Okay, so the yards came back later, but certainly not to all the houses. It was as if they'd taken offense at being treated so scornfully before. The new yards were bounded by high walls, with fit, well-groomed young men sitting in the gate lodges, and parking lots concealed under the English lawns. The children in these yards played under the supervision of nannies, the drunken residents were extracted from their Mercedes and BMWs by bodyguards accustomed to dealing with anything, and the new yard keepers tidied up the English lawns with little German machines.

This yard was one of the new ones.

The multi-story towers on the banks of the river Moscow were known throughout Russia. They were the capital's new symbol, replacing the faded Kremlin and the TsUM department store, which had become an ordinary shop. The granite embankment with its own quayside, the entrances finished with Venetian plas-terwork, the cafes and restaurants, the beauty salons and supermarkets and also, of course, the apartments with several hundred square feet of floor space. The new Russia probably needed a symbol like this-pompous and kitschy, like the thick gold chains men wore around their necks during the initial capital accumulation period. It didn't matter that most of the apartments that had been bought long ago were still standing empty, the cafes and restaurants closed, waiting for better times to come, and the waves lapping against the concrete quayside were dirty.

The man strolling along the embankment on this warm summer evening had never worn a gold chain. He possessed a keen intuition that was more than adequate as a substitute for good taste. He had switched his Chinese-made Adidas tracksuit in good time for a crimson club jacket and had then been the first to ditch the crimson jacket in favor of a suit from Versace. He was even ahead of the game in the sports that he played, having abandoned his tennis racket for mountain skis a whole month before all the Kremlin officials (even though at his age the pleasure he could get from his mountain skis was limited to standing on them).