Fifteen minutes later, Yulia and I were alone in my Mercedes, driving down a wide country road on our way to East Hampton. At eight p.m. on a Sunday night, the traffic was going the other way, so we were moving along at a pretty good clip. We had the windows open, and the sweet scent of Yulia's perfume was mixing with the earthy scents of hay and pine in a most delicious way.
Keeping one eye on the road, I was sneaking peeks at her out of the corner of my other eye, searching for even a hint of a bad angle. There was none. She was absolutely perfect looking, especially those long, bare legs of hers, which she had crossed at the thighs. She was doing something very sexy with her foot—letting her right sandal dangle from the tips of her toes and slowly swinging her foot up and down. I tried my best to keep my eyes on the road.
Through the sound of rushing air, I raised my voice and said, “So what was it like winning that contest? Did it change your life forever?”
“Yes,” replied Yulia, “it is beautiful outside.”
Whuh? I had been referring to the rather astonishing fact that Yulia Sukhanova was the first, last, and certain to be the only Miss Soviet Union. After all, the Evil Empire was now residing in the failed-nation-state crapper—next to Rome, the Third Reich, the Ottoman Empire, and King Tut's Egypt—so there would only be Miss Russias going forward.
Still, Miss USSR or not, Miss Yulia was even weaker in the English department than I had originally expected. I needed to cut her some slack and keep things simple. “Yeah,” I said, “it's a beautiful night for a drive.”
“Yes,” she replied, “it will start at nine o'clock this night.”
What the…? “You mean the movie?”
She nodded eagerly. “Yes, I like to go to movies.”
The movies, I thought. How come these female Russkies couldn't say the word the? What was so f**king difficult about it? Well, whatever. The beauty queen was gorgeous, so her deficiency could easily be overlooked. Changing the subject, I asked, “So do you think Inna will show up tonight?”
That one she caught. “No ways,” she said. “This is Inna for you. Always playing… uh… how do you say this in English, uh… svacha.”
“Matchmaker?” I offered.
“Da, da!” exclaimed the linguistically challenged beauty queen.
I smiled and nodded, feeling like I'd just reached the pinnacle of Mount Everest. So emboldened, I reached across the center console and grabbed Miss Soviet Union's hand. “Is it okay if I hold your hand?” I asked bashfully.
Just as bashfully, she replied, “Three months now.”
I stared at her for a moment. “What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “This is last time hand held.”
“Really? That long?”
She nodded. “Da; this is when I break up with boyfriend.”
“Ohhhh,” I said, smiling. “You mean Cyrus, right?”
Her blue eyes popped open. “You know Cyrus?”
I smiled and winked. “I have my sources,” I said slyly.
The “Cyrus” I had referred to was none other than Cyrus Pahlavi, the shah of Iran's grandson. I had done quite a bit of checking on Yulia that afternoon. I had found out that she'd just ended a three-year relationship with Cyrus, who, two years prior, had replaced the prince of Italy as her main squeeze. A royalty-monger, I'd thought.
In essence, Yulia had come to America as an ambassador of goodwill, arriving in 1990 under the watchful eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the then-head of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League, and now the richest man in Russia. More than anything, Yulia was a propaganda tool: bright, educated, cultured, classy, graceful, charming, and, above all else, drop-dead beautiful. She was meant to represent the very best of what the Soviet Union had to offer and, for that matter, Communism as a whole.
It was a wild tale—one of political intrigue and financial skullduggery—but everything was starting to make sense to me. There was a reason why Yulia stood out so regally among the Romans: She was supposed to. A hundred million women had vied for the job of “first Miss Soviet Union,” and Yulia Sukhanova had won. She had been groomed and trained to carry a single message: that the Soviet Union was best.
Upon her arrival in America, Yulia met with Nancy Reagan, George Bush, Miss USA, newscasters, socialites, rock stars, dignitaries, and diplomats. Ultimately, she traveled around the country, doing ribbon-cuttings and hosting game shows, while she served as a proud representative of the Motherland.
And then the Soviet Union fell.
