Snowdrops (23 page)

There was one time, in those few days when I was looking, when for a minute I thought I'd seen Tatiana Vladimirovna, or maybe I just let or made myself think so. It was on Tverskaya, at the bottom near Red Square. I was walking up to meet Paolo for a nervous lunch at the summer cafe on the terrace outside the Conservatory. I thought I recognised her shot-putter form, her relentless gait--slow but determined like an advancing army--and her give-a-shit bowl haircut, about fifty metres ahead of me on the pavement. I stopped dead, just for a second, then ran. But the pavement was crowded, and there was a dense mob of tourists around a stall selling Lenin T-shirts and Stalin dolls. It was like in a dream when you run and run but somehow don't seem to move. By the time I got to the corner where the Central Telegraph building is, I'd lost her. I looked over the edge of the half wall at the top of the steps down into the underpass. I swerved up Tverskaya as far as the Levis shop. The old woman had gone.

It's possible that it was her--I'm not saying that it wasn't. It could have been her. Possibly she's wandering around Moscow or St. Petersburg right now, with fifty thousand dollars in a plastic bag and that baby smile on her face. Maybe they left it at that. After all, they had her flat and she would never have been able to get it back. The paperwork was all in order, thanks to Olga. There was
nothing old Tatiana Vladimirovna could do about it and no one to complain to. Except me, maybe. She would've known where to find me if she'd been looking.

But she never came, and I doubt they would have wanted to see her standing on the pavement making a fuss, or just spending the extra money that could have been theirs. "No person, no problem," an old Russian saying went, and I suspect they would have fixed it so there wouldn't be any problems. It wouldn't have been difficult, even without the snow. I'll never know for certain, but that's what I think.

I'm not even sure that Tatiana Vladimirovna herself ever expected to move to Butovo, not really. Perhaps she didn't really think she'd ever get to pick mushrooms in the forest, swim in the pond, run her dishwasher, and gaze at the cupolas of the church from her new balcony. I'm not certain what she expected, but I've started to think that all along everyone knew more than me, Tatiana Vladimirovna as well as Masha and Katya. That they kept it from me like you keep a dirty secret from a child, until you can't cover it up any longer. I sometimes think that in a bizarre way it might, all along, have been a conspiracy against me.

Or maybe not. Maybe instead--probably instead, being as honest as I can be--it was a conspiracy of me against me, to keep the truth from myself. The truth being that I'd crossed a line somewhere, at some moment in a restaurant, in the back of a cab, under or on top of Masha,
or in the lift at Paveletskaya Square. I'd somehow become the sort of person who would go along with it, whatever it was, sensing but not caring that it was no good, fixing the forms and smiling so long as I got what I needed. The kind of person I never knew I could be until I came to Russia. But I could be, and I was.

That's what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed. The lesson wasn't about Russia. It never is, I don't think, when a relationship ends. It isn't your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.

I was the man on the other side of the door. My snowdrop was me.

In the end, under pressure from the bankers and our London bosses, Paolo and I went up north to check on the Cossack's oil operation for ourselves. We flew up from the abattoir-like domestic terminal at Sheremetyevo Airport, on a plane seemingly held together by Sellotape and hope. It was beautiful from above, the Arctic landscape: the pine forests were still dusted with diehard ice, little streams slalomed and frothed among the trees, and the sea was dark and calm.

The nearest airport to the site of the terminal was at Murmansk, the city where Masha and Katya said they had grown up. I hadn't clocked the connection until we made
the trip. Now, looking back, it feels sort of fitting and hurtful at once that I ended up there. At the time I was excited, even though it was too late and things had gone bad. I was excited to see the parks they might have sat in, the pavements they walked on, the views that wallpapered their lives. My grandfather had been there too, of course, when it was hell on earth. But I don't think I thought much about him. There was a big war memorial at the edge of town, but I didn't visit it. I didn't have time.

The Cossack's project company had an address that the hotel receptionist said was in an old Soviet housing estate. She said it was up near the Ferris wheel that rotated very slowly on a hill above the docks. We called the number we had for the office, but nobody answered.

