Sila's Fortune (10 page)

And now here was this fat, half-bald man, head shaved, standing in front of him, the embodiment of the shift of power. Here he stood in Lev's Moscow office, in his tower, amid all the trappings of power, in front of Lev's staff, making this dangerous proposition without a flicker of hesitation.

‘I could have you kicked out. I could call my bodyguards.'

‘Of course, Councillor Kravchenko,' the man said, smiling, ‘but I'd simply come back through the window.'

On his thickset face, the smile was a rictus. ‘A wrestler,' thought Lev, ‘they seem to have a lot of them.' He remembered the wrestling tournaments he used to go to with his father, a fervent enthusiast. He had stared in admiration at these colossal men with their scars, their heavy, lumbering strength capable of extraordinary speeds. These days, he was meeting many of the idols of his childhood. But there was nothing admirable about them any more.

‘And why would I trust a Chechen?' asked Lev.

‘I anticipated such a question, Councillor, though, if I may say, it does you no credit. The first reason is simple: Chechens are highly competent, a fact recognised around the world.'

‘They've flooded Western Europe with cocaine, amphetamines and ecstasy,' thought Lev, ‘they're in every nightclub.'

‘We can offer you absolute protection,' the wrestler continued. ‘Private security firms, as you know, are not always very trustworthy. They can be poorly organised, too small and employ individuals of a somewhat flexible morality.'

‘Whereas you on the other hand are of the utmost integrity?'

‘Absolutely,' the man said without a trace of irony. ‘We guarantee our clients' security at the risk of our own lives.'

On this point at least, Chechens had an excellent reputation, so much so that they had sold Slavic gangs the right to use the term ‘Chechen' as though it were a franchise.

‘So we come to the second reason, which is … more delicate,' the man went on. ‘But everyone knows that Councillor Kravchenko is a man of great delicacy. It concerns your friend, Councillor Litvinov.'

‘What's the connection?'

‘Everyone also knows that your friendship is … tenuous.'

‘I still don't see the connection.'

‘Of course you see the connection, Councillor, you see it perfectly clearly. You simply want the fat oaf in front of you to spell it out. You want to see the fat oaf getting in deeper. You are familiar with your friend's
krysha
?'

‘The Slavic Brotherhood.'

‘Our most serious competitors. They are tough, organised men with intelligent leaders.'

‘Yes, and they're Russians. Why shouldn't I go to them?'

‘Go to the men who protect your friend, the men he pays so handsomely they have raised an army for him? Would that not be a little dangerous, Councillor? After all, Litvinov's means are virtually limitless. And he is a personal friend of President Yeltsin. Put your trust in men in the pay of such a tenuous friend? That seems to me a very dangerous course of action. Whereas if you put your trust in the Chechens, the enemies of the Slavic Brotherhood, you can put yourself entirely in our hands. Your interests are our interests.'

Lev studied the man.

‘My interests? With the sort of money you demand?'

‘Of a man such as yourself, Councillor, we demand nothing. We are simply proposing an alliance. We consider the sum we ask fair compensation for our services. After all, it is a matter not only of ensuring your personal safety, but also that of your various businesses, including those projects … currently in development.'

‘They really do know everything,' thought Lev. The poster was right: they were everywhere.

‘I'll think about it,' he said.

The big man got to his feet, deferentially saluted and left.

‘Protection rackets now. There's no limit to how low this country can sink. And they have the gall to take me on. Oh, they sound servile, but the results are the same. And what choice do I have but to accept their little proposal of marriage? There's no state any more. Litvinov has already made his marriage of convenience; everyone has made a pact of some sort. But how do I know that the Chechens won't bleed me dry?'

More than 800,000 men worked for security firms all over the country, mostly in Moscow and St Petersburg. They had usurped the powers of the police, who were incapable of carrying out their role. They enforced the law – at the cost of countless murders. They made their presence felt by any means necessary. Sometimes however, as with Litvinov, people approached them to create a private army, partly to protect themselves, partly to muscle in on other people's territories.

