At one o’clock he was shown up to the room that had been readied for him. A bath had been drawn; a dribble of hot from the spout was keeping it at perfect temperature. A swift dip was Nikolai’s intent, but when he was in up to his chin he relaxed and thought of how on the way up he’d seen Savich’s five graduated pieces of Morabito luggage standing in the entry hall. Black with brass fittings. So elegant and obviously expensive. Wasn’t that a bit too blatant a flaunt? or was it part of the new approach, the attempt to impress the West with Russian taste and sophistication? How pleasant it would be, Nikolai thought, to make the trip to Paris with Savich, to be limousined everywhere, to be privy to Savich’s high-level dealings, to have dinner with him at Grand Vefour. They would stroll the Place Vendôme and Avenue de l’Opera, stroll and talk women, perhaps enjoy together a choicely located table for the midnight show at Le Crazy Horse. Be satisfied with the personal rapport and contact already allowed, he told himself. If only Irina, his mother, could see him now, he thought. How proud she would be. And surprised. Even she, with all her ambitions for him, had never imagined him in Minister Savich’s bathtub. If Irina, like Grandfather Maksim, was hovering around in some immaterial state, Nikolai was sure she was beaming.
He went to bed. The bed linens received him like an immaculate envelope. The pillow covering couldn’t possibly have been fresher under the press of his cheek. He turned onto his side, his usual off-to-sleep position, although he didn’t think he was anywhere close to going under. On the nightstand was a bronze-and-ivory figure of a woman leaping uninhibitedly, an Art Deco piece. The downcast lamplight sparkled off the tiny various jewels of her cloche headpiece. They were hypnotic.
It seemed as though he’d merely blinked, or at most closed his eyes for a moment. The jeweled cloche was still glittering. The lamp was still on. But his watch told him it was morning, nine o’clock. He hadn’t slept so soundly in ages. It was a good sign. He was regenerated enough to deal with anything. He got up, shaved, dressed, and went downstairs, not expecting breakfast but glad when Do Kien directed him to a table by the window of a room flooded with undiffused morning sun. He wasn’t really hungry. It was just that he didn’t feel ready to leave. The table was set for one. Savich’s luggage was gone from the entry hall. The apartment seemed emptier. Asked if he preferred coffee or tea, Nikolai said he’d have both. He sat in the quiet brightness, and while he gazed out and down at the mainly dun-colored shoulders of shorter Moscow buildings, he considered the alternatives.
His circumstances, he realized, were unchanged, although they seemed to have a different shape and shade. Savich hadn’t given him any straightforward advice, hadn’t said he ought to do this or that, hadn’t imposed his greater experience. But it seemed he had. One thing for certain, Nikolai thought: he wasn’t voluntarily going to suffer one or two years of Valkov. Nor, for that matter, could he remain in London and keep away from Vivian. The alternative, and what Savich had more or less suggested, was that he leave things as they were, enjoy his arrangement with Vivian for as long as it lasted, not look ahead to the pitfalls, regardless of how obvious, deep, and maiming they might be. Could he return to London and go coasting along like that, taking the moment and telling tomorrow to fuck off? Honestly, he doubted it. In his love for Vivian there was no room for such precariousness. However, he thought, how easily he would be able to make room for security.
The dilemma had been on his mind for so long that by now it had distilled to a simple contradiction: money was essential to Vivian, and as a Soviet citizen he had no money, literally none, would never have. And that was that. Savich was right about his having thought of defecting and taking a job in the West. However, that wouldn’t solve everything. On several occasions Nikolai had scanned the employment advertisements in the London Times and been grateful that he didn’t have to contend with the roil of such competition. Outstanding as his marketing abilities might be in the Soviet Union, they were by no means exceptional in the West, where doing business for profit was the very fuel of existence. Besides, even if he landed one of the better jobs, for example that of marketing director for a leading export-import firm, the salary he could expect, the forty thousand pounds per year, wouldn’t be adequate. Forty thousand was about the average value of one of Archer’s ugly gifts. There was, of course, the option of going to work for the System, of giving Churcher the advantage of all he knew about the Soviet diamond operation: confidential yield figures, projections, negotiating tactics, and so on. Churcher would go for that, would secretly use him and pay him dearly. For a while, anyway.
