Snowdrops (18 page)

"Okay," he said, twitching his fringe.

But the main reason I remember that evening--the reason it has melded with my chat with Tatiana Vladimirovna earlier, the reason I want to tell you about it--is not the meeting itself or the expertly casual torture I watched the Cossack inflict on Vyacheslav Alexandrovich. It's what we did afterwards. It was the only time I ever saw Paolo really angry, even including what happened later,
and the only time we ever argued, he being a man whose purpose in life had been to transform arguments into agreements, find acceptable forms of words, gloss over unpleasant realities.

We wrapped up our business. The illuminated Kremlin palaces were glaring at us from across the river and through the sudden night. The Cossack invited us to dinner to celebrate. "And after dinner," he said, "who knows?" His eyes flickered with rape, pillage, and money-laundering schemes.

Vyacheslav Alexandrovich made his excuses and left. Paolo, the Cossack, and I walked down the street to the Cossack's tinted-window Hummer. Paolo turned up the collar of his Italian coat. I remember the Cossack was wearing one of those fur hats, made from some endangered animal, that sit on top of Russian men's heads and leave their ears exposed, just to show how butch they are. Inside the car he had a plasma television, a fridge, and a driver with a purple scar down one cheek. The driver lowered the window, letting in the sharp late winter air, and with his other hand reached underneath the front passenger seat and produced a blue police light which he slapped onto the roof. He pushed a button and we set off through the dusk and along the river with our blue light flashing--past a hotel with a two-hundred-dollar Sunday brunch and up to the House on the Embankment, the bad-karma building where Stalin's henchmen lived in the thirties, until they didn't, and which by then had a giant rotating Mercedes
sign on top. At Kropotkinskaya, along the outer wall of the cathedral, a line of old women was standing and moaning hymns under the yellow streetlights, waiting to see whichever repatriated icon--some lock of saintly hair or scrap of holy kneecap--was on display inside. They looked unreal, like extras on a film set, there in that city of neon lust and frenetic sin. We got stuck at the lights, and the Cossack swore and kicked the back of the driver's seat.

On Ostozhenka we pulled up outside an elitny restaurant/club. Absinthe, I think it was called. The blue light was switched off. There was a line of would-be oligarchesses shivering in the pavement slush, hoping to be smiled on by the resident
feis kontrol
supremo. The crowd parted for the Cossack as the traffic had made way for his flashing light. He was carrying one of the leather man-bags, just big enough to hold a small semiautomatic, that were then all the rage among the muscled and moneyed classes in Moscow--accessories so camp they were somehow threatening, like they were daring someone to try to steal them. He pulled something out of the bag, waved it at the bouncers, and entered the promised land. We strode in behind him and gave our coats to the pretty cloakroom attendant.

"What was that?" I asked after we sat down.

"What?" said the Cossack, summoning a waiter with a commandingly lazy finger gesture. The air was thick with smoke, Russian techno, and the aroma of deluxe women.

"What did you show the bouncers?"

He opened his bag and took out a card with a double-headed eagle on one side and on the other a photo ID. It stated that he worked for the economic affairs secretariat in the Kremlin. He twirled his contraband card between his fingers. "Forbidden," he said, "only means expensive."

We ordered cocktails, and when they came the Cossack stood up to make a toast, then another and another: "To our friendship ... To our cooperation ... May your families prosper ... May our countries always be at peace ... May you come to visit us in the north." A Russian toast is a liquid dream of a different life.

"There is something I wanted to ask you," I said.

"Anything," said the Cossack, spreading his arms wide and making innocent eyes.

"Have you heard of a company called MosStroiInvest?" I was curious.

"MosStroiInvest? MosStroiInvest ... No, I think no. Maybe, yes, maybe. Why?"

"I have a friend who is buying something from them. An apartment. I want to know if they are reliable."

"I understand," the Cossack said. "I will make inquiries, okay? I will ask my friends in the construction business and let you know. Next week probably. Okay?"

"Thank you."

"Now," said the Cossack, "there is something I want to
ask you, my friend. About those girls." He wagged a finger at me.

"Which girls?" said Paolo.

"Have you had one," the Cossack said, "or both? Maybe both together?"

"They are sisters," I said.

