The Metronome (The Counterpoint Trilogy Book 1)

by D. R. Bell

  My phone rings at three in the afternoon. A gruff smoker’s voice says, “Pavel Rostin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shmulin told me you are looking to find someone.”

  “That’s right. Who am I speaking with?”

  “There is no need for you to know my name. You can call me Ivan if you like. Shmulin gave me a name: Konstantin Mershov. Said he worked for KGB in Moscow back in the 1970s. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do you want to know: Who he does business with, who he fucks, where is he keeping his money?”

  “Just his phone number.”

  “That’s it?” the voice conveys disappointment. “Oh well, that will still cost you.”

  “Shmulin told me five hundred, and he already took a hundred.”

  “Ivan” starts guffawing which sounds like a big dog barking. “What an old shyster…just getting the phone number is only two fifty. I bet he asked for the money upfront.”

  I admit that Shmulin did so.

  “He would have kept half. At least you only gave him a hundred. Where are you staying?”

  “The Courtyard on Voznesenskiy.”

  “Hmm…It should take you about forty minutes to get here.”

  “Where’s ‘here?’”

  “I’ll tell you. Expect my call in an hour or so.”

  “Wait,” I say, “I was going to pay more anyway, so how about checking one more name?”

  “I already like doing business with you. What name?”

  “Probably Andrei Rostin, but could be Andrei Leontsev.”

  “Probably Rostin? Your relative?”

  “My parents adopted a boy whose parents perished in the siege of Leningrad, but I’ve never met him and have not known about him until a few days ago. It’s possible he’s been sent to the Gulag forty years ago.”

  “I’ll see what I can find and call you later.” “Ivan” hangs up.

  “Ivan” does call close to five and tells me to meet him in the Diamonds gentlemen’s club on Prospekt Vernadskogo. I try to suggest that perhaps the place might be loud, but he cuts me off. “We don’t need to talk much. You bring the money, I’ll enjoy the girls.”

  “How would you recognize me?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Be there by six.”

  I debate whether to take a metro or get a cab, but the club turns out to be just off the Yugo-Zapadnaya metro station, the last stop on the Sokolnicheskaya line, and I go with the metro.

  I walk over to Okhotny Ryad station. Sokolnicheskaya was the first metro line in Moscow dating to 1935. Unlike the later Stalinist architecture monstrosities, the early stations have a nice classical feel to them. Last time I was here, it was named after Karl Marx, although no self-respecting Muscovite would call it that. The station was showing its age and the wear and tear of millions of people passing through it every year.

  On a weekday rush hour, secretaries, engineers, businessmen, artists, and schoolchildren streamed through the metro. Moving with the flow, I squeeze myself into a tram and settle into a rhythmic movement as the train makes its way along the line. With the connections worn out, the lights flicker and sometimes go out for a few seconds. During one of such moments, I felt a searching hand probing my back pocket. When I look behind me, a young girl quickly turns away. Thankfully, my wallet and the envelope with $500 are inside a buttoned jacket.

  The tram is still full when we get to Yugo-Zapadnaya, the last stop. I’ve never been at this station before but it is a typical nondescript 1960s construction. Was this blandness of pillars, straight angles, and low ceilings better than the socialist classicism that Stalin treasured? I am not sure. The old escalator makes a clicking noise as it raises the throng of commuters to the surface.

  The Diamond club is only a five-minute walk from the station, and I arrive exactly at six. The club turns out to be a curious combination of a strip joint and a sauna. I hesitate which way to go but lacking more precise directions opt for a more conventional strip joint.

  The scantily dressed waitress assures me that I can apply the $15 entry fee to the sauna later if I choose to do so. “Many visitors start here, but when they find the girl they like they go to the sauna with her. There are private sauna rooms and massage service. Would you like to sit by the stage for the best view?”

  “No, I will be meeting someone so I would prefer a more private spot.”

