—
THE HOTEL NOVOMOSKOVSKAYA WAS in the very heart of the old city, and the attention Florence received from the concierge was in every way swift and agreeable until she was told to pay four nights in advance.
“But I’m only staying one or two nights.”
“Four nights, minimal for residence registration in Moscow. Rule of Intourist.”
The reception manager obligingly took her money before assuming his official capacity as notary, stamping her papers with four identical seals, just as she’d seen on Sergey’s documents. In her room, with the curtains drawn, came the payoff: a view so brazenly triumphant that her eyes couldn’t accept it as anything but a picture plucked from a postcard rack. Sunset was just then settling over Red Square, turning the cobblestones to radiant ripples. Above St. Basil’s, the domes shone like barber’s poles, like custards, virtually burlesque against the walls of the granite mausoleum. There seemed, in the contrasts of this panorama, some hidden vision to be gleaned. A message about man’s chaotic spirit and his somber dignity. His dignity and his power. His power and his purpose. She was sure that there was some thread there, but the burden of decoding it made her feel too tired. Consciousness was draining out of her in a low tide. For almost a month, she had been in transit, on boats and trains and cars and carriages. Had she really stopped moving, she now wondered, or would her feet take it upon themselves to start walking again? A fly buzzing atop two mandarin oranges stirred Florence out of her reverie. She lifted one orange from its saucer and held it in her palm, feeling its weight and the texture of its waxy skin. This, it seemed, was proof that she had really arrived. She raised the fruit to her nose and inhaled its tang. Forever after, she would associate her arrival in Russia with the smell of tangerines, even when there were none to be found.
My BlackBerry puts the time at 7:04 a.m. Through the plane’s ovoid window the half-moon dissolves like a watermark. The Finnair stewardess muscles shut my overhead with a smile just short of coquettish. And to think I once found them frosty, these Nordic darlings of the sky. What did I know? Nothing, before flying business class. Soon one of them comes by and asks whether she can bring me a drink. A little Scotch would be just fine, I tell her. She leans in and smiles, conveying the impression that the two of us are conspirators in some delicious secret that it would be impossible to explain to the dollar-counting hordes in the rows behind.
If only these charms could extend to my fellow passengers. But it’s just the opposite, I’ve discovered. My seatmate’s all right—a mute Finn. A nation that, thank heaven, sees no need for chat. Two rows ahead of me is a different story: a Russian blueblood with a duck’s-ass haircut who’s employing the last minutes before takeoff to abuse some hapless underling on his Motorola. So far, he’s labeled whoever he’s talking to an urod, a mutant, and an aborted fetus. I can already feel my chest constricting in response to his voice, as I brace myself for the week ahead.
I let my eyes fall shut. Today I have the uneasy sense that the fluttering in my stomach is not just the consequence of my body anticipating breaking its bonds with gravity. In the compartment overhead are the five-kilo study guides my wife has insisted I deliver to our son. Next to them is an almost weightless folder containing my birth certificate, my mother’s old passport, and her Soviet-era bankbook. The thought of presenting those brittle proofs of my mother’s time on earth at the FSB archives office—around the corner from the prison where I used to stand for hours with Mama, carrying packages of food for my father (packages never opened, always returned)—doesn’t kindle my enthusiasm. It’s enough for me to be traveling to Russia without also having to make a sojourn into the still-warm bowels of the Soviet Union. Between that, my meetings with L____ Petroleum, and trying to get my son’s head screwed back on straight, I’ll have a busy week indeed. At last we take off, and soon enough Miss Finland comes around with my Dewar’s—two shots of Scotch and a twist of lemon—and sets it down gently on my ample armrest. It tastes excellent, like garden patios and cypresses.
