Troika (9 page)

“Yes. When I was little, maybe around six, seven years old.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“I told my mom, that’s her brother. But she wouldn’t hear of it, said I must be confused. And that was that.”

“What ever happened to him?” Julian asked. His thoughts turned to Petrov, how his friend had been violated by the cook who smelled of rancid oil, how, after the incident, Petrov had returned to their small room, his eyes cast downward, and fell mutely to the mattress. That night, Julian and Volokh slept on either side of Petrov and, with power that was more imagined than real, protected their friend from further harm. “Your uncle?” he asked, furious with himself for not having avenged the harm done to Petrov. “What happened to him?”

Sophie paused, hesitant to reveal any more. But after Julian placed his hand on hers and nodded encouragingly, she continued. “Nothing happened. I just let it go. And he’s gone on with his life
like nothing happened, not a care in the world. Wife, kids, a good job. He’s the fire chief at station eight, down by the church. He’s sort of a celebrity around these parts, a
local
celebrity.” Ashamed of the abuse, ashamed of her confession, Sophie paused again and examined her raw fingers.

As Bristol walked the aisles of the classroom, she noticed that Julian and Sophie were more engaged in their conversation than in the writing assignment, and she approached them. “How’s it going?” she asked, tapping the blank paper on the desk. “Making any progress?”

“Tons,” Julian responded with a wink—one that weakened Bristol and forced her to admit that she could not keep pace with the velocity of her own life. Fearful of authority, even compassionate authority, Sophie leaned over the desk—head down—and began to write. Julian, though, stood up. “I need a break,” he said to Bristol. And before she could ask why, Julian walked out of the room, purposeful in his stride. Bristol had seen so many men walk out of so many rooms that she knew when you could convince a man to stay and when you had to let him leave—and she thus returned to her students.

Julian marched out of the school and across the front lawn. He crossed the parking lot, taking a shortcut behind a row of parked buses, and made his way out to the main road. From there, it was a half-mile walk down to the station. Julian entered the firehouse and was met with the suspicious glances of a half-dozen idle firefighters. Next to one truck, he saw a man in a white uniform that was more formal and ceremonial than the blue work clothes worn by the others. He approached the chief.

“Can I help you?” the man asked, wiping the shiny truck with a chamois.

“I’m in class with your niece,” Julian said.

The man tossed the rag to the floor and approached Julian with menace in his step. “Sophie?” he asked.

“Sophie.”

“And?”

“And you know why I’m here.”

The chief squinted, attempting to read the intentions of the young man. “I have no idea why you’re here.”

“I think you do,” said Julian grimly as he moved closer to the man, so close that they were now separated by no more than two feet.

The chief took a short step forward and further closed the distance. “I think I don’t, and if you don’t get out of my station I’m going to throw you the fuck out.”

Julian released a sigh of predetermination. He imagined the gnarled oak, the wind whipping through the courtyard, Krepuchkin’s hand on his mother’s shoulder. He recalled the high of braining the old man, the euphoria of restoring a natural, harmonious order. And then there was Petrov’s anguish—so great, so negating, that the boy would forever reject even the
possibility
that a benevolent god might exist. Julian cocked his head. He drew it back and held it with the still force of a cobra. Then he drove his skull, his forehead, through the bridge of the chief’s nose, a thunderous crack that shattered the man’s face and propelled him backward into the truck’s wheel. The chief looked up, barely conscious, blood drenching his crisp white shirt.

“You know why I’m here?” Julian asked.

Yes, the man nodded.

“So we’re done?”

Yes, the man nodded again, waving off his approaching colleagues.

Julian returned to school later in the day, a red scuff on his brow. By that time, news of the attack had already spread through school, further magnifying Julian’s mystique. In the cafeteria, Julian encountered Sophie. He approached her, fearful that he might be rebuked, afraid that he had crossed a line that Sophie did not want
crossed. Sophie blushed. From her pocket, she removed a piece of paper. “For you,” she said. Sophie watched as Julian unfolded the paper, as he looked around before reading, his lips mouthing her words, the weary smile, the moisture in his eye.

Today I wilt,

in the air-sucking heat

of my failure.

