Hot Siberian (18 page)

The gist of what Stolar was saying now to the meeting was that radical changes in the area of foreign trade were expected. The term “expected” was synonymous with “ordered” in such context. Everyone, all the way down the line, would have to be more and more aggressive. The push was on, the new push, different from all the old ones. There would soon be noticeable improvements in the quality of Soviet-produced goods, making them competitive with any others on the world market. Profits would be huge. This was, admittedly, a capitalistic attitude; however, ideology had no bearing on it. Anyone so purist that he felt squeamish about it should sit aside now and watch.

Savich's nod confirmed that as the official standpoint.

A woman seated near Nikolai grunted dubiously and lighted another Gauloise from the one she'd smoked down to nearly a finger-burning stub. Nikolai didn't grunt but he thought that even if by some miracle the Soviets became as economically dominant as, say, Japan it wouldn't help his own financial predicament. How many lifetimes such as his would it take for someone like him to become wealthy in Russia? He was looking at the year 2300, and even then only maybe. Anyway, all this pep-talking about wheeling and dealing didn't apply to him. His domain of diamonds was already outdoing the West.

Savich didn't talk, merely attended. At the end of the meeting he stood up and acknowledged the spirited but brief applause with a single sweeping wave of his right hand. Taken differently it could have been Savich wiping away everything that had been said and everyone there. In keeping with form he and Stolar left the room while all remained in place. Nikolai hurried out of the meeting room and saw the gray back of Savich going for the elevator. He felt the debt of an explanation and the need to pay it now; however, at the elevator Savich paused, turned, and stopped Nikolai with his most reproachful look. The impact of it on Nikolai was more than if it had been an hour-long dressing-down.

Nikolai had planned to stay overnight in Moscow. The Hotel Kosmos was holding a room for him. However, now he considered going right on to Leningrad. He wasn't due at his Almazjuvelirexport office in Leningrad at any particular time, just expected. That single censuring look from Savich had really set him off. He tried to shake it by walking along busy Kuibyshevsky Prospekt and trying to feel Russian, but no matter what attracted his eyes that Savich look remained in the front of his mind. It kept saying that Nikolai was irresponsible, soft, selfish, spoiled by the West, an ingrate who had betrayed Savich's personal interest in him. Nikolai fought those accusations with the reasoning that his tardiness had been such a minor infraction, surely outweighed by the countless loyalties he had shown in the past. What about all the times he
had
been conscientious? They stood for him, didn't they? Hadn't he been absolutely dependable, Communistically steadfast, hadn't he demonstrated a sense of allegiance? What about all the tedious hours he'd spent sparring with Churcher and others like him at the System?

His anywhere walk took him to Pushkin Square and the park there. He sat on a bench and continued his “Russian argument.” Perhaps, he told himself, that Savich look hadn't even been meant for him, and it was also entirely possible that he'd misread it, projected his own sense of guilt into Savich's eyes. How could he know unless he stayed in Moscow on the chance of seeing Savich tomorrow at the ministry? That was what he would do. He would check in at the Kosmos, get a good night's sleep, and be at the Ministry early to catch Savich before he began his day. He would apologize. Savich would understand. It would be forgotten.

At that moment a young woman sat on the bench little more than an arm's length away from Nikolai. She had been sitting on the bench directly across the wide walkway, but he'd been so caught up in his thoughts that he'd only vaguely noticed her. She was dark-haired, round-faced, and plump. Typical. No doubt she'd once been a country girl, had come to Moscow for a better, more eventful life. She sat aloof for fifteen seconds, then suddenly smiled her entire smile as she turned only her head to Nikolai and asked in terrible English if he was enjoying Moscow.

Nikolai nodded, but not in reply to her question.

She propositioned him with sympathy for his loneliness and his being so far from home.

Nikolai knew, of course, that he was being mistaken for a visitor from the West, and, what's more, by an expert at making such identifications. He thought about that for a long moment and then told the young woman, “No, thank you,” in flawless English. He got up and walked out to Gorky Prospekt, where he found a taxi to take him to the airport and the next flight to Leningrad.

