Dmitri and Abbey Shaine arrive in Moscow. Dmitri is summoned to a meeting with his sponsor almost as soon as they’re off the plane.

Dmitri tells Abbey to go to the Baltschug and hang out with Natasha. She’s fun. She’ll know what to do. She’s the party girl daughter of a Russian steel magnate — which means her dad was a mid-level Communist Party functionary who lost his scruples about stealing — and now Natasha considers millionaires to be down market.

Natasha knows where to go: Anakonda. At Anakonda, only hot, unaccompanied women get in til midnight. Then an audible whoosh of testosterone gushes in. The men are set loose. The line stretches two blocks down the street. Entrance fee is five hundred dollars.

After Anakonda, they go with some multinational billionaire friends in a convoy of Land Rovers. Over bridges, through tunnels, til they hit a dilapidated industrial area. Everyone gets out of the SUVs, following the bodyguards, Natasha and Abbey enter an abandoned factory. There’s a giant sign over the door, Natasha murmurs to Abbey “Says ‘Chocolate Factory.’” The group congregates on the empty factory floor, it’s a huge space. A hundred yards deep or more, filled with abandoned coils and wires, big hunks of electrical know-how that haven’t functioned in decades. Dirt and garbage. All gray and nasty. Then a blond woman in a tight black dress and red boots appears from behind one of the concrete columns. In perfect English, she says, “Please follow me.” They do. She leads the way around a corner to a broad stairwell covered with dirty, cracked tile. “This way please.” The group reaches a wide concrete landing. There are steps on the right and left. The right leads upward to another empty floor, while on the left there’s a heavy, metallic gate. The woman grapples with the gate, punches several sets of numbers into a keypad. A buzz sounds and the gate opens. “This way” shes says. And another door, this one shiny stainless steel, appears at the end of a short hall. Another keypad. Another code. The silver door opens and there’s an apartment that recedes off into the distance, filled with Gursky photographs, Polke canvases and, strangely, three gigantic National Socialist Arno Breker male nudes in front of the far windows.

  

Every wall and floor is heavy, dark wood. Abbey’s never seen these kinds of dimensions. A mahogany Wal-Mart. Natasha whispers that it’s 35,000 square feet. The entire production floor of the largest chocolate factory in the USSR is now the collector’s “relaxation spot.”

A milky-eyed gaze is tracking Abbey and she feels it. Late 60’s with an unkempt beard and lids so heavy she wonders how he sees anything at all. He walks towards Abbey and Natasha.

“Somewhere between fact and fiction…” Natasha begins the introduction, “…one finds Anatoly Lunacharsky. I introduce to you Abbey Shaine. American accompanying her… You say partner now, no?” Natasha expelled the word with disapproval.

“What does this mean, partner?”

“Liberal, academese term for heterosexual guilt.” Natasha says before she’s distracted by a diamond-encrusted woman of indiscernible age. 30 to 60, Abbey thinks.

Anatoly brings Abbey back, “Want to know something? Since I mostly drunk and I prefer tell my secrets to beautiful women.”

“Uhm, sure. Go ahead.”

“This is big, big secret. Are you ready for that kind of secret? Really big. One so big that you never see world same way again after you hear it?” Anatoly stumbles as he follows Abbey to the low, modernist sofas.

“Yes.” Abbey agrees, adding placating, drunken, elderly Russian to her checklist of Moscow activities.

“You sure?”

“I’m certain,” She says, peering into the eyes that looked vague a moment ago but are now sharp and commanding. Something about him seem belligerent enough to have been very violent and very powerful in the past.

“Okay. There this thing called the Lesbian Commission. You never hear of it. Top, top, top secret. Even Andropov, head of K.G.B., Gensec, he never hear of it. It first meet in 1967 on Greek island. This where name come from. It a group of dissident K.G.B. and C.I.A. Some from each side. Each for own reasons, and this a different, long, different story. Anyway, these guys do not like what happens in United States. Marches, riots, angry women, angry blacks, angry gays, music, hair, drugs, all of it. You know, all of it, everything. The decadence. Now you probably think, you, as American, that Russians behind all this, support social unrest in America. Not true. In particular, Russian Lesbians really angry about these things. They decide decadence and moral decay in America will spread around world and they want it to,” he makes a quick chopping motion with his hand, “stop. Like Malcolm X say, ‘by any means necessary.’ Even if it mean working with enemy. With C.I.A.”

He nods and leans back. “So what happen?”

“Yes, what happened?” Lie or not, the man tells a good story.

“Well, it start in 1968. Lesbians use K.G.B.-C.I.A. network of informants, agents, double agents. They begin targeted campaign. Targeted campaign of what you might call ‘quiet assassination.’”

Abbey think to herself that this is where the conversation needs to end. This is the kind of thing that gets you pulled into a room at passport control and sent to prison. But she keeps listening.

“It start with political figures but go out of control immediately. Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, some Black Panthers, okay, these make sense, but then they spread. More easy to get pop stars; bigger impact with youth. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison in Paris, Brian Jones from Rolling Stones. Strange side note: Lesbians read article in Rolling Stone say Badfinger next Beatles, so they neutralize their singer too. You never wonder why all these pop stars die from ’69 to ’79? And it never happen again? No one from U2 die. No one from R.E.M. die. Britney Spears and Jay-Z doing fine. Any Spice Girl die? Not that I know. ZZ Top? Aerosmith? I see them last night on VH1. What happen is when Nixon and Brezhnev meet in ’74, they find out from each other, it a big secret, that Lesbians do all this. It a big problem, as you imagine, because it make C.I.A. look bad. Make Nixon look very bad. C.I.A. and Nixon have enough problems. So they agree to eliminate everything, everything, about this from all files. In next five years, K.G.B. and C.I.A. ‘deaccession’ all Lesbians. Elvis, Keith Moon from The Who, Bonzo Bonham from Zeppelin, Bon Scott, Sid Vicious: last big Lesbian operations. Go out with bang. Then they shut down. End of story. Big, big secret. You see?”

“John Lennon, too?”

“No. That some sick nut.”