A Flash of Blue Sky

by Alon Preiss

  “Do you still want to visit Tatiana?” he asked, and she said yes. They were just entering the city of Moscow as the sun began to set, and they turned left at Vernadsky Avenue alongside a large boxy building, made up of faded blue and white blocks, a sad, ageing piece of joyless, marginally functional architecture. It was past midnight, but some Muscovites still strode about. When they stepped from the car, slamming the doors shut, a little girl, covered with dirt, peering from an alleyway, her hand outstretched. He shoved her away. “Her parents wait in the shadows,” he said. “They are probably criminals.” Irina handed some rubles to the little girl, who smiled sadly and ran off.

  “How can you call anyone a criminal?” she asked him. She pushed the front door open, and they both strode past three bored looking youths, smoking in the dingy lobby.

  “Are you criticizing me?” he asked, arrogant smirk on his lips. He pushed the elevator button, waiting for a whir of machinery that never came.

  “No,” she said. “I’m just asking a question. You brag to me that you know all the criminals personally – ”

  “It’s completely different.” He pushed the elevator button again, then, giving up, he gestured to the stairs. “Give me this building, the elevators would run. In America,” he added uncertainly, “you know, the elevators run.” In the stairwell, three floors up, they passed a teenage boy strumming on a guitar, singing a mildly subversive song by an underground performer, which had been banned ten years earlier. Several of his friends listened as he sang.

  Tatiana met them in her doorway. She shared a one-room apartment with three other students. As Irina and Viktor walked in, Tatiana was talking, and lighting candles; she liked candles. She had dark black hair, and with another sort of personality she would have been beautiful; in photographs she looked like the Russian spies who always tried to seduce Cold War heroes in the old American and English films that had just made their way to Yaroslavl movie theaters and state television. Perhaps that explained Irina’s devotion to Tatiana: the latter’s celluloid quality. Irina could imagine, even now, that she and Tatiana were deep in a film noir. Shadows danced on the wall.

  Tatiana did not complain about living conditions that were cramped even by Russian standards. She was majoring in international business, and predicted that she would wind up in New York, helping the Americans squander and rape Russia. Six months ago, just before heading off to university, she had bragged to her comrades in Yaroslavl that she would remain in the U.S., earning commissions. No one knew what she was talking about.

  Tatiana’s roommates were trying to study, each of them installed in a separate corner.

  “I know a café where we can go to talk,” she said. Irina and Viktor both nodded. “Wait one moment,” Tatiana said, and she opened her bureau drawer with a flourish and pulled out a handgun.

  “Green trees,” Irina muttered dismissively, and Tatiana ignored her.

  Outside, Tatiana led them down a side alley, to a wooden door with no sign above it. Conversation hummed inside. The café was dark and candle-lit, and they sat down in the corner.

  Tatiana soon began her boastful talk about her future in international capitalism.

  “Either you should have a gun, or some mafia friends.” She took a sip of tea. “Preferably both. I don’t think that you have any mafia friends.”

  Irina shivered. “Your soul is not in place. Don’t try to impress me.”

  “I'm not trying to impress you,” Tatiana replied. “It’s not my business if someone like you is impressed by someone like me.”

  “Irina is very hard on the new structure of Soviet society,” Viktor said. “Irina thinks that the mafia are exactly as bad as the criminals who wait on side streets, who rape women and steal money.”

  “For anyone to make a dent in Russia he needs mafia ties,” Tatiana replied self-importantly. “For any business deal to go through, the mafia needs to sign off. There’s not a government anymore. What do you think has replaced it?” She smiled. “Think about what you want to do with your life, Irina. Then make the connections.”

  In school she had been a die-hard Communist, Irina remembered. A true believer. One of that lot. Her conversion to capitalism seemed to her old school-mates just another kind of extremism.

  Irina shook her head. “I don’t want to be a part of that,” she said.

