A tasseled cross swung gently from the cabbie’s mirror as I rode to the detention center where they held my son. Outside, cold summer rain lashed the high-rises that passed us at halting, rush-hour speeds. We were in Kapotnya, in the southeast. Here the building materials were no longer marble and limestone but cinder block and concrete. The naked apartment blocks were anonymous yet familiar; the neighborhood was shorn of all identifying marks save the silos of the local power plant that puffed white sulfur smoke into the rain-darkened sky.

An hour earlier I’d left the cab to wait while I’d run up to Lenny’s apartment. With her damp ponytail and smudged mascara, Katya had looked like a lost adolescent, though part of this impression was due to the expensive-looking orthodontia in her mouth (another improvement I suspected Lenny was bankrolling). I hadn’t been able to get a complete story out of her, other than that the MVD had spontaneously arrived to detain Lenny over some financial impiety that he’d been only circumstantially connected with two years earlier. Katya, for her part, seemed convinced that Lenny was the victim of a fiendish conspiracy orchestrated by his so-called friends (those suki) to take the fall for some nefarious Ponzi-ish maneuver they themselves had managed to dodge. Between the loud percussion of the rain on the roof and Katya’s sobs, I could not make heads or tails of her story.

The air inside the jail reception area smelled fermented, suggesting that the place also doubled as a sobering-up station for the local street sludge. I gave my documents to a militzia guard and was led through a narrow corridor to an empty room painted hepatitic green. The militzia man made me wait for half an hour before he brought Lenny in and ceremoniously uncuffed him.

Lenny’s skin was patched with blotches. He smelled, implausibly, of tobacco. “You’ve been smoking?”

“They’ve stuffed me in with some skinhead they picked up for harassing Tajik girls on the street. He’s always lighting up. I can’t fucking breathe in there.”

“You look like mincemeat,” I said. “How long have you been in here?”

“Four, maybe five hours.” He showed me his naked wrists. “They took my watch and my phone. Have you called Mom already?”

“Not yet. How the hell did you get yourself in here?”

“Oh, you think I did this to myself?”

“Did I say that?”

“But it’s what you’re thinking.”

“Just tell me what’s happened.” I tried to speak at a discreet volume.

“We don’t have to whisper, damn it, since I didn’t do anything.” Lenny tossed a challenging look at the guard standing inside the door, who stayed as stoic as a eunuch. As he recited the accusations against him to me in his sour breath, I was unnerved by his supercilious calm, as if he were rolling his eyes at each one of them. It seemed that two years earlier he’d served as one of the brokers on a business deal between an obscure European growth fund and a nickel plant in the southern Urals. After the growth fund had completed its purchase of the factory, it had issued a series of specious bonds backed by the nickel plant but without, it later emerged, the knowledge of the plant’s board members. By then most of the bonds had been cashed, bankrupting the plant. A criminal investigation was opened. Old news, said Lenny. The growth fund’s managers—Russians with foreign passports—were charged with fraud. Lenny’s firm, being only a second-string agent in the dark about their clients’ criminal intent, was let off without charge. “It was an ordinary buyout,” he said. “All we did was standard analysis. Nobody at Abacus Group had any connection to anything that happened later. Now someone’s decided to dig it up again.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Did someone at your firm get stingy, forget to pay off the right people?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Listening to him, I felt sick with despair. It was the second time today I was at, or near, a prison. The street signs changed in this city, but apparently little else. “Have you been charged with anything?” No sooner had I spoken these words than it struck me how hopelessly stupid I sounded to myself.

“No, just ‘detained.’ ”

“What does that mean? How long can they keep you here?”

“A prosecutor is supposed to come in the morning to question me.”

“They’re planning to keep you here overnight?” The thought of Lenny having to spend the night in a grim tubercular cell made me so light-headed with anxiety that I had to shut my eyes.

“Trust me, I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve just spent the past four hours avoiding a guy who’s got a manhole cover tattooed on his shaved head, like maybe he wants someone to open it and be impressed by the elaborate sewer system inside.”

