Hot Siberian

by Gerald A. Browne

  They went up.

  CHAPTER

  24

  AN ENORMOUS SIGH OF RELIEF FROM VIVIAN. “FAREWELL to this place!”

  Nikolai agreed with a reflective nod.

  “And never to return!”

  “It wasn’t very good to us, was it?” Nikolai said glumly. He increased the pressure of his grip on the steering wheel.

  “Don’t start that again,” Vivian warned. “If you go grim on me again I’ll get out and walk.”

  Nikolai pulled the corners of his mouth up into a phony smile and did a few fast blinks to make his eyes look happy for her.

  “Russians,” she muttered, scrunched down so her chin was on her chest. “Give them an ounce of the dismals and they take a ton.”

  Nikolai believed the loss of nearly ninety million dollars would weigh on anyone more than an ounce, but he didn’t say anything.

  It was Saturday morning and drizzling. They were in the rented BMW headed west on N-617. Since Thursday and the Nagel fiasco they had remained in the suite at the Rivierenhof. Vivian had been ready to leave Thursday, but Nikolai got stuck in a chair in the sitting room. He wouldn’t budge, just sat there in his anger and regret. The scene with Pulver and Nagel was like a loop across the front of his mind. He couldn’t stop it from playing and replaying. He kept seeing his chance meeting with the slob Loodsen, at the Diamond Club. No wonder no one there wanted anything to do with Loodsen. They knew him for what he was, a stukach for the System. How slickly he’d been taken in by Loodsen and steered to Nagel. Loodsen with his poor-me and bullying-brother-in-law act. Loodsen probably did nothing but hang around the club every day on the lookout for anyone wanting to deal contraband diamonds. Churcher had often boasted about the covert network the System had going throughout the trade on every level. Nikolai had suspected that was an exaggeration, a purposely nourished rumor intended to keep diamond dealers on edge and in line. Now he knew it to be fact. Hindsight was indeed the informer of wisdom.

  How gullible he’d been, Nikolai thought. Shamefully gullible. He could hear Loodsen and Nagel arguing their well-rehearsed lines about whether the diamonds were from Botswana or Namibia, knowing all the while they were Aikhal goods. And he, sitting there in Nagel’s office in the euphoria of imminent Western-size wealth. What a comfortable, elated feeling it had been, though, to have all those millions within his grasp. A sort of enchantment, he realized now, a levitation. It had put a remarkable soft edge and diffusion on everything. How swiftly he’d become used to it, the prospect of never again having to ask the price, indulging old wants and new expensive impetuosities, buying for Vivian, being able to look straight across at Archer. He’d given quite a lot of thought to the dispelling of the castelike awkwardness between himself and Archer, had imagined them giving each other stock-market tips, things like that.

  What could have been.

  Now what was he left with?

  Painful consequences.

  The System now had a solid case against Almazjuvelirexport. No longer mere allegations, but proof. With that advantage Churcher would be anxious to get to Savich. Nikolai imagined Savich’s dismay when Churcher broke it to him. Savich would soon realize the no-win position Nikolai had caused. No matter that Savich deserved none of the blame, he’d have to suffer it, lose face, and eat as much crow as Churcher heaped on his plate. It would also be personally embarrassing for Savich, because he’d put such stock in Nikolai. How could he begin to explain to Savich the links of circumstances that had brought this on? Even if he was able to again get the minister’s ear and told the truth from beginning to end it would still appear that he’d stolen five thousand carats of finished Aikhal goods.

  He’d lost a friend, Nikolai thought sadly.

  What was more, he’d lost a country.

  He couldn’t possibly return to Russia. If he went back the endlessly repeated question would be: Comrade, from whom did you get those diamonds? And he didn’t know the answer. Another question would be: Comrade, why were you trying to sell the diamonds? That he could answer, but not without surely condemning himself to being tied to a rung on a post so he couldn’t move and spoil the aims of those whose fingers would squeeze and send six hunks of metal tearing into his heart; or, at the least, to being transported somewhere so cold it didn’t deserve a name, where, underfed and improperly clothed, he would die of exposure.

