My Man in Uzbekistan

This Week with Vic Monchego.

New York City: I began the week meeting in an ivory tower with the client. The client has a nice view of the Hudson River. The client is hellbent on the destruction of the Chilean cherry crop. Cheap cherry imports are ruining his business in the US. I developed a feasibility study. It involves the carefully timed placement of cherry maggots in the orchards of Chile. Once deployed, the maggots will know what to do. Looks like I’ll be in Santiago this fall.

While visiting, I looked up an old contact. We’ll call him “Charlie.” Charlie is Our Man in Uzbekistan. The funny thing is Charlie isn’t in Uzbekistan. He lives in an East Village sublet with two wiener dogs. Charlie has never left the country. He doesn’t own a passport. Charlie is from Lawrence, Kansas.

Charlie moved to Manhattan after college. He taught himself Russian. Then Uzbek. Then a bunch of endangered dialects like Bashkir, Dolgar and Moksha. He refined his skills by hanging out with taxi drivers out in the Boroughs. And he dates women more for their native tongues than their looks. His latest paramour is from Moldova. Or Mordovia. I get them mixed up. I use a mnemonic devise to remember her country of origin. Charlie's girl has very, very long legs and she wears very, very short dresses. When I think of Charlie’s girlfriend, I think of this woman's vulva (cough!) which leads me down the Volga, and the Volga River, of course, flows through Mordovia. The Russian hydronym "Волга" is akin to the Slavic word for "wetness" which makes the whole thing easy to remember if you know what I mean. (влага, волога). The Russian name is transliterated as Volga in English and Wolga in German.

Charlie collects information from the immigrant communities while playing chess and drinking beer. Everybody seems to think he’s a native. Then Charlie sells his “intel” to the Man. For lack of real information to send the government, Charlie has deceived everyone by inventing a network of phony agents. For the first time in his life, Charlie is making decent money thanks to the Bush Administration which is eager to pay for good fiction.

This is the truth. I swear it.