Under the Hammer

by John Mortimer

  ‘In the Lubyanka?’ Ben suggested, ‘if you stepped out of line.’

  ‘Ben, let Alyosha tell us,’ Maggie shushed him and he muttered, ‘Pardon me for living!’ into his glass.

  ‘Life was very hard for us,’ Alyosha was speaking to Maggie. ‘Very hard. There was nothing to buy. Nothing in the shops. Few motor cars, no stereo-sets or facsimile machines. Mr Glazier is right. You had to take care what you said. So all we could do was to lead a rich inner life. You saw people on the Metro, in those days, reading good novels and great poetry. What are they reading now? I think it will be soft pornography and computer magazines.’

  ‘You’re afraid you may lose your souls?’ Maggie said, causing Ben to sigh and raise his eyes to heaven.

  ‘You understand, Miss Perowne.’ Alyosha looked gratefully at her.

  ‘Please, Maggie.’

  ‘Maggie! I may call you Maggie?’ Alyosha was delighted. ‘That is for Margaret, isn’t it? A most beautiful name. Were you named after Mrs Maggie Thatcher? Older than you, of course, but many in Russia found her a most beautiful lady.’ At which point Ben choked on his beer chaser.

  ‘Are you feeling quite well, Mr Glazier?’ Alyosha was concerned.

  ‘I think another vodka. For medical reasons.’

  Alyosha ordered it and then said to Ben, ‘Perhaps the journey was difficult for you? At your age.’ Before Ben could reply he turned back to Maggie, ‘No, I’m not quite happy about our future.’

  Ben, at this moment, was overcome with irritation at being treated as though he were in the geriatric ward and Maggie was listening to Alyosha. Neither of them noticed the young man reading the New York Herald Tribune at the next table. He wore a good deal of gold, having two gold teeth, a gold watch and a thick gold bracelet. He also had thick black hair, brushed back and sprayed into position. His name was Lubov and he belonged to one of the classes able to shop at Gumm. If either Maggie or Ben had noticed him, they would have had no reason to pay him any close attention. Maggie said, ‘I don’t think you’re in any danger of losing your soul, Alyosha.’ At which Ben groaned, ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘Your God?’ Alyosha was interested. ‘You are a religious man, Mr Glazier?’

  ‘He’s Ben.’ Maggie wanted them all to be friends.

  ‘Ben is religious.’ Alyosha nodded approvingly. ‘That is good. You see, Maggie and Ben, my friends, we have suffered so much. Cold. Ice. Tzars. Stalin. I myself live in a very small apartment with my sister Tatyana, her two husbands, one of which she has divorced, my mother and all their children. Also a troublesome dog. But as I said, we have an inner life. We have curds and whey. Should we be better off with twenty different sorts of yoghurt to choose from at breakfast, as you have in the West?’

  ‘Or muesli,’ Maggie told him.

  ‘Excuse me. What is this mu–es–?’

  ‘Stuff that looks like the sweepings of bird cages,’ Ben explained. ‘Roughage. Some people in England like it for breakfast.’

  ‘Muesli? In Russian we do not know that word.’

  ‘That,’ Ben told him, ‘is, at least, one thing to be said in your favour.’

  The next day Alyosha’s programme began with work. They visited, as recommended by Merry Bland, the Ministry of Culture. After the statutory three quarters of an hour wait in a dusty corridor, being looked at with contempt by passing secretaries, they were admitted to a large, not to say palatial, office, with ornate furniture handed down from the upper bureaucracy in the days of the Tzars. There they met a fair, smiling, muscular man in his fifties who greeted them, with great enthusiasm, wearing a purple track-suit and trainers.

  ‘I am Grekov. Please sit down, Mr Glazier, Miss Perowne. And your guide. I have been jahgging, you see. American-style. In the old days we used to goose-step. Now we have learned to jahg.’ He waved at three small gilt chairs on the further side of his desk. When they were settled he said, ‘Now we have the entrepreneurial society. Already we have Pizza Hut and MacDonalds. It would be an honour if we could also welcome the great house of Klinsky.’

  ‘And no doubt all your citizens will be standing in line for a Picasso drawing and regular fries.’

  ‘Ssh, Ben!’ Maggie tried, as usual, to keep him in control.

