Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

The American unlocked it now and was already scrolling down the long list of world oilfield assays. No two fields in the world were exactly alike and, since it cost less to refine oil that was light and sweet, and more for crude that was heavy and sour, each field’s “signature” was kept on file to assist buyers and sellers with current pricing on the New York spot market. If the instruments sitting in the suspect oil transmitted a match among the signatures in either density or sulfur content, it would be highlighted in red on the computer screen.

The domestic fields were listed on top. “There.” Craig saw it first. “West Texas Sour is 31.7. Shit! This morning it’s at $2.40 off Slope.”

Lev shook his head. “See? The sulfur doesn’t match.”

They walked over to the twin pen-shaped instruments in the beaker of petroleum, just to be sure. Alaska North Slope usually flowed at 0.93% sulfur. This morning it was at 1.35%. Totally sour, beyond even West Texas Sour. Affecting his version of a cowboy’s bowed legs, Lev walked a few steps and drawled, “Well, son, I reckon it ain’t my Texas tea.”

The two men knew the quality of the oil made little real difference to the buyer: what he saved on the purchase price of sour was lost on the added expense of refining it. If the refinery’s feedstock of crude was off in any way, the seller was the big loser.

Glumly, Craig scrolled down the table of foreign fields, looking for a highlighted one. He was almost down to Yemen, the last of the fifty-six producers on the list. “Bingo!” In his own faux–Texas twang, the big man said, “Levitsky my boy, it is your’n. Says right here Russian Urals is 31.7 and 1.35.”

“Urals? Let me see that.” They crowded in together, looking across at that morning’s trades. Russian Urals Crude was going for a $2.61 discount off the North Slope price.

Lev dropped into one of the plastic chairs lining the cinderblock wall. “I don’t get it, man. Since when does Alaskan crude start acting Russian? And how could it come as news to you ? It must have been this sour days ago when your guys piped it in at the other end.”

Craig slumped into the chair next to him. “Not a word. I can’t figure it.” If the American knew more than he was saying, there was no sign of it in his face.

The big man asked, “What you want to do?”

Lev sat there, thinking. Finally he said, “Let’s come back tomorrow and test it again. Give you a chance in the meantime to make some calls to your people in Prudhoe, find out what’s going on. If it’s still running sour tomorrow at five, I’ll file my report. Fair?” He held out his hand.

Craig shook it. “More than fair, you Russky creep. To seal the deal, I’ll take you to Denny’s… they got non-rotten eggs. Breakfast’s on me, one-time offer.”

Lev looked at his watch and got up. “No can do. Gotta go home and Skype my sister before she hits the hay.”

“Funny, isn’t it?” Craig was still sitting in the plastic chair, staring at his hydrometer. “They’ll pump that oil out of the tank farm onto the ships, pump it again into some refinery somewhere, and pump it out one more time, light and sweet. The only two people who’ll ever know how bad that stuff smelled will be you and me.”

Lev pulled out of the lot first. He looked back and waved at Craig getting into his own truck, the last time he saw the American alive.

Back at her flat, Lara stood in front of her open closet, peeled off her blouse and dropped it in the wicker hamper. Then she reached into the closet for her terry wrapper. She’d make herself a cup of tea, sit in a cozy robe and wait for Lev’s call.

The teacher found herself casting a critical eye at her closet. She owned only three kinds of outfits: stiff, slightly uncomfortable clothes to lecture in; loose-fitting pants and sweaters for working in the archives, shopping for groceries, and everything else; and a single cocktail dress, no longer in style, for those once-in-a-blue-moon occasions when Major Viktor Maltsev would come home with something left of his paycheck and insist he and the Mrs. “go out on the town.” Oh, and her wedding dress, wrapped in yellowed tissue paper, in a box on the top shelf of the closet. The New Russian Woman—the one who’d kept her own name to use professionally and now had the use of it full-time—whose closet held only Old Russian Clothes.

Meanwhile, she had a husband working his way through every shopgirl and waitress in the former Soviet Union; a few friends and colleagues, like Vera, busy with their own lives; and a brother on the other side of the world. Lara could feel one of her black moods coming on. She had some pills in the bathroom; should she take one?

And with the moods came the waterworks. Sure enough, an unbidden tear was starting to form in the duct of her left eye. That was another thing—who’s born only able to cry with one eye?

She kept the bedroom door closed in case her roommate, Katrina, came home early from the bars with a guy and found her in her robe. Technically, this was Viktor’s flat. Now that he’d moved out, Katrina was the tenant, helping with the rent by taking the smaller of the two bedrooms that shared the single bath. In reality, between the parade of men who came and went at all hours and the jumble of Katrina’s makeup and cosmetics that wound up all over the bathroom, Lara was a virtual prisoner in her own room.

No, she wouldn’t take the pill. She’d dry her eyes and freshen her lipstick a little. She had to look good when Lev called.

Lara was waiting in front of her computer, the clock on her Mac reading 2200 hours exactly. She had the bedroom dimmer turned all the way up so he could see her on his laptop half a world away to the east, beyond the Urals, Siberia, the Sea of Japan, and the northern Pacific. Ah, the power of Skype.

Looking down at her old-fashioned wristwatch, she studied the second hand as it took its time navigating the face. Luckily for them, Alaska was exactly twelve time zones from Moscow, so the twins simply needed to negotiate A.M. and P.M. to synchronize their calls. Should she be worried? The only time her brother, younger by eight minutes, had been late was when he was born.

The call came in at 22:02. “Hello, Larashka! Wonderful to see you, sis. You’re looking fine, as usual.”

“Am I?” She glanced down from his grinning image on her screen to the small picture-in-picture cameo of herself in the lower left corner and back again. It was scary how alike they looked: the same almost jet-black hair; the same big, dark eyes set deep in olive-skinned faces with Asian-influenced features (their mother’s doing). Lev still looked like Omar Sharif, the way he was in Doctor Zhivago.

“Tell me, Levishka, how’s your week starting off?”

“Strange.” A worried look crossed that strong face. “When Craig and I ran the test this morning, the crude was crazy… sulfur off the charts. I don’t know what to make of it. Neither does he.”

“Could your instruments be off kilter?”

“Two separate meters? No way.”

She thought for a moment. “How many North Slope fields feed into the pipeline?”

“I thought of that too, Professor .” There were laugh lines around his mouth for a moment, the roughneck teasing the academic. “With over twenty fields and a thousand separate wellheads, any gas pocket they hit wouldn’t make this kind of difference eight hundred miles downstream.”

Five seconds of silence traveled back and forth along the 7,000-kilometer connection, much more if you added in the satellites they were bouncing off of. Lev switched the subject. “School start yet?”