He had left Katya at home in the hope that he might more stealthily scope out what was happening. Now he was rethinking this wisdom, given Katya’s propensity to chat up the people he was suddenly finding himself too nervous to approach. Only a half-hour earlier he had spotted Abacus’s chief partner, Alex Zaparotnik, a man three years his junior, fraternizing with some pink-shirts who were giving off a very Big Four vibe. Alex, clearly seeing him, had not so much as raised his chin in acknowledgment.
Now, crossing the expanse of Kuskovo’s beer-soaked lawn, Lenny kept his eyes open for potential allies. Pulsing electronica from several sets of speakers was assaulting his ears. Through these spasmodic house beats and cycling loops of female moaning, he barely managed to make out the reassuringly shrill vocalizations of his friend Noah, holding court among some Alpha Capital folks under one of the red Coke umbrellas. “You would be wasting your money,” Noah was testifying in his foghorn voice, “because you can get all the same wonderful things in Pattaya that you can get in Dubai: opium, exotic firearms, little girls, little boys, white sharks. The Thai, you see, are a very open people, like…playful cats.” The recipients of Noah’s wisdom were two giggling young women, whose combined waist sizes did not add up to Noah’s own generous girth. Noah’s hand was pruriently clutching at the hip of one, a brunette with a minuscule ass outlined nicely by a pair of jeans with lace-up calves. “You walk into any club in Pattaya, they got dancers squeezing ping-pong balls out of their minges.” He squatted to demonstrate while his consorts shrieked with laughter. “I’m absolutely serious. I know a guy who had his eye poked out that way. Ask my friend here, he’ll tell you all about it,” he said, gripping Lenny’s arm.
“I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” Lenny assured the girls, both of whom, he quickly decided, were too young for his tastes. The blond one, though cute, still had her adolescent acne. He had no idea why these nymphets were so reliably drawn to Noah, a blob of fat who looked like Garfield the Cat. Lenny’s only explanation was that, in Noah’s years in Moscow, he’d made boatloads of cash managing the American investments of Mikhail Fridman, a job, Lenny believed, his friend had secured because of his uncanny physical resemblance to the oligarch himself. Perhaps being even an ugly oligarch’s American doppelgänger somehow accounted for Noah’s unnatural confidence with women.
“The girls and I have been comparing our travels. Yulia and Marina have just returned from Sochi, isn’t that right?”
“The Saint-Tropez of Russia,” Lenny remarked.
“And now they’re on the way to…”
“Cairo!” announced Yulia.
“Better steer clear of the Arabs,” Noah advised. “You know what the sight of white virgin flesh does to those Alis.”
Instead of looking horrified, Yulia and Marina giggled once more and agreed that Egypt would indeed be much better if it wasn’t so full of Arabs.
“Why don’t you like Arabs?” said Lenny.
Yulia shrugged. “I danced next to an Arab in club. They have…a smell.” The casual racism of Russian women never failed to impress him. He’d heard the stink argument leveled at Africans, Arabs, everyone from the Caucasus, and even at apocrinely challenged Asian men. Prejudice on the Eurasian continent traveled eastward like the jet stream.
“Marina doesn’t mind how they smell. She wants to be a stewardess for Emirates Airline.”
“Emirates is not Arab!” Marina protested cheerfully. “It’s Dubai!”
“Can I talk to you?” Lenny said.
“The girls have invited us to a party.”
“I need to speak to you. Excuse us, please.” It took some force to pull Noah aside. “I think something’s up with the WCP deal. I just saw Zaparotnik. He acted…I don’t know…”
“How many times have I told you to forget that guy? Let’s go to a party. It’s the Fourth of July, bay-bay.”
“It’s the sixth of July. I need to find Austin. Shit. Where is this party?”
“I don’t know. On Kuznetsky Most, at the apartment of some BP faggot their friend Dasha lives with.”
“No-hua!” Marina called across the grass. “Are you coming! Dasha is waiting at the gates!”
