conference session now?” Monique suggested not very enthusiastically.
“Better than sitting through Christmas performance of Nutcracker Suite danced by badly trained bears with audience of bored snot-nosed brats,” Stella Marenko admitted. “But not by much.”
Monique had to choke back laughter. There were even odd moments when she caught herself liking the Siberians.
“Better to inspect the goods than listen to advertisements,” her husband said.
“Da.”
So Monique tagged along in the background while the Marenkos wandered among the kiosks and industrial pavilions, the cloud-cover generators and plankton-seeding
barges, the models of launch vehicles, orbital mirrors and occluders, the nuclear terrain-sculpting charges and the before-and-after dioramas.
The Marenkos did not seem to be entirely ignorant of climatech as far as Monique could tell, or at least knew enough to fake it with the industrial reps when one of them caught them kicking the metaphorical tires.
“Covers how many square kilometers. . . ?”
“Is guaranteed no residual rads . . . ?”
“What is scale of model? How much area is deployed. . . ?”
Monique found it amusing that while their English was good enough to ask apparently intelligent technical questions, every time the reps sidled up to the subject of cost or money, they shrugged, threw up their hands, and reverted to Russian.
It seemed that the Marenkos were only at the Grand Palais to put in their usual conspicuous appearance. The only time they showed real interest in anything was when they were confronted with a rare something they couldn’t have.
Namely a peek at whatever was inside that big enclosure of canvas screening near the center of the exhibition floor. There was no sign, no banner, no rep, just blank green canvas and two armed guards flanking the only entrance flap.
“What are they guarding?” Stella Marenko asked Monique.
Monique shrugged.
“We look inside,” said Ivan Marenko, barging up to the entrance. The guards took single side steps to bar his way.
Ivan was not pleased. Nor used to being obstructed.
“Out of way, please,” he demanded. “We look inside.”
“No you don’t. This is a restricted area.”
“What’s the big secret?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I am Ivan Marenko!”
“And I am Jared, your security guard for today, and I’m telling you you’re gonna have to wait till Sunday to find out like everyone else.”
“Is only doing his job, Ivan,” Stella Marenko said, coming up behind him, and trying her version of a charm offensive, which was to reach into a pocket, pull out a fistful of Siberian gold wu coins, and shove them under the guards’ noses. “So, nice boys, you tell us what is big secret, we give you big tip.”
Greenhouse Summer Page 17