Red to Black

by Alex Dryden

  ‘I’d love to, Frank.’

  And then he walks away, shuffling in his grey overcoat on to a tram that will take him back across the border to attend the conference’s afternoon session.

  I see Finn is furious and confused. For Finn, everyone must be against Putin. Putin is the enemy that justifies any action. Khodorkovsky is Putin’s enemy and, for Finn, Putin’s enemy is Finn’s friend, no matter what.

  We walk a few steps along the pavement and Finn takes my arm. I feel the energy from his hand. He kisses me on the cheek and says that he will find me back at the hotel after dinner. He has something to pick up, he says. Then he leaves.

  The Troll comes up to me, perhaps seeking sanctuary from his forthcoming partnership with Karin. He asks me if I play billiards and, though I tell him I don’t, he takes me to a billiard bar, a taxi ride away, and insists we play.

  I am worrying about Finn as we order our drinks. The Troll is at home in the dark, subterranean, windowless place, but I feel as if I need some air and, after sipping the drink, I leave the Troll so he can join three others and make a foursome for a game.

  I walk through Geneva’s grey streets, wet from a summer shower that passed unnoticed in the bar. It is the personal tone of Finn’s urgent conversation with Frank that plays over in my mind. I see danger and put it down to Finn’s uncharacteristic display of anger at a colleague. He is taking the job personally. And that is dangerous to all of us. Eventually, I let go of my anxiety and walk back to the hotel.

  I take a bath and change and meet Frank at a small Italian restaurant on the north side of the lake where we have a convivial, relaxed supper and Frank treats me like a daughter. I almost forget the strangeness of Frank’s and Finn’s behaviour.

  And when I return to the hotel, Finn’s afternoon’s work lies face up on the bed and all thoughts of Frank are obliterated at the sight of it.

  26

  THE PHOTOGRAPHS LIE SPREAD OUT on a burgundy-coloured coverlet that Finn has straightened for the purpose over the huge hotel bed. There are eight of them and Finn has neatly arranged them as if we were there to discuss the order of presentation. They are black-and-white pictures, taken from odd angles and with more than one camera, probably hidden in ceiling and wall fittings of the room where the pictures were made.

  ‘Apparently there’s also a videotape,’ Finn says tonelessly. ‘But we couldn’t get hold of that, thank God.’

  The cold orange light of street lamps enters the fourth-floor hotel room like a guilty, unwelcome visitor. But outside the window, the starry sky of a Geneva June night seems to set the city on display like subtle stage lighting. Couples stroll arm in arm and a few lonely people walk the streets, head down, heading for the late bars. The scene outside the window seems slow, staccato, apparently fragmented and disjointed like an old silent movie.

  I turn away from the window and sit down again on the bed. I feel sick and wish that Finn would take the photographs away.

  But Finn gets up and switches on a lamp beside the bed, three twists of the switch for the fullest glare, to augment the ceiling light. The orange light outside, and the moon’s glow, are washed away with incandescent light.

  ‘They come from your side,’ Finn says, trying to be businesslike about the scenes on the bed in front of us. ‘They were taken in March 2001 at an SVR apartment in Moscow. Evidently around the time Clement Naider, the man in the pictures, was threatening to step out of line–and Moscow was looking for insurance against some loss of nerve on his part. He’s been chairman of the bank for over twenty years and my guess is he’d worked for the Forest for many years by the time these were taken. Perhaps he’d become afraid. Perhaps he was intending to go to the authorities, we don’t know.’

  ‘We?’ I say.

  Finn hesitates.

  I realise now, years later, that he, too, was so disturbed by the photographs that he had been on the point of telling me about Mikhail. But he checks himself from taking such a fateful step.

  ‘The knowledge is a burden,’ he says. ‘There are some things—’

  ‘Some things we don’t tell each other?’ I say with a feeling of resentment spilling into my voice.

