Single & Single

by John le Carré

  “I should think so.”

  “He’s green as a leaf about a lot of stuff, bound to be. You’ll have to hand-feed him, teach him our Western ways. He hates lawyers and doesn’t know banking from his elbow. Why should he, when they don’t have banks?”

  “No reason on earth,” Oliver replies obsequiously.

  “Poor chaps have still got to learn the value of money. Privileges were the currency till now. If they played their cards right, they got everything they wanted—houses, food, schools, holidays, hospitals, cars—all privileges. Now they’ve got to buy the same treats with hard cash. Different ball game. Needs a different sort of player.” Oliver is smiling and there is music in his heart. “So it’s a deal?” Tiger proposes. “You do his nuts and bolts, I’ll handle the heavy stuff. Shouldn’t be more than a year or so, max.”

  “What happens after a year?”

  Tiger laughs. A real, rare, amoral, happy, West End laugh, as he pulls his arm free of Oliver’s and claps him affectionately on the shoulder. “At twenty percent of the gross?”—still laughing— “what do you think’s going to happen? A year from now, we’ll have squeezed the old devil out of the loop.”

  8

  Oliver is in tethered flight.

  If he has ever doubted the wisdom of entering his father’s firm, the golden summer months of 1991 provide him with his answer. This is living. This is connecting. This is being one of the team on a scale he has only dreamed. When the Tiger leaps, the financial columnists like to say, lesser men stand clear. Now Tiger is leaping as never before. Dividing his executive staff into separate task forces, he appoints Massingham his field commander, oil and steel, which does not at all please Massingham, who would prefer the lesser post of blood. Like Tiger he has seen where the richest pickings lie, which is why Tiger has kept blood for himself. Twice, three times a month he is to be found in Washington, Philadelphia or New York, often with Oliver in attendance. With an awe tinged by apprehension Oliver looks on as his father dazzles senators, lobbyists and health officials with his persuasive powers. To listen to Tiger’s pitch, you would hardly know the blood came from Russia at all. It is European—for does not Europe stretch from the Iberian peninsula to the Urals? It is Caucasian, it is—more embarrassing still to Oliver’s hard-surviving sensitivities—white Caucasian, it is surplus to European requirements. For the rest, he cannily confines himself to such uncontroversial issues as landing rights, grading, storage, customs exemptions, onward shipment and the establishment of a mobile staff of troubleshooters to oversee the operation. But if Russian blood is assured of a safe arrival, what of its departure?

  “Time Yevgeny had a visit,” Tiger rules, and Oliver sets off in pursuit of his new hero.

  Sheremetyevo airport, Moscow, 1991, on a perfect summer’s afternoon, Oliver’s first in Mother Russia. Faced with the arrival hall’s sullen queues and scowling frontier guards, he succumbs to a moment’s trepidation until he spots Yevgeny himself, accompanied by a squad of docile officials, wading toward him with shouts of pleasure. His huge arms lock round Oliver’s back, his rough cheek presses against his own. A smell of garlic, then the taste of it, as the old man plonks a third traditional Russian kiss on Oliver’s startled mouth. In a trice his passport is stamped, his luggage swept through a side door and Oliver and Yevgeny are reclining in the rear seat of a black Zil driven by none other than Yevgeny’s brother, Mikhail, dressed today not in a rumpled black suit but knee-length boots, military breeches and a leather bomber jacket, in which Oliver glimpses the hatched black butt of a family-sized automatic pistol. A police motorcycle rides ahead of them; two dark-haired men in a Volga follow.

  “My children,” Yevgeny explains with a wink.

  But Oliver knows he is not being literal, for Yevgeny to his grief has daughters and no sons. Oliver’s hotel is a white wedding cake in the center of town. He checks into it; they drive down broad, pitted streets past gigantic apartment blocks to a leafy suburb of half-hidden villas guarded by security cameras and uniformed police. Iron gates open before them, the escort peels away, they enter the gravel forecourt of an ivy-covered mansion teeming with yelling children, babushkas, cigarette smoke, ringing telephones, oversize televisions, a Ping-Pong table, everything in motion. Shalva the lawyer greets them in the hall. There is a blushing cousin called Olga who is “Mr. Yevgeny’s personal assistant,” there is a nephew called Igor who is fat and jolly, there is Yevgeny’s benign and stately Georgian wife, Tinatin, and three—no, four— daughters, all full bodied, married and a little tired, and the prettiest and the most doomed is Zoya, whom Oliver with a kind of aching recognition takes instantly to his heart. Female neurosis is his nemesis. Add a trim waist, broad maternal hips, a large, inconsolable brown gaze and he is lost. She nurses a baby boy called Paul, who shares her gravity. Their four eyes examine him with forlorn complicity.