"That makes it more interesting," said the Cossack. I think they were trained to do this, the Russian spooks: to find out something about you, to pick up some little snatch of nothing, then to use it against you, so you wondered how they knew, what else they might know, who they might tell, and you worried.

"Are they good girls, Nicholas?"

"I think so, yes."

"Be careful," said the Cossack. "Sometimes, in our Russia, people can be less kind than they seem. You get me?"

The Cossack's phone rang (his ringtone was "The Final Countdown"). He answered it, mumbled something, then made one last toast, the Moscow flatheads' favourite: "May the dick be hard, and may there be money!" He gave his credit card to the waiter, kissed us both on both cheeks, said "ciao" to Paolo and left.

I never saw or spoke to him again, not counting a couple of times, months afterwards, on the TV news--during the latest war in the Caucasus, after he'd become deputy defence minister--when I thought I glimpsed him smirking
in the background as the president addressed the wrathful Russian nation.

"Barbarian," I said under my breath, or maybe it was something less polite. Whether it was because he thought I was wrong, or because he secretly felt I was right, or because his wife was bullying him for a new-model BMW or a face-lift, or for some other reason that I couldn't fathom, Paolo flipped.

"You think you're so different to him, Nicholas?" He bared his teeth and looked suddenly old in the mauve restaurant light. His grammar seemed to buckle. "Mr. English Gentleman, you think they do things so much differently in London? Yes, they are more subtle,
ecco
, more nice, more clean"--here he mimed washing his bony hands--"but it is the same. In Italy also. In everywhere the same. Strong and weak, power and no power, money money money. It isn't because of Russia. This is life. My life, Nicholas, and your life also."

Maybe I was thinking about what I hadn't said to Tatiana Vladimirovna earlier. Part of me may have needed to pretend--still, that night more than ever--that I was better than I was. Better than I am. I told him I thought he was wrong. I said we weren't the same. We had rules, we had limits. I said I wasn't the same.

"No?" said Paolo. "So I tell you one more thing, Mr. English Gentleman. This Cossack is how we make our bonus, understand? No Cossack, no bonus. You are sure
you are different? You are sure? You and me, we are the fleas on the Cossack's arse."

There was more. Paolo had a drop of brown blood in the yellowy white of his eye. After a while I couldn't argue anymore. I looked away and out of the window towards the cathedral's ridiculous dome. Teenagers were smoking and kissing in the slush around the statue of some forgotten revolutionary.

That was the lesson, the same lesson, really, as I learned at Tatiana Vladimirovna's: that we were no different. I was no different. Perhaps I was worse.

I raised my almost-empty cocktail glass and said, "To putting lipstick on a pig!"

"Okay," said Paolo. "To the pig's lipstick!"

We clinked.

T
HEY MET ON
the Metro, Tatiana Vladimirovna had told me, just as Masha and I had. She said she'd been at Dorogomilovskaya market buying carp--which, I remember her mentioning, she would bring back alive and keep in her bath--and the girls had helped her with her bags at Kievskaya station. I imagined them flanking her in the hall between the platforms, beneath the misleading mosaics that portray Russian-Ukrainian friendship. It happened in June, Tatiana Vladimirovna said, and I could picture the two of them in summer frocks and open smiles, charming
and strong, and Tatiana Vladimirovna sweating in a short-sleeved summer blouse and a too-heavy skirt.

She said that they had truly come to feel like family, even in this little time. But no, she said, she wasn't actually their aunt. I sat there, kneading my hands, and said nothing. My hands looked like somebody else's hands. I guess they figured an aunt would sound more plausible, less incriminating, and that if they were careful they could keep it from coming out.

"Don't worry," Tatiana Vladimirovna said, smiling, "it's not important." Looking back I wonder whether maybe she was trying to say,
Don't worry about any of it
.

I was drifting towards forty. I'd drifted to Moscow and to Masha and into this. It was only another drift--to pass over this lie and live with it. It wasn't even such a difficult one, to tell you the truth. Probably the truth--the truth about me, I mean, and how far I could go--was there all along, very close, waiting for me to find it.

I changed the subject. I drank my tea. I said I was very glad the winter was nearly over. I said that we were thinking of going to Odessa. When the girls arrived, neither of us said a word about what Tatiana Vladimirovna had told me. She evidently chose to forget about it too. She gave us cake and chocolate. She signed the forms she needed to sign.

