Russian Roulette (13 page)

We passed through a hallway. This was the main entrance to the house, behind the front door. A magnificent staircase swept down to the front door, which stood with a marble pillar on each side. The hallway itself was huge. You could have parked a dozen cars there. A bowl of flowers stood on a table—it must have emptied a flower shop. The main light was from a chandelier, hundreds of crystals twinkling brilliantly like a fireworks display. It made the lights I had seen in the Moscow metro look cheap and gaudy. There were more doors on every side. It was all too much for me to take in. If a spaceship had grabbed me and deposited me on the moon, I would have felt as much at home.

“In here . . .”

One of the twins knocked on an oak door and opened it without waiting for a reply. I went in.

The man from the Moscow apartment was sitting behind an oversized antique desk. There were bookshelves behind him and on one side a globe that looked so old that quite a few modern-day countries were probably missing, as they wouldn’t have been discovered yet. He was framed by two windows with red velvet curtains hanging down. There was a view out to the fountain and the drive. The room was very warm. One wall contained a stone fireplace—two crouching imps or demons supporting the mantelpiece on their shoulders—and there was a dog, a Dalmatian, stretched out in front of it. The walls were covered with paintings. The largest was a portrait of the man I was facing, and I have to say that the painted version was the more welcoming of the two. He had not looked up from his work. He was reading some sort of document, making notes in the margins with a black fountain pen.

There was a gun on the desk in front of him.

As I stood there, waiting to be told what to do, I found myself staring at it. It was a revolver, a very old-fashioned model, twelve centimeters long, with a stainless steel barrel and a black enamel grip. It wasn’t like an automatic or a self-loading pistol where you feed the bullets into a clip. This one had a cylinder and six chambers. A single bullet lay beside it.

“Sit down,” he said.

There was an empty chair in front of him. I stepped forward, although it felt more as if I was floating, and sat down. The door clicked shut behind me. Without being instructed, the twins had left.

I waited for the master of the house to speak. He was wearing a suit now and somehow I knew that it was expensive and that it hadn’t been made in Russia. The material was too luxurious and it fit too well. He had a pale blue shirt and a brown tie. Now that he wasn’t wearing his coat, I could see that he was very muscular. He must have spent hundreds of hours in the gym. He had also removed the hat and I saw that he was completely bald. He had not lost his hair. He had shaved it off, leaving a dark shadow that made him more deathlike than ever. I waited in dread for his heavy, ugly eyes to settle on me. My face was hurting badly and I wanted to go to the toilet again. But I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t move.

At length he stopped and laid the pen down. “What is your name?” he asked.

“Yasha Gregorovich.”

“Yassen?” He had misheard me. The side of my face was so swollen that I had mispronounced my own name. It would be very unusual to be called Yassen. It is Russian for “ash tree.” But I did not correct him. I had decided it would be better not to say anything unless I had to. “How old are you?” he asked.

“I’m fourteen.”

“Where are you from?”

I remembered my mother’s warning. “A town called Kirsk,” I said. “It’s a long way away. You won’t have heard of it.”

The man thought for a moment, then he got up, walked around the desk, and stood next to me. He took his time, considering the situation, then suddenly and without warning slapped me across the face. The blow wasn’t a particularly hard one, certainly not as hard as the night before, nor did it need to be. My cheekbone was already broken and the fresh pain almost knocked me off the chair. Black spots appeared in front of my eyes. I thought I was going to be sick.

By the time I had recovered, the man was back in his chair. “Never make assumptions,” he said. “Never assume anything about me. And when you speak to me, call me ‘sir.’ Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded. “Do you have parents?”

“No, sir. They’re both dead.”

“And last night, when you broke into my apartment, were you alone?”

I had already decided that I wasn’t going to tell him about Dima, Roman, and Grigory. If I told him their names, I had no doubt he would send his men around to Tverskaya to kill them. I still assumed he was going to kill me. “Yes, sir,” I replied. “I was on my own.”

“How did you come to choose that apartment—as opposed to any other?”

