Above the reception desk, now empty, hung a large red banner emblazoned with the words ‘The Future of Russia. The Future of Our Great Fatherland.’ That the occasion was political could not be doubted, though exactly where the crowds of people pressing into the foyer had come from, Joe could not tell. He had never before seen Scythian Gold so full. The occasion was ticketed but apparently free to all-comers. The majority, of course, were Russian. To the steady thump of martial music relayed over loudspeakers, the tumult of people was carried slowly forward, Joe among them. He felt he was literally enmeshed in the sort of crush that could occur in a real Moscow Metro station when a train ran late. Body was pressed firmly against body until, surprisingly, he saw a hand raised just to his left and he glimpsed someone signalling to him. It was Bakhteen, as smart as ever in his dark Savile Row suit.
Thrusting himself against neighbouring bodies, Joe pushed against the flow and managed to get to one side just next to the reception desk. Bakhteen grabbed hold of him and quite characteristically, in his deft strong-arm manner, pulled him behind the red banner. They did not exchange a word. The next thing Joe knew, a door opened, then closed firmly behind them, and they were hurrying through a small office to the rear of the reception area. A girl tapping away in front of a computer screen and two men standing beside her barely looked up as Bakhteen showed the way between desks and out into a neon-lit corridor that ran, it seemed, the length of the building. They passed closed doors into what were very likely kitchens or store-rooms and then ascended a flight of stairs to what appeared to be green-rooms. A door was swung open and Joe was swept in. Decorum was instantly renewed the moment they entered the room by Bakhteen straightening the sleeves of his jacket and punctiliously adjusting a slightly displaced necktie.
‘I recognised you, Sokol, Mr Falcon,’ he explained in Russian a little breathlessly. ‘Welcome to our Scythian Gold. You are here for an important occasion, of great political consequence, I think.’
‘Oh, I’m sure, yes, very…’
Joe found himself unable to respond sensibly, firstly because he’d forgotten that he had a nickname at Scythian Gold, also out of nervousness and chiefly out of shock at the sight of himself in a long mirror the instant the room was flooded with light. Clearly dishevelled, his face was slightly shiny with sweat and his suit looked shabby. The brilliant lighting showed him he would never have worn such an outfit during his sessions of successful lobbying for RGD. By Scythian Gold standards, though, it might be regarded as appropriately proletarian or shabby chic, if clearly not up to Bakhteen’s high-class smartness.
‘So, Mr Falcon, you are,’ Bakhteen licked his lips, ‘you are required to wait here until after some speeches and entertainment. That is the plan. Then will come the climax and for that you are essential, Mr Falcon. I hope you are prepared.’
Joe knew exactly what he was referring to. ‘Oh, I’m prepared. How long will I have to wait?’
‘An hour. No longer.’
The apparent readiness to converse, unusual for the habitually taciturn Bakhteen, made Joe ask: ‘And all the people down there in the foyer, where are they all from?’
‘Representatives of our London community, club members. Oleg Fyodorovich is always very thorough. He has let it be known that he is going to make an extraordinary announcement. Of great importance, he said, for the Russian people and for the world.’
Joe recognised that he would have to play along with such loyal devotion. ‘Mr Goncharov has political ambitions?’
‘Oh, no.’
The contradiction was so emphatic it had to be assumed nothing more need be said. Bakhteen glanced in the long mirror, licked one finger and rather gingerly pressed back a strand of hair that had fallen across his forehead. His glassy, reflective gaze, devoid, it seemed, of any expression, then turned its spotlight on Joe as if it had been attracted by a strange sound. An untidy castellated row of broken white teeth appeared as he smiled.
‘Oh, no. He simply wishes to be welcomed as a very important force for unity. He wishes to be wedded to the future of Russia.’
This extraordinary statement had such an oddly sincere ring to it that Joe found himself smiling as well. The term ‘wedded’ reminded him of what his mother had said about Goncharov’s marriage. He levelled a challenging look back at the smiling Bakhteen, who appeared to flinch from it very slightly. Lowering his voice to a whisper and stepping forward to within a couple of inches of the other’s face, he said bluntly:
‘You’re sure about that, are you?’
