But before she could be embarrassed, the conversation instantly shifted toward the topic of the lead piece, and L. Litvak brazenly put forth his Yuri Gagarin space odyssey, when Cohen turned to him and said, "But how can we even consider passing up Vladimir's poem for the top spot?"

Everyone hushed. Vladimir searched Cohen's face for sarcasm, but it looked tempered, not so much resigned as perspicacious, understanding. With the empty beer bottles in front of him and a smudge of hummus in the fluff of his pseudobeard, Vladimir took a mental snapshot of Cohen as he had pretended to have taken a picture of Mother in the nonexistent Chinese restaurant. Friend Cohen getting wisdom, catching on.

"Yes, of course, Vladimir's poem," said the awakened Plank.

"Of course," Maxine said. "It's the most redeeming piece I've heard since I've come here."

"By all means, Vladimir's poem!" shouted Alexandra. "And Marcus can decorate it. You can draw something, honey."

"Then you can put my story right after it," Larry said. "It'll act as counterbalance."

Vladimir picked up a glass of absinthe. "Thank you, everyone," he said. "I would like to take the credit for this work myself, but, sadly, I can't. Without Perry's mentorship, I could have never cut to the heart of the matter. I'd still be writing the adolescent crap, the shaggy-dog poems. So, please, a toast!"

"To me!" Cohen smiled his "Sunrise, Sunset" elderly papa smile. He reached over to pat Vladimir's head.

"You know . . ." Morgan was saying after the ripples of the toast had subsided and no one had anything else to say. "You people. This reading. This is all so new to me. Where I come from . . . Nobody . . . This is sort of how I pictured Prava. This is kind of why I came here."

Vladimir's jaw dropped at the sound of this unsolicited honesty. What the hell was she doing? You don't just admit these things, no matter how true they are. Did Young Beauty (with the long brown hair) need an introductory course in poseurdom? Self-invention 101?

But the Crowd soaked it right in, punching each other's shoulders in jest. Yes, they sort of kind of knew what she was talking about, this sweet, dazzling newcomer in their midst.

They took Morgan with them after they left the Joy. Later, when Alexandra got the chance to be alone and personal with her in a decaying Lesser Quarter ladies' room, she found out that Morgan had found Vladimir's poetry "brilliant" and Vladimir himself "exotic." So maybe there was hope for her, after all.

BUT VLADIMIR PUT her out of his mind. There was serious work to do. Phase Two had gone off without a hitch; bad poetry had carried the day; the checkbooks were out and ready. He looked to Harold Green, generously making his way past the supplicants at the Carrot Bar, each begging for one of the Joy's hefty artist-in-residence grants. By the looks of him, Harold was on the most important mission of his life. Destination: Girshkin.

No doubt about it, Phase Three's time had come.

The suckling phase.

24. COLE PORTER.

AND GOD.

WAKE UP, SHOWER, and get to church. Vladimir did as his pebble-sized Judeo-Christian conscience told him. He swallowed vitamins and drank glasses of water. His new alarm clock was still howling. He put on his one and only suit bought on a whim from the new German department store for tens of thousands of crowns and realized that it was meant for a person twice his size. "Dobry fucking den'," he said to himself in the mirror.

In the side lot by the opium garden, his car was idling along with Jan. The sky was a desolate bleached-out blue with patches of russet clouds as thick as bark on which, it seemed, advertisements could be placed and sailed above the city. Kostya was doing some nature stuff with a rose bush, pruning it, perhaps; the gardening lessons imparted by Vladimir's father had long lost their relevance.

"Good morning, Tsarevitch Vladimir," Kostya said upon seeing him. He looked more dignified than ever today--no nylon, just khakis, brogues, and white cotton shirt.

"Tsarevitch?" Vladimir said.

Kostya ambled over and snapped the shearlike things at Vladimir, missing him by centimeters. He seemed all too happy at the prospect of a Russian Orthodox Sunday. "The check cleared from the Canadian!" he shouted. "What's his name? Harold Green. The club owner."

"The full quarter million? You mean . . . Heavenly God . . . Are you saying that . . . ?" Was he saying that U.S.$250,000.00, the equivalent of fifty years of wages for the average Stolovan, had gushed into the Groundhog's kitty like the Neva River melting in the spring? And all through Vladimir's free-market treachery? No, it could not be. The world rested on sounder poles: north and south; the Dow Jones and the Nikkei; the wages of sin and the minimum wage. But to sell two hundred and sixty shares of PravaInvest at U.S.$960.00 a pop . . . That was out there in Loop-de-Loop Land where Jim Jones, Timothy Leary, and Friedrich Engels rode their unicorns up and away into the pink-purple sky.