  Like it or not, his only choice now was the West. If it would have him. What would he do for a living? He was unavoidably up against that now. He remembered Grandfather Maksim telling him about how after the Revolution Russian émigrés who were princes had worked as waiters in Paris restaurants. And they were the fortunate ones. Many dukes had literally gone begging, mere countesses took to the street. Well, he wasn’t that bad off. He might put to use his linguistic talents, interpret or translate or do correspondence. His marketing background was too narrow to be considered valuable. Except, of course, to the System. Churcher would hire him in a second as an adviser. He knew the confidential ins and outs of the Soviet diamond interests. He knew, for example, that the Soviet Union was hoarding its large stones, squirreling away the really fine big ones for the day when the System might decide it no longer needed to rely on the Soviet Union as a primary source. If, for example, there ever really should be a major Australian find. He knew what the current Soviet inventory of gem quality amounted to, practically within a hundred carats. He knew the exact number of diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes discovered yet left untapped in the Yakut region. He knew precisely how many such pipes the Soviet geologists’ projections said remained to be found. What he knew would make Churcher not sleep, would make every owner of diamonds in the world realize he or she had overpaid for a scarcity that did not exist—indeed, Churcher would hire him, keep him under wraps, pay him well for being an informer.

  He’d rather be a waiter.

  It was at this impasse that his thoughts looped and he recommenced with his “Russian” conversation.

  At first Vivian had tried nonchalance. “Tant pis,” she said, “it was only ninety million.” She went about brushing her hair as though nothing of all that much importance had occurred. “You’ll probably lose more than that three or four times. Most men who are worth anything do.”

  When nonchalance didn’t work she tried to tempt him out of it. First with sweets. She ordered about a dozen of the most elaborate creations room service could come up with. Peaches in kirsch, gâteau millefeuille, blancmange, profiteroles, and petits fours. Nikolai just sat there looking at them. She spoon-fed him vanilla Bavarian cream and he opened his mouth for her and swallowed it. He even smiled, but just fleetingly. That having failed, she tried to tempt him out of it with herself. She quick-changed into silk tap panties with camisole, without camisole, camisole without tap panties. A peach-colored teddy, a turquoise chemise. She pretended to be tending to her toenails with one leg up, she dropped some bobby pins on purpose so she could retrieve them stiff-legged with her bottom toward him. She lay on the sofa in an absolutely-alone-time sort of position, lay on the floor and did certain calisthenics, including pelvic lifts, wasted an entire repertoire of such enticing inadvertencies. When, Friday night, she put on a pair of tight antelope gloves and massaged him here and there without getting even a tiny spasm of response, she’d just about had it. “God, but you’re shitty company,” she said. “I’m going out.” She dressed hurriedly, thinking any second he’d prevent her from doing so. She didn’t get even a “Where?” or a “Be careful” or a “When will you be back?” from him. At that point she was honestly angrier than she wanted to admit. But not angry enough. She gathered up her purse and went to the foyer. He was faced away, still in that chair. She opened the door, making sure the sound of the knob turning and the latch retracting was distinct. She remained in the foyer but slammed the door as though she’d gone. Hearing the unequivocalness of that, he’d rush to catch her, stop her, hold her. After two long minutes of just standing there waiting she came back into the sitting ro
om, flung her purse in his direction, and went to bed. With all her clothes on.

  That morning, Saturday morning, she’d been awakened by a sound that resembled bubbles gurgling up to a watery surface. Whatever it was, it was coming from the bathroom. She got up, looked in, and saw Nikolai seated nude on the edge of the bidet. He had both hands over his mouth, trying to stifle the laughter that was coming up out of him. He hadn’t wanted to disturb her, but now that she was up he removed his hands from his mouth and let it come full force. It was an all-out belly laugh. Her first thought, because she was still half asleep, was that he’d gone mad, and how would he be able to hug her when he’d be hugging himself in a straitjacket? But then between outbursts he looked at her and she knew the siege had been broken. Thank the angels! No more the mope, he was seeing the amusing side of it all. Perhaps he’d at last learned from her that it was best to allow money to have its slippery way, that it wasn’t even necessary for it to go in one hand and out the other, it could sometimes go right through any hand that tried to clutch it, so one might just as well accept it for the chicane that it was. His laugh was infectious. She caught it. She sat on the toilet next to him on the bidet and simultaneously began laughing and peeing. Soon they were both so weakened from laughter they tumbled from their perches, went to their knees on the rectangular bath-mat, and ended up like a couple of supplicating Muslims, but facing each other rather than Mecca.

