“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 you 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.