Ortega had persuaded Kennedy to take the train to St Petersburg with one of his body guards, Alexander ‘Sacha’ Kutzmenkov, a huge young man of about thirty years old with an appetite and capacity to drink, which matched his size.
Travel by train was one of the surest methods of transport in Russia, mainly because of the unpredictability of the winter weather conditions when northern airports could be snowed in. The railways worked like clockwork, in spite of the age and condition of the trains. The trains were however not that uncomfortable and were considered safer than the internal Russian air links. Ortega did not want to risk his investment aboard an ailing and poorly maintained Tupolev.
The trip to Russia had been conceived by Ortega as part of his design to gain a firm grip over the impressionable Kennedy. Ortega had demonstrated his influence and impressed Kennedy with his political and business relations. He had shown him another world that he knew nothing of and had learned to look on Ortega differently, with awe and respect.
As the week drew to an end Ortega announced to Kennedy’s surprise that he had been booked for a visit to Saint Petersburg where he was to be joined by Erikkson and Barton. He would then travel to Finland, from where he would take the ferry for an overnight excursion to Tallinn, Estonia, some eighty kilometres across the Gulf of Finland. In Tallinn together with Barton they would collect some important documents for the development of Ortega’s Cuban business.
“You will enjoy the trip Pat, in any case you have nothing more to do here over the weekend!”
“Yesh Señor Ortega,” he replied through a fog of Vodka. He would never be able to explain to his wife Susan the drinking he had done as a sworn teetotaller. But he pushed that back into the fog, as there were a lot of things he had done in the previous few days that he would have great difficulty in confessing to Father Brenan back in Limerick.
Kennedy did not ask too many questions, he was out of his depth, he followed Ortega around shaking hands and unsuccessfully trying to refuse Vodka, but willingly meeting the stunning Russian girls that Ortega plied on him.
“After you can go on to Stockholm to meet the Bottens’ president with Stig,” Ortega said stroking Kennedy’s shoulder, as though the change in plan was the most natural thing in the world.
If things worked as Ortega had carefully planned, Kennedy would fall like a ripe fruit into his hand, in fact he was already in his hand though Ortega needed a little leverage just in case, for those unforeseen events that have a nasty habit of popping up.
Ortega used a well run-in technique developed and refined over seventy years by the MKVD, the predecessor of the KGB, the KGB itself and its successor, the FSB, whatever the name it was the same organisation and given the never changing conservatism of the Russia system it would probably go on for ever.
Erikkson and Barton were to meet Kennedy at the Nevsky Hotel on Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg, where they had been holding meetings with Ortega’s bankers. The three would then travel on to Finland.
Kennedy’s mouth felt like as though it were lined with a couple of millimetres of dental plaque and at eleven that evening as he settled down in the night train he thought to himself that his armpits had begun to smell like a Russian shit-house. It was the third day he had spent drinking and whoring in a whirlwind of dinners and parties, meeting and shaking hands with a dizzying number of personalities, politicians and businessmen not to speak of the girls.
They had a first class compartment to themselves. There were two bench type seats, which were transformed into couchettes for the night. They were separated by a fold-down table, on which open sandwiches of salmon eggs and caviar had been set down on a silver tray with a bottle of vodka and four bottles of imported beer with glasses.
Kennedy stared with mounting curiosity as Sacha proceeded to empty onto his couchette a plastic bag that advertised a Finnish supermarket in Moscow. He withdrew a length of black multiple strand plastic sheathed cable and placed it on his couchette, then a red and white plastic gadget.
“Alarm!” he announced to Kennedy.
Kutzmenkov closed the compartment door firmly, and then proceeded in what appeared to be a practised manner to wind the cable into a series of knots around the door lock then extending it to the rail of the clothes hanger on the compartment wall. He then he took an old trouser belt from the bag, the artificial leather had cracked to the point of almost breaking the belt in two where it had been frequently buckled, he fastened it tightly around the alarm to the growing astonishment of Kennedy, he then fixed the belt to another rail above Kennedy’s pillow and a cord from the alarm to the door handle.
