by L. S. Hilton
So, about a week after the fire, I took the Tube east to Kingsland Road, diverting for a bowl of spicy pork pho at one of the cluster of Vietnamese restaurants. Much as I loved Italian food, it was great to be back in a country where they’d heard of star anise. Azerbaijan House was a shabby building in a terrace between a dry-cleaner’s and an artisan coffee shop. A faded carpet was pinned up in the window in front of a broken Venetian blind that hadn’t seen a dusting since Stalin captured Baku. I rang the bell without really expecting an answer, but the door was opened by a small man with round glasses, in a black suit nearly as dusty as the blind. He looked surprised when I asked if I could use the reading room, but let me into a narrow hallway papered with flyers for concerts and cultural events.
‘First floor.’ He disappeared into a small kitchen in the back. As I climbed the bare planks of the stairs, obstructed by boxes of more flyers, I heard a microwave ping.
There hadn’t seemed much point in looking into Zulfugarly online. The official images of Azerbaijan I had called up the previous evening were glossy and progressive, at least if you thought that Bulgari outlets and Lamborghini concessions constituted progress. I couldn’t read Azeri, which is Turkic, rather than Russian-rooted, and a look at the Index on Censorship site told me that even if I could there would probably be little real information in the public domain. At first glance, the two formica tables in the community library didn’t look much more promising, as most of the carelessly heaped material was Azeri, though there was a small English-language section, in which I found a photostatted samizdat-style book in a clear plastic cover entitled State Kidnap! I was still reading it two hours later, when the dusty man reappeared.
Zulfugarly came up quite frequently in its pages. Described as a ‘black raider’, he was one of a generation of former public servants who had blithely rewritten the law on publicly owned resources. Naturally, he described himself as an ‘entrepreneur’. The announcement of his planned cultural foundation was depicted by the author as ‘a blatant display of disregard for national legislation’, not that this had prevented many prestigious European architecture firms competing for the design project. It was a familiar pattern in the art world. Look for an oppressive military despot who controls an embarrassment of fossil fuels and there’ll be a branch of the Louvre waiting to open right next to the missile launch pad. From Astana to Tashkent, nothing succeeds in polishing cosmopolitan credentials like the acquisition of art. Zulfugarly was entirely typical in posturing as a latter-day Medici – unlike any other market, art is only regulated by the size of the cheque. You could argue that it has always been so, but at least the Romanovs and the Bourbons were tyrants with taste. The custodian looked on dolorously as I contemplated a shot of Zulfugarly on a jet ski, the repulsive aluminium canisters of the Baku Flame Towers in the background.
‘You are interested in my country?’
It seemed rude to answer ‘not particularly’, so I pointed to the hirsute figure in the photo.
‘In this man.’
‘You know him?’
‘I’m going to meet him tomorrow.’
The little man removed his spectacles and polished them on his shirt.
‘Scum,’ he pronounced decisively. ‘Now I am afraid I have to close. The reading room is no longer available.’
*
‘Scum,’ I reported back to Rupert. ‘Just what we need.’
We were sitting in his office. I had noticed that the experts in the department all seemed very busy as I was shown through, heads bent diligently over their screens. Rupert, surprisingly, had come out fighting. He was determined that the sale would go ahead, presumably with an eye on his bonus, and our meetings had taken on an us-against-them air. Fatman and Robin.
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Zulfugarly. The Azeri guy. He doesn’t give a stuff about Gauguin’s teenage lovelies. He wants the piece for his cultural foundation. And he’s still in. I think we should tour the picture to Baku.’
‘Touring’ was a practice whereby particularly important pieces were taken for clients to view in situ.
‘What about insurance? We don’t have much time to arrange it before the sale.’
Of course, the Gauguin was not really insured, seeing as it was worthless, but in presenting the provenances I’d been sure to include the appropriate documentation, courtesy of Li.