  “Then enjoy yourself cleaning the streets in Yaroslavl,” Tatiana said. “Or maybe you can get a job working in tourism. So when the bratva come into town in their big cars, you can sell them postcards.” She laughed. “In ten years, when all the chaos is over, they won’t be criminals anymore. They will have replaced the Union’s import-export channels. They will be brokering international business deals. You always said you wanted to be in the movies, didn’t you, Irina? They’ll be giving Hollywood access to Russian locations. They’ll be making movies themselves. You’re becoming very pretty, and maybe there’s a place for you in the movies.”

  Irina said angrily, “Don’t try to mock me like this. All I can hope for is that my factory won’t close down, but I’m not stupid.” She said her last statement in a tone of voice that fell far short of utter certainty.

  Tatiana shook her head. “Oh, that’s right. You’ve given up your dreams. You have too many scruples. Such a shame.” She took one last sip of tea. “In a decade, they won’t be killing people anymore. That’s the most important thing. That’s what will give them legitimacy.”

  “To make the United States, George Washington had to kill a lot of people, didn’t he?” Viktor agreed. “Our Union is disintegrating. It’s obvious, isn’t it? There used to be a government to distribute the food. Now there isn’t one. Without the mafia, everyone would starve while they wait for the sea weather. What they – we do is find ways to distribute the food.”

  “At ten times the price,” Irina said.

  “That just shows outdated thinking on your part,” he said. “In America, that would just be a free market. If anyone else can offer it more cheaply, let them do it. We have overhead we have to account for.”

  He stared at her intently. She had no answer for that, and he laughed.

  “Anyway, perhaps you have had a bit of education today,” Viktor said to Irina. He looked back and forth between the two young women. “I am taking Irina to a big reyv tomorrow night. This party will be a real demonstration of what Moscow’s new benefactors are doing for Russian society. There will be artists there, and writers, and the publishers of intellectual journals, and film directors and actresses. In the old days, these people couldn’t make the art they wanted. Now they are free. The Communist bosses gets their usual payoff, but even the important ministers are afraid these days to stand in the way of progress. So without the mafia, this would not happen.” He smiled. “I have keys to the building, and we can go take a look.”

  Tatiana shook her head, unimpressed, but Irina said she would go along. It would delay her return to Viktor’s apartment, and his company was becoming more and more tiresome. She was even thinking about losing Viktor in the street, spending the night at Tatiana’s place, then taking an early bus back to Yaroslavl.

  They walked Tatiana back to her door, and said good night. “We can walk from here,” Viktor said. They made a left turn, then a right, and the street opened up onto a wider thoroughfare. At a black building, Viktor stopped and pulled out his keys. People were still milling about on the street.

  They walked into the front hallway, turned left, and entered a large room with a stage at the front, and perhaps a hundred tables in the middle of the room. In the back was a dance floor with a capacity for hundreds of young lovers. They sat down in the dark at one of the tables. “I don’t know, Viktor,” Irina said. “If you ask my family, my friends, the people who can’t afford to eat back in my town, they would all say – ”

  “All they need to do,” he said, “is get a job that pays enough to eat.” He put a hand on Irina’s shoulder and looked into her eyes. “For years, Irina, government was kil
ling people. No one could eat. People were murdered in the forest. The Uzbek starved, the Kazakhs saw their sea drained. But people – your mother and father – worked for the government. Did you tell them that they should starve instead?”

  “Still – ”

  “I have something to show you,” he said. He took her hand and brought her to a back room, filled with vodka and wine and other drinks.

  Irina was unimpressed.

  “They’ll all drink a lot tomorrow night,” she said. He handed her a key and pointed to a door in the back of the room. She took the key and walked to the door, unlocked it. Inside were rows of pistols and machine guns, stacked along the floor.

  “From the Soviet army,” he called in to her.

  “Is this supposed to impress me?” she asked.

  “Yes.” He didn’t say anything else.

