17

Leonberger took off his weathered dockworker’s cap and sat across from the young accountant with the smooth cheeks. ALEXEI BERIDZE, the nameplate said. Georgian stock. He’d been surprised when he finally reached this MirGaz satellite office, a glass edifice on the Frunzenskaya embankment; it was huge, particularly given that its sole function was financial—payroll and investments for the enormous energy company.

“So,” young Alexei said in his barely disguised Tbilisi accent, “you were interested in one of our employees.”

“That’s right,” Leonberger said. He wove his blunt fingers together over his growing stomach. He was a big man, and when he was younger his size was its own kind of weapon, frightening people into submission. “Name’s Joseph Keller.”

The young man blinked at him, stiffening. “I’m afraid he no longer works for us.”

“Really?” Leonberger pursed his lips, as if this were a surprise. “I saw him just last month.”

“It was last month when he left.”

“Did he go back to England?”

A shrug. “I don’t know.” When Leonberger let the silence go on, Alexei said, “Why are you looking for him?”

“Ah!” Leonberger leaned his mass closer to the edge of the desk. “Joseph rents a little place from me in Kitay-gorod, and he hasn’t paid the last three months.”

“Are you sure?” the young man asked. “He lived in Pokrovsky Hills with his family.”

Leonberger grinned mischievously and wagged a finger at him. “I didn’t know about the family, but I guess he didn’t want me to know. He brings girls up there sometimes.”

“Joseph?” Alexei said, flabbergasted yet interested. “Unbelievable.”

“Not my type, you understand—skinny—but pretty enough. I don’t know if he pays them.”

“Joseph Keller?”

“All men are dogs,” Leonberger said, then rapped the tabletop with his nails. “Tell me—how could I get in touch with Joseph?”

“I wish I could tell you. He walked out one day, no explanation, and we never saw him again.”

“Last month, you said?”

“August sixteenth.”

“Girl trouble. That’s my guess,” Leonberger said as he rose to go.

“If you do find him,” Alexei said, “we would love to know.”

“Would you pay off his rent?”

“Look around. I think that could be arranged.”

In the enormous parking lot, he checked for shadows, then climbed into his Golf and drove south for a while before doubling back on himself and heading back into Moscow. He’d clocked the accountant’s anxiety when he’d first brought up Keller’s name, and had known from that point that he wouldn’t get anything out of him, not even if he reached over and dragged the man across his desk and beat him to a pulp; within minutes the beefy security he’d seen floating around the place would have descended on him. Besides, Leonberger wasn’t quite so formidable anymore—a fact he often forgot.

In the late eighties he’d been a welterweight champ in rough-and-tumble Kapotnya, then in greater Okrug District, until getting knocked out in the Moscow finals. Good enough to land him some respect, though, and while Yeltsin fought against the old guard, Leonberger had bruised his way through street fights against the still-devout Communist youth. After 1991, he’d found himself a field agent for the FSB, watching out for counterrevolutionaries (his phrase, not his bosses’) and putting muscle where muscle was needed. He’d made it to lieutenant before, in 1996, being kicked out for assaulting a superior who had ordered him to organize an attack on a gypsy encampment outside town. At the same time, Elena divorced him and took Nadia away. A bad time. That was when old Yevgeny Primakov showed up at his apartment block and asked if he’d like to do the occasional odd job for him. It had sounded good to Leonberger. Anything to keep his mind off his life.

Those odd jobs hadn’t been what he’d expected. His fists turned out to be of little use. Instead, he’d had to develop new skills like patience, observation, and deduction, as well as the occasional use of a camera on government officials Primakov told him were ripping off the Russian people. Leonberger was, he insisted, part of the vanguard of the effort to clean up the New Russia. Which was good enough for him.

