Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  “That’s fine. What kind of guy is he?”

  “Lime! He’s a new Russian. He’s a former Spetznats or KGB or something. They’re all over Moscow. Most of them are small fry, but this one’s good. He delivers the goods. Maybe he’s Mafia, maybe he’s just a businessman. The borders are a bit hazy in Moscow. Like all the others, he owns what he refers to as a security and consultancy company. What do I know? I don’t know what that means, but he’s always come up with the goods.”

  “Fine, Derek,” I said. “Give me his number.”

  “He’s a bit particular too,” said Derek. “He’s very cautious with his clients, so I’ll have to ring him and then he’ll ring you when he’s checked you out, and he’s not always easy to get hold of.”

  “OK, Derek. Ring him. Tell him it’s urgent. Say it’s a contract that’s got to be wound up now. And then I owe you one.”

  Derek’s husky smoker’s laugh was loud and clear.

  “Forget it, Lime. You got me started. I’ve got a lot of debts to you. You don’t owe me a damn thing.”

  “Say it’s urgent,” I said.

  “Pronto. And say hello to Oscar and Gloria and thank them for a great evening in London.”

  “Will do,” I said. “I’ll certainly say hello to Oscar and Gloria.”

  I spent a couple of days in Don Alfonzo’s house, which I didn’t really feel I could call my own yet, struggling to keep off the booze. I tried to put the books in some kind of alphabetical order and I ate the food which Doña Carmen prepared for me dutifully every day. She had carried on coming to the house after Don Alfonzo’s death and I didn’t have the heart to say she should stop. I didn’t ring Clara again, but spoke on the phone with Gloria a couple of times a day. There was a frailty hidden in her voice, but she was businesslike, and talked about extricating herself from her life with Oscar as if it was an important and challenging assignment she had taken on by choice. It was a case of getting a marriage annulled in a Catholic country, legally closing various accounts and procuring documents from Herr Weber and others in the dusty rooms full of files of the former GDR. The work kept her going, but she sounded like she might collapse once the process had reached a meaningful conclusion. We were a sorry pair.

  Sergej Sjuganov finally rang one morning. He spoke English as if he had been to one of England’s top boarding schools, but it was more likely the result of time spent at Moscow’s diplomatic school and perhaps a posting at the embassy in London.

  “Mr Lime. You want to do business with me,” he said.

  “I’d like you to find someone for me. It’s to do with …”

  He interrupted abruptly, but politely.

  “Excuse me, Mr Lime. But I never discuss business on the telephone.”

  “Then let’s meet,” I said.

  “Frankfurt airport, the VIP lounge in the central hall, next to the duty free shop, tomorrow afternoon. The are flights from Moscow and Madrid arriving almost simultaneously.”

  “Fine. How will I recognise you?”

  “I’ll find you, don’t worry. Tall, slim, leather jacket, ponytail, jeans. Be reading tomorrow’s El Pais.”

  “Pretty accurate,” I said.

  “And bring a photograph of the target. Until tomorrow, Mr Lime.”

  Most people use the airports of Europe and the rest of the world as points of arrival and departure, but for modern businessmen or researchers working internationally, airports are practical meeting places. You can hire meeting rooms and you don’t waste time getting into the city and finding a hotel. You can work between an arrival and a departure and never see anything other than the airport. I had used airports as meeting places myself, so I wasn’t surprised by his choice. And Frankfurt was situated conveniently between Madrid and Moscow.

  I bought a cola and sat at a table with the day’s El Pais, and waited. The airport was swarming with travellers, many of them carrying parcels as if they were going on an early Christmas holiday. The transit hall of an international airport is one of the safest and most anonymous places in the world. You’re just one among many, and unless you’re on some wanted list or you’re being shadowed, no one notices you.

  A chunky, athletic man of about my age sat down opposite me and we shook hands.

