Free The Family Hightower by Brian Francis Slattery Page A

language of the schools and street signs and the language everyone still knows how to speak—sprinkled with a little English. At night it gets frantic. The neon from the casinos comes on; people park their cars all over the sidewalk, drive down it to get back on the road. The music starts blaring, that pulsing, throbbing, four-on-the-floor beat you hear everywhere in the northern hemisphere. Someone closes the street and sets up a stage, and there’s a giant crowd in front of it, dancing with their hands in the air. It goes until three in the morning; at four there are still people out, smoking and drinking coffee in a café. There’s so much energy here, the same energy that got people to vote themselves out of the Soviet Union just before it dissolved; in less than a decade, even the West will know Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square—because it’ll be jammed with hundreds of thousands of people, enough of them wearing orange to give the revolution its name. They’ll be there because they’re tired of it, because the government that comes in after the Soviet Union falls looks too much like the Soviet Union. Maybe because it looks worse. In 1995 , there’s the hyperinflation, the obvious corruption. People moving to the black market just to make a living. The general breakdown in order; the creepy sense that the criminals own this place. People keep getting shaken down; people keep getting killed. At the birthday party of an oligarch on the banks of the Dneiper, there are seventy-two bodyguards, some of them water-skiing the perimeter with their Kalashnikovs in their hands. Years later, though, there’ll still be the people kissing all along Khreshchatyk Street, and the musicians busking Western pop music of every era, as if they discovered it all at once when the walls came down and the country opened up, and now one beautiful note keeps getting played and the kiss goes on forever.
    But again, Petey’s disappointed. He expected more of a welcome from the criminals he’s come to work with. Hugs, drinks, all that. A warm smile, showing their eagerness to be friends. They check into the Hotel Dnipro, a place that makes Curly think of nothing but James Bond movies from the 1970 s, from the clacking buttons for the elevator to the wood paneling in the hallways, the phone and TV lines running along the tops of the walls. The industrial tiling in the bathrooms, the giant heated towel rack. It’s too easy to imagine the room being bugged. He remembers a friend of the family who made good a couple decades ago and went to Moscow just a few years ago. They got into the bathroom and checked out the amenities. Gee, I wish these towels were a little bigger, the wife said out loud. Three minutes later, there was a knock on their door, a friendly bellboy with linens in his arms. You wanted larger towels, madame?
    The first meeting is in a casino, where it’s all about black. Windows tinted so black you can’t see in. A row of black Mercedes-Benzes parked at a forty-five-degree angle on the sidewalk outside, their windows also tinted so black you wonder if the driver can see out. A huge man at the door at first won’t let them in, no matter what Curly says, until a short buzz-cut man in a black leather jacket and designer jeans opens the door, gives the bouncer the nod.
    â€œSorry,” he says in Ukrainian. “We weren’t sure it was you.”
    He leads them through the games, the bar, fast, to a quieter back room. It’s small but screams money to blow: dark wood paneling, leather chairs. A glass coffee table with marble feet. Good booze, booze from all over the world. Espresso. Cigars. Curly can see from Petey’s smile what he’s thinking: This is more like it. But Curly’s nervous.
    â€œYou speak Russian?” the buzz-cut man says, in Ukrainian.
    â€œNo. Just Ukrainian.”
    The man smiles. “How charming,” he says. Now