‘Go to the men who protect your friend, the men he pays so handsomely they have raised an army for him? Would that not be a little dangerous, Councillor? After all, Litvinov’s means are virtually limitless. And he is a personal friend of President Yeltsin. Put your trust in men in the pay of such a tenuous friend? That seems to me a very dangerous course of action. Whereas if you put your trust in the Chechens, the enemies of the Slavic Brotherhood, you can put yourself entirely in our hands. Your interests are our interests.’
Lev studied the man.
‘My interests? With the sort of money you demand?’
‘Of a man such as yourself, Councillor, we demand nothing. We are simply proposing an alliance. We consider the sum we ask fair compensation for our services. After all, it is a matter not only of ensuring your personal safety, but also that of your various businesses, including those projects … currently in development.’
‘They really do know everything,’ thought Lev. The poster was right: they were everywhere.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.
The big man got to his feet, deferentially saluted and left.
‘Protection rackets now. There’s no limit to how low this country can sink. And they have the gall to take me on. Oh, they sound servile, but the results are the same. And what choice do I have but to accept their little proposal of marriage? There’s no state any more. Litvinov has already made his marriage of convenience; everyone has made a pact of some sort. But how do I know that the Chechens won’t bleed me dry?’
More than 800,000 men worked for security firms all over the country, mostly in Moscow and St Petersburg. They had usurped the powers of the police, who were incapable of carrying out their role. They enforced the law – at the cost of countless murders. They made their presence felt by any means necessary. Sometimes however, as with Litvinov, people approached them to create a private army, partly to protect themselves, partly to muscle in on other people’s territories.
‘Warlords. Armed thugs trying to invade rival kingdoms – though these days the kingdoms are multinationals. It’s the Middle Ages.’
Lev went home to his Moscow palace, the former palace of Prince Ehria. Oligarchs had replaced princes. Outside the railings stood two men. Bodyguards. They would have to be replaced. He’d have to make the Chechen gorillas wear suits instead of their hideous tracksuits and baseball caps. A Russian resorting to Chechens …
Standing motionless a short distance from the bodyguards was an elderly man, a beggar with a long black coat and a walking stick. Lev asked the driver to stop next to him. Through the tinted window, as the car purred gently, he contemplated the man silently, with a sort of dreamlike attentiveness. He contemplated the man’s pallor, the deep furrowed wrinkles, the hungry face consumed by misery. A victim of neglect, but most of all of self-neglect.
‘A muzhik,’ thought Lev. ‘A character straight out of Tolstoy. This country has gone from being an epic to a seedy thriller with gangs and criminals and militias. But the muzhik remains, still exploited, enslaved, humiliated.’
He rolled down the window. The old man looked up, his eyes weary and clouded by cataracts. His head swayed, trying to make out the person in front of him. What could he see? What could anyone see in Lev Kravchenko who, even after a hard day at work, presented an expression of icy perfection, as though it was vital to reveal nothing, as though his safety depended on the poker-face, the perfectly knotted tie, the immaculate white shirt with its starched collar?
For a moment, the two faces remained motionless, facing each other. Then a hand appeared, opened, placed a banknote in another hand, and the tinted window silently rolled up again as the car drove towards the gate, which was already opening.
Lev got out, walked up the steps to the entrance. A maid took his briefcase and he headed into the living room. Elena came over to him, wearing a somewhat artificial smile. As so often, he pictured her as the student she had been, and as so often dismissed the image because the Lev he had been back then no longer existed either. Or rather he no longer had the right to exist except in the ghostly form of a dream tinged with remorse. A sort of rain inside him, the drizzle of memory, persistent and a little sad.
Elena kissed him. She was wearing a black dress. Lev thought of the beggar’s long black coat. Elena was always elegant, always dressed up to greet him.
‘Good day?’ he asked.