Or is it?

Mine,

or a failure.

A friend,

he surrounds me.

A cool, draping mist.

Picks an eyelash from my cheek,

lint from my sleeve,

a shard from within.

And it is no longer mine—this failure.

It is his too,

his to chew and swallow—and digest.

To the dogwood he points.

If the trees can do it,

so can you.

In deference, in gratitude, Julian nodded to Sophie. And then he bowed, dramatic and ceremonial—like Svetlanov after the final note.

A
t the age of twenty-six—yet another young man in New York City struggling to translate his considerable talents into commensurate results—Julian stood in his studio apartment: a small, barren room reminiscent of the one in the orphanage that he had shared with Petrov and Volokh. His apartment on the Lower East Side, too, had a broken window, courtesy of a real estate developer who owned the properties on either side of the decaying tenement. Julian placed his hand over the newly formed hole and cupped the harsh winter air. He peered through the open space, out to the street below, and then stuffed a ball of rags into the hole—a maneuver that only partially prevented the cold from entering.

As Julian watched a taxi spin its wheels in a hump of dirty snow, his thoughts turned to the speed with which four years had passed since his graduation from college—and how little he had accomplished. He thought about his time at Columbia, how, near the end
of his freshman year, his adoptive parents had died within six months of each other. Oleg had hoped that his wife would pass first—not because he wished to have time alone at the end of his life or because he wanted Irina to suffer a punishment for some imaginary sin, but because he understood how fragile Irina had become in her old age, how terrified she was of solitude.

So, when Oleg imagined the sequencing of their deaths—who went first, who carried on—he pictured Irina alone at their home: gloveless, pricking her finger on the pointed thorn of his prized floribunda bush, scalding her hand in the hot steam of the espresso machine, the maniacal rubbing of the beads. And with those troubling images in mind, he concluded that he, not Irina, was better suited to outlive, and that it would be a blessing if Irina died first. But as he lay in the hospice, Irina pacing at the foot of the bed, he conceded that God had other plans.

Oleg and Irina left Julian with just enough money to complete his undergraduate studies, and he did so with a major in economics and a minor in English literature. After graduation, he joined a think tank that conducted what was described vaguely as “non-partisan research on international economic issues for the betterment of the global community.” There, he joined a team of intellectuals from various disciplines: economics, law, public policy, international relations. Julian’s love for business had been instilled in him at a young age by Frankmann and cultivated in college by his professors. So, when he first entered the institute’s Beaux-Arts mansion on the Upper East Side, he thought he had discovered an exciting entry point into the world of commerce.

But Julian’s excitement was short-lived. He soon realized that the institute’s work was too academic, too abstract for his liking, and that what he craved was the buzz of Frankmann’s horse trading, the quick-twitch negotiations with colorful characters like the barmaid
Garlova and the dimwitted Mongolian with the fermented horse milk. Julian dreamed of being in the middle of the fray. When he concluded that he had erred, that he was far too spirited for policy work, he resigned apologetically and took a job at a downtown brokerage house that he hoped would better suit his personality. There, in the boisterous, electric setting of the trading floor, he would buy and sell arcane financial derivatives. He loved the bustle of the floor, the frequency and speed of the transactions, the ability—like Frankmann—to quantify the profit and loss at the end of every day.

Yet, as the most junior broker on the desk, he was subjected to a ritual hazing that had been ingrained in this culture for decades. At first, the senior brokers required Julian to fetch coffee, cigarettes, sandwiches: tasks that were irritating but tolerable. But then his supervisor named him
board boy
—a demeaning role that required him to stand before two hundred brokers and update the latest prices on a towering white board. When the prices on the top row needed to be changed, Julian would climb a ladder—a wooden, wheeled type that might be found in an old English library—and glide from one end of the board to the other with marker in hand.

And it was here, atop this ladder, that an exhausted Julian mistakenly transposed two numbers—and a broker who drank too early and too much, with a map of magenta veins on his sprawling nose, noticed the error. At the age of fifty-two, ancient in this field, the broker screamed at Julian. Hey, board boy, you fucking suck! And then he grabbed an orange from his desk and threw it across the room, striking Julian in the back of the head. To the great delight of many, Julian lost his balance, fell off the top step of the ladder and crashed to the floor.