  “Couches are generally reserved for groups of four,” she demurs, but a $20 bill quickly secures for me something resembling a small red sofa away from the stage. The waitress hands me the menu. “We have salads, hot and cold appetizers, shashliks, soups, cocktails. Private dances are only $30. I am available for private dances, too; you just give me a one song notice so I can change.” She lowers her eyes coyly. “My name is Tanya, I am a good dancer, and I’ll let you touch my tits.”

  “Thank you, Tanya, I’ll just have a beer for now. Heineken if you have it.”

  Tanya sways away on tall platform shoes. She looks like a first-year student that just arrived in Moscow from the provinces. I’ve been gone for too long, and this switch from a false puritanism to wanton sexuality is still jarring to me.

  It’s early in the evening and the place is half empty, but layers of smoke already hang in the air. I am not used to smoking anymore, and my eyes start watering. Through the haze I can see a brunette in micro-fatigues and a Soviet Army hat rubbing herself against the pole on the stage. Then I become aware of a large figure moving toward me from the direction of the bar.

  “Pavel?”

  “Ivan” is in his late sixties, large, red-faced, with short buzz-cut hair and a bulbous nose crisscrossed by a thin net of red lines.

  “Ivan?”

  He sits next to me, and the couch complains with a groan. The waitress appears with my Heineken, he grabs her ass and says, “Tanyechka, my dear soul, bring me a bottle of vodka and a plate of pelmeni.”

  “Oh, Uncle Vanya, don’t pinch.” She giggles. “Will you hire me for a dance later?”

  “Of course, little love, of course.”

  After she leaves, I laugh. “So your name is really Ivan?”

  “No, but that’s how they know me here.”

  “How did you recognize me?”

  “Ivan” smiles and punches me in the shoulder. “You look like a man from a small village that has never seen such a place before.”

  “I lived in Moscow for eight years…” I shrug. “…but it’s a different city now.”

  “It sure is. I just wish I was younger.” He sighs. “This is a country for young people. But I am a cheerful man.” He brightens. “I am grateful that I can afford to come here and enjoy the company of pretty girls.”

  Another girl shows up with a bottle of Stoli, a plate of pickles and two small glasses.

  He pinches her as well. “Svetlana, little darling, how are you?”

  “Good, Uncle Vanya.” She kisses him on the cheek. “You’ll have me for a dance later, right?”

  “Ivan” pours two glasses. “Drink with me, Pavel, I don’t trust people that drink foreign beer.”

  He gulps his vodka, exhales, wipes his lips, and crunches a pickle. I drink half a glass, not willing to risk more.

  “Did you bring the money?” “Ivan” suddenly is all business.

  I hand him the envelope.

  “How much is there?”

  “Five hundred. Please count.”

  “No need to. Not in your interest to cheat me.” He gets a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Computers are great. A dozen years ago, I would have had to show my face in the archives, search through the old files, pay people to forget I was there. Now, I just pay people for access and login with one of their accounts. Konstantin Mershov was a colonel in the FSB. He quit and moved back to his hometown of St. Petersburg in 1999. His phone number is current, so he must still be alive.” “Ivan” pours himself another glass, fills mine to the rim. After repeating the procedure and finishing another pic
kle, he says. “A fascinating story about Andrei Rostin. Thankfully, the KGB kept good records and preserved them. Your parents never told you about him?”

  “No.”

  “Hmmm. He was supposed to be evacuated from Leningrad in 1942, but I guess they did not want to send him away to an orphanage. At the end of the war, he had to go to school and the authorities would have taken him away, so your parents adopted him. They were ridiculously young themselves, and they take on this kid to take care of. Crazy!”

  Tanya shows up with a steaming bowl of pelmeni and two plates.

  “Ivan” loads pelmeni on both plates. “Eat, Pavel. You don’t want to go back drunk; people in this area will kill you for ten dollars. Food here is crap, but pelmeni not too bad.”

  He swallows a couple and drinks another glass of vodka. His face reddens even more.

