by Peter Corris
"Things are changing in Russia," Jerry said. "Surely . . ."
"I gather they haven't changed that much," Montague said.
Lou Faraday gulped some wine and frowned. "I don't get it. Is . . . Mikhail holding out on us in some way? Won't he agree to sell?"
"Oh, no, nothing like that." Montague held the waiter off with a motion of his hand. 'You don't think we'd be celebrating like this if there were that big a problem, do you? By the way, they do a wonderful apple crumble here. You all must . . ."
Jerry eyed Cromwell suspiciously. "Get on with it, Monty. What's the snag?"
"I want everything to be nice," Montague said. "Everybody happy, that's always been my motto."
"In a pig's ass," Rachel muttered. Faraday jabbed her in the ribs.
"There's a problem with Mikhail," Montague said. Faraday snorted. "You figure he wants to get out."
Montague looked pained. "I imagine so, but I have no definite information. All I know is that he wants anonymity, whereas La Vita . . ."
"Shit," Rachel said, "what does he want?"
"He wants some publicity for his book," Montague said. "Some propaganda for his cause and his release. We've been useful there. I can show you the draft press statements."
"You'd better," Rachel said.
Montague, looking forward to his apple crumble and brandy, ignored her. "Dr Clarke has made no requests but, as he would know, a certain palm will have to be greased in due time. There were problems about his travel documents."
Kobi nodded.
"What about you, Georgia?" Lou Faraday said. "What's your angle?"
Georgia scarcely heard him. She was still thinking of making love with Kobi a few hours earlier. He'd admitted his hang-up about white women to her and proceeded to show her how potent he could be with one. She'd tried to remember how long it had been since she'd had two orgasms in a single session of lovemaking. She couldn't remember, but it was a hell of a long time. She had scarcely tasted the food and hadn't drunk much of the wine. "No angle," she said. "Everything's sweet."
Montague leaned towards her. "I'm sorry. Do you mean the wine or. . . ?"
Georgia laughed. "No, Monty, the wine's okay. We've got better in Australia, but that's not what I was talking about."
"She's sweet," Kobi said, in authentic educated Australian. "It means there are no problems."
"I'm relieved and glad," Montague said. "But it leaves the problem of Mikhail."
Lou Faraday looked at Rachel, who shrugged. The movement dropped the neck of her dress down close to the tops of her nipples but Montague didn't notice. He was intent on the reaction of Faraday, who appeared to be thinking.
Georgia felt the warmth of Kobi's leg against her own. She put her hand on his thigh and stroked towards his knee, although she wanted to move her hand in the other direction. She'd kissed the tattooed stars beside his eyes as he'd held her white breasts in his brown hands. Mikhail is Kobi's cousin, she thought. I should be more interested in this.
"I don't see a problem," Lou Faraday said. He winked at Georgia and Jerry. "Are we writers or what? Do we have imagination or do we have imagination?"
Jerry blinked. "I don't quite see . . ."
"We invent something, dummy."
Jerry paled and bright spots appeared in her cheeks. Lou grinned, threw up his hands suddenly and went into a broad Brooklyn accent. "Sorry, I'm sorry. It's justa way a' talking, ya know? I don' wanna offend nobody."
"Quit it, Lou," Rachel said.
"Okay. Here's what we can do." Lou drained his wineglass and looked at Montague. "We invent a story for the press, a story to cover Mikhail. Not hard. Just change it all to Chinese, say. Translate the name. Fix the details. Who's to know? Chinese instead of Russian. Throws the Russians off the track, and if the Chinese want to set about finding their Gulliver, let em. How many people've they got now?"
Kobi's eyes were dark slits. "Over a billion," he said.
Lou smiled. "My point exactly. What d'you think, Monty?"
"Brilliant," Montague said. "You've got a brilliant mind, Mr Faraday, and you've set mine completely at rest. Let's move on to dessert, shall we?"
Lou Faraday was paying his own and Rachel's expenses. Their hotel at King's Cross had small, hot rooms, a noisy elevator and carpet that seemed to have retained smells from before World War I. The bed sagged in the middle so they put the mattress on the floor and upended the frame. Rachel used the legs to hang clothes on.