He knew he had to start the conversation. Their relationship required these platitudes, the seemingly futile words that began the process of bringing them together again, like the flourish of a proffered hand before a dance, words that were all the more necessary since their days were utterly different, especially given that he had just had a Chechen gangster in his office. What had she spent her day talking about? Which French, Italian, Spanish writer? Stendhal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Dante? What scholarly interpretation had she been elaborating even as he had been trying to weigh up the threat posed by the sudden incursion of a protection racket into his life, into their lives? It was not the sort of protection racket a shopkeeper faces when some thug teaches him the harsh realities of business, but one that heralded the beginning of a dangerous and menacing alliance. A menace contained in a neck that, though meekly bowed, was like that of a bull, in a smile that, though humble, was fraught with ominous undertones. An alliance for better or worse, until death …
Lev stroked Elena’s hair. Surprised, she drew back. He so rarely touched her … Usually he behaved in a cold, controlled manner that could be charming but was icy for all that. Then she came towards him. He breathed in her perfume, kissed her hair. Then he drew back with an awkward smile. She looked at him, puzzled. He nodded his head and smiled again.
‘Are the children in bed?’
Always the same question, though he knew the answer. Of course they were in bed. How could they not be at this time? They had two children now. Two boys he did not see grow up. Two boys who would be strangers to him, like everyone except Elena.
They went upstairs to kiss their sons. In the palace bedrooms. Rooms so vast they were absurd. Lev thought of the two-roomed apartment where he had grown up, of the strange grey, colourless world in which he had been raised in which things were so scarce, so drab they seemed to wince. Now, his children had so many things, an orgiastic accumulation of things, filling the rooms with an expensive clutter that even Elena made no attempt to curb.
Elena opened the bedroom door of the older boy, Yevgeni, who was sprawled on his huge circular bed. He was breathing regularly. The boy was tall and thin, a beautiful child who looked a lot like his mother.
‘Two parents watching over their child,’ thought Lev. ‘It’s as moving as a soap opera.’
They moved on to the younger boy’s room. A small cot with bars at the sides. For the hundredth time Lev thought that he did not know this child. Mikhail Kravchenko. It sounded good. But who was this boy? Lev knew Yevgeni a little, the boy had been born in a different period of his life, back when he had been one of Yeltsin’s advisors, when everything still made some sort of sense. Now that every day was a struggle, now that all his energies were devoted to clinging on to what territories he had and trying to annex others, he found it terribly difficult to look at his wife’s child, this helpless little creature, so fragile and so delicate. Who was this Mikhail Kravchenko? A baby, later a child that he sometimes held in his arms, a boy he rarely saw awake since he was so rarely there in the daytime. But a child he would have to get to know if he were not to have another stranger in his midst, someone vaguely familiar, someone to whom he would smile, address a few platitudes, to whom he would bequeath a part of his fortune so he in turn might carry on the struggle.
He kissed the child. His skin was soft. Then, carefully – and to some extent they were both playing a part – they stepped out of the bedroom and went back to the living room.
‘Would you like dinner?’
‘That would be lovely.’
The table was laid. The cook, as always,
had prepared dinner but Lev did not like to be waited on by servants. Sometimes, Elena would insist on serving him. More often than not, she had already eaten by the time he got home but even so, it was a shared moment. She would sit next to him, sometimes sipping a glass of wine, and here they wove the ties of their relationship, the tenuous ties that had to be rewoven every day, not because they did not get along, nor because they no longer loved each other, but because of the ghosts.
The ghosts of their first meeting. The professor and the undergraduate. The brilliant intellectual, the young, beautiful student. The girl who took notes during Professor Kravchenko’s lectures and who, after they had a drink together, fell in love with her professor. Elena was still beautiful, but she was no longer young. She was a wife and mother, she was a professor who taught at the university where once she had studied. She no longer took notes from Professor Kravchenko. In fact she did her utmost not to take notes, not to register the cynicism in his voice when he talked about his businesses.
