The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  ‘Not lazy.’ Julian laughed. “Well, that’s the sort of compliment I love to receive. And attractive? Sexy?’

  ‘That depends on your taste. Attractive? Yes, why not? She always dressed smartly. Sexy? Not for me. She was the correct wife for a rising official. She was one of the same bunch, from exactly the same sort of background as Anatoli. They have a room in their flat, full of photos of the great ones of the old days: Mikoyan and Brezhnev out hunting at Zavidovo; Ustinov and Andropov at tea parties at the dacha in their shirt sleeves; Yelena Nikolaevna as a baby on Gromyko’s knee. Ah, those were the days. Yes, take it.’

  This was to the waiter who had come to remove their plates, Igor’s barely touched. He allowed Julian to choose creme brulee for him and ordered another bottle of wine.

  ‘It always helps to marry the right person. I once heard a story about Anatoli when young. He almost crashed, but his good sense put him right. He made the correct decision in the end.’

  Julian was often unsure of his tone as he talked about his partners. Did he accept the reasoning that he attributed to Anatoli and the Uzbek? Sometimes his phrasing was ambiguous. She could not judge whether what he said, the way he used the word ‘correct’, was the remnants of Soviet-speak or ironic commentary on it.

  ‘I heard this story from an official in the Finance Ministry who moved to work at the bank. He told me that when Anatoli was just back from Harvard, (bad influences, you see) he got involved with a musician. She was Jewish – bad news – and she had a whole crowd of friends who were not correct. Not in the sense that Dyadya was not correct, you understand. Dyadya subverted the system in order to make it work, everyone knew that. After all, we all need food and houses, caviar and dachas, don’t we? No, this girl, she was called Sveta, Sveta and her friends were much more dangerous. They listened to western music; that was bad enough. They talked about change; that was worse. Some of them applied to go to Israel, that was the end, as good as standing outside the Kremlin with a placard saying Capitalism Rules or Lenin was Wrong.’

  Julian had finished what she wanted of the tarte tatin. She swapped her half-empty plate for Igor’s full one. He watched without comment. ‘It was only a moment’s madness for him. He soon came to his senses and married Yelena Nikolaevna.’

  ‘And the Jewish girl?’

  ‘Her madness probably lasted longer. Russian psychiatry takes time to correct these things.’

  ‘And what was she like?’

  ‘How should I know? I never saw her. Thin, dark, ugly, sexy as sin apparently.’

  He reached out with the hand that was not holding the wine glass and cigarette and took her wrist. The spoon with its smooth, creamy-brown mound cleanly broken from the main mass was arrested in mid-air. ‘I would’ve given Anatoli good advice, if I’d known him then. Just as I give him good advice now. But I didn’t know him then. I was still in… I was in Siberia. But I could have told him: keep away from thin women. They have too much self-control. Choose a nice rounded woman who will do everything for your pleasure, suck your cock, pile your blinis with caviar and smetana.’

  Julian removed her arm from his grasp, still smiling. ‘And what about thin men?’

  ‘Hungry men make good businessmen.’

  ‘And good partners?’

  ‘That depends on how nice the fat men are to them.’

  The creme brulee at last reached her mouth and she swept it off the spoon with her upper lip, savoured it with a sucking movement and swallowed, before saying, ‘Well, don’t go around giving that kind of advice to Anatoli now.’

  ‘A threat?’

  ‘Not at all. What can I do to you? A plea for solidarity.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  20

  In the beginning the Uzbek came to London every month. Anatoli used to take her to see him, to amuse and placate him. She was a useful means by which he could flatter his partner with attention and at the same time avoid contact with him.

  Anatoli would say, ‘Use your charm on him, Julian. He needs charming.’

  ‘I can’t. I haven’t any.’

  She was beautiful and that was more than enough for the Uzbek, Radesh Muzafarov, the grandfather, Dyadya. He liked the company of a beautiful woman, although he felt conversation was too much for the female intellect to bear, so social intercourse was confined to jokes and laughter, which was as much as Julian’s Russian could take.