A flicker of disbelief and annoyance showed itself in some rapid blinking. Bakhteen lifted his chin in obvious disdain. The whispered words were being treated as so much bad breath.
‘Oleg Fyodorovich will tell everyone. Be obedient, Mr Falcon! Listen to his words! Now excuse me. You must wait here.’
There was an interval of silence as he appeared to receive a message on an earphone. He could only receive it properly by re-opening the door and leaning out into the corridor with one hand pressed tight to one ear. From nearby came a burst of applause and shouting. Instructions were being received, because the door was suddenly closed, then locked from the other side and the noise reduced at once to so many distant rumblings. The green-room became momentarily dominated by the soft whirring of an extractor fan.
For Joe this raised his stress levels. Certain arrangements had been made for his safety. Jenny had insisted. They depended on phone contact, but he realized from Bakhteen’s behaviour that contact of that kind might be impossible. He had a strong suspicion that, even if he tried, the call would be monitored and intercepted despite the use of codes. Panic began to rise in him as if water were already up to his neck and about to overwhelm him. The fear brought a momentary, quite uncontrollable chattering of his teeth, but he instantly determined to fight it and pressed his lips tightly together, helped by holding a hand firmly over his mouth and chin as if he had caught himself telling a lie. Ashamed of his own feebleness, he did not dare look at himself in the long mirror and instead started walking up and down in the hope of steadying his nerves. He had been at Scythian Gold some dozen times before. This was the first time he had felt so nervous.
After several bouts of pacing he began pausing to study the photos, mostly of musicians and dancers, fixed to the fronts of wardrobe doors. All were relatively new, intently smiling, posed in groups or singly and however supposedly natural in their appearance had a waxwork awkwardness about them. To him the awkwardness had an appeal. He recognised fellow dwellers in the same limbo world between being and pretending. They were skilled, of course, experienced, probably less fearful, but in the intentness of the eyes turned towards him he could see his own nervousness. The sharing was what mattered. The sharing, if only in daydream, had an awkward uncertainty about it and for what must have been quite a long time he tried to imagine the feelings, latent as ghosts, permeating the green-room air that the unknown faces must have breathed along with his own slow, anxious breathing.
Suddenly the daydream ended. The door was unlocked and re-opened. Appreciative laughter coupled with applause from somewhere nearby burst loudly into the room.
Bakhteen stood there. He filled the doorway. Joe sneezed. Bakhteen gave him a sharp glance and, quite casually, as if up-tipping rubbish, pushed a smaller, older man into the room in front of him.
‘Hey, hey, hey! Cool it!’
Crew-cut, in a striped shirt and tie, this man protested angrily. He had a strong American accent. Just as he set about indignantly smoothing shirt sleeves at points where he had just been manhandled, Bakhteen crowned the insult by throwing a jacket on the floor at his feet. The man stooped to retrieve it.
‘D’you hear me – cool it! You don’t treat a guy that way! Messing up my clothes!’
‘You stay here!’ Bakhteen’s English command separated the words as if he had just learned them by heart. ‘Not go anywhere! Stay with Mr Falcon!’
The accompanying smile caused Joe a lightning strike of resentment. He stared back at
Bakhteen as he wiped his nose while the latter continued with malign joviality:
‘Oh, yes, we see you soon. You stay here. Please.’
Then he slammed shut the door and locked it again.
‘Boy, is that something!’ the American exclaimed. He was carefully smoothing down his jacket. ‘Who the hell do they think they are, these Russkies!’
He glanced in the mirror to adjust his tie, scowled, took in a deep breath and finally tried pulling at the door handle to be sure it was locked. It was. He shook his head several times before turning and asking:
‘You know ’em, do you?’
The query gave Joe a chance to study the weathered, leathery look of the man’s face. To judge by the web of fine lines round the pale eyes, the straight white eyebrows and the tensioned skin of his cheeks, he was of late middle-age, with a sharpness about his features that matched the wiriness of his slender build. He pulled on his jacket before Joe could answer and seated himself in one of the chairs facing the long mirror.
‘I’ve been here more than once.’ Joe had to admit.
‘You’re Mr Falcon, right? Nice to meet you.’ The American held out his right hand and Joe shook it. ‘If you know the place, tell me one thing. This place hasn’t got many windows, am I correct in thinking that?’
