Viktor Gagarin entered first, with a young woman on his arm. She was carrying a bouquet of tall yellow flowers, hiding her face from view.
But Stanley recognized her by her walk alone. And those hands! Sensitive, restless, with delicate wrists. He remembered those hands as well. How deftly they had handled the packets of cocaine. And other things.
Gagarin’s companion wore a long silk dress. Similar to the dress she had on when they had merged into one, the hem of which she gathered up in one swift, graceful motion.
McKnight’s hands seemed to have acquired their own particular memories. A traitorous drop of sweat slipped down his forehead. Luckily, Laville and Lagrange were standing in front of him, and he managed to quickly find his handkerchief and dry his face before anyone saw.
For the next few minutes, as the guests exchanged the necessary pleasantries, Stanley focused all his attention on maintaining a polite smile. This woman was Gagarin’s wife! She extended her narrow, perfumed hand to McKnight with a polite, distant smile.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. McKnight,” she said, her voice absent any of its former huskiness or playful tone.
Stanley shook her hand and handed her his business card. By the time they sat down, he had finally pulled himself together. Gagarin cast a mocking eye around him at the antique furniture of carved mahogany, the starched tablecloths, crystal, and silver flatware. Then he slapped the table with his palms and invited everyone to drink vodka.
Mila, as Gagarin had introduced his wife, sat directly across from McKnight. The topic of yachts hadn’t yet been introduced. The documents were handed over to Biryuza; Stanley hadn’t noticed his arrival.
He decided that his only path to salvation here was to focus on the food, which was certainly worthy of his attention.
Mila watched Stanley’s methodical consumption of the meal surreptitiously, but only drank champagne, herself. There was a spark of mischief and amusement in her gaze. She had obviously recognized the man across from her.
Meanwhile, Gagarin continued to discuss abstract topics, despite the best efforts of Lagrange and Laville to turn the conversation toward the subject of this meeting. When lobster carpaccio was served, the oligarch brought up the price of oil and his friends among the sheiks in the UAE.
After the carpaccio was replaced by foie gras prepared three different ways with goat’s cheese, Gagarin lectured his companions about the bridge being built in the Crimea, and why the government hadn’t let him participate in the project.
When they served Sanda beef with Spanish artichokes and crispy perch with saffron cooked over charcoal, which McKnight couldn’t even look at by this point, their Russian guest had moved on to explaining in detail why he no longer invested in the gold market.
Stanley was impressed by Laville’s patience and restraint, as he listened to all this useless and unasked-for information about the Russian business world with an imperturbable expression.
And then Gagarin, as if just noticing McKnight despite shaking his hand before lunch, began speaking directly to him. Lagrange, who had long since lost control of the situation, gave Stanley an approving nod.
Stanley began giving unexpectedly clear and meaningful responses to their guest.
With each of his rejoinders Viktor grew more and more animated.
But things took a new turn at the table. When the waiters replaced their plates once again to serve pumpkin pie and ginger ice cream, Mila joined the conversation. She had by then consumed quite a few glasses of champagne, and was in an excellent mood. She spoke Russian, so of the Swiss side, only Stanley understood her.
“You’re all so self-important and boring!” she said loudly. “What am I doing here? I can drink champagne at home.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Stanley saw Biryuza jump and throw his boss a worried look. Gagarin seemed to wake up as well, and wagged his finger at Mila.
“Gentlemen, I believe our meal has come to an end,” Gagarin announced. “As for the main purpose of our meeting, I will say the following. I’ve already had the pleasure of listening to the arguments of your young banker.” He nodded toward Stanley. “They seemed clearly reasoned and convincing at the time. I don’t have any reason to believe his work has declined in quality since then!” He turned to Laville. “He was the one who put together the packet of documents, was he not?”
Stanley tensed, unsure of how to react. Their Russian client was behaving unpredictably.