“I was just walking past. I saw that the window was open and the lights were out. I didn’t even think about it. I just went in.”

The answer seemed to satisfy him. He took out a gold cigarette case. I noticed the initials V.S. on the cover. He removed a cigarette and lit it, then lay the case on the desk, close to the gun. “Vladimir Sharkovsky,” he said. “That is my name.”

I didn’t tell him that I knew. I simply sat there and watched as he smoked in silence. My insides were churning.

“You must be wondering why you are still alive,” he continued. “In truth, you should not be. Last night, as I drove over the bridge, I thought of dropping you in the Moscow River. I would quite have enjoyed watching you drown. When I drove you here, my intention was to give you to Josef and Karl, to be punished and then to be killed. Even now, I am undecided if you will live or if you will die.” His eyes rested briefly on the revolver. “The fact that you are sitting in this room, talking to me, is down to one reason only. It is a question of timing. Perhaps you have been lucky. A week ago it would have been different. But right now . . .”

He trailed off, then took another drag on the cigarette, the blue smoke curling into the air. A log snapped in the fireplace and the dog stirred briefly, then went back to sleep. So far, Vladimir Sharkovsky had shown no emotion whatsoever. His voice was flat, entirely disinterested. If machines ever learned to speak, they would speak like him.

“I am a careful man,” he went on. “One of the reasons I have been so successful is that I have always used everything that has been given to me. I never miss an opportunity. It may be an investment in a company, the chance to buy my way into a bank, the weakness of a government official who is open to bribery. Or it may be the chance appearance of a worthless thief and guttersnipe like yourself. But if it can be used, then I will use it. That is how I live.

“There is something you need to understand about me. I am extremely successful. Right now, Russia is changing. The old ways are being left behind. For those of us with the vision to see what is possible, the rewards are limitless. You have nothing. You steal because you are hungry and all you think about is your next pathetic meal. I have the world and everything in it. And now, Yassen Gregorovich, I have you.

“A large number of people work for me in this house. Because of the nature of my work and who I am, I have to be careful. Josef and Karl, the two men who brought you here, are my personal bodyguards. Right now they are standing outside, and I should perhaps warn you that there is a communication button underneath this desk. If you were to try anything, if you were to threaten me again, they would be in here in an instant. Be glad they were not with me in Moscow. That was the private apartment of a friend of mine. The moment you picked up that knife, your own life would have been over.

“I will not kill you—yet—because I think I can use you. As it happens, a position has arisen here, a vacancy which would not normally be easy to fill. You are, as I said, very fortunate with the timing. I have no doubt that you are stupid and uneducated. But even so you might be acceptable.”

He paused and it took me a few seconds to realize that he was waiting for me to reply. I couldn’t believe what he had just told me. He wasn’t going to kill me. He was offering me a job!

“I’d be very happy to work for you, sir,” I said.

His eyes settled on me, full of contempt. “Happy?” He repeated the word with a sneer. “You say stupid things without thinking. It is not my intention to make you ‘happy.’ Quite the opposite. You broke into my apartment. You attempted to hurt me and in doing so you ruined a perfectly good overcoat, a jacket, and a shirt. You even cut my flesh. For this, you must pay. You must be punished. If you decide to accept my proposal, you will spend every hour of the rest of your life wishing that the two of us had never met. I am not offering to pay you. I will own you. I will use you. And maybe, many years from now, if you work hard enough, I will let you go. Until then, I will expect your total obedience. You will do whatever I tell you. You will not hesitate.” He gestured at the fireplace. “You see the dog? That is what you are now. That’s all you mean to me.”

He stubbed out the cigarette. I could see that he was bored of the interview, that he wanted it to be over.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “What sort of work?”

I had no choice. I had to survive. Let him employ me in whatever capacity and somehow I would find a way out of this place. In the back of a car, over the wall . . . I would find a way to escape.

“You will clean. You will carry messages. You will sweep floors. You will help in the garden. But that’s just part of it. The main reason that I need you is something quite different.” He paused. “You will be my food taster.”