She looked up from the mattress at the cracked ceiling. A silk slip fell from the bed leg onto the pillow. She threw it at the window. "This place is like the goddamn Chelsea," she said.
Lou groaned. He had proved that good wine and brandy could give you as much of a hangover as bad stuff. "You were never in the Chelsea," he said. "You're from Queens."
"I looked at it," Rachel moved her head close to his and whispered. "You could write a whole book with the roach blood from a single room."
"Jesus, Rachel. You don't have to prove how Manhattan you are at two in the a.m."
"You always gotta prove it. Tough gotta be renewed. So if we're not goin' to sleep on account of you tying on a big one, and we're not goin' to have sex for the same reason, let's talk about the man."
Lou felt the beginning of indigestion and wondered if he had a Quick-Eze in his bag. "Monty?"
"Who else? You trust him, baby?"
"No, and I don't trust his son more."
"That's a relief. I thought you mighta bought all this British shit. So what you planning to do about it?"
Lou rolled onto his side. "What can I do? The paperwork for the movie and book rights is solid. I'll do fine out of that. The British lawyers won't find anything wrong there."
"I mean the sale, dummy."
"I'll look at the auction deal, the commissions and so on, but I haven't got any direct interest there."
"You got an interest in seein' that it sells for big bucks, haven't you?"
"Sure."
"Well, where do you think that kinda money is?"
"Oh, I get it," Lou said. "You mean I should make sure Monty's put the word out to the right people—the Texans and such?"
Rachel's Afro bobbed loosely. "I wouldn't exactly call them the right kind of people. But you got it—the rich honkies, baby."
That's amazing," Kobi said. "Really amazing. You mean she killed him?"
"Had him killed. I think so. That's how I understand it now, although I didn't take it in properly at the time."
Kobi and Georgia were lying close together in the single bed in her room. They'd made love after getting home from Monty's dinner, slept for several hours despite the lack of space, come awake together and made love again. Now they were relaxed and peaceful with light seeping in under the window blind. As they were sketching in their lives as new lovers do, Georgia had told Kobi something about her mother and grandmother. She felt him go rigid beside her and wondered whether she'd said the wrong thing.
"What, darling? What's wrong? It's an awfully long time ago. Women were chattels, I . . ."
Kobi stroked her dark, unruly hair. "It's all right. Nothing's wrong. It's just the familiarity of it all."
Georgia struggled up on the pillows. Kobi's long body seemed to stretch beyond the end of the bed. There was grey in his hair, about the same amount as in her own, and she noticed now something she hadn't seen before—a peculiar thickness to his wrists, as if they had an extra bone in them. Her father's wrist was the same in a photograph she'd looked at often and lost many years before. Second cousins, she thought. I wonder whether it matters. She touched his head and felt him relax. "Keep talking," she said. "I'm going to make a cup of tea."
She got out of bed and pulled on a long T-shirt. She belched slightly as she tugged the shirt down. "Sorry. I don't really like veal all that much, d' you? I don't think it agrees with me."
"Was it veal? I'm ignorant about food."
"It's overrated," Georgia said. She got the electric jug and the tea making things from a cupboard and m
oved to the handbasin. "I must tell you about my malnutrition phase. I don't think I ever completely recovered."
"I'm glad," Kobi said. "Probably accounts for the thin covering over those delicious bones."
Georgia filled the jug, put teabags in two cups and opened the foil tops of the little milk containers. "What did you mean when you said it was familiar—what my grandmother did?"
Kobi stirred in the bed uneasily. Naturally guarded and professionally reticent, he was surprised to find that he wanted to pour everything out, tell Georgia the smallest details of his life. Even the things he was ashamed of, like his conflicts with Mora. "My mother killed my father," he said. "I'm sure of it."
He felt tears well up in his eyes as he spoke. Through them he watched Georgia prepare the tea; she poured the water and lifted and dropped the bags, added the milk. He found the ritual comforting and soothing. Georgia brought the cups back to the bed and they balanced them on their palms, blowing on the liquid to cool it.
