The Silent Oligarch: A Novel

by Christopher Morgan Jones

  “Alexei.”

  “Richard.” They shook hands. This was Alexei Chekhanov, Lock’s opposite number. If Lock was offshore, Chekhanov was Russia. He ran Malin’s business there; he had no title, but his job, in effect, was chief executive of Malin Enterprises ZAO. As Lock had come to understand it through observation over the years—it had never been explained to him—Chekhanov made money for Malin in Russia and oversaw how that money was invested. When a foreign oil company paid over the odds for an exploration license, Chekhanov set the price and handled the arrangements. When the resulting profit needed investing, Chekhanov saw that it was wisely spent. When that investment threatened to go awry, it was he who made sure that it did not. He was the more important man by far but had the decency to treat Lock as an equal.

  “That was a long one,” said Lock. “How is he?”

  “We had a lot to discuss. This is a busy time.”

  “You too? All good, I hope?”

  “Yes, everything is good. I need to see you soon. There are things we need to discuss.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “It is always interesting. A company in Bulgaria. Maybe something to sell in Kazakhstan. We will see.”

  “Fine. Call me.”

  “Very good. You should go.”

  “I should. Good to see you, Alexei.”

  Lock held his hand out, a little awkwardly, and they shook again. He knocked lightly on Malin’s door and went in. It was not a large or opulent office. Malin was reading some papers laid out on his desk, which was otherwise bare: a glass of water, a row of pens, no computer. On the wall behind the desk were two photographs: in one he was shaking hands with Yeltsin, in the other with President Putin. A third frame held his Order of Merit for the Fatherland, an eight-pointed star with a double-headed eagle in gold at its center.

  “Good evening, Richard.” Malin did not look up. “Please, sit.”

  Lock watched him read. Was this an evil man? Behind those blank eyes what was there? Blackness? A cold hatred? Efficiency, thought Lock. A single-minded commitment to an end. What end, he had never known.

  Malin finished reading and put the document lightly to one side.

  “How are you, Richard?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. A little shaken. You know. But fine.”

  “It was a great shock. He was young and it was not his time. It is never pleasant when this happens.” Malin paused and looked at Lock, who despite himself looked down at his lap. “I have heard no more since yesterday.”

  “I haven’t found out a great deal, I’m afraid. He fell from the roof of the Hotel Gellért in Budapest, apparently. The police think it was suicide. I don’t know much more than that to be honest. I’m waiting for a call from Colonel Bashaev.”

  Malin considered the information for a moment.

  “If Dmitry had a failing,” he said at last, “it was that he was emotional about business. He was emotional about all things.”

  Lock didn’t know what to say. This seemed unfair to Gerstman, who had always seemed, if anything, a zealous rationalist.

  “Did you send flowers?” Malin asked.

  “Yes,” said Lock. “To his office.”

  “Good. Good. I was sorry to lose Dmitry. He was an effective worker. But in business it is important to keep one’s head, and he did not, I think. He did not.” Malin shook his head slightly, a gesture of considered regret. “This you must remember, Richard, especially now.”

  Malin’s gaze seemed to deepen. Lock, lost in it for a moment, managed to respond only with a weak “Yes.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “I understand. You know I do.”

  “I know you do.” Malin let Lock shift in his stare for a further second or two, then asked, “When is Paris?”

  Paris. God, he had forgotten about Paris. A day or two of lying under oath. With an audience.

  “It’s next week. I go to London tomorrow to have a final run-through with Kesler.”

  “How is Mr. Kesler?”

  “Good, I think.” He had spoken to Kesler three times in the previous week, each time to talk through some new materials that had to be absorbed before he gave testimony. In fact, Kesler, for the first time since Lock had known him, was beginning to sound exasperated; his last words had been that they had a great deal of work to do in London. Had he told Malin this directly? “He seems to think we can convince the tribunal that Tourna’s claim is vexatious. Let’s hope so.”

  “But he is expecting that you will be questioned about the facts?”

  “Almost certainly, yes.”

  “And your position will be that I do not exist?”

  “Our position—my position will be that I own Faringdon.”

  Malin made a soft, low noise, something between a snort and a grunt.

  “How did you come by it?”

  “Faringdon? Well, you can trace the history back through the companies, all the way back to Arctec. My name is on everything. Ostensibly I own the lot anyway, always have done.”

  Malin propped his elbows on his desk, clasped his hands together and rested his chin on them. He thought for a moment.

  “This makes you a big man in Russia.”

  “They can’t prove that I’m not.” Lock knew what he meant. Who would believe such a thing? “That’s the point.”

  “All right. All right. Any more on Tourna?”

  “Nothing interesting. I’m going to see the London guys this week. Bashaev is promising me good stuff for when I get back.”

  “It would have been good to have something before Paris.”

  Malin pinched the skin on his chin with his thumbs. Then he sat back and looked hard at Lock. “You have worked hard for this, Richard, for a long time, but in one moment so much can be undone. A whole life can be undone. For you and for me.”

  Lock didn’t respond.

