“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.