Free The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil Page A

wouldn’t roll. He put the mint in his pocket and felt the pack of cigarettes and sat there, smelling the clean car, wanting to pull the Troikas out and smoke. Because now that they had passed The Dachas there was no question where he was being taken, or to whom.
    Once a northern palace built for the tsar, for royal hunts of bear and wolf and wild boar, it had become a camp for the apparatchiki in the Party, a private place where Stalin went to mull his purges, where Kosygin recuperated from the failure of his heart, where only army generals and directors of the GRU, politburo secretaries and the occasional chest-starred Hero of the State, were allowed through gates still topped with twisted spikes, still attached to the two stone pillars that had always lined the drive. But the brass hammer that had replaced the double-headed eagle once mounted on the leftward pillar was now gone, the brass sickle that had matched it on the right removed. In their place: a rough-hewn crossbar made of cracked, grayed wood. And in its center, staring out at the road: a bleached-white skull. It had the eye sockets and muzzle of what Yarik thought to be a cow, but from its head sprung horns too huge, more like elephant tusks. Above them, centered over frontal bone, sat three iron letters: БРБ. Boris Romanovich Bazarov. The gates slid open. Yarik looked behind as he passed through in the hope they might not swing closed. And, watching them shut, he noticed, for the first time, the base of the pillars: below each post the marble had been carved into the talons of a giant eagle’s foot.
    That was when he wished Dima was with him. He would have liked to see his brother’s face. Their uncle’s whispers: fowl feet beneath a witch’s house. Pushkin’s lines: lanterns made of tree-spiked skulls. He would have liked to hear Dima tell the story of this . For a moment he wished he could see it through his brother’s eyes, that his own first thought wouldn’t be, instead, how foolish .
    But it was foolish. Gold domes like a boy’s trophies shelved in the sky; the topiary like a toy model of the Petrodvorets Palace grounds; the marble statues of Rus warriors in chain mail, of high-headdressed Indians brandishing spears, Greek maidens replaced by reclining squaws; the filigreed horse sleigh sitting at the end of the drive, the fact that someone had shot arrows into its sides.
    And yet there was something about it all that made Yarik reach for the candy in his pocket, work at the wrapper with his hands; something that, when the driver stopped before the wide stone steps, made Yarik shove the mint into his mouth just to keep his jaw unclenched; something that, when the driver got out and opened Yarik’s door, made Yarik grind the mint up in his teeth. It was the foolishness itself that made it worse: the man who’d brought him here knew what he’d think, what men a million times more important would think, knew it—and shrugged. If it made Yarik smile, good. If it made others laugh, so be it. If it made the visitors who the billionaire had brought here swallow sharp chunks of unchewed candies at the crack of the front doors opening, that was probably the point.
    “Mr. Bazarov,” the driver said, motioning with his hand to the top of the steps.
    Instead, a woman stood in the doorway. She’d gathered her blond hair in a white kerchief rimmed with the red needlework for which the region was famed, wrapped herself in a similar Karelian shawl, and when she turned and led him in he could see, following, how it was cut to slip down her arms and leave her shoulders bare, how her cool blue dress barely reached to her thighs, how her heels were dyed to match the needlework, how she walked in them in a way that made her long braid swish, that made him have to turn his head away.
    The parquetried floor and velvet drapes, panels of mirrors and painted ceiling and all the glass chandeliers: none of it compared to what hung from the walls. There were enough