The Art of Deception

by The Art of Deception (retail) (epub)

  Old women dressed in black, with headscarves pulled forward like blinkers, stood in a long line in the idly falling snow. Each one was tendering a pair of broken shoes, a cup and saucer, a jam jar of home-made pickles, her pathetic goods held in her hands or placed in the snow at her feet. She found herself looking at the image of her parents’ ultimate terror, her only inheritance, their fear of losing their mean little house and ugly possessions, of falling into the humiliation of destitution.

  She thought it must be a film, a fantasy of degradation, until her ear seized the words, ‘… a market on the outskirts of Moscow…’ from the commentary. The camera focused on the face of one old woman, who stared back pitilessly at the viewer. The lax skin hanging from her high cheek-bones suggested that she had once been heavily fleshed. Her eyes were dark, shadowed and drooping, expressing neither resentment, nor accusation, simply shameless poverty.

  ‘Anatoli, is that…?’

  He abruptly changed channels. ‘That’s seventy years of Communism for you.’

  Or a year of capitalism. That settled it for her. For the blade of terror that struck her when she heard one of these stories had nothing to do with a horror of wrong-doing. It was fear of what might happen to Anatoli if anything went wrong, fear that the whole edifice of his life and hers, divided between Moscow and London, might founder.

  Oddly, the other subject with which Igor would try to tease her had no power whatsoever to disturb her. He liked to tell her about Anatoli’s wife, who had now abandoned her institute of learning in Moscow and found herself a job in a Russian-German joint venture.

  ‘I saw Yelena Nikolaevna on CNN last night, shaking hands with Chancellor Kohl,’ he would say. ‘She was part of a delegation in Bonn to sign a new trade agreement.’ His stories of the power of Anatoli’s wife, her enormous income, the influence she wielded on Russian politics, raised no anxiety and after a time he dropped them. She had no desire to change the status quo. Anatoli never indicated any intention of abandoning his wife or his home in Moscow. He wanted a double life, not a replacement one. She accepted this and, apparently, felt no rivalry with the powerful Yelena Nikolaevna.

  When she told me this, I challenged her. The subject was interesting, too, as it reflected on my position, telling me what she might want, what I might expect. It seemed to me far more natural, given her whole-hearted commitment to Anatoli, that she would have put pressure on him, in direct or subtle ways, to leave his wife.

  ‘Didn’t you ever try to get him to marry you? You lived the life of a couple when he was in London. He set up house with you, you went around together, you were invited together, why shouldn’t he marry you?’

  We were sitting by the fire and the lamps were off. We never went out in the evening any more. She talked, with long pauses in which she recalled, or decided what she would tell me.

  ‘I liked the illicitness. I mean, we didn’t live in a secretive way or anything. But it was not orthodox. So I felt free. I thought, at the beginning, for quite a long time, I could just walk away and so could he. Of course, I didn’t want to and I was terrified he would, but I liked the idea that it was a balance that was perfectly maintained. If it tipped, one way or the other, that would be it.’ She was frowning faintly, trying to be honest. ‘That was the theory. In fact, I knew he wouldn’t marry me in any case. If he wanted something, he said so and he got it. If he didn’t suggest it, it was because he didn’t want to change things. So there was no point in my wanting it.’

  Anatoli’s wishes were the ultimate authority. He dealt with her fears about what the Bank did, which had been implanted by Igor. She had come across an article on the Russian Mafia in a colour supplement and had read its account anxiously, looking for parallels with what she knew of the Bank’s operations. The magazine had been left, folded open at the headline Mafia in a Fur Hat over a picture of a broad-faced Russian in a shapka. Anatoli must have been attracted by the illustration. As he picked it up to glance at it, Julian made a movement, immediately cancelled, to prevent him. He saw it and recognised her intention. His eyes moved back to what she had not wanted him to see. He skimmed the pictures and their captions, glancing at the article as he went.

