“Trust me, I’m not looking forward to it. I’ve just spent the past four hours avoiding a guy who’s got a manhole cover tattooed on his shaved head, like maybe he wants someone to open it and be impressed by the elaborate sewer system inside.”
“You need a lawyer,” I said, a bit too frantically. “You can’t talk to some apparatchik prosecutor without a lawyer.” But Lenny was two steps ahead of me. “I’ve already told Katya to call Austin. He’s getting me a lawyer in the morning.”
“You trust those guys? Katya says they’re the reason you’re in this mess.”
“Who else am I supposed to call?” Lenny almost shouted, awakening our eunuch guard.
“I have to call your mother,” I said, checking my watch. “It’s not even past one at home; there’s still time to call around the firms and find you someone good, an American who focuses on this sort of thing.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“This is serious stuff, Lenny.”
“Don’t call her. Call around yourself if you must, but don’t get Mom involved or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
I said nothing.
His eyes surveyed me with grinning suspicion. “I can see what you’re thinking—that I got myself into this fucking mess.”
“I think no such thing.”
“You do. Like maybe I didn’t do it intentionally, but by trying to take some shortcut. Isn’t that what you tell Mom—that I’m a ‘corner cutter’?” His voice swelled with something almost like satisfaction at forcing me into an acknowledgment of this exquisitely miserable view of him.
But he was wrong about me in one respect: I did believe him when he said he’d landed here through no misconduct of his own. What I faulted him for—though I could hardly admit this to Lenny—was the same thing I faulted Mama for: neither of them seemed to have the foggiest idea of how to protect themselves in this country.
“We’ll come up with something,” I said, though I had no idea what this might be. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I told him. “Please, don’t open your mouth until then.”
Our hooligan-faced young warden was at the gate again, telling us visiting time was over.
Lenny nodded distantly, without commitment, at what I’d just said.
“Please,” I pleaded a final time before I was led out.
—
I SPENT MOST OF THE NIGHT calling various law firms in New York and Washington, writing down names of attorneys who weren’t able to take a phone appointment with me until the following day, abandoning myself to this pointless task even as I knew that the “law” had nothing to do with the predicament Lenny was in. What we were dealing with was a simple hostage situation, for which a suitable ransom would have to be worked out sooner or later, perhaps with the intervention of a local negotiator. But where to find a negotiator with enough pull? The answer came the next morning at L-Pet’s offices, where, with my eyes desiccated and my head pulsing, I entered in a sleepwalking state and, approaching the conference table, almost spilled coffee on Kablukov, seated in the chair beside mine. “Ivan Matveyevich? You’re back so soon,” I said.
“Forty-eight hours is quite enough time in Tallin.” He spoke in his usual hoarse, semi-bored voice. “And it sounds like there’s pressing business to be done here. I hear you’ve been keeping my lieutenants on their toes.”
I painted a grin on my tired face and said we were all trying to choose the best contractor we could.
“I hope all this nonsense hasn’t so tied you up that you’ve neglected to spend time with your son,” Kablukov said.
At the mention of Lenny I felt my coffee turn into indigestible sludge in my gut. I could see the desolation on my face reflected in Kablukov’s Ray-Bans, and then in the concerned knit of his brows. “You don’t look well.”
“I could be better,” I said, trying to prepare a proper introduction of my request.
“These tedious meetings can give anyone an ulcer. That’s why I steer clear.”
“The meetings don’t bother me, Ivan Matveyevich. It’s my son. He’s presently sitting in a police station in Kapotnya. There’ve been some reckless complaints against a firm he worked for—an unfortunate mix-up—some financial delinquency Lenny really has no connection to.”
Kablukov removed his sunglasses and rubbed the wide bridge of his nose. “That does sound quite serious.” He frowned in sympathy. “Our judiciary system can be…careless sometimes.”
“You understand. I don’t know if Lenny quite understands what he was mixed up in. I’m looking for an advokat who can clear this up.” My suggestion to find a good lawyer provoked a not unexpected smirk on the old recidivist’s face.
“A good advokat is worth his weight in gold, certainly. But if one can manage with more informal means of persuasion…”
“I’m not opposed to that,” I hinted.
“I find it’s wise to give one’s adversaries a more dignified exit….”
“I feel awkward even bringing this up,” I said disingenuously.
“Nonsense. We have quite reliable counsel here at L-Pet, of course. We can place a few phone calls to the Ministry of the Interior. Where did you say they were keeping your son?”
I told him the number of the facility, quickly adding, “But it’s not company business.”
He took my demurral with a knowing smile.
Our meeting was starting, and I watched nervously through the glass doors as the Boot excused himself to make the phone calls on my behalf. No one besides me seemed to notice his extended absence. My already abraded nerves, in the meantime, were so jittery that I struggled to follow Steve McGinnis’s presentation of the work being done on our Varandey terminal. His descriptions of the construction were exhaustingly informative, and to keep them filed in my head seemed a task more Sisyphean than trying to convince myself that Kablukov was intervening on Lenny’s behalf out of some fundamental human kindness or charity. No, in my heart I knew some recompense would be in order. And at this particular moment I did not care; I thought only of Lenny in his cell. Had he been fed? Could he use a toilet? Or were they, as in the old days, making him do his business in a metal pan in the corner?
My grim reveries must have lasted a full hour, or until my phone began buzzing wildly in my jacket. To my spontaneous relief, it was Lenny. I took the call in the hallway, where Kablukov was still nowhere to be found. “I’ve been released,” he informed me with only a slight inflection of pleasure.
“I’ll come pick you up,” I said.
“Don’t worry about that—just come to the apartment.”