  “Sergej Sjuganov,” he said. He was wearing an immaculate, dark suit with a dazzling-white shirt and a smart tie that was held in place by a gold tie pin sporting a fine little diamond. He had a Rolex on his wrist and smelled of an expensive cologne. His face was covered with tiny, delicate lines and he was tanned, as though he went on expensive holidays or perhaps used a solarium. His eyes were very blue and he had a little scar near one corner of his mouth. His handshake was firm.

  “Coffee, Mr Sjuganov?” I asked.

  “Please. We have a little under half an hour, Mr Lime. I’m taking Lufthansa back.”

  I went to the bar and got a coffee for him and another cola for me. I had brought along a couple of recent photographs of Oscar. Photographs I had taken. There was a full-length picture, a full-face portrait and one where he was seen more in profile. I passed them to the Russian and he studied them.

  “He’s a tall man,” said Sjuganov. “About 50. Well-dressed. Self-confident. Money. Keeps himself trim, but with a tendency to a slight paunch. He’ll stick out. Language, nationality, background?”

  I told him about Oscar. That he was a German national, but his past was a bit murky. Besides German, he spoke English and Spanish, perhaps a little Russian. He was well travelled. He’d been trained by the Stasi. I explained the background.

  This brought a gleam to his cold, blue eyes.

  “Ah-ha. That of course somewhat complicates the matter.”

  “In what sense?” I asked.

  “It’s a little more difficult to find a man who has learnt to cover his tracks. It will make it slightly more expensive for you, Mr Lime. And what exactly do you want me to do?”

  “Find him. I think he’s in Moscow. He went there just over a week ago. That’s all I know really,” I said.

  “I charge one thousand dollars per day. You transfer ten thousand dollars as a deposit to an account in Switzerland. You cover all expenses incurred during the operation. And you pay a bonus if I find him, of ten thousand dollars.”

  “And if you don’t find him?”

  Sjuganov smiled.

  “A six-foot German who has been in Moscow for only a week or so? We’ll find him. We have our contacts. As with so much else in the new Russia, it’s just a question of money. If the target has left Moscow, it will be somewhat more complicated, but not impossible. If the target is still in Moscow, then it’s unlikely to take more than a week. If we don’t find him, you just pay the actual expenses, but that won’t happen. We’ll find him, dead or alive.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Sjuganov leant across the table.

  “What do you want us to do once we have located the target?”

  “I’ll need a guide. I don’t speak Russian.”

  “That goes without saying, but do you want us to do anything regarding the target? I don’t need to know why you want to find the target, whether it’s personal or business. But usually there’s a reason that someone goes to ground and someone else wants to find that person. So what do you want us to do once we have located the target? An active response necessitates separate fee negotiations. If you understand me.”

  He was businesslike and detached, as if discussing a small issue in a standard commercial contract, but I had no doubt as to what he meant.

  “No,” I said. “You lead me to the address, I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “And if the target has protection?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “If I think it necessary that someone keeps an eye out in case there’s an attack from the rear, then I’d like to engage your services,” I said.

  “No problem,” he said, getting up, and we shook hands. “I know you pay your bills.”

  “So it’s a deal,�
� I said. “You’ll find Oscar.”

  “Consider it done. Stay by the telephone. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you, Mr Lime. Have a good trip back to Madrid. See you in Moscow,” he said, and faded into the crowd. The back of one more well-cut suit among all the others.

  23

  Russia looked like her old self. I hadn’t been there since it was just one of 15 Socialist republics within the Soviet Union. like the GDR, it had disappeared from the map, not with blood and violence, but signatures on a piece of paper, signed by three half-drunk presidents in a hunting lodge in Minsk. Seen from the air it looked as I remembered it. As the plane broke through the heavy cloud cover and began its descent, I could see the landscape speckled with snow and small, deserted villages where only smoke from the chimneys of the snow-clad houses gave any sign of life. The countryside with its frozen lakes looked timelessly Russian and flat, as if the huge changes hadn’t washed over it.