"Tell me," she said.
They sat in the bed and drank the tea as another grey London day began. Kobi told Georgia about Sally Chan and his father's life on Rabi Island, and what his sister had told him of their mother's machinations.
"She killed him," Kobi said, "as surely as if she'd knifed him in the back."
Georgia plucked at the hem of her T-shirt. "The Gulliver men don't have a lot of luck with women, do they?"
"Carl Gulliver did, in the end," Kobi said, "and Edward too, although they had their problems."
"It seems you Gullivers can't expect an easy passage."
"You're one too, don't forget." Kobi put his hand on the back of Georgia's neck and caressed the fine bones. "What about you? How's your life been?"
"I've done all right. This is the happiest I've felt since puberty, if it's of any interest to you."
"It is." Kobi moved his head forward and kissed her. "I'll have to go to Sydney to start buying up Hong Enterprises stock, white-anting it, or whatever they call it."
"I'll be there," Georgia said.
"Maybe we can help each other. I'm sure there's some skeletons in the Hong cupboard."
"Well, your mind-reading faculty could come in handy."
Kobi stared at her. "What?"
"I've sometimes felt that you could read my mind."
"That's just extreme compatibility, or maybe my Melanesian genes. There were some men bilong poison back there."
"What's that?"
"Sorcerers. How do you feel about that?"
Georgia reached for his cup and put it on the bedside table next to hers. She kissed him hard. "It looks like we've got each other. Now we need the money."
52
Tashkent, Uzbek, November 1986
Mikhail Bystryi knew that what he had been doing in recent days was very dangerous, but he didn't care. Since he had received the news of his inheritance—in the form of cryptic, almost coded letters from his mother—he had felt his ties to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics drop away like a snake's discarded skin. Another letter, passed nervously to him by an English horticultural student, had given him more information and fired him still more. It was not the money.
"It's not the money," he told Sofya Vertova. "It's you and God and Jerusalem."
Sofya touched Mikhail's arm. They were in the park near the centre of the city. It was cold; snow covered the park and gathered in grey clumps in the branches of the trees. Still, the park was the best place to meet and talk in private. It was Sunday and there were a lot of people around. All walking, all talking. Sofya wanted to embrace Mikhail, to tell him that she understood and supported him, but public demonstrations of affection drew attention and comment.
"You are saying you want to leave," she said.
"I want us to leave. You, me and . . ."
"Your mother?"
"Yes. Of course, she will not go." Mikhail snorted so that a long plume of steam jetted from his closely wrapped face. He and Sofya wore heavy coats, hats and scarves. "She was born in 1920-something, but she says she remembers the cossacks and the Tsars. She wants us to go. She understands about love."
Sofya Vertova loved Mikhail deeply. She wanted him and his children. She wanted to raise a Jewish family in an atmosphere of certainty—precisely what she had not had—and she was prepared to do a great many things to achieve this goal. "She is very old, Mikhail. Surely they would not . . ."
"They might," Mikhail said. "They might do anything. There would be a great deal of publicity. You know what it is like in the West. Nothing excites them more than money. If the story of the money got out after we had left, they might punish her terribly."
Sofya nodded. She had visited Vitalia Bystryi in her small flat and knew how important each creature comfort was to an old woman, how badly the loss of one metre of space, one domestic appliance, could affect her. Sofya clasped Mikhail's arm and they walked on a few steps before she spoke. She was afraid of the idea forming in her mind. The right words from Mikhail now might head it off. "What are you thinking of doing, my darling?"
"I have been talking to some people," Mikhail whispered. He bent his head close to hers and she jerked away, forcing him to move into a less suspicious stance. "I'm sorry, Sophie. You're right. We must be cautious. I've tried to find out about the ways people use to get across the border. There are a hundred ways."
A hundred ways to be killed, Sofya thought. She struggled to keep her voice steady. "Yes? Your mother too?"
"Of course. There are ways to do it. You can buy documents. You can bribe people, if you have the money."