‘I’ve already spoken to Palermo,’ I went on. ‘You’re right. My client is naturally concerned about insurance. But there’s a way round it. If Mr Zulfugarly will agree to view the piece at the British Embassy in Baku, then technically it remains on British soil, so my client’s insurance won’t be affected.’
‘Transit?’
‘I believe you have a plane. The House, that is.’
Rupert was smiling now.
‘Indeed we do. You can travel that way.’
‘I can? Wouldn’t you want to come?’
I had no desire for a weekend on the Caspian Sea in Rupert’s company, but I very much wanted to keep him close until the sale.
‘Can’t do it. We can’t officially be part of the viewing. However, we have a . . . strategy that’s worked before in similar situations. Since the picture has been consigned to us, we can send a guard with it. We’ve had one of the junior experts stick on a uniform before. It’s worked very well.’
‘Ah. You’ve thought it all through, haven’t you?’ Just a little more flattery and he’d think it was all his idea. ‘I’m willing to go, of course.’
For a moment, I considered asking him if I could take Pandora as the ‘guard’. But then I thought it might prove a blight to her career, after the sale, not to mention that her eye was just a bit too good.
‘There’s just one more thing, Rupert. All this business in the press. I think we need to take back the story. You know, own it. So we need another bidder. Someone major. Then that becomes the story, the competition for the Gauguin.’
Rupert pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘But we’ve lost so many buyers. And if Zulfugarly is bidding, who’d go against him?’
I leaned forward. ‘How about if I told you I could get you Pavel Yermolov?’
PART THREE
DELAMINATING
22
Rupert had laid on the oil so thickly on the phone that I found myself leaving from City Airport three days later. Zulfugarly was apparently ecstatic that the House was showing him such exclusive attention. The Gauguin and I were accompanied on the House jet by one hired heavy from a private security firm and Hugh, a junior in Rupert’s department. The heavy introduced himself as Karel in a heavy Polish accent and was roughly the size of a garden shed. Nonetheless, Hugh felt the need to inform me as we climbed the steps to the plane that it was indeed he who was the House’s undercover agent. I could have maybe worked that out from his floppy fair hair and the Sebago deck shoes sticking out from below his regulation black uniform trousers. The hostess offered me a glass of Krug as we took off; I accepted, not to drink it, but just to hold as the apricot-tinted summer clouds closed in an obliging Turner skyscape over the Thames beneath us. I had sold out everything I had thought I believed in, and at that moment, with the soft leather behind my shoulders and the smell of fresh croissants from the galley, it felt really, really good.
Like all fake democracies, Azerbaijan has a super-snazzy airport. Aliyev’s terminal was a wonder of cascading steel and glass, though I only got to view the exterior, as we and the Gauguin were loaded immediately into the diplomatic car waiting on the tarmac, in order to comply with the insurance.
Once the canvas and the guards were deposited, I was to go on to the Four Seasons, where Zulfugarly had provided a suite.
‘Are you coming over to the hotel too?’ I asked Hugh as we watched the crate containing the Gauguin being wheeled into the embassy lobby beneath the watchful gazes of Her Majesty and Karel.
‘No, um, I’m staying here, actually. My godfather’s brother does something at the British consulate, so I’m a
guest at the residence.’
‘Of course you are. Well, I’ll see you here in the morning.’
‘Unless you’d like me to accompany you to the dinner?’ he asked hopefully.
‘No, I’m sure Rupert would prefer that you stay with the picture. Wouldn’t want to bust your cover!’
‘Oh-er, righty-ho.’
Once I’d signed for the deposit of the canvas, I took a cab – a London cab, only it was painted bright purple – to the hotel, skirting the edge of the Icheri Sheher, the medieval town, dwarfed by its frill of skyscrapers. There was an hour to enjoy the flocculent whiteness of the Beaux Arts suite before dinner with Zulfugarly, but after laying out my dress, the same pattered Erdem silk I had worn to Carlotta’s wedding the previous summer, I felt twitchy, somehow caged. The air conditioning was on at full blast and the view of the pompous Soviet cityscape from the sealed windows was more unnerving than the concrete walls of the shed in Calabria. And the room was full of lilies, parasitical de-stemmed callas. I pressed the button for the floor butler and had them taken away, but their scent lingered, suspended on the stale, gelid air.