True, Vladimir did recall Harry drunk and delusional at the Nouveau's Martini Bar, his head in his hands, his pate, bald and moist, gleaming like the martini decanters arrayed above the bar. Slobbering, weeping: "I have no talent, my young Russian friend. Only off-shore accounts."

"Get out of here!" Vladimir barked without warning, surprising even himself. This was the tone of Mother addressing one of her native-born underlings, some poor accountant with a state school education. Was Vladimir drunk? Or was he more sober than ever? It felt like a little bit of both.

"What?" Harry said.

"Get out of this country! Nobody wants you here."

Harry pressed his drink to his chest and shook his head without comprehending.

"Look at you," Vladimir continued bellowing. "You're a little white boy in a big white man's body. Your father and his capitalist cronies destroyed my nation. Yes, they fucked the peace-loving Soviet people right and proper."

"But, Vladimir!" Harry cried. "What are you saying? What nation? It was the Soviets who invaded the Stolovan Republic in 1969--"

"Don't start with your cozy little facts. We do not bow to your facts." Vladimir suspended his diatribe for a minute and took a deep breath. We do not bow to facts? Hadn't he seen that slogan once, in his youth, on a communist propaganda poster in Leningrad? Just what the hell was he becoming? Vladimir the Heartless Apparatchik?

"But you're wealthy yourself," Harry protested through his tears. "You have a chauffeur, a BMW, that nice felt hat."

"But that is my right!" Vladimir bellowed, ignoring the kindly impulses his better organ--his heart--was pumping through the left ventricle along with the liters of frothy type-O blood. There would be time to indulge Mr. Heart later . . . This was war! "Have you not heard of identity politics?" Vladimir shouted. "Are you daft, man? To be rich in my own milieu, to partake in the economic rebirth of my own part of the world, why, if that's not part of my narrative, what the hell is?" At this point, Vladimir himself almost became misty-eyed as he pictured Francesca, the woman at whose feet he had learned the ways of the world, walking in through the gilded doors of the Nouveau's Martini Bar, smiling wanly as Vladimir beheaded this sorry creature in the same way she used to castrate the politically challenged masses in New York. Oh, Frannie. This is for you, honey! Let greatness and beauty prevail over baldness and nullity . . .

"My narrative!" Vladimir resumed screaming. "It's about me, not about you, you imperialist American swine."

"I'm Canadian," Harry whispered.

"Oh, no, you don't," Vladimir shouted, grabbing him by the folds of his oversized rugby sweater. "Don't even go there, pal."

AND LATER, IN the rank Nouveau bathroom, where the piss of the English-speaking world mingled on the chipped marble, Vladimir personally applied minoxidil around the Arctic outposts of Harry's remaining hair, while a lone, smashed New Zealand tourist looked on, one hand poised to reach for the door in case things went too far.

By this point, Vladimir was rocked from side to side by waves of pity. Oh, that poor Harry Green! Oh, why was embezzlement so cruel? Why couldn't rich people just spontaneously give money away like that nice Soros fellow? Vladimir even leaned over to kiss Harry's wet brow like a concerned parent. "There, there," he said.

"What do you want me to do?" Harry said, wiping his scarlet eyes, blowing his tiny twisted nose, trying to regain the quiet dignity that, before this wretched evening, had been his signature. "Even if I do grow back my hair, that's only half the battle. I'll still be old. I'll still be a . . . What did you call me?"

"An interloper."

"Oh, God."

"Harry, my sweet man," Vladimir said, recapping the minoxidil bottle, his portable fountain of youth. "What am I going to do with you, huh?"

"What? What?" Vladimir looked at Harry's reflection in the mirror. Those huge red eyes, the freckled chin, the receding gums. It was almost too much. "What are you going to do with me, Vladimir?"

AND TWENTY MINUTES later, winding through the darkened streets around the walls of the castle, the parapets coming in and out of the corners of vision, Beethoven's Seventh blaring off the CD player, Vladimir held the checkbook steady on the crying Canadian's lap. To be honest, Vladimir was shaking a little, too. It was hard to come to terms with what he had done. But this wasn't really the worst kind of crime, now was it? They were going to print a literary journal! A journal with Harry's name prominently displayed. It was all part of the familiar cultural Ponzi scheme practiced the world over--from third-rate dance collectives to those idiotic creative-writing programs. The participants put in their time and money, dutifully attended each other's kazoo recitals and poetry readings, and by the end of the day the only ingredient missing from their enterprise was the actual talent (much as a regular Ponzi scheme lacks the actual cash). Still, was it so terribly wrong to give people a little hope . . . ?

