Chip laughed. “You actually expect American investors to send you money? On the basis of, what. Of sand shortages in Latvia?”
“They’re already sending me money,” Gitanas said, “on the basis of a little joke I played. Not even sand and gravel, just a mean little joke I played. Tens of thousands of dollars already. But I want them to send me millions.”
“Gitanas,” Eden said. “Dear man. This is completely a point-incentive moment. There could not be a more perfect situation for an escalator clause. Every time Chip doubles your receipts, you give him another point of the action. Hm? Hm?”
“If I see a hundred-times increase in receipts, trust me, Cheep will be a wealthy man.”
“But I’m saying let’s have this in writing.”
Gitanas caught Chip’s eye and silently conveyed to him his opinion of their host. “Eden, this document,” he said. “What is Cheep’s job designation? International Wire Fraud Consultant? First Deputy Co-Conspirator?”
“Vice President for Willful Tortious Misrepresentation,” Chip offered.
Eden gave a scream of pleasure. “I love it!”
“Mommy, look,” April said.
“Our agreement is strictly oral,” Gitanas said.
“Of course, there’s nothing actually illegal about what you’re doing,” Eden said.
Gitanas answered her question by staring out the window for a longish while. In his red ribbed jacket he looked like a motocross rider. “Of course not,” he said.
“So it isn’t wire fraud,” Eden said.
“No, no. Wire fraud? No.”
“Because, not to be a scaredy-cat here, but wire fraud is what this almost sounds like.”
“The collective fungible assets of my country disappeared in yours without a ripple,” Gitanas said. “A rich powerful country made the rules we Lithuanians are dying by. Why should we respect these rules?”
“This is an essential Foucaultian question,” Chip said.
“It’s also a Robin Hood question,” Eden said. “Which doesn’t exactly reassure me on the legal front.”
“I’m offering Cheep five hundred dollars American a week. Also bonuses as I see fit. Cheep, are you interested?”
“I can do better here in town,” Chip said.
“Try a thousand a day, minimum,” Eden said.
“A dollar goes a long way in Vilnius.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” Eden said. “It goes a long way on the moon, too. What’s to buy?”
“Cheep,” Gitanas said. “Tell Eden what dollars can buy in a poor country.”
“I imagine you eat and drink pretty well,” Chip said.
“A country where a young generation grew up in a state of moral anarchy, and are hungry.”
“Probably not hard to find a good-looking date, if that’s what you mean.”
“If it doesn’t break your heart,” Gitanas said. “To see a sweet little girl from the provinces get down on her knees—”
“Uch, Gitanas,” Eden said. “There’s a child in the room.”
“I’m on an island,” April said. “Mommy, look at my island.”
“I’m talking about children,” Gitanas said. “Fifteen-year-olds. You have dollars? Thirteen. Twelve.”
“Twelve years old is not a selling point with me,” Chip said.
“You prefer nineteen? Nineteen comes even cheaper.”
“This frankly, um,” Eden said, flapping her hands.
“I want Cheep to understand why a dollar is a lot of money. Why my offer is a valid offer.”
“My problem,” Chip said, “is I’d be servicing American debts with those very same dollars.”
“Believe me, we’re familiar with this problem in Lithuania.”
“Chip wants a base salary of a thousand a day, plus performance incentives,” Eden said.
“One thousand per week,” Gitanas said. “For lending legitimacy to my project. For creative work and reassuring callers.”
“One percent of gross,” Eden said. “One point minus his twenty-thousand-dollar monthly salary.”
Gitanas, ignoring her, took a thick envelope from his jacket and, with hands that were stubby and unmanicured, began to count out hundreds. April was crouched on a patch of white newsprint surrounded by toothed monsters and cruel scribbles in several colors. Gitanas tossed a stack of hundreds on Eden’s desk. “Three thousand,” he said, “for the first three weeks.”
“He gets business-class plane fare, too, of course,” Eden said.
“Yes, all right.”
“And first-class accommodations in Vilnius.”
“There’s a room in the villa, no problem.”
“Also, who protects him from these criminal warlords?”
“Maybe I’m a criminal warlord myself, a little bit,” Gitanas said with a wary, shame-faced smile.
Chip considered the mess of green on Eden’s desk. Something was giving him a hard-on, possibly the cash, possibly the vision of corrupt and sumptuous nineteen-year-olds, or maybe just the prospect of getting on a plane and putting five thousand miles between himself and the nightmare of his life in New York City. What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he’d figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.
He touched the hundreds.
“Why don’t I get online and make plane reservations for you both,” Eden said. “You can leave right away!”
“So, you gonna do this thing?” Gitanas asked. “It’s a lot of work, lot of fun. Pretty low risk. No such thing as no risk, though. Not where there’s money.”
“I understand,” Chip said, touching the hundreds.
In the pageantry of weddings Enid reliably experienced the paroxysmal love of place—of the Midwest in general and suburban St. Jude in particular—that for her was the only true patriotism and the only viable spirituality. Living under presidents as crooked as Nixon and stupid as Reagan and disgusting as Clinton, she’d lost interest in American flag-waving, and not one of the miracles she’d ever prayed to God for had come to pass; but at a Saturday wedding in the lilac season, from a pew of the Paradise Valley Presbyterian Church, she could look around and see two hundred nice people and not a single bad one. All her friends were nice and had nice friends, and since nice people tended to raise nice children, Enid’s world was like a lawn in which the bluegrass grew so thick that evil was simply choked out: a miracle of niceness. If, for example, it was one of Esther and Kirby Root’s girls coming down the Presbyterian aisle on Kirby’s arm, Enid would remember how the little Root had trick-or-treated in a ballerina costume, vended Girl Scout cookies, and baby-sat Denise, and how, even after the Root girls had gone off to good midwestern colleges, they all still made a point, when home on holiday, of tapping on Enid’s back door and filling her in on the doings chez Root, often sitting and visiting for an hour or more (and not, Enid knew, because Esther had told them to come over but just because they were good St. Jude kids who naturally took an interest in other people), and Enid’s heart would swell at the sight of yet another sweetly charitable Root girl now receiving,