CHAPTER

10

THREE HOURS LATER AN OTHER TAXI WAS CARRYING HIM
down Moskovsky Prospekt. Just being in Leningrad made him feel better. This was his rodina, he thought, his truly native place. The very air that he occupied seemed a more comfortable fit, the mauve of the late-night sky a reminder to his eyes that it was something lovely he'd been missing. It had been six months, a half of one of his years, since he'd been here, home. After the last two general meetings in Moscow he'd hurried right back to London and Vivian, and prior to that there had been the required field trip to the mine and cutting factory at Aikhal. So the pastels, the gentle greens, blues, and pinks of the structures that were so Leningrad and that he had held but lost somewhat in mind, now reverified themselves, and when the taxi was on the Kirovsky Bridge, to Nikolai that was not just a river he was crossing over, it was the beloved Neva.

His apartment in the Petrogradskaya district was on Scovsa Prospekt. It was situated on the sixth, the top floor of a cutstone building that predated the Revolution. The building's entrance was wide, as was the stairway up. The granite steps were worn concave, and the slight gritty sounds of them were familiar to Nikolai as he made the climb, up and around, up and around. It caused him to recall a fragment of another kind of friction: a long, loud argument between his father and mother over whether to move to a new twelve-story elevator-serviced apartment building in the outlying Lakhtinsky area or to stay put. Nikolai was now, again, glad that his mother had won out.

He unlocked and entered the space of his infancy, boyhood, young manhood. The apartment was three rooms, originally four. Eight years ago Nikolai had removed a wall and combined the living room and what had been his parents' bedroom. A high ceiling and three tall double windows along one side made that area appear more spacious. The foot of Nikolai's bed was butted against the window wall, fit nicely beneath the sills. That allowed him to lie facing out with his only view the sky, because the buildings across the way were three stories shorter. The sky, Nikolai thought, was a wondrous thing to see last before sleep and, no matter what its mood, remarkable to wake up to. From the end of his bed he had the Malaya Neva and its ship and boat traffic to see, and if there was no haze he had a view all the way out past Vol'nyj Island to the Bay of Finland, with the distance miniaturizing huge ships and making them seem hardly under way. Nikolai's bed had a substantial brass headboard with knobs on its posts. Formerly he'd kept the knobs and the brass rings of it gleaming, but now they were corroded and actually seemed more comfortable with neglect. The bed by its position and size dominated his other furnishings: the chest of drawers and the gilt but plainly framed mirror above it, the sizable desk and its chronically sticking drawers, the pair of easy chairs that were low-seated and difficult to get up out of. The floors were varnished dark and quick to show dust. There were several area rugs. Here a small Verkneh Kilim that refused to stay in place, there a machine-woven brown-and-yellow Bokhara never intended for prayer use. The largest rug and that which provided anchor for everything was a Turkestanian, a cross between an Uzbek and a Tadzhik, which made it neither. Nikolai had bought it at the official secondhand store on Bolshoi Prospekt. It was, for its type, a rather large knotted rug, somewhat carelessly done, perhaps for practice by the younger children of a Turkestan family or possibly by the oldest of old hands that no longer cared to weave well or just couldn't. The rug's mainly blue and red shades were unevenly faded, had been victimized by the sun.

Nikolai put down his bag and parcel and switched on the desk lamp. There was a stack of mail on the desk. He went quickly through it. As he expected, most of it was political and to him unimportant. Bulletins and newsletters from the microdistrict, and the oblast party committees, from his trade union and the local branch of the Young Communist League, the Komsomol. There was one personal letter, from a once-removed younger cousin on the musically famous Borodin side who lived in Kalinin. Nikolai could not remember ever having met her, but for some reason she had taken it upon herself to regularly write him long, trivia-laden letters. Apparently her good intention was to alleviate the loneliness she assumed he suffered. Nikolai thought she might be projecting her own or satisfying some other need, so rather than disillusion her he always made sure his brief notes in reply contained a tinge of melancholy or a hint of brave cheer.

He dropped all the political mail unopened into the wastebasket and propped Cousin Katya's letter against the base of the desk lamp where he was least likely to forget it. He got out of his business suit, undressed completely, and sat on the edge of the bed while he placed a call to Vivian in London. When he heard the call being put through he easily pictured her in her flat, most likely as nude as he was. He had promised he would call from Moscow. He hoped she would pick up on the first ring, giving him a measure of her waiting. He heard the chirplike ringing, and after the third he imagined her having to interrupt some messy personal beauty ritual or some such thing, hurrying to the phone. There would be a click and then her voice with its distinctive slight gravel. She would know it was he calling, might not begin with a hello. Once when she'd expected a long-distance call from him she'd started with “I love you,” because, as she said, the truly important things deserve preference. He let her phone ring fifteen times before he hung up. It was eleven o'clock London time. Where might she be? Eleven wasn't late, he told himself, not late enough to be either worried for her or for himself.