—
MY LATE CAREER TURN with Big Oil began five years earlier, in March 2003. I’d driven from my office in Annapolis to D.C. to meet my friend Tom for lunch. Tom Boston, who heads the marine arm of Continental Oil, is an Ohioan, broad of hand and gut, with a fleshy face possessing the sort of pop-eyed wonder that makes all of smug Europe and sneering Russia reliably underestimate the American breed. Continental was then still my client. The official purpose of my lunches with Tom was for me to catch him up on the status of various technical and design projects that my engineering firm was handling for his department. After the debriefing, which usually lasted the seventeen minutes that it took for the waitress to arrive with our salmon or steak, we’d relax and begin to talk about what really interested us, the flight hours Tom had logged on his Cessna, or my tournaments in Tae Kwan Do—I was, at the age of fifty-nine, pursuing my black belt. “The trick is to pretend the kicks and punches are happening to someone else,” I told him, suddenly remembering that this was something I had learned long ago, at the children’s home.
“That’s the upside of coming from a family like the Bostons,” Tom boasted. “Today they pummel you, tomorrow they’ve got to go up against your four siblings and six cousins.”
Tom’s childhood had been in every conceivable way different from mine, except for the central fact that both of us had grown up poor without knowing quite how poor we were. Also, after boyhoods deprived of the sea, both of us had dedicated our lives to big ships. Among the things, I think, that had drawn together this outsized, amiable Midwesterner and me, the compact, contrarian Jew, was that, for both of us, life was a long show of mastery over our childhoods. That day, Tom had chosen a restaurant inside the Park Hyatt Hotel, a more impressive setting for our lunch meeting than the burger-and-steak houses to which Tom was inclined. He didn’t bother with preliminaries. “I’ve got some interesting news,” he said as soon as we sat.
“Do you?”
“Continental has made a deal with L____ Petroleum to buy a six-percent stake in the company from the Russian government.”
“And this is good news?”
“What do you think? We’ve just been given access to a billion barrels in oil reserves. Our stock’s about to get a nice little spike.”
“Okay, I’ll call my broker right now.”
“Don’t joke. At the moment it’s still very sub rosa. Very buttoned up.”
“And how much did you pay for such a privilege?”
“No more than two billion.”
I picked up the menu.
“What you should be asking,” Tom suggested, “is how much we’re going to make.”
“I’m sorry to tell you, my friend, but you’re going to lose money on this thing. It’s been—what—five, six years since every oil company has hurried to Russia. And name me a single venture that’s making a profit. Their tax laws are always shifting. They violate contracts. They renege on debts. It’s easier to get a drunkard off the ground there than a business.” I had been trying to say the same thing to my son for the past four years, but Lenny insisted on taking the “long view.”
“How about you don’t worry about Continental’s money,” Tom said. “We aren’t going bankrupt. Aren’t you curious where we’re drilling? I’ll give you a hint—it’s cold.”
“That’s very good, Tom. Very good.”
“What are you smiling about?”
“The penguins.”
“What penguins?”
“The penguins that the Kremlin will claim you poisoned when they decide to kick you out.”
“There aren’t any penguins where we’re drilling.”
“Putin will fly them in personally.”
Tom leaned back in his chair and wrapped his meaty hands behind his head.
“In five years,” I resumed, “they will claim you have been drilling in an ecologically delicate habitat, announce that you’ve poisoned all their fish, or polar bears, and demand you hand over
half your profits or get the hell out. They’ll give you a warning first—it is, after all, a Christian country.”
“If you know so much, maybe you should work for us at Continental.”
“You can’t afford me,” I demurred.
His hands still interlaced behind his head, Tom said, “Name a number. How much are they paying you at Herbert Engineering?”
Were we negotiating? Tom’s question was enough to raise the color in my face. It was like a blunt proposition after a courtship so prolonged that all erotic possibilities had been drained from it years ago.
“I like working for Herbert. They let us bring our dogs to work.”
“You don’t have a dog.”
“People play Frisbee on the lawn at lunch.”
“You can play Frisbee on our lawn.” Tom went on looking at me unblinkingly.
“What do you want me for?” I said. “I’m old.”
“Reagan was sixty-nine when he was elected president.” He didn’t need to remind me. Among the assortment of things Tom and I happened to share was an abiding love of Ronald Reagan. With little Bush in office, there were not too many people to whom I could admit that one of the first actions I’d taken as a freshly minted American (being granted citizenship de jure upon arrival) was to cast my vote for Ronnie.
