The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  “But is there any way of getting someone in there? – not so easy in the current climate.”

  “Sure, sure… Partly because they’re still waiting for the much discussed funding for electronics, and now they really need it! We did the right thing when we froze it. Now they are really relying on them, and therefore they’ll be ready to negotiate – well, that’s my opinion. If nothing else, he was the one who came along with the bone in his mouth.

  Interesting that, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay. But listen, who’s doing the application?”

  “Hell, the situation there is a bit of a mess… I think that the only one in the running is Rasulayev. But we’ll have to have a quiet word with Rasulayev, you know. Because Rasulayev is in cahoots with Nordman, and Nordman is the real villain in there.”

  “So who is Nordman in bed with? It has always been a bit of a mystery.”

  “Nordman is just a whore; he hangs out with everyone, but in the city council he has been putting his fingers in the till just about everywhere. I know this from my father-inlaw, Salimov. He told me: every time there’s a bit of business going, Nordman turns up and shares out all the funding. It seems to me that we’ve got to sort that one out…”

  “Yes, it has got to be sorted… But who goes in his place?

  Kharitonov?” “No! It has to be Rasulayev!”

  “It has to be Rasulayev? But you’ve got to speak to him first.”

  “Okay. We’ll deal with that. But you know that at any time you call me… Oh, hold on a moment.”

  Click! The engineer stopped the recorder.

  “Did you see that, Nazar Kallistratovich. What a beauty?”

  “I saw and I heard,” Nazar muttered. “So that is where all our money is going. But for my purposes, there is nothing cast-iron coming out of this. Is this all that we’ve got on Dyakonov?”

  “No, this is not all; now we get to the good part. But are you sure you can’t put a name to the Muscovite?”

  “I’ve already told you I can’t,” Nazar was losing his patience.

  “Well, let’s listen to a little more; maybe you’ll get there in the end.” Click! Vezirov’s voice invaded the room again.

  “Listen, you can discuss the terms of the contract with Dyakonov face-to-face; he’s coming to Moscow tomorrow.

  And he’s bringing you the cooperative’s articles of association, so that you can come to an agreement…”

  “But is he coming just for that? Because otherwise I could…”

  “I don’t know; I think he has something else to sort out, an international joint venture. With Italy, manufacturing artificial limbs for veterans or some such shit like that… You know he’s got a finger in every pie…”

  “Fucking right, I know… and sooner or later…”

  “Yes, sooner or later… But for the moment we’ll let it run, shall we? Anyway, he’s coming to see you tomorrow or Thursday, I can’t remember. Let me know what happens, you hear?”

  Nazar stared in amazement on hearing these words. “And did you record this conversation yesterday?” he exhaled incredulity.

  “Yesterday evening,” Ogodayev confirmed. “From twenty eighteen to twenty forty-five.”

  “And – has he phoned?”

  “He phoned not long ago, Nazar Kallistratovich. We traced the call, of course. He was ringing from an office in Gorky Street, from the Inturist skyscraper; you know where it is, I think. And this office, would you believe it, has just been rented by two cooperatives with registered offices in Baku. Anyway they’ve fixed an appointment to meet at the Krasnaya Presnya sauna, tomorrow afternoon at five.”

  “Oh really? Well, I think I might go along myself to this little get-together, and I won’t be on my own. But now,”

  Nazar’s voice was suppressing eager desperation, “but now you must tell me please: who is the Muscovite? I need his name to prepare his arrest warrant.”

  “Really, you want to arrest him too? Well, that will be an interesting meeting. I am only sorry that I won’t be there to see it,” Ogodayev commented. And then he told him whom Dyakonov would be speaking to. Nazar practically had a heart attack.