Joe had no idea. He said so.
‘But you’ve not seen many?’
‘No.’ Why the hell was he asking about windows?
‘That restaurant, it hasn’t got any?’
Joe tried to recall and realized he couldn’t remember any windows.
‘I’ve been doing some scouting around.’ The American smoothed his hand over his cheeks as he looked in the mirror. ‘That’s why I’m in this slammer. They got to let me out, of course, otherwise, well… well, otherwise their whole show’ll be one god-awful flop.’ It obviously gave him some pleasure to say this. Then his face reflected in the mirror looked up at Joe. ‘But why’re you in here? You goin’ to make a speech?’
Distantly but quite distinctly loud applause could be heard. ‘No,’ Joe said.
‘So why’re you here?’
He was uncertain how much to tell or indeed to tell anything at all to this American. He knew only too well that he was here in Scythian Gold to perform a supposed act of revitalization, to be an imposter, to cheat, that is to say, or simply to be so much bourgeois filth. The presence of this American suddenly emphasized the precariousness of his situation. He needed more than ever to check out the arrangements. He fished his smartphone out but he found his hand was shaking so much he couldn’t finger the keys. A wave of appreciative shouts came loudly into the room.
‘That sure won’t work in here.’ The American yawned, adding almost self-righteously: ‘No windows, buddy, no windows.’
True, Joe could get no signal.
‘Put it away,’ the American said. ‘I’ve tried. Zilch. So why’re you here?’
This time Joe knew he had to come clean. ‘I’m here to pretend to be…to pretend to be a kind of Frankenstein.’
He could hardly bear to hear himself say it. It sounded so silly he couldn’t keep a straight face. The American, though, rose from his chair, his face lit by a broad smile, and held out both hands in welcome. ‘So you’re the one Martha told me about!’
‘Martha?’ Joe cried. ‘You know Martha?’
‘Of course I know Martha Richter! She’s why I’m here. She instructed me – there’s some young Englishman, she said, he’s got the power, he’ll do the revitalizing.’
He grabbed both of Joe’s hands, shook them vigorously and then sat down again, this time spread-eagling his right leg over his left knee and adjusting the trouser crease to form a straight line down to his ankle. ‘Look, I’m Samuel. You’re?’
Joe admitted his name.
‘So, Joe, don’t let’s shoot the breeze anymore and let’s talk real sense. I collaborated with Bob – I say Bob because that’s how he liked to be addressed when he was at San Jorge, but Martha always called him Robert and formally he was always addressed as Dr Hazell Jr or Mr Richter, so enough with names – but Bob always relied on me to set up his invention, you know what I mean? He taught me. He was a wizard, there’s no doubt about that. I couldn’t match his expertise. I just read the guide book and did all the right things. And when he passed away earlier this year I was the only one who knew anything about it. So that’s why I’m here. But you’ve got the power, right? I’m told you can bring it alive, as they say?’
Samuel’s querying grin invited another form of collaboration from Joe, who felt a sudden stab of panic at the question.
‘I was told I had to pretend,’ he said a little shakily. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any power to make anything come alive. I’m a cheat, you know.’ He was about to show the brand on the inside of his left wrist and could feel droplets of sweat break out on his temples. Then he glimpsed Samuel’s eyes watching him in the mirror.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘You don’t know, do you?’
‘What?’
‘That gizmo, that locket thing you’ve got, it’s for storage, sure, but basically it’s a battery.’
‘So?’
‘It’s a very powerful battery.’ There was a slight edge of annoyance in the American voice. ‘It stimulates, sure. It generates, that’s what it does. It could cause what amounts to a surge, a real powerful surge, enough to light up or black out Times Square for, oh, forty-eight hours, give or take. That’s all. Bob invented it for his invention. That’s its purpose here. So that’s the power you’ve got. Maybe it won’t last all that long. It hasn’t been recharged all that recently, I imagine.’
‘Invention?’ Joe asked.
