by David Szalay
‘Oh, she didn’t use the word! Fuck. She might as well have.’
‘The language was strong,’ Lars admits.
‘Until now,’ Aleksandr says, ‘I always believed in English justice.’
‘It’s not perfect,’ Lars says philosophically. ‘Nothing is.’
‘It’s rotten.’
‘I wouldn’t go so far …’
‘It’s fucking rotten …’
‘There’s not much we can do about it now,’ Lars says. He advised against the whole thing in the first place – it was, he had thought, obviously doomed. He had wanted no part of it. He does not mention that now. He says, ‘We have to look forward.’
Aleksandr almost laughs. ‘What is there to look forward to?’
Lars smiles, slightly sadly. He has finished the omelette and puts down his fork. ‘Life?’ he suggests. He is wearing very expensive sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames.
‘Life,’ Aleksandr murmurs, looking at the sea.
There is a longish silence.
‘Where do I stand?’ he asks sombrely. ‘Tell me.’
This is the purpose of the meeting – to take stock, now that the legal action has definitively failed. And Lars, the steward of his fortune, the lawyer who hid the assets in a labyrinth stretching from Andorra to the Dutch Antilles, says, after a few moments, ‘The picture is not very positive.’
That, Aleksandr already knows.
His principal asset, Rusferrex, once the world’s second-largest producer of iron ore, is worth nothing now. Fatally over-leveraged, it was sunk by the steep fall in the metal’s price, the end of the super-cycle, which Aleksandr had failed to foresee. Lars, and many others, had advised him against embarking on an ambitious, debt-fuelled expansion programme – anyone keeping half an eye on China could see the danger of that. Aleksandr wouldn’t listen. It never occurred to him that he might be wrong.
His other mining assets went down with Rusferrex in a net of interconnected accounts.
The Ukrainian airline he owns is in liquidation.
(‘The timing,’ as Lars put it, ‘was sub-optimal.’)
(Aleksandr’s less equivocal verdict: ‘It was a fucking stupid idea.’)
They talk for a while about the Moscow-based bank, whether that has any life left in it. No, seems to be the answer.
Then Lars says, ‘You do still have a number of significant assets, that I know of.’
‘Tell me.’
Lars takes a little scrap of paper from the pocket of his linen trousers. There seems to be some sort of list scrawled on it. He says, ‘The house in Surrey. The house in London. The Dassault Falcon. The villa in Saint Barthélemy. The Barbaresco estate and vineyards. And this yacht. All of these assets are held by offshore trusts and can be liquidated without tax liability,’ Lars adds. ‘Plus you have a minority stake in a Belarusian mobile-phone operator with subsidiaries in Moldova and Montenegro, worth perhaps twenty million sterling.’
Aleksandr says, ‘Oh, yes, that.’
‘Those shares are held by a trust in Gibraltar,’ Lars says.
‘Why do we have that?’ Aleksandr asks.
‘When you took over the lignite miner,’ Lars says.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You were going to spin it off.’
‘Yes.’
‘So those are your outstanding assets,’ Lars says. ‘Total value, about two hundred and seventy-five million sterling. I would estimate.’
A steward – not Mark – wheels a trolley over to them and pours coffee from a silver pot.
Lars thanks him.
They wait until the steward has withdrawn. Then Lars says, taking another scrap of paper from his pocket, ‘Now, the liabilities.’
Aleksandr releases several pellets of sweetener into his coffee. ‘Hit me,’ he says.
‘Legal fees – at least a hundred million and still increasing,’ Lars says.
This includes, though Lars does not spell it out, the two million pounds Aleksandr owes Lars’s own legal practice, itself an opaque trust domiciled in Liechtenstein.
Lars says, ‘Plus additional liabilities arising from ongoing litigation – another hundred million. That’s just an estimate,’ he tells him. ‘So let’s say two hundred million. Maybe a bit more. Which leaves you with.’ Lars, finally, takes off his sunglasses. The understated tan sharpens the blue of his eyes. He is in his mid-forties: he looks younger. He says, ‘Fifty to a hundred million?’
