Snowdrops (11 page)

"Of course," I said. "Good idea. Definitely. What should I bring?"

"You think of something, Kolya. Something English."

There was more, and most of it I've forgotten, but I can remember her saying, "I see you soon, Kolya. I think about you. I love you."

I went back to the lounge, and they all averted their eyes in an ostentatious show of indifference. I felt trapped
like you do after you've eaten your airline meal, and getting the stewardess to take your tray away so you can escape seems the only thing in the world that matters. Underneath it all, I suppose, was the knowledge that I could have turned out the same way as my parents, and the fear that maybe I still could--that I might not manage to make my own life at all.

We sat looking at the children, willing them to do something adorable or eccentric. I lasted 'til the day after Boxing Day, then moved my return flight forward by a week to take me back home, back to Moscow, just before New Year.

I
HURRIED THROUGH
the scrum of lean Russian youths who were wrestling for their parents' luggage at the baggage carousels, and out into the crush of criminal-looking taxi drivers in the arrivals hall--into that particular Russian everyday war, the war of everyone against everyone else. I marched up through the check-in desks and bought a ticket for the train into the city.

The big freeze was on, the real cryogenic deal that I could feel in my teeth, and then everywhere else, when I stepped out of the clammy underpass and into the fierce air at Pushkin Square, after the airport train and the Metro. It hadn't been that cold when I'd left for England, minus ten
maybe. Walking down the Bulvar to my place, I remember, my breath froze differently from the way it had before Christmas, congealing into a kind of tangible fog. The bit of exposed skin on my cheeks, between my upturned collar and my pulled-down hat, stung and then went numb. My nostrils froze together, the hairs inside them hugging each other for survival. The electronic thermometer outside McDonald's said minus twenty-seven Celsius. It was so cold that there was almost nobody smoking in the streets. The traffic police had been issued with old-fashioned felt boots, an ancient Russian precaution that kept their feet from falling off while they hung around extorting bribes from people.

I called Masha and arranged to spend New Year's Eve with her and Katya and, at least to start with, Tatiana Vladimirovna. There were two days of work left before the statutory ten-day New Year break, a national binge referred to by my colleagues as the "oligarch skiing holiday." I had nothing else to do, so I went into the office on the day after I got back.

"That fucking surveyor," Paolo said when I shut the door to his office. Beneath his window the orange men burrowing around in the white expanse of Paveletskaya Square looked like an army of angry ants. "That fucking Cossack."

"Happy New Year, Paolo."

"It is almost finished," he said. "The client is almost happy. Everyone is almost happy. Except for this surveyor. Where is he, Nicholas?"

"I don't know."

"You know, sometimes I wish we never saw the Cossack at all. Why must it be project finance? Why must it be the British Virgin Islands? Always the British Virgin Islands. How are you, by the way?"

The truth is that, in those days, even the bankers didn't care all that much whether the banks they worked for got their money back. They earned their bonuses just for shelling it out, and would probably have moved on or upstairs before the Russians or whoever got a chance to default. All the Western banks were desperate to do business in Moscow, because everyone else seemed to be, and most of them weren't too fussed about the destination of their loans. Half the time, when they were lending to one of the huge energy or metals firms, the bankers handed over the cash with no security at all: the Russians were drowning in petrodollars, and anyway the firms' bosses
knew they would get even richer in the long run if they observed the niceties--right?

All the same, because the Cossack's project company was new and had no credit history, there were boxes that we had to tick. We'd received the letters from the regional governor, committing him to supporting the project. Narodneft had signed reassuring agreements about how much oil it would pump from its northern fields to the terminal once it was operational, and the export fees it would pay. We had statements of interest from prospective buyers for the oil in Holland and America. The banks had taken out political risk insurance (covering them in case of expropriations or coups). The main contract for the loan was watertight and oil proof.

That wasn't quite enough for the banks to release the first tranche of cash. We also needed a report from Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor, confirming the suitability of the site chosen for the terminal and the progress of preliminary construction. We needed it immediately if the banks were to transfer the money--a hundred and fifty million dollars, I think, or thereabouts--before the end of the year.