  “I think that’s all now, Richard. Concentrate on Paris. Do not let Dmitry’s death distract you.”

  Lock said that he would not, got up from his seat, agreed to see Malin in a fortnight and left. As he walked out of the office he could feel Malin’s eyes on his back and a chill ran across it. A life undone.

  BASHAEV CALLED LOCK in his office the next morning. He confirmed what Lock already knew and added some new, jarring details. A post-mortem had revealed that Gerstman had had a blood alcohol level of 0.4 percent, enough to render him more or less senseless. At midnight, about two hours before he died, he had been seen in the Black Cat, a gay bar ten minutes from the Gellért. He had seemed crazed: according to one witness, “beside himself.” No one was with him. The police hadn’t been able to establish when he had left the club, or what he had done between there and the Gellért. He had e-mailed his wife a suicide note five minutes before he jumped. The police were now convinced that he had died as a result of suicide or misadventure and were not expecting to investigate further.

  For Lock, who had spent a dark night dwelling on Malin’s words and convincing himself again that now more than ever he was indispensable, this news was disabling. Dmitry didn’t drink. He never had. Lock had never seen him drink so much as a single beer. He was famous for it throughout Malin’s team. Could he have been gay? He had never been at home in Moscow, that was true: whenever Lock had seen him there people had ribbed him about his running, about his sharp suits, about not drinking vodka. Lock imagined that others who had known Gerstman would nod their heads when they heard the news and congratulate themselves on knowing all along. But he and Nina had always seemed real. They were close, natural—Lock had seen it. Could you fake that?

  In the end, thought Lock, I’m not subtle enough to think this through. What I do know is that in Russia there are few accidents. I’m wise enough to know that. And I can’t simply wait for one to happen to me.


  THAT EVENING, before leaving for London and Paris, Lock took Oksana to dinner at Café Pushkin. On his way to meet her he thought about something Kesler had asked him: if you wanted to prove Malin was corrupt, where would you look? That, surely, was what the whole thing was about. If Malin had ordered Gerstman dead, it wasn’t because he objected to his drinking habits or his sexual preference. Gerstman must have known something. That much was clear.

  What was less clear was how much Lock himself really knew; murkier still, what Malin thought he knew. Less than Gerstman, surely? Maybe not. Perhaps he knew all manner of things but didn’t understand their significance. If that was true, he risked meeting with an accident for no reason at all. After all these years being governed by others he had no desire to end his days so powerless. So he had a choice: he could show Malin that he was no threat, or he could become a threat after all.

  His car sat in lanes of traffic on Tverskaya. He looked out of the window at the boxy Ladas and bulky ZiLs around him; even in his own BMW the petrol fumes were thick. What would a Russian do? A Russian never did anything for a single reason. That was one important principle. And he never revealed his true position. He was two-faced: he showed one to the world and the other he hid. Lock had never learned this trick. If his Russian colleagues had laughed at Gerstman’s softness they undoubtedly laughed still at Lock’s naïveté. But here, surely, was an easy opportunity to exploit that. If he could convince Malin that he was harmless while building up what he knew, that must be sensible. A dossier. That was what he needed. That’s what people in his position did, drew up a secret file, to be deployed when necessary—with luck, perhaps never. And after all, what else did he have, except what he knew?

  Lock felt a new energy inside him. He had had an idea: for the first time in years, a positive idea about his own fate. Now all he had to do was find the courage to act on it.

  Café Pushkin was a re-creation of a rich Russian’s town house from the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. It was pedantically, absurdly authentic: huge, worn flagstones covered the ground floor and wood paneling the walls throughout. The cloakroom, in the cellar, was appropriately dank. In the library, on the first floor, where Lock had booked his table, and where real oak bookshelves held real Russian books, a brass telescope and a Victorian globe sat by huge sash windows, as if the owner of the house, an amateur scientist perhaps, had merely stepped outside for a moment and invited you to improve yourself while he was gone. From the cream-white walls brass sconces gave out fake candlelight. Lock liked it here because in among the fashionable Russians, who more than a decade on still came here, were tourists and even middle-class Muscovites celebrating. It felt democratic in a way that much of Moscow did not.

  It took them a while to find his reservation but then it always did. He waited patiently while his waitress, dressed in a burgundy waistcoat and apron, slowly extracted it from the computer, an ugly anachronism in the warm light. Finally he sat, and ordered a gin and tonic. Oksana would of course be late. He read the menu: Russian food: blinis, pelmeni, solyanka, borscht, caviar, sturgeon, stroganoff. He would have the solyanka as he always did, and then maybe some duck. His drink came, and he poured a small amount of tonic into the glass: like the water and the wine, he told himself.

  If he moved his flight to the evening he could make a start on his file tomorrow morning. All he needed to do was download everything on the network. It would probably fit on a single memory stick—two at the most. That would leave a record, of course, but he was the administrator of the system and in all his time working for Malin no one had ever inspected it. And he could always say that he’d needed to take it all to London and Paris. He should make a copy or two, and leave them somewhere secret but accessible. One in Moscow, one in London perhaps. Marina could look after one. If this was one of those thrillers I halfheartedly read, he thought, I would entrust one to my lawyer and have him publish it should anything terrible happen to me, but I don’t have a lawyer and even if I did no one would publish the little I know. We could always vanity-publish. He smiled at the thought, wondered whether Oksana would be much longer and ordered another drink.

