“What he is doing for them, you think?”
“My best guess would be he’d be looking into money laundering, bank fraud.”
“But EisenerBank is Switzerland, not fucking America.”
“Maybe he’s looking for the Larrimer money. In any case, he probably knows about you.”
“But have you seen him? He is fucking old man!”
“Maybe so. But if I were you, I’d be careful. And about the accountant, Robert Feather: The FBI can’t find him either. He’s gone missing.”
“Yes,” said Dimitri. “So now is just old man is problem.”
The air hostess brought Dimitri a big glass of iced vodka and some beluga caviar. He decided the movies were all crap. In ten hours he would change planes in Moscow; in less than twelve he would be back in Chelyabinsk with no progress to report. The money was as gone as it had ever been.
Dimitri gazed out at the night sky. The full moon shone on the shield of clouds passing beneath them. This Morgon guy was definitely on the list of people to be dealt with. First Usher, then Morgon, then Larrimer. He needed them alive until he got Larrimer’s money. Maybe Morgon would lead him there. He just had to figure out how to play the guy. Just the thought of Larrimer stealing his money put Dimitri in a rage all over again. “Fucking crook!” he said and slammed his fist on the armrest.
The woman in the seat across the aisle from Dimitri jumped.
“Sorry,” he said. “Is business. Bad business.” Dimitri was sure he would feel better once he was home.
Chelyabinsk was far to the east of Moscow and protected by the Ural Mountains to the west, which is why, during the buildup to the Second World War, it became a center of weapons manufacturing. Chelyabinsk produced so many Katyusha rocket launchers and T-34 tanks that the city came to be known as Tankograd. After the war, Chelyabinsk and the surrounding area became a nuclear weapons production center, and as the Cold War heated up, so did the manufacture of atomic bombs in and around Chelyabinsk.
Sergei and Irina Adropov had grown up in Kasli, a small town near Chelyabinsk. Like most of their neighbors, they worked in the Mayak nuclear fuel processing plant. Weapons were built with a great sense of urgency and a minimal regard for safety, so a disaster was all but inevitable. The explosion of a nuclear waste facility, when it came, propelled massive amounts of radioactive waste into the atmosphere, which then rained down on the surrounding country. A large region, including the villages of Kasli and Mayak, were rendered uninhabitable.
The area was evacuated, but it was too late to make a difference for many. Hundreds had died in the explosion and in the following days, and now the slow and agonizing death of many others from radiation poisoning commenced. Sergei was among the afflicted. He was moved to the hospital in Chelyabinsk, and Irina moved with him. The region around Chelyabinsk was shut off from visitors, and a veil of official secrecy fell over the area and was not lifted until nearly fifty years later.
Sergei lay in bed in the hospital, dozing or hallucinating from the drugs he was given. “I smell death on myself,” he said. He held his arm against his nose and inhaled deeply. “Can you smell it?” He stretched his bluish, thin arm toward Irina. Or he said, “I am glowing. Turn out the light and see.” Irina switched off the light. “Do you see?” he said. “See the green glow?”
“I don’t see anything, Sergei,” she said. But she knew he was dying. Irina was three months pregnant at the time.
The doctors at the Lenin Hospital Clinic were not hopeful about the condition of the child. “Radiation sickness is in your blood and bones,” they told her, “and it will be in your child’s bones too.” Irina prayed to the Blessed Virgin. And when her baby boy was born, he was not only healthy, but large and strong and strapping, with a full head of black hair and a voice like a bugle. He did not cry so much as shout, and when Irina gave him her breast, despite the doctors’ objections—“your milk is radioactive,” they said—it was as though little Dimitri wanted to swallow her breasts, first one, then the other.
Dimitri turned two the day his father died, but he remained robust and healthy. In fact, his health was so overwhelming that it seemed contagious. Irina had been showered by radioactive debris and then breathed the poisoned air and had shown early signs of radiation poisoning. By all rights she should have been dead. But instead she flourished, and little Dimitri—who was never really little—flourished as well. It was as if he shared his life spirit with his mother, and she took it in.