  She stood in the small storage room. “Now what?” she called, but there was no reply. She called out his name. A moment later he appeared in the doorway. “I hear someone,” he said. “I really shouldn’t have brought you. Stay here while I go look.”

  She stood nervously in the little room, staring at all the weapons. Some of these were from the army, she thought. She wondered which ones had killed a man. Which ones had killed children in Afghanistan? Now their country was about to collapse, the reason for the fighting in Afghanistan had ceased to exist. She recalled a young man interviewed on the street on the Soviet news the night the army pulled out of Afghanistan. “It was for a good cause,” he said, and that little tug of patriotism seemed to be enough for him. Failing is all right, if you’re doing the right thing. But now that man on the street must have learned that it had not been the right thing to do, that even the last seventy years had not been the right thing to do. Patriotism was dying in the ashes of her country. That young man on the street was watching his dreams dry up faster than the Aral sea.

  She was more nervous now. She wasn’t supposed to be here, in this room, this cache of mafia weapons. Viktor was young, he was just showing off and putting them both in danger. She should run for her life, she decided suddenly. She should find a window and scurry out. But there were no windows; there was no way out. She walked into the vodka room and whispered her friend’s name.

  Suddenly, the building became terribly silent, and Irina turned cold all over. The next second, when the building shuddered and shattered with a terrific hail of gunfire, she realized she had known it was coming, that the silence of impending death had been unmistakable. She froze; there were men walking through the building. She could hear them talking, laughing, their footsteps coming closer.

  She hurried back into the cache-room. She put a handgun into her jacket pocket, then she scooped up two machine guns and brought them into the liquor room. She trained one on the door. When they came in, whoever they were, she would fire. What if it were her friend? she thought for just a moment. It was not a hard decision: Then he will die, and it will be a terrible mistake. He never should have brought me here. She stood in the corner, her hands sweating on the machine-gun, her pointer finger twitching on the trigger.

  A heavy-set man with a Stalin mustache came into the room, squinting. Irina pushed down hard on the trigger and screamed with rage and despair and desperate fear – for a moment she heard no other sound, but then the machine-gun went wild, spraying the man with bullets. His body danced, his head exploded, scalp and brain splattered on the wall behind him. Still his body hung in the air, held up by the force of the bullets. She released her finger, and the corpse dropped to the ground in a heap.

  She ran out of the open storage room, already firing, tears blinding her vision; as the blaze of bullets pounded through the hallway, a young man lifted a gun towards her, but his chest burst wide open and he was thrown six feet backwards, crashing violently against the iron door. A young man like Viktor, maybe, who liked big cars, who wanted to impress girls. Irina walked though the building, firing indiscriminately. When she reached the open air, she threw the gun into the bushes. The street was clear; people had heard the gunfire, she assumed, and headed in other directions. She ran wildly through the streets, shaking, tears streaming down her cheeks. She wanted to run far from this place of death, but she thought that was not possible, not really. As she ran, she kept her hands in her pockets. Always, her right hand clutched the handgun in her jacket pocket.

  The next morning, Tatiana was puzzled to see Viktor’s black car still parked in front of her building. When she returned from classes, it was still there. Two men in big suits were standing on the driver’s side, trying their keys. Tatiana stopped for a moment and watched them, but one looked up and warned her away. She quickly vanished into her apartment building. By the evening, when she went out to meet some friends for dinner, the car was gone.

  When Irina stood shivering in the big empty building, her trigger finger shivering, she wished that someone would save her, that Viktor would call out, Irina, don’t be afraid, everything is fine, and that her worst suspicions would not be fulfilled.

