Hot Siberian (32 page)

At Mayakovsky Square the limousine screeched left onto Sadovaya. It flashed aside the thick flow of that bustling boulevard for nearly a mile, then turned right onto Rileev Street, a much smaller way, quiet and, for the most part, fashionable. When it had gone several blocks of Rileev it swung in at the paved drive of one of the apartment buildings along there—a towerlike structure, pleasingly landscaped with arborvitae and other evergreens and situated well back from the street. Nikolai had expected Savich's Moscow residence to be in an older, conservative place. This was blackened steel and glass, and, according to Nikolai's quick count by twos just before the limousine nosed down into the subterranean garage, it was eighteen stories high. The garage was immaculate, with an impermeably coated concrete floor. The rubber heels of the driver's shoes made suffering squeaks as he accompanied Nikolai to the elevator. It was the quietest, fastest Soviet elevator Nikolai had ever ridden. At the sixteenth level it stopped and opened to offer a tastefully carpeted corridor which served several apartments. Nikolai was about to step out when the driver gestured that this wasn't the floor. In the momentary pause before the elevator doors closed Nikolai thought how he wouldn't mind having an apartment there, a modest one-bedroom or even just a studio that he could fix up. He'd get rid of most of the things he had, certainly those that were petrified with sentimentality. His great-grandmother's samovar, for instance. Never used and yet preserved like a shrine. Out with it! He'd begin anew all the way down to his everyday dishes. Never again, when he was taking a sip from a glass, would he think that his lips were touching where Irina's had, or when a fork went into his mouth would it occur to him that its tines had experienced a slip over the tongue of Grandfather Maksim.

The fantasy saddened him. He chastized the upper third of his head for having thought it up.

A key was inserted into the flush lock on the face of the control panel. As though sighing, the elevator went to seventeen. Its doors parted again to reveal a spacious private entry hall. There, standing on gleaming marble beneath a crystal chandelier of six thousand facets, was Savich.

He had saved his smile so he could break out with it now at the first sight of Nikolai, and instead of a mere handshake, he transmitted twice the amiability by extending both hands palms up in the Russian manner. Vigorous man-to-man squeezes were exchanged.

“I'm glad you came,” Savich said. He said it as well with his eyes.

“It was kind of you to suggest it,” Nikolai replied. He swiftly appraised his surroundings, noticed a gracefully curved ascending stairway on the left, and assumed that Savich's apartment included the entire floor above.

Savich turned and led the way down a wide center hall. Nikolai, following along, happened to glance into one of the rooms they were passing, a large room, the sort that seemed to be awaiting an occasion with its suite of gilt Empire pieces arranged just so, its walls dressed with creamy silk. An ornate Chippendale mirror shot Nikolai back to Nikolai and helped him verify that he was actually there. At the deep end of the hall Savich slid open left and right pocket doors and stepped aside for Nikolai to precede him. They entered Savich's study, the room that was most personal to him. It was where he spent his precious time alone. A pair of matching
bergères à la reine
were situated at a conversational angle to each other. The down-filled seat cushion of one had surrendered much of its plump. Nikolai gathered that was Savich's chair and sat in the other.

“What will you drink?”

“Whiskey, thank you.”

“How do you want it?”

“Neat.”

“I'll have the same,” Savich said as though imparting that to someone else in the room. He remained seated. The sharp-peaked bush of his black eyebrows canopied his sockets as he assessed Nikolai.

Nikolai felt that the next words were expected to come from him. He knew what they should be. “I apologize,” he said, “for arriving late at the general meeting two weeks ago.”

“From what I understood when I left Devon, you would be leaving shortly thereafter. In fact, I expected you to be on the flight that I took. I thought it would give us time for a chat.”

“At the last minute I gave in to persuasion and stayed down there an extra night.”

“By far the better option.”

“Then what time there was to spare went to car trouble. Otherwise I would have made it. I'm truly sorry.”

Savich didn't acquit Nikolai further. He just deserted the subject. “You look terribly uncomfortable,” he said. “Why don't you take off your jacket and tie.”

Nikolai had worn one of his everlasting Russian wool suits, believing that appropriate for what he intended to say. It was now liberating to get out of the jacket and remove the tie he'd knotted too tight. He unbuttoned his shirt two down. He felt like stretching but didn't.

