Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 159 – 1832 words
Columns :: Sergei loses $ 27,000! Apr. 1st in August

MOSCOW, August 17, 2005 -- Comments:   Ratings:
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Old story: Where’s Sergei?
Nailing Tioufline?
Avian flu
Siberia melting
Home – without money
Half the rent
Uncle Sasha – another hated cop
April fool!



MOSCOW, August 17, 2005 – The deadline has passed, and Sergei and Zhorik haven’t returned.

When we parted about 11:00 last night, Sergei said he’d be home sometime during the night – “no later than 5 a.m.” – with the $ 25,000: 10,000 bucksi for me, 10,000 for Andrei, and 5,000 for himself.

We bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate with, whatever time he arrived.

It’s 5:05 and he’s not here.

Neither is Zhorik.

I left them together at Valera Dmitrivich’s apartment.

I’m hoping they’re just late. All my dire predictions of fates worse than death so far have been grossly exaggerated. Sergei has always shown up eventually, and everything has been hunky-dory.


But this is different! He admitted last night that what he was doing was dangerous. “I don’t want them to know about you, about where I live here in Moscow, about Stavropol, or Svetlograd. I told them I was from a little town in the north of Moscow region.”

“Where is the danger from?” I asked. “The cops? The mafia? What could happen?”

Not from the cops, he said. “The worst thing that could happen is you won’t have the rent tomorrow.”

That in itself would be pretty bad. But not as bad as what the mafia – or somebody – might do to him.

“Why did you need the thousand dollars you took the other night; and the $ 100 yesterday?”

“To make the documents.”

It sounds like documents are being forged. What for?

Zhorik is with him. I feel better about that. I think he’s in less danger with Zhorik – or is Zhorik simply in more danger with him?

Dima, the landlady’s son, is coming for the rent between 11 and 2. I think I have about $ 500 in the bank. If Sergei doesn’t show up with the money, I’ll just have to tell him I don’t have the rest right now.

But I also called Nadya yesterday and told her that Sergei said he’d have the money for me today, and I’d pay her today or tomorrow. If I don’t get it to her, I’ll have egg all over my face.

But what will Sergei have all over his? Blood? Crushed eyeballs? This is not a pretty business, and I wish he weren’t in it. All I wanted was enough to pay the rent and repay Nadya.

But Sergei’s a gambler. Maybe an addictive gambler, although since he opened his own casino, he doesn’t gamble any more. Now that he’s “the house,” he’s learned that the gambler always loses to the house. But he still has the gambler’s soul. It sounds like he’s staked everything on one throw of the dice.

He’s now 20 minutes past deadline. Does that mean he rolled wrong?

He recently told me with a grin: “My life’s like a casino. Sometimes I’m lucky, sometimes I’m not.”


The purpose of our visit to Valera Dmitrevich was to look at the possibility of recouping something from my $ 30,000 judgment against Tioufline three years ago (Chapt. 91).

I had never mentioned it to Sergei and Andrei, because I knew if they found out about it, they’d want to kill the bastard. Though I think he may deserve it, it’s not a good idea. They’d get caught and spend the rest of their life in jail. He’s not worth it.

But in one of Zhorik’s and my intimate canned cocktail moments on the bench in the courtyard back in the spring, I told him the story. He promised he would look at the court order after he finished his pre-law school in Peter and see if there might be something we could still do.

So he took it to his and the twins’ lawyer friend Valera Dmitrevich and asked him to look it over.

Valera concluded that I’ve got a pretty good chance of collecting, though how, I can’t fathom if Andrei owns nothing. In any case, first I have to give Valera $ 500 to do the necessary research – Where’s Andrei? Is he even alive? Where’s his brother? What’s the status of the apartments, etc. – and then try to go after it. If he succeeds, I’ll give him a percentage.

It’s a long shot, but worth a try.

Siberia’s melting! Described as “a frozen peat bog the size of France and Germany combined” containing “billions of tons” of greenhouse gas, the Siberian permafrost is thawing for the first time since the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago.

The scientists who discovered it, Sergei Kirpotin at Tomsk State University in western Siberia and Judith Marquand at Oxford University, reported in New Scientist magazine that the thawing only started 3-4 years ago and is unquestionably connected to global warming caused by burning fossil fuels.

If “the world's largest frozen peat bog” thaws, scientists think it will in the process release into the atmosphere billions of tons of methane, “a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide” that will lead to a 10% to 25% increase in global warming in the next 100 years.

Kirpotin called it an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible….” In other words, the damage from the dying petrochemical age has already been done. Nothin’ you can do now to stop it.

It’s too late for the Kyoto Treaty, but, hey, Dubya, don’t worry. You’ll be dead by the time the polar caps melt. It’s your grandchildren that will have to deal with the worldwide social, economic and environmental devastation. And with your Caldwell ranch under 10 feet of water, maybe they can supplement their pensions by selling seaside lots! Or cactus fish!

That is, if anybody but you and your cronies still has any money left by then.


They came home about 6:30 – sans money. No, the mafia came through right on target: $ 27,000 cool cash. The cops got it! Out of the pockets of one set of bandits into the pockets of a worse set.

His face was also bruised and swollen. But no blood and no concussion. And he’s alive. He’s lucky.