Irina worked on the assembly line in a metal stamping factory. Dimitri joined her there when he was sixteen. At the same time, he did what anyone did who wanted to get ahead: He joined the Communist Party. By the time he was twenty, he had advanced off the factory floor and onto the administrative committee. By the time he was thirty, he had been named one of the factory’s managing directors. His salary was nominal, but the opportunities for graft were almost unlimited, and Dimitri took full advantage of them, extracting kickbacks from suppliers, substituting cheap alloys when steel was called for, and banishing rivals, all in the name of the Communist Revolution.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Dimitri sought, and was given, the assignment to oversee the disbanding and disposal of the factories around Chelyabinsk. If you wanted to buy a factory in Chelyabinsk—and there were plenty to be bought—Dimitri Adropov was the man to see.
Valery Grushin, a former KGB operative, was the first to show up with a suitcase full of dollars, and Dimitri allowed Valery to purchase the metal stamping factory and several nearby pipe rolling facilities at an extremely advantageous price. For his efforts Dimitri was granted an enormous commission, which Valery gladly paid. Soon other buyers showed up, and Dimitri gave them such extraordinary deals that his commission often exceeded the price they paid for the factories.
In a matter of months, Dimitri was a wealthy man. He used his gains to buy several small oil and gas production and transport companies. (He had held the best factories back for himself.) These companies made up the core of what eventually became Gazneft, which he then sold to a consortium of businessmen.
Dimitri had two qualities that made him a formidable opponent and a danger to anyone operating at cross purposes with him. Having been a communist one day and a capitalist the next, Dimitri mistrusted all ideologies and all organizations that subscribed to them. He saw ideologies, and in fact all beliefs, as false and stupid and, above all, a distraction from the main business of life.
He believed mainly in force. He remained the principal director on the Gazneft board, but he had others serve as president, chairman, treasurer. He directed things from the shadows. He did not have to trust these others because he owned them. He could harm them, and they knew he would, so they pretty much did his bidding.
Dimitri’s second dangerous quality was that he preferred to do his own dirty work. Other men with his means hired it done. But Dimitri derived a measure of satisfaction from doing what needed to be done. He was not a sadist; he did not enjoy the suffering of others. But he didn’t shy away from it either, if he thought it necessary. And when it had been done, what gave him satisfaction was knowing that an unpleasant job had been expeditiously and expertly carried out. He thought of himself as a craftsman whose specialty was mayhem.
Dimitri was not a man without tenderness. He had a lover with whom he was generous and kind. But his greatest love was reserved for Irina, his mother, who lived in a small apartment in a less than fashionable part of Chelyabinsk. Dimitri had bought her a large, luxurious apartment across town, but she had refused to move in. She found the size and the luxury oppressive. “It is too big,” she said. “What am I to do in all this space? How will I even keep it clean?”
“You will have a cleaning lady, Mamochka.”
She looked at her son with horror. “Then why did we even have the revolution?” she said.
“Look, Mamochka,” he said, trying to drum up her enthusiasm. “The faucets are gold.” He turned on the hot water.
“
Like the tsar’s,” she said, and went back to the small flat she had lived in since coming to Chelyabinsk in 1957. He bought her other gifts—clothing, a car—and of course she rejected them as well. Even the appliances he had delivered to her old apartment were refused. “My old stove is fine.”
“Mamochka, I just want you to have a better life. Things have gone well for me, and I want to share my good fortune with you. I owe you everything. I love you, Mamochka.”
Irina reached up with her plump, wrinkled hand and caressed Dimitri’s cheek. “I know, Dima, my little Dimka. I know. You have worked very, very hard, and hard work always succeeds.” It was true. In his way, Dimitri had worked very hard. Over the years, as the money had rolled in, he had put it in banks in Liechtenstein, Mexico, the Caymans, and Switzerland, including the unfortunate EisenerBank.
