“We need to know, first and foremost, the names of your friends and colleagues, anybody with whom you have regular contact.” Subotin ran a delicate finger down the crease of his notebook and tore out a clean sheet. “On the right side, please list any foreign-born acquaintances you and your husband have. On the left side, list any colleagues or acquaintances at the Institute of Philology, History, and Literature.” He pushed his fountain pen closer to her.
Rapidly, Florence made a list of everyone she ran into in the course of a day, then wrote a shorter list of those she and Leon knew socially. She had to write quickly because it was important not to think too hard about what she was doing. She took comfort in the idea that the NKVD probably knew with whom she worked and socialized by now anyway. How else had Subotin known when her classes ended? Very well, she’d show them she had nothing to hide. Soon enough they would learn on their own that she had nothing to report, either. In the meantime, she was attesting to her honesty. Still, none of this rationalizing could account for her total absence of shame. And this, she suspected, could only be because some part of her knew why she was doing it. The very sound of the word “America” had gone clean to the tender root of her homesick heart.
Florence slid the paper back toward Subotin and watched him read it. Briefly, she let herself study his face. It was at once handsome and unpleasant. She had the feeling she had seen it before. He slipped the silver pen into his vest pocket and rose from his seat, giving her license to do the same. “You will report here again in exactly three weeks,” he said. “I don’t need to tell you that you will keep these meetings to yourself.”
Outside, early evening had descended. Naked tree limbs twisted in the moist, iodine-colored air. The tram, overcrowded on the way to her meeting with Subotin, was now peopled only by a few pale and listless passengers with bundles at their feet. The bumping trolley jerked her empty stomach as she tried to tell herself that she’d acquitted herself well with Subotin.
Still she could not erase the mental picture of his face, those meticulous features and the narrow build all tugging at some unsettling memory. It wasn’t until her trolley crossed the bridge over the Moscow River and was heading toward Manezh Square, beyond which the fortress of the U.S. Embassy stood, as impenetrable as it had been on the fateful day when she’d tried to get past its gates—not until then did Florence’s mind come into focus on the memory of the man in owl-framed glasses who’d stood on the sidewalk in front of the Hotel National, watching her as she crossed Gorky Street with the egregious confidence of an American.
A tasseled cross swung gently from the cabbie’s mirror as I rode to the detention center where they held my son. Outside, cold summer rain lashed the high-rises that passed us at halting, rush-hour speeds. We were in Kapotnya, in the southeast. Here the building materials were no longer marble and limestone but cinder block and concrete. The naked apartment blocks were anonymous yet familiar; the neighborhood was shorn of all identifying marks save the silos of the local power plant that puffed white sulfur smoke into the rain-darkened sky.
An hour earlier I’d left the cab to wait while I’d run up to Lenny’s apartment. With her damp ponytail and smudged mascara, Katya had looked like a lost adolescent, though part of this impression was due to the expensive-looking orthodontia in her mouth (another improvement I suspected Lenny was bankrolling). I hadn’t been able to get a complete story out of her, other than that the MVD had spontaneously arrived to detain Lenny over some financial impiety that he’d been only circumstantially connected with two years earlier. Katya, for her part, seemed convinced that Lenny was the victim of a fiendish conspiracy orchestrated by his so-called friends (those suki) to take the fall for some nefarious Ponzi-ish maneuver they themselves had managed to dodge. Between the loud percussion of the rain on the roof and Katya’s sobs, I could not make heads or tails of her story.
The air inside the jail reception area smelled fermented, suggesting that the place also doubled as a sobering-up station for the local street sludge. I gave my documents to a militzia guard and was led through a narrow corridor to an empty room painted hepatitic green. The militzia man made me wait for half an hour before he brought Lenny in and ceremoniously uncuffed him.
Lenny’s skin was patched with blotches. He smelled, implausibly, of tobacco. “You’ve been smoking?”
“They’ve stuffed me in with some skinhead they picked up for harassing Tajik girls on the street. He’s always lighting up. I can’t fucking breathe in there.”
“You look like mincemeat,” I said. “How long have you been in here?”
“Four, maybe five hours.” He showed me his naked wrists. “They took my watch and my phone. Have you called Mom already?”
“Not yet. How the hell did you get yourself in here?”
“Oh, you think I did this to myself?”
“Did I say that?”
“But it’s what you’re thinking.”
“Just tell me what’s happened.” I tried to speak at a discreet volume.
“We don’t have to whisper, damn it, since I didn’t do anything.” Lenny tossed a challenging look at the guard standing inside the door, who stayed as stoic as a eunuch. As he recited the accusations against him to me in his sour breath, I was unnerved by his supercilious calm, as if he were rolling his eyes at each one of them. It seemed that two years earlier he’d served as one of the brokers on a business deal between an obscure European growth fund and a nickel plant in the southern Urals. After the growth fund had completed its purchase of the factory, it had issued a series of specious bonds backed by the nickel plant but without, it later emerged, the knowledge of the plant’s board members. By then most of the bonds had been cashed, bankrupting the plant. A criminal investigation was opened. Old news, said Lenny. The growth fund’s managers—Russians with foreign passports—were charged with fraud. Lenny’s firm, being only a second-string agent in the dark about their clients’ criminal intent, was let off without charge. “It was an ordinary buyout,” he said. “All we did was standard analysis. Nobody at Abacus Group had any connection to anything that happened later. Now someone’s decided to dig it up again.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Did someone at your firm get stingy, forget to pay off the right people?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Listening to him, I felt sick with despair. It was the second time today I was at, or near, a prison. The street signs changed in this city, but apparently little else. “Have you been charged with anything?” No sooner had I spoken these words than it struck me how hopelessly stupid I sounded to myself.
“No, just ‘detained.’?”
“What does that mean? How long can they keep you here?”
“A prosecutor is supposed to come in the morning to question me.”
“They’re planning to keep you here overnight?” The thought of Lenny having to spend the night in a grim tubercular cell made me so light-headed with anxiety that I had to shut my eyes.