  “You are very beautiful,” Zoya declares, as sadly as if she were reporting a death. “You have the beauty of irregularity. You are a poet?”

  “Just a lawyer, I’m afraid.”

  “The law is also a dream. You have come to buy our blood?”

  “I’ve come to make you rich.”

  “Welcome,” she intones with the profundity of a great tragedienne.

  Oliver has brought documents for Yevgeny to sign and a personal sealed letter from Tiger but—“Not yet, not yet, first you will see my horse!” And of course he will! Yevgeny’s horse is a brand new BMW motorbike that stands pampered and glistening on a pink Oriental carpet at the center of a drawing room. With his household crowding at the doorway—but Oliver sees mostly Zoya—Yevgeny kicks off his shoes, climbs onto the beast’s back, lowers his rump onto the saddle and wraps his stockinged feet round the pedals while he revs the engine all the way up, then down again and shines out his delight from between matted eyelashes. “You now, Oliver! You! You!”

  Watched by an applauding audience, the heir apparent to the House of Single hands Shalva his tailor-made jacket and silk tie and springs onto the saddle in Yevgeny’s place; then demonstrates what a good chap he is by setting the building shuddering and rattling to its foundations. Zoya alone takes no pleasure in his performance. Frowning at this vision of ecological mayhem, she clutches Paul to her breast, her hand protectively over his ear. She is straggle haired and carelessly dressed and has the deep shoulders of a mother-courtesan. She is alone and lost in the big city of life, and Oliver has already appointed himself her policeman, protector and soul companion.

  “In Russia we must ride fast in order to stand still,” she informs him as he reties his tie. “It is normal.”

  “And in England?” he asks with a laugh.

  “You are not English. You were born in Siberia. Your blood also. Do not sell your blood.”

  Yevgeny’s office is a chapel of calm. It is a sweetly paneled annex, roof high, perhaps formerly a stable. No sound from the villa penetrates. Sumptuous antique birchwood furniture glows with a golden-brown intensity. “From St. Petersburg museum,” Yevgeny explains, caressing a great writing table with his palm. When the revolution came, the museum was sacked and the collection was scattered across the Soviet Union. Yevgeny spent years tracking it down, he relates. Then he found an eighty-year-old ex-prisoner from Siberia who restored it. “We are calling it Karelka,” he says proudly. “Was from Catherine the Great the favorite.” On the walls hang photographs of men who Oliver somehow knows are dead, and framed diplomas featuring ships at sea. Oliver and Yevgeny sit in Catherine the Great’s armchairs under an Arthurian iron chandelier. With his hewn old face, gold-rimmed spectacles and Cuban cigar, Yevgeny is every man’s good counselor and powerful friend. Shalva the priestly lawyer smiles and puffs his cigarettes. Oliver has brought letters of agreement drafted by Winser and restored to plain English by himself. Massingham has provided Russian translations. From the end of the table Mikhail watches with the alertness of the deaf, his deep-sea eyes devouring words he cannot hear. Shalva addresses Yevgeny in Georgian. While he speaks
the door closes, which surprises Oliver since it was not open. He glances round to see Alix Hoban standing inside the room like some beckoned henchman forbidden to advance until instructed. Yevgeny orders Shalva to be silent, removes his glasses and addresses Oliver.

  “You trust me?” he demands.

  “Yes.”

  “Your father. He trusts me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we trust,” Yevgeny declares and, waving aside Shalva’s objections, signs the documents and shoves them down the table for Mikhail to sign also. Shalva leaves his chair and stands at Mikhail’s shoulder, indicating the place. Slowly, every letter a masterpiece, Mikhail laboriously carves his name. Hoban sidles forward, offering himself as witness. They sign in ink while Oliver thinks blood.

