by Mark Blair
Viktoriya explained that Leningrad Freight had dealt with him on customs and security issues when he was a colonel in charge of Smolensk and he had been kind enough to recommend her. It was halfway to the truth.
‘I also have a letter of introduction from the Leningrad gorkom and my director at Leningrad Freight.’
‘You do indeed come highly recommended,’ said Federov, glancing at the documents before returning them. He took off his glasses and placed them on the table.
‘So, Miss Kayakova… back to the beginning. It says in my notes that you wish to discuss fuel supply problems for… Leningrad Freight. Normally I would not get involved in such matters but, as I said, you come highly recommended, not least by General Marov, who tells me you are trustworthy and discrete.’
Viktoriya had the impression Federov was beginning to talk in code.
‘Leningrad Freight is the second largest shipping company in Russia,’ he continued. ‘You have done well to rise so fast. You must only be…’
‘Twenty-eight.’
‘Yes, I have that here too,’ he said, referring to his notes, ‘first-class honours in Economics at Leningrad State.’
Viktoriya felt this was turning into an interview.
‘You will appreciate I like to know who I am dealing with.’
He turned a page. It was a list of diesel supplies to Leningrad Freight over the past four months.
‘I am a petrochemical engineer,’ he added apropos of nothing. ‘Your requisitions have increased substantially. It’s good to know that at least someone is moving goods around Russia,’ he said with a deadpan face and shut the folder.
‘May I suggest we continue at a café close by? They do much better coffee and it has stopped raining now.’
The café was indeed close, a few doors down from the ministry. It was spacious with a freshly painted vaulted ceiling and newly installed red velour booth seating.
‘I think this will be more private, Miss Kayakova.’
Coffee arrived almost instantly.
‘I’ll come to the point. You have a supply contract with Mikhail Revnik’s cooperative to supply him diesel, in which… how shall I put it, the gorkom also have an interest?’
The minister for oil and gas was not a simple state-level bureaucrat, after all, she thought.
‘Yes, fuel surplus to Leningrad Freight requirements.’
‘Quite, sound economics… Tell me, do you know of the oil refinery at Roslavi?’
Viktoriya said she did. Leningrad Freight had made sporadic deliveries for it going back years. It was south of Smolensk, halfway to Bryansk.
‘General Marov, I am sure, is very familiar with it from his previous command,’ added Federov. He paused, and she wondered for a moment whether he would continue.
‘It will not come as a surprise to you that perestroika has turned everything on its head. First there were rules, and now there are none. Many of our industries, and that includes oil refineries, are plagued by criminal gangs. In our motor industry there is wholesale theft from the production line of spare parts, even cars. No one dares challenge them, not if you value your life. Mikhail Dimitrivich has his bank – Moika – and accounts in Switzerland?’ he continued.
She nodded.
‘Do you think that between yourselves and General Marov you can secure Roslavi?’
Secure Roslavi? Occupy it, militarily? That was a tall order, she thought.
‘And if I could?’
‘I grant your new cooperative a distribution agreement with the refinery, all you can manage.’
‘At the domestic price, in roubles?’
‘Naturally… and 15 per cent of the market price, US dollars, into a Swiss bank account, which your friend will set up for me.’
What he was proposing was on an entirely different scale. The current offtake would seem like petty cash to this. The revenues would be enormous.
‘Comrade Minister, let me speak with my principals. I’ll come back to you shortly.’
‘Well don’t wait too long… carpe diem.’
Chapter 29
The aircraft taxied to the edge of the runway. Out of her window, Viktoriya glimpsed the aeroplane in front lift from view, its wheels already retracting, as it rose into an unblemished morning sky. On cue, the giant Ilyushin made a slow turn to face down the runway, square onto the flight strip. It rolled forward a few metres and stopped.
‘Prepare for take-off,’ said the address system.
Viktoriya looked at the second hand of her watch as the engine noise swelled to deafening pitch and she resisted the temptation to cover her ears. Like a dog anxious to be unleashed, the aircraft struggled against its master, shaking and shuddering. Surely now, she thought. There was an almost imperceptible change in gravity, the infinitely small gap between stillness and kinesis, a stasis, where opposing forces cancel each other out. The sudden, precipitous, forward movement of the aircraft forced her, almost threw her, back in her seat. She looked again at her watch as the behemoth gathered momentum and lift with every inch. Thirty, thirty-five, she had guessed fifty seconds, forty, forty-five; the Ilyushin slipped the lead and clawed its way skyward before turning north to Leningrad.
She reached for the briefcase stowed under her seat and pulled out the latest shipping figures. Blankly, she stared at the numbers, unable to concentrate on the neat schedule of rows and columns. Her mind drifted to the meeting she had just finished with Yuri, who had delivered her to the airport that morning. They had sat in the busy concourse watching the early morning bustle while she recounted her conversation with Federov.
Yuri had sat quietly thinking it through. It was entirely within his power whether they went ahead or walked away.
‘I know what you are thinking, but there is no honour in penury, not unless you’re a religious obsessive, and we’ve surely had enough of them,’ she had thrown in. ‘And if it is not us, it will be someone else.’
