As she enters, her eyes begin to adjust. The smoke is not quite so thick as she initially imagined, yet the ceiling remains all but invisible: chandeliers and lamps seem to be suspended from the heavens. The desk attendant looks at her—surprised, slightly outraged—and requests a name, as if he could not expect a Saypuri to provide anything more. “Votrov,” says Shara. The man nods stiffly—I should have known—and extends a sweeping arm.
Shara is led through a labyrinth of booths and private rooms and bars, each stuffed with men in suits and robes, all gleaming gray teeth and gleaming bald heads and gleaming black boots. Cigar ashes dance in the fug like red-orange fireflies. It’s as if the whole place is smeared over with oil and smoke, and she can feel the smoke snuffling bemusedly at the hem of her skirt, wondering, What is this? What alien creature has infiltrated this place? What could this be?
Some tables go silent as she passes. Bald heads poke out of booths and watch her. I am, of course, a double offense, she thinks as she maintains her composure. A woman, and a Saypuri …
A twitch of a velvet curtain, and a grand backroom is revealed. At the head of a table the size of a river barge sits Vohannes, half-hidden behind a tent of newspaper and slouched in a cushioned chair with his light brown (but muddy) boots propped up on the table. Behind him, in very comfortable-looking chairs, sit his Saypuri bodyguards; one looks up, and waves and shrugs apologetically: This wasn’t our idea. Vohannes’s tent of newspaper deflates slightly; Shara spots a bright blue eye peeking over the top; then the tent collapses.
Vohannes springs up as quickly as his hip allows, and bows. “Miss Thivani!”
He would make an excellent dance hall emcee. “It’s been less than two days,” she says. “There’s hardly need for such ceremony.”
“Oh, but there’s plenty of need for ceremony! Especially when one is meeting … how does the saying go? The enemy of my enemy is my …”
“What are you talking about, Vo? Do you have what I asked you to get?”
“Oh, I have it. And what a joy it was to get. But first …” Vohannes claps twice. His gloves—white, velvet—bear smudges from the newsprint. “Oh, sir—if you could, please fetch us two bottles of white plum wine, and a tray of snails.”
The attendant bows like a spring toy. “Certainly.”
“Snails?” says Shara.
“Are you fine gentlemen”—Vohannes turns to the Saypuri guards—“in need of any refreshments?”
One opens his mouth to respond, glances at Shara, rethinks his answer, and shakes his head.
“As you wish. Please.” Vohannes gestures to the chair next to him with a flourish. “Sit. So glad you could make it. You must be terribly busy.”
“You have picked an interesting venue for our meeting. I believe a leper would have received a more cordial welcome.”
“Well, I figured that if I meet you at your place of work, you might as well meet me at mine. … For though this place may look like a lecherous din of old fogies, Miss Thivani, I guarantee you, here is where Bulikovian commerce lives and dies. If one could see all the flow of finance, envisioning it as a golden river hanging above our heads, here—right here, among all this smoke and all the crass jokes, all the boiled beef and bald heads—would be where it forms its densest, most impenetrable, most inextricable knot. I invite you to look and reflect upon the rickety, shit-spattered ship that carries Bulikov’s commerce forward into the seas of prosperity.”
“I get the strangest sense,” says Shara, “that you do not enjoy working here. …”
“I have no choice,” says Vohannes. “It is what it is. And though it may look like one building, it’s actually several. Any house in Bulikov is a house divided, and this house is cut to ribbons, my battle-ax. Each booth could be color-coded for its party allegiances. You could draw lines on the floor—if the warped floorboards would allow it—highlighting barriers some club members would dare never cross. But recently, this club—like Bulikov—is beginning to align itself around two main groups. My group, and, well …”
He slaps his paper in her lap. A smallish article has been circled: wiclov takes stand against embassy.
“You’ve been accumulating some ink, my dear,” says Vohannes.
Shara eyes the article. “Yes,” she says. “I have been notified of this. What do you care about it?”
“Well, I have been ruminating on ways I could help you.”
“Oh, dear.”
“And I can help you quite a lot with Wiclov.”
A waiter materializes out of the smog with a bottle of white plum wine. He proffers the bottle to Vohannes; Vohannes glances at the label, nods, and lazily extends a hand, which is promptly filled with a brimming crystal glass. The waiter looks doubtfully between them, as if to say, And do you really want me to serve her, as well? Vohannes nods angrily, and the waiter, exasperated, gives Shara a perfunctory version of the same ceremony.
“Cheeky shit,” says Vohannes as the waiter leaves. “Do you get a lot of that sort of thing?”
“What are you proposing, Vo?”