A saga of love, friendship, life, drugs, and opportunities almost lost on an ex-KGB company man who leads a seemingly decent immigrant’s life of quiet desperation in New York. “The less people know about you, the longer you live” is the motto of Arkady Prikol — the antihero of this quirky, existential thriller — an aging Russian-Jewish émigré living an uneventful life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Uneventful until the day he gets a phone call from a man who calls himself Timur. The man who has been dead for 20 years. Once upon a time Arkady and Timur were best friends and co-workers at a top-secret place called Lab 52, where they designed and tested psychotropic drugs. But soon Arkady and Timur’s camaraderie ran into something greater than all the LSD in their lab. Her name was Lisa. Such triangles don’t end well. Arkady keeps replaying in his mind bittersweet scenes of love, sex, and tenderness, and gradually comes to realize that their torrid romance was not what it seemed. As Lisa broke out of the romantic mold the two friends have tried hard to keep her in, she showed her true colors, and they learned what happens when poetry mixes with political dissent in a Russian girl’s heart. With his old life trying to catch up with him, Arkady goes on a lam, running from one hideout to another — from the Dominican barrio to a Moldavian bordello in Riverdale and finally to a top-security Mafia “sanctuary” in Brooklyn. As he runs, he keeps searching for the clues to his caller’s true identity, forced to dig into his long-dead past where he suddenly discovers a slim possibility of a future.

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