  Whereas Anatoli had set up a second home in London and Igor thriftily chose cheap hotels, Dyadya always stayed at the Savoy. He had a fiercely sweet tooth and Anatoli often took Julian along for tea there. The Uzbek would heave himself out of his chair at their approach and, simultaneously, two men seated behind him would rise and stare attentively beyond them. When he sat down again, they sat too. Julian remarked on their mimicry.

  ‘Who are those men with the fake Rolexes who are always there with Dyadya?’ she said to Anatoli in the taxi on the way home.

  ‘Bodyguards, of course. And the Rolexes aren’t fake.’

  ‘Why does he have them here? What harm can come to him in London?’

  ‘None at all. It’s just what he’s used to. It’s like staying in the Savoy: it’s status. You can’t be a big man in Russia without a heavy to guard you.’

  At tea, the Uzbek would consume a prodigious number of cakes and Julian was popular because, unlike Anatoli, she never refused to eat with him. This was one of Dyadya’s subjects of laboured joviality at his partner’s expense.

  ‘This is not like Tolya,’ he said to Julian. ‘Normally, he is a good companion. We’ve had some great times together, eh Tolya? In the banya, eating, drinking, telling stories. What’s come over you? Worried about your weight, like all these westerners?’ The last word was spoken with infinite contempt. Eventually, the cakes consumed, the tea drunk, Anatoli and Julian would leave, without a word of business having been spoken. When they rose, the two dark-suited men behind them stood, watching them depart.

  Julian’s meeting with my father, just before Christmas, had supplied her with a comparison between my great-grandfather, the freebooting, nineteenth-century Scottish chemist and Dyadya, the Russian capitalist. She found it as amusing to link the greedy dynamism of my forebear with the gross energy of the Uzbek.

  After the first year of her life with Anatoli, when she had met both Dyadya and Igor in London quite frequently, the Uzbek ceased to appear. She observed to Anatoli that they hadn’t had tea at the Savoy for some time and he had said nothing more than, ‘Dyadya’ll be here again next month and you’ll have all the jokes and cakes you can take, I promise you.’ But a month passed and still no Uzbek.

  At one of their dinners together Igor said, in passing, ‘… and now Dyadya can’t get out, either Anatoli or I will come more often.’

  Later she asked Anatoli why the Uzbek couldn’t get away. For once he was willing to talk. He was unpacking from a trip to Geneva, dropping shirts onto the floor.

  ‘He hasn’t been able to get a visa recently.’

  ‘An exit visa?’

  ‘No, no, there’s no problem there. No, a visa for Britain, the US, France.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows. No one’ll ever tell you. Russians have always had a bad name in the west. Somebody puts a black mark against you and that’s it’

  ‘So he’s shut in Russia?’

  ‘Yuli.’ He was taking off his trousers now, flinging them over the back of a chair. Then, as if the removal of layers of clothing was a stimulus to confidences, he said, ‘The problem is that he thinks I’ve done it.’

  ‘You? How could you?’

  ‘Dyadya’s an anti-bureaucrat. His whole life had been spent circumventing a bureaucratic system. He hates it as much in the west as at home. He thinks that somehow, as an ex-functionary, I can tip off an opposite number, someone I used to know in the State Department or the Quai or the Foreign Office and get his entry visa cancelled.’

  He had stripped down to his shorts now, but
instead of going into the bathroom, as he had obviously intended, he sat down and put his briefcase on his knee, turning over the edges of the papers and printouts within.

  ‘And could you?’

  ‘Of course not, Julian, what do you think I am? Dyadya is unreasonable. He doesn’t understand how the world works in the west. He thinks everything is done by knowing people and by having influence, like it used to be at home; well, as it still is.’

  ‘Isn’t it here as well?’

  He didn’t reply to her question, frowning irritably. ‘I want him to be able to travel as much as he does himself. I have more work now. More risk. And I have to cope with his congenital suspiciousness. He thinks I am cheating him, manipulating the London end for my own benefit. He won’t trust the documentation I take him. He’s convinced that I’ve cut him out from a whole track, which I now have under my control in the west.’ He closed the briefcase and put it down beside him, wiping his hands across his face. ‘What he means is that’s what he would do if he had half a chance, so he thinks I must be doing it to him.’