But rather than accept this humiliation as a necessary rite of passage—for every young broker took at least one demeaning turn
as board boy—Julian rose from the floor and, orange in hand, walked over to the broker. He stood over the man and considered a backhand slap across the offender’s face, an antiquated battery designed to debase rather than to injure. Julian looked at him: the gin blossom in full bloom, the shaking of the hands, the gray hair dyed a sad orange-black, his sandwich cut in quarters, his full name written on the side of a brown paper bag.

There was an uneasy feeling in Julian’s chest, as if his heart itched. He looked at the rows of brokers lined up in front of their monitors—many laughing, some heckling, a small number unaware of this incipient conflict and focused on more important things. He squeezed the orange, crushed it so that the juice drenched his hand and dripped onto his polished shoe. Wondering if his inability to submit to another man was a blessing or a curse, he dropped the ruptured orange in the man’s lap, glanced around the office for the final time and walked out.

Months later, Julian watched from his apartment as the taxi made it up over the peak of the snowy mound, caught its rear wheels on the pavement, and shot east toward Ludlow. He repositioned the rags to better fill the hole in the window, but as he twisted the cloth, his right thumb grazed the sharp glass and sliced the skin over his top knuckle. He shook his hand, sucked the blood from the wound, examined it, confirmed its superficiality. Then he cursed Austerlitz—the shadowy and private figure who had paid many millions to assemble the surrounding properties and who, Julian surmised, was responsible for the broken window.

According to neighborhood gossip, the developer intended to demolish the entire block and erect a hotel, a high-rise and a row of retail shops. However, Julian’s landlord, a prideful Greek who refused to sell the tenement, was frustrating Austerlitz’s plans. “I’m a
holdout, a principled and irksome holdout,” Fotopoulos would announce to the dwindling universe of people who would listen to him, to his tale of futile resistance.

The tenement stood dead center in the middle of the street and blocked the construction of the new building. Austerlitz had offered Fotopoulos an amount that was only a small fraction of its inherent value and an even smaller fraction of its market value, given its importance to the development. But when Fotopoulos stood firm, demanding a higher price, the developer resorted to acts that were devious and illegal, yet difficult to prove. First, the power lines to the building were cut, leaving the tenants in darkness for several days. Then the underground pipes were mysteriously severed, causing floods and leaving the tenement without running water. These inconveniences, life-threatening to some, caused an exodus among the tenants; only Julian and the landlord remained.

As Julian applied a sheet of tape over the rags, Fotopoulos knocked on the door. The landlord looked agitated, unstable. He held a cigarette in one hand, burned low against the filter. In his other hand he waved a document that had been rolled into a thin tube.

“We’re at the end. . . .
I’m
at the end,” Fotopoulos fumed. “No tenants, no rent. I haven’t paid the mortgage in months.” Fotopoulos tossed the roll of paper to the table and pointed. “There, a foreclosure. And then this bastard will get his wish.”

Julian picked up the paper, unrolled it. He trembled at the injustice, enraged not only by the depravity of Austerlitz, but also by his own powerlessness. “Maybe I can pay you a few months’ rent in advance,” Julian offered. “I don’t have much, you know, but it might help you hold on for a bit.”

Fotopoulos grimaced and shook his head. “That would be very kind, but I couldn’t. It would be money wasted. Even worse than wasted, if there’s such a thing.” The landlord snatched the
foreclosure notice from Julian’s hand and tore it to pieces. He stuffed the shredded paper into his coat pocket, waved farewell dramatically and descended the buckled stairs to his first-floor apartment.

Julian checked his watch, remembering that he had early dinner plans with Sophie. His wallet emptied of cash, he put on his coat and headed around the corner to the bank, where he withdrew money from the machine. He removed the receipt and, expecting once again to see irrefutable proof of his struggle, looked at the account balance. But Julian was shocked by what he saw, and he carefully examined the balance several times until he was satisfied that he was reading the numbers correctly.