Suddenly Yulia became the reigning beauty queen of a nonexistent superpower. The once-proud Soviet Union was now a bankrupt nation-state that would go down in the history books as nothing more than a failed experiment in bogus economics and corrupt ideology. So Yulia decided to stay in the United States and become a model. Inna, at the time, was one of the only Russian-speaking bookers in the modeling industry, so she took Yulia under her wing.
There were only two things that now troubled me about Yulia. The first were some references to a man named Igor, who was vaguely connected to Yulia and followed her around, in the shadows; and the second was the fact that Yulia was a KGB agent and Igor was her master. And as far-fetched as it seemed, they had originally come here under the auspices of the Soviet government, hadn't they?
So here I was, five hours later, heading to East Hampton, with a female KGB agent sitting next to me, and the dreaded Igor lurking in the shadows. Igor, I figured, was the least of my worries.
“Anyway,” I said to the beauty queen/KGB agent. “I didn't mean that in a bad way. We all have our sources, you know? I'm sure you have yours too, right, right?” I winked playfully at KGB. “I guess mine are just a little better than most.”
KGB smiled back, seeming to understand. “Yes, you are very good cook.”
“Whuh? What are you talking about? What cook?”
“You say sauces,” said KGB, who apparently had slept through her English classes at the secret KGB training school. “Like this night: You make tomato sauces, on penne.”
I started laughing. “No—not sauces! Sources, with an r.“ I looked KGB in the eye and dragged out sources for all it was worth, so it came out like Sourrrrrrrrrrces. Then I said, “You get it?”
She let go of my hand and began shaking her head in disgust, saying something like: “Bleaha muha, stupido English! Ehhh! It make no sense!” Then she started waving her perfectly toned arms around the car, as if she were swatting imaginary flies. “Souwwwwsses… Sourrrrrrces… Seeeeeeesses… Sowwwwwsses!” she was muttering. “Crazy! Crazy! Crazy…”
After a few seconds, she started giggling and said, “This English make me crazy! I swear—it make no sense. Russian make sense!” With that, she hit the power-window button and pointed to the side of the road and motioned for me to pull over.
I pulled beneath a large maple tree a few feet off the road, put the car in park, and turned off the lights. The radio was barely audible, but KGB reached over and flicked it off anyway. Then she turned to me and said very slowly: “I… do… speak… English. It is just hard to understand with wind”—the wind—“blowing. I thought you say you make sauces, like tomato sauces, because you make that tonight: tomato sauces.”
“It's okay,” I said, smiling. “You speak English a lot better than I speak Russian.”
“Da,” she said softly, and she turned to face me, leaning her back against the passenger door and crossing her arms beneath her br**sts. Over her pink baby-T-shirt she had thrown on a white cotton sweater, a very soft cable-knit, with a very low V-neck, bordered with two thick stripes, one maroon and the other forest green. It was the sort of old-fashioned preppy sweater that you see in old photographs of people playing tennis. She had pushed up the sleeves, revealing wonderfully supple wrists and a very classy watch, the latter of which was thin and understated. It had a pink-leather band and a pearl-white face. Her blond hair looked shiny as corn silk. It rested on either side of the front of her sweater, framing the face of an angel.
She didn't look like a KGB agent, did she? I took a deep breath and looked into KGB's liquid blue eyes and smiled warmly. Try as I might, I couldn't help but compare her to the Duchess. In many ways, they looked very much the same: blond and blue-eyed, broad-shouldered yet thin-boned, perfectly proportioned above and below the waist. And they both stood with that same imperious posture—the eager young cheerleader, with the shoulders pulled back and theirs knees locked out and their perfectly round butts stuck out—that used to drive me so wild.
“You're beautiful,” I said softly to KGB, ignoring my last thought.
“Da,” she said wearily, “krasavitza, krasavitza…. I know this,” and she shook her head with equal weariness, as if to say, “I've been called that a thousand times, so you're going to have to do better than that.” Then she smiled and said, “And you are cutie too, and you like real Russian man! You know this?”
I shook my head and smiled. “No, what do you mean?”
