by A. D. Miller
“Thank you again for the biscuits and the tea,” Tatiana Vladimirovna said to break the silence. “It is excellent to have a speciality of England.”
“Maybe one day you will see England for yourself,” I said. “Buckingham Palace. The Tower of London.”
“Maybe,” she said.
The notary called out, “Next, come in.”
There were two women sitting behind a pair of desks in a narrow room. There was one window, I remember, looking out through rusty bars onto the white-grey street. It was a beautiful midwinter day, the sky as pure and glaring as the Mediterranean blue you and I saw on that holiday in Italy. The woman at the desk on the right was youngish, a sort of missing link between normal human beings and notaries. The older one, the boss—overweight, glasses, cardigan, hairy mole—was so rude that in another country you might have thought it was one of those hidden camera setups.
She took our passports and started to fill out the form for our power of attorney. She shrieked in glee when she saw that the name in my passport looked different from how I’d written it in her register, and seemed crestfallen when I explained that was because the passport showed my surname first. When she’d finished, she stamped the two copies of the document she gave us about thirty times, pushed them across the desk without looking up, and told us to pay her sidekick four hundred roubles. Tatiana Vladimirovna took one copy and I took the other. It meant that I could manage and sign all the paperwork for the apartment swap on her behalf. The apartment scheme was now my scheme too.
We slid back up to the Metro, so Tatiana Vladimirovna could go home and I could go to work, late. She said thank you and kissed me on both cheeks when we said good-bye. She waddled off towards the escalators.
For some reason it has stuck in my mind—in the way that things can without your wanting them to, sometimes, maybe especially, when you don’t want them to—that down in the Metro, by the ticket kiosk, I saw two men having a row. One was a big Russian guy, the other a shaven-headed, furious, almost spherical Georgian, and the Russian was saying, over and over, very loudly, “Give me the knife, Nika, Give me the knife.”
THAT EVENING I found Oleg Nikolaevich waiting on his landing in distress. I could tell that he was waiting for me because he was coatless and hatless, not going out or coming in from anywhere. He was standing in front of his door, looking like a relative expecting bad news from a doctor. He tried to smile, and asked me how I was. I told him I was fine but very tired. He didn’t budge.
“Nikolai Ivanovich,” he said, “I must ask you once again for your help.”
I knew it was about the old man.
“Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said, “forgive me, but what more can I do?”
“Please, Nikolai Ivanovich. Go to my friend’s building. Just to look. I think there is someone in his apartment. I was on the stairs and I heard them coming down. Please.”
I looked into Oleg Nikolaevich’s eyes, and he looked away. I could see he was embarrassed to ask me. In retrospect, I think that for him the whole thing was less about his friend, in a way, than about resisting change, fighting time. I think he just wanted to keep his life as recognisable as he could for as long as he could—his friend, his cat, his books, his manners. I think that was why he stayed on in his downtown flat, instead of renting it out and living on the proceeds like most of the old Russians who had a pad like his (all their less tangible assets having vanished in the economic carnage of the nineties). Oleg Nikolaevich wanted to stop the clock.
“Okay,” I said in the end. “Tell me where he lives.” He told me, and I can still remember: apartment thirty-two, number nine, Kalininskaya (a little turning between my building and the Bulvar that ran down the side of the church).
“So I turn right out of here, then take the first road on the left, and it’s there, along from the church?”
“In Russia,” said Oleg Nikolaevich, “there are no roads, only directions.”
• • •
I PUT BACK on my hat and gloves and went down the stairs. I walked up my street towards the Bulvar and turned into Kalininskaya. It was dark, and the only living things I saw outside were a gang of fat black crows convened around a rubbish bin. The ice that had formed underneath the drainpipes on the outsides of the buildings glistened blackly under the streetlights.
When I reached the door of Konstantin Andreyevich’s building I did what homeless people do in Moscow on fatal winter nights: I rang the buzzers of all the apartments, which the homeless try in the hope that someone will carelessly or compassionately or drunkenly let them in to sleep in the stairwells. Someone answered, told me to fuck off, but buzzed me in anyway, maybe by accident, and I climbed the stairs that curled around the caged elevator shaft to the third floor. I found Konstantin Andreyevich’s front door.
