The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  * * *

  As soon as Julian Bennet met Anatoli Vozkresensky she recognised him as an outlaw. She used the archaic word to describe him several times, and when I asked what she meant, she said that he was like her, a risk-taker.

  As so often with momentous meetings, it had very nearly not happened. She had been living in Battersea, an area she did not like, imposed on her by the man who had helped her with the purchase of her flat. He had chosen it because he knew no one who lived there. She was happy with the flat, if with little else in her life, and had furnished it with minimalist elegance, so that it lacked everything that made for comfort.

  He had disappeared some time earlier and she now had a job, as a model, which she hated more than anything else and only ever took on when money was especially tight. She sometimes used to work for friends, or friends of friends, in art galleries, PR offices or desktop publishing. She was welcomed because she was fiendishly efficient and supremely presentable. They begged her to stay, but she never would, because she became bored and, she said, liked the freedom to arrange her own time. She kept saying to herself, ‘Why am I living like this?’ She knew she was supposed to have a different sort of life. Yet she so nearly missed the moment. She arrived home about seven one evening, after a day spent being photographed in underwear of a warming rather than glamorous kind, to find a voice on the answering machine.

  ‘Are you free? I mean, hi, hi, Jules, long time and all that. Look, are you free this evening? I’m having this little dinner and we wondered if you could come to make up the numbers. I’ve got this Russian guy coming who’s suddenly announced he’s bringing his partners and really, you know, if you’re outnumbered two to one by Russians, it makes a heavy evening. At least, I imagine it does, I’ve never experienced it before myself. I don’t even know whether they speak English, the partners I mean, and I remembered you knew Russian, so…’

  Francesca could never say goodbye. On the answerphone she could be expected to consume the tape. Julian lowered herself into the reclining chair, whose elegant shape was the only object in the bay window, while Francesca’s voice revolved with the spools. Finally, it said, ‘Eight thirty to nine tonight, you know the house, number 15. See you, bye.’

  She thought, oh, hell, why not?

  They were all there that evening, Anatoli, the Uzbek, the Whiz-kid, but she paid little attention to anyone except Anatoli and later had difficulty in recalling the other faces round the oddly assorted table. Barnaby, Francesca’s boyfriend, from one of the oldest banks in the City, had invited the Russians, although Julian was puzzled why he should entertain three characters so uncongenial to him. Francesca herself, Julian had known for years. She had salvaged her little house in South Kensington as the spoils of an acrimonious divorce and spent her life giving and going to parties. That she was stupid did not prevent her from being popular. She was always surrounded by laughter, some of it directed at her, which she either did not notice, or did not permit herself to mind. She was very thin and dressed as if she were twenty years younger than her real age. Her house, too, had something juvenile about it, crammed with little objects, most of them furry or lacy, that she had acquired and set down at random. She was always saying, ‘Jules, you must sort me out, design me, you know. Then we could appear in House and Garden or Interiors. It would really give you a boost.’

  In this dolls’ house the Russians gave the impression of wearing an environment that was too small for them. It was not just their physical build: Anatoli was tall, the Uzbek bulky, the Whizkid lanky. All three of them emanated a force that suggested that they felt constrained by the diminutive country they were visiting. Julian saw them as powerful animals temporarily enclosed in a miniature zoo. At present they were moving around carefully, anxious to please, but if the desire took them, they would charge the frail barriers that hemmed them in, trample them down and escape. And it was a similar quality that she identified in Anatoli that she knew she shared with him. They both needed the edge of risk to animate them, to make life worth living. And neither of them was held back from an action that seemed necessary by fear of what people thought. The recognition was mutual and instantaneous. She knew as they shook hands that he had seen her, as she had seen him.

