He had left Katya at home in the hope that he might more stealthily scope out what was happening. Now he was rethinking this wisdom, given Katya’s propensity to chat up the people he was suddenly finding himself too nervous to approach. Only a half-hour earlier he had spotted Abacus’s chief partner, Alex Zaparotnik, a man three years his junior, fraternizing with some pink-shirts who were giving off a very Big Four vibe. Alex, clearly seeing him, had not so much as raised his chin in acknowledgment.
Now, crossing the expanse of Kuskovo’s beer-soaked lawn, Lenny kept his eyes open for potential allies. Pulsing electronica from several sets of speakers was assaulting his ears. Through these spasmodic house beats and cycling loops of female moaning, he barely managed to make out the reassuringly shrill vocalizations of his friend Noah, holding court among some Alpha Capital folks under one of the red Coke umbrellas. “You would be wasting your money,” Noah was testifying in his foghorn voice, “because you can get all the same wonderful things in Pattaya that you can get in Dubai: opium, exotic firearms, little girls, little boys, white sharks. The Thai, you see, are a very open people, like…playful cats.” The recipients of Noah’s wisdom were two giggling young women, whose combined waist sizes did not add up to Noah’s own generous girth. Noah’s hand was pruriently clutching at the hip of one, a brunette with a minuscule ass outlined nicely by a pair of jeans with lace-up calves. “You walk into any club in Pattaya, they got dancers squeezing ping-pong balls out of their minges.” He squatted to demonstrate while his consorts shrieked with laughter. “I’m absolutely serious. I know a guy who had his eye poked out that way. Ask my friend here, he’ll tell you all about it,” he said, gripping Lenny’s arm.
“I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” Lenny assured the girls, both of whom, he quickly decided, were too young for his tastes. The blond one, though cute, still had her adolescent acne. He had no idea why these nymphets were so reliably drawn to Noah, a blob of fat who looked like Garfield the Cat. Lenny’s only explanation was that, in Noah’s years in Moscow, he’d made boatloads of cash managing the American investments of Mikhail Fridman, a job, Lenny believed, his friend had secured because of his uncanny physical resemblance to the oligarch himself. Perhaps being even an ugly oligarch’s American doppelg?nger somehow accounted for Noah’s unnatural confidence with women.
“The girls and I have been comparing our travels. Yulia and Marina have just returned from Sochi, isn’t that right?”
“The Saint-Tropez of Russia,” Lenny remarked.
“And now they’re on the way to…”
“Cairo!” announced Yulia.
“Better steer clear of the Arabs,” Noah advised. “You know what the sight of white virgin flesh does to those Alis.”
Instead of looking horrified, Yulia and Marina giggled once more and agreed that Egypt would indeed be much better if it wasn’t so full of Arabs.
“Why don’t you like Arabs?” said Lenny.
Yulia shrugged. “I danced next to an Arab in club. They have…a smell.” The casual racism of Russian women never failed to impress him. He’d heard the stink argument leveled at Africans, Arabs, everyone from the Caucasus, and even at apocrinely challenged Asian men. Prejudice on the Eurasian continent traveled eastward like the jet stream.
“Marina doesn’t mind how they smell. She wants to be a stewardess for Emirates Airline.”
“Emirates is not Arab!” Marina protested cheerfully. “It’s Dubai!”
“Can I talk to you?” Lenny said.
“The girls have invited us to a party.”
“I need to speak to you. Excuse us, please.” It took some force to pull Noah aside. “I think something’s up with the WCP deal. I just saw Zaparotnik. He acted…I don’t know…”
“How many times have I told you to forget that guy? Let’s go to a party. It’s the Fourth of July, bay-bay.”
“It’s the sixth of July. I need to find Austin. Shit. Where is this party?”
“I don’t know. On Kuznetsky Most, at the apartment of some BP faggot their friend Dasha lives with.”
“No-hua!” Marina called across the grass. “Are you coming! Dasha is waiting at the gates!”
Noah motioned toward the porta-potties. “We’re just gonna hit the unemployment line and meet you there.”
“It was like I was some girl he was ignoring.”
“You’re sweating over that mayonnaise eater when you should be asking why you want to be a drone at WCP in the first place. You probably have enough clients by now to go independent.”
“It’s not that simple….” Lenny couldn’t remember what exactly he’d said to encourage this view of himself. Maybe he’d preserved the illusion by letting Noah go on assuming that he, Lenny, always looked out for number one as surely as Noah would have in his place. He scanned the hordes that populated the field. “I gotta find Austin; then we can go.”
“He’s over there at the whack shack.” Noah pointed his chin at a stage by the Procter & Gamble raffle pavilion, which Lenny recognized as the source of the repeating loop of techno. The DJ had evidently abandoned his station long ago, and in his place two Russian dancers in Day-Glo bikinis had continued performing for an oblivious, hypnotized crowd of old white men.
“Wait here, will you?”
“That’s not an order, I hope, because my plan right now is to piss and go to a party.”
But Lenny was already picking his way across the minefield of red plastic cups and scattered bottles into the thick crowd around the stage where the bikinied dancers were doing go-go moves under strobe lights. Above the human sea facing the stage, Austin’s red baseball cap bobbed like a buoy. “Hey, man!” Austin’s face lit up with a reassuring flicker of genuine happiness. “Didn’t think you were coming.”
“Why not?”
“What?”
“Forget it. What are you doing after this?”
Austin took off his cap and wiped his bald and shaved head. “Maybe heading to Bleachers to watch the Rays screw up their shot at the playoffs.”
Sometimes Lenny wondered why people like Austin even stayed in Moscow. Aside from professing an old-fashioned reverence for “other civilizations,” Austin was drawn neither to the city’s high culture nor to its copious depravity. His favorite activity on any given night was to sit in one of the Canadian pubs and follow the score of a Florida–Florida State game.
“Are you kidding me? It’s not even a live game,” Lenny said.
Austin gazed around. “Is Katya here?”
“No, she stayed home.”
“You two all right?”
“Yeah, we’re fine. You talk to Sasha Zaparotnik today?”
“Um…yeah, I saw Alex.” Austin’s smile seemed to pass from good-natured to impervious at the mention of Zaparotnik’s name.
“So what’s up with him chatting up those guys from WCP all afternoon…?” Lenny hoped he was wrong. He was making a wild guess as to who the pink-shirts were, hoping that Austin would now contradict him.
But Austin did not.
“So have they made an offer, or what?” He tried to sound optimistic.
“Yes,” Austin said wanly. “They’ve made an offer.”
“Okay, then. So—we’re keeping all our old clients, right?”
“Lenny…”
“The condition is they all keep us together in one department, right? Full autonomy…”
“Lenny, please stop talking.”