  Now on Belgian National Route 617 they were going seventy through the cool drizzle. Nikolai turned on the de-mister to volatilize the ghosts that their warmths had attracted to the windows. To demonstrate that he was still in high spirits he hummed a bit and whistled a bit and sang snatches of a Noel Coward refrain from Set to Music:

  “I’ve been to a marvelous party,

  Elise made an entrance with May,

  You’d never have guessed

  From her fisherman’s vest

  That her bust had been whittled away.

  Poor Lulu got fried on chianti

  And talked about esprit de corps.

  Maurice made a couple of passes at Gus

  And Freddie, who hates any kind of a fuss,

  Did half the Big Apple and twisted his truss,

  I couldn’t have liked it more!”

  Nikolai sang the last several lines with arch facial expressions and appropriate drollness. Vivian had never seen him more un-Russian. They had often sung Noel Cowards to pass the time while driving and tried to stump each other with obscure Coward lines. Vivian knew this one well but didn’t join in, just enjoyed being Nikolai’s captive audience. As a form of applause she smiled her best smile and thought how fortunate she was to be able to love him so much. Should she mention that counting today she was eight days overdue? She decided now wasn’t the best time to tuck that into his carry. Quite possibly he might already know. All he had to do was figure the number of days since her last period, and he was the sort of man who might. Anyway, if she couldn’t make it a topic, the least they could do was celebrate.

  She broke out one of the two bottles of wine she’d had room service bring up at the last minute that morning. The most expensive wine on the Rivierenhof’s list, Pétrus ’43. She thought what the hell, as long as she was going to sign for the hotel bill using her Visa card, and as long as the Visa people were going to have to dun her interminably for payment, she might as well stretch the splurge that much more. To open the wine she used the corkscrew she’d “borrowed” from the hotel tray the wine had been brought on. She poured the wine into goblets also “borrowed” from the same source. So Nikolai could keep his mind on the road, she clinked their goblets for him and handed him his.

  “Nazdorovye!” she toasted with growling Russian fervor.

  “Cheers,” he rejoined, very British.

  They gulped.

  She propped the bottle between her thighs and held it there with pressure while she dug into her carryall for the napkin-wrapped baguette from their hotel breakfast. She broke off a hunk of the bread, dunked it into her wine, and swiftly, to avoid dripping, extended it to Nikolai’s mouth. He barely opened fast enough.

  “Blood and flesh,” she said, and after saying that realized what would have been more fitting. “Blood or flesh,” she revised, and popped some wine-sogged bread into her mouth.

  “You give good communion,” Nikolai remarked.

  “So the showgirl said to the bishop,” she quipped.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go down to Deauville?”

  That had been the original plan: after financial success in Antwerp, as many days as they wanted in Deauville. A suite at the Golf, afternoon champagne at the Bar du Ciro’s, the casino each night. It didn’t matter that it was slightly off-season. They wouldn’t ever let social timing dictate, none of that “It’s August and we simply must be in Antibes” crap.

  “We wouldn’t have to stay in Deauville,” Nikolai suggested. “We could drive right through to Le Touquet and catch the air ferry to Lydd.”

  “No,” Vivian decided, careful not to sound disappointed. “Let’s go to the tulips.” A while back she’d read a travel-magazine article on Holland and had mentally put the tulip fields of Alsmeer and Lisse into her “perhaps someday” file. Now, if Nikolai had asked, she would have sworn that the travel angels had guided her to that article, because what side trip could have been more convenient—and less expensive? Less than a day’s drive away, and, no doubt, bucolic accommodations. Seeing all those tulips was exactly the sort of parenthetical distraction they needed to recount their blessings, she reasoned. She took a road map from the door pocket. Earlier she’d folded the map to make it more manageable and marked the best route with a blue eyeliner pencil. “We go north when we come to Sixty,” she said.

