Sashenka (57 page)

“Well, you may, that is totally possible. You will see them.”

“Thank you,” said Katinka, surprised. “When?”

The Magician waved a finger at her. “We’re adapting to the new era, aren’t we, Colonel Lentin? We’re embracing it! But we’re still patriots. We don’t wish to be American. Make no mistake, girl, we in the Competent Organs are the conscience of this country. We’ll make it strong again!”

“But what about the documents? When can I see them?”

“You’re young, in a hurry. As soon as tomorrow?”

“Yes, please,” she said, as eager as she was uneasy.

“Can we do it tomorrow, Colonel?” asked the Magician.

“Three days perhaps,” said the Marmoset, clearly the junior partner here. “Maybe a week.”

“Then that is that,” said the Magician. “And it won’t be too expensive.”

“Expensive?” cried Katinka. “But…”

“Ahhh, look at her!” cried the Magician theatrically. “Look at that worried pretty face! Ha ha. You’re new in Moscow, just a kitten in the big city, I can tell. Yes, everything has its price. The Colonel and I are embracing the new mentality! More whiskey, Dima. Let’s drink to it!”

12

Just after midday next day, Katinka walked through the high halls, past window displays and along vestibules of the new shops in the GUM arcade on Red Square. She had an appointment at the Bosko Restaurant, where slim, tanned girls with long legs in boots and skirts and gleaming Versace chains sat with squat men in Italian suits. The aromas of ground coffee and scented skin filled the air. The place was so chic that Katinka felt she might be in Venice or New York, even though she had never been anywhere but London.

What a place! she thought, not noticing the maître d’, an Italianate Tatar with the profile of a pigeon, scowling at her spangled skirt and white boots. “Oh look!” she burst out. “What a view!”

She sighed with the sensual pleasure of a provincial girl at Bosko’s wallsized panorama of Red Square and its expanse of shiny cobbles. From here, the gaudy icecream cones of St.

Basil’s seemed more Tatar than Russian. Just under the Kremlin walls stood that strangely unslavic Egyptian mausoleum in freckled red granite wherein lay the mummified Lenin.

There, farther away, almost hidden against the Kremlin Wall, was the little green marble bust of Stalin himself, rudely removed from its resting place in the Mausoleum. The Russianness of the Kremlin, with its Orthodox churches, its green and ocher Tsarist palaces, even those red stars, filled Katinka with Slavic pride.

She could see the domed roof of the Council of Ministers Building, where Lenin and Stalin had worked. Now President Yeltsin held office there. Sashenka had known Lenin and Stalin in the early years of Soviet power, Katinka remembered—and her obsession jolted her: she was relating to a woman whom she knew only from a photograph and a file.

“Can I help you, mademoiselle?” said the Tatar maître d’. “A table with a view?”

“She’s with me,” said a voice behind her. Pasha Getman towered awkwardly over her. He moved clumsily and none of his clothes quite seemed to fit even though they looked expensive. The trousers were too baggy; the shirt, open necked, was wrongly buttoned, yet he exuded cosmopolitan confidence, and Odessan haughtiness with the pungent smoke of his oversized cigar.

Katinka had spoken to Roza after her meeting with the Magician and the Marmoset, and Roza had asked her to talk to Pasha, who had agreed to meet her straight away.

She was now not sure if he would embrace her. Both leaned toward each other but at the last minute he withdrew and offered his hand. Katinka blushed but was rescued by the maître d’.

“Welcome, Gospodin Getman! Your usual table in the alcove? Sir and mademoiselle, please follow me!”

Getman’s three bulky, shavenheaded bodyguards, tattoos peeping over their shirt collars, sat at the neighboring table. Katinka followed Pasha, noticing that he walked like a juggling bear with his pawlike hands ready to catch the balls.

“I haven’t got long,” said Pasha when they were seated.

“I didn’t know you were here. I thought you were in London.”

“Water?” Pasha reached for the water and spilled it. Waiters rushed to clear up but he did not seem to care. “I came home again. There’s going to be an election soon. The President needs our help—we must keep out the Communists. Mama’s on her way back from London. You understand that this is her last chance to find out who she really is. Imagine not knowing, Katinka! I knew my parents so well, so intimately, but she has always this burning sense of loss inside her. Do you know your parents?”

“Of course.”

“Happy childhood?”

She nodded, unable to conceal her pleasure in the thought. “My father’s a doctor. They really love me and we live with my grandparents in their old house.”

