Sila's Fortune (6 page)

What could he do but grunt confidently when his mother asked if he felt at the top of his game, ready to win, to become a pro footballer?

What could he do but constantly reassure his father that he would win, but that he was finding it tough, a confession which filled his father with a secret satisfaction as though some carefully hatched plan were coming together?

What could he do but work at it, work harder, take everything that was dished out and more, take something to help him out, it wasn't doping, just a little boost, not some rubbish?

What could he do but tough it out while other players gained ground until they were completely out of reach and even his place on the bench was doubtful?

‘I'm gonna win, Pop.'

Doubt. Crippling doubt. The terrible feeling that his father had always denied him.

And then deliverance.

‘I got injured. During training. It was tough, really tough because we had a big match that weekend, the semi-final against Boulder. Big bastards. Well, obviously I was training hard, I wanted to get on coach's good side. He's been talking seriously about putting me back on the team. But then in this tackle I put my knee out. My knee. I swear, Pop. I completely fucked up my knee. Tore all the ligaments.'

‘Yeah, it's all over, the doctors all say the same thing. I'll never play again. Never. They say I'll be lucky if I don't end up with a limp.'

‘Yeah, it's definite, like I said. It's over.'

‘Work with you? In real estate? After college? Sure, Dad, I'd love to work with you. And I'll work hard, I'll earn my place. Don't worry, I'll make you proud of me.'

You're a winner, Ruffle the tough guy. You're right where everyone expected you to be all those years. You'll fulfil your destiny, this is what you were raised for. The real battle: business and money.

So why are you crying?

Why did you put down the phone, lie back on your hospital bed, alone, shaken by sobs as if you'd been lied to and betrayed your whole life, as if your part had been written for the end-of-year school play?

Ruffle had finished college. He was heading home to take up a job in his father's business, a phoney career path that was to lead from the foothills to the dizzy heights and allow his father, head held high, gripping his son's arm, to declare with a proud, beaming smile: ‘Mark started at the bottom and he's worked his way to the top; he is now worthy to take over the family business.'

We weren't quite there yet. Ruffle Senior, the portly father whose flushed face and bow legs made it look as though he had just climbed down from his horse – a Ford four-wheel-drive – threw a huge party to celebrate the graduate's homecoming to which all his friends and his son's were invited. It was a casual party, a barbecue. So everyone dutifully pretended to be casual as they waited for alcohol to do its work, peeling away airs and graces. They had been careful to wear jeans and shirts that were at once casual and cost a small fortune. Their host, after all, was a millionaire.

Ruffle had completed his university education, which is to say he had drunk too much, gone to as few lectures as possible, studied a number of practical examples, attended a few seminars on management where an overpaid – hence respectable – CEO smugly spouted platitudes. He had sniggered during
marketing lectures, like many people, but had made an attempt to understand the basics of accountancy since it might come in useful, hankering for the world of finance while quickly realising that, at least from a technical viewpoint, he wasn't cut out for it. But after all, he thought, the technical aspects were always handled by the juniors.

Thanks to understanding professors who were much more lenient than the high-school teachers who had insisted on filling his head with rubbish, he had managed to get a degree, and from an Ivy League college at that. Now he could go home, the graduate's laurel wreath like a halo of wisdom perched atop his bulldog face. Curiously, despite his laziness and his fecklessness he had acquired an indefinable flair for human relationships, a sort of easy-going directness that masked his deep-rooted aggression. All in all, he was perfectly equipped to slip into the business world.

When he arrived back at his house – his father, as usual, had met him at the airport with his girlfriend Shoshana who, despite various fumblings with girls at college, still had the most beautiful breasts he'd ever seen – the assembled guests, casually gathered around the swimming pool, yelled ‘Surprise!' though it was anything but. They hugged him, congratulated him, shook his hand, kissed him, everything, in short, to give him a fitting welcome while he puffed himself up, laughing nervously, thrusting his chest out and making clucking noises as he chest-bumped his buddies.