  That is the problem with this scheme, he thought. My value to Malin relies solely on my not being him. I don’t actually know very much. I’m not important enough to know things. The one devastating thing that I know is that I’m a fraud, but that in itself is not enough to finish Malin. And the hard irony is that Malin probably doesn’t know that—or can’t afford to believe it. He thinks I’m more dangerous than I am.

  His second drink arrived. He looked at his watch. Twenty past. Oksana could be another twenty minutes. He sipped his gin and tried to remember what she had been doing that day; there was something at the university. He couldn’t, and returned to his new project. How to find out how Malin stole? For a long time he considered this without a single thought occurring to him. God, he thought: I am no spy.

  As he tilted his head back to finish the last of his drink he saw Oksana arrive, stately in black, a head taller than the waitress who led her to the table. For a moment it occurred to him that she would make a perfect accomplice. She had poise and coolness enough for the both of them. He stood to greet her and they kissed. On his empty stomach the gin was making him feel warm and slightly giddy. He ordered another and a vodka for Oksana. She looked around the room and took a long time to settle herself on her chair; she seemed exercised about something. Her long nails, painted a deep red, rapped on the tabletop.

  “You look amazing.”

  “Thank you, Richard. This is a good table.”

  “Of course. How was your day?”

  “Hm. Not so good. Unbelievable in fact. I need that drink.” She looked around for the waitress.

  “She’ll be here soon. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She met his eye but couldn’t hold it. “Just a bad day.”

  “Tell me.”

  She sighed. “All right. Christ. It’s that little fucker Kovalchik. I had a review with him today, you remember?” Lock gave a grave little nod. “I hadn’t seen him since the summer, not since I decided to include those chapters on the Gulag. So we go over the new plan, and he tells me that the Gulag is not a ‘profitable’ area of research. Too many people have already written about it, apparently. Academic exhaustion. But you can’t write about . . . ah, at last. Bring me another, please.” She took her shotglass, held it up to Lock, and knocked it back. “You cannot write about displacement without mentioning the Gulag. Hundreds of thousands of people began life—if you can call it that—began life in Kazakhstan because they were sent to the gulags. Idiot.” She played with her empty glass. “Idiot.”

  Lock waited for a moment to see whether she had finished. Could he not discuss his plan with her? She was from Almaty. She was a foreigner, more or less. “So what does that mean?”

  “That means I have to go back to the original plan and scrap everything I’ve done for the last three months. Or I carry on and risk being failed.”

  “Would he do that?” He should talk to her. She might be the difference between doing it and just thinking about it forever. When they had finished discussing Kozlovsky or whatever his name was he would test the ground.

  “Oh yes. Yes, he would. He’s a nasty little shit.”

  “Who does he report to?”

  Oksana gave a hard, short laugh. “Maybe I could have him sacked?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Do you have any right of appeal? Can someone have a word with him?”

  “He’s my professor. If I piss him off I won’t get another one.” She had stopped fidgeting now and looked at him with a coldness he didn’t enjoy. “Not every problem can be solved by finding a bigger bully, Richard. Even in Russia. You should understand that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know who you are, Richard. You have a pretty unpleasant boss of your own.�
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  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Never mind. Never mind. Let’s just have a nice dinner like we always do. You can pretend to be interested in my thesis.”

  “I am interested in your thesis.”

  She laughed again. “You know, when I first met you I liked you. We have an arrangement, I know that, but I liked you. Here’s a man, I thought, who knows things, who doesn’t care only for money. Here’s a man with self-respect. And then I see the papers and I see what you do. For that slug. It saddens me, Richard. I can’t tell you how much. You should have been more than this.”

  She held his eye for a moment and then stood up.

  “I’m sorry, Richard. I didn’t want to be disappointed by you. Let me know if I owe you anything.”

  Lock watched her as she walked away, betraying no emotion in her even stride. The waitress came and put new drinks on the table. Lock drained Oksana’s vodka and sat for some time watching the space she had left.

  “MY NAME IS Richard Lock.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Lock. And can you tell us in what capacity you are here today?”

  “I am here as a representative of Faringdon Holdings, one of the companies named in Mr. Tourna’s complaint.”

  “Very good. Let me start with some establishing questions. What is Faringdon’s business, Mr. Lock?”

  “Faringdon is a private energy business that invests in oil and gas in the former Soviet Union. We own stakes in companies in Russia and Kazakhstan, mainly.”

  “And what is the turnover of the group?”

  “That’s commercially confidential. I would prefer not to answer that.”

  From the end of the table Kesler gave a small nod of approval.

  Across from Lock, Griffin resumed. “And what is your role in the company, Mr. Lock?”

  “I am a shareholder.”

  “The sole shareholder?”