‘Warlords. Armed thugs trying to invade rival kingdoms – though these days the kingdoms are multinationals. It's the Middle Ages.'

Lev went home to his Moscow palace, the former palace of Prince Ehria. Oligarchs had replaced princes. Outside the railings stood two men. Bodyguards. They would have to be replaced. He'd have to make the Chechen gorillas wear suits instead of their hideous tracksuits and baseball caps. A Russian resorting to Chechens …

Standing motionless a short distance from the bodyguards was an elderly man, a beggar with a long black coat and a walking stick. Lev asked the driver to stop next to him. Through the
tinted window, as the car purred gently, he contemplated the man silently, with a sort of dreamlike attentiveness. He contemplated the man's pallor, the deep furrowed wrinkles, the hungry face consumed by misery. A victim of neglect, but most of all of self-neglect.

‘A
muzhik,'
thought Lev. ‘A character straight out of Tolstoy. This country has gone from being an epic to a seedy thriller with gangs and criminals and militias. But the
muzhik
remains, still exploited, enslaved, humiliated.'

He rolled down the window. The old man looked up, his eyes weary and clouded by cataracts. His head swayed, trying to make out the person in front of him. What could he see? What could anyone see in Lev Kravchenko who, even after a hard day at work, presented an expression of icy perfection, as though it was vital to reveal nothing, as though his safety depended on the poker-face, the perfectly knotted tie, the immaculate white shirt with its starched collar?

For a moment, the two faces remained motionless, facing each other. Then a hand appeared, opened, placed a banknote in another hand, and the tinted window silently rolled up again as the car drove towards the gate, which was already opening.

Lev got out, walked up the steps to the entrance. A maid took his briefcase and he headed into the living room. Elena came over to him, wearing a somewhat artificial smile. As so often, he pictured her as the student she had been, and as so often dismissed the image because the Lev he had been back then no longer existed either. Or rather he no longer had the right to exist except in the ghostly form of a dream tinged with
remorse. A sort of rain inside him, the drizzle of memory, persistent and a little sad.

Elena kissed him. She was wearing a black dress. Lev thought of the beggar's long black coat. Elena was always elegant, always dressed up to greet him.

‘Good day?' he asked.

He knew he had to start the conversation. Their relationship required these platitudes, the seemingly futile words that began the process of bringing them together again, like the flourish of a proffered hand before a dance, words that were all the more necessary since their days were utterly different, especially given that he had just had a Chechen gangster in his office. What had she spent her day talking about? Which French, Italian, Spanish writer? Stendhal, Rabelais, Cervantes, Dante? What scholarly interpretation had she been elaborating even as he had been trying to weigh up the threat posed by the sudden incursion of a protection racket into his life, into their lives? It was not the sort of protection racket a shopkeeper faces when some thug teaches him the harsh realities of business, but one that heralded the beginning of a dangerous and menacing alliance. A menace contained in a neck that, though meekly bowed, was like that of a bull, in a smile that, though humble, was fraught with ominous undertones. An alliance for better or worse, until death …

Lev stroked Elena's hair. Surprised, she drew back. He so rarely touched her … Usually he behaved in a cold, controlled manner that could be charming but was icy for all that. Then she came towards him. He breathed in her perfume, kissed her hair. Then he drew back with an awkward smile. She looked at him, puzzled. He nodded his head and smiled again.

‘Are the children in bed?'

Always the same question, though he knew the answer. Of course they were in bed. How could they not be at this time? They had two children now. Two boys he did not see grow up. Two boys who would be strangers to him, like everyone except Elena.

They went upstairs to kiss their sons. In the palace bedrooms. Rooms so vast they were absurd. Lev thought of the two-roomed apartment where he had grown up, of the strange grey, colourless world in which he had been raised in which
things
were so scarce, so drab they seemed to wince. Now, his children had so many
things
, an orgiastic accumulation of
things
, filling the rooms with an expensive clutter that even Elena made no attempt to curb.