Of course, he and Yevgeny had failed in this endeavor. He’d snapped photos of politicians in metaphorical bed with bankers and foreign tycoons and intelligence officers who were expanding their reach, but the fact was that he and Primakov were only witnesses. By the time Yevgeny sat him down in 2002 to explain that his job would change, Russia had become a different place. The crimes they had painstakingly documented were no longer secret. They’d become common knowledge, but it was too late. The intersection of the intelligence apparatus, the banks, the politicians, and the police meant that what was once illegal was now only illegal if you were poor.

“You’ll be part of something bigger now,” Yevgeny had told him. “But you’ll have to learn how to live in ignorance. Because what you’ll be working on will be so big that one man cannot keep it in his head. It won’t be Russian; it will be global.”

“What’s the job?” Leonberger asked.

“Saving everything.”

Which wasn’t an answer Leonberger was ever able to really understand, but he trusted the old widower who had by then left the FSB and moved to Western Europe, working for the United Nations. And when orders came through to surveil some player in the larger game, to break into an office and photograph documents, to meet someone and pretend to be someone else … whenever he was asked to do something, he reminded himself that it was for a larger good that only Yevgeny Primakov fully understood. All he needed to understand was his orders.

This was why Yevgeny’s death, a decade ago, had been such a groundswell. The news had spread through Moscow before he heard it from the Library itself: The great Yevgeny Primakov had been found killed in an apartment in New York, in a place called Park Slope. What was he going to do? When he got the call from a soft-spoken woman whose Russian smelled of other lands, he demanded to know who was taking over his command. “For the moment,” she said, “I am.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m Yevgeny’s daughter.”

“I didn’t know he had a daughter.”

“He has two,” she said, and when she called again a few months later, it was to tell him that management had changed again. “To his son.”

“He has a son?”

Despite the shock and the momentary sense of dislocation, when the Library returned to regular operation, Leonberger’s life remained much the same. Elena still didn’t speak to him, and Nadia, now married to some bureaucrat in Sochi, hardly knew him. So he was available to make sudden trips to St. Petersburg, or the other side of town, in order to gather this or that and send it to an encrypted server located somewhere in the world, other times to a post office box in Zürich, which was the only physical address he had for the Library. And when he wanted to, he could imagine Yevgeny Primakov still at the helm, somewhere in the world, reading his messages.

There had been troubles, of course. A man left on his own really is a dog, him no less than others. Last year, he’d taken it into his head to put down a cheap bottle of Dobry Medved and rush a trio of Moscow policemen hassling some queers in Vin Zavod, breaking one arm in the process. When she arrived, he’d seen in Yevgeny Primakov’s daughter’s face a kind of disgust that filled him with the desire to drink six more bottles of vodka and go for a swim in the Moskva.

In fact, it sounded like a good idea to him now.

But that would have to wait until he’d given Primakov’s children what they needed. Joseph Keller and Anna Usurov. At home, he used his computer to look up Usurov. A pretty girl, he thought, and though her blog, RESIST, had been shut down he found plenty of her articles reprinted on other sites, proving that she’d been a thorn in someone’s side. Probably Putin’s. That was when he found one of Usurov’s pieces on a website called —or Endeavor!—run by someone who claimed to have been Usurov’s friend: Sofia Marinov.

This was interesting: In her last post, dated August 18, Marinov claimed that the security services had killed Usurov. The official report, that Anna Usurov had stuck her head in her gas stove and suffocated herself, was ridiculous, she said, because no one had been as happy to live as her friend.

Not a convincing argument, but a heartfelt one.

Leonberger found Marinov’s number in the public records, but when he called he got her voicemail. “Ms. Marinov,” he said, “my name is Anatoli Kedrov. I’m writing an in memoriam about Anna Usurov. If you could spare me some time, that would be great. You can call me back at this number anytime.”

He hung up and wandered into the kitchen, where the refrigerator revealed bottles of water and a half-empty Dobry Medved. He took one long swig from the bottle, just one, then put it back in the fridge and closed it. He thanked God every day that he wasn’t an alcoholic.