by Mitch Silver
Taking off the headphones, Lara scrolled back through her iPad notes of the man’s testimony and started with “Sir Robert.” No last name, so there was no help there. Moving on to In Which We Serve, she dragged the phrase over to the Google search box. What came back was, “The 1942 film boasts an impressive cast, which includes Noël Coward, John Mills and Celia Johnson.”
She then typed in “Celia Johnson.” Google showed her the woman’s obituary: “Celia Elizabeth Johnson. A fine actress and beloved mother; wife of Peter Fleming. Born December 18 …” All right, Ian Fleming did have a sister-in-law named Celia who was an actress alongside Coward.
Next, Lara determined the old RMS Aquitania had indeed crossed and recrossed the Atlantic during the war, first as a passenger liner and later as a troop ship, before finally being sent to the scrapyard in 1950. So, that part of his tale, about cabling his assistant from the ship, was plausible.
While she was considering what to do next, her phone vibrated soundlessly. Outgoing calls were discouraged in the Arkhiv. Incoming ones were absolutely prohibited unless one’s mobile had the ringer off. It was her tenant, Katrina.
“Trina?”
Lara could hear the buzz of the busy TsUM department store in the background. “Larissa Mendelova, I’m sorry, I know it’s Tuesday and I’m supposed to pick up dinner, but something’s come up. Maxim is taking me to the Lokomotiv football match.”
“Who’s Maxim?”
“You met him last night. He was the tall one, the soldier. We’re going straight from work, so I’m afraid you’ll have to do your own shopping. I’d do it myself on my lunch hour, but I have an errand to run and—”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be getting home late myself.”
“A date?”
“Not exactly. I—”
“Good for you, Lara. Oh, I almost forgot. Viktor called again.”
“What did he want?”
“I’m not sure, something about the divorce papers. He said you know the number.”
Lara sighed. More stalling tactics. “I know the number.”
“Look, I’ve got a customer.”
“Okay, see you … whenever.”
“Umm, don’t wait up, you know?”
Lara sighed again. “I know.”
Noël Coward began clearing his throat and she turned back to her work.
I apologise for that telephone call just now. It was another call, from Blunt a few days after we’d met, that brought me to the Courtauld Institute of Art at 20 Portman Square, a Georgian home I believe was once the official residence of the French Ambassador to the Court of St. James. A century and a half later, he would be chagrined to know it’s populated by art students.
Fearing that German artillery and the Luftwaffe’s dive bombers would begin their “rain of terror” any day now, the faculty—many of them German-Jewish refugees from Hamburg’s Warburg Library—and the entire student body were engaged in taking down the artworks from the walls and packing them for removal to the safety of the countryside.
In his “Technological Department,” the art restoration workshop one storey down from his own top-floor digs, Blunt insisted on giving me “the shilling tour.” There must have been a hundred different varieties of the canvas, board, paper, and parchment used by artists through the millennia. And untold numbers of paints, inks, varnishes, and shellacs, side by side with the pens and brushes of every size, shape and material needed to apply them. Blunt called it “my playroom, which doubles as the best-equipped art supply shop in the world.”
As my own Technology Department consists of a pen-and-pencil set, I was suitably impressed, and I told him so. “When I said at lunch we needed a man of your resources, I had no idea how … resourceful your resources were.”
“Thank you, Noël—” Blunt was interrupted by two students, a young man and a woman, carrying a Van Gogh self-portrait, the one with the bandaged ear, down from his rooms for safekeeping. He said, wistfully, “I’m going to miss the crazy old boy.” It would be the only vaguely sentimental moment I would ever see the man have.
We followed the students carrying the picture down the wide central staircase. As best I can remember, I tried to ease into the topic of his ”payment.” “Yesterday I telephoned someone I know in the Government and, if we can pull this thing off, there might be a place.”
He said, “This ‘thing’ of yours, this simulacrum—who knows about it?”
“In this country? No one.”