‘Not always the best way to justify one’s actions.’
‘Maybe not, but you can see the state things are in… One day soon the ordinary Russian is going to wake up and discover that the money in his bank account is worth nothing, zero, the government have spent it all. I don’t want to be that ordinary Russian. You don’t either.’
He had stared at her for a moment. His expression changed. It was as though he were seeing her for the first time.
‘Carpe diem,’ he had said with the hint of a smile on his face.
‘Carpe diem.’
‘Look, I can’t commit the military, not to secure the refinery, but there is a way. It’s no secret that we are decommissioning whole regiments with the Afghan pull-out. There are a lot of soldiers looking for work – officers and men. I know a few from my old regiment. We build our own security force.’
‘A private army.’
‘Four hundred men… to start, one battalion. The way things are going we’ll need more, a lot more. Tell your minister we’ll take care of Roslavi.’
She closed her eyes.
‘Coffee, madam,’ asked the hostess. She looked up and placed her cup on the small tray held out to her.
Yuri – he was his own enigma, she thought. What did he ultimately want? She didn’t believe it was all about money… but didn’t wealth and power go together, and was he not quietly accumulating both.
August 1989
Chapter 30
Moscow, the Arbat
‘So we are agreed on the preliminary timetable?’ Yuri heard himself say. He looked around the long table at the district generals and their delegates. Here and there was the nodding of heads, none spoke. It had been another exhausting and frustrating meeting trying to tie down a phased time for the evacuation of the Western Forces Group from East Germany… should negotiations get that far. He thought, at last, after months of meetings, they were finally there. On an
easel at the far end of the meeting room stood a flip chart listing a dozen or more military groups with dates scribbled out and reinserted. ‘We evacuate through Rostock and Reugen.’
‘You are good at retreats, General,’ said General Vdovin, breaking the silence.
Yuri counted to ten; losing his temper was just what Vdovin and his supporters wanted.
‘We have been over this, General. This is a political decision. At the moment it’s still a what if. Last time I looked, the Berlin Wall was still standing.’
‘We were never interested in Eastern European government support before,’ scoffed Volkov. He was shorter than Yuri, eagle-eyed and driven. As commander of the Western Group he was the most immediately affected. ‘It is the general secretary who is out of step. He needs to be better advised.’ Volkov meant that he should better advise him, or better still somebody else entirely.
‘I would remind you, General, that the economy is on the brink of collapse. Your soldiers have not even been paid for months.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ added Vdovin.
‘We start with the 2nd Guards Tank Army, followed by the 2nd and 8th Shock Armies,’ continued Yuri, ignoring Vdovin’s remark. He went round the table, eying each general in turn, not breaking contact until they said yes or grunted their assent. Volkov was last. He looked across the table at Vdovin, who had already signalled his agreement.
‘Agreed,’ he said finally. Volkov stood up abruptly and everyone clambered to their feet. The meeting broke up. Two minutes later, only Volkov and Yuri remained in the room.
‘Does it make you proud presiding over the collapse of an empire?’ Volkov said bitterly.
‘General, I don’t see it like that.’
‘Clearly not.’
Volkov opened the door and was gone.
Yuri sat down at his desk and rubbed his temples. The colonel general had told him it would be hard going; he wasn’t wrong. He was taking the lion’s share of the flak for both the general secretary and the general staff. He sensed Volkov and Vdovin were not about to give up that easily, despite their verbal assurances.
He stood up and walked over to the window. Drizzle lightly wetted rooftops and street lanterns. Five floors below, on Arbatskaya Square, next to a canvas-covered stall, a group of hippies tendered Afghan coats and roughly made leather bags to passers-by. Yuri laughed to himself – weren’t they twenty years too late? A seventies song he knew but couldn’t identify drifted upward, piecemeal and incomplete. He felt the sudden need for fresh air, to get out of the defence building he had been cooped up in for most of the day.
He lifted the papers off his desk, placed them in the drawer, locked it, and buzzed through to the outer office.
‘Olga, can you please call my car.’
He stood up, walked over to the coat stand and unhooked his raincoat. His hands went instinctively into his pockets to check for the apartment keys. They were where they should be. But there was something else too, something he had not expected. He pulled out a small folded piece of paper and studied it in the palm of his hand. He had no recollection of putting anything in his pocket. Maybe it was Natasha? She had put a love note in his pocket when he was in the shower. It brought back memories of the previous night. He must give her a call. Yuri walked over to the window and idly unfolded what he assumed must be a note.
In neat handwriting it read: TONIGHT 8.00 P.M. BARFLY, PUSHKINSKAYA PLOSHCHAD. There was no signature, nothing that would indicate who might have written it.
He wracked his brains. Who could have put it there and when? To have put it in his coat pocket inside the defence headquarters, they would have had to run the gauntlet of security and Olga, who was herself not to be underestimated in this. She had successfully guarded him from a myriad of unwelcome callers. It had to be someone with easy access to his office. He stood there a minute wondering whether to respond. He reckoned that rubbing a three-star general up the wrong way by inviting him on a pointless clandestine meeting was unlikely to improve their position in life. It could, of course, be some sort of trap. He looked at his watch. It was only seven fifteen and he could make it easily, but he would need to throw off whoever had been following him… if indeed he was being followed.