“Now you will see!” he pulled the cord sharply and a small jack was jerked out of a socket on the side of the alarm. A sharp modulating screech was emitted for a few seconds before Sacha re-inserted the small jack back into the socket. It was not exactly ear piercing and Kennedy suspected that it would not wake up the worn out babushka any more than the rattle of the worn bogies over the equally worn tracks. Not to disappoint him Kennedy made signs of being impressed.
Finally Sacha plugged the air vents in the door explaining that this would prevent robbers from spraying knockout gas into the compartment.
Kutzmenkov was pleased with himself, but the finality of the arrangement dismayed Kennedy when he realised that if nature called during the night Sacha may not appreciate being awoken to let him out.
Sacha indicated the food and vodka to Kennedy, who invited him to go ahead, which he did wolfing down the blinies and sandwiches with large gulps of vodka alternated with beer directly from the bottle.
As the train rattled towards St Petersburg, 600 kilometres to the northwest, Kennedy settled into an uneasy sleep. The springs of the wagon were worn and at each uneven point on the track they went into what seemed a never ending series of oscillations with the bogies, sleep was difficult. Soon the pressure either real or imaginary mounted on Kennedy’s bladder. The more he tried to push the thought of a piss from his mind, the more it invaded his thoughts.
He switched on one of the dim night lights and pushed Sacha on the shoulder.
“What’s wrong!”
“I need a piss.”
“What!”
“I need to go for a piss.”
“Shit!”
“No, a piss.”
“Shit!” Sacha lifted his huge body sleepily from his couchette and started to fumble with the alarm. A few minutes later he pulled the compartment door open.
As Kutzmenkov carefully watched over his ward, Kennedy trod carefully over the lengths of worn carpet towards the toilet as though frightened of picking up some awful microbe. The stench of the toilet woke him up instantly and alerted him to the pool of urine on the floor, balancing on tip toes with his feet far apart he managed to hold steady himself with the swaying of the train which seemed to come in waves, he then hurried back to his compartment where Kutzmenkov sat irritated on the side of his couchette with the bundle of belt and wires in his hands.
Kennedy together with Barton hurried in from the snow and made their way around the cleaners, who had the never ending job of clearing and swabbing away the watery black trails left in the lobbies and entrance halls by the passing feet of guests and visitors.
It was late in the afternoon when they checked out of the Nevsky Hotel in St Petersburg. A dark blue Mercedes waited for them outside the hotel, it was dirty, that was to be expected, the wet snow had turned dust of the Czarist city into a quagmire of mud and water.
There was an endless discussion at the cash desk and Sacha called Kennedy back to the hotel desk, where three dollars extra were required for a phone call to Moscow, which had only just come through to the checkout desk. After some discussion on the cross exchange rates between sterling and dollars they returned to the Mercedes.
“They’re are so fucking stupid,” shouted Barton, “the bill was over six thousand dollars and they make a fuss over three dollars!”
They climbed into the Mercedes and headed out of the re
splendent though rundown city towards Viborg, some 150 kilometres to the northwest and Finland.
After leaving the city, the road was as not as bad as Kennedy had been led to believe, the traffic was light and the surface was in a reasonable condition. The only difficulty was to restrain the Frenchman from his desire to ask the driver to stop, so that he could piss on the green metallic monument at the city limit, which commemorated Napoleon’s defeat in 1812.
About one hundred kilometres from St Petersburg it started to snow heavily, it was apparently no problem for their Russian driver, he had been born in the snow and no doubt he would end his days in an icy grave. Frequent police controls reassured Kennedy that road pirates were a thing of the past.
After about an hour they pulled off the highway onto to small road covered with thick fresh snow and drove slowly towards a small Russia village, where the driver had informed them they the shops were open. The shops consisted of a line of dismal kiosks where they bought a bottle of vodka and three bottles of mineral water, the drive to Helsinki would be long and refreshment would be needed to keep their spirits up.
Chapter 58
The Sally Anne
Offshore Islands Page 57