  He was a tall man, strongly built, with a fair skin, dark hair and very pale grey eyes. Only later, at much closer range, did she notice the dichotomy between the upper and lower parts of his face. The forehead, brows, eye sockets and nose were bony, sharply modelled, cerebral; the cheeks, jaw and lips under a moustache were fleshy and sensual. He sounded like an American and could have passed for one. The Uzbek, in contrast, was an old-fashioned Soviet. He was square, and the engaging smile that occasionally split his leathery face sparkled with gold teeth. He was much older than his partners, in his sixties, and still wore the standard grey suit of the Communist days. The Whiz-kid, too, was unmistakably Russian.

  At dinner, Julian found herself sitting next to him. Her initial reaction was based on his appearance and produced a misjudgement that took her some time to correct. He was the youngest of the partners; she assumed him to be the junior in every sense. His name, he told her, was Igor and the abrupt sound with the stress on the first syllable, was as crude as he seemed to be. He spoke an odd, self-taught English which he filled out with demotic expressions, so she was not obliged to use the Russian that she had learned at A level.

  He was wearing a grey suit, too large for him, lending him an appearance of fragility and incompetence. When she learned that he was the numbers man of the partnership, with a passion for computers, she understood that he was a Russian version of a nerd. She had long ago perfected a technique for dealing with bores which was to talk about a topic that interested her. So she chose music and gave an account of a concert by a Russian baritone. She was describing the moving sounds that issued from this gross figure, knock-kneed and splay-footed, when Igor said, reproachfully, ‘He’s supposed to be one of our greatest singers. You didn’t know him?’

  ‘No, I’d never heard of him before. But you’re quite right. He was very good.’

  ‘No one here knows anything about us.’

  ‘Well that’s hardly our fault. You can’t be said to have been very welcoming over the last seventy years.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But it was difficult for us. Ten years ago it was a dream to go to Europe, America, California, like going to the moon. Now, look, here I am.’

  ‘Ten years ago? You must have still been at school.’

  ‘No, I had already finished university. I’m older than I look, the same age as you, I should think. People have always thought I was too young.’ He turned to look at her. ‘You look about twenty-five, twenty-six, but I think you’re thirty-two, thirty-three, the same as me.’

  Julian was, for once, short of a reply.

  Igor carried on, ‘I was teaching in the university at Irkutsk, but I looked younger than my students. I had to show them I knew more than they did.’

  “Where’s Irkutsk?’

  ‘It’s in Siberia. I’m a Siberian. We’re different from other Russians.’ He nodded towards the others. Julian was glad of the opportunity to hear something about Anatoli.

  ‘In what way are you different from him?’

  ‘From Anatoli?’ He laughed. ‘In every way. He’s a Muscovite that tells you everything.’

  ‘But now you’re partners.’

  ‘Yeah, we’re partners now. He needs me. I need him.’

  ‘Whose need is greatest?’ As they talked Julian covertly watched Anatoli in conversation with Francesca.

  ‘Just now we, all three, hold one another together.’

  ‘What are you doing? I don’t really know what Barnaby does, let alone you three.’

  ‘We have made a bank and we’ve just arranged for representation here with Barnaby’s business. It’s great for us. His is a very old organisation, very prestigious.’ He was not interested in the pile of wild rice and breast of guinea fowl in a sauce, which had been placed in
front of him. He moved the food around with his fork and then said, ‘Is it allowed to smoke, do you think?’

  Julian smiled at him said cruelly, ‘No, I wouldn’t try it. Francesca hates people to smoke at the table.’

  ‘Shit, I thought so.’ He sighed and drained his wine glass, which Julian refilled for him. ‘And you, what do you do?’

  She was used to this question. If you were a married woman no one expected you to do anything and, even if you had a high-powered career, you were probably not asked about it. But an unmarried woman had to ‘do’ something. She said, as she always did, ‘I decorate houses.’ She had not done anything in that line for at least a year, but the answer remained the same.

  Igor plodded on with his research. ‘You come from London?’

  ‘I’ve lived in London for the last fifteen years, but originally I came from the north.’

  ‘You’re a provincial, too.’

  She noted that way he was at pains to mark himself out: he was the clever boy without advantages, but with a chip. She, too, felt that she had been born an outsider, but her plan was not to emphasise the gap, but to leap over it and join the other side. She should have been one of the privileged. She was going to be. The conversation petered out and she turned to Barnaby on her other side.