‘Tervaskaya,’ was all Yuri said to his driver. Ten minutes later they had slogged their way through heavy traffic to the front entrance of his apartment building. Acting as he did every day, he checked for messages before taking the lift to the seventh floor and his apartment. Quickly changing out of uniform, he donned jeans, an everyday jacket and silk scarf, which he wrapped loosely around his lower face, covering his mouth.
Ignoring the lift, he descended the emergency stairwell to the first floor and exited onto the landing. The corridor was empty. He followed it round to the rear of the building and an unmarked door, used in Stalinist times as a bolthole, and took a narrow staircase down to the ground. A janitor shifted bins ready for the morning collection.
Yuri walked up the long incline to the main street and continued for a couple of blocks before stepping off the kerb and holding out his hand. A car pulled up, a government employee out to make some extra money on his way home.
‘Pushkinskaya metro.’
The driver named a price. Yuri nodded and climbed in, ignoring attempts to engage him in small talk. The drizzle had thankfully stopped. Residents swept clean the entrance to their buildings as a construction brigade attended a burst water main.
‘Here’s Pushkinskaya.’ The driver pointed to a sign two hundred metres ahead. ‘Where do you want to be dropped?’
Yuri recognised Barfly on the opposite side less than one hundred metres away.
‘This will do fine.’
Outside, a photograph pinned to a cracked and broken glass frame displayed a poorly lit, smoke-filled interior. A girl, sidestepping puddles in her high heels, passed him and gingerly took the steps down to the basement entrance. He looked at his watch: five minutes before eight. He followed her down. A flat-nosed, shaven-headed bouncer blocked Yuri’s way.
‘I have to search you,’ he said bluntly. Yuri noticed he was wearing an old military jacket and heavy army boots. The tattoo of a claw crawled up his neck.
Yuri stood still while the bouncer patted him from head to foot. At least this way, Yuri thought, it would only be the bar staff that carried guns. The bouncer nodded; he was free to go.
A heavily made-up girl in a small cloakroom cubicle took his coat and handed him a ticket. He pocketed it, drew back the curtain and stepped into the bar. The photo outside did not do it a disservice. Cigarette smoke hung thick and pungent, draining what small light and oxygen there was in the room.
Negotiating low tables, Yuri made his way over to the bar, grabbed a stool and ordered a beer. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust. A woman, sitting at the far end of the bar, caught his eye, held it and smiled an invitation; around the room, men and women, both single or together, sat at small circular tables under outsized revolutionary posters that decorated the red-painted brick walls: a virile-looking man driving a sparkling new tractor in a sun-filled scape, his adoring wife looking on; a woman with her index finger at her zipped mouth; a man at dinner, his hand up, refusing a proffered glass of vodka. Yuri smiled; if only life were like art.
He looked at his watch again and wondered who he should be looking for: a man, a woman, someone he would recognise? He looked again at the woman at the bar. What was it that was so important that he be dragged out here? The bartender caught his eye and cast a look to the back of the room. A woman was signalling to him. Picking up his beer, he carried it back to her table.
‘May I join you,’ he said, standing over her. She was dyed blonde with thick smokey eye shadow and dark red lipstick. He didn’t recognise her at first. It took a few seconds for his brain to process her image, strip away her make-up. She was Volkov’s adjutant. Not unexpectedly, she looked entirely
different out of uniform.
‘Another drink?’ he said, and she caught the bartender’s attention and pointed at her near empty glass.
‘Galina,’ she said, introducing herself – Lieutenant Galina Biryukova, he remembered. He had caught her studying him across the table during the day’s negotiation. He put her in her early thirties.
‘Please call me Yuri.’
Galina cast her eyes nervously around the room.
‘Just to reassure you… Yuri… I don’t normally go out looking like this. I had to pay the doorman five dollars to come in… I assume that’s the going door rate for sex workers.’
‘Well I do look like this when I go to hockey matches,’ he countered, and smiled, trying to put her at ease. She was certainly more provocative than in uniform.
Her drink arrived. Yuri waited for the waitress to move out of earshot.
‘Does General Volkov know you are meeting me?’
Galina shook her head.
‘So what is it that is so important?’
‘I am not sure.’
‘Not sure?’ Yuri started to wonder whether the lieutenant was wasting his time.
‘General,’ she slipped into army mode, ‘Yuri… I trust I can rely on your discretion. From what I’ve seen and heard, I believe I can.’
‘I think you need to spit it out,’ Yuri said, without giving her any guarantee.
She nodded and seemed to relax, almost anticipating the relief of telling him what was troubling her.
‘Look, I may be way off beam but something is going on which I can’t explain. You know I am General Volkov’s adjutant; I’ve been working for him just under three years. I organise, attend and take minutes of all his meetings. There’s not much I don’t know. But a month ago he attended a meeting at the Ministry of Defence. It was only by coincidence I found out. I was delivering some papers to the ministry and spotted him coming out.’ She hesitated.