Noah motioned toward the porta-potties. “We’re just gonna hit the unemployment line and meet you there.”
“It was like I was some girl he was ignoring.”
“You’re sweating over that mayonnaise eater when you should be asking why you want to be a drone at WCP in the first place. You probably have enough clients by now to go independent.”
“It’s not that simple….” Lenny couldn’t remember what exactly he’d said to encourage this view of himself. Maybe he’d preserved the illusion by letting Noah go on assuming that he, Lenny, always looked out for number one as surely as Noah would have in his place. He scanned the hordes that populated the field. “I gotta find Austin; then we can go.”
“He’s over there at the whack shack.” Noah pointed his chin at a stage by the Procter & Gamble raffle pavilion, which Lenny recognized as the source of the repeating loop of techno. The DJ had evidently abandoned his station long ago, and in his place two Russian dancers in Day-Glo bikinis had continued performing for an oblivious, hypnotized crowd of old white men.
“Wait here, will you?”
“That’s not an order, I hope, because my plan right now is to piss and go to a party.”
But Lenny was already picking his way across the minefield of red plastic cups and scattered bottles into the thick crowd around the stage where the bikinied dancers were doing go-go moves under strobe lights. Above the human sea facing the stage, Austin’s red baseball cap bobbed like a buoy. “Hey, man!” Austin’s face lit up with a reassuring flicker of genuine happiness. “Didn’t think you were coming.”
“Why not?”
“What?”
“Forget it. What are you doing after this?”
Austin took off his cap and wiped his bald and shaved head. “Maybe heading to Bleachers to watch the Rays screw up their shot at the playoffs.”
Sometimes Lenny wondered why people like Austin even stayed in Moscow. Aside from professing an old-fashioned reverence for “other civilizations,” Austin was drawn neither to the city’s high culture nor to its copious depravity. His favorite activity on any given night was to sit in one of the Canadian pubs and follow the score of a Florida–Florida State game.
“Are you kidding me? It’s not even a live game,” Lenny said.
Austin gazed around. “Is Katya here?”
“No, she stayed home.”
“You two all right?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. You talk to Sasha Zaparotnik today?”
“Um…yeah, I saw Alex.” Austin’s smile seemed to pass from good-natured to impervious at the mention of Zaparotnik’s name.
“So what’s up with him chatting up those guys from WCP all afternoon…?” Lenny hoped he was wrong. He was making a wild guess as to who the pink-shirts were, hoping that Austin would now contradict him.
But Austin did not.
“So have they made an offer, or what?” He tried to sound optimistic.
“Yes,” Austin said wanly. “They’ve made an offer.”
“Okay, then. So—we’re keeping all our old clients, right?”
“Lenny…”
“The condition is they all keep us together in one department, right? Full autonomy…”
“Lenny, please stop talking.”
But he could not stop. He was afraid at this moment that if he stopped his mouth might swell like a Novocained dental patient’s and he would be unable to speak another word.
“Lenny. WCP isn’t taking anyone except the partners.”
“I’m on track to be partner.”
“You aren’t one right now, is what I’m saying.”
“And why is that? You told me I’d be partner in a year when we started.”
“Lenny, I brought you on. I can’t hold your hand every step of the way. And, anyway, Alex
is the one who’s putting this deal together, not me, and you know how things between the two of you have been lately.”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me how they’ve been? He seemed pretty happy the day I brought in Actophage.”
“Everybody appreciates what you’ve done.”
“Oh shit, Austin…”
“Lenny, it’s not my decision.”
“Oh shit, please tell me you took my side in this. This is all so much bullshit, Austin.”
Austin let out a long breath and looked out at something in the distance. “Of course I did, but you know you’ve pushed the guy’s buttons.”
“Like, what did I do!”
“Like calling him Sasha, for one.”
“That’s his fucking name.”
“Whatever. Letting some of the clients think you’re a partner. He didn’t think that was cool.”
“There are four of us. The clients assume we’re all partners.”