“Your . . . ?” I almost laughed out loud, and if I had, I am sure he would have shot me there and then. But it was ridiculous. At school, we had been taught about the Roman emperors—Julius Caesar and the others—who had employed slaves to taste everything they ate. But this was Russia in the twentieth century. He couldn’t possibly mean what he had just said.

“It is unfortunately the case that I have many enemies,” Sharkovsky explained. He was completely serious. “Some of them fear me. Some of them are jealous of me. All of them would benefit if I was no longer here. In the last year, there have been three attempts on my life. That is how things are now. Several of my associates have been less fortunate—which is to say, they have been less careful than me. And they have died.

“Outside my wife and my children, I can trust no one, and even my immediate family might be bribed one day to do me harm. I employ a great many people to protect me and I have to employ more people to watch over them. I trust none of them.” His dark eyes bored into me. “Can I trust you?”

I was trying to make sense of all this. Was that really to be my fate? Sitting at his dining table, digging my fork into his blinis and caviar?

“I’ll do whatever you want,” I said.

“Will you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything?”

“Yes . . .” This time I was uneasy.

It was what he had been waiting for. It was the very worst thing I could have said.

“We will see.” He reached out and took the gun. He jerked open the cylinder and showed me that it was empty. Then he picked up the bullet—a little cylinder of gleaming silver—and held it between his finger and thumb like a scientist giving a demonstration. I watched silently. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I could feel my heart pounding. He slid the bullet into one of the chambers and snapped the cylinder shut. Then he spun it several times so that the metal became a blur and it was impossible for either of us to tell where the bullet had lodged.

“You say you will do anything for me,” he said. “So do this. The gun has six chambers. As you have seen, one of them now contains a live bullet. You do not know where the bullet is. Nor do I.” He placed the gun back on the desk, right in front of me. “Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.”

I stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple enough!” he said. “Point the gun at the back of your mouth and shoot.”

“But why . . . ?”

“Because you said to me five seconds ago that you would do anything I asked you, and now I am asking you to prove it. I need to know that I can rely on you. Either you will pull the trigger or you will not. But let us consider the options, Yassen Gregorovich. If you will not do what I ask, then you have lied to me and I cannot use you after all. In that case, I can assure you that your death is certain. If you do as I have asked, then there are two possibilities that lie ahead of you. It is quite possible that you will kill yourself, that in a few minutes’ time my cleaners will be wiping your brains off my carpet. That will be annoying. But there is also a very good chance that you will live, and from that moment on you will serve me. It is your decision and you must make it now. I don’t have all day.”

He was torturing me after all. He was asking me to play this horrible game to prove beyond any doubt that he had complete power over me. I would never argue with him. I would never refuse an order. If I did this, I would be accepting that my own life no longer belonged to me. That in every respect I was his.

What could I do? What choice did I have?

I picked up the gun. It was much heavier than I had expected, but at the same time, I had no strength at all. Nothing below my shoulder seemed to be working properly—not my wrist, not my hand, not my fingers. I could feel my pulse racing and I had to struggle even to breathe. What this man was demanding was horrific . . . beyond imagination. Six chambers. One containing a bullet. A one in six chance. When I pulled the trigger, nothing might happen. Or I might send a piece of metal traveling at three hundred twenty-five kilometers per hour into my own head. If I didn’t do it, he would kill me. That was what it came down to. I felt hot tears brimming over my cheeks. It seemed impossible that my life could have come to this.

“Don’t cry like a baby,” Sharkovsky said. “Get on with it.”

My arm and wrist were aching. I could feel the blood pumping through my veins. Almost involuntarily, my finger had curled around the trigger. The grip was pressed against the palm of my hand. For a crazy moment, I thought of firing at Sharkovsky, of emptying the chamber in his direction. But what good would that do me? He probably had a second gun concealed somewhere, and if I didn’t find the bullet at the first attempt, he would have plenty of time to shoot me where I sat.