On the second day Paolo and I went by ourselves to the spot on the coast from which, according to Vyacheslav Alexandrovich, the oil would very soon be pumped out through a pipeline to the supertanker. The road stopped a few hundred metres from the shore. We got out of the taxi and walked along a rough path. It was hot and there were mosquitoes. We slung our suit jackets over our shoulders and swore. On a flat stretch by the sea there was a square pit, about the size of a squash court, muddy but dried up, like a kidnapper in a thriller might keep a woman captive in. But there were no pipes, no supertanker, and no oil. There was nothing.

Paolo lit a cigarette and smoked it in one drag. We
stood up there for about ten minutes, taking in the dimensions of our fuckedness, or that's how it felt to me. Then we went back to the hotel to get drunk.

We sat at the bar on the top floor, run by a Dagestani barman and a Korean madam. We drank for a long time and a lot. It was light around the clock up there in the summer, and through the window at three in the morning we could see cranes standing around the docks, silhouetted like paralysed insects against the sentimental pink clouds, with seagulls wheeling around them. It wasn't really our fault, we told each other. We'd done all the paperwork right. Maybe we'd given the Cossack a little more slack than he deserved. Perhaps my mind had sometimes wandered. But we weren't engineers or private investigators: we were only lawyers. Basically, we agreed, we'd just been unlucky to be exposed when the Kremlin changed the rules--when someone decided that actually running businesses and siphoning off their profits month by month was too much like hard work, and that it would be easier just to fleece the banks instead.

All the same, we knew this would stick to us forever. No partnership for me, probably the boot for Paolo, no bonuses for either of us, and very likely no more Moscow. No more no limits.

"Fucking British Virgin Islands," Paolo said. I could make out a birdshit-covered Lenin statue in the square beneath the hotel. "Fucking Cossack. Fucking Russia."

His pupils had shrunk to vicious black dots. Later on, I wondered about Paolo--I wondered whether, just maybe, he had somehow been mixed up in it. I thought about how he had been with the Cossack, about the times he'd seemed to be angry and that meeting at Narodneft on New Year's Eve when we'd approved the loan, trying to remember any moments or tells I might have missed. But it didn't add up to much or enough.

We drank to us, and then to Moscow and the weasel president. Paolo took one of the Korean madam's plump associates back to his room for comfort. I lay on my bed, looking out into the milky Arctic air. I felt like crying but I didn't.

A few hours later--I'm not sure what time it was, I was still drunk, and down, and also on a strange sort of high at the same time, the high of nothing more to lose--I got up, went out, and strolled in the direction of the cranes and the docks. I crossed over a railway line on a graffitied footbridge and landed on a cargo quay. I heard music, and saw a cafe open a little way along the water.

It had a tiled floor and a counter and one human being, a fat man in an apron with crowdedly tattooed hands.

"Good morning," I said.

"I'm listening," he said.

"Coffee, please."

He put a teaspoon of Nescafe in a cup and gestured at an urn of hot water at the end of the counter. I mixed the
coffee and sat down. The cafe smelled of oil. An antique fridge gave off an ominous hum.

I remembered what Masha had told me about her father. I said to the cafe owner, "Is this the base for the nuclear icebreakers?"

"No."

"Where are they?"

"Round the bay. There is a separate military installation. It is secret." They kept the submarines there too, he told me. It was where they'd towed the one that sank a few years before, to fish out the bodies of those poor swollen boys. I could see that he wanted to talk but needed to pretend that he didn't.

"Is that where the
Petrograd
docks?"

"Which?"

"The
Petrograd
. It's an icebreaker."

"No. There is no
Petrograd."

"Yes, there is. I'm sure there is. I mean, I think there is ... or maybe there used to be but they took it out of service?"

"No," said the fat man. "There is no
Petrograd
. I worked on that base for twenty-five years. I was a mechanic. There is no
Petrograd."

I cupped my coffee. My hands shook. I remembered another thing Masha had told me about her childhood in Murmansk.

"Tell me," I said. "The wheel--the big wheel." I
gestured over my shoulder in the direction of the hill it stood on. "In the eighties, was it expensive? I mean, was it too expensive for some children to ride?"

