no such “movement.” In fact, John Smith had no such assignment, either, and wouldn’t have been able to get a real Herald photographer to come along with him. Besides, at this point he didn’t want anybody at the Herald to get wind of what he was doing. It was too early. He had to get the facts nailed down first. Hell, Topping the Fourth had turned severely squirrelly at the very mention of the subject.
From the moment the elevator came to a lumbering, lurching stop on the third floor… lurching because the Mexican had to swing the tiller handle this way and that to make the floor of the enormous freight cab line up just right with the level of the floor outside… the nostalgie-de-la-mudders loved that part, the lumbering, lurching stop… it was so real… Even before the doors opened, Nestor and John Smith picked up the scent of their man… turpentine!… Upscale nostalgie-de-la-mudders might or might not object to the odor. But they couldn’t very well grumble, could they. Naturally there were working artists in these lofts, and naturally the painters were working with turpentine… You’re in the “art district,” my friend!… You’d best take the bitter with the better and consider it an emanation of Art and other Higher Things amid the squalor of it all.
As soon as Igor opened the door to his loft, it was obvious that he was primed for this major event in his so-far-negligible media life. His face was one great bright Rooooshian beam. If he had still had his outsized Salvador Dalí–jolly waxed mustache, it would have been really something. He had his arms stretched out. It looked like he was about to embrace them both in a Russian bear hug.
“Dobro pozalovat!” he said in Russian, and in English, “Welcome! Come in! Come in!”
Such booming bonhomie!—so much so that the two hard Cs in a row, Come in! Come in!, propelled the alcohol on his breath into Nestor’s and John Smith’s faces. He was bigger, more heavy chested, and drunker than Nestor remembered from the Honey Pot. And how art-district-fashionably he was dressed!… a long-sleeved black shirt with a silky sheen, rolled up to the elbows and open at the neck all the way down to the sternum… hanging outside a pair of too-tight-fitting black jeans in a game attempt to obscure his girth.
The entrance took you straight into an open kitchen at one end of a space at least forty feet long and twenty feet wide. The ceiling must have been close to fourteen feet high, making the place seem enormous… likewise, a bank of towering old-fashioned warehouse windows way down at the other end. Even now, close to 4:00 p.m., the entire work area was flooded with natural light… the easels… the metal tables… a ladder… some tarpaulins… the same sort of stuff Igor had at his hideaway studio in Hallandale. Nestor’s survey of the premises came to an abrupt halt when Igor stuck his face right into his and exclaimed, “Ayyyyyyyyyyyy!” and took Nestor’s hand and gave it a shake that felt like it had dislocated every joint in his right arm and clapped him on the shoulder in the manner that among men means, You are my pal and we’ve survived a lot of good times together, haven’t we!
“This is my photographer,” John Smith interjected—Nestor could tell that John Smith’s facile lying mind was churning to come up with a suitable fake name. Pop!—“Ned,” he said, probably because it started with Ne, like Nestor.
“Nade!” was the way it sounded when Igor said it. With another gush of inexplicable merriment he maintained his grip on Nade’s hand and clapped him on the shoulder again. “We have a drink!” he said, reaching back to a kitchen counter and producing a bottle with a Stolichnaya vodka label but containing a pale amber liquid… He poured it into a big shot glass, which he hoisted with one hand and pointed at with the other.
“Vodaprika!” he exclaimed, accenting the apri—and threw the entire shot-glassful down his gullet. His face turned arterial red. He emerged grinning and gasping for breath. When he finally exhaled, the air they breathed smelled like alcoholic vomitus.
“I take the vodka and I give it a little—what do you say in English?—‘spitz’?—of apricot juice. You see? One little spitz—vodaprika! We all have some! You come!”
With that, he led them to a big, long, stout wooden table with an odd lot of wooden chairs around it. He took the one