  ‘But why won’t they let him in?’ Julian persisted, lying on the bed with her arms thrown above her head. ‘Perhaps it’s temporary, or a random error.’

  ‘No. Once, perhaps. But he’s applied three times now. Someone must have whispered the word “KGB” to one of the security services and they alerted all the others. We’ll have to hope it’s that.’

  ‘Hope? Was he KGB? Is there something worse?’

  ‘The Americans aren’t worried about the KGB anymore. It’s drugs that make them paranoid. Anyway, Dyadya wasn’t KGB. He cornered a few of their enterprises in central Asia when the Union went down the can, privatised them you could say, but he wasn’t straight KGB. That’s not how it was. He’s a fixer. These capitalist countries ought to give him a medal. There he was, a businessman operating under a command economy. He’s living proof that the market can provide when central planning can’t.’

  ‘Dyadya isn’t dangerous?’ She sat up, taking no notice of Anatoli’s own line of thought. ‘Is he?’

  ‘Not to me. I can keep him pacified when I’m back in Moscow. It’s a question of soothing him. But he’s as suspicious as… suspicious as Stalin.’

  He wouldn’t say more, but he had revealed enough to frighten Julian. ‘Take care. Do take care, seriously. Do you have a bodyguard in Moscow?’

  ‘Yes, I’m well looked after. Don’t worry about me.’

  ‘Is he armed? Dyadya comes to England with bodyguards. You have nobody.’

  ‘I trust to your excellent British police. I haven’t got enemies like he has, so I don’t need bodyguards here. Don’t fuss, Julian. Anyway, that’s what I come to London for, to get away from all that.’

  Anatoli’s attempts to calm her fears, by ignoring them, were counteracted by Igor, who was amused to heighten them. He called her early one evening the following week to say that he was in London for two nights. They went to the Lebanese restaurant that she liked and Julian tried to question him. Normally she avoided any reference to the Bank. It was an area which she did not know about and which she did not want to be involved in. Only now, when it was a matter of Anatoli’s safety, did she raise the subject.

  ‘Of course there’s risk,’ he said, scornfully. ‘That’s what you like, isn’t it? What do you expect? Don’t you ever ask yourself what we do, Anatoli and Dyadya and I? Don’t you ever ask yourself, how do they make so much money? How do they make so much money so quick?’ He was clicking his lighter, then threw it down on the table in exasperation when it refused to work. ‘It doesn’t come free, you know.’

  ‘Eat something now, don’t smoke. I shall buy you a good lighter, Igor. A really expensive one, that doesn’t run out after a week.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I’m giving up tomorrow. And I’m not a man for expensive lighters.’

  It was true. Igor had not changed at all in the time she had known him. He still wore his light grey suits and crepe-soled shoes. She could not think of any item of conspicuous or even inconspicuous consumption that he had bought for himself.

  ‘We’re not just bankers. We have fingers in many pies.’

  There was tension between them. Igor was irritated that she affected to know nothing, that she was above the money-making. He wanted to claim her complicity. She was taking spoonfuls of hors d’oeuvres from the half dozen or so dishes in front of them.

  ‘And what sort of pies?’ She put some food on his plate; he reluctantly picked up his fork.

  ‘Metals trading, for example, construction materials. That grew out of Dyadya’s old business, but now, instead of flogging it to the nomenklatura for their villas, he exports it. He buys the aluminium from the alu plants in the Ukraine and he puts it into wagons and trains and bribes it through all the new borders to Riga and ships it out of the Baltic. He can do it faster now than it was ever done in the time of the centralised economy.’

  She found his account of the Uzbek’s trading reassuring, innocent. He was a valiant exporter, propping up the Russian economy.

  ‘And what does Anatoli do?’ she asked, pouring him some more wine.

  ‘Anatoli’s our front man with the west; that’s obvious. Joint ventures, new capital, funding from the EU, the Know-How Fund, the World Bank. They trust him. He seems respectable, one of them. Appearance is the thing. You’ve only got to look the part and they’ll believe you. Dress a Russian up as a banker and he’s a banker. Give him an American accent and a year at Harvard and he’s an American banker. Hang a label round his neck and they’ll read it. They never look beyond the packaging.’