“What are you doing at Herbert now?” Tom proceeded. He had prepared his pitch. “Retrofitting Coast Guard vessels running thirty years past their prime? Performing life support on icebreakers commissioned in ’65. Is that what you want to be doing when you retire?”
The mention of retirement reliably made my skin break out in a prickle. At fifty-nine, I wasn’t quite done with ambition. Quite the contrary. At fifty-nine, I found that my ambition was inoculated with the strains of past disappointments, a drive to make up in the second half of the game the chances I’d lost in the first.
Tom explained the opportunity: L-Pet was very interested in tapping its Arctic potential. They wanted to launch a joint venture with Continental to build an offshore terminal in the half-frozen Barents Sea, from which crude could be ferried to the warm port of Murmansk.
“The Arctic is frozen eight months of the year, Tom. You’ve always claimed shipping across the Arctic isn’t economically viable.”
“Not yet—but soon.”
“I thought you oil folks didn’t believe in global warming.”
“Nonsense. Our position is merely that ‘climate change’ is a natural rather than a man-made phenomenon. The area of open water in the Arctic is increasing rapidly, and the Barents Sea is gradually thawing. L-Pet has the oil, and we have the technology.”
“What technology?” I said. Murmansk might be a warm port, but it was surrounded by two-foot-thick ice. You still had to get your crude up there, and those passageways were too tight for conventional icebreakers.
“That’s the beautiful part. We’re going to make our own dual-acting shuttle tankers. Three shuttle ships that’ll carry the oil and break the ice. A totally new concept.”
I couldn’t believe it. A year ago, this idea had been mine. Now Tom was selling it back to me. When I pointed this out to him, he said, “You could make it real. You fiddle with other people’s ships all day. No more of this Frankenstein business—it’s time you designed your own.”
“But I can do that from Herbert. You can get me to do it cheaper from Herbert.”
“Yes, but at Herbert you’re also potentially working for Exxon and Chevron, and who knows who else. Maybe we want to take you out of circulation.”
Against appeals to my wallet I’d been able to put up some resistance, but against appeals to my vanity I was defenseless. Fool that I am, I’ve always suffered from the intellectual’s weakness for praise.
He employed all his forceful charm and Reaganesque persuasiveness on me that afternoon. He needn’t have worked so hard. Underneath my sarcasm was the unalterable fact that I would be turning sixty in seven months, and there were not going to be many more offers like this in my future.
Tom told me not to give him an answer right away, to sleep on it. But a formal offer arrived at my house by fax by the time I parked in the driveway. And once I saw that number, how could I sleep?
Had I known Tom’s real motivation for wanting to hire me away, I might have had the guts to ask for double. It wasn’t a master shipbuilder that he was after, but a person with my more accidental qualities. That evening, however, with the offer still warm in my hands, it occurred to me that the lucrative liaison Tom was proposing might present a rare opportunity to make a few late-stage adjustments for my parental neglect. Maybe, I wondered, the only way to get my son out of Russia was to take myself back to her.
Until his thirty-fourth birthday, Lenny Brink believed that a man who did not have a million in the bank by the time he turned thirty-five was a failure. But adjustments had to be made. When he arrived in Moscow, nine years earlier, the age number in this equation had been thirty. The problem, as he saw it, was that the forces of globalization, like the forces of entropy, moved stealthily and unchecked across national and social membranes until everything began to resemble everything else. Today this problem was evident all over the leafy premises of Kuskovo Estate—Moscow’s miniature “Versailles”—where the expatriate classes and their cohorts had congregated to celebrate America’s independence. The summer residence of the Sheremetyev counts had been built to flatter the European aspirations of Russian nobility, but today, on either side of the baronial gardens, the white bosoms of marble statuary were garlanded with the decidedly American banners of Kodak and Avon. An inflatable Ronald McDonald hovered, Zen-like, on the bank of the koi pond. Helium balloons in primary red-white-and-blues were tangled with the branches of the ancient Russian pines. In the distance, the rose-hued central palace hung back from the festivities, slightly embarrassed, like a stout and unobtrusive chaperone. Here, along the geometric grounds of the city’s imperial inheritance, the corporate sponsors of the American Chamber of Commerce had erected their food tents and concession stands for the annual Fourth of July celebration.