"PravaInvest will do for you what cultural relativism did for me," Vladimir said, patting the soft head resting warmly on his shoulder. "Now, two hundred sixty shares is not a lot. I've got a couple of Swiss going in for three thousand. But it's an introduction to the global continuum. It's a start."

"Ooh, if only my father knew where his lousy money was going!" Harry laughed. "I can't wait to fax him that Cagliostro journal. And pictures of that hospital in Sarajevo! And the Reiki clinic, too!"

"Now, now," Vladimir said, as the car's headlights illuminated an archway carved into a castle wall, beyond which the Lower City was repositioning itself so that its spires would lie directly at Vladimir's feet. "Let's not be spiteful, Harry." And he gave his new investor a pleasant squeeze, then ordered Jan to set a course for Harry's villa, where his gurgling friend, reeking of minoxidil and self-love, could be deposited for the night.

And that was that. The cash register opened, the digits turned, the sun rose once again over Prava.

"YES, THE FULL quarter-million," Kostya said, confirming yesterday's wondrous news, as he fell on his knees before the young tsar and kissed his hand with his dry, chapped lips.

"And ten percent of it is mine," Vladimir said. He had not intended to say it out loud, but to stifle a sentiment like that was not possible.

"The Groundhog said he will give you twenty percent as an incentive," Kostya said. "Can you lunch with him after church?"

"Of course!" Vladimir said. "Let's hurry then! Jan, start the car!"

"No expensive car, please," Kostya said.

"Pardon?"

"We show our piety on the way to church by taking public transportation like the rest of the congregants."

"Oh my God! Are you serious?" This was a little much. "Couldn't we just take a Fiat or something?"

Jan smiled and twirled the car keys around his meaty forefinger. "I'll drive you gentlemen as far as the metro station," he said. "Now be good Christians and kindly open your own doors."

THE METRO WAS designed in the Lenin's Starship motif: the walls chrome-plated in futuristic shades of that socialist-friendly color, ecru; the cameras at the edge of the platform recording the reactionary tendencies of the passengers; the Soviet-built trains that inspired many an Ode to Moving Metal from besotted Slavs around the bloc; the recorded voice of some sturdy, no-nonsense Heroine of Socialist Labor over the public address system: "Desist in entering and exiting! The doors are about to close."

And close they did, as fast as lightning cranked out of some totalitarian power-station out in the woods. Look! Everywhere Vladimir turned--Stolovans, Stolovans, Stolovans! Stolovans in Prava, of all places! Dobry den', Milan! Howdy do, Teresa? Did you get a haircut, Bouhumil? Panko, stop climbing on the seats!

The wagonful of these "Stolovans on the Move" rumbled toward the Tavlata. At the Castle station they picked up some British grade-schoolers in uniform who swiftly moved to one corner and behaved themselves like good little gentlemen. They were disgorged at the Old Town station, the last outpost of Tourist Prava, and were replaced by teenage locals with out-of-control acne, polyester leisure suits, and high-tops.

On and on they went. The distances between the stations got progressively longer. The bored teenage boys were now making slurping sounds to one of their girlfriends, a tall pimpled beauty in a Lycra skirt who took out a book and busied herself flipping through the pages, while a babushka waved a fist the size of a beefsteak tomato at the boys and shouted something about their "unsocialist upbringing."

"Hooligans!" Kostya said. "And on a Sunday, too." Vladimir nodded and pretended to doze off. At his present rate of ascension he could foresee a time when it would be possible to tell Kostya the Angel to bugger off, and to let his debauchery and projected lechery assume the sum total of his waking hours. But he had to have a friend in the Russian circuit, a shield from Gusev and the merry men with the Kalashnikovs out in the lobby. Everyone held Kostya in high regard, this Vladimir knew. When Kostya went to church, it was as if he went to church for all of them. Plus he knew something about computers--you could never underestimate that.

And then, while Vladimir never enjoyed the huffing and puffing sessions beneath the sun, and the craziness with the ten-pound dumbbells, he was aware of a new physical vitality that went along nicely with his new big-man-on-campus image. For instance, he was straighter, and, as a consequence, taller. His breasts, the objects of Gusev's merriment, which had at one point reached such a state of disrepair that even Vladimir himself had started to find them mildly arousing, were slowly being shaped into two hard little mounds suitable for flexing. His lungs were in better order, too--he didn't leave a trail of mucus behind after each lap; when smoking hashish he could keep the smoke in longer and let it percolate among the nooks and crannies of his asthma-scarred villus.

