Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets Read Free Book Online Page A

and neck chains, rings with small diamonds, and other items made from precious metals and stones. Customers were huddled over the few display cases. Most seemed less concerned with the aesthetics of the goods than with their practical qualities, such as grams and karats. One squat, middle-aged man with thick, pharmacy-style glasses purchased some sapphire earrings and two gaudy women’s rings with completely different band sizes. I wondered whether he was making a foray into cross-dressing or just had a lot of paramours to please.
    It wasn’t that everyone had struck it rich and had started buying up baubles in the midst of an economic collapse. Prices for gold and stones had been set artificially low by the state, much lower than on world markets. Buying and then reselling to middlemen could be lucrative—like swapping a ten-dollar bill for a twenty. The shoppers would then go on to sell to other middlemen or take the loot out to Western countries and hawk the items for hard currency.
    Vova and his lot were middlemen too, after a fashion. They controlled access to the store, taking payoffs from the people in line, who anted up for prime positions and rights to buy from “special” collections of goods. The gang then shared the payoffs with the store managers; the managers then used the proceeds to secure more jewels and gold from state suppliers, and so on. And Vova’s guys also provided “insurance,” as he put it. The “insurance” bit was obligatory, obviously.
    Yet the gig wasn’t a reket in the full sense of the word. Vova scolded me for misunderstanding the difference: A racket, he explained, was a simple, one-off extortion, with the extorters threatening to kill or maim the owners of a budding small-business cooperative (or actually killing or maiming them) unless they handed over cash on demand. Vova was adamant that this sort of crude shakedown had no resemblance whatsoever to his “respectable” line of business. His vocation had important sorts of “moral underpinnings,” as Vova reasoned, because he and his associates provided actual protection for their clients, who might otherwise be molested by “real racketeers” or, worse, by corrupt Soviet police or bureaucrats, who could either extort money themselves or simply shut down the operation—and no one wanted that, did they?
    Vova acted as if he were the only thing standing between the workers of the jewelry shop and chaos.
    “We keep an eye on them so they don’t get kicked around,” he said. “You see, the people we protect would rather deal with us than the cops. Why? With the cops they might have to pay bribes, or they might end up tossed into the clink for no real reason. The cops could end up running the store, or the cops and some bureaucrat might close it down. So the workers prefer to deal with us.”
    It helped that everyone was part of the racket: the state suppliers who dealt the cut-rate goods for bribes, the store managers who took and gave payoffs, even the customers who bought purely for speculative profit. And, of course, Vova and his “business partners.” They were the most parasitic on the food chain, but the fact that everyone in the entire game was corrupt helped calm his conscience.
• • •
    BARDAK!” VOVA EXCLAIMED once we were back in another taxi and heading away from the jewelry store. “Whorehouse!”
    This was Vova’s one-word postulate about the nature of the crumbling Soviet system and usually signaled the beginning of one of his out-of-the-blue inexplicable rants.
    The word bardak can literally mean “whorehouse” in Russian, but colloquially, it is something closer to “chaos” or “mess.” It lacks the vulgarity connoted in English, and in the language of Pushkin, it is employed with great frequency. Still, I could not get over the curiousness of hearing “Whorehouse!” several times a day from the lips of average Russians whenever the slightest injustice befell them. In Vova’s case, it