Diamonds, Nikolai thought.
The little contraband pile he’d been shown recently by Churcher would be enough. Not even a fistful. He’d thought of diamonds as a commodity for such a long while he’d lost his personal appreciation of their cash value. Now, however, he imagined a replay of the scene in Churcher’s office, only this time Churcher and Pulver went into a state of suspended animation, froze in midgesture, while he, Nikolai, casually folded up the briefke containing the eight hundred carats of D-flawless Aikhal goods, pocketed it, and sat back, giving the cue for Churcher and Pulver to reactivate but with a total lapse of memory regarding the diamonds. Churcher offered tea and small-talked that Mrs. Churcher was coming into town that evening for dinner and the theater, and Pulver stiffly but cordially excused himself, saying he had some things to tend to. And there he, Nikolai, sat, just minutes from walking away with more than fourteen million dollars’ worth.
Some fantasy.
It was followed immediately by another set at the installation in Aikhal. He, Nikolai, there on a field trip, had unrestricted run of the place, so it wasn’t unusual for him to be wandering around the finishing area where the electronically controlled machines were cutting and polishing stones at the rate of a dozen a minute and depositing them into a traylike receptacle. The cutters on duty were blind to him as he took a pinch or two of diamonds every now and then from each machine’s output, just dropped them into his shirt pocket and felt them accumulate into a bulge. One thousand D-flawless one-caraters, unmissed, to be easily carried away because he as a ministry representative was never searched or questioned, turned into eighteen million dollars.
It could happen, he told himself as he came back to the reality of the indefectible early June sky over Moscow. It is happening, something else inside him contravened. Perhaps it wasn’t being pulled off in the slick way he’d just imagined, but someone in Aikhal was helping himself (and, no doubt, others) to finished goods, and the ideal spot for that along the chain of diamond production was the moment they’d been cut. The skimming of a few pinches at a time from the trays on a regular basis, the accumulating of pinches until they amounted to hundreds (thousands?) of carats, and then the transporting of them through the fine sieve of security—that explained the extra lots of finished Aikhal goods that had been showing up on the market. It seemed Churcher had valid reason to complain, although he was undoubtedly off in pointing his accusations at Almazjevelirexport.
Should he inform Savich of this suspicion? Nikolai wondered. But if it proved out, wouldn’t it be viewed as a blemish for Savich, proof of incompetency that his rivals could use against him? And what would he, Nikolai, get out of it other than being distrusted as a stukach? A medal maybe?Shove their medals, Nikolai thought.
Anyway, corruption, maybe not on this grand a scale, but nonetheless corruption, was an unmentioned additional benefit known to come with certain jobs. The fellow who worked in the slaughter house was expected to sell steaks and roasts on the side. What about the caviar packers who had for several years been putting herring labels on tins containing the best beluga so they could ship those tins to the West and pocket the substantial difference? Stealing, great and trivial, was often what made conditions bearable. It had grown into the way of life, and only those who were supposed to get caught got caught.
Thus, Nikolai found it difficult to blame whoever was skimming diamonds from Aikhal. They had to be audacious, cr
afty, resourceful, and, according to Churcher’s numbers, greedy. To be honest, Nikolai thought, he envied them. Would that he were in a position to pull off such a thing. Just one packet of goods such as he’d seen on Churcher’s desk would solve everything for him. When was he scheduled to go to Aikhal again? If the Afghanistan emerald drama was only in Valkov’s mind, perhaps there’d be a field trip to Aikhal come September. But that was four months away, and even then, when he was in Aikhal, what would he do—sneak around and filch a few carats? It certainly wouldn’t be as easy as he’d fantasized, helping himself to all the carats he wanted from the machines.