  ‘It’s not a matter of us. It’s not about personal trust,’ he says. ‘This is separate from you and me, Anna. This is the job, not our life together. It’s a matter of security, your security. How you will bear the burden of knowledge.’ Finn gets up off the bed and throws his jacket on to a chair. It is a gesture of doing something to distance himself from any awkwardness between us.

  ‘“We” naturally includes Mikhail, who procured the pictures,’ he says with his back to me, confirming what I already know.

  ‘It wasn’t Sergei who got the pictures, then,’ I say.

  ‘No, it was Mikhail. He’s going right out to the edge,’ Finn says. ‘Taking big risks.’

  But Finn’s perfectly reasonable argument, the protection of Mikhail, causes a flame of anger to rise in me. By now I realise just how big a toll the stress of being four different people is taking on me. Finn’s lover. Finn’s helper. The Forest’s agent. And still, in some twisted form, someone who believes that Russia can be something other than the prisoner of the siloviki, the men of power. And I no longer know which of these four selves is credible. I maintain them all with equal conviction, comfort them, cherish them, look after their needs.

  But most of all, perhaps, I need to believe that the two sides, the Forest and Finn, believe in me, despite my own clear deceit towards the former. It has become almost unsustainable, this split, and on this afternoon in the presence of the pictures I feel the unease rushing to the surface.

  Naturally, I do not expect trust from my masters and so my need for Finn’s total openness, complete trust in all things, becomes the greater. I feel myself like a child wanting to know who Mikhail is, just so I know that Finn has told me everything.

  ‘He only wants to use you.’ Patrushev’s words run through my head.

  The more I need the sureness of our relationship, the oneness of Finn and me, the more inconsistencies lie in the path I am following and the more fear I feel that Finn will be gone once, with my help, he has found what he wants. I don’t stop to think for one moment that, in fact, Finn has never asked anything of me in the first place.

  But my anger and despair are welling up at the sight of the pictures, not at Finn.

  I begin to weep quietly. But I don’t really know why I cry. Out of fear for Finn and me? At the content of the pictures? At the trap I’m in? I don’t know, perhaps all of these. And eventually I cry for the reason that finally uses up our tears. I cry for all the evil in the world.

  And when I know that I am crying for everyone and everything, I stop and smile at this great futility. Finn holds me and I feel in the closeness of his presence one of those brief moments of truth that I know we both gain from each other in times of chronic self-doubt.

  ‘Don’t worry, Rabbit,’ Finn says after a while. Then he smiles. ‘I’ll give you more than enough to betray me.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I reply.

  ‘But that’s the choice. Eventually,’ he adds. ‘I’d like you to have the choice, Anna. Having the choice is what will bind us. Because I know of course you’ll make the right choice,’ he says. ‘And leave Russia.’

  I stand up and go to the bathroom. I look in the mirror to see if there are traces of four different people in my face. But I look as I always look, though paler, perhaps, from shock. And as I look at myself I think how easy life would be without choice and yet how such a possibility never exists, even when we are enslaved. I see my finely balanced act of doing my work and being so close to Finn, not as a brilliant exercise of skill and craft, but as simply a refusal to choose, to choose to leave Russia for ever.

  When I return from the bathroom, I am ready for what we have to do.

  ‘How do you plan to use them?’ I ask.

  Finn sits down on the bed and we both turn and look again at the pictures.

>   The sixty-one-year-old president of the Banque Leman, an elegant if bland nineteenth-century building artfully lit across the street from our Geneva hotel room, is dressed in various leather straps and thongs, studded or not with silver metal. His paunchy white stomach protrudes over a tight black leather strap above his naked genitals and in his right hand, in a studded glove, he holds a leather stick. There are open bottles of liquor everywhere in the room, some knocked over, their contents spilled over the carpet. In one picture white powder, possibly cocaine, is visible in a disorderly pile on a side table. In another picture there are stains on the wall-wine, blood, bodily fluids? The black-and-white photographs leave this to the imagination, which is somehow worse.