Elena opened the bedroom door of the older boy, Yevgeni, who was sprawled on his huge circular bed. He was breathing regularly. The boy was tall and thin, a beautiful child who looked a lot like his mother.

‘Two parents watching over their child,' thought Lev. ‘It's as moving as a soap opera.'

They moved on to the younger boy's room. A small cot with bars at the sides. For the hundredth time Lev thought that he did not know this child. Mikhail Kravchenko. It sounded good. But who was this boy? Lev knew Yevgeni a little, the boy had been born in a different period of his life, back when he had been one of Yeltsin's advisors, when everything still made some sort of sense. Now that every day was a struggle, now that all his energies were devoted to clinging on to what territories he had and trying to annex others, he found it terribly
difficult to look at his wife's child, this helpless little creature, so fragile and so delicate. Who was this Mikhail Kravchenko? A baby, later a child that he sometimes held in his arms, a boy he rarely saw awake since he was so rarely there in the daytime. But a child he would have to get to know if he were not to have another stranger in his midst, someone vaguely familiar, someone to whom he would smile, address a few platitudes, to whom he would bequeath a part of his fortune so he in turn might carry on the struggle.

He kissed the child. His skin was soft. Then, carefully – and to some extent they were both playing a part – they stepped out of the bedroom and went back to the living room.

‘Would you like dinner?'

‘That would be lovely.'

The table was laid. The cook, as always, had prepared dinner but Lev did not like to be waited on by servants. Sometimes, Elena would insist on serving him. More often than not, she had already eaten by the time he got home but even so, it was a shared moment. She would sit next to him, sometimes sipping a glass of wine, and here they wove the ties of their relationship, the tenuous ties that had to be rewoven every day, not because they did not get along, nor because they no longer loved each other, but because of the ghosts.

The ghosts of their first meeting. The professor and the undergraduate. The brilliant intellectual, the young, beautiful student. The girl who took notes during Professor Kravchenko's lectures and who, after they had a drink together, fell in love with her professor. Elena was still beautiful, but she was no longer young. She was a wife and mother, she was
a professor who taught at the university where once she had studied. She no longer took notes from Professor Kravchenko. In fact she did her utmost not to take notes, not to register the cynicism in his voice when he talked about his businesses.

The ghost of the professor. The ghost of a man who had never been an idealist but who joked about the empire with such caustic, such acerbic wit that Elena had thought him brave. He was not brave. Not that he was a coward, but he did not believe political courage was a valid concept because he did not believe in anything. He had not believed in Communism, nor had he any greater faith in capitalist democracy. ‘It's the rule of money,' he would say, ‘that's all there is to it. We've gone from being ruled by bureaucrats to being ruled by accountants. And the Russian people are neither more nor less happy.'

But more than that, the ghost of a man more cheerful, more amenable, more
alive
. Not the Hun, no, not the Hun. How could she not miss the Lev she had once known? How could she not go on looking for this ghost in some fleeting look, in his infrequent smiles, in some deft, eloquent phrase?

Lev ate in silence. Elena toyed with a glass of red wine.

‘You know, I had someone try to extort money from me today.'

He said it as though it were a joke. Immediately Elena was on the alert: he rarely talked about business.

‘Extort money? In the street?'

Given he was permanently flanked by two bodyguards, this was improbable to say the least.

‘In my office. Easier that way, not so many witnesses.'

‘Who?'

‘The Chechens. One of those security firms, you know, there are lots of them. They offered to protect me. In exchange for money, obviously.'

‘Did you have them thrown out?'

She used the same words Lev had used when confronted with the Chechen.

‘No. Actually, it was just one guy. An ex-wrestler making a comeback. He was very polite. Couldn't have been more polite. I told him I'd think about it.'

‘Think about it? They're trying to extort money and you're going to think about it?'

‘Yes. Because if I refuse protection – from them or from anyone else – then we would really be in trouble.'