Lenny and Sasha were not expected to score where other matchmakers had failed. Their assignment was not to usher the factory’s managers into a shotgun marriage with foreign investors, but merely to crunch some numbers and report whether the plant was worth taking on the buyer’s side. Such a job would require an afternoon and a half, which meant that the remaining time could be spent at the local banya, partying with some cheap Plusinsk girls. (Lenny had already worked this out with their guide, Kostya, who had offered to arrange both for the zakuski and the girls.) But Sasha Zaparotnik had other plans. He had spoken with one of the turbine engineers and learned of a “nearby” geothermal plant some five hundred miles away.
The small thermal field had been abandoned early in the previous decade by the Soviet government, after it had drilled boreholes and set up grid connections and before the nation had run out of money and dropped the project altogether. It now belonged to an oil-and-gas conglomerate which was making so much from its petroleum sales that it had let the plant languish without adding any new investments to it. The conglomerate could be easily convinced to sell the facility, Sasha reasoned. And this was where Lenny lost him. Zaparotnik could be forgiven for thinking that five hundred miles was a short distance by Russian standards, but the kid had to be either a fool or a nationalist to want to ride in the stale heat of the Trans-Siberian just to poke his head down a thermal hole. Sure, it had to hurt to see his motherland’s once-robust industries ground to dust, painful to watch legions of uncles and grandpas with advanced degrees made redundant. But thermal power? Seriously? When the country was literally bleeding oil? No, thanks.
That, more or less, was what Lenny told Sasha when he left him at the Plusinsk train station and took a flight alone back to Moscow. He didn’t speak to Zaparotnik much until they presented their findings together to the company partners. And that was when Sasha made his surprise case for the little geothermal plant. Counterintuitive as it seemed to try to find a buyer for a thermal plant in an oil-rich country that subsidized its citizens’ gas bills, if WCP took another look, it would notice that the field was in a part of Russia where there was an unmet demand for energy, and where the electricity prices were among the highest, since much of the fuel had to be transported from a long distance away. The plant had been overlooked because everyone believed it was too expensive to complete it in the harsh climate. But there was a simple solution: the plant could be designed in modular pieces, which would be manufactured in warmer western Siberia, then airlifted and assembled right on the spot. The most difficult part—the drilling—had already been done by the Soviets. The plant could even start producing electricity immediately and finance the drilling of new boreholes with the money. If a buyer was willing to make, say, a sixteen-million-dollar investment, the project could start financing itself practically overnight. With only a dozen permanent employees, Sasha reported, its operational costs were actually quite low. Most of the other work could be done with cheap seasonal labor.
Sitting through Sasha Zaparotnik’s presentation with virtually nothing to add, Lenny had felt his mouth go dry with cottony sourness. The fetus-face had thought of everything. He’d even found a company in Japan that might be a willing investor. He’d choreographed it all without giving Lenny so much as a heads-up while the two of them had assembled their PowerPoints the night before.
—
BUT THAT HAD BEEN seven years ago, and much had changed since. Lenny had gone on to have a few successes of his own. He had some talent for drumming up business on the road, and he was a guy the clients could depend on to organize some fun. Part of him had been surprised when he’d gotten the offer from Abacus. It might have been a peace offering on Zaparotnik’s part, and there was also the fact that the other two partners, both close friends of Lenny’s, were numbers guys in need of a salesman. By this time, Sasha was going by “Ah-lix” and had transformed into one of those de-Russified Russians who sported Anglicized names and certificates from the London School of Economics. Lenny knew that to give voice to his disdain for the “Ah-lix”es was only to make himself vulnerable to an equal and opposite disdain Alex had for him. Zaparotnik always seemed to be looking straight through Lenny’s best attempts at business chumminess down to his neurotic immigrant core, as if it were a tragedy to belong to that confused breed of expats whose families had escaped the Soviet Union only to have their children return, salmonlike, to dip their heads into the fecal pool of a newly democratic Russia.
—
UNDER A SKY TURNING from champagne to magenta, Lenny slouched onward in the direction of the front gates, the tacky, sweet odor of burnt grill fat leaving in its wake an odd nostalgia. It made him recall his two years of college fraternity life at Rutgers—the lawn cookouts watched enviously by the unaffiliated freshmen and sophomores. He hadn’t stayed in touch with his “brothers” or particularly missed them. What he missed was the fact of affiliation itself, its code of loyalty. It was the promise he had seemed to rediscover in Moscow. In their own way, he and his expat friends had formed a kind of fraternity. The familiar haunts—Bourbon Street, Molly’s, Mishka Pub—the all-night benders, the instant friendships over shots, the inexhaustible supply of willing girls, all of it had the same collegiate flavor of life moving fast and yet somehow placed on hold. And, with a bit of maturity and a little money in his pocket, he had at last been able to enjoy it. He had always assumed that he and his American friends in Moscow shared this code of loyalty. When had everything changed? When had guys like Austin started taking Sasha’s side? Or was it possible—and this terrified him most of all—that he had been wrong about it from the beginning? That he’d been alone on the lawn all along?
At the front gates, Lenny found Noah bumming a cigarette off some strangers, even though, Lenny was sure, he had a pack of his own somewhere on his body. “Where the hell have you been?” Noah said, gesturing threateningly with the smoke. “You told me five minutes.”
“I’m sorry. Are the girls here?”
“They left!”
“I’m out of the WCP deal.”
“We’re both out of luck, then. Damn it, boy, I hate throwing back my catch.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry. Make it up to me with some food. My stomach’s turning from this cafeteria slop.”
—
IT WAS NOAH’S IDEA to take them to Night Flight to lift Lenny’s spirits, though a day of stuffing himself on oily hot dogs and soggy corn had not left Lenny in a gustatory mood for rosemary reindeer or elk carpaccio in truffle sauce. Nor was he in the proper state of mind to fend off the coercive friendliness of a roomful of model-level chicks throwing him kittenish glances. For the past twenty minutes, one auburn-headed seductress in the corner had been giving him sad little twists of the smile that only you and she can understand. A year ago this might have worked its magic, but these days all Lenny ever felt around a hooker were vague guilty stirrings and an overwhelming desire to save her. That so many impossibly proportioned beauties should have to ply their trade in a restaurant catering to saggy-breasted middle-aged foreign fatsos also attested, in his mind, to a deep flaw in the world’s balance of justice.
“Cheer up,” said Noah, sawing a knife into his elk flank.