Aleksandr, still wearing his own sunglasses, looks away and says, in a hard neutral voice, ‘There’s something you don’t know.’
‘What’s that?’
The wind is up. Whitecaps are appearing on the vivid blue water. Just perceptibly, the immense yacht moves in the steepening swell.
Aleksandr says, ‘Ksenia is leaving me.’
Lars looks surprised, says nothing.
‘Yes,’ Aleksandr says.
She had sat next to him every day at the trial. Those long hours of lawyers’ voices. Of shuffling feet, and shuffling papers. She had sat next to him, sometimes looking worried and engaged, sometimes stifling a yawn in the middle of the afternoon as the lawyers whispered to each other up near the judge. For more than a month, that had lasted.
And then, on Thursday morning, the judgment.
And it wasn’t just that he had lost – that financially his wipeout was now final, an immovable fact, and all the implications of that.
It was what she had said, the judge.
‘The language was strong,’ even Lars had admitted.
And then while she was speaking, Adam Spassky’s smile – the way he had smiled, nearly imperceptibly and with that usual strange look of vacancy in his heatless blue eyes. Seeing that smile – that’s when Aleksandr understood that this was actually happening, that it was not in fact a nightmare. That it was his life.
Facing the media scrum on the steps outside he had been in a state of shock. Not sure where he was. Still seeing that smile. Minders hurried him to the Maybach, Ksenia hanging on his arm.
Then the house in Lowndes Square. Shadowy hotel-like spaces. Impersonal work of interior designers. And it was then, in the shocked hush of the house, that she told him.
‘I’ve waited long enough, she said. ‘I didn’t want to do it during the trial,’ she said. ‘The trial’s over now.’
She said, ‘It’s no use, Aleksandr.’
He was shouting at her.
‘You say that,’ she said. ‘When was the last time you actually noticed me? When was the last time you thought about what I might want? What do you want me for? You’re not even interested in sex any more …’
That’s when he threw the Japanese vase.
When he threw the Japanese vase, she froze up.
She said, ‘I’m taking the twins to St Barts for two weeks.’
And that afternoon, when the twins got home from their expensive English school, everything was packed, the huge pile of luggage in the hall, and they went to the airport, she and the twins, and her PA, and her personal trainer, and the two English nannies, and all the earpiece-wearing security men – from the window he watched the four-vehicle motorcade move away.
He was too shocked to try to stop her.
His throat was sore from shouting. His eyes were pink.
He was standing at the window, staring out.
‘What does she want?’ Lars asks.
He says, ‘The London house. The villa in St Barts. Money.’
‘How much money?’
‘I don’t know. Her lawyers are talking to mine.’
‘You’re not married?’ Lars says delicately.
‘No,’ Aleksandr says, sounding tired. ‘So what? We’ve been together fifteen years. We have the twins.’
‘How old are they now?’
‘Ten.’
There is a silence.
‘You have children?’ Aleksandr asks.
‘Yes,’ Lars says, surprised.
It is the first time, in all their years of a
ssociation, that Aleksandr has asked him about his family, has shown any interest in his life.
‘Yes,’ he says again. And then, trying to be friendly, ‘They are a little older than yours. Fifteen and twelve.’
‘Oh, I have older children,’ Aleksandr says. ‘I have been married twice, and divorced twice. The first divorce was okay, not too expensive. The second …’ He sighs heavily. ‘What am I going to do, Lars?’
Lars takes the question to be a practical one. He says, ‘To meet legal fees and other liabilities you will need to sell some assets. I advise you to settle all pending litigation now. The prospect of winning,’ he says, ‘has been materially diminished by last week’s judgment.’ He waits to see what Aleksandr will say.
Nothing. Staring at the sea, he seems to be thinking about something else.
‘To do that,’ Lars goes on, ‘to pay all outstanding fees and settle everything, you will need, as I said, about two hundred million sterling.’
He lets that sink in.
‘With luck,’ he says optimistically, ‘this yacht might fetch that on its own.’