“We’re so lucky, you and I. Now I know you’ve been talking to Mama”—Katinka was amused that this bear of a billionaire in his midthirties still called his mother

“Mama”—“but I’d like to know myself what you’ve found so far.”

As Katinka explained, Pasha’s mobile phone continued to ring. Once the bodyguards took a call and gave him a message; a redhaired girl in a leather miniskirt and Chanel boots and belt greeted him; and several businessmen came to shake hands—but navigating these interruptions, she managed to reveal her story. While she talked, Pasha leaned forward and listened to her, chewing on his cigar, his sharp, dark eyes looking straight into hers.

“So Satinov does know something but he’s very old and mysterious. Typical of that generation for whom secrecy is a fetish. You’re doing well.”

Katinka flushed with pleasure. “But the documents were incomplete and I met with the KGB to discuss the ones that were missing and I’m so embarrassed—and of course, I told them it wasn’t possible—but they asked…”

“Asked what?”

“For money! It’s disgusting!”

“How much?” asked Pasha.

“I told them it was ridiculous.”

“Look,” said Pasha, “I don’t mean to sound…I’m older than you so…I’m sorry I lost my temper in London. Mama told me off. But you’re so unworldly. I meet a lot of greedy girls.

I understand you’re not like that. Mama says too that you’re not doing this for the money

—that you genuinely want to help us. So I hope you’ll keep working on this day and night. How much do they want?”

“But we shouldn’t pay them,” Katinka objected. “Not the Organs! These are not decent people.”

“Just tell me how much they’ve asked for.”

“They mentioned…it’s so much, it’s a crime and they’re Mafiosi…,” she sighed. “Fifteen thousand dollars. A sin! What has happened to Russians these days?”

Pasha shrugged, the juggling paws opening and closing. “Well, this is my gift to Mama.

Truth is expensive, but I think family is priceless. Understand that, understand everything.

I’ll pay it.”

“No.”

“Stop telling me what to do!” he growled and crumpled up the tablecloth, almost sending all the cups to the floor. “It’s my money, and we need their information.”

“Well, OK…,” Katinka said at last. “And there’s one other thing. Satinov gave me this and said I must meet this person and not leave it too long.” She handed over a scrap of paper.

“But this is a Tbilisi number. In Georgia.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? You must go immediately, Katinka.”

“Now?”

“Sure, pick up your passport and suitcase from the hotel. When you get back, I’ll give you the cash and you can meet your KGB crooks.” He dialed on his cell phone. “It’s me. Book a flight to Tbilisi for this afternoon. Four o’clock? Fine. Ekaterina Vinsky. Put her in the Metechi Palace Hotel. Bye.” He called to the next table. “Hey, Tiger!” One of the bodyguards lumbered over. “Take Katinka back to the hotel and then on to Sheremetyevo.

Right now.”

13

It was already dark in Tbilisi—once known as Tiflis—when Katinka arrived at the airport, a bazaar of shouting taxi drivers, gunmen, traders, soldiers and footpads. But there was a driver waiting for her with a sign that read
Vinsky
—and a Volga that apparently could only be started with two wires and a hummed song. As they drove into town, the gunshots of a small wild land in the midst of a civil war ricocheted over the halflit city. The Metechi Palace Hotel, an ugly modern construction with glass elevators and a big open foyer with ranks of green metal balconies reaching up toward a giant skylight, was patrolled by Georgian gunmen in glittery gun holsters toting battered Kalashnikovs.

Leaving her bags at the hotel, Katinka caught a taxi into the city, passing through checkpoints manned by militiamen of motley uniform belonging to any of several private armies. The police themselves looked shabby and lost in their own city. The buildings were grandly decayed, and the streets had the flavor of a Levantine dream of a Paris that never was.

Katinka had never been to Georgia—her family spent their holidays in Sochi on the Black Sea—but she had heard a lot about it, of course: the fruit basket, the wine barrel, the playboy capital, the jewel in the crown, the pleasure dome of the Soviet Imperium with its luscious harvests of grapes and vegetables, its sulphurous Borzhomi water in those famous green bottles, its earthy red wines, its privileged, corrupt Communist bosses who lived like sultans, its argumentative intellectuals and its flashy Casanovan lovers. But Georgia had its dark side too. It had produced Stalin and Beria—and other famous Communists with unpronounceable, slightly ridiculous Georgian names: Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Abel Yenukidze—and Marshal Hercules Satinov.