Later I withdrew twenty-five thousand dollars from the bank, and Masha and I met Stepan Mikhailovich at an
empty jazz club near the Conservatory, with dark private rooms, to hand the money over (he theatrically declined to count it). I told Olga the Tatar not to worry about collecting the papers for the Butovo apartment. We had those, I told her. I took her to the fancy bar in the hotel next to the Bolshoi like I'd promised.

In my experience, you could roughly gauge the level of depravity in a Slavic city by the time it took, after you arrived, for someone to offer you women. In Odessa, I didn't make it out of the airport. As we were walking to his car from the Soviet arrivals terminal, the taxi driver asked me whether I wanted to meet some girls. The fact that I already had two girls with me didn't seem to deter him.

It was, I think, the first weekend in June. Just before we flew out of Moscow it snowed again--the end-of-May, fuck-you snow by which God lets the Russians know that he hasn't finished with them yet. But, inside, the Flintstones plane baked like a
banya
. Somewhere very close to
my ear a high-pitched engine whine got steadily louder and made it seem inevitable that, in the end, we must crash. I sat across the aisle from a mad, fat, Hungarian businessman, who for the first half hour of the flight stared at me and cursed in four or five languages like he was looking for a fight. Then he calmed down, wiped his forehead, and complained about the changes in Ukraine since the new president took over (maybe you saw him on the news--the guy with the ruined face, from when the Russians tried to poison him). Ukraine, according to the Hungarian, just wasn't corrupt enough anymore. "Six months ago," he said plan-gently, "I knew who, when, how much everything took. Now it is impossible to get anything done."

The plane smelled of sweat and cognac. A stewardess stationed herself outside the toilet at the back, ready to turn off the smoke alarm for a small consideration. Two drunk Russians danced a jig in the aisle as we came in to land, while the passengers around them clapped.

The early summer Black Sea warmth licked at my skin as we stumbled down the steps and across the cracked tarmac. It wasn't properly hot, not yet, but it felt like paradise. I got an old childish sensation of out-of-placeness, a feeling I remembered from our two or three family trips to the Costa Brava--a glow of forgiven naughtiness at having made it to a place that wasn't really mine, at having somehow got away with something.

I had. I was in Odessa: technically in Ukraine, but for
Russians still a fairy-tale nirvana of debauchery and escape. Masha and Katya were strolling in front of me in minidresses and strappy high-heeled sandals that they'd put on while we were in the air. They were wheeling knockoff Louis Vuitton cabin luggage, wearing film-star sunglasses, willing smiles, and, I was almost sure, no knickers. Masha put up a bright red sun umbrella that wiggled in synchrony with her arse.

They looked like they were celebrating. They had almost done it. Or we had almost done it. By the time we went to Odessa, there were just a couple of visits to a bank before it was all over.

The Ukrainian border guard had trouble deciphering my exotic passport. An old woman standing behind me in the queue tapped me on the shoulder and asked long-sufferingly, "Do you have to pay him, young man?" In the end the guard brandished his stamps and I went through customs to catch up with the girls. I found them in the arrivals hall, negotiating with the taxi driver (gold incisors, year-round leather jacket, shiny shoes that looked pointy enough to pick locks with).

We were heading for the car park when he asked me. "Do you want to meet some girls?"

I laughed like a nervous foreigner. Katya laughed too.

"Do you?" said Masha, in a voice I didn't recognise--ironic but also somehow angry and mocking and final. "Do you want to meet some girls, Kolya?"

* * *

T
HEY
'
D TURNED OFF
the central heating in Moscow about five weeks before we went to Odessa, sometime towards the end of April. I was at home with Masha--she was wearing my dressing gown and watching reality TV, I was enjoying some light foreplay with my new BlackBerry--when we heard the telltale snap in the heating pipes, short but distinct: the starting gun for the summer, for the urgent squeezing of life and lust into a few little warm months. The big melt was on, the snow and ice running off the roofs like low-altitude rain. Foreigners smiled at each other in restaurants, like speechlessly relieved survivors of a catastrophe. It was over: the back-and-forth between overcooked buildings and frigid streets, the endless putting on and taking off of clothes, the marathon Russian winter that no sane human being would voluntarily live through. It felt like a miracle.