“You mean no Grand Poobah has vetted your idea?”
I laid it on the line. “That’s precisely what I mean. With your help, I intend to present Churchill with something very like a fait accompli as far as the book itself is concerned. Otherwise, the thing would be too fantastical for the PM to grasp. It’s almost too fantastical for me to grasp.”
“Then, come with me.” Abruptly turning on his heel and with a brusque “beg pardon” to the small knot of people standing in front of a door directly under the staircase, he led me down an interior flight of steps, saying, “When the nobs lived here, these were the kitchens and pantries. It’s easier to control the temperature and humidity down here than it is upstairs.”
I was a little slow keeping up. Blunt stopped and looked back. “I said I was giving you the shilling tour. Don’t you want your money’s worth?”
We made our way through a warren of storage rooms, some still with washing-up sinks in the corners, that were lit by a few bare bulbs. Paintings in their frames were stored on their sides in the first of these rooms, dozens of them chock-a-block. Unframed canvases were rolled up in cardboard tubes and stacked in pyramids, like so many wine bottles in the caves of a French chateau. In another room were altarpieces, disassembled and leaning against the walls three deep. Blunt waved his hand. “Italian on this side, German over there.”
The next set of rooms held leather-bound books from floor to ceiling. “All of this is available for study.” He began ticking off the centuries as we walked: “Ottocento, settecento, sei, cinque …” We walked through a door into another, similar room. “Still cinquecento. Notice anything?”
I looked around. All I could see were more leather-covered volumes. Maybe these were a little thicker than the previous ones. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I admitted.
Blunt beamed, the teacher indulging the dull student—something I’m sure you’re familiar with, Robert, having been my maths tutor that lamentable winter term. “We’ve left paper and now we’re in vellum. That door we just walked through was the year 1450.”
When I didn’t know enough to go “ooh” or “aah,” Blunt grew peevish. “The printing press, man. Movable type. Everything from here on is pre-Gutenberg. Handwritten and illuminated.” Whilst the twentieth century was going about its business upstairs, we had traveled back five hundred years in the time it took to walk from the front of the old kitchens to the back.
“Think of it,” Blunt was saying. “It’s always the year 1375 where you’re standing. Westminster Abbey is still unfinished. Martin Luther won’t be born for another century. Constantinople is still—well, you get the idea.”
I got the idea. It was a boring idea, but I got it. I followed Blunt, who was walking toward five or six large canvas carts of the sort commercial laundries employ. Inside each were more volumes piled one on top of another, willy-nilly. In all, there must have been three hundred old books in the carts.
My guide waved his hand over them. “Depressions aren’t bad for everyone. They’re quite good for art historians. We picked these up for a song. And it’s not just private collectors; the Catholic Church are hurting quite badly just now. Those three hold the contents of a monastery that closed in ’38. Of course, with a war on, I have no one to do the cataloguing. So here they sit.”
Blunt crossed his arms. “Our tour ends here. Noël, I thought you ought to know what we’re up against. If you want me to fabricate something, it had better look right and feel right and smell right if it’s go
ing to fool the Germans. Their art historians are the best in the world.”
I knew I musn’t say what I was thinking, but you know enough about me to know I said it anyway. “Smell right?”
Blunt grabbed a heavy book at my elbow. He opened it and immediately slammed it shut again. The dust and whatever else was in there nearly choked your humble correspondent. I coughed and then sneezed for nearly half a minute. When I finally could get the words out, I managed to say, “It smells something horrid.”
“Mold.” Blunt was triumphant. “Fourteenth-century mold. If you don’t have mold, the boys in Berlin will know it straight off.” He put the volume back where it had been. “I’ve read the things you left with me in the bag from the toy store. You were quite right to do so—I find this sort of thing to be child’s play.” The man was simply insufferable.
He turned on his heel and walked back through the door by which we’d come, the one he’d said was the year 1450. I found him fingering the volumes along the left-hand wall. He extracted a book from the shelf, opened it, and closed it again almost immediately, gently this time. He said, “Do what I’m doing on the next shelf down. Look for one with a hole in the flyleaf.”
