“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.”
The guards eyed each other greedily but, it seemed to Monique, forlornly.
“We don’t know.”
“They don’t tell us.”
“We play game. You guess. We like, you win.”
“Bunch of computer stuff, I think.”
“Not climatech?”
“Don’t look like it.”
The Marenkos looked at each other, exchanged a few words in Russian.
“Okay boys,” Stella Marenko said, handing over the money, “have a nice day.”
“So what you think, Monique?” Stella said as Ivan wandered over to inspect a plankton-seeding barge.
“About what?”
“Mystery item.”
Monique shrugged.
“You have conference program? Anything interesting Sunday?”
Monique fished the program booklet out of her bag, scanned it. “Presentation of ocean current modification proposal by Orbital Mechanix. Presentation of climate model by John Sri Davinda. Presentation of albedo-increasing forest cover by Qwik-grow. Summing up by General Secretary Lars Bendsten. Closing ceremony. Usual stuff.”
Shit, she realized,
I’m
lapsing into Russified English!
She vowed to watch her sentence structure for the duration of the Marenkos’ tour of the climatech exhibitions, which fortunately did not prove difficult, since the Siberians seemed to lose interest after another twenty minutes or so during which they mostly conversed with each other in Russian.
“Okay, we see enough,” Ivan Marenko finally said as their brownian trajectory took them near the entrance to the makeshift auditorium from which the drone of the proceedings could be dimly heard.
“You want to catch some of the conference?” Monique asked.
“So, Ivan?” Stella Marenko asked.
“Better to catch up on drinking,” her husband said. “Is bullshit in there. Answers only one question . . .”
Stella Marenko eyed him warily. “This is going to be joke, Ivan?”
“Da.”
Stella glanced at Monique. “
Dirty
joke,” she told her. “Knows no other kind.” Monique noticed that half a dozen people on the way into the conference, drawn, no doubt, by the visual spectacle of the Marenkos, had paused within earshot to listen.
“Why is planet like nymphomaniac?” Ivan Marenko said.
Stella Marenko rolled her eyes. “Okay, so why is planet like nymphomaniac, Ivan?”
“
You
should know, Stella!”
Ivan Marenko grabbed his wife squarely by the crotch as Monique goggled in disbelief.
“Much easier to heat up than cool down!”
The restaurant band was playing Dixieland Bach, the tables were full of chattering diners, but the raucous noise leaking from the aft bar was still audible over the general buzz of the far larger salon even from the foot of the spiral staircase.
Eric Esterhazy smiled, waved, chatted, did his professional hostly duty as he meandered through the restaurant toward the stern, but inside he was seething as he made his way to the Marenkos’ lair.
For two nights now the Siberians had held court back there. He had been constrained, that is all but ordered, to remove a third of the tables in the aft bar to make room for one that the Marenkos appeared to have acquired at one of those larcenous antique boutiques specializing in fobbing off flea-market junk on tourists at ridiculous prices, an oversized round wrought-iron dreko-deco monstrosity that looked as if it had been fabricated from an outsized manhole cover and a defunct nineteenth-century Métro kiosk.
And there they sat, drinking like Road Warrior mercenaries back from a bone-dry six-month tour guarding the Ka’bah in Mecca, ordering whole smoked Scottish salmon and baked sturgeon by the school, wild boar, venison, and pheasant by the meat locker, fruits de mer by the boatload, and caviar by the ice bucket delivered to their table, and floating it all on a continuous flood of the most expensive champagne and wine and exotic vodkas swilled down as if they were supermarket plonk as they invited all comers to partake of their largesse in loud beer-hall voices.
Eric wondered why he was even drawn to visit this unseemly permanent brouhaha, since there was nothing he could do to impose any measure of civilized restraint, Eduardo Ramirez having made it clear that if the Marenkos chose to bite the heads off live chickens and spit them across the room, he was to supply the poultry and spittoons.
Perhaps it was the same outraged instinct that caused baboons to display their flaming red buttocks in the face of intruders. The Siberians had usurped a portion of
his boat
as their own, and if he was
powerless to drive them off, the least he could do was establish his own right to invade it with impunity, without, of course, going so far as dropping his pants.
The Marenkos’ table and surrounding environs were crowded as usual. As many chairs as was geometrically possible had been pulled up to the table and filled, most of these with climatologists, including Pereiro, Braithwaite, and even Allison Larabee, plus Aubrey Wright, and some lower-rank climatech-corp people.
A second-tier standing-room crowd consisting mostly of press, show people, professional celebrities, and assorted hangers-on reached greedily over the shoulders of the fortunate seated for the huge iced mountain of fruits de mer, the caviar-and-sour-cream-filled blinis, the contents of the caviar bucket itself, the charcuterie platter, the tranches of smoked salmon and smoked freshwater eel.
Ivan and Stella Marenko poured drinks with one hand almost as fast as empty glasses were shoved under the bottles they held, he vodka, she champagne, while belting it down themselves with the other. There was a mound of designer dust on a Tiffany mirror that guests were vacuuming up through rolled and taped hundred-wu notes that had been thoughtfully supplied.
“Aha, so Sweet Prince Potemkin arrives!” Stella Marenko shouted by way of greeting. “But sober as Saturday night in downtown Kabul and tush as tight as my dress!”
This item was a silver sheath that seemed spray-painted on, the paint having given out just north of her nipples and south of her ass. Her long blond hair was cornrowed with beads of emeralds and rubies. A gem-encrusted golden dagger depended on a heavy chain between her bulging breasts.
She shoved away the forest of empty glasses supplicating her like the ravening beaks of baby birds with her bottle, grabbed her husband’s, and filled a champagne glass with vodka. Her bloodshot eyes glowed like whorehouse neon.
“Loosen rectum and join very serious intellectual party!” she barbled boozily. “I learn English verb form! You drink till you stink, he drank till he stank, I’m drunk as a skunk!”
She handed the glass to Eric, who did not need to approach within
range of her breath to verify that that exalted state had indeed long since been achieved.
“Is everything all right, Madam Marenko?” he said frostily. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
“You think you’re up to it, do you, boy?”
“I
meant
is there anything you need?”