But still he wanted freedom from the Lord's man in Prava, or at least a lighter schedule. More time to splash water on his face and get his bearings in the morning.

BY THE TIME they disembarked they were the only ones left on the train. At ground level the main smokestack of a factory rose dramatically above them like a NASA rocket with a serious fire in the capsule. In one direction a distant huddle of panelaks shimmered in the translucent chemical haze. In another direction there appeared to be a vast stretch of nothing. Kostya looked toward the nothing, using his hand as a visor against the late morning sun. Vladimir looked to the cherub and smiled, trying to appear both enthusiastic and confused. He made a few epic sweeps of the hand as if to indicate that the "nothing" was not a good thing and the powder towers and jazz clubs of the Golden City were really more his cup of grog.

Kostya remained unmoved. He found a bus schedule tacked on to an enormous electrified fence that enclosed the factory. "There," he said. "There should be one now."

And by the dictate of God, Kostya's coconspirator, an entirely empty double-jointed bus, its two tremendous halves bound together by a thick oval of rubber, rounded the corner, raising dust in its wake. The bus stopped, let out a long sigh as if overcome by its loneliness for passengers, and opened its many doors.

THEY RUMBLED THROUGH the fields of emptiness, the giant factory growing distant in the dirty rectangle of the back window. The empty fields looked to Vladimir as if they had been tortured by Romania's dreaded Securitate, the soil randomly upturned and heaped into mounds or depleted into mini-canyons.

Kostya sat pensively, his hands cupped together as if he was praying already, which might have been the case. "You know, my mother's very sick," he said without the customary preamble.

"How terrible," Vladimir quickly replied.

"Yes. I don't know how it will turn out. I'm going to pray for her."

"Of course." Vladimir fidgeted quietly. "I'll pray for her too."

Kostya gave his thanks and turned to the window and the empty view. "If you want," Vladimir said, "I can give you the money to fly her to Austria for better medical treatment. That is, if you need the money."

"I thought about that. Of doing it with my own money. But I want her in Russia in case she . . . I want her to be surrounded by her own people." Vladimir nodded as if he could appreciate the sentiment, but somehow the phrase "her own people" reminded him of the fact that these concerned and helpful (and mythical) Russians of the medical profession were a far cry from his own people, whom Kostya's mother would probably not appreciate milling about her deathbed with their legendary big noses and dirty hands. But then again, that was just an assumption. There were some Russians who weren't like that. Kostya, for one, knew of Vladimir's missing foreskin and never said anything derogatory. On the other hand, he was taking him to church.

Amid the empty fields they came across "The International Technological Joint Venture--FutureTek 2000," announced by a freshly painted billboard on the side of the road. It resembled something of a Victorian-era factory mated to a grain silo, really just a collection of thick, rusted pipes and bulbous metal containers joined together at odd angles. To think that somewhere within this pastiche of industrial decay a new fax modem was waiting to be born was to invest too much hope in the resilience of the human spirit.

Now, thought Vladimir, you take some white plaster walls, throw them up around the factory, perforate a mock-tinted window along one of the sides, stick a couple of recycling bins out front, and presto! Why sell worthless shares to Stolovans at ten crowns a pop, when you can unload them to Americans at ten dollars? He made a note.

THE CHURCH WAS hiding behind the factory, with a small field of failing carrots separating the two. It looked rather Appalachian, the church did--a little corrugated tin shack with a metal Orthodox cross that gleamed amid the empty surroundings like a television antenna bringing news of civilization beyond. "Please," said Kostya and opened the door for him.

You couldn't mistake the parishioners for anything but Russians. Tired, stern faces that even in the meditative act of prayer looked ready to kick some ass for their fair share of beets, sugar, and a parking space for the beat-up Lada microsedan. Broad, heavy bodies bursting with thick veins and copious sweat, looking as if they had been somehow blown out of proportion by a diet of meat and butter--par for the course in a world where one had to appear as formidable as a tank to start the wheels of distribution turning.

Kostya bowed to a few of them and pointed at Vladimir, eliciting several difficult smiles and the tiniest of whispers. Vladimir hoped he looked more like Jesus than Trotsky to them, but an icon above the altar showed the prototype of the one whose second coming was awaited--a very gentile Christ indeed, with light brown hair verging on dirty blond, the traditional soft-focus physiognomy, and, of course, a look of supreme transcendence that Vladimir didn't even want to begin to fathom. Yup, he was in church.

