Green Tango (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781462021024)

A long time ago, Vlad was married to his school sweetheart, Irene. They were in love and used to live like other people. But once, in a course of charity, young KGB officers were sent to assist villagers in harvesting potatoes. Among them was twenty-six-year-old Second Lieutenant Yakubovsky. On one autumn day, when a torrential rain poured down and there was no need to work, he remained in the house where he was assigned to stay. To kill the time, Vlad asked the owner's daughter, a rather young, lazy, fat girl, to start a steam sauna. While the sauna heated up, she poured him some homemade moonshine. Vladislav drank the moonshine by wine glass, first one, then another, while having a snack of pickled cucumbers and crude eggs. The fat girl drank with him also. What happened next is not known, but when the owner of the house returned home, he found his seventeen-year-old daughter and the tenant in the sauna together. Everything that happened next was simple. The teenager, Natalie Ponamarev, submitted a written complaint to the Federal Service of External Intelligence. In the complaint, she claimed the Second Lieutenant Yakubovsky deprived her of her virginity. And notwithstanding the fact that Yakubovsky was married and had a five-year-old son, Igor, whom Vlad loved very much, he was forced by his superiors to divorce his wife and marry Natalie Ponamarev. If he didn't do so, he would have to say good-bye to KGB and go for work as a police patrolman.

Fifteen years had passed since then. The fat girl had turned into a short-legged, clumsy creature, but for Yakubovsky, who had become a lieutenant colonel already, the price of working for the police still would not be worth the joy of getting rid of her.