He got the parcel he'd brought and went into the other bedroom. For many years he'd shared that room with his grandfather, Maksim. It was now used by Lev. It wasn't officially Lev's, but, like the rest of the apartment, it was there for him and he used it freely. Lev's bed was made, but, Nikolai noticed, its spread was rumpled as it would be if two people had lain on it. He also noticed in the adjoining bathroom a fragment of tissue with the blotted pink imprint of lips floating in the otherwise clear water of the toilet bowl, and in the green glass dish on Lev's dresser, among quite a few various foreign coins, was a single iridescent plastic earclip. When had Lev last been there? Nikolai wondered. When would Lev be back? He saw that another Gauguin print had been added to the wall to the left of the bed. That wall was practically all Gauguin now.

He put the parcel on the bed and then changed his mind about just leaving it there. He picked loose the knot of the cord it was tied with and tore open its wrapper. The shearling jacket seemed glad to be released, immediately expanded. Nikolai held it up and shook it and thought how much Lev was going to like its cowboy style. He'd bought it at a shop on Kensington High at a reduced price during an off-season sale. Still, it hadn't been cheap. It was a really good jacket of its type, the inside fleece of Scottish origin, soft and thick, the outside leather pliant and pleasant to the touch, and it had buttons made from the tips of stag's antlers. Nikolai would just hang it in Lev's closet, not mention it, let Lev discover it. He found a wire hanger in the closet and pushed some of Lev's shirts and other things aside to make room. As he was putting the hook of the hanger over the closet pole the wire hanger gave way and the shearling jacket fell to the closet floor and toppled over Lev's best pair of cowboy boots. Nikolai retrieved the jacket and hung it on a more substantial wooden hanger, then he knelt to set the boots straight. He noticed something protruding from the neck of one of the boots. A French passport. Nikolai opened it and saw that it was issued to one Jean-Christian Toucel of Lyon but the photograph in it was of Lev. The passport was validly dated, appeared unquestionably official. Nikolai inverted the boot. Five other passports fell out: British, Swiss, Czech, United States, and West German. Why would Lev risk having all these illegal passports? Being caught with them would bring a long hard-labor prison sentence, unless, of course, Lev was KGB. Nikolai at once dismissed altogether the possibility of Lev's being KGB. Not Lev. More likely he was still involved with
spekulyatsiya
, dealing black-market foreign currency, somehow using his job with Soyuzchimexport and these passports to do so. That was it, Nikolai decided. He was disappointed that Lev still chose to be mixed up in such things. However, he would, as he had in the past, stay removed from them and thus innocent. Best he shouldn't mention to Lev that he'd seen the passports. He put them back into the boot and paired the boots as he thought they had been.

He returned to his room and again put in a call to Vivian. This time for some reason it took nearly half an hour just to get through to London. Nikolai let her number ring longer than before. Was something wrong with her phone? Could it sound on this end as though it were ringing while on her end it remained silent? He tried to blame the possibility of such an electronic failure, to put Vivian right there by her phone futilely awaiting his call.

He knew he was reaching.

She'd complained to him a bit about the many things she had on her agenda that day. First she was to go to a dealer on Brook Street and unload the ugly authentic Louis XIV side table that Archer had given her. She expected to get no less than thirty-five thousand pounds for it, would haggle hard to get forty. With that money in hand she'd pay a visit to her bank to not only wipe out all the past-due mortgage payments on both her London and Devon places but make several mortgage payments in advance, giving herself a nice period of easy-mindedness. Then she would make the rounds to her various bookmakers and settle up with them. (The amount she'd won on her last bet with Gareth hadn't been nearly enough to bring her even.) She'd also personally pay off Michaeljohn, her hairdresser, and Harrods and Hermès too, and she'd settle some really long, long overdue accounts at Smythson's, Penhaligon, Hardy Brothers, and a few others. She especially would be delighted to pay in full her sizable bill at Partridge's, the food specialty shop on Sloane Street. What a relief to no longer feel self-conscious when she went in for a little wedge of double Gloucester or something or asked to have a few things brought around. While she was at Partridge's, she'd stock up on some delicacies for their cupboard in London and for the coming country weekend, during which she planned to very actively welcome him back, she had said. With all that much to accomplish, possibly she'd arrived home exhausted and fallen deep asleep, was now unconscious to the ring of the phone.