I did as I was told.
Blunt pronounced, “I have a stratagem.”
It was at least thirty seconds before Lara was aware the cylinder had run out. And, lost in thought, another minute before she realized the Arkhiv was closing. She packed her things and walked the six tins containing Noël Coward’s words back to her cubicle before locking them up, wishing the Englishman a pleasant evening.
Chapter 19
Five hours later, Lara found herself trapped in a nondescript dance club way out on Ulitsa Shchepkina, all glammed up in one of Vera Lebedova’s slinky Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses and pasting her last smile of the evening on her face before sitting down.
Her so-called friend had gotten her into this evening of “mixing and mingling” as the price of going through her closet and borrowing clothes for Friday morning’s telecast. Vera had said, “I just happen to be signed up for this thing tonight. You should come.”
“Thing?”
“A flirt party. They’re fun, a way to meet guys. You remember guys, don’t you?”
“I’ve still got a guy. At least until he signs on the dotted line.”
“You think that’s keeping your no-good Viktor home nights? Larashka, you’ve been a hermit long enough.”
Her final “flirt partner,” waiting at Table 14, was a handsome enough guy, blond like a lot of Russian men but with unusual dark gray eyes. He’d clearly polished off most of the bottle of vodka that was on the table, and was leering at her through eyes at half-mast. It occurred to her as she sat down that the only difference between Moscow flirt parties and American speed dating was that, over here, the women did the moving while the men sat. The leers were identical.
His nametag read “Yuri.” Lara fingered the sticker on her blouse that read “Larissa.” No last names or even patronymics allowed. The Master of Ceremonies rang his bell and the guy jumped right in. “I like men without hats.”
Wait … was this a test? Lara smiled a little and said, “So do I. I notice you’re not wearing one.”
“No, I mean I like Men Without Hats, the ’80s band. They’re in Moscow this week and I’ve got two tickets.”
“Aren’t we supposed to get to know each other first?”
“What’s to know? I dig Eurasian chicks.”
“So do I.”
That threw him. Lara followed with, “The Eurasian Chicks, that country band from Kazakhstan. Know them?”
He didn’t laugh, he didn’t chuckle, he didn’t do anything for about ten seconds. Then all he managed was a surly “I don’t think so.” Men. Can’t live with them, can’t use them for firewood, as an American friend used to say.
So much for lively banter at Table 14. She couldn’t wait to share a laugh about it with Vera, who was just at that moment being chatted up by the hottest guy in the room. Easy for her. Vera Lebedova was pretty in a Maria Sharapova sort of way, blond and willowy. “Lebed” was Russian for “swan,” and her long, elegant neck lived up to the name. Guys fell all over themselves for her.
Lara knew she was too picky, looking for a Russian guy who could take as well as he could give. One who was not just interested, but interesting. Ilya Kolkov, he’d been interesting. There was a moment back then … before Viktor had shown up with his medals and his war stories and seemed the more interesting one … before she understood how many other women found Viktor interesting, too … when it might have been Ilya.
The emcee announced, “Okay, smeshivatsya!”
His call of “Mingle!” set off the final cattle call, when people who’d been sizing each other up all night exchanged mobile numbers. Or simply decided to go off together. Over near the bar, Vera was mobbed. Guys competed to get her a drink, to light her cigarette. Was it all about how you looked; were Russian guys that shallow? Or was it something Vera instinctively knew to say, some magical combination of syllables in those quick moments sitting across from each other, when the guy was cute and the moment was right … something Lara would never master.
Three nondescript men came up and pressed slips of paper with their table numbers into her hand, one of them Mr. Men Without Hats. Then someone tapped her from behind and said, “I think I can help you. Forget Table 9; guy’s a washout.”
Lara saw it was one of her fellow competitors. The tall, well-dressed woman wore a nametag that said, “Tati.” Her face was vaguely familiar.