The ghost of the professor. The ghost of a man who had never been an idealist but who joked about the empire with such caustic, such acerbic wit that Elena had thought him brave. He was not brave. Not that he was a coward, but he did not believe political courage was a valid concept because he did not believe in anything. He had not believed in Communism, nor had he any greater faith in capitalist democracy. ‘It’s the rule of money,’ he would say, ‘that’s all there is to it. We’ve gone from being ruled by bureaucrats to being ruled by accountants. And the Russian people are neither more nor less happy.’
But more than that, the ghost of a man more cheerful, more amenable, more alive. Not the Hun, no, not the Hun. How could she not miss the Lev she had once known? How could she not go on looking for this ghost in some fleeting look, in his infrequent smiles, in some deft, eloquent phrase?
Lev ate in silence. Elena toyed with a glass of red wine.
‘You know, I had someone try to extort money from me today.’
He said it as though it were a joke. Immediately Elena was on the alert: he rarely talked about business.
‘Extort money? In the street?’
Given he was permanently flanked by two bodyguards, this was improbable to say the least.
‘In my office. Easier that way, not so many witnesses.’
‘Who?’
‘The Chechens. One of those security firms, you know, there are lots of them. They offered to protect me. In exchange for money, obviously.’
‘Did you have them thrown out?’
She used the same words Lev had used when confronted with the Chechen.
‘No. Actually, it was just one guy. An ex-wrestler making a comeback. He was very polite. Couldn’t have been more polite. I told him I’d think about it.’
‘Think about it? They’re trying to extort money and you’re going to think about it?’
‘Yes. Because if I refuse protection – from them or from anyone else – then we would really be in trouble.’
‘What trouble?’
‘At best,’ said Lev, sounding detached, ‘they attack the drilling operations or the pipelines. Though I suppose they could easily plant a bomb in the ELK Tower in Moscow. At worst, they kill me.’
‘How could they kill a man as rich and powerful as you?’
Lev looked at her curiously. She was so intelligent, so independent yet here she was thinking like everyone else, thinking solely in terms of money and power.
‘I wouldn’t be the first,’ he said. ‘Berezovsky’s enemies set off a bomb in the middle of Moscow as his car was passing – and he was one of the five most powerful oligarchs in the country. His driver was decapitated; Berezovsky escaped with only minor injuries. No one is safe. Anyway, I have no choice. I need to form an alliance, with the Chechens or with someone else. But I can’t carry on by myself.’
‘There’s always a choice,’ Elena protested. ‘There’s still a police force in the country.’
‘Poor Elena,’ thought Lev. ‘Choice. She thinks of it in terms of something you learn at school: the nature of choice. Philosophers agree that we always have a choice so, like a good little student, she thinks it follows: we always have a choice.’
‘The police are weak,’ he said simply. ‘But you’re right. I’ll take my time. Weigh up the situation.’
But that night in bed while Elena was sleeping, the word rattled around in his head. Choice. What choice did he have? He could resign, of course, he could walk away. That was the choice he had. Give up. Give up the crippling weight of business, the worries, the problems, the responsibilities. Responsibilities … What did that mean? What responsibilities did he really have? What exactly was he responsible for? His business? It would be swallowed up overnight. His family? Of course. But they could always leave the country. He had so much money … They would only need to take a fraction of it. But was that a choice? Was giving up a real choice? He wanted to carry on. He was caught up in the system and now he had no choice. Otherwise he faced defeat or death. He might win, end up in prison or wind up with a bullet in his head. That was how it was. Because things had taken a strange turn. Because his life had become the strange violence of this ruined country.
Choice.
What choice did he have?
8
In life, the problem is reinventing oneself. Becoming someone else. Especially since when we try to reinvent ourselves the real work begins, that of sustaining the illusion; a powerful force that compels us to go on being ourselves such that the metamorphoses ravel and unravel and we come to the terrible realisation that we are still ourselves, only more so.