  It was at that moment Nikolai first noticed the Saab, a maroon late-model sedan. He merely saw it in his rear-view mirror about a hundred yards behind, and thought nothing special of it. Within a few miles there was Route 60. Nikolai turned off. So did the maroon Saab. And only minutes later at the border, while getting passed through Dutch customs, Nikolai looked back and saw the same Saab pull over to the side of the road, which seemed a bit strange. It occurred to him that perhaps the reason it had pulled over was so it could keep its distance, thus preventing him from a closer look. Then again, the reason could be as mundane as taking a moment to make sure papers, passports, car registration, and so on were in order. Nikolai believed he accepted that explanation, but as he drove away from customs he couldn’t refrain from glancing back. The Saab had just then driven up to the customs station, right on cue.

  Over the seventeen miles of minor road from the border to Perkpolder the maroon Saab made Nikolai increasingly uneasy. He pressed the BMW up to ninety. The Saab did the same. He slowed abruptly to thirty. So did the Saab, all the while keeping its distance.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Vivian asked.

  “Just fooling around,” Nikolai fibbed.

  “You’ve sloshed wine on me.” Her white shorts were stained at the crotch, and there were red splatters on her white cotton knit cardigan. “Maybe I should drive.”

  He apologized.

  “Okay,” she said. “But no more of that.”

  By the time they arrived at the ferry landing in Perkpolder, Nikolai was convinced they were being followed, but he still kept it to himself. It was the System, he thought, some of Pulver’s snoops. Keeping him under surveillance for a while, being routinely diligent after Thursday’s contretemps. Well, he’d let them know he was aware of them, if they hadn’t already gathered as much from his driving. The ferry was probably something they hadn’t counted on. It presented them with an impasse. They could either come aboard and let him have a closer look or wait for the next ferry an hour from now and lose him.

  Nikolai paid the required fare and drove across the treaded steel ramp and on into the belly of the ferry. He was directed to steer the BMW into a barely adequate space and pull it up until it came in touch with the bumper of
the car ahead. Vehicles were being packed in all around. A scarred-up van got in directly behind the BMW, so when Nikolai looked in the rear-view mirror all he could see was some of its grill and windshield. The side-view mirror presented him only a raking perspective of various wet metals and glass. It was claustrophobic. He opened the car door. The car next over was so close it was a squeeze for him to get out. “I’m for some air,” he told Vivian and assumed from her facial expression that she preferred to remain where she was.

  Standing, he had a much better view of the cars jammed in behind. He scanned them, fought the reflections coming off them, and finally made out the roof of the maroon Saab eight cars back in the same line as the BMW. He went aft, sidling along the narrow space between cars. When he reached the Saab he glanced deliberately down and in. Its driver was a woman, an attractive blond in her twenties, a fair-complexioned Polish or Estonian sort. That was so unexpected Nikolai failed to get as good a look as he wanted at the others in the car. He only got the impression there were others, didn’t even know how many, guessed two. He continued going aft until he was outside on the deck. The ferry was already under way, about a hundred yards out of its slip. The drizzle had stopped. The leaden clouds were breaking up here and there, allowing blue. The surface of the Westerschelde was scuffy. Nikolai stood at the thick chain that was strung across the edge of the ferry’s on-and-off ramp, serving in place of a rail. He looked down into the roil of the wake and experienced a moment of hypnotic fascination. It seemed to be asking to be thrown someone it could drown.

  That brought to mind the Lake Geneva incident Pulver had made a point of that day in Churcher’s office—the errant dealer who hadn’t known how to swim. Pulver was too well informed about the way the man had died. In fact, now that Nikolai recalled it seemed obvious Pulver had insinuated by his insensitive tone and choice of words that he himself was responsible for the man’s death. It had been a macabre subject then, but now Nikolai realized it had also been meant as a warning. Perhaps these people of Pulver’s were not merely following, he thought. It wasn’t unimaginable that they might have more ominous intentions.