Free Fellow Travelers by James Cook Page B

clouds, a faint rumble of thunder echoed in the canyon and there was a bright blaze of lightning.
    We catapulted down the mountain like an avalanche, like three stones rolling, with me in the lead, running and sliding, and what had taken us a day and a half to achieve we undid in an afternoon. By nightfall, we were back at the mine, in our warm civilized house, and I was myself again.
    iii
    In the eight months I had spent in Platinumburg Manny had been establishing Faust Enterprises as a foreign showcase in Moscow. He had given the company a new name, Faust American Corp., and set up quarters on the ground floor of a four-story marble building in Koznetsky Most, a steep narrow commercial street near Petrovska in the heart of Moscow’s shopping district. The Russians had greater hopes for Faust American than we did. They wanted us to take over the whole building, but Manny said no, all he would need was the ground floor, and he worked out a deal to rent it not for a quarter or so of what it would cost to occupy all four floors, but less than a fifth. That was symptomatic somehow of the new Russian economy. Moscow was the only city in the world where you paid less for more and where even the scalpers in Sverdlov Square sold you tickets to the ballet for less than you’d pay at the box office.
    Manny turned the Faust American headquarters into a European’s dream of an American corporate office. He cut a paneled waiting room into the corner, filled it with dark leather-upholstered furniture, polished oak tables and chairs, green-shaded brass lamps, a few strategically placed potted palms, and a pretty girl sitting at a switchboard at the reception desk.
    Out back there was a large office in which Manny conducted his business, and next to it a smaller one that was to be mine. Both had windows overlooking the office floor so we could keep an eye on the staff—a half-dozen young women and two men sitting at desks, shuffling papers, and doing their best to look busy and efficient. For months, we had twice as much staff as we needed, but they cost us practically nothing, and Manny insisted we had to seem to be the sort of substantial organization that needed many employees. So FAC looked like a real business, and as a foreign corporation it was exotic enough to attract attention.
    But if we now had an office to work in and a place for doing business, our living conditions were no better than they had been a year before. The housing shortage was already acute in Moscow, and the best Manny had been able to find was some rooms on the fourth floor of a seedy hotel called the Excelsior, not far from Stoleshnikov Lane. To people who visited us there, the place seemed fairly luxurious. But to us, the filth and squalor were beyond belief.
    You climbed those rickety stairs, past families of six and eight crowded into rooms barely large enough for two, and wound up at the Faust quarters on the fourth floor front: three rooms facing the street and affording a view of the river in the spaces between the buildings. Manny took the bedroom, I the living room, and we shared the sitting room in between. The floors were bare and the furniture wobbled when you touched it, so you propped it up with an old book, newspaper, or piece of wood. There was a ramshackle unlighted bathroom off the bedroom and hot water in an unlighted room at the end of the hall. You slept on bedding in unbelievable filth. The management provided a mattress, but no sheets or blankets.
    Roaches scattered across the walls when you turned on the lights, and bedbugs disappeared into the linen when you turned back the bedding. The smell of cooking pervaded everything, the halls, the rooms, even your clothes, and hung in your head like smoke when you went outside. But there by the living-room window was a spanking new Swedish telephone—bronze-plated, with earpiece and mouthpiece in a single implement that rested in an elegant cradle.
    â€œYou don’t know how