That thought was the hinge that swung open an obscure gate of his memory, allowing a certain recollection to emerge. It didn’t come shooting out and strike him like a bolt. Rather, it swashed oozily around in his head for a moment and then surfaced. He remembered something that had occurred when he was in Aikhal last year, last September. A man, a sharp-faced, wild-eyed sort, had stopped him in the corridor, sort of cornered him and blurted out a string of whispered words so rapidly they didn’t make sense. Nikolai had caught only fragments of what the man said, gathered vaguely that it had to do with someone stealing. His thought at the time was that the poor fellow was suffering from being too long in Siberia. There had also been the distraction of the man’s terrible breath, a foul combination of alcohol, garlic, and dental caries. Nikolai had silently endured the man to have him sooner gone. He’d immediately forgotten the incident. He wished now that he’d hung on the man’s every word, been impressed enough to have arranged to discuss the matter further with him. Why was he wishing that? Nikolai asked himself. What difference would it have made? He had the sensation that his mind was detached, on its own, out of his control, intent on constructing a nefarious recourse. To that end it presented him with another detail of that encounter in the corridor at Aikhal: the man had furtively shoved a sheet of paper in among those Nikolai was carrying. Nikolai hadn’t ever bothered to look at it.
Chances were it contained the information that he now admitted he wanted very much to know.
CHAPTER
19
UPON HIS RETURN TO LENINGRAD THAT AFTERNOON, NIKOLAI went directly to the offices of Almazjuvelirexport. He arrived there just as everyone was leaving for the day. He ran into Valkov, who was on his way out.
“You are on holiday,” Valkov said.
“Which means I can be wherever I want.”
“I suppose.” Valkov exaggerated his indifference. “Were you aware that Savich has been trying to reach you?”
“Really?”
“It appears you’ve gotten yourself in hot water.”
“Let it boil,” Nikolai quipped.
Valkov decided to smile. “We should get together some evening.” He was always saying that very thing to people he never had any intention of socializing with, as though it camouflaged his dislike.
Nikolai knew that and jumped right on it. “Tomorrow night.We’ll have dinner. I’ll pick you up at eight.”
“Tomorrow night is impossible,” Valkov said automatically and walked away.
The place was deserted. Nikolai hurried down the hall to his modest office. Nothing was changed, not a speck. The late daylight glancing through the window hit upon the surface of his desk and showed where he’d disturbed the dust last time he’d been there. He went to the gray four-drawer metal filing cabinet in the corner. He knew he needn’t bother to look in the top drawer, for that was where he kept, well organized, his scant cull from the thousands of memorandums and bulletins that flowed at him. If anywhere, the single sheet of paper that had now become so important for him to find would be in one of the other three drawers, which were jammed carelessly with all sorts of written and printed material. He had a vague recollection of having deposited whatever he’d brought back from Aikhal in one of those drawers. However, he also had an equally vague recollection that that was one of the times when he’d decided not to add to the accumulation and had just dumped it all into the trash basket.
He pulled open the second drawer down, removed everything from it, every scrap, piled it on his desk. He went through all that carefully and then got into the disordered contents of the next drawer. About halfway through that pile he came upon it. Hidden appropriately between printouts showing the gem quality yield from the Aikhal installation last year. It was an ordinary work report. Scrawled on the back of it was “Prague: Konviktska 16/ Potlaska 34” and “Paris: 131 rue de Paradis,” apparently three addresses. Also “Kislov,” which Nikolai took to be a name, perhaps the name of the fellow who had slipped this information to him.
To check on that, Nikolai went to the nearest computer in the accounting office just down the hall. He asked the computer for the listing of personnel assigned to Aikhal, and on the display screen appeared names in alphabetical order. If indeed that fellow had been Kislov, Nikolai thought, he’d phone him at the installation on some pretense and possibly get more out of him. Nikolai skipped quickly to the Ks. There was no Kislov listed. He asked the computer if it had anything ever on Kislov. It told him in a few words that Kislov, Josep, had accidentally frozen to death last January 12, New Year’s Eve. (Not divulged was that Kislov’s sister in Ulyanovsk, when notified, had wanted nothing to do with his remains. So the body, in a heavy plastic bag, had been placed in a wire basket and horizontally suspended from the understructure of the installation, close up and in a spot where even the highest leaping wolves couldn’t get to it. There it had remained, like a side of meat frozen through, until just a week before, when the ground was believed to be sufficiently thawed. Still, the two men assigned to do the burying had to chip and hack after digging down less than a foot. They considered it a waste of energy and left Kislov’s corpse shallowly covered, susceptible to sniffs even a mile away.)
