But he could not stop. He was afraid at this moment that if he stopped his mouth might swell like a Novocained dental patient’s and he would be unable to speak another word.
“Lenny. WCP isn’t taking anyone except the partners.”
“I’m on track to be partner.”
“You aren’t one right now, is what I’m saying.”
“And why is that? You told me I’d be partner in a year when we started.”
“Lenny, I brought you on. I can’t hold your hand every step of the way. And, anyway, Alex is the one who’s putting this deal together, not me, and you know how things between the two of you have been lately.”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me how they’ve been? He seemed pretty happy the day I brought in Actophage.”
“Everybody appreciates what you’ve done.”
“Oh shit, Austin…”
“Lenny, it’s not my decision.”
“Oh shit, please tell me you took my side in this. This is all so much bullshit, Austin.”
Austin let out a long breath and looked out at something in the distance. “Of course I did, but you know you’ve pushed the guy’s buttons.”
“Like, what did I do!”
“Like calling him Sasha, for one.”
“That’s his fucking name.”
“Whatever. Letting some of the clients think you’re a partner. He didn’t think that was cool.”
“There are four of us. The clients assume we’re all partners.”
An unconvinced look stole over Austin’s face. He was a person who often disagreed but seldom argued.
The truth was, Lenny had thought of himself as a partner. In all but name. And the fact that he hadn’t yet been made one officially was an oversight that he was sure would be rectified in a matter of time. “Okay, okay, don’t go,” Lenny said. “Just…help me understand. What did he say?”
“Why are you doing this to yourself, Len?”
“You owe me at least that.”
Austin wiped his head again with the side of his cap, and then seemed absorbed in studying the sweat stain. “He thinks you don’t always have a sense of the importance of the mission, that sometimes you think like a, like a…”
“Like a what?”
“Like a Russian.”
“He called me a Russian! What the hell does that even mean?”
“The way you’re always talking about ‘the Big Picture,’ and paying for everyone’s drinks, and—”
“What’s wrong with a little generosity?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just all the glad-happy tovarisch stuff you do with everyone, with the clients. It’s typical Manilovism.”
“You’re losing me, Austin.”
“Manilov in Dead Souls. Gogol—you read it.”
Lenny was caught by the twin surprise that Austin had read it and that he assumed that Lenny would be at least equally literate in his own heritage. “Yeah, fifteen years ago,” Lenny lied, “what about it?”
“Manilov—the one who’s always daydreaming about building a bridge over the river where the merchants will set up booths and sell goods to the peasants. But then, when someone interrupts his daydream with a practical request, his brain can’t digest it.”
“I don’t need a fucking book report.”
Austin put his cap back on and adjusted the visor. “Lenny, you’ll find something. I’m sorry.” He appeared to see someone in the distance and lifted his arm in recognition. “I have to go,” he said, manfully gripping Lenny’s shoulder in parting.
Lenny was finding it hard to move his legs. His feet were suddenly very heavy, or else his knees couldn’t be fully trusted not to buckle if he took a step. Not three feet from him, two little girls—five or six years old—were gleefully imitating the libidinous gyrations of the dancers onstage. Lenny heard the sound of his own laughter, a madman’s giggle.
—
BACK IN 2001, WHEN “Alex” was still “Sasha,” a pasty-cheeked graduate of Moscow State University whose stoop and pallor spoke of innumerable hours in front of the gelatinous glow of computer screens, the two had been paired up on a mission to do standard analysis on a turbine factory outside the eastern-Siberian town of Plusinsk. The factory was a dud that had languished in negotiations with three other consulting firms in four years. By the time Lenny had arrived in Russia, the choicest plants had all been cherry-picked by the big investment funds, the least choicy ones snapped up on the cheap and stripped for assets. A venturesome young private equity associate had to be more enterprising to find a true investment gem. The turbine factory was their first scouting assignment following a flimsy six-week training program in which they’d been taught to fill out financial and risk reports. The “business jet” WCP had booked for them turned out to be a Yak-40 with a wheezing engine. Their driver and guide in Plusinsk, Kostya, was a five-foot hustler with a junkie’s frame and an unheated van that would have required a blowtorch to thaw out, but which Kostya managed to navigate with terrifying skill through the run of potholes that was the Plusinsk road system. Watching a Tarkovsky-esque tableau of rotting utility poles, shell-shocked farmers, and orange snow through the window of Kostya’s van, Lenny felt happier than he’d ever been in his life. He thought about all his friends in America with their office jobs and their weed and their HBO. Fuck The Sopranos, he thought. Fuck The X-Files. He was fuckin’ living that shit. A cowboy on the frontiers of private enterprise.
The Plusinsk Turbine Factory turned out to be in far better shape than he or Sasha Zaparotnik had expected. It had once been a premier Soviet manufacturer, producing mainly defense-related turbines and generators. Its fatal flaw was neither its debt (modest compared with the typical Russian factory), nor its outdated equipment, which was still viable, but the fact that its management, coddled for years by the plant’s defense-industry status, was unwilling to sell a majority share to any foreign firm. The factory was like a moderately attractive woman who’d become an old maid because her expectations were overinflated.