The Cossack wanted the cash yesterday, he said he had liabilities to meet with his construction workers and suppliers. The bankers wanted to give it to him, especially because, if they waited until the following year, their bonuses for the closing one would be smaller. But there was a hitch.
In the middle of December, Vyacheslav Alexandrovich had finally made it up to the Arctic. Then he disappeared.

In our office we worried that maybe he'd fallen through a hole in the ice or made friends with the wrong lady at the hotel bar. The Cossack said there were no holes in the ice and he was sure everything was normal. He wanted us to come to a meeting at Narodneft's Moscow headquarters, on New Year's Eve, to sign the last documents we had to send to New York and London before the banks released the money. Paolo agreed to go. He said he thought it would be a waste of our time, but we'd be on the clock even so. He took me and Sergei Borisovich with him.

N
ARODNEFT IS MORE
like a state than a company. Along with its wells and pipelines and tankers, it has hotels and planes and football teams. It owns sanatoriums in the Caucasus and an island in the Caribbean. It runs a submarine in the Gulf of Finland, and, rumour has it, a couple of satellites in space. It operates bespoke brothels and tame assassins. It was at that time said to bankroll half the members of the Russian parliament. It also boasts a weird HQ in southern Moscow that was built in the nineties, during what had evidently been the era of maximum eccentricity in Russian architecture, and looks like an inverted spaceship. Paolo, Sergei, and I pulled up outside it first thing in
the morning, at maybe half past eight. It was New Year's Eve, my last New Year's Eve in Russia.

Normally in the winter you can expect twenty or thirty seconds of leftover warmth, after you step out of a car or leave a building, before the heat of inside wears off and you suddenly feel the cold--a temporary delusion of comfort, like the extra time a decapitated chicken gets to run around before it realises it's dead. You don't get that period of grace at minus twenty-seven. It was instant nostril freeze and eye water. (While I'd been away in England someone in the office had taken off a glove to answer his mobile in Paveletskaya Square, and the phone had frozen to his palm.) We hurried into the security cabin at the front of the Narodneft complex to have our passports checked, then up past the frozen fountains in the landscaped compound and into the main building. A ginger Narodneft "greeter" in a green minidress showed us into the lift and wiggled us to a meeting room up near the spaceship's nose. The room had a sideboard set with vodka, glasses, and bits of herring impaled on toothpicks, and a floor-to-ceiling view over the frigid city. The sky was as white as the snow on the ground, whiter maybe, because the exhaust fumes didn't reach that far.

The girl sat down on one of the chairs along the wall and smiled at us. Sergei Borisovich ate some herring. We waited, pretending not to look at her.

After maybe an hour, at about half past nine, the
Cossack came in. He was accompanied by two lawyers and a deputy director of Narodneft, who seemed to be about nineteen. I found out later that he was the son-in-law of the head of Russian military intelligence. The Cossack whispered something to the girl and slapped her arse as she walked out.

"A little vodka?" he asked in Russian.

"Extreme," said Sergei Borisovich, in English.

"No thanks," I said.

"Come on," said the Cossack, "it's New Year's Eve."

"First we work," said Paolo, "then we drink." You could tell Paolo was a Moscow veteran if you knew where to look. He showed up at parties at midnight, at airports he charged to passport control like a stampeding animal to avoid the queues, he went outside to smoke when it was minus twenty degrees, and he was never surprised.

"Okay," said the Cossack. We sat down at the conference table. He whispered to one of the lawyers, who left the room for five minutes and then came back. We had a languid chat about legal technicalities. About twenty minutes later, Paolo's mobile phone rang.

"Maybe," said the Cossack, "this will be good news."

Paolo answered it and walked over to the window to talk. I heard him say "Where are you?" and some swearing in Italian. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and asked what the phone number was in the meeting room. One of the Narodneft people told him, he repeated it and hung up.

"Vyacheslav Alexandrovich," Paolo said, sitting down again. "He's in Sochi." You might already know this, but Sochi is on the Black Sea, about three thousand kilometres from where Vyacheslav Alexandrovich was supposed to be. "He's calling back."

A phone rang in the middle of the conference table. The Cossack reached over and switched on the loud speaker.