The drinks came. Brought by a manservant Savich introduced as Do Kien. He was oriental, typically diminutive and sinewy. He moved as though to disturb the air as little as possible and placed the silver tray on the table without making a sound. Should he pour? he asked almost imperceptibly with his head and eyes.

“I'll take care of it,” Savich told Do Kien, dismissing him with his tone. As an unimportant accompaniment to the transferring of ample portions of whiskey from an antique Waterford decanter, Savich mentioned that both his servants were orientals. “Do Kien does all the cooking. His wife, Mai Lon, won't go near the stove or even chop up a vegetable. He, in turn, is above doing any cleaning, won't even empty a wastebasket. Every so often they argue about it. You've never heard such screaming volleys. Do Kien calls them discussions. Actually, I've learned it is rather difficult to tell when they're having a peaceful talk or flinging vitriol. In Vietnamese, it all sounds so emphatic.”

“How long have they been with you?”

“Nearly two years. He came here to Moscow to study political philosophy at the university but found it not to his liking. Before that for ten years he was a captain in the Vietnamese army. I've seen his commission papers signed by General Van Phu himself. Do Kien is proud of what he was but for whatever reason doesn't want to return to it. At least, not yet.”

“He struck me as younger,” Nikolai put in. His imagination transported the stealthy Do Kien to the Vietnam jungle, pictured him with an automatic rifle at the ready, patrolling for enemy units along the Cambodian border. Nikolai found it not so simple to bring this Do Kien back to boiling potatoes for Savich.

“
Na zdorovye
.” Savich tilted his raised glass at Nikolai.

Nikolai returned the toast.

They both took large gulps to stress their sincerity.

With his throat still warm from the excellent whiskey, Nikolai told Savich, “The morning before I left London I had a meeting with Churcher. He had the head of security in on it.”

“Pulver. George Pulver.”

Nikolai was mildly surprised that Savich knew of Pulver, who wasn't on the level Savich usually dealt with. But then it was in keeping with Savich's thoroughness. He went on: “Churcher and Pulver were extremely disturbed over a packet of finished Aikhal goods they managed to intercept.”

“How many carats?”

“Twenty-four hundred, or so they claimed. I was shown only eight hundred. The other sixteen may or may not exist. Anyway, Churcher is again accusing us of selling beyond our quota.”

“Did he happen to say from whom he took the goods?” Savich sounded mainly curious.

“Not by name, just that the man was somehow drowned in Lake Geneva.”

“Seems a bit dramatic, don't you think?”

“Possibly. But knowing Churcher as well as I do I'm almost certain he wasn't inventing. Not this time.”

“Did you do a meeting report?”

“No, I—”

“Good. If there is any substance to this it's best that as little as possible be made of it at the moment. You've met Gleb Kulinich, of course.”

“Kulinich?”

“The Minister of Mines. He was along on your field trip to Aikhal last September.”

“I don't recall anyone named Kulinich.”

“He made the trip under an assumed name and not in any important official capacity, merely to snoop around. A rather short, big-bellied fellow with numerous chins and a constant scowl, always breathing loudly.”

The description helped Nikolai remember the man.

“Kulinich is attempting to convince the Central Committee that Aikhal and all the other diamond mining and recovery installations would be better placed under his charge. To this point his campaign has been unsuccessful. However, there's no need to fuel it with even the rumor of a problem.” Savich got Nikolai by the eyes. “Do I have your confidence?”

“Of course.”

“If Churcher broaches the matter again, don't get into it with him. Or with Pulver. Tell them my instructions are that they should take it up directly with me.”

“I understand.”

Savich thumbed back his shirt cuff to look at his wrist-watch. “Now,” he said, getting up, “I must make a call.”

“Shall I step out?”

“No, stay where you are. I'll only be a few moments.”

Nikolai welcomed this interlude alone. It gave him time to enjoy the fact that he'd just lightened his professional conscience. He estimated that he felt about 25 percent better. It also allowed him to take in this room, which he believed probably personified Savich.

An eighteenth-century Régence bureau sat on the right, a truly substantial one and rare for not being overly embellished with ormolu. On its gilt-tooled brown leather top, correspondence lay overlapped in a line, weighted in place by a miniature bronze of Herakles nude. Herakles, so muscular, with a tiny pointed spout of a penis protruding above a lopsided sack. The surface of the desk shared by a jade letter opener, simply a sharpened lavender blade, a shagreen-covered agenda, and a fine Daum Nancy vase containing pens, ordinary ballpoints and felt-tips, some bearing the names of hotels. Stuck out among the pens, like a beauty suffering inelegance, a solid gold Dupont. It reminded him of Archer.

