“A good advokat is worth his weight in gold, certainly. But if one can manage with more informal means of persuasion…”
“I’m not opposed to that,” I hinted.
“I find it’s wise to give one’s adversaries a more dignified exit….”
“I feel awkward even bringing this up,” I said disingenuously.
“Nonsense. We have quite reliable counsel here at L-Pet, of course. We can place a few phone calls to the Ministry of the Interior. Where did you say they were keeping your son?”
I told him the number of the facility, quickly adding, “But it’s not company business.”
He took my demurral with a knowing smile.
Our meeting was starting, and I watched nervously through the glass doors as the Boot excused himself to make the phone calls on my behalf. No one besides me seemed to notice his extended absence. My already abraded nerves, in the meantime, were so jittery that I struggled to follow Steve McGinnis’s presentation of the work being done on our Varandey terminal. His descriptions of the construction were exhaustingly informative, and to keep them filed in my head seemed a task more Sisyphean than trying to convince myself that Kablukov was intervening on Lenny’s behalf out of some fundamental human kindness or charity. No, in my heart I knew some recompense would be in order. And at this particular moment I did not care; I thought only of Lenny in his cell. Had he been fed? Could he use a toilet? Or were they, as in the old days, making him do his business in a metal pan in the corner?
My grim reveries must have lasted a full hour, or until my phone began buzzing wildly in my jacket. To my spontaneous relief, it was Lenny. I took the call in the hallway, where Kablukov was still nowhere to be found. “I’ve been released,” he informed me with only a slight inflection of pleasure.
“I’ll come pick you up,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that—just come to the apartment.”
—
WHEN I ARRIVED A HALF-HOUR LATER, excusing myself from the meeting on a plea of stomach pain, I found Lenny pacing the living room with a cordless phone in hand. His hair looked greasy, and his eyes, no less bloodshot than mine, were battling sleep with the psychotic mania of the unmedicated. “Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about it,” he was saying loudly into the phone. “…Well, you can tell Ah-lex I’m not done with him. He wants to sell me down this river, I’ll pull him into the sewage creek with me—are you listening?” Cradling the phone with his shoulder, Lenny proceeded to the kitchen, where I followed him; he resumed stirring the contents of an enamel pot on the stove. He was still on the phone, telling whatever friend or colleague was on the other end not to blow smoke up his ass, even as he leaned forward with a wooden spoon and took a delicate taste of the pot’s contents. He caught my eye and shook his head at the absurdity of it all. The sly, exasperated look tossed my way made me wonder if he really was as outraged as he’d seemed when I’d first walked in, or if this whole display—the tough, manly talk as he unflappably stirred his alfredo—was performed for my benefit.
“Did the prosecutor ever come?” I asked once he set the phone on the counter.
“Some babka showed up from the prosecutor’s office. Clicking heels and a powerbun, full of righteous talk about pilferers like me fleecing ‘the people.’ I said: Lady, what exactly am I being charged with here?”
“Did she have an answer?”
“She said, ‘We have our ways of dealing with abettors of fraud,’ and told me I better get used to seeing a lot of her. Two hours later I’m sitting in the same room when the guard opens the door and says I’m free to go. Gives me back my phone and my stuff like nuthin’.”
“Did a lawyer show up?”
“No, Austin never sent one over!”
I hesitated. “And no one else came—?”
He cast me a perplexed look. “Who else would come?”
“I don’t know.” Was it possible Kablukov really had cleared it all up with a mere phone call?
“I’ve already told you—they have no case,” he said conclusively. He set the pot of pasta on the table by the window, where I’d settled myself in preparation for the explanation I planned to give him: that I had intervened and that he still wasn’t out of the woods. But in his mania, Lenny seemed unconscious of me again. “Jeez, I stink,” he said, taking a strong whiff of himself, and headed for the shower.
I could hear him humming triumphantly under the pummeling water as I searched his fridge for something with which to fix us a more complete lunch. There was hardly anything in it—some bologna and cheese, some wilting tomatoes, grapes going fuzzy with mold, and plenty of beer. At its emptiness I felt an uptick of hope that maybe Katya had moved out after all. In my eagerness to see Lenny, I’d forgotten to ask where she was.