I could hear him breathing. I rang the bell, and heard a man’s voice mutter something and the squeak of his shoes on the inevitable parquet. I heard him stop maybe twenty centimetres from the door, and the creak of a leather coat as he leaned forward to look at me through the peephole. I could tell from his wheeze that he was a heavy smoker. He was close enough to shake my hand, or to slit my throat.
We stood like that, facing each other invisibly through the door, for what felt like a hundred years but was probably more like thirty seconds. Then he retched and spat. It was as though whoever it was felt obliged to go through the motions of pretending not to be there, but at the same time wanted to make it clear that he didn’t much care if somebody like me knew that he was. I turned and headed down the stairs, slowly at first, then fast, two and three stairs at a time, the way you might run away from a bear, hoping it doesn’t realise how scared you are.
On the ground floor I found an old woman collecting her post from one of the vandalised mailboxes.
“Excuse me,” I said in Russian, “do you know who is living in apartment thirty-two—Konstantin Andreyevich’s apartment?”
“The less you know,” she said without looking at me, “the longer you live.”
“Please,” I said.
She turned to face me. She had sharp eyes and a white goatee.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Nicholas Platt. I am a friend of Konstantin Andreyevich.”
“Mee-ster Platt,” she said, “I think it is his son in the apartment. That is what they told me.”
“Have you seen him?”
“Maybe.”
“What does he look like?”
“I can’t remember.”
Outside the wind was tearing through the canyons formed by the old merchants’ houses, driving the snow into my face, making my nose run and my eyes weep. I forgot to put on my hat on my way back. If I’d dawdled I might have lost an ear. I scattered snow from my boots up the stairs of my building and rang Oleg Nikolaevich’s buzzer.
“Oleg Nikolaevich,” I asked him when he came to the door, “does Konstantin Andreyevich have a son?”
Oleg Nikolaevich shook his head.
Then, because we were still standing there, because I didn’t know what else to say but wanted to say something, and because it suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know, I asked him what his cat was called.
“His name is George,” said Oleg Nikolaevich, turning away.
10
“You know how they do it? How the serious guys do it? First they find some drunk or bum and give him five hundred dollars, a photo of the victim, and the promise of another five hundred once he’s done the job. The bum figures, what the hell, that’s enough to keep me in meths or antifreeze for a year. So he whacks the victim in his doorway or an alleyway with a knife or a hammer. If he’s got ideas above his station, maybe he uses one of those air pistols they convert into real guns in workshops in Lithuania.”
“Why Lithuania?”
“Listen, that’s not the end of it. This is the clever part, Nick. Afterwards, the customer gives a pro ten thousand dollars to do the bum as well—tidily, you know, silencer, insurance shot to the head,
deluxe. That way there’s no living link between the customer and the original target. Finito.”
At that point, as I recall, Steve Walsh broke off to ogle two leggy redheads who were chasing each other round a striptease pole behind my left shoulder, one of them dressed as a rabbit (elasticated ears, furry white tail), the other as a bear (claws, bearskin bra, little brown bear nose). Russki Safari, I think the strip joint was called. It was Steve’s favourite, somewhere out on Komsomolsky Prospekt.
“Wow,” he said, drinking up.
His riff on murder had started when I asked what had happened to the big energy story he’d been working on in the autumn. It was spiked, Steve said, after the editors got spooked by libel threats. But he’d been out to Siberia, to one of those obscure Russian districts that are three times the size of Europe. It was minus thirty-seven out there, apparently, and he’d almost lost his toes. He’d gone because the governor of the region had suffered a rush of blood to the head a month or so before: he’d launched a crackdown on corruption, annoyed someone in the interior ministry, and shortly afterwards had been found dead in the banya at the bottom of his garden. It was suicide, Steve explained, at least according to the prosecutor’s office and the local newspapers. The governor had shot himself in the head—twice.
