Praise God, for it is done.
Whereupon Nero Golden also exclaimed loudly, “Shut the doors,” and his sons rushed to the French windows, and whereas I understood this to be a practical response to the wind and the driving rain, Vasilisa and the priest understood it differently. The beard shook, the tent surrounding it trembled, excited Russian words emerged, and the new Mrs. Golden triumphantly translated and paraphrased them, “Shut the doors against the rain, but there is no need to close them against the demons, for they have been driven out of my husband, and they will never return.”
Whatever took place that morning—and I was deeply skeptical about the exorcism’s authenticity—it is certainly true that there were no more nocturnal walks for Nero, no more weeping on summer lawns. As far as I know, the phantoms of the two women did not appear to him again. Or if they did he controlled his feelings, turned his back on them, and did not mention their visits to his wife.
From his sanctum, that evening, came the sounds of his Guadagnini violin, playing—only adequately—Bach’s powerfully emotional Chaconne.
On the Monday evening when the trouble began Nero Golden accompanied his wife Vasilisa to her preferred Russian restaurant in the Flatiron district for a dinner in honor of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was visiting the city to raise funds for his cancer charity. They were placed at the table of honor alongside the émigré billionaire with the artistically inclined wife, and the émigré billionaire who had bought his way into the newspaper business just when the newspaper business was going out of business but who fortunately owned a baseball team as well, and the émigré billionaire with a big stake in Silicon Valley and a wife with a big stake in silicon as well, and at other nearby tables were lesser billionaires with smaller boats and soccer teams and cable TV networks and wives who were not quite as impressive. For Vasilisa Arsenyeva, the girl from Siberia, her presence among this elite group was proof that her life was finally worthwhile and she insisted on taking photographs of herself with each of the Russian grandees (and of course their wives also) to text to her mother at once.
Before they left home, when she was fully dressed and looking almost criminally attractive, she knelt at her husband’s feet, unzipped his pants and serviced him slowly and expertly, “because,” she told him, “when a man like you takes a woman like me into a room like this one he should know where he stands with her.” This was an unusual miscalculation—and she was usually good at sexual calculation—because it had the effect of making Nero Golden more suspicious, not less, so that at the restaurant he watched her every movement like an increasingly bad-tempered hawk, and as the food circulated, the herrings in red coats, the beef-stuffed cabbage golubtsy, the vareniki, vushka and halushky Ukrainian dumplings, the veal pelmeni, the stroganoff, the vodka infused with gooseberries and figs, the blinchiki pancakes, the caviar, his jealousy increased, it was as if she was serving little pieces of herself up to all the men present, on little red paper napkins, to be eaten with a little two-pronged cocktail fork, like a yummy little canapé. Of course, at this top table all the men were with wives, so everyone behaved with discretion, the billionaire with the artistically inclined wife told him he was a lucky man to have captured “our Vasilisa,” the billionaire with the unsuccessful newspapers and the successful baseball team said, “she is like our daughter.” The Silicon Valley billionaire with the silicon wife said, “God knows how you got her,” and made a lewd gesture with his hands suggesting something big inside the pants, but everyone had had plenty of vodka, so no offense was intended or taken, it was just man talk. But after a while he noticed that she was waving at people across the room, and they were waving back, and all of these people were men, in particular one man, a youngish man, tall, muscular, maybe forty, with hair oddly, prematurely white, wearing aviator shades even though it was night, a person who could be a tennis coach or—this was, for obvious reasons, Nero Golden’s ultimate term of disapproval—a personal trainer. Or maybe a hairdresser, a homosexual, which would be fine. Or, yeah, maybe another billionaire, younger than these other guys, one with, for example, a large red yacht built at the Benetti shipyard in Viareggio, Italy, and a fondness for one-and-a-half-million-dollar hypercars named after Quechua wind gods, and fast girls to go with them. That was a possibility that could not be ignored. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’m just going to salute my friends.” Then she was gone, and he was watching her, the hugs, the air kisses, nothing improper but something smelled bad over there, maybe he should go and inspect these friends, these so-called friends. Maybe he should take a closer look at that blonde he couldn’t see properly, that guy’s date, that petite blonde with her back to him, he could see the musculature of her arms, yes, he remembered her, the bitch. Maybe he should just rip her fucking head off.
But then Gorbachev was making conversation, “So now, Mr. Golden, with your lovely Russian wife you are one of us, almost, I would say, and I can see you are a man of consequence, so allow me to ask you…” Except that this wasn’t Gorbachev talking, it was his interpreter who was called maybe Pavel, peering over Gorbachev’s shoulder from behind like a second head, and speaking so soon after the former president that he was almost in lip sync, which meant either that he was the greatest, fastest interpreter ever, or that he was making the English up, or that Gorbachev always said the same kind of thing. In any case Nero Golden in his immense and mounting irritation at Vasilisa’s behavior wasn’t going to allow himself to be interrogated by the guest of honor and interrupted him to ask a question of his own.
“I have business associates in the city of Leipzig, formerly in GDR,” he said. “They told me an interesting story and I would be pleased to hear your comment.”
Gorbachev’s face became grave. “What is the story,” his second-head Pavel asked.
“During the unrest of 1989,” Nero Golden said, “when the protesters took refuge in the Thomaskirche, the church of Bach, the chief of the East German Communist party, Herr Honecker, wanted to send in troops with machine guns and kill everyone and so much for the revolution, it would be gone. But because of the proposal to use the army against civilians he had to call you for permission, and you refused it, and after that it was only a matter of days until the fall of the Wall.”
Neither Gorbachev nor his second head said a word.
“So my question is this,” Nero Golden said. “When you received that phone call and were asked that question, was your refusal instinctive and automatic…or did you have to think about it?”