A pair of George III mahogany breakfront cabinets. Blue moroccan bindings squeezing spine to spine along the glassed-in shelves. Titles and authors' names patiently glinting out over the shoulders of Chinese porcelain snuff bottles and erotic netsuke figures. The eight-fold Coromandel screen, the salmon-and-gray marble pedestal supporting a fat, zealous fern, the collection of seventeenth-century falcon hoods in a mahogany case.

Nikolai, from where he was sitting, had no idea what those were, the falcon hoods. He got up and went across the room for a closer look at the little sewn leather caps with their feather-tufted crests. They were arranged in four rows, seven across, the spaces between punctuated here and there by brass bells. Where had Savich found them? Nikolai wondered. Had he gotten them all at once or one or two at a time over the years? Nikolai was fascinated. For a moment he was transported to the sensation of such a bird, its disposition temporarily subdued by blindness, as though its eyes were as lethal as its talons. The hood was slipped off, the entire sky offered, the perch of wrist tossed upward, launching. Go kill!

Nikolai moved on around the room, gave attention now to the paintings hung upon the gray velour walls, hung with little or no regard for arrangement. That, rather than exclude any one. A Boldini nude was putting on her black silk stockings next to mystically entwined bare figures by the Symbolist Lévy-Dhurmer next to a small, guileless Maillot. Here, no overcrowded Flemish bouquets or studies of waves in dash or pastorals of sheep being herded home. But women, one after another, their displaying displayed. They seemed more in alliance than in competition, each presenting the imagination with conceivably whatever had occurred before or after these caught moments. There was a voluptuous, longing one with almost geometric flesh done in 1932 by Tamara De Lempicka; another, contrastingly lithe and eerily
fatale
, depicted by Fernand Khnopff. A rather somnambulant Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864, was the close neighbor to a wistfully suggestive Frederick Lord Leighton which shared closely with a much smaller, charming Théodore Rousseau. The Rousseau a young woman, presumably a model, possibly his lover, if, indeed that gender was his preference, seated nude in the sling of a folding chair, intent upon the page of a magazine. Nikolai imagined the moment, the artist calling out to her and she, with total physical confidence, rising from this honest attitude to invent a pose. How sensitive and correct of Rousseau to have left her as she was, Nikolai thought before he transferred his gaze to the nearby long Louis XV parquetry table. On its
brèche d'Alep
marble top stood another collection.

Photographs.

How many? Were there not more than a hundred? And not one female face duplicated. Within their propped-up frames, their tiny silver circles, putti-crowded ovals, and classic linear rectangles, each contributed to the legion and, at the same time, set herself apart. As Nikolai went beyond his initial panoramic impression and began examining the photographs individually, he realized that here he was entering Savich's more intimate ground. He felt he was a trespasser if not a sort of thief, but then he reasoned it was evidently Savich's choice to allow such exposure. Nikolai compared the feminine energy that looked out at him now, that usually looked out to Savich. The smiling snapshot of whoever she was gone a bit brown with time. The professionally taken portrait just this side of demure, her complexion impossibly lineless. The defiant candid nearly nude with her fists on her hips holding open the oversize hotel bathrobe. The surprised one in sable on a street, most likely turned by her name and snapped before playful protest. Some were dated by their attitudes as much as by what they wore. Which were the most recent was obvious to Nikolai. Those seemed more requiring, less dependent on guile or modesty. Here and there were signed ones. The flourished or plain promises of a forever or an always did not give them an advantage, Nikolai thought. Each face was to a degree fixed with the same hopefulness, the same confidence in pleasure, the same concealment of melancholy. All those mouths kissed, all those eyelids closed, all those brains momentarily pacified. Where were they now, at this very second? Nikolai doubted that even one of them was weeping. And what of that frame conspicuously vacant? It was one of the larger upright frames, silver elaborately chased with bezel-set cabochon rubies integrated into the design. Nikolai had noticed it right off. It was centered, importantly placed and yet vacant. Was it the frame of honor, awaiting the elusive her who would excel for Savich, who would anesthetize him with her sensations? Or had there been an occupant in that frame and had she, out of jealousy, to escape the torture brought on by her own possessiveness, torn herself away? On the other hand, perhaps Savich had simply decided she no longer belonged. However, that was not as easy for Nikolai to imagine.