  ‘You are an entertaining fellow, Mr Glazier.’ Grekov clicked on a smile. ‘We give you both a warm welcome. We will cooperate fully with everything except money. You understand that?’

  ‘I think so.’ Maggie understood.

  ‘We have enthusiasm. We have the love of art. We have adopted the great principles of your economy. Every man for himself. And woman, of course. Forgive me, Miss Perowne.’

  ‘Don’t give it a thought.’

  ‘Now, there are others apart from me who must have a say in this. Other departments to be consulted. I will let you have a list of those to be visited by you. I’m sure you will find them very young and go-ahead. Very entrepreneurial guys, every one of them. Very thrusting, as I told your colleague Mr Shrimsley.’

  ‘He’s been here already?’ Ben was surprised.

  ‘Oh, yes. He is the early bird, Mr Shrimsley. And I am the poor worm! Amusing, didn’t you find that? I have suggested to him premises in Petrovka Street. Once a department of the KGB. You see, we change from the secret police to fine art. What a world of difference!’

  ‘I suppose both of them can be concerned with crime,’ Ben suggested and Grekov leant back in his big carved chair and looked at him with some suspicion.

  ‘So entertaining! Now, Miss Perowne. Is there anything else you wish to touch upon?’

  ‘Someone suggested we ask what you know about a picture. An icon by Rublev.’ Maggie was hesitant.

  ‘I am a mind-reader!’ Grekov smiled again. ‘I am sure your enquiry is about “The Virgin of Vitebsk”. It was one of our greatest treasures.’

  ‘The man in our Icon department ...’

  ‘Mr Meredith Bland.’ Grekov knew at once.

  ‘Yes. He wonders if you’ve ever been able to trace ...’

  ‘A terrible tragedy! A small icon, by all accounts, but very beautiful, “The Virgin of Vitebsk”. We have knocked over all the statues of Stalin. And why? Because he was a thief. Long before the war, he stole many great Russian works of art. I know he sold “The Virgin of Vitebsk” to line his own pocket! Who bought it? That is a mystery. But I have heard rumours that it may turn up in Germany. I hope so. Who else do you go and see?’

  ‘Mrs Olga Krupenska,’ Alyosha told him.

  ‘At the Voynitsky Gallery. Dear Olga. An unreconstructed, old-style Communist, I’m afraid. But a great art expert. You will learn something of great value from her. I hope it. Give her my good love. Tell her to start jahgging and invest in foreign currency.’

  A phone had started ringing. A secretary came up to the desk and whispered something to Grekov in Russian. ‘Oh, the telephone!’ Grekov was waving them away.

  ‘Goodbye, colleagues from Klinsky. That is the trouble with the entrepreneurial society. The telephone never stops ringing! I wish you all the best, for your business in Moscow.’

  In the passage outside Grekov’s office a round, redfaced man in a worn, shabby overcoat, wearing his unwashed hair long, was standing by a window lighting a cigarette. His name was Tolyagin and his job at the Ministry of Culture was of a mysterious nature, except that he worked directly to (as Shrimsley would have said) Ivan Grekov. When Maggie and Ben and Alyosha got to the Voynitsky Gallery, Tolyagin was also there, but that might have been simply because the gallery houses the world’s greatest collection of icons. They didn’t notice him particularly, although they couldn’t fail to see the English schoolgirls who were giggling and whispering their way round the solemn saints and placid Madonnas. Ben also saw that their schoolmistress gave him another look of curious intimacy as they passed through the gallery.

  ‘From the days of the early icons we have been very religious. Our great writers – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky – they were religious. And this will surprise you. Mrs Olga Krupensk
a, who is an old-fashioned Communist, is religious also,’ Alyosha told them. She’s what you call a ‘character’. I think you will get along together.’

  Ben said, ‘Cry God for Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev? How very curious.’

  On their way to the director’s office, Angela Ridgeway, the tallest, thinnest and prettiest of the schoolgirls, who had her ears full of the taped commentary the gallery provided, ran into Ben coming round a corner. Although the collision was entirely her fault, he apologized and she uttered no word at all.

