Page 30 of The Oligarch's Daughter

The next morning, Paul had the best day he’d ever had at Aquinnah.

It began when he arrived at his cubicle in the bullpen. Michael Rodriguez stood there waiting for him.

“You check your Bloomberg?”

“Not yet. Why?”

“Look at Robust Robot.” Six months ago, Robust Robot was a tiny artificial intelligence start-up out of MIT, in Cambridge, run by a professor and his student with no employees, when Paul got Bernie’s approval to invest a couple of million dollars of the firm’s money for 20 percent of the company.

Now Paul looked at his newsfeed. After heated bidding among three tech giants, Microsoft had just acquired Robust Robot for a billion dollars.

The math was easy. Paul had just made Aquinnah two hundred million dollars.

He let out a whoop.

That two hundred million went into the bonus pool, which meant he’d be getting a tiny fraction of it himself, but it would still be a lot. True, he’d made a number of bets that hadn’t panned out, but this one more than made up for them.

He looked up and saw Bernie Kovan heading his way with a bottle of Cristal, a grin on his face.

*

On the following Saturday, Tatyana woke up seeming out of sorts. They went over to his apartment, in Hudson Yards, on the West Side. He needed to check the mail, clean his refrigerator of old take-out cartons; he barely spent time there anymore. The place had one bedroom, one bath, and a “gourmet kitchen” he never used, except to store takeout in his fridge. Hardwood floors, white walls, perfectly characterless. Generic furniture ordered from a catalogue without trying it out, because he didn’t have time.

This was the thing. He didn’t have time. He worked a bazillion hours a week, rarely saw people. He could afford a nice place, but he didn’t want the hassle of living in a 150-year-old building where things broke down, the AC didn’t work, and his mail was stolen. So he lived on the seventh floor of a luxury building, with an elevator, a washer-dryer in the unit, and a doorman. A perfectly fine place. Every apartment looked like every other. Very adult. Best of all, he didn’t have to worry about anything. He was all about efficiency, optimizing his precious and very limited spare time.

It couldn’t have been more different from Tatyana’s funky rental.

She’d asked him, a few months ago, to move in with her, even though her place was smaller than his. It was a big step when he agreed. But he realized that her apartment, modest though it was, was at leastinterestingcompared to his well-manicured, generic place.

All day, while he puttered around, Tatyana seemed nervous, out of sorts. In the late afternoon, they returned to her apartment. Around six p.m., she started getting ready for her father’s party while wearing a fluffy white bathrobe. Paul liked watching her apply her makeup, a whole choreographed routine. An eyelash curler that looked like the kind of implement they give you at French restaurants for escargots. Sponges and pots of lotion. Concealer, mascara, a highlighter stick.

He wanted to tell her she was beautiful without makeup, but this didn’t seem to be the time. She might interpret it as a criticism of her skills with the makeup brush. But he wondered why she took such care with her appearance for a family party.

As she dressed, Paul admired her lithe body. Her shoulders were small and round and glossy, as if she polished them. She had tiny feet and wore a ring on the second toe of her right foot. She slipped into something black and satiny that was low-cut and showed off her beautiful shoulders. She didn’t look like a cater waiter tonight.

*

Their Uber was a white Tesla, immaculate. Tatyana was nibbling on a thumbnail.

“Where’re we going?” Paul asked.

She sighed, ducked her head, mournful. “You’ll see. My parents are very different from me. They live very differently.”

She’d told him only that her parents lived way uptown, that her father worked in sales.

The Uber was traveling up Madison Avenue.

“Beautiful buildings,” he said when they’d hit East Sixty-Ninth Street and pulled up in front of two elegant neoclassical town houses. They were obviously built around the same time by the same architect.

“This is where they live?”

She nodded.

He hadn’t been expecting Brighton Beach, Little Odessa in southern Brooklyn, where so many Russian émigrés lived, butthis. . . this was something else.

“They’re connected,” Tatyana explained.

“Not sure I’m understanding you, Tatyana. You said your parents lived uptown. You didn’t say they had two . . .” He trailed off as she sighed again. He heard kind of a tremolo, a nervous sigh, escape her body.

---