Moscow Rules (12 page)

neck. Her suede boots made her appear taller than she had the previous evening. Their heels tapped

rhythmically along the pavement as they walked slowly past the graves.

The musicians Rostropovich and Rubinstein…

The writers Gogol and Bulgakov…

The Party giants Khrushchev and Kosygin…

Kaganovich, the Stalinist monster who murdered millions during the madness of collectivization…

Molotov, signer of the secret pact that condemned Europe to war and the Jews of Poland to

annihilation…

“There’s no place quite like this to see the striking contradictions of our history. Great beauty lies

side by side with the incomprehensible. These men gave us everything, and when they were gone we were

left with nothing: factories that produced goods no one wanted, an ideology that was tired and bankrupt.

All of it set to beautiful words and music.”

Gabriel looked at the bouquet of flowers in her arms. “Who are those for?”

She stopped before a small plot with a low, unadorned stone monument. “Dmitri Sukhova, my

grandfather. He was a playwright and a filmmaker. Had he lived in another time, under a different regime,

he might have been great. Instead, he was drafted to make cheap Party propaganda for the masses. He

made the people believe in the myth of Soviet greatness. His reward was to be buried here, among true

Russian genius.”

She crouched next to the grave and brushed pine needles from the plaque.

“You have his name,” Gabriel said. “You’re not married?”

She shook her head and placed the flowers gently on the grave. “I’m afraid I’ve yet to find a

countryman suitable for marriage and procreation. If they have any money, the first thing they do is buy

themselves a mistress. Go into any trendy sushi restaurant in Moscow and you’ll see the pretty young girls

lined up at the bar, waiting for a man to sweep them off their feet. But not just any man. They want a New

Russian man. A man with money and connections. A man who winters in Zermatt and Courchevel and

summers in the South of France. A man who will give them jewelry and foreign cars. I prefer to spend my

summers at my grandfather’s dacha. I grow radishes and carrots there. I still believe in my country. I don’t

need to vacation in the exclusive playgrounds of Western Europe to be a contented, self-fulfilled New

Russian woman.”

She had been speaking to the grave. Now she turned her head and looked over her shoulder at

Gabriel.

“You must think I’m terribly foolish.”

“Why foolish?”

“Because I pretend to be a journalist in a country where there is no longer true journalism. Because I

want democracy in a country that has never known it-and, in all likelihood, never will.”

She stood upright and brushed the dust from her palms. “To understand Russia today, you must

understand the trauma of the nineties. Everything we had, everything we had been told, was swept away.

We went from superpower to basket case overnight. Our people lost their life’s savings, not just once but

over and over again. Russians are a paternalistic people. They believe in the Orthodox Church, the State,

the Tsar. They associate democracy with chaos. Our president and the
siloviki
understand this. They use

words like ‘managed democracy’ and ‘State capitalism,’ but they’re just euphemisms for something more

sinister: fascism. We have lurched from the ideology of Lenin to the ideology of Mussolini in a decade.

We should not be surprised by this. Look around you, Mr. Golani. The history of Russia is nothing but a

series of convulsions. We cannot live as normal people. We never will.”

She looked past him, into a darkened corner of the cemetery. “They’re watching us very closely.

Hold my arm, please, Mr. Golani. It is better if the FSB believes you are attracted to me.”

He did as she asked. “Perhaps fascism is too strong a word,” he said.

“What term would you apply to our system?”

“A corporate state,” Gabriel replied without conviction.

“I’m afraid that is a euphemism worthy of the Kremlin. Yes, our people are now free to make and

spend money, but the State still picks the winners and the losers. Our leaders speak of regaining lost

empires. They use our oil and gas to bully and intimidate our neighbors. They have all but eliminated the

opposition and an independent press, and those who dare to protest are beaten openly in the streets. Our

children are being coerced into joining Party youth organizations. They are taught that America and the

Jews want to control the world-that America and the Jews want to steal Russia ’s wealth and resources. I

don’t know about you, Mr. Golani, but I get nervous when young minds are trained to hate. The inevitable

comparisons to another time and place are uncomfortable, to say the least.”

She stopped beneath a towering spruce tree and turned to face him.

“You are an Ashkenazi Jew?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Your family came from Russia originally?”

“ Germany,” he said. “My grandparents were from Berlin.”

“Did they survive the war?”

He shook his head and, once again, told her the truth. “They were murdered at Auschwitz. My mother

was young enough to work and she managed to survive. She died several years ago.”

“I wonder what your mother would have said about a leader who fills young minds with paranoid

fantasies about others plotting to steal what is rightly theirs. Would she have called it the ideology of a

corporate state or would she have used a more sinister term?”

“Point taken, Miss Sukhova.”

“Forgive my tone, Mr. Golani. I am an old-fashioned Russian woman who likes to grow radishes

and carrots in the garden of her grandfather’s broken-down dacha. I believe in my Russia, and I want no

more acts of evil committed in my name. Neither did Boris Ostrovsky. That is why he wanted to talk to

you. And that is why he was murdered. ”

“Why did he go to Rome, Olga? What did he want to tell me?”

She reached up and touched his cheek with her fingertip. “Perhaps you should kiss me now, Mr.

Golani. It is better if the FSB is under the impression we intend to become lovers.”

15 MOSCOW

They drove to the Old Arbat in her car, an ancient pea soup green Lada with a dangling front bumper.

She knew a place where they could talk: a Georgian restaurant with stone grottoes and faux streams and

waiters in native dress. It was loud, she assured him.
Bedlam
. “The owner looks a little too much like

Stalin for some people. ” She pointed out the window at another one of the Seven Sisters. “The Ukraina

Hotel.”

