Page 19 of Kingmakers, Year One

I’ll be leaving soon myself.

Going to the one place my father will support—the one thing he won’t view as abandonment.

Finally I reach Korobeynikov Lane, where the slush has been painstakingly cleared from the street for the benefit of the elite residents of Noble Row. It’s a long, sandstone building divided into six luxury residences, worth about twenty-one million each in American dollars.

That’s where I live with my father.

I would assume that the other five houses on Noble Row are bright and clean inside, full of sparkling chandeliers and gleaming woodwork.

That’s not how our house looks. Not on the inside.

It’s dark, crowded, and filthy, because my father won’t allow any maids. He won’t let anyone in the house but me. Not since my mother left.

He’s holed up in there like Howard Hughes, only leaving when he absolutely has to handle his business in person. And he’s barely managing that these days.

I open our front door, struck in the face by a waft of stale and dusty air. It smells like the carpets haven’t been vacuumed in six years, which they haven’t. It smells like the windows are never opened, and the walls are full of mice.

It’s dark inside, almost as dark as the train tunnel. The heavy drapes that hang floor to ceiling are all pulled shut. It’s as quiet as a tomb.

You can still see the remnants of my mother’s decorating from the time when we first moved here, when I was a toddler and she still had the motivation for projects.

I don’t actually remember that time, other than a few snippets—a few bright flashes nestled in my memory like jewels. My mother with paint streaks on her face, laughing and telling me not to ride my tricycle in the house. My father coming home dressed nicely in a suit, bringing me a little bag of Tula gingerbread, asking me to guess in which pocket it was hiding.

I can see the work she did—the blue floral wallpaper in the dining room. The gold chandelier shaped like elkhorn. The soapstone fireplace with its pile of white birch logs, never burned, never touched since.

All those rooms are filled with shit now. Piles of books stacked taller than I stand. Piles of newspapers, too. Magazines, old bills, and receipts. And then the boxes: things my father ordered and never even opened.

So many boxes. Telescopes and globes. Toasters and binoculars. Stationery, photography equipment, power tools, and shoes. I couldn’t guess what’s in half of them. I don’t know why my father started ordering all this crap. And I don’t know why he piles it up on tables and chairs, never even bothering to look at most of it.

I climb the long, curving staircase up to his office. He expects me to check in when I get home at night.

I knock on the door, waiting for him to say, “Enter,” before I turn the knob.

He’s seated behind his vast walnut desk, dressed neatly in a dark suit with a cleric collar. His ash-blond hair is combed back. He has carefully shaved the side of his face that grows hair.

His hands are folded on the desktop in front of him—one smooth and pale, one red and scarred. That hand doesn’t work as well as the other. The tissue is so tough and knotted that he can’t even grip a pen.

My father is jarring to look at.

He’s so handsome and so ugly at the same time.

The left side of his face is beautiful almost to the point of femininity—his eye a particular shade of blue that almost looks violet, striking against his fair skin and white-blond hair.

The right side is a mass of blistered, discolored flesh, like a dry river bottom baked and cracked by the sun. His hair is burned back to show a patch of shiny skull, with no eyebrow on that side. Even the eye itself is milky and pale. He can’t see out of it. His mouth twists up at the corner as if he’s smirking, though he never actually is.

The scars run all the way down the right side of his body. Down his arm and leg.

He looks like a strange kind of cyborg—part human, part something else. Not robot—monster, instead.

I’ve only ever seen him without a shirt on one time. He hates to be viewed that way. He hates to be viewed any way, really.

He’s only become more sensitive about his appearance over time.

When I was small, he would let me sit on his lap and touch the roughly wrinkled skin on his right hand.

By the time my mother left, he wouldn’t let her near him. They slept in separate rooms so she wouldn’t even see him changing.

My father is a powerful man. He holds a high position within the Bratva—thederzhatel obschaka, the bookkeeper. The head accountant for all illegal dealings within the city of Moscow.

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