  “So in 1955 Andrei gets drafted, and a year later he is in Hungary crushing the uprising there. You are too young to remember, but after Stalin’s death, Hungarians thought freedom was within reach. So we sent the tanks to liberate them from themselves. Except that Andrei came back in handcuffs, arrested for insubordination. Normally they would have just shot him, but someone interfered, and he got 10 years instead. He served seven and was allowed to return in 1963. Instead of sitting quietly, he became involved with anti-Soviet writers, was active in samizdat, propagating prohibited works by Solzhenitsyn and others. He was arrested for subversive activities in 1966 and sent back to the camps.”

  “Ivan” refills his plate and pours more vodka for both of us. I do another half a glass. I drank less than half of what he did, but my head is starting to swim.

  “There was nothing from your parents in that file until 1968. That’s when there was a record of a letter from your father denouncing Andrei. That’s the system we lived in. Children were denouncing their parents, parents their children. Our national hero, Pavlik Morozov, was celebrated for denouncing his father to the authorities.”

  “And where is Andrei now?”

  “Ufa, an oil town in the southeast. The second time Andrei served the whole ten years, but this time he did not come back to St. Petersburg. I wrote down his number for you.”

  “Ivan” falls silent, the story must have had an impact.

  I need one more thing from him. “Shmulin told me you provided a ‘roof’ for their operations, is that true?”

  “Yes, back in the 1990s.”

  “So you knew Evgeny Voronezhsky?”

  “That I did. I know the story. Why do you ask?”

  “Because when I checked the Internet, I couldn’t find his obituary.”

  “So what? It’s been eight years.”

  “I am curious. I can go check newspapers archives, but perhaps you remember: Did he leave a family behind?”

  “He had a wife and a son.”

  “Do you remember their names?”

  “Wife’s, no. I think the son’s name was Grisha. He was going to university somewhere out of town, perhaps St. Petersburg.”

  Grisha is diminutive for Grigoriy. When Americanized, that would be Greg. Now the connection between my failed hedge fund and the Brockton and Streltsova’s murder is suddenly not so tenuous.

  “Ivan” finishes his vodka and pelmeni, waves to Svetlana who is circling nearby and stands up unsteadily.

  “You’ve got your money’s worth. Pay for the food and drinks, and Misha will see you to the metro station; we don’t want you robbed on the way.”

  A younger man tears himself away from the bar. I did not realize he’d been watching us all this time.

  Back in the metro, heading to the center. We must be going against traffic, the train is not full. An inebriated soldier tries to strike a conversation with a girl listening to her iPod and demonstratively ignoring him, a gang of five young men going to party downtown, a babushka, an old man wearing a tweed gray flat cap and a dark blue Adidas tracksuit. The young men noisily crowd him, he moves next to me, clears his throat and quietly asks, “Are you visiting Moscow?”

  “Yes,” I decide to respond. “But I lived here twenty years ago as a student.”

  “Ah,” he whispers, “So you remember how things used to be.”

  He nods to the young people that chased him away.

  “Young people knew how to behave, to be quiet and respectful. But if you ask me, it all went downhill after Stalin died. They would not do that under Stalin.”

  “Did he not kill millions?”

  “When you cut trees, chips fly! Stalin made this country great.” The old man is practically spitting saliva in his excitement. “He showed the world what Russia can do; they were all afraid of us. Now too much freedom, no respect inside the country, foreigners don’t respect us, all these Americans, Germans, Chechens, Jews.”

  A strange combination, I think. America is the superpower. Germany, well, two brutal wars will leave bad feelings. Blaming Jews seems to be our tradition, the small tribe being almost a mythical superhuman force. But Chechens? I guess Chechens now arose to a similar status. There’s our dirty little secret: for all of our conquests, for all of our space missions, for all of our nukes, Russia has the worst inferiority complex I have ever seen in a country. I think that’s the real reason why we like strongmen to lord over us and to tell us lies about our greatness. And that’s why the small tribes we can’t subdue take on these absurd, unreal qualities.

