It turned out to be in the east wing of the complex, as I learned from a young man in a trim suit who displayed a wonderful lack of suspicion of my question after I showed him the official badge hanging from my neck, and who in fact walked me all the way down a side hall to another set of elevators that took me where I needed to go. Thus I emerged at last in a glass-and-steel part of the building that seemed to be a separate tower. For a suspended moment I couldn’t place where I had come from or where I was. The view below me was no longer of the grassy median of Sretensky Boulevard but a block entirely torn up by construction, apart from a small yellow-painted church and attached parish house stranded in the midst of this violent modernization. I approached a set of glass doors through which was visible an open area like the VIP lounge in an airport. Oblong leather couches and potted trees were illuminated by invisible light fixtures tucked into recesses in the ceiling. No weighty mahogany or unused fireplaces here. It was as though I had escaped one century and ascended to another—though this lighter, neoteric world was still out of reach on the other side of the glass doors, closed by some strong magnetic grip that could only be released electronically, but not by my pass. I spotted what looked like a reception desk, but there was no one there.
The closed glass doors were an obvious invitation for me to turn myself around and wander back down the footbridge. It was nine-fifteen. The meeting would be starting in a few minutes, and I could still divert myself from this present course. I had no idea how I would get into that closed gallery, how I would manage to find Kozlovsky, or even what I would say to him if I did. But when I opened my eyes, I saw a woman walking to the desk that had previously been empty, a middle-aged brunette with a severe haircut like the writer Ayn Rand’s. There were others coming down the hall behind her, a group of three loudly chatting men, strolling toward the doors behind which I stood. One of them pressed a button on the inside to release the magnetic lock and waited while the other two walked out, holding the door for me, so that I might enter. I stepped in confidently, all at once aware that I was approaching the desk with my toes pointed out, the cowboy walk that afflicted some of our Texas colleagues around the halls of Continental. I felt light-headed with my brazenness.
Ayn Rand gave me an indifferent look when I smiled at her. I continued grinning until, finally, she addressed me in Russian with a cool “Zdravstvuyte” and a “Can I help you?”
I was about to answer with my own zdravstvuyte, to try to get on familiar ground with this creature, when something made me pause. Clearly, this woman had identified me as a fellow countryman, from somewhere below deck, to be addressed with appropriate contempt. I did not like the way things were starting off.
“Yes, hello,” I said, in English, and smiled an even broader smile. I did not believe that my accented English could really have fooled her, or that she had accepted it over the glaring evidence of my Russian mug. But she blinked and looked at me again, uncertainly, as if trying to recalculate a sum, yet with a face composed into a more obliging expression.
They can never think they know who you are, were in fact the words in my head. And hearing them I thought: The only way to get the balance back in my favor was to keep them off theirs.
I told her I was here to see a “Mr….Cuz-luv-sky,” pretending to have some trouble with the name. I lifted up my security pass, on which my own name was simply written as “Julian Brink, Continental Oil,” title omitted, and told her I was the technical director of the Varandey project, which was an amplification of the truth, if not quite a bald lie. She picked up the phone, then pointed a finger at one of the oblong couches, a directive for me to go sit down. I took a few paces back, but didn’t sit.
“Kto-to from Continental,” I heard her say into the phone, and then to me, more loudly in English, “You have appointment?”
“My secretary should have made one….I am flying back to Washington tonight, and I need to…”
Her expression indicated that she didn’t much care when I was flying back, or where. She slid a paper across the desk. “Write your business here. Mr. Kozlovsky will call you.”
The dame did not even give me a pen. No problem. From my shirt pocket I took out my phony Mont Blanc. I waited for her to put down the receiver. “One question,” I said.
She offered up an agitated face, on guard for new surprises.
“Is your family from Norilsk?”
“Why Norilsk?”
“I worked there last year and met a lady who looked just like you. You have such white skin.” I heard my voice, my unsanitized articulation of the English language, my preposterous act, and I continued. “This lady…she told me there are two reasons for such lovely white skin: the White Nights, and, because the Mongols never reached them in Norilsk, that they are the real Russians. And you are, yes?”
It would have taken a truly heroic effort for her to stifle her smile, though she tried. “No. My family is from Novgorod,” she said. “But we also did not have any Mongols, either.”
“Ah!” I went to take my seat on the leather couch.
“Wait here,” she said, and picked up the phone again. When she hung up, she gestured with her finger. “You have ten minutes.”
—
ANTON KOZLOVSKY WAS A tall man in a pale-gray suit with neat hair and pale eyes set widely apart on a face that bore the pitted pockmarks of some childhood affliction. He did not shake my hand when I walked in, and glanced at his watch almost as soon as I sat down.
“What can I do for you?” he said.
I introduced myself, said I was a representative of Continental Oil for the Varandey project—all of this in Russian. I had no pretensions about fooling him. With his wide-set eyes he looked at me, not quite coldly but…factually, and for a moment I wondered if he had learned to stare people down in this way in his childhood, whenever they gazed at his pitted cheeks.
Behind his head was a map of the world with brown pins on every L-Pet field, and blue pins that I thought might indicate future fields to develop.
“In a half-hour, our joint team will be making final selections for our shipping company. There are some last…unanswered questions about one of the candidates for the contract.”
“What questions?”
“Questions of competency and…cost.”
“So voice them with my team. Why are you coming to me with these technical matters?” He fixed me with the same challenging, factual look. I cast about for the right thing to say. I felt there had to be some perfect ordering of words that could be pulled down from somewhere—words contrived for just this use. But they eluded me.
“Respectfully, you’ll be signing off on the deal,” I said. But I could hear these words losing exigency, my voice sounding wheedling. Whatever force of certainty had brought me this far had abandoned me.
“I’ll sign whatever my team decides.” Kozlovsky checked his watch again, quickly but deliberately. I pictured Tom and the others waiting for me in the heavily paneled room four floors below. Maybe they had started the meeting without me. And yet I could not get up and leave now without showing myself to be a stoolie and a coward. I tried to study Kozlovsky’s face, to guess if he was in on Kablukov’s graft deal or not. I had assumed, without quite realizing it, that with one look at him I would be able to answer this question and know what to do. His face gave nothing away.
“I’m sorry to waste your time,” I said. “It’s my mistake for not listening to Ivan Matveyevich. He did say your signature was only a formality.”
“Who said that?”
“Kablukov. He said your signature was a formality and that the decision has already been made…above you.”
I shrugged my shoulder regretfully, my thumb rubbing the phony Mont Blanc in my sweating hand. Kozlovsky did not look happy to hear what I’d just said. He was not a man who took well to being taunted. With those few words I had done the equivalent of pulling down my pants and showing him my behind.
“I don’t know what Kablukov told you, but there are no decisions made above me.”