Page 33 of Gone Before Goodbye
“Thank you,” Maggie shouts back.
She expects a black car to be waiting, but across the tarmac there’s a helicopter instead. A man waves her toward it. She climbs into the back. It’s a six-seater, but she’s alone. Two pilots sit up front. One turns around, hands her a black aviation headset, and mimes that she put it over her ears. When she does, she hears the pilots converse in Russian with a woman she assumes is an air traffic controller. In moments they are up in the air. They fly over a vast landscape, a forest really, blanketed in snow.
Maggie has not been in a helicopter since she was crammed into the medevac ones during the war. It feels absurd to be so comfortable in one. There’s a twinge of something like guilt here.
Through the headset, one of the pilots switches over to broken English and says, “Flight time just six minutes, Doctor.”
He turns and looks at her to make sure she understood. Maggie gives him a thumbs-up in reply.
She sees very few buildings, even in the distance, which is odd. Rublevka, she knows, is only a few miles outside of bustling Moscow. That’s part of its draw for the überwealthy—it is private and protected and ultra-exclusive, but it is not remote.
At least, not remote like this.
The copter veers toward a snow-capped mountain. When it makes its way over the fir trees, Maggie sees a clearing in the distance. Not a natural clearing. It looks to be a perfect rectangle cut out of thick woods and taking up acres.
In the middle of the rectangle, equidistant from the property’s borders, stands a palace out of some long-ago fable. She looks down on it. “Palace” is really the only word for it. A term like “mega-mega mansion” is inadequate here. The palace is too sprawling, with too many interconnected branches to be anywhere near the mansion family.
The copter starts to descend about a hundred yards from the front door. The lawn isn’t just green—it’s perfect green, flawless, seemingly painted green. Maggie wonders whether it’s real grass or something artificial. The copter sets down gently, the rotor blades decelerating to a stop. When the pilot opens the door, the frigid air hits her in a rush. She steps out, the wind biting her face.
The palace gleams—actually gleams—in the sunlight. She wonders whether the entire edifice is marble, though that seems unlikely. The architecture is overwhelming and heady, much too much, a garish and almost grotesque blend of Italian Renaissance, French Rococo, and mostly Russian Baroque. The windows are tall and thin. There are reliefs and carvings on the walls. Overly ornamental domes and gold-trimmed cupolas line the roof.
It all feels, if not fake, not authentic either. The beloved palaces Maggie has been lucky enough to visit in her lifetime—Versailles, Pitti, Abdeen, Buckingham, Mysore, the Alhambra—none of them are this pristine. None gleam like this, probably because they have aged and been ravaged by time and history. People have lived and diedthere, history has happened, and when you visit, even if you stand at a safe distance or are surrounded by clamoring visitors, you can feel the ghosts that still haunt the place. This palace feels more like what it is—a reproduction, a showpiece, unblemished in every way.
Maggie stands there, unsure what to do, when the front door opens. A man steps into the doorframe. She is at a pretty good distance, at least a hundred yards, but she sees him raise his hand and beckon her toward him. She huddles up against the biting wind and starts down a green path. The grass feels real and even warm beneath her feet.
How?
There are white marble statues, lots of them, forming a gauntlet for her to head down. She recognizes many—Michelangelo’sDavid, Myron’sDiscobolus, Puget’sMilo of Croton, Rodin’sAdam—all too white, all too pristine, all too obvious and soulless replicas.
The palace—she will just keep calling it that for now—has four soaring floors. Everything here is big and obvious and unsubtle—not so much an attempt to classily suggest opulence and power as to batter you with it.
The man at the door stands and waits.
Despite the frigid cold, the man is not wearing a coat. His shirt is gaudy maroon and silky and too tight. His belt line is hidden by an unapologetic gut. His jeans are skinny jeans in the sense that they seem much too small. His hairline is somewhere between receding and surrender, slicked back with something oily.
Oily.
If she was asked to describe him in one word, “oily” would seem apropos.
He smiles and waves at her with childlike enthusiasm.
“Come, come, Doctor, you must be freezing,” he says with a thick Russian accent.
Maggie hurries her step. He whisks her inside and closes thedoor. Despite the massive entrance hallway—soaring ceilings four stories high, a grand marble staircase in the center that branches to both sides, a crystal chandelier the size of that helicopter—the warmth from the heating system is immediate. She quickly takes off the hat and gloves, and unzips the fur coat.
The man spreads his arms. “Welcome, Doctor McCabe!”
She is not sure of the protocol here—he looks ready to hug her—and when she puts out a hand to shake, he looks a little disappointed.
“Thank you,” Maggie says. “And you are?”
He rubs the greasy stubble of his chin with one hand, uses his other hand to shake hers. “My name,” he says, “is Oleg Ragoravich.”
She can tell that he is scrutinizing her face to gauge her reaction. She tries not to give one, but she knows the name. Ivan Brovski had insisted that there was no need for her to know until arrival, but before the plane took off and she lost service, Maggie googled “Russian billionaires” and “Russian oligarchs” and then added words like “clandestine” and “reclusive.”
Oleg Ragoravich was one of about a half dozen possibilities she crossed when doing this. She hadn’t had time to do a deep dive, but there wasn’t all that much anyway. Of the top ten Russian billionaires, he is listed as “one of the most reclusive” and rumored for many years to be in poor health. He looks fine to her, but that doesn’t mean much. There are almost no photographs of him online, suggesting that he’s had them scrubbed from the internet. Most people don’t realize how easy it is for the über rich to do that, to control their online existence, how often you will google someone superpowerful and what comes up through search engines is only what that superpowerful entity wants you to see.
In Ragoravich’s case, there are a few old grainy black-and-white photographs. His age is listed as “between 61 and 64 years old.” Birthplace: Unknown but perhaps Tbilisi. As with many of his fellow Russian billionaires, the story of how he amassed his fortune ismurky—something to do with the “chaotic privatization” of state-owned assets when the Soviet empire crumbled, along with currying favor with current government leadership.