Lenny’s kitchen windows were abnormally large for a Russian dwelling; his apartment was in one of the new high-rises on Novy Arbat, whose broad sidewalks, nine stories below me, were adorned with signs for nightclubs and casinos, their neon lights shut off during the day. It seemed fitting that Lenny would perch his nest here—an elevator’s distance from the ground zero of fun. I fixed us bologna sandwiches, set the teakettle to boil, and gazed out toward Kudrinskaya Square. Out there, just a few blocks north, still lived our old family friend Ludmila Ostrovsky. I wondered if Lenny ever saw her. She had, after all, once been his mother-in-law. I knew it was unfair of me to persist, so many years later, in connecting Lenny’s troubles with the Ostrovskys, but the pathway was, for better or worse, soldered into my mental circuitry. In 1996, Lenny had taken a break from the crushing dullness of his post-college job as a junior business consultant for Arthur Andersen by venturing on a short vacation to the “new” Moscow. And this was when our problems with him really got off the ground. Ludmila, having lost her husband a year earlier to a heart attack, offered Lenny a spare room in her apartment. The room came with an added bonus: her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Irina, would serve as Lenny’s guide to the city of his childhood.
Our friendship with the Ostrovskys went back many years—to a time when little Lenny and little Irochka employed her father’s old blood-pressure cuff to play doctor on the Ostrovskys’ Lithuanian carpet. In ’79, we’d stayed in Russia just long enough to witness six-year-old Irina bud into a musical prodigy, displaying her talents on the violin with impromptu chair-top performances to the accompaniment of her mother shouting “More bow!” as the little girl sawed away. In subsequent years, we would learn through letters and phone calls that this early achievement was followed by a string of others, including prizes not only in violin, but also in ice-skating, citywide mathematics competitions, and English. All the talk of Irochka’s prodigious talents had led Lenny to remark, before he’d left for his vacation, that he expected to find in Moscow not a girl but a well-trained circus animal. And so Lucya and I were pleased when Lenny reported back that Ludmila’s daughter, in spite of her sweatshop childhood, seemed quite “well adjusted,” and “not terribly annoying.” That year was marked by several perplexing return trips to Moscow and many expensive transatlantic phone calls that concluded with Lenny’s announcement that Irina would soon be arriving in the United States on a fiancée visa so the two of them could get married.
It wasn’t like I thought that goofy grin on Lenny’s face was a result of all those visits he’d made to the Tretyakov Gallery, not like I had no clue about the singular charms of Moscow’s girls. But marriage? Still, I’d be lying if I said I completely disapproved of this union. Maybe it was the push Lenny needed. And how could I object to Irochka, who, besides being as pretty as a picture, was also mature, impressive, and clever? Impressive enough, apparently, to make Lucya question the virtue of her motives. Not that our son’s motives were so virtuous, I reminded her. He was beside himself with his windfall, telling his friends, “A girl like that wouldn’t talk to me here. A girl like that wouldn’t piss on my face if it was on fire.” This was Lenny-speak for being in love. In love, and full of hallucinatory visions
of childhood nostalgia, though it was plain to see that the girl who bore the weight of all his rapture was, even in her plain jeans and cotton sweater, far more sophisticated and shrewd than our son. For all her wholesome Young Pioneer exuberance, Irina was no kid. In that two-room flat she shared with her mother, she had lived through a decade of upheavals no less disturbing than the American sixties; had watched her father drop dead of a stress-induced infarction and seen her mother go from Gosplan economist to “redundant state employee” with a vanished pension in a matter of weeks. This would go some way to explaining why, in 1996, while Ludmila was embarking on a late-stage career as an accountant doctoring the books at a telecom start-up, Irochka was quietly at work seducing our son on the same Lithuanian carpet where the two of them had played as children.
