Free The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil Page B

weapons along one side to have given pause to a Tartar horde—long swords, rapiers, battle-axes, bludgeons—while along the other enough tomahawks and arrows and eagle-feathered lances to pull a cavalry regiment up short.
    The clacking of the woman’s heels stopped so suddenly he almost ran into her. She took a swift step aside, as if she’d been blundered into before, then took another step to the closed door, knocked, spoke to the wood—something in English—stepped aside again, pushed the door open for him to go in.
    The billionaire was standing in the middle of the room. Not behind a desk, or with hands on a chair, or near any furniture at all, but just standing there. He looked Yarik straight in the eyes. “What do you want?” he said.
    Behind Yarik, the woman, or some automatic thing, shut the door.
    “Excuse me?” Yarik said.
    “I asked you, what do you want?”
    Yarik tried not to look away. The bits of mint he’d mashed into the depressions of his molars had hardened and stuck; his teeth felt glued together. The billionaire watched him, motionless. He was dressed in another shiny metallic suit, another leather string tie. This time the tie was orange. So were the boots. They were cowboy boots, Yarik realized, made from the kind of scaly leather he’d seen used on women’s handbags. Something about that gave him the strength to get his teeth unsealed; they came apart with a pop.
    As if the sound was a latch coming loose in the billionaire’s cheeks, the man’s face sprung a grin. He whistled, a piercing, high-pitched noise that came through his teeth and lifted his eyebrows and brightened his eyes, and died fast as it had come, leaving the man grinning even wider. “Look at you jump,” he said. “You are nervous. You better sit down.”
    “Sir—” Yarik started.
    “Sit down,” the man said. “I’m just joking, sit down.”
    Yarik didn’t know if the man meant he was joking about the sitting, or about what had come before. With one hand, he hitched the hard hat up where he held it against his side.
    “Sit!” The man shot the word through his smile, finished it off with a smack on the back of the couch.
    It was a leather couch, plush and deep, and it was the only seat in the room. The room was an office—a big-windowed, beige-carpeted, airy, vast office—but in the whole office the only other piece of furniture was the desk. Behind the desk: no chair. On the desk: a computer, a phone, a lamp, three glass picture frames on clear glass stands with their black felt backs turned to him. Beneath the lamp, in the center of the desk: a pair of wooden hands carved out of burl-whirled Karelian birch. In the hands: two guns. They were antiquated, long-barreled, cylinder-loaded pistols with ivory handles and brass trigger guards and heavy-looking muzzles, and taking in the scenes of galloping horses scratched into the gold plate over their chambers, Yarik wondered if they had ever even been fired, and then if the billionaire had been the one to fire them, and at what, at whom. He had not touched a gun in more than a decade, since the day that Dyadya Avya—drunk, said the kulak who’d bought their uncle’s land; sober, Yarik knew—waded out into the Kosha with his old army pistol in his hand, the day the brothers had splashed in after him, shouting for their dyadya out in the current, the day that Yarik had grabbed the gun too late.
    He looked away. In one of the corners, a huge wood-burning oven made of blue and white china stretched from floor to ceiling. In another: a sea green orb of translucent plastic. One wall was completely covered by a painting Yarik remembered from some high school textbook: a field of heavy horses thundering forward at full charge, on their backs Rus knights in plated mail and glaring helmets, lances lowered, swords drawn. Across the room, on the opposite wall, another painting just as huge: grassy plain, hot blue sky, white teeth gritted beneath wide brimmed hats,