Fist gripping a huge chicken drumstick which he regularly dipped into a jar of mayonnaise, he strolled through the assembled crowd, leering, with a sort of dazed smile impossible to interpret.

It was with the same dazed smile that he listened to his father's speech: ‘Brilliant university career … first in the family … his considerable talents as a jock and a scholar … but the sporting world's loss is the business world's gain … the same energy … in the service of others … doing for society what … joining the family business, putting his keen mind at the service of … climbing the company ladder … now, let's party!'

As he wandered around, grabbing a beer bottle to replace the chicken drumstick, Ruffle listened to an old friend of his father's, nodding at just the right moments, smiling as the man patted his arm. Now well and truly loaded, he barrelled a couple of guys from his football team like bowling pins and knocked them into the pool and was immediately rewarded with his own dunking, his fat, ruddy face staring wide-eyed underwater. The music was louder now.

An hour later, eyes vacant, he was slumped in a chair, silent, motionless, chugging a bottle of beer.

Lev entered the Moscow restaurant where Councillor Litvinov was celebrating his birthday. The Councillor had rented the whole space, which was decked out in red and lit by thousands of candles. Tall, thickset men in black suits turned away passers-by. This was Litvinov's
krysha
. Yeltsin's most important advisor and Lev's fiercest rival had become a shrewd businessman – which is to say ruthless, frenzied and dangerous. And to protect his business interests from competitors, Litvinov had set up an umbrella of protection – a
krysha
– in this case calling on the Slavic Brotherhood, the most powerful gang in Moscow. The brotherhood had five
men posted on the door and three more working the room. The party would go off without a hitch.

They had done sterling work, Lev, Litvinov, Gaidar, Chubais and the others. Yeltsin's team, known as the ‘kamikaze cabinet', had liberalised prices, privatised the economy, opened the country up to capitalism. And, inevitably, Russia had immediately crumbled. They knew ‘the transition' as they called it, resorting to the economic euphemisms that quickly replaced Communist slogans, would be difficult but they had not anticipated the ferocity of the maelstrom that would engulf the country. They had fought hard, and there had been unforeseen events: Yeltsin's car crash, which Gorbachev exploited to regain the upper hand; the August putsch in which hardliners tried to stall progress by arresting Gorbachev and attempting to seize power. Yeltsin's stroke of genius had been to rise from the dead, climb up on a tank and harangue the crowds
in support of Gorbachev
. The loudmouth clambered onto the tank and, in the hoarse voice of a drunken boxer, delivered his speech in favour of resistance; and the people had rallied to him, the army had deserted the hardliners. Democracy – which in this case meant delivering the empire into the hands of thieves and criminals – was saved. But Yeltsin had saved Gorbachev the better to crush him completely. On national television he forced Gorbachev to admit that his own ministers had been behind the coup and to replace them with Yeltsin's men, leaving Gorbachev with only a fig-leaf of power. Yeltsin had proved to be the stronger. Alcoholic, easily influenced, but stronger. Most of the time his advisors manipulated him like a puppet, but every now and then the fighter in him would stir, the broken-nosed brawler who knew how to lead his people.

Yes, there had been unforeseen events, but they had triumphed: Yeltsin was still in power, master of the largest country in the world, a sprawling continent of boundless energy resources.

If Yelstin was master, his advisors were princelings. And now they had to be rewarded. And so came the time of thieves. All those close to him, all his advisors, all those who, by hook or by crook, could find a way to loot the empire set themselves up in business and fought over a plunder unrivalled in history. A few hundred men helped themselves to a treasure out of the Arabian Nights, a treasure no fairy-tale sultan could even have dreamed of. For a song, making the most of subsidised prices thirty or forty times below world market rates, they made off with vast reserves of gas, oil, diamonds and metals. These men came to be called oligarchs and the West marvelled at their wealth and their vulgarity, putting them in the same category as the
nouveau riche
, oblivious to the criminal source of their vast riches. At such prices, even the idiot on a corner with a begging bowl could have become rich as Croesus: these men were buying oil for one dollar a barrel and selling it for thirty dollars!