  She had never much liked Francesca’s taste in men and Barnaby was one of her worst choices. His bland surface betrayed interest in nothing. She had tried on several occasions, by introducing more and more outrageous subjects, to elicit enthusiasm, distaste, shock, without any result.

  ‘What does he like?’ she had once asked Francesca, plaintively.

  ‘Sex, money,’ she had replied. “What else is there?’

  ‘He can’t expect to talk about sex and money to everybody all the time. He ought to make an effort on one or two other subjects, like where he went skiing and what was the last film he saw.’

  This time money seemed the best bet. She asked him about the Russians’ bank.

  ‘It’s called the Stary Bank, which makes it sound glitzy in English, but in Russian it means old, as if it has got millions stashed away from the imperial past, respectable, rich, romantic. I don’t know whether it was accident or cunning. Usually Russians are no good at PR. They tend to think that just mouthing the party line is enough to persuade the masses.’ His voice dropped. ‘But you can’t tell with these three. They’re absolutely minting it in Russia today. Don’t ask me how they do it. And in financial services, for people like this,’ he nodded to Igor and the Uzbek, who were talking in Russian across the table, ‘the sky’s the limit; it’s really starry. It’s like, well, it’s like the early days of the industrial revolution here or America, the railway boom, or something like that. It’s all new, there’s no framework, so they can do as they like.’

  He was happy, Julian thought, and would talk about making money for as long as she let him.

  ‘It’s a cash economy, which is about to leap into the age of electronic money. The first banks in there, are, well, they’re printing it. And all this cash, hard currency, I don’t mean roubles, is swilling about looking for a home. And new business, eager for capital. It’s the wild west. We couldn’t get involved ourselves, directly, I mean. It’s unsafe, of course, and we’re respectable people, but it does no harm to dip a finger in, at second hand, as it were.’ He was eating at the same time as he spoke, masticating his food, as if he were absorbing dollars into his bloodstream.

  ‘And who are they, your Russian colleagues?’

  ‘God knows. It’s amazing to me how they have sprung straight out of the Communist system. You wonder what was going on there all those years. I mean, they don’t look like bankers, I agree, only Anatoli and he is the smoothest Russian I’ve ever seen. But it’s not what they look like that matters.’

  Julian hid her amazement. He had always appeared to be a man for whom appearance was all, for whom an incorrect style of tie, belt or shoe would be conclusive evidence of unacceptability.

  ‘They’re living proof that the market rules, OK. Anatoli is an absolutely up-to-date economist, knows all the western theories, understands everything. The old boy, well he’s a real capitalist. It’s like meeting the first Rockefeller. And as for the boy wonder. He’s a Russian version of a Californian silicon chip.’ He was becoming incoherent in his astonishment.

  ‘You’ve fallen for Russia in a big way,’ she commented, drily.

  ‘Wonderful place, the new frontier. They’ve invited us to Moscow. I’ve already been, but I might take Chessy along for a weekend.’

  When they left the table, they crammed themselves into Francesca’s tiny drawing room which was shaped like an old- fashioned railway compartment. Julian sat on the minuscule sofa beside the Uzbek. Neither of them spoke. He offered her a cigarette, which she refused with a shake of her head. He was unbelievably ugly. It was hard to imagine how anyone could allow himself to become so unprepossessing, for when he was younger he must have been at least less obese, she thought. The pliability of his fleshy face had settled into thick creases around his eyes and mouth. Tufts of hair sprouted from his ears and nostrils. His eyebrows, still black in contrast to his thickly matted head, jutted over narrow Tartar eyes. He sat beside her, smoking, impervious to Francesca’s distaste, as if he and she were the audience at a play.