And then McKnight felt someone stroke his leg. He flinched and looked at Mila. There was no question—her tipsy gaze was focused directly on Stanley’s face, direct and challenging. He could have fainted from terror. Any second now Gagarin would see, smash the neck off a bottle of vodka, and leap over the table to gut him.
But nothing happened. Viktor went on telling Laville and Lagrange that their points had convinced him, and that only the formalities remained.
“Biryuza is also a specialist in these matters, you know,” said the oligarch. “He’ll check everything over and give you a call. But for today, I suggest we just relax. I always enjoy seeing you, and I rarely get the chance to talk with decent people.”
He looked over at McKnight, and said in Russian, “In Moscow, you were drinking like a real Russian. Today I’ve only seen you take a couple sips. Holding back?”
“There’s still time to catch up, right, Viktor?” said Stanley.
Gagarin clearly liked Stanley’s tone.
“There is, indeed, McKnight! But,” he said, finally looking at his wife, “someone has managed to drink enough for all of us. How do you do it, my dear? It must be magic, even I haven’t had the time. Something went wrong. Anton!”
“Yes, boss!” answered Biryuza.
“Do you know where they smoke around here? I could use a cigarette.”
Lagrange guessed what he was asking, and stood up to point toward the gallery leading out onto a balcony over the garden.
“Come, Mila,” Gagarin ordered, bowing to Laville. “We’ll be back shortly.”
Biryuza hurried after his boss.
“Go ahead. I’ll be right there,” Mila replied, but Gagarin didn’t hear her.
“You never know what you’re going to get into with these Russians,” Lagrange remarked quietly to Laville in French.
“I think he may have had a bit too much drink before he even arrived,” Laville replied, not a muscle on his face moving. “McKnight, you take the lady to the balcony. I think she has something important to tell you. Pierre and I have something to discuss. Given the, ahem, informality of our dinner.”
Stanley rose from the table and offered his arm to Mila. She got up, stumbling a bit.
“Your husband is waiting.”
“Let’s go! Let’s go, my friend! I’m delighted by this gift.”
“What gift?”
“The gift of fate.” Mila laughed. “Botticelli says hi. Okay, let’s have a smoke. Otherwise, my husband might lose it. Start smashing the furniture.”
As they walked along the gallery, she whispered to Stanley, “You don’t have to worry about the yacht contract. Consider it yours.” She squeezed Stanley’s hand so tightly he nearly cried out. “You’ll owe me a favor.”
“What will I owe you?” asked Stanley.
“Three wishes,” Mila whispered, running her moist fingers over his lips. “Do you know that old song, ‘I have three wishes but no golden fish’? You’re going to be my gold fish.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You haven’t read Pushkin? And here I thought you were a man of culture.”
“I’ve read Pushkin. I even remember some lines…wait, isn’t this Pushkin—‘and blessed me on his way down to the grave’?”
“It is, it is, but let’s not talk about the grave and nonsense like that. Don’t you worry. They will be pleasant wishes. You’ll like them. Sorry, I
really did overdo it on the champagne. But I didn’t like the meal. You need a new chef. Only the ice cream was good.”
Biryuza approached, his manner businesslike, with a message from Gagarin that Mila was to leave for their villa immediately.
“He couldn’t tell me himself?” Mila smiled crookedly. “Okay, then. Let’s go! Anton, you take me. Goodbye, Mr. McKnight, it was nice to meet you. Very, very nice.”
Stanley returned to the dining room to find both Laville and Lagrange missing. He asked the waiter where Lagrange had gone, and learned that his boss was in the garden with the blonde in the pantsuit and a bottle of cognac. Stanley had to start drinking with Gagarin, who demanded vodka and the usual accompanying small plates. The waiter raised his eyebrows, but rushed off to fulfill the demands of the important guest.