She raised her chin toward my ankle bracelet. “You steal money”—she winked—”like real Russian man!” She giggled. “And I hear you steal a lot!”
Jesus Christ! I thought. Leave it to the damn Russkies! Of course, this was not the moment to alert KGB to the fact that I hadn't stolen quite enough—and that because of that I would not be living on Meadow Lane next summer. Better to cross that bridge when I came to it, I figured.
“Yeah,” I said, forcing a smile, “but I'm not exactly proud of it.”
“When is jail for you?” she asked.
“Not for a while,” I said softly. “Another four years or so. I'm not really sure.”
“And your wife?”
I shook my head back and forth. “Getting divorced.”
She nodded sadly. “She is pretty.”
“Yeah, she is,” I said softly. “And she gave me two great kids. I guess I'll always love her for that, you know?”
“You still love her?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No, I don't.” I shrugged. “I mean, for a while I thought I did, but I think I was just…” I paused for a moment, trying to find words that KGB would understand. In truth, I wasn't really sure how I felt about the Duchess. I loved her and hated her, and I suspected that I always would. But one thing I was certain of was that the only way to get over someone was to fall in love with someone else. “… I think I was just in love with the thought of being in love. I wasn't actually in love with her anymore. Too many bad things had happened. Too much hurt.” I looked into KGB's eyes. “Do you understand what I mean?”
“Da,” she replied quickly, “I do; this is common.” She looked away for a moment, as if lost in thought. “You know, I am here nine years now.” She shook her head in amazement. “Can you imagine? I should speak better, I think, but I never have American friends. My friends are all Russians.”
I nodded in understanding—understanding far more than KGB probably gave me credit for. There were only two types of Russians I had met so far: those who embraced America, and those who held it in contempt. The former did everything they could to assimilate themselves into the American way of life: they learned the language, they dated American men, they ate American food, and, eventually, they became American citizens.
The latter group, however, did just the opposite: They refused to assimilate. They held on to their Soviet heritage like a dog with a bone. They lived amid Russians, they worked amid Russians, they socialized with Russians, and they refused to master the English language. And at the very heart of this, I knew, was the fact that they still longed for the glory days of the Soviet Empire, when the world marveled at the ingenuity of Sputnik and the courage of Yury Gagarin and the iron will of Khrushchev. It was a heady time to be a Soviet, with the world trembling at the Warsaw Pact and the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yulia Sukhanova had been a product of all that—no, she epitomized that. She still longed for the days of the Great Soviet Empire and, in consequence, had refused to assimilate. Ironically, this didn't make me respect her any less—in fact, quite the contrary: I felt her pain. I, too, had risen once, to the dizziest heights of Wall Street, becoming a celebrity of sorts, albeit in a twisted sense of the word. Nonetheless, just like Yulia Sukhanova, it had all come crashing down on me. The only difference was that her crash was through no fault of her own.
Still, both of us, it seemed, needed to figure out a way to reconcile a completely insane past with any possible future. Perhaps, I thought, we could do it together; perhaps, once we got past the language barrier, she could help me make sense of what had happened in my life, and I could help her make sense of hers. With that thought, I took a deep breath and went for broke:
“Can I kiss you?” I said softly.
To that, Miss Yulia Sukhanova, the first, last, and only Miss Soviet Union, smiled bashfully. Then she nodded.
CHAPTER 22
STAYING THE COURSE
nd we made love.
Not that night, but the very next day.
And it was beautiful; in fact, not only was it beautiful but, thanks to some very savvy biochemists at the Pfizer drug company, I performed like a world-class stud.
Indeed, just before I picked up KGB at the Creature's Sag Harbor cottage, I swallowed fifty milligrams of Viagra on an empty stomach. In consequence, by the time we pulled into my driveway that afternoon, I had an erection that the DEA could have used to break down a crack-house door.
It's not like I was impotent or anything (I swear!), but, nonetheless, it had seemed like a prudent move. After all, to consume a blue bomber, as a Viagra was affectionately known (due to its purplish color and bombastic effect), was the equivalent of taking out a biochemical insurance policy against the most dreaded of all male complexes: performance anxiety.