Pungent gusts of the aroma of shashlik wafted to the pine-shaded area where Lenny sat at a picnic bench, his large shoulders hunched in the task of consuming a second hot dog. The sky was turning the color of champagne, and snatches of Japanese, German, Dutch, and Texan floated on the grill-flavored air. “If dumb was dirt, he’d cover an acre. You wanna convert that to metric for the ladies, Dmitri,” a Gulliver-sized oilman standing not two feet away was saying to his Russian companions. The ease with which these American belugas enjoyed their white-god privileges irritated Lenny all the more for the ways he felt incapable of enjoying them himself. Still, even the Texans’ sturdy vulgarity offered greater comfort than other conversations he was overhearing, conducted in an unnervingly colloquial English that shielded its speakers’ origins (Moscow? Bern? Cleveland?), no longer the stiff Esperanto of Europe’s business class, but an all-purpose jargon that could be absorbed by osmosis through DVD marathons of Lost and The Wire. Its profusion at this picnic was adding a headachy panic to the gut-rumbling anxiety he’d been feeling since morning. In the nine years he’d been coming to AmCham’s Independence Day party, the Russian-born had never been as hard to distinguish from the foreign expats as they were today. Lenny could still spot a few Hong Kong suits and more than enough baptismal crosses, but the once-reliable cohort of bleached denim and Adidas mafiawear had so dwindled that it could no longer be counted upon to restore his sense of superiority. In its place had proliferated a swarm of oxford button-downs, preppy pastel knits, and boating shoes, the summertime uniforms of the global elite. For a brief moment Lenny worried that his own wrinkled linen blazer might cause others to mistake him for a native.
His companions at the picnic table were two junior associates at his equity firm: a prematurely balding New Zealander, who was giving a spittle-laced facts-of-life lecture to a young Virginian brooding over his Ukrainian ex-wife. The ex-wife, with whom the Virginian still
occasionally slept, was bleeding him for capital for her window-dressing business. “It’s like Pavlov, mate, you’ve conditioned her to want your cash.” The Virginian nodded sagely, almost as if it were some badge of honor to be so tormented and exploited by Slavic women. It struck Lenny that neither of these fools had any idea that Abacus Group was about to sack both of them upon the successful conclusion of the company’s imminent buyout by Westhouse Capital Partners. He was, he assured himself, safe, being a senior associate on a track to partnership. He listened to his companions just long enough to vow to take a tougher stand with his own Slavic tormentor, Katya, then crumpled his napkin resolutely into an overflowing trash can and resumed his trek across the lawn. Since they had broken up three weeks ago, he had gallantly assumed the couch while Katya continued to claim their bedroom. Almost a month had passed without her finding, or seeming to look for, a place of her own. This morning he’d raised the topic at breakfast only to be reminded by a sobbing Katya at the stove that he had dragged her to this city, away from her beloved mamochka and little sister in St. Petersburg. Was she to leave her job, her whole life, now that she’d become for him an unnecessary person? Perhaps it was the sight of her tears and mucus dripping unhygienically into the kielbasa omelet she was frying for him that prompted Lenny’s spontaneous promise to subsidize her new rent, at least for a few months. In addition to quieting her sniffles, this promise had the virtue of being underwritten by the plump little bonus he was anticipating from the WCP move and buyout, a bonus that, even with his renewed obligations to Katya, would help him restore his depleted savings. His only real concern on this bright afternoon, aside from the questionable meat in the hot dog he was having trouble digesting, was that three days had passed since his friend Austin had told him in strictest confidence about the forthcoming deal, and so far no one else had mentioned anything about it. It was, of course, still too early for a formal announcement, but Austin had all but assured him that as an almost-partner he’d certainly be brought along once Abacus got absorbed by the larger firm.
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