“Please, Ivan Matveyevich, do tell us,” I said. My throat ached from the steam, or maybe from the effort of having to be civil.
“Enough with the formalities. Please, call me Vanya. I like Americans because you are like us. Simple. Not like those complicated French, or the chilly Germans, or the Japanese—who the hell can read their faces, they all look alike to me.”
I translated for Tom, who did a fair imitation of looking amused as Kablukov set aside his beer glass and leaned across the stone bench to squeeze his hand, as though to seal the mutual understanding.
Around us, grown men were sprawled or slouched on marble slabs, breathing through their mouths, absorbed in the grave business of their health-inducing stupor. A few squatted against the Turkish tiles by the polished spigots, scrubbing one another’s hides or thrashing them with dried birch leaves before banishing the toxins in bursts of cold water. If I closed my eyes, I might have been in a tannery. The vapor seemed to turn all conversations into a mutter, save the cries of “Harder! Harder!” that occasionally rose above the echoes of thwacking and thrashing.
“A man can be a ‘professional,’ a good worker. But what is work? It is only…a thing.” Kablukov signaled for an attendant. “What matters is what is on the inside.” He hit his fist against the strangely shaped cross etched on his chest. “A man’s spirit. Take care of him,” he ordered the ancient-looking attendant, motioning at Tom. The wiry little man gestured for Tom to prostrate himself on the bench and then proceeded to whack Tom’s back and legs with birch twigs, gently at first and then, after a few nods from Kablukov, with more vigor, flagellating Tom’s smooth Midwestern flesh in rhythm to his poorly suppressed grunts of pain.
“Easy there,” Tom warned the man sheepishly, between groans.
Kablukov adjusted his loincloth and took a few heavy swallows of steam, then ordered the attendant to bring two fresh beers, which the man did with disturbing efficiency. Kablukov released a gurgle of air as he popped each cap. “There’s no point spending less than three hours in a banya,” he advised us, upending his beer bottle, then waiting for me to take a drink. “You Americans go to your doctors and buy your pills, pills, pills, and we”—he spread his arms and planted the bottle on the bench—“we take care of our bodies right here!”
As an advertisement for the banya’s salubrious benefits, Kablukov hardly struck me as a model specimen. The first time I met him, he’d appeared to me a physically powerful man. But that first impression was a testament to the value of an expensive suit. When he was naked, it was plain to see that, like a walrus, he had no shoulders. All his formidable bulk was concentrated in front of him. Decades of lard and vodka consumption had coarsened his tapered frame and bloated his face into that of a veteran pimp or public official.
“You’re selling me a horse I already own,” I said, a bit too irascibly. I was impatient to know what Kablukov was after. “I mean, I used to come here to Sanduny,” I amended.
“Ah, before we lost you to the Americans.”
“Even as a boy,” I said. “With my father.”
“Is that so?”
It was, in fact. I had come here with Papa, though only one time. I’d retained the fading memory in glimmering patches all of my life. It was the last image I had of my father.
“My own father was Armenian. You see this?” He tapped the tattoo on his chest. “People think it’s some ordinary cross. It ain’t. It’s the Holy Lance. It’s the spear they used to stick Christ Himself.” With his index finger Kablukov made a slow surgical swipe along his left rib. “The Holy Lance was brought to Armenia by Saint Gregory the Illuminator.”
“You learned that from your father.”
Kablukov looked at me like I was nuts. “My father? If I spotted that bastard walking down the street, I’d pop him. However”—he raised a finger—“I believe in the importance of remembering one’s heritage. That’s why I have this.” He pointed to a faded blue inscription on his forearm. “He who’s been thrown in the water is not afraid of the rain.”
Kablukov now ordered the wiry attendant to give peace to Tom’s abused flesh and come service his own. I tilted my head back and dozed to the murmur of men’s voices. The muffled banya noises formed a braid of sound around me as I faded in and out of mental acuity. I had tried to fight sleep, but the intervals between my conscious moments were diminishing, while slabs of memory rose up like stepping-stones in a streambed.
