his dreary, soul-crushingly backward village sent an unfamiliar flare of pride up his chest.
“How do they survive?” he asked, glancing at a building with more plank bridges than floors. An ingenious strategy; these young engineers were clearly ethnic Chechen. Collapsed floors would take construction crews years to lift and rebuild, but plank bridges could be reassembled in minutes.
“They sell the rubble back to the Russians. Construction has begun on defense and petroleum ministry buildings. They buy back the bricks at two rubles each.”
“More than I would have thought.”
“Bricks purchased at dawn are cemented by noon, so the kids have to chisel off any remaining mortar. You see those white rubber casings in the rubble?”
“Like snake skins.”
“It’s electrical wire insulation. They strip and sell the copper wire. Just about any metal is worth its weight. Most of these kids can’t read or write, but they’ve created metal-based currencies.”
“Scrap metal and disappearances,” Akhmed said, flat and without irony. “Our national industries.”
The warehouse stretched wider than a soccer field with half its windows stained tar-black and the other half blown out, and when Sonja nodded to it he knew something was wrong. They passed a toppled chemical drum, its top peeled back like a bean-tin lid; a glowing blue sludge, too thick to evaporate, pooled at the bottom. A guard blocked the warehouse drive. His bloodstained bandoliers intersected at the sternum, the only red cross Akhmed would see that day. A dull glint, less recognition than knowing, appeared in the guard’s face when he saw Sonja. “Only a fool would sit in a truck,” the woman had said; if only Akhmed had met her a day earlier. The vise tightening in his chest had been there since the morning, since Sonja had refused to acknowledge him. She parked the truck, went to find the snow leopard–thief, and he was alone, brought by a woman who didn’t trust him to a warehouse large enough to hold his village, a place where he shouldn’t have been, in a city unworthy of even an imaginary plane ticket. Three Mercedes sedans sat at the center of the warehouse floor, Scandinavian license plates hanging from shiny screws. The walls were Western department stores: racks of leather and fur coats, refrigerators and dishwashers with warranties dangling from plastic ribbons, cardboard boxes stacked two stories high. A folding chair sat open on the floor, pliers and duct tape on the seat. A faucet turned on in Akhmed’s mouth.
“It was the most remarkable thing I’ve seen in years. I couldn’t think. I was stunned. Do I bow? I didn’t know what to do.” The thin, excited voice belonged to the thin, excited man entering the warehouse beside Sonja. “I never thought I would meet someone from China.”
The two strolled with a familiarity—she touching his shoulder, he timing his footsteps to hers—that left Akhmed uncertain and unaccountably envious. The wide arc they walked around him drew a line of tension across the room. “What was he doing here? A journalist?” Sonja asked, avoiding his eye.
“An oil man. He wants to buy a refinery.”
“You’re selling refineries now?”
“Just the machinery,” the man said simply. He wore a beige summer suit and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to exhibit a triangle of voluminous chest hair. His loafers reflected the pale light. A man dressed like this would be stripped, hog-tied, and beaten within one city block, but he didn’t seem like the type of man that went anywhere alone. “Is this our friend?” the man asked, and nodded to the folding chair, pliers, and duct tape. “Have a seat, please.”
Akhmed pivoted sharply, but the guard was behind him, the gun barrel leveled to his chest. A tourniquet gripped the corridor between his brain and body, and directions came to his limbs in halting dribbles that wouldn’t save him. That morning Ula had been asleep when he left. He hadn’t said good-bye to her.
“You haven’t been honest, Akhmed,” Sonja said. The way she studied him he knew his skull was just another bone she could amputate.
“I’m sorry,” he gushed. “I lied about being in the top tenth of my graduating class. I was in the bottom tenth. In the fourth percentile.”
No relief in her smile. “Do you think that’s what this is about?” she asked.
What else could it be? The only lie he had told was that he was a good doctor.
“You knew my surname and patronymic, Akhmed.” She had said his name twice now. The third time would be the last. “No one knows those.