“World’s biggest?”

“We cannot live as normal people.”

She left the car in a flagrantly illegal space near Arbat Square and they walked to the restaurant

through the fading late-afternoon light. She had been right about the owner-he looked like a wax figure of

Stalin come to life-and about the noise as well. Gabriel had to lean across the table a few degrees to hear

her speak. She was talking about an anonymous tip the
Gazeta
had received before the New Year. A tip

from a source whose name she could never divulge…

“This source told us that an arms dealer with close ties to the Kremlin and our president was about

to conclude a major deal that would put some very dangerous weapons into the hands of some very

dangerous people.”

“What kind of people?”

“The kind you have been fighting your entire life, Mr. Golani. The kind who have vowed to destroy

your country and the West. The kind who fly airplanes into buildings and set off bombs in crowded

markets.”

“Al-Qaeda?”

“Or one of its affiliates.”

“What type of weapons?”

“We don’t know.”

“Are they conventional?”

“We don’t know.”

“Chemical or biological?”

“We don’t know.”

“But you can’t rule it out?”

“We can’t rule
anything
out, Mr. Golani. For all we know, the weapons could be radiological or

even
nuclear.
” She was silent for a moment, then managed a cautious smile, as if embarrassed by an

awkward pause in the conversation. “Perhaps it would be better if I simply told you what I
do
know.”

She was now gazing at him intently. Gabriel heard a commotion to his left and glanced over his

shoulder. Stalin was seating a group of people at the neighboring table: two aging mobsters and their

high-priced professional dates. Olga took note of them as well and continued speaking.

“The source who provided us with the initial tip about the sale is impeccable and assured us that the

information was accurate. But we couldn’t print a story based on a single source. You see, unlike many of

our competitors, the
Gazeta
has a reputation for thoroughness and accuracy. We’ve been sued many times

by people who didn’t like what we wrote about them but we’ve never lost, not even in the kangaroo

courts of Russia.”

“So you started asking questions?”

“We’re reporters, Mr. Golani. That’s what we do. Our investigation unearthed a few intriguing bits

but nothing specific and nothing we could publish. We decided to send one of our reporters to Courchevel

to follow the arms dealer in question. The dealer owns a chalet there. A rather
large
chalet, actually.”

“The reporter was Aleksandr Lubin?”

She nodded her head slowly. “I assume you know the details from the news accounts. Aleksandr was

murdered within a few hours of his arrival. Obviously, it was a warning to the rest of the
Gazeta
staff to

back off. I’m afraid it had the opposite effect, though. We took Aleksandr’s murder as confirmation the

story was true.”

“And so you kept digging?”

“Carefully. But, yes, we kept digging. We were able to uncover much about the arms dealer’s

operations in general, but were never able to pin down the specifics of a deal. Finally, the matter was

taken out of our hands entirely. Quite unexpectedly, the owner of the
Gazeta
decided to sell the magazine.

I’m afraid he didn’t reach the decision on his own; he was pressured into the sale by the Kremlin and the

FSB. Our new owner is a man with no experience in journalism whatsoever, and his first move was to

appoint a publisher with even less. The publisher announced that he was no longer interested in hard

news or investigative journalism. The
Gazeta
was now going to focus on celebrity news, the arts, and life

in the New Russia. He then held a meeting with Boris Ostrovsky to review upcoming stories. Guess

which story he killed first?”

“An investigation into a possible deal between a Russian arms trafficker and al-Qaeda.”

“Exactly.”

“I assume the time of the sale wasn’t a coincidence.”

“No, it wasn’t. Our new owner is an associate of the arms dealer. In all likelihood, it was the arms

dealer who put up all the money. Rather remarkable, don’t you think, Mr. Golani? Only in Russia.”

She reached into her handbag and withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Do you mind?”

Gabriel shook his head, and glanced around the restaurant. One of the mobsters had his hand on the

bare thigh of his date, but there were no signs of any watchers. Olga lit her cigarette and placed the pack

and lighter on the table.

“The sale of the magazine presented us with a terrible dilemma. We believed the story about the

missile sale to be true, but we now had no place to publish it. Nor could we continue to investigate the

story inside Russia. We decided on another course of action. We decided to make our findings known to

the West through a trusted figure inside Israeli intelligence.”

"Why me? Why not walk over to the U.S. Embassy and tell the CIA station chief?”

“It is no longer wise for members of the opposition or the press to meet with American officials,

especially those who also happen to work for the CIA. Besides, Boris always admired the secret

intelligence service of Israel. And he was especially fond of a certain agent who recently got his picture

in the paper for saving the life of the daughter of the American ambassador to London.”

“And so he decided to leave the country and contact us in Rome?”

“In keeping with the new mission of the
Gazeta
, he told our publisher he wanted to do a piece about

Russians at play in the Eternal City. After he arrived in Rome, he made contact with your embassy and

requested a meeting. Obviously, the arms dealer and his security service were watching. I suspect they’re

watching now.”

“Who is he? Who is the arms dealer?”

She said a name, then picked up the wine list and opened the cover.

“Let’s have something to drink, shall we, Mr. Golani? Do you prefer red or white?”

Stalin brought the wine. It was Georgian, bloodred, and very rough. Gabriel’s thoughts were now

elsewhere. He was thinking of the name Olga Sukhova had just spoken. It was familiar to him, of course.

Everyone in the trade had heard the name Ivan Kharkov.

“How much do you know about him, Mr. Golani?”

“The basics. Former KGB turned Russian oligarch. Passes himself off as a legitimate investor and