  She turned to leave the room when he called her back. He was wearing a harsh expression, one she had never seen in all their time together. His tone was usually light, his air humorous. The only seriousness that ever entered their relationship was that of her desire to please.

  ‘Julian,’ he repeated. With one gesture he tore the whole supplement across its width. ‘It doesn’t exist. Don’t read stuff like this. Don’t even look at it. Don’t think about it. It does not exist.’

  23

  Anatoli’s denial of the Mafia broke down a psychological barrier, reversing his purpose. To name it, even in negation, was to admit it. Whatever the connexion, it was immediately after this incident, Julian said, that he began to make use of her. More cynical, I dismissed the explanation based on the psychology of personal relations. It was far more likely, to my mind, that Anatoli had decided she must be initiated and so implicated in whatever it was the Bank was doing.

  The next day he asked her to arrange a dinner for a business associate.

  ‘At home,’ he said. ‘The best of everything.’ Then, seeing Julian’s horrified expression, he roared with laughter. ‘Don’t worry. Did you think I wanted you to be like Francesca, running out of the kitchen with some delicious dish created by your own hands? She drives me mad telling me of the superiority of her cheese, the special way she treats her vegetables.’

  ‘Since I don’t cook, I don’t see how I could. Anyhow, you shouldn’t laugh at Francesca. You enjoy her food.’

  ‘I do. “Anatoli, I have made this extra-especially for you.”’ He wickedly pulled his mouth into the earnest expression that Francesca used, imitating her tone of voice. ‘We’ll just be the three of us. You and me and him. And can you organise it that service stops with coffee? I’ll look after brandy and liqueurs. We don’t want to be disturbed if we’re talking business, as I hope we shall by then. You’ll stay of course.’

  ‘If you like.’

  Later, the dinners she arranged for Anatoli blurred. The only way she could distinguish them was by her own part in them: the flowers she had chosen, the amusing table centre she had bought at a certain shop, the witty menu she had devised with the caterers. Only this one, for her first guest, stood out in every detail.

  She expended enormous efforts on the preparations and waited to meet their guest with high anticipation. He was tall and fleshy, with a striking olive-skinned face and melancholy eyes and mouth too large for their frame, overscored with heavy black eyebrows and moustache. His loose-jointed, awkward body was contained in an impeccably expensive suit. Julian did not learn who he was that evening. When she shook his soft hand, his name was not mentioned and, for all the notice he took of her, she might as well not have been there. But Anatoli wanted it, so she was.

  The atmosphere between the two men was at first cautious, revealed in exaggerated laughter at one another’s anecdotes. Their guest refused the Krug and the Ducru Beaucaillou ’81 she had ordered, and they all drank orange juice. They ate the feuillete and the lamb, the vacherin and the salad, the tarte aux fruits de la passion with appreciation. Once they settled down to business and the maid left them, they drank coffee and ate petits fours. The little pile of sweet things was devoured in ten minutes. Their guest ate with the eagerness of the addict, his lips snapping on them, sucking at the melting texture like a baby at a teat This was someone, like Dyadya, who adored sugar and she went quickly to the reserves of presents she had received. She arranged more chocolates and pate de fruits on a plate and sat down again with them beside the fire. She was attentive to their needs for more coffee, more chocolates, clean ashtrays. She paid no attention to what they talked about. She watched their guest smoke incessantly, as he listened to what Anatoli was saying. Neither of them made notes or consulted papers. Finally, he rose, forgetting to sh
ake her hand or thank her as he left, ushered out solicitously by Anatoli at three in the morning.

  Anatoli was jubilant. It had gone very well, he said. She did not ask what ‘it’ was.

  Now, she became a parody of a wife, spending her time in arranging the house and entertaining guests. Yet as a hostess she was closer to the professional than the social variety, for she presided over meals to which other women were never invited and at which she was herself almost invisible. Hours of thought as well as money went on producing the perfect meal for guests whose only purpose was business. They did not notice that the huge mass of acid yellow flowers, punctured with orange lilies, exactly matched the colours of the new painting she had just bought, nor that the menu had been composed with the guest of honour’s passion for golf in mind. No detail was too small for her attention, but she did nothing herself. As she had always known, as long as you have money, anything is possible, and at once.