  As soon as we were in the buildings of Sheremetyevo Airport, the new began to mingle with the old. There were still long, winding queues at passport control, but the airport was full of advertisements and promises of quick returns at the casinos. There were advertisements for computers and Russians of all types were chatting on mobile phones. They had mountains of luggage. The halls were still dimly lit and strangely oppressive and they smelled just as I remembered. A mixture of frost outside, heat inside, black tobacco and low-octane fuel. A grating female voice announcing take-offs and landings in incomprehensible English sounded as if it were the same woman who had been there for years. The customs officials worked in the anarchic way they always had done, either casually letting people through without a glance or laboriously checking everything. Russians returning home mingled with business people and tourists, and they were better dressed and more arrogant than I remembered, but there was absolutely no mistaking that I had arrived in Moscow.

  Sergej Sjuganov had kept his word and phoned ten days after our meeting. The target had been located, observed, and a reservation had been made for me at the Hotel Intourist near the Red Square. It was below my usual standard of hotel, but it was less conspicuous than the renovated Metropol or National. Sjuganov hoped I would understand. He gave me a fax number and asked me to notify him of my time of arrival. I would be met at the airport.

  I rang Gloria and told her that Oscar had been found and that I was going over to talk with him. Gloria wanted to come too, but I said no, and she let herself be persuaded fairly easily. I got the feeling that she didn’t really want to confront him, that she would rather conclude the divorce and total dissolution of their union under cover of unemotional writs. Everything was going according to plan, she said. Accounts had been blocked; business went on as usual. She had asked if I would rejoin the company, and this time I hadn’t said no outright, but I knew in my heart that I wouldn’t do it. I had thought about it again on the plane, and also thought about Clara and the possibility of starting a new life. Just before I left Madrid, I had sat by Amelia and Maria Luisa’s grave and was overwhelmed by as intense a feeling of grief as if they had died the day before, but they hadn’t spoken to me. The feeling of loss was as strong and I still felt anger, which was really desperation and frustration over what had happened. A feeling of impotence. Rage against the injustice of life.

  The female customs officer in her dreary, grey uniform glanced briefly at my currency voucher as my travel bag went through the screening apparatus. She had painted her lips and nails bright red, and her face was sullen as she stamped my passport and papers with a heavy hand and pushed them towards me. Without so much as looking at the next person in the queue, she pulled his papers across her desk. I walked into the dark arrivals hall and saw a young man in his late 20s. He was wearing a leather jacket, and stood in the throng holding up a cardboard sign on which was written in large, black letters: Lime. He was clean-shaven, and looked like the type who spent hours in the gym, but I could see that his physique wasn’t pumped up, but was genuine muscle. I wouldn’t like to take him on.

  He greeted me with a nod, took my bag and with a movement of his head indicated that I should follow him. His black Mercedes was parked right outside. The cold hit me like a sledgehammer. I was wearing only jeans and my leather jacket over what I thought was a thick sweater. It was a dry cold, and the air was dense with diesel and petrol fumes. The car’s engine was running and the exhaust swirled in the breeze. He held the door for me and I was grateful to get into the back of the warm car. The man who had met me got in beside the driver and the car pulled away from the kerb with hardly a sound, just the rumbling of the studded tyres on the asphalt. The man keyed in a number on his mobile and said a single sentence in Russian. Sjuganov was expensive, but you couldn’t complain about the service.

  We drove at speed, but not irresponsibly, into the city. The road was uneven, making the car vibrate. We drove past the memorial shaped like one of the twisted spikes used to derail tanks. I remembered having seen it before, but the modern, well-lit service station with a McDonald’s attached was new, and all the old hoardings depicting the over-achieving socialist worker had been replaced with adverts for Sony and IBM. The traffic was heavy, but moved steadily until we got near the centre where we slowed to a snail’s pace. The street we were on had once been called Gorky, but I could decipher enough of the sign to see that it had been renamed. The old Socialist countries had replaced everything from attitudes to street signs with such ease that you feared they might swap back again in the same casual manner. The pavements were packed with pedestrians, their breath like white fog. There were Christmas decorations and imitation fir trees in illuminated shops that hadn’t been there before, but still looked insignificant among the massive buildings. It was both Western and yet still Soviet in its solidity. There were piles of snow along the kerbs, but the traffic lanes had been cleared. A smattering of snowflakes swirled in the headlights. Then the edge of the Kremlin appeared ahead, bathed in light, brooding and elegant at the same time. We pulled up in front of the Hotel Intourist, where I had stayed twice before, on the two occasions I had been in Moscow at the beginning of the 1980s. It’s a large, solid, concrete skyscraper on the edge of Revolution Square. In the past there had been traffic crossing back and forth, but now the Square looked like a park with people out for a stroll.