The taxi took her right to the city center through Freedom Square (once Yerevan Square under the Tsar, then Beria Square, then Lenin Square) and into the broad and handsome Rustaveli Avenue (Golovinsky during Tsarist times) with its theaters and palaces. The driver did not know the way to the house she wanted: he shouted at people to ask. He turned the car round, oblivious to the hooting traffic, and showed her the burntout wreck of the Tbilisi Hotel, once the grandest south of Moscow. Finally they stopped on a steep cobbled hill, beneath a church with a round tower in the Georgian Orthodox style, and the driver pointed into the dark.

“There!”

Katinka paid him in dollars then walked carefully down the darkened street. Behind high walls the mansions were embraced by longfingered vines, their courtyards overhung by flowerdraped balconies where laughter and lanterns flickered. A bearded man with the thick white hair that Georgians never seem to lose held up a lantern.

“Where are you going? Are you lost?”

She saw he had a shotgun but did not feel afraid. “Café Biblioteka?” she asked.

“Come on!” His Russian was abysmal but he took her arm and led her down the cobbled street until they reached a house almost completely concealed in the vines. He opened the wooden double doors into a crumbling marble hall, lit with a candle, that reeked of Georgian feasts. To the right was a large shabby door and he pushed it open, jabbering in Georgian, the shotgun angled alarmingly over his shoulder. “Come on! Here is Café Biblioteka!”

With a gasp of wonder, Katinka entered the café, in the flickering light of candles decorated with wings of wax. She thought it smelled delicious: of
tkemali
, ginger, apple and almond. It was an old library, the bookshelves still standing in between the tables and behind the bar. Maps, banners of Tsarist Guards regiments, Georgian brigades and Bolshevik workers, drawings, noble and obscene, paintings, icons, pieces of old Georgian uniforms, swords and daggers, busts of Mozart, Queen Tamara, Stalin and Roman senators covered the walls. Some of the bookshelves had rotted and collapsed, tossing their priceless antique volumes onto the floors, where they lay, their yellow parchment pages open like fans.

At small tables, a single old man in a black fedora read in the half light; a group of American backpackers in yellow Timberlands and big shorts with their wallets on belts round their waists (advertising their Western riches to any brigands present) toasted one another in Georgian wine; and two greyhaired Georgians argued loudly about their politicians.

“Shevardnadze’s a traitor, a spy, KGB!” shouted one.

“Zviad’s a lunatic, a spy, KGB!” retorted the other.

“Do you want a table? Wine? Dinner?” asked a tall slim Georgian man with a blue beret on his head and a
chokha
coat, waspwaisted with pouches for bullets, and a jeweled dagger in his belt. He bowed. “I’m Nugzar. Who are you? You look lost.”

“Do you know Audrey Zeitlin? I want to see her.”

“The old English lady? She’s our icon, our lucky charm! We feed her every day. She worked here for a long time, she taught us English and our children! Upstairs, come on!”

Katinka followed Nugzar to the first floor, along a corridor where the vine had punched its way through the wall and joined up with another of its limbs through a window that could no longer be closed. He knocked on the door at the end.

“Anuko!” he called.

Those Georgians, Katinka thought, with their funny diminutives!

“A visitor, Anuko!”

No reply.

Peering tentatively into the gloom, Nugzar opened the door.

14

“I always hoped you would come,” said Lala in the squeezed pitch of the ancient.

She wore a housecoat over a nightgown, and had long white hair. There was little left of her, just a bag of bones held together by white skin so delicate one could almost see through it. But it was her eyes, which seemed enormous in their glowing opalescence, that drew in Katinka, for they had a bold, exuberant will that held the spotlight and challenged the energy of the young. “I’ve waited for fifty years. What took you so long?”

“Hello,” Katinka said hesitantly, afraid she had come to the wrong place, yet surprised that this antique woman seemed to know who she was. “Marshal Satinov sent me to see you.”

“Ah—Satinov. He was our hero, our guardian angel. He’s old now, of course. Not as old as me, though. Sit down, sit down.”

Katinka sat in the soft chair in the corner of the small room musty with tissues and hand cream. There was a single candle beside the bed; sepia photographs of grandees in stiff white collars and bowler hats; a haughty schoolgirl in a white pinafore; a silver model of an oil derrick; and many old books.