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the basement.
    “It’s compact,” explained Stas, “all you might want in one place.” The restaurant itself was done up with plush burgundy walls and black lacquer chairs. All the clientele wore ironed shell suits. The restaurant was Chinese owned; we were just fifty miles from the Chinese border, and rumor had it that a third of the population was illegal Chinese immigrants.
    “The Chinks used to just walk anywhere,” said Stas, “but the gangsters sorted that out. Now they just keep themselves to the market and the suburbs. They need to know this is Russian territory. . . . But they do have the best restaurants.”
    With the meal there was karaoke. As the Chinese waiters brought the food, everyone at the restaurant sang “shanson,” the gravelly, syrupy gangster ballads that have become some of Russia’s favorite pop music. Shanson reflect the gangsters’ journeys to the center of Russian culture. These used to be underground, prison songs, full of gangster slang, tales of Siberian labor camps and missing your mother. Now every taxi driver and grocery plays them. “Vladimirsky Tsentral” is a wedding classic. Tipsy brides across the country in cream-puff wedding dresses and high, thin heels slow-dance with their drunker grooms: “The thaw is thinning underneath the bars of my cell / but the Spring of my life has passed so fast.” At the Chinese restaurant Miami Stas sang along too, but he seemed too meek, too obliging to be a gangster.
    “Me? A gangster? God no,” he seemed surprised when asked. “I’m just a businessman. The shovel, well that’s just for show. I like hanging around with Vitaly.”
    I asked him what their relationship was. He changed the subject fast.
    We asked Vitaly the next time we saw him.
    “Stas? Stas is one of the businessmen we used to extort money from.”
    “And now you’re friends?”
    “He does what I tell him to.”
    It turned out Vitaly had once beaten Stas to a pulp, and now Stas half worshiped, half lived in fear of him, helping Vitaly put on his coat and holding his phone for him. And everyone we met in the town seemed somehow crumpled, mumbling, black and white. Only the gangsters strode tall in glorious Technicolor. This was Vitaly’s town, the representative, cross-section town of Russia, the country where a third of males have been to prison, the sort of town spin doctors and TV men look at when they design politicians.
    The day of his big shoot Vitaly took over a whole market. The scene had the young Vitaly and his gang being busted as they extorted money from the market traders. The traders played themselves, and cops had been hired to play cops.
    “Isn’t there a problem that you’re working for a gangster today?” we asked the cops.
    They laughed. “Who do you think we work for anyway?” (The new mayor of Vladivostok was a man nicknamed Winnie-the-Pooh, a mob boss who had previously served time for threatening to kill a businessman.)
    Vitaly’s set had a cast of hundreds, and it should have been chaos, but I’d never seen a film set so slickly run. His gangster crew was the production team. Who would dare to be late on set when professional killers are running the show? Vitaly was a natural. Cap pulled low, long finger tapping against his mouth, he set up every camera position unerringly. Though there was no script on paper, he never got lost, giving terse, tight instructions to all the players.
    “It’s just like setting up a heist,” he told me. “Everything’s got to be exact. Not like one of your little documentaries.”
    Every detail of the clothes, the guns, and the items the market traders were selling had been reproduced just as they were in the late 1980s. But for all its detailed accuracy, the way Vitaly shot his films was more like a cheesy B-movie than documentary-style realism. Every shot of Vitaly was a glamorous close-up. He wiped his sweaty brow, sighed like a pantomime hero, looked intently into the distance, and escaped