Vyacheslav Alexandrovich told everyone he was sorry, please forgive him, it had been a family emergency, it would never happen again. But we shouldn't worry, he said. He'd been up to the Arctic with his assistants--spent almost a week up there, in fact--and everything was normal. The construction team was ahead of schedule and on budget. They had started welding the pipeline that would run from the shore to the floating terminal, the first parts of the onshore pumping station had arrived and were waiting to be assembled when the weather improved. The supertanker was in a dry dock along the coast and had begun to be converted (the hull adapted to take in oil from the pipeline on one side and pump it out to customers' ships from the other). They'd identified the locations on the sea floor where the twelve permanent anchors would be sunk. All this was in his official report. He was wrapping it up now and it would be with us in hard copy very soon. He talked for about twenty minutes, spraying around measurements
and statistics--decibars, barrels per day, metres per second, tons per year. He apologised again and rang off.

Paolo, Sergei Borisovich, and I wheeled our chairs back from the table to confer.

"Is it kosher?" Paolo murmured to me.

"It's certainly convenient," I said.

"And what is he doing in Sochi?" said Sergei Borisovich.

"On the other hand," Paolo said, "he knows what he is talking about. What is really the difference between a phone call and his report?"

"We have the other guarantees," I said.

"And it's New Year's Eve," said Sergei Borisovich.

I can't now remember exactly what we were thinking at that meeting. I'm sure we were eager to give the bankers what we knew they wanted, which was to make their problems go away and not discover new ones. We could see that the Cossack was a chancer. On the other hand, by the cowboy standards of that time, it wasn't so irregular. We'd worked with Vyacheslav Alexandrovich before. All the paperwork was in order. Most importantly, Narodneft was behind the project, even if it wasn't legally responsible, and with its stock exchange listing coming up, we figured it had to care about its reputation. And for such a monster company the repayments amounted to small change: its executives probably dropped almost as much every year flying their wives to Paris for shopping trips in its private jets.
Narodneft was behind it, and somewhere behind Narodneft was the president of Russia. We must have realised that Steve Walsh was right, and that the Cossack and his pals in the Kremlin or the FSB or wherever were bound to feather their nests a little. I'm sure we believed, though, that our banks would be safe.

In the end it was Paolo's call. "Okay," he said, "let's do it."

He went over to the window to wake up the lead banker in his Manhattan bed and tell him the good news. The Russians headed for the vodka and herring. We clinked.

Everyone was happy. The banks were happy, and so was Paolo. So was the Cossack. The Cossack was very happy. He invited me and Paolo to go hunting with him in the Altai mountains. He said he would teach us to fire a grenade launcher. Which was my favourite James Bond film? he wanted to know. Was it all true about Freddie Mercury? Looking back, I think he thought it was normal, his way of doing things--normal for us to drink together, make jokes and tell each other about our families, then do whatever had to be done anyway. I think he thought we were friends.

"So," said the Cossack, "Nicholas. When are you coming up to see us? Your new wife is waiting for you. Though on the other hand," he said, "I liked your Moscow wives
very much too." He gave me a quick, obscurely blackmailing wink, then knocked back another shot of vodka.

P
AOLO TOOK US
all for a celebratory lunch at Laughing Camel of the Desert, an Uzbek place on Neglinnaya. To get there Sergei Borisovich and I jumped into a passing Volga outside the tower at Paveletskaya. The enormous jovial driver was trying to learn English: he pulled an exercise book out of his glove compartment and pinned it to the steering wheel, every now and then writing down words that he liked the sound of ("lunch ... Wild West ... unsecured loan ... leveraged buyout ... Exxon-Mobil"). He must have been driving by sonar. Outside the restaurant there was a shivering black doorman in a furry white costume. Inside, in the coat room, a pair of doomed cockerels scratched at their tiny cages, getting ready to peck each other's eyes out during the New Year's Eve feast. In the dining room there were two belly dancers. One was a lithe thrusting blonde, who looked more like an off-duty stripper than a proper belly dancer, with a garland of hundred-rouble notes already sprouting from the top of her knickers. The other was a fat authentic brunette, wiggling each of her stomachs in turn, who no one was paying any attention.