  ‘Klinsky’s! Of course, the name is famous.’ Olga Krupenska had the fine bones, lustrous eyes and much-lined face of an old woman who had once been a beautiful young girl. She was smoking heavily, sitting behind a desk on which the books and papers were stacked as untidily as they were in Ben’s office in London. Alyosha was helping her pour out tea and hand round small cakes to her visitors from England. She asked if Mr Glazier would take a little vodka, and when he declined politely she looked hurt. ‘Why not? My husband, General Krupenski, always took vodka for breakfast. Good on the stomach. I tell you. We are giving away our country to western politicians and the Mafia. We give them all the treasures we have left. But such a house as Klinsky’s! Yes. I think we can do some business. We could trust each other.’

  ‘Of course,’ Maggie began, ‘there are many great works of art in Russia ...’ And Olga, looking at her with interest, asked, ‘You are his mistress?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ Ben had to admit. ‘Maggie’s the head of Old Master Paintings. In fact, she’s my boss.’

  ‘Strange! I took her for your mistress. My husband the General had many mistresses.’

  As she turned away to pour tea, Ben whispered to Maggie, ‘Always took one for breakfast?’

  Olga turned round to Alyosha. ‘What did Mr Glazier say?’

  ‘He suggested that General Krupenski always took a mistress for breakfast,’ Alyosha repeated solemnly.

  ‘Good! Very good!’ Olga laughed, surprisingly loudly.

  ‘There’s one masterpiece we can’t see, apparently. “The Virgin of Vitebsk”.’ Ben changed the subject.

  ‘Our greatest work of art! Stolen by the Germans.’ Olga looked disgusted. ‘Looted. What for? To hang in the lavatory of Field Marshal Goering, I shouldn’t be surprised. Where is it now? Who can tell? We may never find it again, I think. Only by great good luck.’

  ‘How did you come to lose it?’

  ‘I tell you. It was in a monastery attacked by the Germans. Our soldiers fought to save it. They were good Communists, of course. But they fought to save that famous icon. Many were killed fighting in that monastery. Some were shot in front of the icon itself. “The Virgin” looked on as they were shot.’

  ‘Is that the story?’

  ‘It’s the truth. My husband was there, a young officer, in that fighting. Look, here he is. With our heroic leader!’ She stood up then and pointed to a large photograph hanging on the wall, framed in heavy, dark wood, ornately carved. It showed a number of young officers in a group with a jovial Stalin, then the hero of the West also. ‘I have seen my husband weep when he told how the icon was lost.’ There was a short, respectful silence and then Olga Krupenska became business-like. ‘But now, of course, I should be pleased to help the great Klinsky’s. I think we shall meet again now we have broken the ice. Is that that what you say? And I can decide exactly how we might work together.’

  ‘If we did open in Moscow,’ Maggie asked, ‘are there people with money, interested in buying pictures?’

  ‘Oh, there are enough people with money. When there are poor, there are always rich also. Now we have some in Mercedes cars and many sleeping on rubbish dumps.’

  ‘It sounds just like home,’ Ben added.

  Olga had moved closer to the old photograph and was looking at it again with pride. ‘Things were better in the time of the old Communists. When General Krupenski was alive.’

  At the end of the day, long after Maggie and Ben had left her, Olga Krupenska locked the door of her office against further intruders. She then went to the big photograph once more and pressed a spot on the heavy carved frame which swung back from the wall. In the space behind it hung a painting with a gold background. ‘The Virgin of Vitebsk’ was kneeling and holding a flower, listening to the angel who brought her astonishing news. Olga kissed the icon’s frame and then, reverently, folded her hands in prayer.

  Maggie, to Ben’s silent regret, had invited Alyosha to join them for dinner at the Slavyanski Bazaar and now, after caviare and boiled fish, ice-cream and vodka, they were back in the foyer of their hotel. Alyosha, looking round at its green and gold, its chandeliers and marble floor, said, ‘What a palace you live in! How either of my sister’s two husbands would envy you such accommodations.’ He was about to leave them to return to his overcrowded flat when Lubov emerged from the shadows with a smile which fully exposed his gold teeth.

  ‘You English?’

  ‘No,’ Ben said truthfully, ‘Scots.’

  ‘I can show you round this town.’ Lubov was undeterred. ‘You guys want to know how to have a good time in Moscow?’

  ‘These are my clients!’ Alyosha was pale with anger. ‘I arrange their programme as their guide, officially credited. You are not needed here!’

  ‘OK. Keep your cool!’ Lubov was laughing as he moved away. ‘See you around.’