  More than anything, Irina needed someone to save her, like that princess in the story her father had told her in Sochi, someone to grab her life, to give it form, to write it like a novel, and she would one day meet that man, and he would, in fact, guide her with the sure hand of a writer of fiction. But even later, as a slightly famous middle-aged woman with a comfortable stash of money on which to live, when she would sit down to write her autobiography, she would be unable to force herself to remember that the pivotal personality in her life had been a little mouse named Emmett, a nondescript, unimposing American with a face and body like a marshmallow on a hot day, a man who was nothing, nothing at all, small and meek and laughable. How could such a man rehabilitate a life? Faced with this dramatic dilemma, Irina would banish all mention of Emmett from her autobiography, and she would simply pretend that he had never existed. It was her own hard work that had led to her brief moment of rather monumental Hollywood greatness, she would tell her readers. She had been born with her life plan already in mind. She was a girl who always left nothing to chance.

  When Daniel returned to his office after lunch on Thursday, he found on his desk a pink phone message from Percy Edwards, the head of Edward Bear industries. He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply and dialed Percy’s number. The phone rang twice, and Percy picked up. He had begun his career as an engineer in the New Jersey plant, but he had rapidly made his way up the ladder as the old guard had faded and now ran the business from a company town in northern California. There was an energy and vitality to Percy, but, as the Environmental Protection Agency investigation thickened, also a palpable sense that his time was passing as well.

  “Daniel,” Percy said. “What have you got for me?”

  “I'll tell you the truth, Percy. I went out to Jersey yesterday.” And in terms as tactful as he could manage, Daniel explained that the entire town was a cesspool, that Percy’s employees had turned into ‘Swamp Thing,’ that the whole county smelled like a sewer.

  “So,” Percy said coolly, “what do you think?”

  “EPA’s offered a deal,” Daniel replied. “All the Jersey polluters sign on, Edward Bear takes the biggest hit. Eventually, we’ll have a meeting at the EPA office for all the potentially responsible parties where everyone can weigh in on the deal.”

  “And?”

  “Well, we could settle, if you want.”

  “And then what?”

  “I’d guide you through negotiations with the EPA, then we’d turn around and sue the insurance companies for the settlement costs.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we try to get the whole thing into court in New Jersey. The law is in our favor in New Jersey, and the insurance companies will be begging to settle if the Jersey courts exercise jurisdiction.” He laughed. “In New Jersey, the courts think every polluter is insured for the possibility of getting caught. It obviously helps us. If you settle with your insurer, you’d save years worth of attorney fees.”

&
nbsp; “Let’s start with the first question first,” Percy said. “Do you think we should settle with the E.P.A.?”

  Daniel stopped as though carefully considering the question, though his mind had been made up for days. “Let’s talk this through. Let me play Socrates for a minute here, OK? Do you guys deserve to clean this crap up? Is it your crap?”

  Edwards took a deep breath. “No. Edward Bear isn’t a polluter. We shouldn’t be liable at all.”

  “Edward Bear created the waste, right?”

  “Yeah, sure, but – ”

  “And Edward Bear arranged for the disposal of the waste, right?”

  Edwards paused a bit, then spoke slowly and calmly. “Let me explain my problem with that. For years, we had a contract with a company called Plastic People. It’s not as though they were our distributors. Plastic People made all the decisions. We made the stuff, but Plastic People took care of everything. They owned the plastic, they sold the plastic, they even owned the byproducts. We provided a service. We were technicians, that’s all. They hired a company to haul away all the byproducts. They worked out what dump site would take it.”

  “Do you know for sure which site took the waste?”

  “No, not for sure. I assume it was Site 34, but I don’t have any records of that, I don’t think. Why would we? And the shipper’s long gone. It was owned by Plastic People.”

  “Good.” Daniel smiled to himself.

  “You know, we had to let them haul the byproducts away. If we’d refused, it would have been, I don’t know, whatever you call it – unlawful conversion, or whatever. We would have been illegally retaining possession of their property. Contractually, we had no choice. We just followed orders.”

  “The Nuremberg defense,” Daniel said with a laugh.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you say?” Edwards asked. “The Nuremberg defense? What’s that? Will it work?”