  In a flagstoned cellar with an open hearth, skewers of pork and lamb are roasting on a wood fire. Garlic mushrooms sizzle on hollowed bricks. Loaves of Georgian cheese bread are stacked on wooden plates. Oliver must call it Khachapuri, says Tinatin, Yevgeny’s wife. To drink there is sweet red wine that Yevgeny mysteriously proclaims to be homemade from Bethlehem. On the birchwood dining table plates of caviar, smoked sausage, spicy chicken legs, home-smoked sea trout, olives and almond cake are precariously heaped on top of one another till not a square inch of the lovingly polished surface can be seen. Yevgeny and Oliver have the head and tail of the table. Between them sit the big-chested daughters beside their taciturn husbands, all but Zoya, who languishes in becoming isolation with little Paul seated on her knee, spoon-feeding him as if he were ailing, and only rarely diverting the spoon to her own full, unpainted lips. But in Oliver’s head her dark eyes are fixed eternally upon him, as are his own on her, and the child Paul is an extension of her ethereal solitude. Having cast her as Rembrandt model, then as Chekhov heroine, he is outraged to see her raise her head and frown in conjugal disapproval as Alix Hoban with his cell phone enters between a couple of hard-faced young men in suits, kisses her perfunctorily on the same shoulder on which Oliver, in his imagination, has this minute been planting his own impassioned kisses, pinches Paul’s cheek so that the child snarls in pain, and dumps himself beside her while continuing his conversation on the cell phone.

  “You have met my husband, Oliver?” Zoya asks.

  “Of course. Several times.”

  “I too,” she says enigmatically.

  Down the length of the table Oliver and Yevgeny toast each other repeatedly. They have toasted Tiger, they have drunk to each other’s families, their health, prosperity and, though these are still the days of Communism, the dead who are with God.

  “You will call me Yevgeny, I will call you Post Boy!” Yevgeny roars. “You mind I call you Post Boy?”

  “Call me what you like, Yevgeny!”

  “I am your friend. I am Yevgeny. You know what is meaning Yevgeny?”

  “No.”

  “Is meaning noble. Is meaning I am special people. You also are special people?”

  “I would like to think so.”

  Another roar. Silver-chased ram’s horns are fetched and filled to the brim with homemade wine from Bethlehem.

  “To special people! To Tiger and his son! We love you! You love us?”

  “Very much.”

  Oliver and the brothers toast their friendship by draining their horns at a draft, then turning them upside down to prove they are empty.

  “Now you are true Mingrelian!” Yevgeny announces and Oliver once more feels Zoya’s reproachful gaze fixed upon him. But this time Hoban is observing it, which perhaps is what she wants, for he lets out a coarse laugh and says something to her between his teeth in Russian which causes her to laugh scathingly in return.

  “My husband is overjoyed that you have come to Moscow to assist us,” she explains. “He likes very much blood. It is his métier. You say métier?”

  “Not really.”

  Late-night drunken billiards in the basement. Mikhail is coach and umpire, masterminding Yevgeny’s shots. Shalva watches from one corner, from another the supercilious gaze of Hoban covers every move of the game while he burbles into his cell phone. Who does he talk to in such caressing terms? His mistress? His stockbroker? Oliver thinks not. He has a picture of men in shadow like Hoban himself, in dark doorways and dark clothes, waiting for their master’s voice.

  The brassbound cues have no tips. The yellowed balls barely fit the deeply angled pockets. The table slopes, the cloth is ripped and stretched from previous revelries, the cushions clank when struck. Whenever a player succeeds in potting a ball, which is rare, Mikhail bellows the score in Georgian and Hoban disdainfully puts it into English. When Yevgeny misses a shot, which is often, Mikhail gives vent to an oil-rich Caucasian oath against the ball, the table or the cushion, but never against the brother he adores. But Hoban’s contempt grows with each demonstration of his father-in-law’s incompetence: the intake of breath like a wince of pain suppressed, the ghostly sneer of the hairline lips as they continue talking into the cell phone. Tinatin appears and, with a grace that melts Oliver’s heart, leads Yevgeny off to bed. A driver waits to take Oliver back to his hotel. Shalva escorts him to the Zil. About to climb into it, Oliver looks back fondly at the house and sees Zoya, childless and topless, gazing down at him from an upper window.

  Next morning under a half-cloudy sky Yevgeny takes Oliver to meet some good Georgians. With Mikhail at the wheel they drive from one gray barracks to another. In the first they are marched down a medieval corridor smelling of old iron, or is it blood? In the next they are embraced and plied with sweet coffee by a lizard-eyed, seventy-year-old relic of the Brezhnev time who guards his great black desk as if it were a war memorial.

