“No, I like it.” I fiddle with the stem. I’ve realized it was stupid to come here right off the airplane, so tired and disoriented, not just from the marathon flight but from Rome itself. I lived here less than a year—why did it take such an outsized hold of my imagination? “I saw your fall collection. Marvelous. That tweed dress with the—”

“Bambina,” he says sadly, “you did not come all the way to Roma to talk to old man about his clothes, did you?”

“No.”

“Then tell me what you want. What this besotted old lover can do for you to make amends for his sins.”

“I need your help.”

“So I am guessing. What do you need? Some money? Some work for new model?”

“Nothing so simple, I’m afraid. It’s my sister, Iris. I think she’s in terrible trouble.”

He frowns. “Your sister? Little brown mouse with luscious tits?”

“The same.”

“What kind of trouble? She needs husband? My son Giovanni—”

“A husband? God, no. The husband’s the trouble.” I set the empty wineglass on the floor and lean toward him, bracing my folded arms on my knees. “I need your help to go to Moscow and rescue her.”

LET’S RETURN, FOR JUST a moment, to those sins Orlovsky mentioned.

As I said, I have some moral advantage over Orlovsky, which I never intended to use. Moral advantage has its own priceless value, after all, a hefty solid weight in the column of your assets, and if you cash it in, you don’t possess this credit any longer. You’re no longer wealthy in the only currency that human beings really care about.

On the other hand, isn’t it merciful to allow others a chance to pay their debts?

When I first met Orlovsky, he made no secret of his hatred for the Bolsheviks. Obviously Russia needed to reform, he said, needed to modernize its archaic ways and make way for the lower classes to escape the terrible poverty that was the legacy of serfdom. But the Bolsheviks were no more than brutes, he went on, whose vision of world Communist revolution was a grotesque and indeed opportunistic twisting of an idealistic political movement to achieve both vengeance on their ideological opponents and power—always power—for themselves. He was absolute on this point, that bolshevism was corruption, was a psychological pathology. I remember how he used to pace naked around the studio—pale and compact and somewhat paunchy—still ravishingly masculine inside his field of bristling energy. He waved his arms and told me stories about neighbor informing on neighbor, about a petty party official he knew who delivered an impassioned speech at dinner about Communist principles—From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs, that kind of thing—when everyone at the table knew that he sent his wife to obtain goods at the special shops available only to party officials in favor with Comrade Lenin.