*
Zulfugarly had sent an enormous Bentley to drive me the short distance to the restaurant, complete with capped chauffeur and a bodyguard who carried his gun in a dinky leather manbag. There was a black Bulgari carrier, much beribboned, waiting for me on the back seat, containing one of the horrible triple-gold bracelets inscribed with the brand name. I clipped it reluctantly over my wrist as we arrived at the Caravanserai Bukhara, where the bodyguard informed me Mr Zulfugarly was waiting in a private room. My heart sank a little at that news, but the restaurant was in the open air, stone pavilions around a courtyard with an ancient fountain, their arches hung with white silk curtains. Vines and pomegranate trees gave it the feeling of an oasis.
‘Welcome to Baku, Miss Teerlinc!’
Zulfugarly was waiting outside the central pavilion, looking exactly as I expected him to: tailored shirt unbuttoned over a froth of chest hair, slightly ambitious jeans, Gucci loafers, Hermès belt, Hublot orb on his left wrist – standard uniform for the socially anxious mogul.
‘What a wonderful place! I’m so delighted to be here!’
‘I’m Heydar, Heydar Zulfugarly. My friends call me Hay-Z!’
There was a pause, into which we dived awkwardly for the double cheek-brush. Zulfugarly explained that the Caravanserai was really that, one of the gathering places for merchants on the Silk Road for thousands of years. After I’d recovered from the offensive capabilities of his aftershave, made suitable cooing noises about the ancient merchants and his generous gift of the bracelet, there was another pause. The bodyguard had joined his doppelganger at a wooden table set for two in the courtyard. Zulfugarly toyed with his phone.
‘It’s UNESCO protected,’ he dropped into the silence. He sounded rather regretful about that.
Pull yourself together, Judith. This is the easy part. Why are you standing here gawking?
I gave myself a little shake and for the next two hours concentrated on making Zulfugarly feel as good as possible short of blowing him. Like most men, his favourite topic of conversation was himself, so all I had to do was wheel out a carefully researched question now and then to keep him chatting. Over drinks – Japanese whisky for him, a musky, sweetish white wine for me – we had an inventory of his real estate holdings in the city, his vision for the future of Azerbaijan, which mostly seemed to involve turning it into Dubai, his connections in Silicon Valley and his love of New York. When I’d worked as a hostess at a London bar I’d learned a trick to stop you from yawning: pressing the tongue against the roof of the mouth. I used that quite a lot.
Dinner was delicious, fat little pancakes stuffed with spinach and pumpkin, a salad of sharp white cheese spiked with tarragon and chervil and an extraordinary dish of lamb meatballs carried in on a brazier with a bucket beneath it, into which the waiter dropped a blackened horseshoe he had first heated on the coals.
‘Fisindjan,’ Zulfugarly explained as a sticky dark sauce was ladled over the meat. It tasted of plums and molasses, smoky and sweet. We ate it with little cakes of saffron and almond rice rolled in flatbread and a thick wine almost as black as the sauce.
‘чернила,’ I said as we raised our glasses. ‘Ink.’
‘You speak Russian?’
‘A little. But you must tell me about your plans for the cultural institute.’
By the time he’d finished doing that, the first bottle of wine was gone and we were the best of friends. Regrettably, Zaha Hadid had passed away before Zulfugarly could engage her for the job, but he had hired a French architect who had produced a design which looked remarkably like one of the tulip-shaped glasses in which we had been served tea with cherry jam. A space had been bought on the Bulvar, the wide promenade on the Caspian waterfront, and the project, Zulfugarly told me with relish, had already cost him over a hundred million.
‘And that’s before I buy your Gauguin!’
‘You intend to bid for it?’
‘I intend to have it.’