  Julian had an acute sensitivity to power. She realised this was someone who had to make no effort to please, because everyone tried to please him. It was habitual, expected. It did not date from yesterday and the foundation of the Bank. He had been used to deference for years and years. She remembered what Barnaby had been saying. Where had they come from? What had he been doing for so long under the old system that he regarded everything as his due? Stubbornly, she refused to give him what he demanded, to talk, to charm, to flatter. She watched Anatoli with a blank gaze, which could have suggested that her thoughts were elsewhere.

  She was surprised when the Uzbek said in Russian, ‘He is married, you know. He has a wife and son in Moscow.’

  She could have pretended not to understand the language. Instead, she chose not to understand what he said, looking at him directly and saying, haltingly in Russian, ‘You have a wife and son in Moscow?’

  ‘No. My wife is dead. My son is in Tashkent. I said he has a wife and son in Moscow.’ She was about to continue with her pretence of misunderstanding him, when he added, ‘You may need to know.’ She recognised his desire to inform was not well meant, and took his hostility to be directed against herself. Only later did she realise it had been a spoiling tactic, aimed at Anatoli. She made no acknowledgement.

  At the end of the evening she still had not spoken to Anatoli since they were introduced and had concluded that she would have to contact Barnaby or his secretary for a phone number. But when she left, later than the rest after congratulating Francesca on the success of her recipe for guinea fowl, she found him standing in the street finishing his cigar. He strolled towards her and they fell into step. ‘You have a car?’

  She held up her key ring on the end of her finger.

  ‘I was going to walk back, but perhaps you can drive me. I want to show you where I live. I’ve just bought an apartment and I think I need you.’

  18

  Julian had always been, more or less, a kept woman. She had had no interest in a career.

  ‘What’s the point?’ she said. ‘Women kill themselves to work like men. They still don’t get to the top and they lose everything else they ever had in the process. Who wants to live like that?’

  When I commented that there was something very old-fashioned about being kept, she said it was no more old-fashioned than being a wife, and there were still plenty of those around. If I had ever given the matter any consideration, I would have thought that the mistress was an extinct species. Feminism, divorce, work and the pill had made sex easier and cheaper for men. No need to take on financial responsibility when there are attractive women, unmarried, no longer married, or still married, with career
s and incomes, willing to share pleasure for nothing. Wifehood and prostitution were shrinking habitats and the landscape between had widened enormously.

  ‘What kind of men keep women nowadays?’ I asked, thinking old, fat, ugly men.

  ‘All kinds of men,’ she replied. ‘Men like you.’

  I rejected the comparison with indignation, for I was not keeping her. She had moved in with me of her own accord. I had not even invited her. I made no financial contribution to her upkeep. Her attitude to money was, in my view, seriously odd. She insisted on paying for herself. She always carried huge sums in cash and paid for taxis and film tickets before I could get out my wallet. At the same time she had a running joke about the approach of bankruptcy, and if she lost a five-pound note, or could not account for fifty quid there was a major drama.

  ‘Ruin, ruin,’ she would say as she signed a cheque. ‘I’ll have to find some more clients.’

  Her first year with Anatoli was an explosion, golden stars raining from the skies. She was Danae to his Jove. He was a dazzling comet, arriving every two weeks from Moscow, working eighteen hours a day in London, making dashes to New York or Paris or Geneva. I imagined her watching this fireworks display with her customary inscrutability, impressed in spite of herself. He was, like a comet, a natural force. His charm did not lie in subtlety or wit, but in power, of personality, of emotion and of action. Part of his power was the money that seemed to flow from his fingertips.

  When they met, he had come to London to take over the flat he had just bought. It was here that he installed her, with instructions and money to furnish it. Julian, who was more sentimental about places than people, always loved that first apartment, even though it was to be nothing more than a beginning, a place to stay, while the duplex opposite my mother’s flat was constructed. When she had first entered it, the night of Francesca’s dinner, it had been almost empty, uncurtained, uncarpeted, occupied only by a mattress and a few suitcases. They had walked around the echoing space, their footsteps resounding from the naked walls. Anatoli had opened the stiff metal casements to let in the hum of city noise and the chill night air and they had looked out over the brilliant darkness of the London night.