Not long after she arrived, it became obvious to me and Lucya that Irochka had a taste for finer things than the starter apartment our son was offering. She rolled her eyes coldly at his jokes over Passover dinner. Two years later, her nitpicking of Lenny’s every failing and lack of ambition had become the signs of a woman challenging a man—begging him, really—to let her go. Some twisted sense of duty kept her from walking out herself. Through all this searing pain our son held on until Irina finally left him, taking with her a few possessions and a letter of acceptance from the Stern School of Business.
And yet the greatest irony was still to come. A week after Lenny signed the divorce papers, putting his name beside all those tragic little “x”s, he was on a plane headed to—where else?—Moscow. To make his million and prove his manhood. To whom? I still wondered.
Lenny came out, wearing a thin bathrobe like Hugh Hefner, then wolfed down both his lunch and mine.
“You don’t think this arrest was accidental, though?” I asked him. I was trying to summon the courage to tell him about Kablukov, but something prevented me. Knowing Lenny, he would only get mad at me for meddling. Maybe better to stay quiet.
“The simplest explanation is usually the correct one,” he said, chewing. “If there is a case against our old client and the Ministry of the Interior wants to finger more people…well, that would explain why Zaparotnik was so eager to seal his deal with WCP and cut me out. Clever bastard. He dissolves our old firm—so no liability there. Gets himself and his buddies beamed up to WCP—the fortress. But he leaves one person, me, in the lurch. So, if the FSB needs to sniff around our old business, there’s always someone to blame. A scapegoat.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That doesn’t exactly sound simple.”
He seemed not to hear me. “He’s a son of a bitch.”
“Maybe it’s a sign,” I said.
“A sign of what?”
“A sign that it’s time to head home.”
“Hell, no. I’m not going to let them gaslight me out of here just like that. I’ll get to the bottom of it. You want one?” He handed me a Yarpivo from the fridge, and went to find a bottle opener.
“It doesn’t pay to get to the bottom of things,” I said.
But once again he seemed not to be listening. His phone was ringing. “Yeah, where are you?” he said. I could hear digital bits of a feminine voice in distress. “I’m just here, with my Pop….How much did they ask for the work? I’ll talk to them….” He set the phone on the table. “Katya’s on her way here,” he informed me.
“Where was she?”
“At the orthodontist’s office. They’re overcharging us again.”
Us? I thought. “Since when has she been wearing braces?”
“Since Mom told her—when she visited last summer—that she should get her teeth fixed.”
This was pure revisionist history. Katya had already been self-conscious about her teeth. My wife had made a mere suggestion, which she would never have made if she’d known Lenny would be footing the bill.
“I thought you two were through,” I said. “What are you doing—making her beautiful for your successor?”
“This is from before. I made her a promise.”
My son, the promiscuous promiser. “Lenny,” I said, “I think we should start looking for tickets home for you. Today.”
But again he was deaf. The door buzzer rang twice, then went flat. “That’s her,” he said, getting up.
My heart sank a little as Katya came in, carrying two bags of groceries. “Aunt Valya asked me to pick up some eats for tonight,” she said, seeing Lenny first. “I thought we could get a head start to the dacha. You’re expected too!” She turned to me. “We’re giving your boy a big homecoming! Aunt Valya is already there, preparing. And if we leave now, we can beat the weekend traffic.”
“Oh crap!” Lenny said, hitting his temple.
“Didn’t you tell him? Aunt Valya has been planning for your father’s visit for weeks!”
“I forgot! I’ve been attending to more pressing matters, obviously.”
“Well, we better pack,” Katya said petulantly.
I stared at Lenny in amazement. What was this dacha nonsense? If he had any wits right now he’d be packing a suitcase for the States, not for a summer outing.
“Katen’ka, Lenny and I have some plans of our own.”
“It’s going to be boiling here this weekend! The whole city will be empty. And Aunt Valya got a whole calf to grill for us!”
I checked my watch. I was out of time to argue. “I have to get back to a meeting,” I said.
“So come after. We’ll pick you up at the train station,” said Lenny.
—
“HOW IS EVERYTHING WITH the boy?” Kablukov inquired from his seat in one of L-Pet’s overstuffed leather chairs.
“Better, miraculously.” I tried to smile. I felt provoked to add that I was in his debt, but hesitated.