—
WITHOUT QUITE BEING AWARE of it, I was remembering my father—his thin frame, his ropy muscles, the hair on his toes—as we made our way up the tiled stairs to the Sanduny banya’s second floor. At my eye level was his flapping penis. Already I was aware of its being different from my own—not only in size, but in the prominence of the polished bulb of the tip. It would be another ten years before I would learn about the mark of Abraham that I and the rest of my Jewish peers were missing—sons born after the war, who, for fear of the fascists, had entered manhood with our foreskins intact.
The Sanduny banya was older and hotter than the municipal facilities I’d gone to with Mama, those plain and dingy public baths that lacked the atmosphere of departed imperial glory which lingered everywhere amid Sanduny’s carved and gilded walls, its peeling moldings, the chipped marble staircases and vast clouded mirrors. A ruined paradise, a shipwreck of ghosts flogging themselves and one another like penitents. Upstairs, where the steam was densest, the real enthusiasts congregated in their peaked felt hats and slippers. There the air was barely breathable. From somewhere, Papa obtained a big zinc tub and filled it with cold water from a spigot.
“What’s that for?”
“You’ll see.”
Naked, he carried it to the wooden benches at the rear while I followed behind, afraid of losing him in the forest of legs. The floor under my feet was covered in slippery leaves.
“Now, when it gets too hot for you, you just bend down and inhale the air right up above this tub, see? The moment you feel your lungs burning, put your face right by this cold water and breathe. You got it, boss?”
“Got it.”
I did as he instructed, while he scraped his back and shoulders with a scrubber. Every time someone opened the oven door and tossed more water on the glowing bricks, I dipped my head down to the zinc tub. As soon as I was able to breathe again I’d look around furtively at the other boys in the baths. Some were just a little older than I was, and a few were younger. All of them strutted beside their fathers, confidently withstanding the heat. I felt myself growing jealous of them, embarrassed every time I needed to kneel down and drink in the cool air above the tub. The boy who had gone to the banya each week with Mama—surrounded there by white-skinned, milky creatures, mountains of old flesh and mounds of ripe bellies, patronized by kindly female smiles—seemed to me now a distant person, a little child. My mother was always reminding me to clean this spot and that, “so nothing gets stuck between.” Papa, handing me the soap, seemed to trust me to take care of this business on my own.
I tried not to linger above the tank of icy water, where it was easier to stay. Each time I stood up, I tried to hold out against the heat a little longer. The floor scalded my feet. Somewhere in the haze above me, the men were calling for the attendant to “Toss on more!” I could hear the creak of the boiler door, the water being hurled against the bricks and exploding in hissing steam, filling the room with fog as I struggled to breathe.
—
KABLUKOV’S VOICE WHIPPED ME back into the present.
“I couldn’t fail to notice you put our boys from Sausen through their paces at their presentation.”
Our side of the steam room had emptied out, and the vapor had subsided. I saw Tom get out of his cold shower and wrap himself in a towel. Scrubbed and refreshed, he sat down beside me. “What’s the man saying?”
“That we ask a lot of questions.”
“Tell him we asked them the same questions we would ask any potential contractor.”
But Kab
lukov seemed to understand without translation. “And it’s right well that you did! I told those boys they should know this shipping is a serious business. When they start this job, they have to be prepared for everything.”
It took some self-control for me not to raise my eyebrow. I turned and translated for Tom.
“We haven’t made our decision yet, Mr. Kablukov,” he said respectfully. “There are still a few other contractors to consider.”
Kablukov shut one eye and nodded gravely to show he understood without need of an interpreter, and to signal, it seemed, that he had no intention of meddling in our selection process. “It’s your consideration that we’re depending on.” He set his elbows firmly on his toweled thighs, leaning in and lowering his voice to a throaty whisper. “I didn’t set up our meeting for no good reason.”
I did my best to convey the gist of this, though I wasn’t sure where it was heading.