‘It’s just an invention.’ The remark had the matter-of-fact ordinariness of something so commonplace that to have asked such a question could be politely classed as irrelevant and more probably as plain dumb. Samuel switched his gaze from the mirror image directly to Joe himself who was standing almost behind his chair. ‘You’ve seen it, haven’t you? You saw it at San Jorge.’
‘I saw Lenin’s son, the son of Vladimir Ilych Lenin, or I thought I did. If he is a living person, how did you get him here? And why’s he here if he is who I think he is? Oh, bloody hell, these questions!’
‘Yeah, bloody hell, as you say.’ Samuel’s smile had a sardonic edge. ‘But Bob did it. We took it to Washington once. Reagan wanted to see it, so we took it to the White House. Yeah, Bob knew how!’ He reflected on this with a shake of the head. ‘Questions! Don’t ask questions! Martha wants rid of it, that’s all you need to know. And this oligarch fellow, he thinks he’s got the political equivalent of the secret of life.’
That was the full stop. Joe knew it. He had reached the end of his questioning. If what he had seen at San Jorge could be transported somehow from place to place, well, that was amazing, but if Martha wanted to be rid of it, then that was all he needed to know. As for Goncharov, if he thought he’d found some kind of political equivalent of the secret of life, then he, Joseph Richter, should be content to remain totally ignorant until summoned to use his supposed power. And if the whole thing were a hoax, a bit of clever showmanship or a highly intricate invention, he would still be the only one, he assumed, able to bring it to life and make it seem authentic. One final aspect, though, puzzled him.
‘I was told my DNA, my bloodline, was the power.’
‘Bloodline,’ Samuel said. He thought about this quite seriously for several moments. ‘Yeah, that may be right. Bob used to claim he was kind of related. That’s why he alone could recharge it. Or so he used to say. But maybe he was just having fun. He was a great one for having fun. All his life he had fun.’
A loud stamping of feet, so vigorous that the floor of the green-room shook slightly, resounded like a prolonged roll of thunder outside the door, accompanied by bursts of applause and shouts. It achieved a sudden crescendo when the lock was turned from outside and the door flung open to the dying chords of the waltz from Swa
n Lake. Once again Bakhteen stood there, but he was accompanied this time by a couple of smartly suited, dark-haired men with the solid, anonymous looks of security guards. Whatever orders Bakhteen gave were lost in the thunderous noise filling the corridor. Samuel rose from where he was sitting after once more adjusting his tie in the mirror, acknowledged with a reluctant grin and a nod the fact of Bakhteen pointing along the corridor and unhurriedly followed Bakhteen’s tailored shoulders the short distance needed to reach a sloping walkway.
Joe, stumbling in their wake, glanced ahead and saw enough to realize that this was the entrance to an area of stage at one end of the restaurant where a gypsy orchestra or a pianist usually played. Black curtains enclosed the stage area, making a view from the wings of what was happening on-stage extremely difficult. All he saw for sure was a young ballerina in a tutu running down the walkway mopping her face with a towel and slipping past him, her blonde hair floating out like a halo and leaving behind her a charming waft of perfume and perspiration. Two others followed, followed in their turn by several staff armed with towels and bags. By the time this little army had disappeared far down the corridor, to be replaced by groups of stage hands and what looked like more security guards in smart suits, the shouting and stamping had faded sufficiently to give way to another sound that almost made Joe’s teeth shoot out of their sockets.
It was an ear-splitting blast of trumpets from the loud-speaker system. The virtually stunning roar of this noise kept everyone paralysed with shock for several moments. The ensuing quiet became quickly filled with a soft crackling sound before a loud male voice made an announcement in Russian. The climax of the meeting was approaching, the voice proclaimed, and the audience was invited to stand for a minute’s silence in memory of Vladimir Ilych Lenin.
At that moment Joe caught a glimpse of the audience. The usually smart restaurant with its chrome furnishings and artificial palms had been transformed into rows of seats, now crammed with people rising to their feet, while others, the less fortunate, were pressed shoulder to shoulder along the side walls. He was only allowed a glimpse of the scene before the loud shuffling noise of a hundred or more people standing up replaced the blare of trumpets. The security guards politely but authoritatively detained him for the required sixty seconds before marching him along a further length of corridor and up steps to a poorly lit backstage area.
Mr Frankenstein Page 32