  By undertaking all this with her fanatical thoroughness, it was easy for her to ignore the subjects that were discussed and the goods that were bargained for at her table. The guests were usually anonymous. Sometimes, with surprise, she recognised an opposition politician, or a junior minister, a businessman or a lawyer whose influence Anatoli needed to cultivate and she looked with curiosity at a face made familiar by television.

  The first evening set a pattern for those that followed. The purpose of the meeting was not social, but politeness and caution forbade that the real subject should be mentioned until the end. The conversation, until the important topic was reached, was so standardised, she sometimes thought dreamily, that they could just hum and it would make no difference at all. There could be different notes for different stages of the meal. There would be something rapid and light for the half hour in which they assembled, standing in the drawing room in front of the fire, sipping their champagne or whisky, moving round to be introduced, and talking about the decoration of the room, the paintings, her latest acquisition for Anatoli. The conversation always became more concentrated once they had sat down in the Chinese yellow dining room: golf, Wimbledon, racing, football, which Anatoli followed with learned passion, depending on the national taste of the guests. Julian, who had no interest in any sport, would listen to her neighbour with her rapt expression of boredom.

  With the main course came the serious stuff, politics and economics, and the discussion would range across the world’s war zones and stock markets with the dispassionate, wheeling flight of a bird of prey. After cheese had been served and removed and the dessert was in front of them they had reached the sweet centre of the evening. She could always tell what sort of negotiation it was to be by the rise or lowering of tension at this stage. If she felt excitement in the air, she knew there was hard bargaining to be done and she might well still be sitting pouring coffee, or herb tea, or brandy in the early hours. If there was a relaxation, she knew that it was all agreed and it was simply a question of talking over the details.

  * * *

  When Igor was next in London, he said, ‘I heard you sat in on the arms negotiations.’

  ‘Arms?’ Julian said vaguely.

  ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t understand what they were talking about, because I won’t believe you. For an intelligent person, you are sometimes unbelievably fucking stupid.’

  She continued to gaze at him blankly. They were sitting in her drawing room. He was lying on the sofa with his feet propped on the coffee table, inserted between the huge volumes on the paintings of the Hermitage and the Louvre, smoking. She had given up trying to prevent him and had bought a machine to clean the air of his tainting presence. Beside him was an overflowing ashtray which he would not permit her to replace, and on the other side, on a small table, a vodka bottle and glass. He had discarded his suit jacket and tie and his physical presence was represented by his voice and the hollow looseness of his white shirt and grey trousers, which seemed to suggest that he was not there at all. There was no one within.

  Julian was sitting opposite him in the wing chair by the fire, undistressed by his abuse.

  ‘But I am fucking-stupid, Igor. That’s why I’m here now. That’s why I was there then. I must say, your English has come on a long way. When we first met, I don’t think you would have got the intonation right on the unbelievably-fucking-stupid.’

  ‘OK, OK. You can be as fucking-stupid as you like with Anatoli, but cut it out with me. This guy Iman is a big arms dealer and we’ve been working on him for some time to convince him that we’ve got access to more than cases of Kalashnikov machine guns and clapped out, standard-issue Red Army pistols, which is the usual menu on offer from Russia nowadays.’ He wasn’t actually smoking his cigarette. It hung between his etiolated fingers, the smoke shimmering upwards to make a veil in the air between them. Julian’s gaze was fixed on the loose hand, the chain of smoke.

  ‘It was Dyadya,’ Igor was saying. ‘Even though he can’t get out, he can still see where we should be going. He’s unbelievable. He’s opened up our sources in Russia. He spotted Iman.’ Igor talked on. The Uzbek had obtained access to the output of one of the most sophisticated arms factories of the former Soviet Union, one whose production was still in demand among Russian generals. The idea was to sell arms abroad in order to finance the Russian Army’s needs and Dyadya was the chosen agent for these dealings.

