“What you should be asking,” Tom suggested, “is how much we’re going to make.”
“I’m sorry to tell you, my friend, but you’re going to lose money on this thing. It’s been—what—five, six years since every oil company has hurried to Russia. And name me a single venture that’s making a profit. Their tax laws are always shifting. They violate contracts. They renege on debts. It’s easier to get a drunkard off the ground there than a business.” I had been trying to say the same thing to my son for the past four years, but Lenny insisted on taking the “long view.”
“How about you don’t worry about Continental’s money,” Tom said. “We aren’t going bankrupt. Aren’t you curious where we’re drilling? I’ll give you a hint—it’s cold.”
“That’s very good, Tom. Very good.”
“What are you smiling about?”
“The penguins.”
“What penguins?”
“The penguins that the Kremlin will claim you poisoned when they decide to kick you out.”
“There aren’t any penguins where we’re drilling.”
“Putin will fly them in personally.”
Tom leaned back in his chair and wrapped his meaty hands behind his head.
“In five years,” I resumed, “they will claim you have been drilling in an ecologically delicate habitat, announce that you’ve poisoned all their fish, or polar bears, and demand you hand over half your profits or get the hell out. They’ll give you a warning first—it is, after all, a Christian country.”
“If you know so much, maybe you should work for us at Continental.”
“You can’t afford me,” I demurred.
His hands still interlaced behind his head, Tom said, “Name a number. How much are they paying you at Herbert Engineering?”
Were we negotiating? Tom’s question was enough to raise the color in my face. It was like a blunt proposition after a courtship so prolonged that all erotic possibilities had been drained from it years ago.
“I like working for Herbert. They let us bring our dogs to work.”
“You don’t have a dog.”
“People play Frisbee on the lawn at lunch.”
“You can play Frisbee on our lawn.” Tom went on looking at me unblinkingly.
“What do you want me for?” I said. “I’m old.”
“Reagan was sixty-nine when he was elected president.” He didn’t need to remind me. Among the assortment of things Tom and I happened to share was an abiding love of Ronald Reagan. With little Bush in office, there were not too many people to whom I could admit that one of the first actions I’d taken as a freshly minted American (being granted citizenship de jure upon arrival) was to cast my vote for Ronnie.
“What are you doing at Herbert now?” Tom proceeded. He had prepared his pitch. “Retrofitting Coast Guard vessels running thirty years past their prime? Performing life support on icebreakers commissioned in ’65. Is that what you want to be doing when you retire?”
The mention of retirement reliably made my skin break out in a prickle. At fifty-nine, I wasn’t quite done with ambition. Quite the contrary. At fifty-nine, I found that my ambition was inoculated with the strains of past disappointments, a drive to make up in the second half of the game the chances I’d lost in the first.
Tom explained the opportunity: L-Pet was very interested in tapping its Arctic potential. They wanted to launch a joint venture with Continental to build an offshore terminal in the half-frozen Barents Sea, from which crude could be ferried to the warm port of Murmansk.
“The Arctic is frozen eight months of the year, Tom. You’ve always claimed shipping across the Arctic isn’t economically viable.”
“Not yet—but soon.”
“I thought you oil folks didn’t believe in global warming.”
“Nonsense. Our position is merely that ‘climate change’ is a natural rather than a man-made phenomenon. The area of open water in the Arctic is increasing rapidly, and the Barents Sea is gradually thawing. L-Pet has the oil, and we have the technology.”
“What technology?” I said. Murmansk might be a warm port, but it was surrounded by two-foot-thick ice. You still had to get your crude up there, and those passageways were too tight for conventional icebreakers.
“That’s the beautiful part. We’re going to make our own dual-acting shuttle tankers. Three shuttle ships that’ll carry the oil and break the ice. A totally new concept.”
I couldn’t believe it. A year ago, this idea had been mine. Now Tom was selling it back to me. When I pointed this out to him, he said, “You could make it real. You fiddle with other people’s ships all day. No more of this Frankenstein business—it’s time you designed your own.”
“But I can do that from Herbert. You can get me to do it cheaper from Herbert.”
“Yes, but at Herbert you’re also potentially working for Exxon and Chevron, and who knows who else. Maybe we want to take you out of circulation.”
Against appeals to my wallet I’d been able to put up some resistance, but against appeals to my vanity I was defenseless. Fool that I am, I’ve always suffered from the intellectual’s weakness for praise.
He employed all his forceful charm and Reaganesque persuasiveness on me that afternoon. He needn’t have worked so hard. Underneath my sarcasm was the unalterable fact that I would be turning sixty in seven months, and there were not going to be many more offers like this in my future.
Tom told me not to give him an answer right away, to sleep on it. But a formal offer arrived at my house by fax by the time I parked in the driveway. And once I saw that number, how could I sleep?
Had I known Tom’s real motivation for wanting to hire me away, I might have had the guts to ask for double. It wasn’t a master shipbuilder that he was after, but a person with my more accidental qualities. That evening, however, with the offer still warm in my hands, it occurred to me that the lucrative liaison Tom was proposing might present a rare opportunity to make a few late-stage adjustments for my parental neglect. Maybe, I wondered, the only way to get my son out of Russia was to take myself back to her.