  XXVIII

  In the steam room

  Moscow, October 1988

  Small puddles of muddy water were forming on the floor tiles of that repulsive yellow colour that you so often find in our utility rooms. Jackets and ties of the kind bureaucrats wear, officers’ caps and coats, oil-splattered overalls and peasants’ heavy jackets were all hanging from pegs and jumbled up together on the walls – a veritable democracy of garments! (That was the word used at the time, and no one had started to call it shitocracy, as would happen later.) Nazar, naked and self-conscious, draped a sheet around his large, pasty-white body, accepted the bundle of birch branches that the attendant was solicitously handing him, and in return put a coin in his hand: Listen, dear fellow, keep an eye on the wallet and glasses in the coat pocket, just in case someone decides to rummage around… Next to the judge, a police captain was divesting himself of his civilian clothes. When he was naked, he exchanged a glance with Nazar, and they both moved off towards the sauna.

  “What’s the steam like today?” he asked the attendant as he passed.

  “Good,” he replied with a wink.

  Following the policeman, Nazar’s clogs clattered across the wash area with its marble basins, and then he entered the immense, dimly-lit room: the heat hit him immediately and took his breath away. You know how it is – just like when you take the first shot glass of matured vodka: powerful. A multitude of ill-defined figures all wrapped in identical sheets were sitting or moving about in groups through the steam. Without his glasses, Nazar was unable to recognise anyone, and was therefore obliged to rely on the captain. When they entered a cavernous room, someone, on seeing Nazar’s imposing profile, shouted, “Hey! More water!”

  Respectful of tradition, the judge returned to the wash area, filled an aluminium bucket with water, returned to the sauna and poured the water on the scorching hot bricks. A cloud of boiling hot steam escaped and sizzled, completely blinding everyone close to that furnace.

  “That’s enough, that’s enough!” came a chorus of protests. “What do you mean ‘that’s enough’?” came the bitter retort from an elderly man seated with great dignity on the highest steps, precisely at the point where the heat becomes suffocating and every breath seems to scorch your nostrils.

  “It’s barely warm!”

  The Krasnaya Presnya sauna must have been built to resemble a Roman amphitheatre. The steps rise up all around the hot bricks, but they are not made of marble – oh no, just those same sad yellow floor tiles. Who manufactures that stuff? And couldn’t they change the colour every now and then? Some equally miserable greenish colour just for a change… Even in the sauna in Taganskaya Square – the one Nazar usually frequents – the floor is made of those same tiles, but they are older and in bad condition. The structure of the room there was, however, entirely different and you had the feeling of going down into the bowels of the earth.

  Whether it was because of the darkness, due to the council’s judicious savings on light bulbs, or the steam that floated lazily in the air half way up the room, or even the crowds of semi-naked bodies, you felt as though you had descended into the underworld, as it was imagined by the ancients.

  Here it was more like climbing up from Hades to an Olympus surrounded by clouds. It was still an underworld, but an element of hope existed… Once he had returned the bucket, Nazar worriedly looked around: he would be in trouble if he could not find his police captain, who was the Virgil to guide him through this Avernus. Eventually he saw him slowly climbing up the steps: without showing it, he was examining the faces of each individual wrapped in a sheet. The judge went along behind him, struggling to breathe, and sensing with pleasure that sweat was beginning to drip from every pore. He would have liked to sit down somewhere, nod off while his body happily absorbed all that health-giving heat, r
evive the blood circulation with a good beating with birch and then perhaps complete the treatment with a tankard of beer or perhaps even two. But they were there to work. On reaching the highest step, now completely out of breath, he noted that the captain had slowed down and, every time someone passed, he stopped as though to adjust the sheet around him. This gave Nazar a chance to catch up with him.

  “I believe,” the policeman whispered while gesturing with his head, “that the ones we’re looking for are over there.” Nazar looked in the direction he had indicated and saw two seated figures draped in white who were chatting in a corner. “Shall we sit down,” the captain suggested.

  They sat down rather uncomfortably on boiling tiles.

  “Is that them?” asked Nazar lowering himself to his partner’s ear.

  “I would certainly say so.”

  Nazar attempted put the two phantasms into focus, but unsuccessfully. It was no use without his glasses. And yet if the policeman was not mistaken, one of them was Dyakonov the Accountant, the elusive trafficker he had been chasing for months, and the other, well Nazar could not think of the other without his blood beginning to boil…

  “What do we do?” he asked tensely.