  Julian made no response to the story. She sat holding her wine glass in both hands, her elbows lodged on the arms other chair. Igor collapsed onto the floor. The tension that maintained his body, fakirlike, horizontal, gave way. He was crawling towards her. When he reached her, Julian, startled, had already put down her glass. Approaching her from below, he reached up, grabbing her chin, forcing her to look at him.

  ‘Listen, Julian, pay attention, will you.’

  ‘I am. I listen to everything you say.’

  ‘I’m offering you a deal. I want you to do a little spying for me. Tell me who comes to these dinners he gives in London, what they say, what they agree. And don’t give me that stuff about not understanding all that boring money talk.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  He ignored her question. ‘You must tell me about who comes, who he sees here, what’s going on in London, and I’ll tell you what it means. I’ll explain what Anatoli won’t. You need to know, so you can worry. You think it’s your worry that keeps him safe, don’t you? So, as long as you listen to me, you’ll know what you have to worry about. We’ll watch his back together.’

  She did not respond. The cover story, of protecting Anatoli, did not quite conceal the reality of the spying.

  He dropped his hand, allowing it to run down the length of her body as he turned and leaned his back against her knees. He stretched across the coffee table for his vodka bottle and poured himself another glass, swallowing it with a single sharp toss of his head.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She looked down on the top of his head. He had fine straight hair thinning on the crown so that she could see the eggshell gleam of his skull through its mesh.

  ‘Why does he need someone to watch his back?’ she asked. ‘Is it Dyadya?’

  ‘Julian, are you stupid or what? If you knew why your back needed watching, you wouldn’t need to watch your back, you’d turn to face it Yes, it could be Dyadya, though that seems to have settled down now. But it could be anyone, anything. That’s the point.’ There was silence. She leaned over to touch the CD player and fill the room with music.

  ‘And why do you want to protect him?’ She put out a hand and stroked his hair, so that the filaments were no longer criss-crossed, but lay smoothly in parallel.

  Igor always spoke with a suppressed violence when he had been drinking, as if only with the loosening of inhibition could his exasperation with her reveal itself. ‘I’ve told you, we’re partners. What’s his is mine.’

  He reached for her hand, putting it to his lips. He took her index finger into his mouth, working it with his tongue. With sudden viciousness he bit it s
o deeply that Julian shrieked. She pulled it away from him, nursing it to her chest, examining the bleeding punctures. Igor did not move.

  ‘And, Julian, it’s not just for Anatoli. You need me, too.’

  24

  Later I looked back on this secondary relationship, the one with Igor, with more attention. Even at the time she was telling me about him, I could see that, however strong her obsession with Anatoli, she had an equally powerful connexion with his partner. It was hard to judge on what it was based. One of its pleasures was its secrecy. She enjoyed a hidden life, even an innocent one. Innocent? The impression she gave was that they just talked. She liked evenings in restaurants, discussing the parties she gave, the atmosphere, the relationships between the guests. At the time, although I noted her love of the illicit, the sexual element in her friendship with Igor, I failed to draw conclusions for my own case. I wrote him down as an alcoholic, perhaps impotent, in love with her, content with power over her. This derived in part from the secrecy: he could always betray her to Anatoli. But he needed the information she supplied about Anatoli’s dealings in London, just as she needed what he told her about Moscow, about the men who gathered around her table, and most of all his reassurance. She needed to know that all was well; Anatoli was safe; it was not yet time to abandon ship.

  One evening they went out to an Italian restaurant. It was crowded and so noisy that even though the tables were closely packed there was little danger of anyone overhearing two consecutive sentences amid the surging waves of conversation. They settled into their familiar attitudes at the table, like a long married couple. Julian sat with her forearms resting on the cloth, leaning forward, his arms were raised to his face, a cigarette in his fingers.