—
WHEN I ARRIVED A HALF-HOUR LATER, excusing myself from the meeting on a plea of stomach pain, I found Lenny pacing the living room with a cordless phone in hand. His hair looked greasy, and his eyes, no less bloodshot than mine, were battling sleep with the psychotic mania of the unmedicated. “Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about it,” he was saying loudly into the phone. “…Well, you can tell Ah-lex I’m not done with him. He wants to sell me down this river, I’ll pull him into the sewage creek with me—are you listening?” Cradling the phone with his shoulder, Lenny proceeded to the kitchen, where I followed him; he resumed stirring the contents of an enamel pot on the stove. He was still on the phone, telling whatever friend or colleague was on the other end not to blow smoke up his ass, even as he leaned forward with a wooden spoon and took a delicate taste of the pot’s contents. He caught my eye and shook his head at the absurdity of it all. The sly, exasperated look tossed my way made me wonder if he really was as outraged as he’d seemed when I’d first walked in, or if this whole display—the tough, manly talk as he unflappably stirred his alfredo—was performed for my benefit.
“Did the prosecutor ever come?” I asked once he set the phone on the counter.
“Some babka showed up from the prosecutor’s office. Clicking heels and a powerbun, full of righteous talk about pilferers like me fleecing ‘the people.’ I said: Lady, what exactly am I being charged with here?”
“Did she have an answer?”
“She said, ‘We have our ways of dealing with abettors of fraud,’ and told me I better get used to seeing a lot of her. Two hours later I’m sitting in the same room when the guard opens the door and says I’m free to go. Gives me back my phone and my stuff like nuthin’.”
“Did a lawyer show up?”
“No, Austin never sent one over!”
I hesitated. “And no one else came—?”
He cast me a perplexed look. “Who else would come?”
“I don’t know.” Was it possible Kablukov really had cleared it all up with a mere phone call?
“I’ve already told you—they have no case,” he said conclusively. He set the pot of pasta on the table by the window, where I’d settled myself in preparation for the explanation I planned to give him: that I had intervened and that he still wasn’t out of the woods. But in his mania, Lenny seemed unconscious of me again. “Jeez, I stink,” he said, taking a strong whiff of himself, and headed for the shower.
I could hear him humming triumphantly under the pummeling water as I searched his fridge for something with which to fix us a more complete lunch. There was hardly anything in it—some bologna and cheese, some wilting tomatoes, grapes going fuzzy with mold, and plenty of beer. At its emptiness I felt an uptick of hope that maybe Katya had moved out after all. In my eagerness to see Lenny, I’d forgotten to ask where she was.
Lenny’s kitchen windows were abnormally large for a Russian dwelling; his apartment was in one of the new high-rises on Novy Arbat, whose broad sidewalks, nine stories below me, were adorned with signs for nightclubs and casinos, their neon lights shut off during the day. It seemed fitting that Lenny would perch his nest here—an elevator’s distance from the ground zero of fun. I fixed us bologna sandwiches, set the teakettle to boil, and gazed out toward Kudrinskaya Square. Out there, just a few blocks north, still lived our old family friend Ludmila Ostrovsky. I wondered if Lenny ever saw her. She had, after all, once been his mother-in-law. I knew it was unfair of me to persist, so many years later, in connecting Lenny’s troubles with the Ostrovskys, but the pathway was, for better or worse, soldered into my mental circuitry. In 1996, Lenny had taken a break from the crushing dullness of his post-college job as a junior business consultant for Arthur Andersen by venturing on a short vacation to the “new” Moscow. And this was when our problems with him really got off the ground. Ludmila, having lost her husband a year earlier to a heart attack, offered Lenny a spare room in her apartment. The room came with an added bonus: her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Irina, would serve as Lenny’s guide to the city of his childhood.