An unconvinced look stole over Austin’s face. He was a person who often disagreed but seldom argued.
The truth was, Lenny had thought of himself as a partner. In all but name. And the fact that he hadn’t yet been made one officially was an oversight that he was sure would be rectified in a matter of time. “Okay, okay, don’t go,” Lenny said. “Just…help me understand. What did he say?”
“Why are you doing this to yourself, Len?”
“You owe me at least that.”
Austin wiped his head again with the side of his cap, and then seemed absorbed in studying the sweat stain. “He thinks you don’t always have a sense of the importance of the mission, that sometimes you think like a, like a…”
“Like a what?”
“Like a Russian.”
“He called me a Russian! What the hell does that even mean?”
“The way you’re always talking about ‘the Big Picture,’ and paying for everyone’s drinks, and—”
“What’s wrong with a little generosity?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just all the glad-happy tovarisch stuff you do with everyone, with the clients. It’s typical Manilovism.”
“You’re losing me, Austin.”
“Manilov in Dead Souls. Gogol—you read it.”
Lenny was caught by the twin surprise that Austin had read it and that he assumed that Lenny would be at least equally literate in his own heritage. “Yeah, fifteen years ago,” Lenny lied, “what about it?”
“Manilov—the one who’s always daydreaming about building a bridge over the river where the merchants will set up booths and sell goods to the peasants. But then, when someone interrupts his daydream with a practical request, his brain can’t digest it.”
“I don’t need a fucking book report.”
Austin put his cap back on and adjusted the visor. “Lenny, you’ll find something. I’m sorry.” He appeared to see someone in the distance and lifted his arm in recognition. “I have to go,” he said, manfully gripping Lenny’s shoulder in parting.
Lenny was finding it hard to move his legs. His feet were suddenly very heavy, or else his knees couldn’t be fully trusted not to buckle if he took a step. Not three feet from him, two little girls—five or six years old—were gleefully imitating the libidinous gyrations of the dancers onstage. Lenny heard the sound of his own laughter, a madman’s giggle.
—
BACK IN 2001, WHEN “Alex” was still “Sasha,” a pasty-cheeked graduate of Moscow State University whose stoop and pallor spoke of innumerable hours in front of the gelatinous glow of computer screens, the two had been paired up on a mission to do standard analysis on a turbine factory outside the eastern-Siberian town of Plusinsk. The factory was a dud that had languished in negotiations with three other consulting firms in four years. By the time Lenny had arrived in Russia, the choicest plants had all been cherry-picked by the big investment funds, the least choicy ones snapped up on the cheap and stripped for assets. A venturesome young private equity associate had to be more enterprising to find a true investment gem. The turbine factory was their first scouting assignment following a flimsy six-week training program in which they’d been taught to fill out financial and risk reports. The “business jet” WCP had booked for them turned out to be a Yak-40 with a wheezing engine. Their driver and guide in Plusinsk, Kostya, was a five-foot hustler with a junkie’s frame and an unheated van that would have required a blowtorch to thaw out, but which Kostya managed to navigate with terrifying skill through the run of potholes that was the Plusinsk road system. Watching a Tarkovsky-esque tableau of rotting utility poles, shell-shocked farmers, and orange snow through the window of Kostya’s van, Lenny felt happier than he’d ever been in his life. He thought about all his friends in America with their office jobs and their weed and their HBO. Fuck The Sopranos, he thought. Fuck The X-Files. He was fuckin’ living that shit. A cowboy on the frontiers of private enterprise.
The Plusinsk Turbine Factory turned out to be in far better shape than he or Sasha Zaparotnik had expected. It had once been a premier Soviet manufacturer, producing mainly defense-related turbines and generators. Its fatal flaw was neither its debt (modest compared with the typical Russian factory), nor its outdated equipment, which was still viable, but the fact that its management, coddled for years by the plant’s defense-industry status, was unwilling to sell a majority share to any foreign firm. The factory was like a moderately attractive woman who’d become an old maid because her expectations were overinflated.
