After that Riya stayed close to D, and together they watched the dancing queen in her moment of triumph, Beauty spinning around and around in the arms of the loving Beast, and all around her the Gardens, and all of us, invited and uninvited, real and fictional, as evening drew in and the strings of fairy lights in the trees heightened the enchanted Disney mood; my parents the professors happily dancing with each other, with eyes for nobody else, and sad U Lnu Fnu of the United Nations, and Mr. Arribista of Argentina, and the true aristocrats of the Gardens community, Vito and Blanca Tagliabue, Baron and Baroness of Selinunte, and me, all of us happily joining with one another, lubricated by plentiful champagne, eating the excellent food provided by the finest catering service in the city, and feeling, for the short blissful time-out-of-time that a wedding can sometimes create, happy, together, and one. Even the five tennis players with the expensive wristwatches painted grins onto faces that were not built for smiling and nodded in an approximation of fellow feeling at the others in the Gardens, and applauded the monarchs’ dance.
But there was a group that held itself apart and as the music played and darkness fell and gaiety grew they seemed to bunch closer and closer together as if to say, stay away from us, keep your distance, we aren’t a part of you. These were men with slicked-down hair worn slightly too long at the back, and beards of the designer-stubble variety, and uncomfortable body language, wearing ill-fitting tuxedoes with white shirt cuffs protruding much too far out of the jacket sleeves, men without women, drinking water or soda or nothing, shuffling their feet, smoking heavily, and all of a sudden I thought, my Godfather intuition maybe wasn’t just born from seeing the trilogy too many times, maybe I was onto something, because these people looked like they could be supplicants, people who had come to the don’s big day so that they could kiss his ring. Or (now the gangster movie trope really was getting me carried away) they looked like they could be packing heat. I ran the movie in my head, the sudden appearances of handguns from the bulging inside pockets of those badly tailored suits, blood spattering the wedding day with tragedy.
None of that happened. These gentlemen were in the hotel trade, we were informed, they were Mr. Golden’s business associates. It felt like being told that they dealt in olive oil: true, perhaps, but maybe also not the whole truth.
The oldest of the bridegroom’s sons was standing by the serving table with the gold tablecloth where trays of finger food awaited the hungry, methodically working his way through a sequence of pigs in blankets. A thought occurred to me. “Hey, Petya,” I went over to say, sounding as casual as I could, “what do you know about 2G Spectrum?” A ripple of confusion passed over his face, maybe because the word spectrum had a different immediate resonance for him, and maybe because his extraordinary memory and instinct for truth-telling was doing battle with the pledge of secrecy the Goldens had taken. Finally he decided the answer wasn’t covered by the pledge and therefore was not under embargo. “Telecommunications kerfuffle,” he said. “Shall I recite the list of companies involved? Adonis, Nahan, Aska, Volga, Azure, Hudson, Unitech, Loop, Datacom, Telelink, Swan, Allianz, Idea, Spice, S Tel, Tata. It should be added that in 2008 Telenor bought a majority share in the Unitech group’s telecommunications company and currently operates twenty-two licenses as Uninor. Datacom operates as Videocon. The Russian-based company Sistema owns a majority share in Telelink and is changing the operating name to MTS. Swan was originally a subsidiary of the Reliance group. Idea has bought Spice. Bahrain Telecommunications and Sahara Group both hold substantial stakes in S Tel. A PIL which is to say Public Interest Litigation is under way and will reach the Supreme Court soon. It is expected that at least one minister and several corporation executives may be faced with serious jail time. The five megahertz 2G Spectrum is valued per megahertz…”
“I notice,” I said, “that you didn’t mention Eagle, or Verbunden Extratech, or Murtasín.”
“I was simply listing those companies named in the scam,” he said. “The corporations you mention have not been accused of any irregularity, nor are any actions pending against them. Are you thinking of writing a film about the admittedly amazing and inevitably in part corruption-tainted proliferation of mobile phones in that faraway country? If so, you should absolutely play the lead. Because you are so good-looking, you know, René, you really should be a movie star.”
This was a new thing with him that summer. Petya had recently decided, against the evidence of everyone’s eyes but his own, that I was the most handsome man in the world. At first he declared that I was “more handsome than Tom Cruise,” then I became “much better looking than Brad Pitt,” and these days I was “a hundred times as gorgeous as that George Clooney.” Sic transit gloria, Tom, Brad, George, I thought. Petya was not expressing homosexual longings. He was telling it the way he saw it, as he always did, and all I could do was say thanks.
“Something like that,” I answered him. “But I don’t think there’s a role for me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Write one in immediately. A big role. The romantic lead. You’re so sexy, René. I’m serious. You’re a sexpot.”
Maybe weddings bring out the romance in us all.
And at a certain point in the gaiety of the night, I did not fail to notice, Nero Golden was absent, and there was a light in his office window, and the men in the bad tuxedoes were absent also. Petya was on the dance floor. He was a bad dancer, so absurdly uncoordinated that people found him funny, the five tennis players half-tried to stifle their alpha-male sniggers, but fortunately Petya, transported by music, did not seem to notice. And then Vasilisa was dancing with her girlfriends, all glamorous, all real estate brokers, doing their New York versions of Cossack dances involving candles and shawls and hand-clapping and high kicks and boots. Instead of fur hats and military uniforms there were gossamer dresses and female skin but nobody was complaining, we danced in a circle around the dancing girls and clapped in unison and shouted “Hey! Hey!” when we were told to and drank the vodka shots we were given to drink and yes, Russia was good, Russian culture was fine, what a good Russian time we were having, one and all, and then Nero Golden reappeared in full Cossack costume, so there was at least one fur hat and one blue military coat with golden braid and buttons, and the girls danced around him like their captain, their king, which he was, and he waved his special shashka saber in the air above their heads, and we danced around them, and drank, and shouted “Hey! Hey!” some more, and so Nero and his beauty were wed.
The hotel-trade gentlemen in the bad tuxedoes, however, did not return.
A strange summer mist crept into the Gardens that night after midnight and made them look like the setting for a Japanese ghost story, Ugetsu, perhaps, or Kwaidan. The guests had all gone home and the debris of the celebration had been cleared away by the diligent staff of the catering company, to whom generous tips had been handed out by Nero Golden himself. A single lantern still hung from the branch of a tree, its candle sputtering to its end. I heard one single hoot of what might have been an owl, but it is possible I might have been mistaken. In the sky a pale moon glowing faintly through gathering rainclouds. A hurricane was coming. All was still before the storm.