"Have you got the money, Mikhail?"
"No. Of course not. But if I can get some of it, some of the money from the sale of the painting, then I can do these things."
Sofya squeezed his arm encouragingly and they walked on. To her, the park seemed to grow colder around them and the looming buildings that flanked it seemed to draw nearer, to overhang the tram tracks and incline towards the trees above their heads. Sofya Vertova's family had been virtually eliminated by the earthquake that devastated Tashkent in 1966. She was at school in a newly developed area of the city, in a recently constructed building that withstood the upheaval. Her parents and siblings, in the old quarter, were killed. She had been raised by an aunt and uncle who lived on the outskirts of the city. Their values—religion and education—were at once limiting and liberating. Sofya derived certainty and confidence from one strand and ambition, with a certain amount of insight and ruthlessness, from the other.
"How can you make any use of English money?" Sofya bent and picked up a handful of snow. She bunched her gloved fist around it, but not long enough for it to harden. She flung it towards a tree and the snow fluttered and fell uselessly ten feet away. "Foreign money is like that."
"Not if you know the right people," Mikhail said. "I've talked to some men at the bazaar. Don't forget that my father dealt with the gypsies. He sent messages to my mother from the gulag."
God, a romantic, Sofya thought.
"A black market exists," Mikhail said. "For money, documents, train tickets—everything!"
"So I've heard," Sofya said coolly.
"Everything can be arranged."
Sofya pointed in the direction of a food stall; the brazier where the meat was roasted and the coffee was heated and the bread was toasted stood behind a series of low, wheeled and mounted partitions, which could be moved against the direction of the wind. "I want a coffee," she said.
Mikhail changed direction, stamping snow from his boots. He was relieved at Sofya's reaction so far, having expected violent opposition from her. "I know it's dangerous," he said, just before they moved behind the shelter of the partitions.
Sofya nodded and touched his cheek. She was fighting down an urge to scream at him. She wanted to condemn him for being criminally stupid in the eyes of God and man. Mikhail took out his money pouch and selected some notes. Sofya imagined the pouch stuffed with American dollars and the KGB man, tipped off by the bazaa
r tout, holding Mikhail by the throat as he examined the money.
Mikhail frowned at her pained expression. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. Get the coffee, darling. I'll have a cigarette."
"You shouldn't smoke. It'll kill you."
Fool, she thought. Your mutterings in rug shops are more likely to kill me. She knew they could get out easily and safely as tourists if they were patient and made plans. But to propose taking along an old mother was a certain giveaway. Sofya smoked and struggled with her conflicting emotions—love, anger, hope and the dangerous idea that refused to go away.
Mikhail bought coffee and hot, spicy meatballs wrapped in crusty dough. They crouched below the level of the partition on the stools the vendor provided.
"Perhaps we should wait," Sofya said.
Mikhail sipped his coffee. "For what?"
Sofya bit back the words she wanted to say and said instead, "For the picture to be sold."
"Certainly," Mikhail said. "That must happen soon."
"Have you destroyed the communications you've had?"
"Of course, darling. I'm not a fool."
Sofya bit into the meat and tasted the fat it had been rolled in and the spices. She wondered if she would miss these things in Jerusalem or New York. She thought not.
The coffee was hot but bitter. Mikhail swallowed some and grimaced. "This is terrible. Do you want sugar?"
Sofya shook her head.
"You get better coffee in Moscow," Mikhail said. "I'll be going there soon, my love. I'll talk to mother and prepare."
"How will you persuade her?"
"I will tell her that you are pregnant and that we want the child to be born in Israel."
Sofya gulped some of the bitter coffee and made her decision. He thinks this will work with a woman who bore a child at forty to a survivor of the gulag, she thought. Hopeless. She risked frostbite by taking off her glove and caressing the beard on Mikhail's firm jaw. The hairs were stiffened by the cold. "We can make that true in a way, can't we, darling?"
Mikhail kissed her. "Yes," he said. "We can." He was relieved. He had expected a barrage of opposition. Sofya's lips were soft and almost warm. He kissed her hard.