Classic
,
fucking classic
, Julian muttered with a mixture of dismay and regard—for it was at this moment that he first learned of Frankmann’s death. There was no telephone call from Kira, no letter from a rabbi, no legal notice from a Russian probate lawyer. Rather, Julian learned of his mentor’s demise when he checked the bank receipt and, expecting to find a balance of several thousand dollars, instead discovered that his net worth had ballooned to just over one million.

Julian knew that only one person could give him so much money—
would
give him so much money—and he smiled at the crafty manner with which Frankmann had announced his own death. He recalled the beloved iconoclast’s gruff affection after his mother died, the months that he slept on Kira’s sofa, played with her nieces, even kissed the one with the blonde hair and the scabby knees—how he stuck close to Frankmann’s side, absorbing as much of the old man’s business cunning as he could.

With the receipt in his hand, Julian walked out to the street and imagined what he might do with this windfall: a bright apartment uptown, a cottage in the country, maybe a car. He wondered if he should finally propose to Sophie. Walking up Avenue A toward
Sophie’s apartment, he approached the antiquarian bookstore that he loved. In addition to books and old autographs, the aromatic shop sold loose tea and pipe tobacco in enormous glass apothecary jars. The store was closed, but he stopped for a moment to look in the window. There was a stuffed fox baring its sharp teeth; a misshapen globe with the sprawling splash of the Soviet Union in red; several leather-bound volumes of indeterminate authorship; and there, leaning against a shelf draped in gold velvet, was an English edition of Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
.

The book’s plastic cover glistened in the streetlight, and Julian was reminded of the painter with the feminine features and his collection of fine books. Recalling with specificity Frankmann’s lesson on scarcity, need and knowledge, he looked again at the receipt—at the million-dollar balance—and considered again what he might do with the money. This bequest was, Julian concluded, Frankmann’s final lesson, his final challenge. The old man had guided Julian to the States years earlier, and now, with this ultimate act, he was leading the boy—the man—toward abundance.

He imagined what the old Jew might say to him at this instant.
Remember your wiring
,
Julian
,
the greatness of your lineage
.
Remember your mother
’
s beauty
,
her faith
.
Her guidance
.
Submit to no man
.
And remember your father
’
s courage
,
his quiet power
.
Go
,
boy
,
go
.
Just like I taught you
.
And don
’
t screw it up
.

As he recalled Frankmann’s preternatural ability to make money—to identify some quiet inefficiency in the marketplace that was invisible to others—Julian dismissed the idea of a cottage and a car, and this impulsive longing for immediate comfort was replaced by a hunger to turn this million into many more. Without intention or effort, his gait increased in speed and length, a reactive response of the nervous system that propelled him into a full sprint—an indication that his brain had transmitted a command to his body but
had not yet revealed to him the reason for this command. A half block from home, still in full stride, a signal from deep within penetrated the lustrous membrane that separates unconsciousness from sentience, and an idea began to crystallize.

Julian considered the scarcity of the building and the land beneath it, how, given its singularity, it could not be more scarce; he thought of Austerlitz’s need to own the property, its critical importance to the massive project; he estimated the many years and many millions that the developer had spent to assemble the surrounding properties and how those investments would naturally inflate the value of the tenement.

Julian pounded on the door of the landlord’s apartment. After a few moments, Fotopoulos answered—holding yet another cigarette burned down to the filter. “No, boy, I cannot take your money,” he said, closing the door.

Julian jabbed his foot into the doorway before the lock could engage. “Even if it’s more than just a few months’ rent?”

“Two, three, four . . . It doesn’t matter, he wins.”

Julian smiled. “He’s not going to win.”

The landlord dropped the cigarette into a bucket of sand on the floor. “How do you figure?” he asked.

Julian waved the bank receipt in the air. “What I have in mind is this. Through good luck, bad luck, some of both, I now have enough money to make your mortgage payments. And if necessary, I can hire some people who are as smart and nasty as Austerlitz. I put up the money, I join the fight, and we go from hunted to hunter. And after I get my money back, we split the profit fifty-fifty.” Julian paused to let Fotopoulos consider the offer. “What do you think?”