“I want to do what you do,” she said again, then added, quite thoughtfully, “if it makes good money.”

Kids today. I was very tired. “Drive carefully,” I said, and fell asleep.

—

On the way to Austria.

On the flight, I had a stack of reading. Russian oligarchs, Vory, the Russian Mafiya, the FSB, successor to the KGB, all reputed to be in orbit around Putin, a soft-core, non-Commie Stalin, autocrat for a country that was never without one.

My name, at this point, was Victor Vasquez.

When I returned to the States in 1990, there was a strong possibility that things might turn out for the worse. I thought it wise, like the playwright Bertolt Brecht, to have an alternate passport. He lived in East Berlin, as the showcase artist of Communism, but kept Austrian papers. Also a Swiss bank account. For my purposes, I thought a different name would suffice. We were staying on West 123rd Street, just off of Broadway. I got friendly with owner of the bodega down the block. Our conversation turned to travel. He had no interest whatsoever in leaving America. Did he have a passport? No need, he declared. He looked a bit like me. Enough that in a small, black-and-white, slightly smudged photo we might pass for each other. Who looks that closely anyway? I did the paperwork. He got the passport. He handed it to me. I handed him $1,250, which was a lot at the time.

It was good for ten years. Every nine, I renewed it, the old one serving as proof of identity, slipping in photos of myself. This trip seemed the right time to bring it out. If, afterward, the Vory or the FSB or someone came looking, let them search for Victor Vasquez, a name so common that Wikipedia will take you to a singer, a comedian, at least two professional soccer players, a rapper, to the DEA agent who took down El Chapo, to characters in the TV series The Walking Dead, and to the superhero movie Shazam, but not to my guy who retired many years ago to Vieques. To prevent cognitive dissonance when I needed to present ID at a point of purchase and to avoid leaving financial footprints with my real name, I had Elizabeth get Victor his own company credit card.

She had given me a packet of information on Russian divorces and told me it was must-read material.

Elena Rybolovleva won four billion dollars. From Dmitry Rybolovlev. It was the biggest divorce award in history in the whole world. Although they were Russian, the suit had been in Switzerland. Then another Swiss court knocked it down to a mere $400 million. The message was that you can’t trust the courts when it comes to divorce. It was ultimately settled in private for an undisclosed amount. The process took seven years. A painfully long time if you were investing in the litigation.