do you do” and all that… “What do you do to get food, to get clothes” and whatever the rest of it was, all I had to do was say something like “Sir, do I know you?” And then, no matter what he said, I should have kept pressing him with that question, “Sir, do I know you? I’d have to get to know you really well before I answered questions like that”… and if he still kept going, I could have added, “And something tells me I’ll never get to know you that well, not in a thousand years, not if I can possibly avoid it”… Well, the “not if I can possibly avoid it” might have been overdoing it, especially coming from someone my age, twenty-four, and he’s in his—what?—fifties?—but that was the moment I should have cut him off, right at the very beginning, before he could get going on that vile, humiliating roll of his—::::::
And that was all that was on her mind as she sat here in the passenger seat barely twelve inches from Sergei, who was letting this expensive sports car out for a romp down Collins Avenue in the dark… a black hole with a regular comet of red taillights plunging into it… Sergei laughing and chuckling and chortling and saying things like, “Creenge! He creenged! He creenged like a leetle boy who knows he haf been meesbehafing!”… whipping past this red taillight whipping past the next one and whipping past and whipping past the next one and the next one whipping past whipping past whipping past all of them in the darkness at an unbelievable speed… totally reckless and Magdalena is aware of it all but only in her cerebellum… it doesn’t even reach the pyramids of Betz, much less her thoughts… All she can think about is what she should have done, what she could have done to get that horrible piece of mierda off her… “Champion” Zhytin.
::::::You bastardo de puta!:::::: That kind of crude language Magdalena ordinarily didn’t allow even inside her head. But she was in the throes of Why didn’t I, that dreadful interlude when you’re walking upstairs to go to bed or speeding madly down Collins Avenue—after the party is over—and now you think of the comebacks you should have made… to obliterate that bastard who kept scoring points off you in conversation at dinner this evening… not that Magdalena knew the term l’esprit de l’escalier, but she was living it right now… furiously, uselessly ransacking her brain.
Sergei was in such good spirits, he never noticed how silent and sunken in thought Magdalena was… and now he was off on the subject of Flebetnikov, the Russian who had invited them to the party they were heading for, at his mansion, estate, palace on Star Island—you really couldn’t give it too grand a name… and hadn’t she noticed that every Russian in Miami who lived in a big house was called an “oligarch”? What a joke that was! He himself got called an oligarch. He couldn’t help but chuckle over that. An oligarchy was rule by a few… so would someone kindly tell him what it was he was ruling and with whom? In fact, he had heard that Flebetnikov’s hedge fund had run into some real problems, and how many problems did a Russian have to have before he stopped being ranked as an oligarch? He chuckled again.
By now they were passing through Sunny Isles, and Sergei pointed to the left at a condominium tower on the other side of Collins Avenue. “That’s where I live,” he said. “I have the twenty-ninth and thirtieth floors.”
That caught Magdalena’s attention. “The entire floors?”
“Well… now that you say it… yes, both floors.”
“How tall is the building?”
“Thirty floors.”
“So that means you have the entire top two floors?” Big wide eyes.
“Ummm… yes.”
“The penthouse?”
“Zey are ferry nice, zee fiews,” said Sergei. “But you vill zee for yourself.”
Now he had her back on his wavelength ::::::Does that mean tonight?:::::: and Amélia’s question popped back into her head… and that hoisted her up out of her funk far enough to at least think about something other than the horrible scene at Gogol’s… You’ll see for yourself… and Magdalena began feeling the answer to that question. Could she conceivably be strong enough to go up to those two whole floors of a condominium tower overlooking the ocean and be a good girl who no la aflojare in his lap right then and there?—who is strong and