“Our friends at the Ministry of the Interior were quite appalled at the way he’d been harassed,” he hinted.
“I’m grateful, Ivan Matveyevich.”
He seemed satisfied with that. “We’re sorry to have missed you. Your colleague there has been rather unpleasant in his cross-examination of the candidates for this contract.” He gestured toward Tom, just entering from lunch and giving me a dismayed look that said, Where the hell have you been? I gathered he’d been holding the fort against L-Pet for the both of us.
“Mr. Boston is my boss, actually,” I said, though Kablukov knew as much.
“We can all see he defers to you.”
I tried to assure Kablukov that this wasn’t so, that Tom’s deferential manner belied his authority, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Listen to me,” he said, taking me by the shoulder. I could feel the burn of his gaze even through his dark shades. “You designed these ships, did you not? So you tell your nachal’nik over there who you think ought to charter them.”
“With due respect, Ivan Matveyevich,” I said, “I’m not comfortable telling my boss how to do his job.”
At this, Kablukov’s mutton-colored face split open with a leisurely smile. All of his teeth were fake. “Comfortable,” he repeated. “It’s an interesting word. In my life, I’ve had to become comfortable with many things.” He lifted the cuff of his jacket sleeve. On his wrist was a white-gold Rolex that I suspected cost more than my car. It wasn’t the watch he wanted me to look at, however, but what was just above it—a faded purple tattoo of a card with an upside-down spade. “This I got in Khabarovsk. Now, that wasn’t comfortable. But wherever we are, we must learn to be comfortable.”
I knew that the chill in my arms was only in part on account of the air conditioning. The indigestible lump I’d felt this morning was back, pressing into my lower gut. I recognized it as the sensation I had earlier—an absurd possibility taking the shape of something monstrously certain. And suddenly I knew why I’d been so reluctant to thank Kablukov for his help.
Albert Einstein once wisely said that the formulation of a problem is more essential than its solution. Now these words assaulted me in their most sickeningly literal implication. Nobody, not even Kablukov, could pull strings that qui
ckly. He had devised the problem for which he himself was the solution. This was the simple fact that my worries about Lenny had kept hidden from me. I remembered our dinner at the Metropol several nights prior, my gushing about how much Lenny loved this worm-eaten place. How many hours had it taken Kablukov to find out where Lenny worked and lived? The Boot readjusted his cuff. His gravel voice broke the inertia of my silence. “Now we’re singing from the same songbook?” he said pleasantly.
It was almost March before Florence noticed anything different. Her tiredness might have been explained by the heavier course load she took up in February. The new packed schedule could account for why she felt so winded walking up a flight of stairs at the institute, or why her eyes shut spontaneously on the trolley ride home as soon as her forehead touched the glass. But what about the other signs? The fact that she’d twice had to flee to the toilets and leave her students alone in the classroom. That her one good brassiere forced her to breathe as heavily as if she were immersed ten leagues under the sea.
She struggled not to believe it. Her last period had been lighter than usual. Too light, really, when she thought about it. And now another month had passed, and nothing. The thing to do was to get it confirmed, but that, instinct told her, would make the reality of the matter too undeniably permanent.
The trouble, as always, was due to the national shortages. Since September the pharmacies had been out of Prekonsol cream. And then, all winter, Florence had been trying to replace her old kafka cap only to find, when the new shipment of diaphragms finally arrived on the shelves, that the one she bought felt too loose. She’d returned to the pharmacy, but all they sold were the one-size-fits-all models. Unlike dropping off a shirt to be tailored, she couldn’t have this “taken in” unless she planned to waste a day at the public clinic, sitting in a room packed with mothers of screaming children, waiting to see a doctor who might be able to fit the thing properly (or at least give her something else, maybe one of those Vagilen balloons that were likewise out of stock in the pharmacies), but who would as likely chastise her, like the doctor she’d seen that summer, for her decision to put off motherhood. He warned that at her advanced age (twenty-nine) she was already bound to be a starorodka, an old birther, leading to “irremediable problems” for herself and her child later on. The only encouraging thing that jowly dinosaur had said was that at this rate it would take her at least five or six months even to conceive.
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