‘No,’ Aleksandr says, evidently listening after all. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘A hundred and fifty?’ Lars suggests.
‘Maybe.’
‘So we need another fifty million,’ Lars says thoughtfully. ‘I think you must sell the Falcon,’ he says. ‘The overheads, I imagine, are very high.’
In fact, Lars does not need to imagine how high the overheads are: he established, some years ago, a trust in the Isle of Man to own and manage the jet and it eats several million pounds a year.
‘So, the jet?’
‘Okay,’ Aleksandr says, absent-mindedly.
‘I hope we will get twenty million,’ Lars says. ‘The market is pretty strong for that sort of aircraft these days.’
‘Okay.’
‘So we need another thirty million.’
Aleksandr says nothing.
‘The London house and the house in St Barts will go to Ksenia?’ Lars asks.
‘She wants them.’
‘And will she get them?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And money?’
‘She will want money,’ Aleksandr says.
‘You don’t know how much?’
‘No.’
‘Not more than ten million, I would say,’ Lars says. ‘She shouldn’t have more than ten million.’
Aleksandr, in his black silk shirt, just shrugs.
‘If you sell the house in Surrey,’ Lars says, ‘and the Barbaresco estate, you will be able to meet your outstanding liabilities and pay her ten million.’
Wind moves over the terrace, which someone is now mopping – an African woman in a white Europa-logoed polo shirt and tracksuit trousers, the uniform of the vessel’s menials, mopping the deck some distance from them.
The wind disturbs the surface of the sea, making it scintillate in places.
Aleksandr says, ‘And what does that leave me with?’
‘It leaves you,’ Lars says, looking at one of his scraps of paper, ‘with that stake in the Belarusian telco.’
‘Only that?’
‘Yes. It’s worth about twenty million sterling,’ Lars points out.
‘Twenty million?’ Aleksandr says vaguely.
‘Yes. And it pays a decent dividend. About five per cent. A million pounds a year, more or less. It is possible, I think,’ Lars jokes, ‘to live off that.’
A pause.
Then he says, no longer joking, ‘With appropriate tax arrangements.’
Lars himself, indeed, manages to live off not very much more than that, with appropriate tax arrangements.
Aleksandr does not laugh at Lars’s joke. He does not seem to have been listening. When he finally looks at him it’s as if he has forgotten what they were talking about. ‘You will stay for lunch, Lars?’ he asks.
They eat on the small terrace outside the private dining room – a table set for two. Mark and the young Vietnamese trainee steward wait on them. Aleksandr says he wants sushi. Sushi, unfortunately, is not available. Obviously disappointed, Alexander yells at Mark for a while, while Lars looks the other way. He looks at the sea – a wonderful dark blue, with here and there a foaming wave. In the end, they have grilled salmon with a fennel salad and new potatoes, and a bottle of very nice Pouilly-Fuissé, and Aleksandr tells Lars, forgetting that he already knows the story, about the time when he was in Ulaanbaatar and decided, at some point during the day, that he wanted sushi for his supper.
‘Now then,’ he says to Lars, ‘at that time, it was actually not possible to get a decent sushi in Ulaanbaatar. Maybe it’s different now, I don’t know.’
Trying to look amused, Lars nods.
‘So I said to Alain,’ Aleksandr says – Alain being a man whose job it was to make sure that Aleksandr always had whatever he wanted, wherever he was – ‘I said to Alain, “I want sushi tonight. Proper sushi, okay? Not some local shit, okay?”’
Lars tries to increase the intensity to his smile a notch or two – from wryly expectant, say, to definitely amused.
‘So you know what Alain does?’ Aleksandr asks him, as Mark, standing at his shoulder, pours more Pouilly-Fuissé.
Still smiling – and though he does in fact know what Alain does – Lars shakes his head, and pats his mouth with his napkin. He murmurs a word of thanks to Mark.
‘He phones Ubon in London,’ Aleksandr says. ‘You know that restaurant?’
‘Yes,’ says Lars.
‘He phones them and he orders something like … something like a thousand quid’s worth of sushi,’ Aleksandr says, ‘to take away.’