We both laughed. You learned to laugh, after a while.
So he had begun telling me how the Russian contract-killing market worked. The price had been going up, Steve said. You could try to hire a retired Chechen rebel, but you had to go through their friends in the Russian army who sold them the weapons, and that bumped up the bill. Otherwise, to find a competent murderer for less than ten thousand dollars these days, he reckoned, you had to go out to Yekaterinburg or down to Kaluga. Inflation, he said. Terrible, I said.
The bear caught the rabbit, or vice versa, and they set about eating each other. When they’d finished, a blonde wearing only a pair of aviator goggles and high heels hung herself by her ankles from the top of the floor-to-ceiling pole. Steve took a happy swig of red wine.
I had, I suppose I should admit, been to flesh bars like that one too many times in my first year or so in Moscow—to Snow Queen, Pigalle, the Kama Sut-Bar. It was almost part of my job. Before, when I lived in London, I went to a lap dancing place in Clerkenwell once or twice for stag nights, never otherwise, but in Moscow everyone with a dick and a credit card seemed to spend at least an evening a week shoving roubles into diamanté underwear, all the expat lawyers and bankers and half the Russian men who could afford it. By that winter, though, it had started to seem a bit demeaning—demeaning to me, I mean, not the girls. I don’t think I really thought about the girls. Plus there’d been one nasty occasion when the barman loaded my bill with hyperpriced cocktails that I hadn’t drunk, and when I argued, the bouncers took me into a little yard outside the kitchen and swung me around by my hair for a few seconds, until my glasses fell off and I agreed to cough up. And by then there was Masha, and she’d been enough. I’d never felt that way about a girl for so long before. Usually, even when I liked them, my eyes wandered after a month or two. But Masha seemed to get better, fiercer, selfish in a good way. It felt like the real her and the real me, two mammals in the dark.
I hadn’t spent an evening in that faintly gay strip-club atmosphere of shared half-drunk arousal for months. But Steve had wanted to go, so we went.
“How’s the love of your life?” he asked me. “The one you met on the Metro?”
“She’s fine.”
“Has she moved in yet?”
“No. Nearly. I mean, not really. Not yet.”
“How about the babushka from Murmansk? When does she turn up?”
“Fuck off, Steve.”
It was, I think, the beginning of February. The snow was piled waist-high in the churchyard between my building and the Bulvar, even higher on the uncleared side of my street. Masha was fine, we were fine. She was probably staying with me two or three nights a week by then. I’d started laying in the food she liked, pickled mushrooms and berry juice and a Russian yogurty drink that I never got a taste for. I’d hired a Belarussian cleaner to keep the flat more or less hygienic. We were entering the stage when Masha might have moved in properly if we’d been in London, a city where, as you and I know well, practicality and the housing market nudge lust into commitment, mix up now and the future, and romance has a bottom line. Masha could go from Pushkinskaya Metro station to the mobile phone shop near the Tretyakov Gallery in a quarter of the time it would have taken her to get to work from the Leningradskoe Shosse. But she didn’t mention it, and I didn’t push her.
“She’s got a sister,” I said to Steve. “Katya. Blond, nice girl. She’s twenty. Sort of innocent and grown-up at the same time. She’s a student at MGU. You’d like her.”
“Sounds like I would.”
“Except she isn’t her sister, she’s her cousin.”
“Right,” said Steve. Behind me the waitresses were massing on stage for their hourly “jungle dance,” wearing leopard-print minidresses and thigh-high snakeskin boots. I was losing him.
“It was strange,” I said. “I went to that Uzbek place on Neglinnaya with some people from work. We went on New Year’s Eve, after we signed some papers with the Cossack. Katya was waiting tables there. She didn’t want me to tell Masha that I’d seen her.”
I hadn’t told Steve about our first night together, the night Katya watched. I hadn’t told anyone. I wanted to tell, like all men do sometimes. But more than that, I’d wanted to see Masha and us as something different, maybe even sort of pure.