  “It’s a shopping centre, Mr Lime. Eight floors underground,” said the young man, in English with a heavy accent. “My name is Igor.”

  “Hello Igor,” I said.

  I noticed that an archway had been erected leading in to Red Square.

  “Yes, Mr Lime. The old Kremlin Gate has been rebuilt. Stalin pulled it down to make way for his tanks during military parades. Stalin has been buried, the archway has been rebuilt and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is back in place. A lot has happened in Moscow since your last visit.”

  “I can see that,” I answered.

  We got out of the car and entered the lobby. Nothing much had changed. It was teeming with people. A group of tourists were waiting to be checked in. Two of the women behind the desk were having what was obviously an important private conversation, a third woman was listening, while a fourth was trying to sort out the paperwork for a large group of French people who were waiting for the keys to their rooms. It looked like an operation that could take all evening.

  “Your documents, please,” said Igor, and I gave him my passport and visa. He went over to the reception desk and spoke to the two chattering women. They ignored him. He said something else in a sharper tone of voice and they immediately broke off their conversation and one of them took my documents and gave him a security key with an apologetic smile.

  We took the lift to the 19th floor and walked down a long corridor. Igor knocked on a door, stepped aside and ushered me in. We entered a large living room with a desk and an oval table. I could see a double bed in the adjoining room. It was an attractive suite, and it looked as though it had been renovated, but it was still decorated in red and bro
wn, which seemed to have been the preferred colour scheme of the Soviet Union. There was a minibar and a television and a notice saying that satellite telephone was available. And Sergej Sjuganov.

  He was wearing his immaculate suit. We shook hands.

  “Welcome to Moscow, Mr Lime. Have a drink and let’s get down to work. You are undoubtedly just as busy as I am,” he said.

  “Without doubt,” I said, and went to get one of the miniature bottles of whisky from the minibar, but Sjuganov shook his head and picked up a bottle of Russian vodka, poured some into a schnapps glass and raised his own.

  “To a well-executed operation,” he said, emptying his glass, and I did the same. It had a good, biting and very Russian taste of grain and alcohol.

  “We’ve got a job to do,” said Sergej Sjuganov. “Please, come and look!”

  Igor, who must also have been Sjuganov’s bodyguard, had taken his place in a chair by the door. Sjuganov was standing next to the oval table in the middle of the spacious room. Some photos and a map of Moscow and its outskirts were lying on the table.

  The photographs showed Oscar and a woman I recognised as Lola, although she had dyed her hair black. There were pictures of Oscar on his own, of Lola on her own and of the two of them together. I could see from the grainy prints that they had been taken with a telephoto lens, some with a 1,000 mm lens, others with a 400 mm. They were at some kind of market where stout women wearing headscarves and shapeless coats were selling vegetables and what looked like pickled cucumbers. There was also a series of photos showing the two of them in front of a large red house in a birch wood, the snow lying thick on the branches and the ground. What looked like surveillance cameras were attached to a wall that seemed to encircle the building, and in one of the pictures I recognised the big Irishman with the cosh from the house in San Sebastián. Oscar and Lola looked as though they were having an argument and the Irishman was watching them, with his coat open revealing the edge of a shoulder holster. Lola looked just as she had on the television pictures I had seen in Copenhagen, but Oscar looked haggard and angry.