  “We wait a little longer. Otarik’s boys will soon be with us.”

  And so it was. Two unusually sturdy young men suddenly materialised a short distance away. They were Herculean not in the sense so commonly used here in Russia: meaning forearms as mighty as you could want, but stomachs, dear me, mightier than their chests. No, these boys were quite the opposite; their pecs burst forth above waists that in comparison you could hardly notice: body builders, followers of the great Stallone. Of course, thought Nazar, you’re not going to find people like that in the police force, and if there are any, they’ll be in the shot-putting team, but then those guys wouldn’t take a risk in an operation like this, in which, God forbid, there’s the chance of stopping a bullet… That’s it! Because the fact is that the two body-builders, like their associates who were strategically placed at the various exits from the room, weren’t policemen but wrestlers from the “Dynamo” gym, which was, and perhaps still is, just round the corner from there, on Krasnopresnensky Boulevard. Rumour had it that some dirty deals were going down at that gym and the trainer and headman, known to his close friends as Otarik, had several peccadilloes that he wanted to hide from the authorities. The man himself didn’t seem too bothered about denying the rumour, and the Moscow police for some reason were not showing any interest in the matter. It’s true that the gym had provided more than one Pan-Soviet champion in wrestling and even a couple of Olympic medalists, and no doubt there was also the fact that Otarik occasionally lent two or three of his lads to that very same police force for operations requiring a degree of discretion. This was one of those occasions, at the captain’s explicit request: You could arrest them in the sauna, but it would be better to come to an agreement with Otarik first. Everything that happens in that neighbourhood is his business, you understand, he had said with a meaningful expression, and besides, Nazar Kallistratych, can you see us undressing our policemen and sending them naked into the sauna? Is that any way to make an arrest? No, it would be better for us two to go in on our own with the warrant. My lads will be waiting outside in the van, and inside Otarik will make sure that everything goes ahead unobserved. Let’s keep the business neat and tidy…

  “What do you say, shall we make a move?” Nazar whispered to the captain. He nodded and was about to stand up, when suddenly two more body-builders appeared, but their faces were not known to either the judge or the captain. The first was carrying two large tankards of beer – those half-litre ones they only use in that sauna – and the other something wrapped up in newspaper, which must have been smoked fish. Breathing heavily because of the strain of going up the steps in that heat, the two came up to Dyakonov and his companion.

  “Here,” said the first one in an apologetic tone as he handed over the tankards, “they only had Zhiguli.”

  “Zhiguli isn’t a beer; it’s gnat’s piss,” stated a cold voice that was new to Nazar; evidently this was Dyakonov. He spoke perfect Russian without the trace of an accent, and yet you somehow felt that his peaceful, even educated speech contained an unpleasant, discordant note. Without even getting up, the man wrapped up in a sheet grabbed the tankard he was offered and with a theatrical gesture poured the beer onto the scorching bricks which were only two metres below. The beer frizzled and boiled, and the steam that came from the bricks took on a strange, pungent aroma.

  “Well!” someone said from below.