  ‘And what about you? What does your label say?’

  ‘Mine says computers. I told you that when we met, didn’t I? You know how I got alongside Anatoli?’ He was laughing to himself. ‘I showed him how I could hack into an account in a western bank, sitting in Moscow. Don’t look so shocked. I’m not doing that now. We’re here for the long term. I keep the books and make sure we can explain away those nasty little suspicions that lurk in western minds: fraud, extortion, the Mafia.’

  The word exploded in her consciousness like a land mine planted long ago whose detonator had finally been tripped.

  ‘What’s the Mafia?’ she asked baldly.

  ‘What’s the Mafia? Mafia is an American word, an Italian word, not a Russian one. In Russian we say, vory v zakone.’

  ‘Vory, thieves…’

  ‘Thieves at law. What do you call it, a self-contradicting phrase, something that contrasts with itself?’

  ‘A paradox… A tautology… An oxymoron.’ She left a long pause between each suggestion. Her brain seemed to need it Igor did not respond for a long time. He had drunk most of the two bottles on the table, but the wine might have been water for all the effect it produced.

  ‘Whatever. A contradiction. But what do you expect from our country, we are all contradiction.’

  ‘But what are thieves at law?’

  ‘They are thieves with their own law. The criminal world is a separate state, a secret society, and the thieves at law are the bosses, the ones who command.’

  ‘Is Anatoli?’

  ‘Anatoli? Fucking hell, Julian, don’t you understand anything? He’s official, straight. Straight CP member, straight KGB, straight anything you like.’

  ‘KGB?’

  He did not answer her question, leaving the acronym to fester.

  ‘Dyadya’s the other side, the reverse law. Do you know where they come from the vory v zakone? From the camps. It was like a mirror society ruled by the criminals. If you were in for murder, you were on top. Murder was better than economic crime or sabotage, which was better than political crime, which you’d call freedom of speech. At the bottom of the heap were the people who in your system wouldn’t be in prison at all. I don’t know what they got Dyadya for. Multiple murder probably. This was a long time ago, in the ’sixties. He came out as boss of the camp. He sat in judgement in the prisoners’ court, punishing the narks and any
one who co-operated with the authorities.’ He laughed. ‘Very ironic, because he later made his fortune by going into partnership with the authorities. Whatever they wanted, he provided and they paid. And they turned the system over to him: transport, factories, farms, all put under Dyadya’s control. But he was still a thief at law, one of the biggest. He began in Tashkent, king of Uzbekistan. Then he moved to Moscow, for the bigger market. If you can get your hands on the levers of power in a centralised system like Russia, you have everything. You’re more powerful than the Tsar ever was. That’s what the Mafia was, is, in Russia. It’s not just part of the system; it is the system. In Brezhnev’s day Dyadya was like an emperor. But things change. He had to draw back a bit under Andropov, went back to Tashkent for a while. But then came Gorbachev, and Dyadya met Anatoli. And the rest, as they say, is history. Now they’re a bank. Capitalism is wonderful. I love it.’

  ‘How do you know all this? Are you one of them, the vory v zakone?’ Igor’s eyes were glazed, with a drunken brilliance fixed on her face. It was impossible to tell if he had heard or understood. She kicked him gently under the table with the tip of her shoe. ‘Igor, how do you know?’

  ‘I know, I know, I promise you. I was a camp child.’

  21

  For almost a year she managed to avoid what she did not want to know, refusing to understand the stories that Igor forced on her. Listening to her account, interpreting her words, I had no doubt that Igor was in love with her and that his attempts to shock her with information were a kind of sexual attention-seeking. I wondered whether Julian’s extraordinary face, its secretive blankness, incited him to take greater and greater risks of frankness. Julian did not betray to him how far he affected her; nonetheless, his efforts to teach her had their impact, however much she tried to suppress her knowledge.

  One night Igor made her understand. She only ever mentioned it in fleeting references, which by their obliqueness and frequency suggested the importance of this turning point.

  In London unexpectedly, he called her to say he had a present from Anatoli; would she like to come and collect it. She went round to his hotel just off Queensway and climbed the four flights of stairs to his room.