"It wasn't there in the eighties," the fat man said. "They put it up in 1990. It was the last thing the Soviet Union did for us. I remember because I got married that year. After we signed the register, we went on the new wheel." He looked down at the floor for a second, maybe fondly, maybe ruefully, I couldn't tell. "It cost twenty kopecks," he said. "But in the eighties it wasn't there."

N
ARODNEFT DENIED ALL
liability for the Cossack's scam. They'd only promised to pump the oil and pay the fees, they pointed out, after the terminal was built. Their listing on the stock exchange was postponed. The assorted government ministries we petitioned told us to fuck off, only less politely. We never heard from Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor. They must have turned him, probably that first time when he went missing, then came back to us with his bogus report. Maybe it was threats, maybe money, maybe women, probably all three. I can't blame him. From our firm's perspective the only consolation was that our Arctic debacle was swamped by the spate of even worse Russian news--the big expropriations up in Moscow, the tanks down in the Caucasus, the fear and grudges that erupted in the Kremlin, and seemed to spread across Red
Square and the whole shabby, stunning Russian continent. We got a few paragraphs in the
Wall Street Journal
and the
Financial Times
, and an honourable mention in a feature Steve Walsh stitched together about naive bankers in the Wild East.

Soon afterwards the Russians and Americans started squaring up again, the Kremlin postponed the elections, and most of the foreigners started heading for the airports anyway. But I think Paolo would have stayed on if the company hadn't cut him loose to help pacify the bankers. I heard he moved to Rio.

Instead of being fired I was called back to London to work on due diligence in the corporate division at head office, as you know: to sit in the basements of companies that are being bought or sold, vet files, and never under any circumstances speak to clients--a bit like being put back on traffic after you've been a detective. Back to the thin life I have now. The old university friendships that are all duty and awkwardness, the job that is killing me. You.

I think I might just have quit the firm and clung on in Moscow, possibly tried to get a job with some up-and-coming steel magnate or aluminium baron, if I'd still had Masha. I knew she didn't really love me--she didn't have to love me. I would have carried on, I think, seeing her twice a week, taking her home twice a week, knowing there was no other or better me I could be somewhere else, anchored to Moscow by the heavy inertia of approaching middle age.
I don't think I'd have worried too much about how much of what she'd told me had been true, or even about what she'd done. I could have lived without Tatiana Vladimirovna. I might have managed to forget about her. So I think that Masha was better than me in the end. She had Seriozha, so she had a better excuse. And she at least acted like she'd done something wrong. I don't know who was in charge, but I hope she got a decent cut.

A couple of days before I left Russia, I went once again to Tatiana Vladimirovna's old place. It was the last time, and to be honest I think it was more out of nostalgia than anything more moral or noble. I punched random numbers into the keypad in the courtyard until someone buzzed me in. I climbed the stairs to her apartment. The door had been padded in maroon leather since the last time I saw it, and a creepy security camera had been installed above the top left-hand corner, which tracked me as I approached the threshold as if it was about to zap me with a laser. I rang the bell, listened to the footsteps, felt the eye peering at me through the peephole, and heard three or four locks turning and a bolt being drawn.

He was wearing a silk kimono and a green face pack and at first I didn't recognise him.

I said, "Excuse me ..." trailing off as I tried to place him. I knew I'd met him before, but I couldn't remember where. Through work maybe, I thought, or at a party somewhere, maybe that one time I'd been for the drinks
they threw at the British embassy to celebrate the Queen's birthday.

"Yes?"

"Excuse me ..."

I could see boredom and mild anxiety competing on his forehead as we stood there, both of us waiting for me to finish my sentence. Then I got it. It was the Russian in the plush coat who'd been leaving Tatiana Vladimirovna's as I was arriving a few months before. His hair was still impeccable. I peered around his silk shoulders and saw that the Siberian chandelier was gone, and the walls of the corridor had been painted racing green. The eternal parquet was still there. I heard a tap running and a radio playing. I thought,
They sold it on before they even got it from her
.