“You need a lawyer,” I said, a bit too frantically. “You can’t talk to some apparatchik prosecutor without a lawyer.” But Lenny was two steps ahead of me. “I’ve already told Katya to call Austin. He’s getting me a lawyer in the morning.”

“You trust those guys? Katya says they’re the reason you’re in this mess.”

“Who else am I supposed to call?” Lenny almost shouted, awakening our eunuch guard.

“I have to call your mother,” I said, checking my watch. “It’s not even past one at home; there’s still time to call around the firms and find you someone good, an American who focuses on this sort of thing.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“This is serious stuff, Lenny.”

“Don’t call her. Call around yourself if you must, but don’t get Mom involved or I’ll never hear the end of it.”

I said nothing.

His eyes surveyed me with grinning suspicion. “I can see what you’re thinking—that I got myself into this fucking mess.”

“I think no such thing.”

“You do. Like maybe I didn’t do it intentionally, but by trying to take some shortcut. Isn’t that what you tell Mom—that I’m a ‘corner cutter’?” His voice swelled with something almost like satisfaction at forcing me into an acknowledgment of this exquisitely miserable view of him.

But he was wrong about me in one respect: I did believe him when he said he’d landed here through no misconduct of his own. What I faulted him for—though I could hardly admit this to Lenny—was the same thing I faulted Mama for: neither of them seemed to have the foggiest idea of how to protect themselves in this country.

“We’ll come up with something,” I said, though I had no idea what this might be. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him. “Please, don’t open your mouth until then.”

Our hooligan-faced young warden was at the gate again, telling us visiting time was over.

Lenny nodded distantly, without commitment, at what I’d just said.

“Please,” I pleaded a final time before I was led out.

—

I SPENT MOST OF THE NIGHT calling various law firms in New York and Washington, writing down names of attorneys who weren’t able to take a phone appointment with me until the following day, abandoning myself to this pointless task even as I knew that the “law” had nothing to do with the predicament Lenny was in. What we were dealing with was a simple hostage situation, for which a suitable ransom would have to be worked out sooner or later, perhaps with the intervention of a local negotiator. But where to find a negotiator with enough pull? The answer came the next morning at L-Pet’s offices, where, with my eyes desiccated and my head pulsing, I entered in a sleepwalking state and, approaching the conference table, almost spilled coffee on Kablukov, seated in the chair beside mine. “Ivan Matveyevich? You’re back so soon,” I said.

“Forty-eight hours is quite enough time in Tallin.” He spoke in his usual hoarse, semi-bored voice. “And it sounds like there’s pressing business to be done here. I hear you’ve been keeping my lieutenants on their toes.”

I painted a grin on my tired face and said we were all trying to choose the best contractor we could.

“I hope all this nonsense hasn’t so tied you up that you’ve neglected to spend time with your son,” Kablukov said.

At the mention of Lenny I felt my coffee turn into indigestible sludge in my gut. I could see the desolation on my face reflected in Kablukov’s Ray-Bans, and then in the concerned knit of his brows. “You don’t look well.”

“I could be better,” I said, trying to prepare a proper introduction of my request.

“These tedious meetings can give anyone an ulcer. That’s why I steer clear.”

“The meetings don’t bother me, Ivan Matveyevich. It’s my son. He’s presently sitting in a police station in Kapotnya. There’ve been some reckless complaints against a firm he worked for—an unfortunate mix-up—some financial delinquency Lenny really has no connection to.”

Kablukov removed his sunglasses and rubbed the wide bridge of his nose. “That does sound quite serious.” He frowned in sympathy. “Our judiciary system can be…careless sometimes.”

“You understand. I don’t know if Lenny quite understands what he was mixed up in. I’m looking for an advokat who can clear this up.” My suggestion to find a good lawyer provoked a not unexpected smirk on the old recidivist’s face.

“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 quickly. 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.