XXVIII
A HARD FREEZE HAD TURNED Louis’s garden into a ruin and driven him indoors. He pulled up the bean poles and scaped away the vines. He pulled out the tomato cages and put them away. He dug up the last of the sweet potatoes, gathered the few squash he hadn’t already taken in, and spread them on the cement floor at the back of his painting studio. He spread compost across the garden. The days were short and relentlessly gloomy.
Louis fed the wood stove in the studio. He stretched a dozen canvases, squeezed some color on the sheet of glass that served as his palette, and began to paint. He stood at the easel with art books open around him. He leafed through the books, painted, then went back to the books again and again. He stared at the canvas for a long while before he scraped away much of what he had done, and started again.
Early in the new year, Pauline came from Paris, and together she and Louis made a dinner party. The Renards, Isabelle and Jean, were there. Their son, Jean-Marie, came from Paris, where he worked for the customs service in its telecommunications division. Louis had known Jean-Marie since he was a small boy. Marianne was there along with Paolo, her artist friend, and a few other friends too. Jean-Michel Aubert came. He brought the wine. Luc and Isabelle Delaroche, Jean Maussion, Thierry Juge, Louis and Dominique Lansade, their daughter Lea, and her husband and new baby, Lisane. Over twenty guests in all, so that Louis had to put an old door on sawhorses to make a second table.
Louis made an enormous stew in multiple pots: shrimp and monkfish and merguez sausages and oranges and potatoes and flageolets in a curry sauce with tomatoes, onions, and red peppers. There were huge pots of couscous and slabs of bread and bottles of red. The improvised table sagged under the weight of it all. Everyone served themselves over and over, finally mopping up the last sauce with hunks of baguette. There was a green salad. A platter of cheeses went around.
An animated debate erupted as to whether Louis had improperly placed a wedge of Camembert on top of a fresh round of the cheese. “It would be impolite,” said Louis, “to present a round of cheese that hadn’t been started. So you cut out a wedge and place it on top to give others permission to cut into that wheel of cheese. Or at least so I’ve been told.”
“That’s right,” said Isabelle Renard. It was she who had told him.
“But no,” said Thierry Juge. “No, no, no, it’s impossible. It can’t be done. One opens the cheese, but one removes the wedge from the tray entirely. It can’t be placed there like … like a trophy. On top of the cheese, it is too … too … well, no, it can’t be done.” Others chimed in with their opinions, and before long, the debate had spread to the other table, interrupted by laughter and derision.
Thierry stood up and gave an impassioned dissertation on the importance of maintaining traditional etiquette. “It is not about manners,” he said. “Manners are bourgeois and stupid. It is principle, it is tradition, it is how things are done.” He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. Everyone quieted down to hear what he was doing. “François,” said Thierry into the phone and posed the question of the cheese. The room erupted in laughter.
“He is the chief of protocol at Élysée,” Thierry said in a stage whisper. “He will know.” Thierry left the room to be able to hear François’s ruling, which Thierry proudly announced on returning. Placing the wedge of Camembert on top of the round was a gross violation, comparable to, say, using a steak knife to eat fish, or burning the crème caramel. Everyone laughed until tears ran down their cheeks. Fortunately Louis had not burned the crème caramel. And the coffee was hot and delicious.
People got up and began carrying dishes to the sink and stacking them wherever they could find space. “Stop,” said Louis. “Leave everything. I want you all to see some new paintings.” He led the way across the terrace to the barn. He opened the door, threw a switch, and the studio was bathed in a blaze of light. Everyone stepped inside and went silent.
Next to the squashes and sweet potatoes, Louis had leaned ten canvases against the wall. Everyone knew Louis’s work, or thought they did. They were familiar with his careful and expressive and—even Renard had to admit—beautiful landscapes. He represented the surrounding countryside again and again in swaths of color layered over other colors, brushed here in fury and then elsewhere using the most delicate strokes, all in pursuit of that shimmering quality of the light here in the Dême Valley and the trembling impermanence of all things. But these appeared to be twentieth-century masterpieces by France’s greatest painters.