But the struggle to be a part of this little circle was vicious. And Litvinov was among the fiercest fighters. He had always wielded considerable influence over Yeltsin and, from the first, had never strayed from his strategy: establish Russian sovereignty, eliminate all opponents including Gorbachev and set Yeltsin up as master. He was consistent. While others were still thinking in terms of the empire, of Yeltsin and Gorbachev ruling together, of liberalising the regime, Litvinov had already put the past behind him: from the ruins of empire, he insisted,
a capitalist Russia would rise. And this is what happened. At the time of the August putsch, Litvinov had been on all fronts, fighting the power of the KGB every inch of the way. He resisted everything: pressure, threats, promises. He played the Yeltsin card. No one quite understood why, since it was obvious that he had never been moved by idealistic motives, but he dug his heels in, displaying a mixture of patience and ruthlessness. He was everywhere, at every meeting, however important or trivial. He sat at the table, fist clenched, his massive bulk bent double, spoke rarely but always succinctly, he was resolute, unshakeable. A fighting bull respected by all. One by one his rivals were eliminated or sidelined to minor roles while he had become Yeltsin's primary advisor. The man of dirty deals and low blows.

And Litvinov had become master of Russian oil. Yeltsin entrusted him with the major Siberian reserves. He was now the head of the largest company in the country and one of the richest men in Russia.

Litvinov dismissed Lev as ‘a pencil-pusher' but he found it impossible to sideline his chief rival completely. Lev was too useful. True, he did not have Litvinov's decisiveness, the almost incredible combination of self-assurance and ruthlessness. But he was much more intelligent and Yeltsin, like everyone else, knew this. The redistribution of power he had negotiated with Gorbachev's people was proof in itself, as was his ability to get Yeltsin elected President before the introduction of universal suffrage. People needed him. Unbeknownst to him they mistrusted him for obscure reasons that had to do, not with his loyalty, but with an almost imperceptible aloofness. The
disquieting sense that, unlike the others, he was not wholly engaged in action, in power. ‘A pencil-pusher.'

And yet in the division of the spoils of empire, Lev had fared rather well. Unlike Litvinov, the pencil-pusher did not get the choicest cut. But from the bloody carcass, he managed to steal a meaty haunch with sufficient oil reserves to create ELK, the tenth-largest company in the country. Like the other oligarchs, he stood tall as gold rained around him, and like them he bought a palace in Moscow and a Mercedes 600. Like them, he could buy a restaurant simply because he liked his meal. Like them, through the miracle of money, he could fulfil his every whim by simply clicking his fingers. And, like them, he had been invited to Litvinov's triumph, to the lavish birthday celebration intended to crush Yeltsin's ministers and advisors by its sheer opulence.

Women of miraculous beauty glided about the room; the most miraculous of all sat next to Litvinov, attesting to a power that could even buy beauty. Lev thought of Elena, who had refused to accompany him since she despised Litvinov and all the oligarchs. She had become a teacher, though it meant her yearly salary amounted to what Lev earned in a couple of hours, because her independence was important to her and she was happy to be working, to be thinking. Lev, even as he suggested she give up working, was proud of her, as though through her he preserved some part of his past. Like most Russians, she considered the oligarchs to be thieves but she never thought too hard about her husband's case. Lev seemed to escape her opprobrium.

Greeting a former councillor whose career had been less
meteoric than his own, Lev noticed the plates were made of gold. ‘I flaunt therefore I am,' thought Lev. On the tables were bowls piled high with caviar, tall granular peaks of translucent purplish black, a nod to Litvinov's little sideline on the Caspian buying caviar from fishermen for a few dollars and reselling it in the West at a 100,000 per cent profit, all the while depleting stocks of sturgeon. The oligarch was blessed with a boundless imagination, a limitless ability to plunder. Russia was being bled dry.

Litvinov came over to Lev.

‘Good of you to join us, councillor. The party should be magnificent.'

Litvinov had gained a lot of weight and lost a lot of hair.

‘I don't doubt it,' said Lev. ‘You always did have a talent for doing things on a large scale.'