Gagarin followed shots of vodka with bites of spicy sausage and tiny pickles, but Stanley declined any food, sipping the vodka like tea, instead, which made Gagarin laugh at him, but didn’t get him drunk. It only made his head feel heavy. Gagarin talked nonstop—on the political situation before the Russian parliamentary elections, about what a high-ranking official did in his free time, about his hobbies—fishing, which he never had time for; soccer, and how he would like to buy a European soccer club, not as famous as the club one of Russia’s richest men had bought, but a modest one, one that would gradually become successful and win the Champions League; how back in the era of cooperatives, competitors hadn’t stopped at killing his partner, but had even cut a diamond ring off his hand, together with the finger it was on.
“The era of what?”
“Cooperatives! You don’t know what that is?”
“I know about agricultural cooperatives—here, in Switzerland—”
“All right, hush, my ignorant friend. Cooperatives are…actually, to hell with them! Waiter! Bring another bottle. And pickles! Don’t forget the pickles!”
Stanley lost his grip on reality.
He came to when they were back on the train. Evening lights flashed past outside the windows. Lagrange was dozing across from him.
“Where are we?” McKnight asked through dry lips.
“We just passed Bern,” Pierre answered without opening his eyes.
The next day, as Stanley was getting ready to drop his suit off at the cleaners, he found his own business card in the jacket pocket, with a handwritten note: “You owe me three wishes!”
Thinking that fulfilling any of Mila’s wishes could be a death sentence for him, Stanley tore the card up into little pieces. Then he flushed them down the toilet. And when it was done flushing, he double-checked to make sure that no paper remained to be seen.
Chapter 13
When McKnight was back at work in Zurich, he was troubled by a sense of internal division that was new to him. On the one hand, he was drawn to Mila. On the other hand, he realized that nothing good could come of a relationship with her. So he tried to bury himself in work, hoping to get rid of this craving for a woman who was, to all intents and purposes, a stranger. And a dangerous one, at that.
True, he did feel a certain sense of pride—Look at me, I picked up the wife of an oligarch, who, while he might not have personally poured concrete over the bodies of his enemies, definitely gave direct orders for it to be done. Stanley was aware that Mila had chosen well with him—in her narrow circle of acquaintances, under the constant watch of her husband and the vicious Shamil, she didn’t have the slightest chance of carrying on even an innocent flirtation. But there was also the possibility that everything hidden could come to light: Stanley recalled Laville saying something like “The lady wants to tell you something important.” His face had been impassive, but Stanley realized that Jean-Michel must have intuitively sensed a connection between him and Mila. And if Laville had sensed it, then others would too, soon enough.
Meanwhile, June was drawing to a close, and all of his colleagues, as well as the bank’s clients, were gearing up for the summer holiday. All ongoing transactions had to be put in order, or completed, or scheduled for continuation in the fall. That was for management to decide.
On top of his usual concerns, Stanley had to deal with family business as well. Although it might be a stretch to call it ‘family,’ he thought. Christine called him from San Francisco every other day, and sometimes daily. The worst part was, she always seemed to catch him at the most inconvenient moments. She could never get the time difference straight. That’s what she said, at any rate. No, actually, that wasn’t the most unpleasant part. The worst part was that when he heard his wife speak, he thought of Mila’s voice. How different they were. And how distant, in all ways, Christine’s voice now seemed to him.
The circumstances of his first chance encounter with Mila, and that crazy lunch in Geneva, seemed to McKnight like a trap laid by fate. This would be the snare into which he would stumble, never to right himself again.
There was no rational explanation for this feeling. And there is only one tried and true way to deal with that kind of obsession—to dive into your work. All the way in. Not bad for your career, either, or your reputation. When Stanley’s mind refused to take in new information, and the numbers and graphs started to waver in front of his eyes, he would go to the lake for a swim or for a ride at the Oerlikon velodrome.
The other employees at the bank still treated him like any other outsider. To his Swiss colleagues, he was just a cog in the machine. They would probably have preferred another PC over an American. But as they didn’t have that computer yet, okay, let McKnight do the work.