  ‘I know that sort,’ Alyosha said. ‘This is a good time for no good people. So, now he has gone, I will leave you.’

  He left. Maggie smiled after him and Ben didn’t mutter anything so crude as ‘alone at last!’ He did say that the fridge in his room was overflowing with beer and champanski, and would she care for a nightcap?

  ‘Oh, Ben, darling, I’m exhausted!’ Maggie stifled a yawn.

  Agreeing that too much Alyosha did wear a person out, Ben went off to the bar, sadly unaccompanied. When he got there he found the plump schoolmistress who had, from time to time, shown such a curious interest in him nursing a small glass of vodka. He had only just sat down, a few stools away from her in the empty bar, when she began a conversation he found frankly mystifying. She opened with ‘Hallo’ in a throaty voice, and went on in almost a whisper, ‘How are you?’

  ‘Well, rather tired.’

  ‘Yes, you would be.’ She moved herself and her drink to sit beside him. ‘Got my girls settled in for the night in the students’ hostel. I came here for a breath of civilization.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen your schoolgirls,’ Ben admitted.

  ‘School young women, actually. Highly privileged daughters of television executives and brain surgeons, about to go mad on Russian interpreters. I teach modern languages at St Peter’s, Bayswater. For my sins.’

  ‘Do Russian interpreters have that effect on girls?’ Ben was worried.

  ‘Oh, yes! English girls especially,’ the mistress told him. At which bad news, he asked for another large vodka and drank it quickly as she said, ‘How are you these days? Still chasing girls, are you?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I suppose they can run too fast for you now, eh? I was never a great runner. But, anyway, you’re happy. That’s good. I’m glad of that. Very glad. Is that your daughter I saw you with at the airport?’

  ‘No. Well, no, I haven’t got a daughter. As a matter of fact, I never had a wife.’

  ‘Lucky you. I married a Russian. I thought he looked like a prince. Ten years later, as a result of vodka and sausage, he looked like a frog. It was a fairy-tale in reverse. The story of my life. Oh, we split up years ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Ben wasn’t sure how to react.

  ‘Don’t worry. It’s not your fault, darling.’

  Ben looked at her apprehensively, finished his vodka and got off his stool. ‘Well, actually, I am rather tired.’

  ‘It was wonderful to bump into you. See you around.’

  ‘Yes. Well, yes, perhaps.’

  She looked after him, smiling, as he walked towards the lif
t. Ben was still puzzling over this conversation when the memory of it was blotted out by a new and deeper anxiety. Maggie’s room was next to his and as he approached it down the long, dimly lit corridor, he heard the distinct sound of revelry by night. Now he stood in front of number 406, listening to high-pitched giggles and deep male laughter. This was followed by music and unsteady singing. He clenched his fist and knocked on the door, again and then again, but he got no answer. Then, feeling ashamed, he stooped to peep through the keyhole and saw an empty champanski bottle on a threadbare square foot of carpet. There was the sound of further laughter and he went to his room, number 405, in the worst possible temper.

  The telephone by the bed started to ring. Ben ran at it, hoping it was Maggie inviting him to a party which had been nothing to her without him; but all he heard was the distant voice of Meredith Bland. His opening line was also mysterious, ‘What about the virgin?’

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t think I know any virgins.’

  ‘ “The Virgin of Vitebsk”, Ben! What did Olga Krupenska tell you about that?’ Merry Bland was in no mood for banter.

  ‘Oh, that the Germans stole it.’

  There was silence and then Merry spoke more quietly, ‘Will you be seeing her again?’

  ‘She said so.’

  ‘Give me a ring at Klinsky’s when she comes across with anything definite. Promise me that. Good-night, Ben.’

  Ben said, ‘God rest you, Merry,’ and put down the phone. He looked up, startled. Who had hurled a glass against the wall between him and the woman he so inconveniently loved?

  Breakfast at the hotel was well stocked with bacon and eggs, ham, herrings, liver sausage, black and white bread – food available to those with dollars, American Express or Visa cards. Breakfast for two would cost in roubles more than the monthly salary of a professor at Moscow University. Ben, sitting at the marble-topped table under the high, mirrored ceiling, saw Maggie help herself to the full English, Russian-style plate and join him with it. He gave her no smile of welcome but asked, ‘You’re hungry?’ in a meaningful way which was quite lost on her.