Paolo, the avant-garde iconoclast sculptor, was the first to break the silence. “But, Louis,” he said with a laugh. “Where did you find all this old crap?” The room erupted, and Paolo was shouted down. Then everyone went silent again.
Pauline stepped forward and looked closely at the first canvas in line. “I thought I knew Matisse.”
“I made it up,” said Louis.
“You didn’t copy something? You made up a Matisse?”
“I know what he liked to paint, how he liked to paint. I made up the painting.”
“And a Picasso,” said Thierry Juge, pointing.
“Three of them, actually,” said Louis, pointing at the other two at the end of the row. “All late works.”
“Actually, they’re better than Picasso’s Picassos,” said Paolo.
“No, they’re not,” said Louis. “And the Matisses. They’re mediocre. And the Cézanne.” There were two more Matisses, two Derains, a Cézanne—yet another view of Mont Sainte-Victoire—and a Bonnard. “The Bonnard is an utter failure, I’m afraid. Like a burned crème caramel.”
XXIX
“YOU KNOW THAT I’M YOUR friend.”
Louis hated it when Renard started conversations this way. Especially when they were in the police station, as they were now. It sounded a little too much like an official conversation. “Yes. I know you’re my friend.”
“But you’re going to make this difficult, aren’t you?” said Renard.
“If I can.”
“Okay. Those paintings you made are forgeries.”
“I like to think of them as fakes. But in a sense, yes, they’re forgeries.”
“In a sense?”
“Well, they’re original paintings.”
“Under the law they’re forgeries.”
“Well, that depends, doesn’t it? On what I do with them.”
“And what are you going to do with them?”
“I don’t know—”
“Stop it.”
“It’s true; I don’t know. It depends on how other things play out. St. John Larrimer—”
“The investor?”
“The thief. He’s an art collector as it turns out—Picassos, Bonnards, others. I’m trying to figure out how to get to him. I’m exploring the banking avenue too. In fact I’m exploring every avenue, and one of the avenues is painting. So I thought I’d do these. They may come in handy, although I can’t yet say how.”
Renard took out a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. He almost lit the filter but turned it around in time. Once it was lit, he blew out a great cloud of smoke. “You’re going to try to sell him your forgeries?”
“He�
�d see right through them. They’re on brand-new canvas; the paint is new. Even if he didn’t recognize that the painting is fake, he’d know from the canvas, the stretchers, the paint. Besides, even if he bought every one of them at a huge price, it would be only a fraction of the money he stole. Anyway, I don’t want to get the money from him by selling him paintings, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“What do you want?” said Renard. He repeated the question to be certain Louis understood his exasperation. “What do you want?”
“I want him to make restitution and answer for his crimes.”
“Then leave it to the authorities.”
“We’ve been over that.”
Renard stood up from his desk and walked to the window. “How are we friends? I sometimes wonder.”
This surprised Louis. “Because we like each other,” he said.
“If I uphold the law and you break it, how can we be friends?”
“Well,” said Louis, “think of how much we have in common.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one thing, we both think we’re right. And for another, we’re probably both wrong.”
“Jesus!” Renard was so exasperated that he ground out his cigarette on the windowsill. “Now look what you made me do.”
XXX
THERE WERE A NUMBER of rich people Hamilton Jones (né Joseph Hamilton) thought of as his clients. They went with him to art exhibitions, where he told them what was good and what wasn’t, what would make an important addition to their collection and what wouldn’t. He guided them through the labyrinthine byways of the art world in hopes of making a sale. But too often, when it came time to make actual purchases, the “clients” turned to auction houses or other dealers where they could arrange favorable payment terms or negotiate price reductions.
Unless Hamilton managed to scare up something extremely unusual and exactly to their liking, he often found himself going without a fee, getting nothing more than a fancy dinner and a gratuity for his troubles. Four years earlier he had managed to arrange a deal that had netted him a $270,000 fee for a Whistler that had gone for over eight million. But since then, nothing much.
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