  In some of the pictures the bank’s president Clement Naider is laughing like a satyr, his prick fully erect. In others he is snapping or snarling and raising his hand and, judging from their expressions, apparently bringing it down from time to time, with its stick gripped firmly, on to one or other of the girls. Without them, without the girls, it would be almost comical.

  But it’s the girls who have broken me. They are no more than ten years old, twelve at the most. One of them looks as if she might be even younger. It is hard to tell how many of them there are–they are never all in one picture. One is lying on the floor like a dead body. But in each picture he is inflicting on them one or more depraved acts that outdoes the ones before, in an escalating gallery of foul and hellish images that threaten once again to break my composure.

  The girls? They are provided for his purposes by my own people, of course, colleagues at the Forest. From where? I don’t know. Orphanages, perhaps. Or off the street. One or two of them have central Asian faces, so they’re from one of the southern republics, I suppose. Perhaps they are stolen from their homes, abducted in the cruel war in Chechnya. I don’t know, I don’t know who they are. But I realise it doesn’t matter where they come from. They are just children inserted brutally into this torment of the Forest’s making.

  And it is at this moment that I decide the time has come for me to leave everything behind, to leave this–if this is what Russia has become again–for good. It is time to spend a life looking over my shoulder for the Forest’s retribution. It is time to defect, and even Nana and all the memories of my childhood can no longer hold me. I wonder if this is why Finn has shown them to me.

  Finn gathers the pictures into a pile and puts them in an envelope.

  ‘Naider goes on Saturdays to visit his wife in a sanatorium outside Vevey,’ he says. ‘His wife has motor neurone disease. He has lunch with her there and then takes a walk alone through the woods if the weather’s OK. I’ll make contact with him then, when he’s on his own.’

  At last I snap my mind away from contemplation of my own situation and consider Finn’s words from a professional point of view, glad to have something else on which to focus my thoughts.

  ‘No. You have to go to the bank, Finn. It’s more of a risk, but that’s where the details are. Account numbers, names, whatever it is you’re after. He won’t have those in his head. If you force him without getting the full details, you risk losing him.’

  ‘I have the photographs,’ Finn argues.

  ‘What if the photographs push him too far?’ I say. ‘He can’t take it. He’s trapped. He kills himself. No, you must hit him just once. It might be too late for a follow-up.’

  Finn thinks for a moment, pacing the room, stopping by the window and, perhaps, looking across the streets at the bank itself. He knows I am right, but he doesn’t like the prospect of entering the bank any more than I do. There are too many people inside a building, too many things that can go wrong. But he agrees.

  Finn has prepared himself in all sorts of ways for what he’s going to do. He has offshore financial vehicles tucked away, shell companies that Frank or the Troll have fixed up for him all over the world. He has an account in the Cayman Islands.

  He also has a set of friendly lawyers, in Switzerland, personal contacts of the Troll and perhaps trolls themselves.

  And he has a passport for the purpose, or more than one passport, for all I know. This one, however, is in the name of Robinson, and the Englishman James has acquired it for him.

  He has painstakingly set up all the trappings of a privately wealthy international individual with strings of companies, but without the actual cash that would normally be concealed by such trappings. Concealment is his purpose but it is to conceal that he has nothing.

  And so, on the following day, Finn drafts a letter from his Swiss lawyers to the Banque Leman which will be sent on their official paper from their true and verifiable address in Interlaken.

  ‘Our client is a high-net-worth individual who wishes any contact with the bank to remain discreet for the time being,’ Finn writes in the imagined hand of his lawyers. ‘Our client wishes to put on safe deposit several tens of millions of dollars’ worth of gold bullion, transferable to stocks, bonds or cash at short notice. For the time being our client has decided to amalgamate from disparate investments around the world a modest quantity of his total resources into gold to take advantage of a perceived upturn in the precious metal.

  ‘Our client is seeking in the short term a major acquisition in Europe and other further investments over a short- to mid-term period. Our client wishes to secure the best, most advantageous rates of return for so high a deposit and in addition to know the security arrangements that he can expect from the bank are adequate.

