Moscow at Midnight by Sally McGrane

Author:Sally McGrane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saraband
Published: 2017-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

24

Gerard was getting nervous. It was a sensation he particularly hated, one that started in his bowels, a kind of ticklish sensation, then mounted, intensifying into a discomfort not unlike cats’ claws, into his intestines. Indeed, when it got that far, Gerard had the feeling he could picture each part of his anatomy as clearly as if he were standing before a chart, like the one at the lycée, with each of the biological mechanisms that make up the human being clearly depicted in a colorful, old-fashioned pen-and-ink drawing.

Gerard seldom let it get that far. In fact, his entire life had been constructed, he could say, around the simple goal of not experiencing this sort of discomfort, which took him back to a helpless childhood state, made him again very short, unable to tie his own shoes, and subject to the every whim of his beautiful mother. His beautiful mother who, often as not, left him alone with the musty concierge or at the coat check for hours on end as she pursued her trans-European love affairs in hotels and auberges of varying quality, depending on the state of her relations at the time with her rich but estranged husband (Gerard’s nominative father, though no one with any understanding of the situation—Gerard, from a very young age, included—could have much illusion that M. Dupres was the actual biological progenitor).

From his early teens, Gerard had carefully cultivated a life that would provide as few possibilities for anxiety as possible. He had wooed his aged father, who died when Gerard was sixteen and left him everything, thanks in large part to his son’s assiduousness. He had been careful not to care very much about the women he was involved with, or for the friends he had made along the way. He had learned to play tennis well. He had chosen a route (business) that would ensure a certain standard of living without (thanks to his connections) much exertion on his part.

The thing about luxury, of course, is that one needs more and more to maintain an acceptable level of non-anxiety, and in the past years, he had forgotten himself a little. He had gotten in over his head, that was all. Then Sonja—that was a mistake, too. He saw that now, clearly. Eloise’s fortune would very much supplement his own, rather diminished one. Why he hadn’t seen earlier that this was the best route—! Some secret, adventurous, unsettled part of himself, perhaps the remnants of his maternal genes, had resisted it, but the scare he had gotten was more than enough to tamp that down, perhaps out of existence.

Why had he gotten involved with the Russians? Because he wanted a piece of PLUTO. Who wouldn’t? But these double-crossing, good-for-nothing . . . he was out of his element. He knew that now.

When he had gone to visit the storage site—that meteor crater—in December, everything looked fine. But ‘Looks can be deceiving. – C,’ as the first anonymous email had read. And they kept coming! Each more specific, and more disturbing, than the last.

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