Lars’s eyebrows jump up politely.
‘Then he arranges for someone to take the sushi to Farnborough, and has it flown, by private jet,’ Aleksandr emphasises, ‘to Ulaanbaatar.’ He says, ‘It gets there about eight o’clock, local time, just when I want to eat. So Alain is very pleased with himself. And I say to him, “This is excellent sushi, Alain. Where did you get it?” And he tells me from Ubon in London. And I say to him, “London? Are you out of your mind? It would have been quicker to get it from Japan!”’
Lars manages a quiet laugh.
Aleksandr tells him, quite seriously, ‘That was in the newspapers.’
‘Oh?’
‘The most expensive takeaway in history, they said it was.’
Quietly, Lars laughs again.
‘They said it was fifty thousand pounds. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true.’
At that time – not so much any more – Aleksandr kept everything the newspapers printed about him in a large scrapbook. For a while there was quite a lot of material – he was known as the ‘Emperor of Iron’ and his lifestyle and wealth were a matter of fascination to them. It was someone’s job, full-time – an attractive young woman, just out of Oxford – to manage the scrapbook.
‘I should have put some money into commercial property in Ulaanbaatar,’ Aleksandr says wistfully. ‘I thought about it.’
‘It would have been a successful investment,’ Lars says, sipping wine. He does not mention that he himself owns a small amount of stock in an investment trust, managed by an acquaintance of his, specialising in Mongolian property – one of the best-performing assets in the world, the last few years.
Enzo joins them.
Aleksandr had asked to see him. He says, ‘We’re going to Monaco, Enzo. I’ve offered Lars a lift home.’
The offer had been made earlier in the meal.
It is what Lars had hoped for.
It is why he has his suitcases with him.
Though it does mean, for most of the afternoon and evening, listening to Aleksandr talk. Aleksandr does not seem to be able to stop talking now.
Over dinner, he talks about Russian history, a subject he is obsessed with. He seems tired, as he explains how Russia ended the twentieth century exactly where it was at the start – a somewhat shambolic authoritarian state lagging behi
nd Western Europe and America in terms of economic and social development, its natural wealth held by a small number of families, with a stunted middle class, and most of the population living in sullen fatalistic poverty. The whole Communist experiment, with all its hope and suffering, had passed like a storm, he says, and left things exactly as they were.
Lars nods at that appraisal.
On the other side of the table, Aleksandr is slouched in a fog of cigar smoke. He is talking about his own attempt in the 1990s to transform Russia, as he tells it, into a liberal free-market democracy, about how that failed.
They are inside, in the small dining room where the smoke hangs heavily in the air.
On the table is a large plate of chocolates. They have an artisanal misshapenness, a dusting of pure cocoa powder. Lars has already eaten two. He says, wondering whether to have another now, or wait until Mark arrives with the coffee, ‘It was a missed opportunity.’
‘It was a historical tragedy,’ Aleksandr tells him.
Historical – his favourite word.
Lars knows that Aleksandr thinks of himself as a historical figure. He likes to talk about the sweep of history as one who knows it at first hand. He had once asked him, ‘How do you think history will see me?’
Lars had not known what to say. After a moment’s hesitation, he had fallen back on a hackneyed quip: ‘It depends who writes the history.’
It was then – in Davos, a few years ago – that Aleksandr had told him about his plan to write a monumental multi-volume account of his own life and times.
He has not, as far as Lars knows, started it yet.
He is talking about his uncle now. Lars has heard about this man before. The KGB officer – a man who sent people to their deaths in the purges of the thirties and forties. And yet – Lars knows the story – someone whom Aleksandr admires.
‘When I was a kid I thought he was just an old fart,’ Aleksandr says. ‘Old-fashioned – you know.’
‘Yes,’ Lars says, trying to seem interested.
‘He wore an old-fashioned hat,’ Aleksandr says.
‘Yes?’
‘He had a shit haircut. That’s what I thought about him. Later I understood he had iron in his soul. He was strong. When the wind changed, in the fifties, he was in a tough position.’
‘I’m sure …’