Lenny and Sasha were not expected to score where other matchmakers had failed. Their assignment was not to usher the factory’s managers into a shotgun marriage with foreign investors, but merely to crunch some numbers and report whether the plant was worth taking on the buyer’s side. Such a job would require an afternoon and a half, which meant that the remaining time could be spent at the local banya, partying with some cheap Plusinsk girls. (Lenny had already worked this out with their guide, Kostya, who had offered to arrange both for the zakuski and the girls.) But Sasha Zaparotnik had other plans. He had spoken with one of the turbine engineers and learned of a “nearby” geothermal plant some five hundred miles away.
The small thermal field had been abandoned early in the previous decade by the Soviet government, after it had drilled boreholes and set up grid connections and before the nation had run out of money and dropped the project altogether. It now belonged to an oil-and-gas conglomerate which was making so much from its petroleum sales that it had let the plant languish without adding any new investments to it. The conglomerate could be easily convinced to sell the facility, Sasha reasoned. And this was where Lenny lost him. Zaparotnik could be forgiven for thinking that five hundred miles was a short distance by Russian standards, but the kid had to be either a fool or a nationalist to want to ride in the stale heat of the Trans-Siberian just to poke his head down a thermal hole. Sure, it had to hurt to see his motherland’s once-robust industries ground to dust, painful to watch legions of uncles and grandpas with advanced degrees made redundant. But thermal power? Seriously? When the country was literally bleeding oil? No, thanks.
That, more or less, was what Lenny told Sasha when he left him at the Plusinsk train station and took a flight alone back to Moscow. He didn’t speak to Zaparotnik much until they presented their findings together to the company partners. And that was when Sasha made his surprise case for the little geothermal plant. Counterintuitive as it seemed to try to find a buyer for a thermal plant in an oil-rich country that subsidized its citizens’ gas bills, if WCP took another look, it would notice that the field was in a part of Russia where there was an unmet demand for energy, and where the electricity prices were among the highest, since much of the fuel had to be transported from a long distance away. The plant had been overlooked because everyone believed it was too expensive to complete it in the harsh climate. But there was a simple solution: the plant could be designed in modular pieces, which would be manufactured in warmer western Siberia, then airlifted and assem
bled right on the spot. The most difficult part—the drilling—had already been done by the Soviets. The plant could even start producing electricity immediately and finance the drilling of new boreholes with the money. If a buyer was willing to make, say, a sixteen-million-dollar investment, the project could start financing itself practically overnight. With only a dozen permanent employees, Sasha reported, its operational costs were actually quite low. Most of the other work could be done with cheap seasonal labor.
Sitting through Sasha Zaparotnik’s presentation with virtually nothing to add, Lenny had felt his mouth go dry with cottony sourness. The fetus-face had thought of everything. He’d even found a company in Japan that might be a willing investor. He’d choreographed it all without giving Lenny so much as a heads-up while the two of them had assembled their PowerPoints the night before.
—
BUT THAT HAD BEEN seven years ago, and much had changed since. Lenny had gone on to have a few successes of his own. He had some talent for drumming up business on the road, and he was a guy the clients could depend on to organize some fun. Part of him had been surprised when he’d gotten the offer from Abacus. It might have been a peace offering on Zaparotnik’s part, and there was also the fact that the other two partners, both close friends of Lenny’s, were numbers guys in need of a salesman. By this time, Sasha was going by “Ah-lix” and had transformed into one of those de-Russified Russians who sported Anglicized names and certificates from the London School of Economics. Lenny knew that to give voice to his disdain for the “Ah-lix”es was only to make himself vulnerable to an equal and opposite disdain Alex had for him. Zaparotnik always seemed to be looking straight through Lenny’s best attempts at business chumminess down to his neurotic immigrant core, as if it were a tragedy to belong to that confused breed of expats whose families had escaped the Soviet Union only to have their children return, salmonlike, to dip their heads into the fecal pool of a newly democratic Russia.
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