But it wasn't too shabby, the service. There was a certain uncertainty to the message, the way the priest, as bearded and robed and wizened as could be (you knew you were getting your piety's worth with this guy), would belt out, singsong-like: "Je-sus has risen!" and the crowd would reply in unison, "Verily, He has risen." Nice the way this central fact had to be constantly affirmed. But of course, He has risen. What would it all mean if He hadn't risen, eh, Vanya?

And crossing yourself was great too, kneeling and crossing endlessly. It felt good--swift and powerful. The goys were good with the swift-and-powerful shtick. Columbus and his wooden armada sweeping into the New World on an Atlantic breeze and a prayer; the medieval English galloping through hot, dusty Palestine bedecked in a ton of steel. Crossing, always crossing themselves. Before the Hebrew God you could only bow repeatedly and feel sorry about your place beneath Him, but with Christ there it was, with your hand--up, then down, then right, then left. Christ has risen? Why, yes, verily.

Vladimir must have crossed himself impressively because several of the babushkas, their blue eyes glowing within their shawls, were clearly taking note of his vigorous motions and loud proclamations. Kostya gave him a smile so wide it could have been redeemed for a place in Heaven. This went on for a while, the tiny room suffused with the brightness of candles and a pair of oversized, out-of-place halogen torchieres like the floor samples Vladimir had seen at the German department store. The smell of sweat and the incense swung about by the priest was getting a bit heady and just as Vladimir was making sure the back door was still present and accessible, Christ was resurrected one last time and it was all over.

They lined up before the priest who kissed them in turn and said something brief to each congregant. Waiting on line, Kostya introduced Vladimir to a couple of nice old ladies whose doubts about "the dark one" had dissipated over the course of the services like the whoosh of stale air released over the empty horizon upon the opening of the front door. The priest kissed Vladimir on the left cheek and the right, his breath smelling surprisingly of dill pickles, and said, "Welcome, my dear young one. Christ has risen."

"Yes, um," said Vladimir, although there was, of course, a better way of saying it; they had, in fact, just said it three hundred times. But His Holiness, broad-shouldered and erect despite his considerable age, with his booming voice and pungent kisses, would make even the most godless members of the Spartacist League quiver in their ankle-high Doc Martens. "You must be Greek," the priest said.

"Half-Greek, half-Russian," Vladimir said. It just came out that way.

"Delightful. Will you join us for a little meal now?"

"Sadly, I can't. I'm expected with my family in Thessalonica. I was just off to the airport. But next week, definitely."

"Delightful," the priest said again, and then he had his turn with Kostya, who whispered something into his ear which made the priest laugh uproariously, his beard, as grand and white as his person, taking on a hairy life of its own. It was a mirth Vladimir could not understand, since God's business was, by all means, a serious one, especially when one of your flock proved to be a Jew in Greek's clothing.

He bowed his way past the congregants and out the door, where a steady autumn rain was gathering force and the sky appeared a tablecloth of unrelenting gray.

WELL, THAT WAS all over with, thank God, and off he was in his marvel of Bavarian tinkering, speeding away on the Tavlata's eastern embankment, thinking Faster! Faster, Jan! for the Groundhog and the most expensive restaurant in Prava awaited. Oh, he had been duplicitous with the Angel, as always, getting off at a suburban metro station to "briefly visit an American friend, a pious man of Serbian lineage . . ." And there, by prior arrangement, Jan and the unholy Beamer awaited their master. Taking the metro to lunch--a little too declasse for an upscale gonif like Vladimir.

The restaurant was situated opposite the castle, with full view of the river growing full under the autumn rain, tourists galloping across the Emanuel Bridge, their umbrellas torn apart by a wind strong enough to have breathed life into a hundred Golems. It was a restaurant popular with rich Germans and American mommies and daddies visiting their drifting progeny, and, yes, a certain Russian "entrepreneur."

The Groundhog kissed Vladimir on both cheeks and then presented his own pock-marked ones. Vladimir closed his eyes and uttered a ridiculous "Mwa!" with each kiss.

With the male Eastern European love overture complete, Vladimir was allowed to take his seat; across the table, the Groundhog squirmed like a happy little papoose in its swaddling clothes, only he was a large, corpulent mafioso in an unflatteringly tight brown suit. "Look," he said, "your appetizer's already here!"

True enough, there was a circle of fatty rings of squid lying atop, of all things, butternut squash, with some sort of powder dusted in the middle that smelled vaguely of parmesan and garlic. At twenty dollars a plate, the restaurant promised to serve no carp, its wine list was purged of the sickly-sweet Moravian vintages that made Prava's head spin, and the proprietors had airlifted an actual old guy from Paris to tickle their Steinway's ivories beneath a huge Art Nouveau spread of frolicking nymphs. Bon appetit!