  Immediately the voice of the second criminal boomed out, a voice now very familiar to Nazar, “You are free to do whatever you want with your own beer, but I will drink to your health, my dear Artur Yakovlevich!” The owner of that voice lifted his tankard high and drank a good half of it noisily, while Nazar continued to kick himself for his stupidity. Of course, the telephone does considerably distort a human voice, but still how could he have failed to instantly recognise that irritating nasal tone and a Caucasian accent as thick as potato soup when he was at Ogodayev’s office? After all, he heard that voice practically every morning when he met his dear neighbour in the lift in Chkalova Street. It was Deputy Minister Polad-zade, of course: for he was the man who had been speaking on the phone to First Secretary Vezirov, and today had an appointment with the Accountant to discuss who knows what shady dealings. To obtain the authorisation to arrest Polad-zade, Nazar had had once more to stay up most of the night: it is one thing to throw a nonentity like Dyakonov into prison, even though he would have had his protectors, and was in the habit of discussing business with powerful men as an equal, but at least on paper he was just a miserable businessman, an intermediary between cooperatives, but it was quite another to do this to a Deputy Minister! Just as well that the deputy ministers of the Minvodchoz, as he had discovered during that night, belong to the nomenklatura of the Central Committee and not that of the Politburo, as can happen with the deputy ministers of some of the more delicate portfolios: if you have to arrest a deputy foreign minister, for instance, there would be nothing for it but to submit your request to the Politburo, and without the approval of Mikhail Sergeyevich, they wouldn’t let you lay a finger on him. But when it came to Polad-zade, it was enough to go a little bit down the ladder, and given the extreme urgency of the case, the Deputy Chief Prosecutor Stepankov had no qualms about waking some powerful figure in the early hours of the morning…

  “So they really don’t have any champagne? What a shithole!” resounded Dyakonov’s contemptuous voice once more.

  “Relax, Artur Yakovlevich, this is a simple and unsophisticated place,” Polad-zade replied in a conciliatory tone. “Come on, let’s get going with the birch branches!”

  The deputy minister stood up and handed the bundle to the man who had brought the smoked fish, and the latter duly set about whipping him with the branches. Although this custom could not have existed in the sunny lands he hailed from, Polad Alyevich had clearly adopted some Muscovite customs and knew that to fully enjoy a sauna you need to have a massage. This is the only way to open all the pores and get the beneficent heat to spread to each and every last muscle.

  “A little more on the legs, on the legs!”

  The branches rustled, the flesh turned red and the deputy minister moaned with satisfaction, and only broke off to give instructions to the man providing the service.

  Only then did the captain, having overcome the hesitation caused by the unexpected arrival of the two body-builders, get up and approach the group, while Nazar hurried along behind, tripping on his sheet. He was in a hurry to see Dyakonov, and what he saw came as a surprise. If you think about it, it was just as you should expect: the Accountant, in spite of his rather unsporting nickname, was in fact a muscular young man with his hair brushed back and kept in place with gel. He was the kind of guy young girls go crazy for at the restaurant or discotheque…

  “Polad Alyevich,” sai
d the captain with a respectful nod in the direction of the deputy minister, “and you too; you are Dyakonov Artur Yakovlevich, are you not? Well, I’m terribly sorry to interrupt your meeting, but I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”

  “What are you trying to say?” the Accountant objected raspingly, without standing up. “And who are you, anyway?

  Introduce yourself!”

  “Captain Matveykin of the Moscow Police. And this is Judge Lappa of the Chief Prosecutor’s Office. I would ask you to avoid causing a commotion and to follow us immediately.”

  “Nazar Kallistratovich, is this some kind of a joke?” echoed the deputy minister’s stunned and now slightly worried voice.

  “I’m sorry, Polad Alyevich, I…” mumbled Nazar, strangely embarrassed – perhaps because he had never arrested anyone in such circumstances, and his neighbour at that. But before he could go any further, the two body-builders and bearers of smoked fish and beer stepped forwards with a menacing air. The captain nodded to the two wrestlers sent by Otarik to escort him, and they too stepped forward. The four Herculeses thus deployed in opposing lines studied each other’s armoury and found that they were equal in number and in tonnage; it seemed that everyone was about to witness a duel between good and evil, just like in the films, but then one of the goodies spoke, “Look, Vitalik, this time it would be better to stand aside. The police are outside.”

  Nazar stared at the Hercules who had just been spoken to in this manner, and this time he recognised him. Yes, it could be no other: Vitaly Gumilyov, gold medallist in wrestling at the ’76 Olympics. The four wrestlers, who apparently all knew each other and must have shared changing rooms and showers in the good times – and most probably accommodation in the Olympic village and perhaps even something not provided for in the IOC programmes, sullenly and silently sized each other up. Then Vitaly and his partner took a step back.