“Do I know you?”
“Possibly. I used to be the weekend weather person on Channel One … Tatiana Ivanova.” She held out her hand.
Lara shook it. “Yes, I remember now. You were good with the maps.”
“Spasibo, Dr. Klimt.”
Dr. Klimt? How did this woman know her—
“Larashka!”
It was Vera, waving, leaving with the hot guy. Lara waved back, but in the meantime Vera’s date whispered something funny in her ear and Vera was turning to him, laughing, the swan forgetting all about the duckling she’d taken under her wing.
In a low voice, the stranger at her elbow said, “I … we … know about the book.”
Lara turned back. “We? Which book? One of mine?”
Tatiana Ivanova snorted. “Don’t be coy, Dr. Klimt, it doesn’t suit you. We’ll double what anyone else will pay.”
The place was quickly emptying out. The emcee switched the lights on and off, his signal that they were closing up.
“Pay for what? Who are you?”
“I told you … I’m a helper, a friend.”
“A friend?”
“All right then, call me a secret admirer. You have many such admirers in The Other Russia.”
“You’re working for the opposition?”
“The democrats, the people who want a more open government, a free press. Garry asked me to—”
“Garry Kasparov? You know him?”
The two women were standing by a table where some guy had left behind his cheat sheet, a crumpled list of crossed-out girls’ names. Lara’s was one of them. Tatiana Ivanova picked it up. “Look, the people you’re dealing with … they aren’t very nice. Afterward, they’ll cross you off like a name on a list.”
“What—what are you talking about? You must have the wrong girl.”
“No, Professor, you’re the right girl. We’ll double any offer … think it over.”
Before Lara could respond, the emcee doused the lights, longer this time. In the dark he said, “Show’s over, ladies. Nighty night.”
When the lights came on again, Tatiana Ivanova was gone.
Chapter 20
The nighttime laser lights beaming from the top of St. Basil’s cathedral were trying to find a way through the closed blinds of the suite when the call came in on the cell phone with the American eagle on it. The President, still up reading policy papers, pushed the blue “pr
ivacy” button and was wide-awake in a hurry.
“You did what?”
The voice on the other end back in Alaska repeated what he’d said. For a moment the commander-in-chief took the receiver from his ear and looked at it in disbelief before replying. “When I said ‘do what it takes,’ I meant pay him anything he wants. Not … eliminate him.”
“We tried that. We couldn’t buy him off. Said he wouldn’t … ”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Wouldn’t be ‘a party to what we’re doing.’ Exact words.”
“Christ, Carl.”
“I know, sir. The good news is, the buyer’s rep and him, they never filed a report. And now that things are running smooth again, there’s no proof anything happened. No proof, no paper trail. Plus, we made the thing look like a suicide.”
“That’s your idea of good news?”
“Well … I mean … you’re in the clear.”
“Except there’s you, isn’t there, Carl?”
Without waiting for an answer, he carefully placed the portable phone back in its leather carrying case with the embossed Presidential seal. Then he threw the case against the hotel room wall.
His wife, used to it all by now, didn’t even look up from the book she was reading. “Problem, Hon?”
Friday and the plane home could not come soon enough.
Chapter 21
Valdez
The weak Alaskan sun was dropping in the west when Lev drew up to the testing station. Craig wasn’t there yet. Five o’clock came and went, but the American didn’t show. Lev left three voicemails while he waited. Nothing.
By a quarter to six, the Russian decided to run the test on the petroleum, unofficially, by himself. He opened the large gate-valve, unlatched the galvanized “thief hatch,” and then the stopcock. When a liter of the goo had filled the Pyrex beaker, he stepped forward and, bravely, took a deep breath. No rotten eggs, no sulfur, just unrefined petroleum.
He dropped his hydrometer in. After a moment he squinted at the result: 31.9 API. North Slope Crude was acting like North Slope Crude again.