He almost made it. He had a taxi take him to the pick-up point, presumably an apartment somewhere around Rechnoi Vokzal and wait while he went to pick up the money. Then he left and got into the cab. All he would have had to do was stay in the god-damned cab and let it bring him straight home; but because he only had 1,000-ruble bills and didn’t want to give the cab driver an 800-ruble tip, he went to the Rechnoi Vokzal metro station.

If he didn’t want to part with the money, he could have stopped at any one of a million kiosks and bought a pack of cigarettes to change the 1,000-ruble note.

Is this some new kind of Russian logic? Or is it the logic of a naïve country kid? But he’s been in Moscow for 3-4 years!

So the cops nailed him. First, they asked for his ID. No problem. “Okay, you can go.” But his pal noticed Sergei’s bulging pockets.

“What’s in them?”

As soon as they saw the cash it was all over. “That’s a loan, it’s for my grandfather,” Sergei protested as they stuffed it into their pockets.

“Get the fuck out of here,” was the cop’s response.”

When Sergei said, “I’m going to report you to the prosecutor,” the cop started beating him in the face and across the nose.

I feel so sorry for him. It was the supreme, valiant effort of his young life. He literally sacrificed himself for Andrei and me, only to have it all snatched away by the uniformed bandits.

It seems that the $ 27,000 was just Sergei’s down payment. When “the job” – whatever it is – is finished, he’s due the remaining $ 23,000.

But he’s still more worried about me than he is about himself. “Dane, I’ll ask them to give me $ 1,000 of what they still owe me and give it to you tomorrow.”

The landlady’s son Dima is due in 10 minutes. I owe 20,000 rubles for the rent. I have only 14,500 – about $ 175 short. All I can do is give him what I’ve got and a sob story, and promise the rest to him by Friday.

“I’m glad you’re at least alive,” I told him as I hugged and kissed him.

“I’m not.”

He’s still defiant; he’s still planning for the future; he’s still trying to decide whether to kill Tioufline or just break his neck.

After it happened, he called Zhorik, still at Valera Dmitrevich’s, who caught the metro to meet him at Rechnoi Vokzal. But it was the last metro, and they had to walk the several miles home. At 8 a.m., they’re both collapsed in sleep, the best state for them both right now.

My poor beloved, selfless, giving, unholy little angel.

My heart is bleeding for him. Russia is a cruel hoax.


Landlady Natasha, not her son, came today to collect the rent. “Something terrible has happened,” and I told her the rough outline of what had happened, except that I told her that it was only $ 3,000 and that he had borrowed it and was returning it when it was stolen. The stark awfulness of it finally hit me, and my eyes were tearing when I told her.

For native Russians it’s a familiar tale, and she sympathized with me completely. In fact, she only took half the 20,000 rubles and said her son would collect the other half on Friday.

But I don’t think I’ll have it. My class at Masha’s law firm, from which I was due to receive $ 100 tomorrow, has cancelled. I might still make it, though, if I get 3000 rubles from Aleksei tomorrow tonight (can’t remember if it’s due), 1500 from Data+ and 500 from Lena on Friday morning. If Anton gets back from Uzbekestan in time for his noon class – which I doubt – I’ll definitely have it.

It’s not looking promising.


The police are universally hated. Sergei’s Uncle Sasha, Valentin’s brother who hosted us in Stavropol (Chapt. 100), is a retired cop. Sergei said he used to stop Orientals – Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese – take their passports and then refuse to return them unless they gave him money. If they didn’t give him what he asked for, he would burn their passports.

Zhorik said he used to tell him that “an honest cop in Russia is a dead cop.”

Damned shame they’re not all honest.


April fool! Yes, instead of Mayday, Mayday, it’s April Fool! Or maybe August fool? Or maybe year-round fool. That’s what I feel like.

I’ve made a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious mistake. It wasn’t 27,000 dollars the cops got. It was 27,000 rubles – a little less than a grand. Of course, that’s a lot of money and would make me well right now, but it’s nothing compared to 27,000 bucksi!

The end of the world still awaits.

How could I make a mistake of this magnitude?

This Abbot & Costello mix-up occurred because Sergei has been talking incessantly about his $ 25,000 deal. He had started out talking about $ 3,000, which soon went to $ 7,000, then to $ 25,000, $ 10,000 of which would be for me. He never switched monetary units when he started talking about collecting last night, so when he said 27,000, I just figured the price had changed again.

It was actually a $ 1,000 advance on the $ 25,000 Sergei will have coming to him when the deal -- whatever it is – is finished.

I also have some other good alibis: a) Sergei has been very cryptic about all this; b) he talks like a machine gun – even my friend Vasili couldn’t understand him last week when I asked him to translate something Sergei was saying; 3) Sergei has a speech impediment – can’t pronounce his “r”s, which makes him even more difficult to comprehend.

So it’s an understandable mistake.

But one that someone who was once considered a good reporter shouldn’t have made.

I feel like an idiot. A very ecstatic idiot who wants to dance and sing. Everything is right-side-up again. Of course I had to tell Natasha I had let her down, and can’t pay her the $ 1,000 for another couple of weeks.

But I was able to borrow $ 200 from Kreutz to pay the rent. And we have about $ 50 to eat on for the weekend.

So life is beautiful again.

And we just drank the champagne!