  “You are Tiger’s son?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “How come such a little guy makes such big kids?”

  “I hear he’s got a formula, sir.”

  Huge laughter.

  “You know his handicap these days?”

  “Twelve, they tell me.” They have told him no such thing.

  “Tell him Dato is eleven. He will go crazy.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Formula! That’s good!”

  And the envelope that is never spoken of: the gray-blue, warquality, foolscap-sized envelope that Yevgeny conjures from his briefcase and slides across the desk while jollier matters are aired. And Dato’s oily downward glance that records the envelope’s passage while refusing to acknowledge it. What does it contain? Copies of the agreement that Yevgeny signed the day before? It is too thick. A wad of money? It is too thin. And what is this place? The Ministry of Blood? And who is Dato?

  “Dato is from Mingrelia,” Yevgeny declares with satisfaction.

  In the car Mikhail slowly turns the pages of a pirated American comic. A doubt springs to Oliver’s mind and his face does not disguise it quickly enough: Can Mikhail read?

  “Mikhail is genius,” Yevgeny growls, exactly as if Oliver had asked the question aloud.

  They enter a penthouse of groomed women secretaries, like Tiger’s but prettier, and rows of computers showing the stock markets of the world. They are welcomed by a svelte young man called Ivan in an Italian suit. Yevgeny hands Ivan an envelope like the last.

  “So how are things in the old country these days?” Ivan inquires in a blasé remake of Oxford English from the thirties. A beautiful girl sets a tray of Campari sodas on a rosewood sideboard that looks as if it too had once resided in a St. Petersburg museum. “Chin-chin,” says Ivan.

  They are wafted to a Western-style hotel a stone’s throw from Red Square. Plainclothesmen guard the swing doors, pink-stained fountains play in the lobby, the lift is lit by a crystal chandelier. On the second floor, women croupiers in low-cut dresses eye them from empty roulette tables. At a door marked 222, Yevgeny presses a bell. It is answered by Hoban. In a circular drawing room filled with cigarette smoke, a bearded, bitter-faced man of thirty called Stepan sits in a gilded chair. A gilded sofa table stands before him. Yevgeny sets his brief
case on it. Hoban watches, as he watches everything.

  “Does Massingham have the fucking jumbos yet?” Stepan asks Oliver.

  “My understanding when I left London was that we’re all set to go as soon as you’re ready this end,” Oliver replies stiffly.

  “You the son of the British ambassador or some fucking thing?”

  Yevgeny addresses Stepan in Georgian. His tone is admonishing and firm. Stepan rises to his feet and reluctantly extends his hand.

  “Nice meeting you, Oliver. We are blood brothers, okay?”

  “Okay,” Oliver agrees. A huge sick laugh that Oliver does not enjoy echoes in his ears all the way back to his hotel.

  “Next time you come, we take you to Bethlehem,” Yevgeny promises as they once more hug each other.

  Oliver goes up to his room to pack. A parcel wrapped in brown cloth paper lies on his pillow, together with an envelope. He opens the envelope. The letter is set out like a handwriting test, and Oliver has the feeling it was written several times before an acceptable version was achieved.

  Oliver, you have pure heart. Unfortunately, you are pretending everything. Therefore you are nothing. I love you. Zoya.

  He opens the parcel. It contains a black lacquered box of a sort on offer in every tourist trap. Inside it is a heart, cut from apricot-colored tissue paper. No blood adheres to it.

  To go to Bethlehem it is necessary to be whisked off your British Airways plane as soon as it has taxied to a halt at Sheremetyevo, then to be processed at breakneck speed by yet another squad of compliant immigration officers, and transferred to a twin-engined Ilyushin with Aeroflot markings but no unfamiliar passengers, which is waiting impatiently to fly you to Tbilisi, in Georgia. All Yevgeny’s extended family is aboard and Oliver salutes them en bloc, embracing the nearest and waving to the more distant, and in the case of Zoya, who is the most distant of all—being seated in the farthest corner of the fuselage with Paul while her husband sits up front with Shalva—bestowing on her a vapid half-familiar wave implying that, well, yes, now he comes to think of it, why of course, he does indeed recognize her.