On top of that, his loyal assistant Barbara was sent to an economic summit in Paris. Not as an authorized representative of the bank, of course. She was plucked from the Zurich office at the request of Laville himself to be his errand girl for the event. It seemed that Laville’s young wife had managed to get pregnant after all, and was overcome with jealousy at the idea of her husband being gone for an entire week. The rumor was she had personally selected his assistant for the trip by looking through photographs of all the bank’s employees, and found one to her taste in the Zurich office.
Lagrange, who also didn’t think much of Barbara’s appearance, told Stanley the whole story.
“She’s not a good-looking woman, it’s true,” he said, “but she’s elegant, and has a nice figure, eh, Stanley? She’s got that mixed look, I love ethnic-looking women.”
“Yes, she has a nice figure.”
“It’s a good thing the photos that girl, Jean-Michel’s wife, was looking through are only head shots,” Lagrange interrupted. “By the way, Barbara was a swimmer and a diver. She was a candidate for the national team. I saw a photo of her at a competition, in a swimsuit, and let me tell you, Stan: it was something, all right.”
He and Lagrange were sitting in his car in the bank’s underground parking garage. Lagrange had called Stanley with the unusual command, “I’m waiting for you in the car!” and Stanley hadn’t the faintest idea of the reason behind it. They had to hide from the rest of the staff and Lagrange’s own secretary just to gossip about Laville’s jealous wife and how Barbara looked in a swimsuit? As Pierre described Barbara’s figure, he flipped through a Ferrari promotional magazine. Tapping on one of the photos, he exclaimed, “Rosso Fiorano! Rosso Rubino! Who comes up with the names of these car colors!”
“Advertisers,” said Stanley. “Not too many clients are going to be interested in a ‘bright-red’ car, so they get fancy.”
“Which one do you like?” Lagrange asked, passing the magazine to McKnight.
“I prefer the darker and subtler shades.” Stanley turned a page. “Here, the Grigio Ferro, for example. The Ferrari California looks like the right amount of aggressive to me with this color.”
“‘The right amount of aggressive,’” repeated Lagrange. “I like it. Aggressiveness is never a bad thing to have. In reasonable doses.” He went on, the tone of his voice un
changed. “You’re flying to Milan tomorrow. From there you’ll take a car to the coast. Rent a Grigio Ferro, if you want. The entire Russian establishment heads there for vacation. There’s a resort, Forte dei Marmi, not far from Florence. Somebody told those Russian savages that it’s paradise down there, that the crème de la crème of European society goes there. So the Russians started going. Which is why that European elite won’t set foot there these days. Besides, the prices have gone sky-high after the Russian invasion. Gagarin and his whole entourage arrived yesterday. I just spoke to him. You’ll take him the documents to sign there.”
Lagrange pulled a folder from his briefcase and handed it to McKnight.
“Our contract with him is a major breakthrough, my friend. I want you to get closer to him. He likes you, and he doesn’t trust many people. Here’s the thing—when he stops trusting his friends and family, and that’ll happen soon, believe me, he’ll need a capable person on our side. It seems like that person, as of now, is you.”
“I’m afraid Biryuza, for one, is not going to like that at all,” Stanley replied thoughtfully.
“Well, don’t be afraid. That one’s got a sharp bite, agreed. And a good eye. But guard dogs are there as protection for their owner, not as allies. But they don’t understand that. Questions?”
“I couldn’t get a more modest car?” asked Stanley. “I’d choose a Mercedes AMG, myself.”
“No! You have to be on the same level as them,” Lagrange said. “After Fidenza, you should turn off for La Spezia before you get to Parma. The road goes along the coast from there, beautiful views. But you’ll figure it out. Put all the expenses on our corporate card.”
McKnight spent the night at a karaoke bar, then a strip club, entertaining new clients from Kazakhstan, and was flying into the Milanese airport of Malpensa at 6:00 AM the next morning. A half hour later, he was behind the wheel of a new Ferrari California, heading toward the city. His eyes were burning from lack of sleep, and “Strangers in the Night” was playing on a continuous loop in his head after the Kazakhs’ five (at least) renditions of it the night before.
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