The refusal
When a thief is caught stealing, Bogdan refuses a twenty-dollar bribe. The same money is redirected into lottery tickets, beginning a chain that makes the two men potential co-owners of a jackpot.
Not Bogdan
After the winning ticket is discovered, another clerk tells the Thief that the employee’s name was not Bogdan and refuses to reveal the actual name. The continuation later presents a “Pseudobogdan” who accepts the imposed designation because that is the name under which the relationship happened.
A name becomes infrastructure
The character is one of the cleanest narrative cases of Naming as Instantiation: the wrong label becomes usable because people act through it.