left Sunny Isles, heading farther north, the scenery became less and less like Miami Beach… Hollywood… Hallandale… “Now we enter the Russian heartland.” He chuckled, to show Magdalena he found that pretty amusing.
He turned off Collins Avenue onto a smaller highway that ran west. Magdalena had no idea where they were now.
“Tell me again,” she said. “The restaurant we’re going to is called…?”
“Gogol’s.”
“And it’s Russian?”
“Eet eez ferry Russian,” he said… with his suave smug or smug suave smile.
They headed west in the darkness… then came around a curve—and there it was, in a blazing backlit sign as lurid as the Honey Pot’s: GOGOL’S!… a porte cochere out front framed by a vast riot of nude nymphs rendered in a bas-relief deep to the point of hallucinatory: GOGOL’S!
Beneath it was a regular hive of valets, young, fair-skinned. Cars were pulling in and going out at a terrific rate… a regular throng of men and women going inside…
Sergei was joking with the valets in Russian. They knew Gospodin Korolyov very well. As soon as he and Magdalena walked in, a tall, hefty man—he must have been six-feet-five or -six—in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a navy tie, his remaining black hair combed straight back over his pate—rushed up and gushed with great enthusiasm, “Sergei Andreivich!” The rest was in Russian. The man seemed to be the owner or manager at the very least. Sergei said to him in English, “This is my friend Magdalena,” Thee sees my freend… The big man bowed slightly in a fashion Magdalena took to be “European.” The place was vast… Every square inch of wall space was covered in a deep-mauve (synthetic) velvet lit only by battalions of small downlights in an otherwise black ceiling. The deep mauve was a backdrop for every form of glitter a team of Russian decorators could get their hands on. A pair of staircases leading to a second level, no more than five feet above the first, had more extravagant curves than the ones at the Paris Opera. The banisters were inlaid with striations of polished brass. Gogol’s white tablecloths—a great flashing sea, thanks to the minute sequins somehow woven in… The small lamps on all the tables had mauve shades supported by flashing faux-crystal stems… At Gogol’s, wherever it was possible to attach glitter rims and fringes and trims and brims—they were attached. All these things were meant to create a flashing glamour within a rich but sedate mauve gloom… but they didn’t. They weren’t even gaudy. They looked prissy, dinky, finicky, fussy, and gussied up. The whole cavernous dining hall looked as though it had come out of Grandmother’s jewelry box.
A regular swarm of men, his age or older, gathered about Sergei. Were they loud! Were they drunk? Well, maybe it was just their way of saluting their beloved comrade, but they sure seemed drunk to Magdalena. They gave him big bear hugs. They cracked up, disintegrated, dissolved over every sentence that came out of his mouth, as if he were the greatest wit they had ever encountered in their lives. Magdalena would have given anything to have known Russian at that moment.
Sergei was no longer even trying to introduce her to these men as they came up. It was hard to introduce anybody who had you in a bear hug and was bellowing loud nothings into your ear. The only attention she got were lascivious looks of men lifting the lust in their loins all the way to their faces.
From all over the place came the deep manly laughter and the manly baritone cries of men… drunk. At the nearest table a big man, about fifty, if Magdalena was any judge, reared back into the middle of a banquette with a great grin and proceeded to down one, two, three, four shot glasses of something—vodka?—and then let out a great ahhhhh! His face was a blazing red, and his grin was as self-satisfied as any Magdalena had ever seen. He ground out a guttural roar of a laugh from somewhere deep in his gullet. He handed a shot glass full of whatever it was to the woman next to him… young or young-ish… it was hard to tell when a woman had her hair done up in a big bun in back, like Grandmother’s… she stared at the shot glass as if it were a bomb… Guttural roars all around…
Sergei managed to disengage himself from his admirers and motioned to Magdalena. The towering house hefty led