‘You’re very confident,’ I smiled. ‘You haven’t even seen it yet. Perhaps you won’t care for it.’
He looked puzzled. ‘But it’s a Gauguin.’
A trio of musicians in embroidered tunics over pale blue shirts and baggy black trousers had set up in the courtyard. One held what looked like a four-stringed guitar between his knees, another a fat-bellied mandolin, the third a skin drum the size of a dinner plate, which he struck with the backs of his fingernails. They began a wavering tune that dipped and wandered on the edge of a major key, playfully melancholic and deceptively repetitive until you listened through each layer of sound and heard it shift, turning towards a theme that never quite arrived. It was lovely, and I wished I could understand it, which was perhaps the best that would be said by any of the benighted visitors to Zulfugarly’s institute. As he droned on about his ‘artistic crusade’, I wondered whether he actually believed any of it, if he truly thought it was any more than a lousy PR opportunity for in-flight magazines, if there could be any connection between the strange constrained wildness of the music he was ignoring, in this ancient and extraordinary place, and a collection of canvas squares which would appear as monotonous and alien to their viewers as the repetitions of the jigsaws of a mashrabieh screen would seem to me. I didn’t say that, of course. I widened my eyes and ran a knuckle along my jaw and nodded earnestly while I looked up at him under my lashes with my head tilted to one side, until the sum of those small, obvious gestures had shifted the power balance between us to the point where he had entirely forgotten that it was all on my side. Sometimes, they actually are that dumb.
‘By the way, may I ask who you’re using for the assessment at the embassy tomorrow?’
‘I flew Solomon Mathis in this afternoon.’
‘Wow. He’s good.’
For someone who in life had been the size of a nine-year-old, Mackenzie Pratt’s reach from beyond the grave was impressive. Mathis was the expert who had called Rupert to warn him of Pratt’s accusations. Had he accepted the job out of curiosity, or because he wanted to score a coup against the House?
Zulfugarly put an arm around me and pulled me close. ‘Are you worried, Miss Teerlinc? Do you think Solomon will tell me you are selling a fake? Ha ha!’ He pronounced the laugh as though he’d learned to from comic books.
‘If I am, then you’ve got the right man to spot it!’ I swallowed hard. ‘Hay-Z’s no fool!’
What were the odds? Mathis was a leading Gauguin expert – if the picture passed, Zulfugarly would surely stay in. Possibly good. But if it didn’t? I let my body rest a moment longer against Zulfugarly’s odorous bulk. If it didn’t, maybe I’d just have to stay in Baku.
Zulfugarly was all for going on to the newly opened branch of Pacha, where of course he had the best table, but there were few things I could imagine fancying less than a night on the tiles with Borat’s less sophisticated brother, so
I pleaded tiredness as prettily as I could manage between thinking of where I’d like to shove that horseshoe. No harm in keeping him keen. He loaded me ceremoniously into the Bentley and I asked the driver to wait while he loaded himself less ceremoniously into his waiting Ferrari. It was actually covered in black velvet. As soon as he’d roared away, I told the driver I wanted to go for a walk. The bodyguard leaped assiduously to my side, but after a few fruitless minutes of insisting that I wanted to walk back to the hotel alone I quieted his concerns with a couple of fifty-euro notes.
Locking my hands behind my back, I stretched as I crossed the wide space in front of the Caravanserai and dived into the alleys of the old city. I had no desire to go back to that white coffin of a room.
The lanes of the Icheri Sheher reminded me of the medina in Tangier, except that they were unnaturally clean and empty. It wasn’t late, and the night was warm, with just a satiny coolness from the sea trailing through the recessed arches of the gateways, yet aside from the odd tourist taxi rattling over the polished cobbles, the old town seemed deserted. Not that I minded; I like remembering that I’m a cat who walks by myself. Yellow wicks in foil bowls burned at the street corners, heightening the shadows of the low doorways, and I trailed my fingers along the walls as I wandered, feeling the contained warmth of the day’s sun.