I had been a biochemical stud, not just that afternoon but into that evening as well. What Pfizer doesn't advertise on the label (and what every man who's taken one knows) is that blue bombers have a way of lingering in your system for a while. So, eight hours later, while your erection might no longer be suitable as a battering ram, it's still stiff enough to hang a few pieces of dry-cleaning on.
Somewhere around the fourteenth hour, the last blue-bomber molecules have been metabolized to the point of worthlessness, turning you back into a mortal man again. It was for that very reason that, precisely fourteen hours later, I took another blue bomber, and then fourteen hours after that I took yet another.
KGB, I figured, could handle it. Yet, sometime late Wednesday afternoon, even she began to complain. She was limping toward my master bathroom, dressed in her Soviet birthday suit, which consisted of a commie-red ribbon in her hair and nothing else, and she was muttering, “Bleaha muha! Your thing don't go down! There is something wrong here! It crazy! It crazy,” and she slammed the bathroom door behind her, muttering a few more Russian expletives.
Meanwhile, I was lying in bed, faceup, dressed in my American birthday suit, which consisted of a federally issued electronic monitoring bracelet and a Viagra-induced erection that was stiffer than steel, and I was fairly beaming. After all, it's not every day that a five-foot-seven-inch Jew-boy from Queens gets to send the first, last, and only Miss Soviet Union limping to the bathroom with her loins on fire! And while there was no denying that the boys at Pfizer had a hand in that, it was very much besides the point.
The point was that I was falling in love again.
In fact, later that afternoon, when KGB told me that she had to head back to her apartment in Manhattan, I felt my heart sink. And when she called me a few hours later, saying that she missed me, my spirits soared. And then when she called again, two hours after that, just to say hello, I immediately called Monsoir and told him to pick her up at her apartment and bring her back to the Hamptons.
So it was that she arrived later that night, carrying a very large suitcase, which I gladly helped her unpack. And just like that we became inseparable. Over the next few days we did everything together: ate, drank, slept, shopped, played tennis, worked out, rode bikes, Rollerbladed, went Jet-Skiing—we even showered together!
And, of course, at every opportunity, we made love.
Each night we built a fire on the beach and made love on a white cotton blanket, beneath the stars. And, of course, with each upward thrust, I would sneak a peak toward the dunes, checking for the dreaded Igor, who, according to her, was merely her brother-in-law who had come to the States to keep an eye on her. And while her explanation had seemed a bit thin, I decided not to press the issue.
When the weekend arrived, no partyers appeared. The Creature had seen to that—spreading the word that 1496 Meadow Lane was closed for business. The following Monday morning, I dropped KGB off at her Midtown apartment to pack up more of her belongings, and then I headed down to 26 Federal Plaza to meet with the Bastard and OCD. Not surprisingly, I was back in the Bastard's good graces again, so the meeting went quickly.
The topic was the upcoming Gaito sting, and we came to a quick decision that I would try to set one last meeting with the Chef before James Loo came into town. The goal was simple: to get James Loo to accept cash. I would tell the Chef that I wanted James Loo to know that I was serious—and to know that James Loo was serious too. I would provide Loo with a small cash deposit, as a token of good faith: $50,000, I would suggest, which he could use to get things going.
At first I was skeptical of the plan, thinking that the Chef would smell a rat. But, on second thought, I knew he wouldn't. For some inexplicable reason, something had clicked off in his mind, something related to the irrational joy he got from getting around the law.
He was a complicated man, an otherwise law-abiding citizen who would never dream of breaking “the law” as he considered it— which is to say, all laws not having to do with securities trading, the movement of money, and its subsequent reporting to the IRS. If you were to ask the Chef for advice on how to rob a bank or how to kite checks, he would either report you to the authorities himself or, more likely, lose your number forever.
This, however, was different. We were talking about money that, in his mind, we had stolen fair and square—no violence had been committed, no guns were placed to people's heads, the victims were nameless and faceless, and, most important, if we hadn't done it ourselves, someone else would have done it just the same. In consequence, we were justified to hide our dirty money from those who meant to find it.