“When you take them home and unwrap them,” Steve said inattentively, “there’s usually a piece missing.”
I started explaining about how I’d met their aunt, and about Butovo—how Tatiana Vladimirovna wanted to get out of the city, how I was helping. There were bureaucratic queues that had to be stood in, and agencies to visit that were only open for two hours every other Thursday. I had to turn up once or twice to sign for things, but as far as I could, I’d delegated the legwork to Olga the Tatar from my office—she’d bought her own little property not long before and seemed to know the form. I gave her the address of Tatiana Vladimirovna’s place by the pond and of the new apartment in Butovo, since we’d need to check those papers too: it was apartment twenty-three, building forty-six, Kazanskaya. I promised Olga that I’d take her for cocktails in the rip-off bar at the top of the hotel next to the Bolshoi Theatre if she got it all together.
“It’s not a lot of work,” I said to Steve. “It won’t cost me anything. And she’s a nice old lady, actually. She was in the siege of Leningrad.”
“Right,” Steve said. Tatiana Vladimirovna was at least fifty years too old to distract him from the jungle dance.
We watched. We were sitting in a grubby little booth to the left of the stage. After a few minutes the drumbeat stopped and the waitresses put their dresses back on. Steve clapped.
He asked about the Cossack.
“Do you know who he’s fronting for? Your Cossack friend, I mean.”
“Who do you think?”
“Probably the deputy head of the presidential administration. Or the chairman of the Security Council. The St. Petersburg crew are taking over, the old defence ministry gang are getting nervous. They’re trying to cash out a bit while they can. I guess they’ll keep a piece of the company they’ve set up to give them some pocket money later.”
“Maybe,” I said. “We’re not completely naïve, Steve. Maybe you’re right. But the project’s on track and that’s all we care about. They’re going to get the second tranche of money in the next few weeks and the last one in a couple of months or so. They think they’ll be pumping their first oil through the terminal by the end of the summer. If they start repaying any later than next spring, the penalty clauses will kick in.”
“I’m sure you know what you’re doing, Nick. But by the way, I asked around. That logistics firm you said was in with Narodneft? It’s a shell. No one’s ever h
eard of it. I bet you the only sort of logistics it arranges involve pumping money to Liechtenstein. If you find out who the backers are, let me know.”
“Maybe, Steve.”
Three girls in Red Army fur hats marched around the tables, carrying replica machine guns (at least I think they were replicas) and wearing bullet bandoliers, draped carefully around their curves so that they covered nothing up. There was a lot of silicone and very little body hair.
“Aren’t you heading down to the Caucasus?” I asked him. It was hotting up again down there, the TV news said, down in one of those fiddly little Muslim regions where there’s always somebody rebelling and dying.
“Probably,” Steve said. “Hard to sell the story though. The news desk in London’s not too interested ’til there are three zeros on the death toll. And the Russians are trying to keep everybody out. You have to go down to Chechnya and pay your way across the border. Maybe next week. Shame to miss it.”
A couple of tourists disappeared into the cubicles next to the toilets, taking the rabbit and the bear with them. I’d done that too, or something like it, I suppose I should also admit, since I’m trying to tell you everything. Three times altogether, I think, I’d paid for it in Moscow. The first time was by accident, when I realised too late that I was expected to and was too far gone to stop myself, the other two times after I’d broken the taboo and thought, Whatthehell. Once, near the beginning, I’d managed to talk a catwalk Ukrainian into coming home for nothing even though she was working. Don’t hate me for it. I would never do it in London. At least, don’t hate me yet.
“Steve,” I said, “do you ever think about this? I mean, worry about it—the way we live out here. I mean, what if your mother could see you?”
“My mother’s dead.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Russia,” Steve said, looking me in the eye with his two bloodshot eyes and getting suddenly serious, “is like Lariam. You know, that malaria medicine that can make you have wild dreams and jump out of the window. You shouldn’t do it if you’re the kind of person who gets anxious or guilty, Nick. You shouldn’t do Russia. Because you’ll crack.”