  I was born after his death, but for as long as I remember, Stalin was both a monster and a hero. Hero, because he turned our backward country into an industrial and military power and “won the war.” Monster, because of the Great Terror he unleashed in the 1930s. As if he was a perfectly nice guy before and then suddenly went off the rails. Somehow people like the Adidas tracksuited-man next to me conveniently overlook that Stalin started murdering well before the purges. Back during the Civil War, he directed killings of thousands, burning villages near Tsaritsyn, the city that was later named after him, the famous Stalingrad. Then millions died in collectivization efforts he ordered. The Boss, Khozyain, as his gang referred to him. Because that’s what he was: a smart, ruthless, paranoid, immoral, revengeful, psychopathic killer, a mafia boss that surrounded himself with rapists and alcoholics. But he made others afraid of us, and that made him “great.” Will we ever get to the point where greatness is not measured by the ability to bomb someone to smithereens?

  “Sorry, can’t agree with you here,” I reply to the Adidas man. He glares at me and moves away.

  I think my business in Moscow is done for now. I don’t feel safe. I call to make a reservation for a flight to St. Petersburg. The first available seat is in the afternoon tomorrow.

  Tuesday, June 20

  Since I have time in the morning, I pull out Suzy Yamamoto’s file and research companies on the Eastern Cottonwood private equity list. Who is this Greg Voron and what is he doing?

  A couple of successful sales of public enterprises. First, an Internet e-commerce company, then a failing oil company. Both were purchased in 2002 following the market crash and flipped a few years later for a nifty profit. The rest of the Eastern Cottonwood purchases remained private. Already mentioned Hardrock Home Security company, bought in 2002. A home lender, a home builder, and a private building materials company all in 2003, all based in California. A curious combination. The last one is MRA Technologies, a semiconductor “system-on-the-chip” (SoC) company. That’s a fairly recent and expensive acquisition. The company makes chips for secure communications and networking and was struggling against larger competitors. But the recent news indicate some large wins, especially for portable devices and mobile phones.

  Something does not feel right. In a booming market, I would expect a private equity firm to flip the companies quickly, take them public and reinvest into another acquisition. But only two companies were sold, the rest remained private. And then in 2002 and 2003, well before they had a chance to sell anything, the fund invested over a billion dollars. Someone staked a lot of money to the Eastern
Cottonwood private equity fund, but who? Detailed disclosures are not required for a fund with a small number of investors.

  No, things don’t quite add up with Mr. Voron. I am assembling a puzzle of hundreds of pieces without knowing what it looks like.

  Before leaving for the airport, I dial the number in Ufa that “Ivan” gave me.

  A wheezy voice of someone who must have difficulty breathing answers, “Allo?”

  “Allo, I am trying to reach Andrei Rostin?”

  There is a pause, then tentative, “Pavel?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I’d hear from you. Where are you?”

  “I am in Moscow, about to leave for St. Petersburg.”

  “I’ll come see you there.”

  “Are you sure? I can come to Ufa.”

  “No. Peter is the place. There are direct flights now, and it’s only three hours. I’ll be there tomorrow if I can get on the morning flight.”

  He called the city “Peter,” the name used by locals and old-timers.

  “Let me give you the address.”

  I realize my stupidity even before the words are completely out. Andrei replies gently, “I know the address.”

  I feel strange hanging up. I just spoke with someone who is my brother, even if not by blood. Someone whom I’ve never met before, whose existence was unknown to me. Someone who was with my parents during those horrible days of the blockade. I will meet him tomorrow. I don’t know what to expect or to ask.

  For the second time in two weeks, I land in the Pulkovo Airport. During the war, that’s where the frontline was. The nearby Pulkovo Heights were occupied by the Nazis. They had their long-range artillery there. The shell that hit my parents’ apartment on Liteyniy Prospekt in that brutal December 1941 was probably fired from here. I half expect to be stopped and arrested right here in Pulkovo, but nobody pays any attention to me.