Officially, this place was a Workers’ Palace of Culture, built years ago for a puppet trade union of textile workers. The textile workers now existed only on paper, as the Azerbaijani cotton crops had been disastrous for years. The Boss had put the building to his own uses, and improved it considerably, with lavish use of stolen state materials and impressed labor. The Boss’s five-story city palace looked like a diseased wedding cake, brilliantly lit and painted in ghastly pastels.