“Our Sausen friends, whether you give the contract to them or to somebody else”—Kablukov shrugged his narrow shoulders—“over the long run, it won’t make a big difference.”
So why all the fuss? I thought.
“That is not the reason I wanted us to talk like this—person to person. I did not wish to make it an official meeting, because what I have to say is still very early news. In six months, L-Pet will make an announcement that it is putting up for auction twelve percent of L-Pet stock, with an option to buy another three percent.”
He motioned with his fleshy arm for me to translate for Tom, and sat back patiently as I did.
I watched Tom perk up out of his vaporous stupor. “Ask him if they’ll be selling those shares on the open market.”
Once more Kablukov seemed to understand the question without my help, and answered: “Who becomes a successful bidder in this auction will depend on many things. We expect Exxon and Chevron will try to offer us bags of lucre for our reserves. But we have no desire to tie ourselves up with a behemoth. As Mr. Khodorkovsky discovered, the bigger your partners, the bigger your problems. What matters to us is what’s in here.” He jerked his thumb toward the hairy flesh straining to hold in his gut. “We like doing business with people who like doing business with us. You understand?”
Through the fog and chiming anxiety in my own head, I understood that Kablukov was attempting to do me a favor: he was smoothing the road for Tom.
“We have preferred buyers,” Kablukov continued. “Just as we have preferred partners.”
I had expected a stick, but instead he was dangling a carrot. I did not believe him. I did not trust him. But I saw no way around all that flesh. Kablukov nodded at me and reclined politely. He was handing me the script.
I translated obediently. What else was there to do? I could taste the sourness of my expression. Four years of work, the gem of my life’s labor—surrendered to the gluttony of a sweating, geriatric gangster. But studying my reaction Kablukov only smiled. He seemed to read my smirk as a show of our alliance. “Does our friend over here understand what I’ve just shared with you?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Tom said, leaning toward Kablukov’s bench. “You’re talking about Continental becoming the preferred buyer of twelve percent of L-Pet stock?”
His eyelids still at half-mast, Kablukov nodded.
“With an option to buy another three.”
“In two or three years, you could raise that share to twenty percent,” Kablukov suggested to me.
When I translated for Tom, he said, in astonishment, “That’s a fifth of the company! It would make us a strategic equity investor.”
“Little by little,” Kablukov said, smiling at us like an elder. “There will be many interested parties, but we are looking for a partner who understands our way of doing business. You see?”
I did. Perfectly. Kablukov had not needed me to pressure Tom; he only had to blackmail me into keeping my mouth shut. He could get to Tom on his own. Tom had dollar signs flashing in his eyes. It occurred to me that this was the essence of the Boot’s criminal genius: to exert his influence on each link in the chain.
“The companies we work with…we think of them all as family.”
Tom said, “Ask him what guarantee Continental will have that we will be the preferred buyer.”
Reduced again to being a translator—a courtier—I did as told. Kablukov patted his hands on his bare chest as if searching his pockets. “What guarantee can anyone give you here? There are no guarantees. There is only trust.”
—
WHAT I REMEMBERED WAS the hot and suffocating embrace of the steam. Sounds of voices reached me from a distance. I lay on my back on the hot tiled floor. Above me, still naked, crouched my father, splashing cold water on my face. He shouted to someone over his shoulder: “Tell them to stop tossing water on that stove! My kid’s fainted.”
“They’ve been here three hours!” a skinny old man sitting beside him said with high-pitched indignation. “Don’t they see the sign says you gotta leave after two?”
My father picked me up and carried me to a cooler part of the room.
I struggled to keep my eyes open. “What happened?”
“Nothing, sport. Just a little too much steam. Lemme see your head.” He sounded nervous. I could feel a cord of shame creeping through my confusion as the bodies parted to let us pass. “You’ve had enough? Me too, boss,” my father said. “Let’s get out of here.”