  ‘In the meantime, he also requests that a Swiss franc account be prepared for his signature, references supplied, so that, if favourable terms can be reached at this meeting, there will be no delay. Our client requests a meeting solely with the president of the bank at this delicate stage.’

  All Finn doesn’t write is, ‘Are you interested?’

  A warm reply from the bank’s president arrives, via the Swiss lawyers, and then via the circuitous routes of Finn’s mailbox arrangements.

  ‘The president, Clement Naider, will be delighted to invite Mr Robinson to his office at a time convenient to him.’

  Two days later, after what Finn considers to be an unhurried interval, Finn’s Swiss lawyers telephone the bank and make his appointment for the following Thursday, just under three weeks since we were sitting in the hotel room with the pictures.

  In the meantime, we watch Clement Naider. We follow him from his home, a smart bachelor apartment in Geneva’s old town, to his bank and, on Saturday, out to Vevey to see his wife at the sanatorium. In Vevey, I walk the same path he walks through the woods after lunch. We watch primarily to see if Naider is watched by others.

  Naider has a driver who doubles as a bodyguard and after some time observing him I see that he is armed. He drives the banker to the sanatorium every Saturday and sits in the car while Naider lunches with his wife and then walks alone. In the weekdays, the bodyguard sits in the car behind the bank or, when he wants to smoke a cigarette, which is often, stands in a wooden hut that collects payments for a car park across the road from the rear of the bank. Here he stands chatting to the car-park attendant, jabbing the sports pages of the daily papers with his finger. He seems to have some kind of horse syndicate going, as far as we can judge.

  Occasionally the chauffeur sits in the bank’s fine entrance hall reading a dedicated sporting paper and every so often he drives Naider to a meeting elsewhere in town, or to a club overlooking the lake on the edge of the city where Naider takes a sauna and massage, and where he usually dines alone. To all, he is the respected Herr Naider, the martyr who has sadly lost his wife to a debilitating illness, and who cares for her regularly on a Saturday like a good husband.

  Otherwise, apart from Naider’s driver, Finn and I and James, and later the grumbling Troll, cannot detect anyone tailing the banker, either from my side, or the Swiss side or from anywhere else. We are, finally, sure of that.

  But inside the bank, it will be a different matter. James has a detailed chart of the bank’s internal securit
y arrangements, which he has procured from one of his Geneva thieves. For a whole day he sits in a van in the car park at the rear of the bank, half a ton of concealed electronic equipment behind him, and ‘looks’ at the bank’s circuits, trips and cut-offs until he knows them by heart. But, under Finn’s questioning, he angrily acknowledges that there is little he can do apart from fuse the whole system, and that might cause more problems than it solves. James’s role is now to disable the chauffeur’s mobile phone–and the chauffeur too, if necessary. But once inside, Finn is on his own.

  In the event of complete disaster, and if Finn is able to signal from the inside, we decide that the Troll will set off a fire alarm inside the bank, in preference to a general breakdown of security cameras which might automatically seal doors shut with Finn inside. To his dismay, it requires him to wear a suit and tie. The three of us spend an afternoon choosing a suit for the Troll. Finn calls it our ‘family day out’ and, at the sight of the Troll trying on ill-fitting suits, we laugh for the first time since the pictures arrived, and eat a huge tea.

  But at least, with the Troll inside and able to set off the fire alarm, it will soak up the ground-floor security for perhaps a few vital moments.

  James’s job is to stay in the car park at the back and watch Naider’s top-floor office window for any signal and then, when Finn exits, to cover him and remove anyone who follows him. James is adept at the management of chaos, Finn says.

  It is the worst type of operation. Naider is on his home ground, Finn deep inside it. The banker might well panic and do something he regrets, but it will be too late for both him and Finn by then. There are too many open questions; Finn’s insistence on meeting alone with Naider–will the bank’s procedures allow it? And there is the possibility of an accidental or impromptu entrance by an employee or secretary. How will Naider react? An operation like this one contains what we would normally have considered, in our professional modus operandi, to be an unacceptable risk.