Lenin's encounter with the West provided the currency for another novel earlier this year (Ilyitch Slept Here). Here it is a letter offering the recipient an apartment in the Kremlin that starts the action. Stephen, a thirty-seven-year-old American newsman in Geneva on assignment, meets Juliette, twenty-one, Belgianborn, but with a grandfather whose Geneva vacation villa was the setting for entertaining Lenin. Hence the letter to grandfather, which Juliette and Stephen make good. Before that, they have made love in Geneva, Paris, Copenhagen, Moscow, rather sweetly, as though the author were cataloguing the good fortune of knowing a woman well. But Stephen has some bad moments, one when his Juliette seems to be a stranger and lost to him forever, and when she has flown from him he succumbs momentarily to the determined Anne, wife of a colleague. All ends well; Juliette and Stephen will take up housekeeping in the Kremlin. Well-intentioned, but the author has overstayed his welcome and his visa has expired before his story is done.