And it’s quite possible that the ghost of Lev was merely an illusion, that the oligarch was already latent in the professor. The irony and caustic wit were the first inklings of a disenchantment, a prelude to cynicism, bitterness and cruelty. The long process of decline.
But Lev was older than Simon, Matthieu, Ruffle or of course Sila, and business had made him old before his time, if not physically, then morally. His role as Yeltsin’s advisor at precisely the point the empire blew up – at the point when the kamikaze team, believing it necessary to destroy the ancient, ossified carcass, had deliberately blown it up – had not helped.
As for Sila, he did not consciously reinvent himself because he was still young. He was content to change. He was entering into the real, becoming more ordinary. And yet his aura had not yet completely disappeared: as Fos had predicted, Sila had luck on his side. What Fos had called the light. And it is true that he attracted people, men and women, possibly by a sort of impassivity. Sila expected nothing of anyone – or of life itself. He set no store by predictions, by wishes or hopes, he simply lived. A rare talent. And this pure presence, this harmony, combined with his great beauty was like a magnet to others, especially to Westerners eaten up with frustration, tormented by unquenchable desires.
One evening when Sila was covering in the restaurant for a waiter off sick, he was called over by a man with a shock of white hair and an affected manner who was drinking at the bar.
‘I’ve got a job for you, if you like.’
‘I’ve already got a job,’ said Sila.
‘I’m the greatest restaurateur in the world. You’d be working in a unique environment, you’d be well paid and you’d truly learn the trade.’
Sila considered the man with amusement. Pretentiousness had always made him smile.
‘Give it a try,’ the man went on, ‘you’ve got nothing to lose. I’ll pay you three times what you’re earning now.’
Sila shrugged.
‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to.’
The man looked at him.
‘No papers, huh?’
Sila nodded.
‘The President of the Republic is a regular at my restaurant. I’ll have a word with him. What do you say?’
Sila tossed his dishcloth onto the counter and walked out with his new employer. Anyone can promise the moon, anyone can claim to be on intimate terms with the
President, but the man who, by some quirk of fate, happened to be having a drink in Montmartre that night was indeed one of the foremost restaurateurs in the world, and like all restaurant owners, he was constantly complaining about his staff. Sila’s physical appearance and his impeccable demeanour were considerable assets. In short, the light had done its work.
So began the period of his apprenticeship: Sila studied during the day and worked in the evening. Gérard Lemerre, true to his reputation as restaurateur, artist and philanthropist – a combination that could only exist in France – became Sila’s mentor, much as Fos had been but with infinitely greater means. He got his protégé a work permit, enrolled him in a hotel management course where Sila learned the business and acquired the basic knowledge he lacked. It was here too that he was first introduced to English, a language that would later prove invaluable to him. He was entering the real world.
For Ruffle, reinventing himself meant finding himself. Over and over he told the story of the promising football jock whose career had been cut short by a knee injury. A one-shot story, always the same, like the feeble pop of a cap gun. This was his life, his lie. And his whole family colluded in the story. His mother often tearfully spoke about him coming home after the accident, hobbling on crutches, devastated that his career was over. And his father, adopting a more positive tone, backed her up. ‘He was a tough kid. He could have been a pro footballer, but it wasn’t to be, God decided otherwise, but he went on to become a champion businessman, because he had that same fierce determination, that same fighting spirit. I’ve always said, life’s like a football game. You run straight for the end zone and you give it all you’ve got.’
The problem with lies, even when you believe them, even when you revel in them, is that they become strangely, subconsciously unsatisfying because the disparity between mask and truth resonates like muffled guilt. With Ruffle, this disparity took the form of a persistent, recurring, nebulous feeling of never being equal to the task. He was a man with no Sundays. With no one to cheer him, to admire him, to praise him. With no public, no fans. He felt as though he were invisible.
Sila's Fortune Page 8