—
AFTER WE PARTED WAYS with Kablukov, Tom said he wanted to talk to me alone, at dinner. We met an hour later at a phony Irish pub of Tom’s choosing. He was waiting for me at one of the wide wooden tables under green felt bunting. “Do you understand what the Boot was dangling in our faces back there?”
I said I thought so.
Our waitress brought us two draft beers. She was bound in a corset, like a medieval wench. Most of the other diners were pallid, doughy expatriates from Britain and its former colonies. We fit right in.
“If Continental becomes the preferred buyer for twenty percent of L-Pet stock, it means we put our own man on the board, get him voting on key decisions.” He was looking at me pointedly, as if anticipating astonishment, or an objection.
“It’s a very appealing offer,” I made myself say.
“Hmm.” Tom was letting his gaze drift into the dim, paneled corners of the pub. “Too appealing. L-Pet’s practically state-owned. I can’t imagine the Kremlin giving away one-fifth of the company to a single partner.”
I considered the courses of action available to me. “But they do seem to like doing business with us, don’t they? Like Kablukov said, it’s a matter of trust. Two more.” I tapped on my empty beer glass as the waitress walked by. I hoped a refill might make the task of praising L-Pet go more smoothly. But Tom shook his head. “None for me,” he told our wench. “They haven’t offered us any assurance in writing.”
I wanted to suggest that we could ask them to, but I had the sense that this wasn’t the tack Kablukov intended for me to take. “You’re the one who told me that in this business you wait for the press announcement and you miss the boat,” I said, and tried to smile. I had excrement all over my mouth.
“So we open our legs and cross our fingers?” Tom was tapping his fingernails against the table in a way that looked involuntary and painful. “We have protocols. We set up strict guidelines to keep this whole process…aboveboard.”
“And following those same protocols we’ve led them exactly where we want them, haven’t we? You always said that this deal was more of a strategic move than a commercial one. We were just buying access to their fields. So here you go—the door is being cracked open.” There was a degrading kind of satisfaction in making all this up as I went along. My stein of beer arrived, and I drained it fast.
“I’m going to have to defend this decision in D.C. This isn’t Monopoly money we’re tossing around. The numbers have to make some sense.”
I did an impression of giving this question serious thought, then said, “If y
ou want to talk about numbers, we can talk about numbers. You told me the only thing that matters for stock prices in this business is future reserves. We’ll have a one-fifth stake in a company that’s got its ass up against the Barents Sea—biggest gas field in the world. Not to mention all of western Siberia. Continental has a problem with taking a loss on a hundred and seventy mil? Sorry, Tom—but I figure you’d be the first to say we shouldn’t give up the farm because one fox wants to grab a couple of our chickens.”
“All right, all right.”
“You don’t get a do-over with some things. You can be sorry or you can be right.”
I watched Tom’s meaty face arrange itself into the shape of reluctant agreement. He was peering into his half-empty beer glass and nodding. “You’re right, we should be taking the long view.”
I was flooded with relief and disgust in equal measure. He’s been ready to take Kablukov’s bait all along, I told myself. It’s just my blessing he wanted.
When he looked at me again it was with confusion and pity. “But what about you? You’ve worked on those ships for years. Doesn’t it rankle you? Two days ago you wanted to run these Sausen guys out of town, and now you’re ready to hand the keys to these chiselers?”
“There’s something bigger at stake than my pride.” For the first time, I said something that wasn’t a complete lie.
“I’m just surprised,” Tom said. “As long as I’ve known you, Julian, you’ve had no patience for cheap shortcuts or tricks. I’ve always admired your sense of fair play.”
It shouldn’t have hurt me to hear this, and yet it cut like a bullwhip. The faith Tom had in me was more painful than his suspicion. I had, for most of my life, tried to steer clear of any Just Causes—paving the road to hell and all that. And yet my eschewing of the noble path had never been without a shade of moral ambition: I would at least do no harm, I told myself, would decline to add my drop to the world’s copious sum of pretense and crookedness. But how ready I was now to defile all that for the sake of Lenny’s safety. “Maybe I’m starting to see the big picture,” I said.
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