Nikolai got a shiver.
Something told him not to believe the word “accidentally.”
He asked the computer if it had anything on the addresses, the two in Prague and the one in Paris. They meant as much to it as they did to him. What nebulous leads they were, Nikolai thought. Not much to go on but better than nothing.
He went home. Lev and his most recent pretty Finn, Ula, weren’t there, but the remnant odor of their lovemaking was distinct and not unpleasant in the air. After about forty breaths, Nikolai became acclimated to it, couldn’t smell it anymore. It caused him to think differently of those times Archer had dropped by at Vivian’s apartment shortly after he and Vivian had made a lot of love. Archer, amiable as ever though hurting each time he inhaled.
The light was on in the kitchen. Nikolai went in. He felt the teakettle. The burner beneath it wasn’t on but the kettle was still warm. Lev and Ula must have left only a short while ago and apparently they’d be returning soon, for Ula’s handbag was on the table with an exposed pink lipstick and several other messy-looking makeup items out of it. Nikolai had thought he’d discuss with Lev what he was getting into. Lev, with his black-market dealings in hard currency, knew a bit about the underside of things. No doubt he’d try to dissuade Nikolai, and that would be a turnabout after all the times Nikolai had urged Lev not to take such dangerous chances. When Lev found out how determined he was he’d do the next-best concerned thing: contribute helpful suggestions. And the more he suggested the more likely it was he’d want to take part. Sharing the risk would lighten it.
Nikolai waited an hour and a half. He changed, packed a few things, and took a flight back to Moscow. During the two-hour layover there he sat on a hard, ass-shaped plastic seat in the waiting area not really reading On the Eve but rather trying to adjust to the sense that he’d entered another dimension from which he was viewing everything slightly off-register. It was, he realized, a symptom of his now being committed to thievery, albeit secondhand. It was like being on the way to the front of a personal war. Better not to think of Vivian so much, he told himself. She might be an imperiling distraction. Wouldn’t that be ironic—if at a crucial moment he got killed because
his mind was on her.
It was ten after four in the morning when Czech State Airlines Flight 312 landed him at Ruzne Airport, Prague. First thing after coming out of passport control he exchanged some of his money for korunas. He hadn’t made a hotel reservation. A tourist folder he’d read on the plane gave the Intercontinental an A-deluxe rating, so he had a taxi take him there. He walked into the lobby and to the registration counter as though he expected to be expected. The registration clerk recognized the hundred-koruna look in his eyes and cordially accepted his hundred-koruna handshake and only minutes later Nikolai was the registered occupant of a front room on the sixth floor. He hung his jacket and tie in the lonely closet, took off his shoes and paired them partly under the foot of the bed, zipped open his suitcase but did not remove anything from it. Needing, for ease, to get more acquainted with the space that now contained him, he went around opening drawers. There was no hospitality really in the blankness of the hotel stationery or down the printed laundry checklist that included every possible wearable, soilable, washable thing. The almost-used-up message pad in the bedstand drawer was accompanied by a stubby pencil, entirely pointless, worn down to its wood.
Nikolai called on a reserve of spirit to counter depression. He stood at the window and saw dawn getting underway, the sky steel-blue to mauve, rather funereal. “Prague,” Nikolai said aloud disdainfully, and drew the drapes. He went to the bed and dropped himself face up across it. Perhaps, he thought, he should remain awake, take the day that was almost already here. He reached for the room-service menu, held it above him. It seemed that every other word was “dumplings.” He chose sleep.
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